The Blog From Another Dimension

Shanghaied in Shanghai

As I type, I am in Shanghai International Airport, sitting in front of a departure gate display, as this is the only available power socket, or so the information guy tells me. The flight leaves in about an hour and a half, and I figured that I'd get in some last-minute blogging.

This morning was a bit of an adventure. Wanting to get to the airport on time for an early departure hour, I decided that I would not hassle with the buses (have to catch the train to some place or another, identify the right bus, puzzle out the schedule, etc.), and instead would take a taxi ride.

So I woke up at 5 am, got everything packed (one camera battery pack unaccounted for, probably somewhere hidden in my luggage), got cleaned up, dressed up, and then headed out with Ken to the street to catch a taxi, by which time it was 6:15 or so.

There I hit the first snag: not many taxis seem to cruise that street in the morning. After waiting several minutes, then walking for a few more, we finally spotted a cab and flagged him down. Ken handled the translation for me, and we seemed to get across to the driver that I wanted to go to Pu Dong Airport, taking the A4, A20 and A1 expressways, and learned from the driver that it would take one hour. Ken had a bit of trouble, though, because the driver spoke with a Shanghai accent so strong that even I could hear it. But we seemed to communicate everything OK. So I got into the cab, said goodbye and thanks to Ken, and the driver sped off.

In the wrong direction.

At first, I figured that he was simply headed for a convenient cross street. After a few minutes, that possibility soon withered away and died. I tried to indicate to the driver that we were, indeed, going in the wrong direction. He seemed undeterred, and when I showed him the map and said, "Pu Dong Airport," he nodded vigorously, and repeated, "Pu Dong!" and kept going in the exact opposite direction as the airport. I gave him a few more minutes, in case he had some miracle maneuver under his hat, but no. He kept on going the wrong way. And I also had just noticed that he had not activated his meter yet.

I insisted then that he was going the wrong way, by eloquently pointing again at the map, pointing behind us, and saying "Pu Dong Airport! That way!" a bit louder (that always works). He again tried to reassure me (I think), but this time added a bit of extra information: he slid his ID placard aside and revealed the placard of a different driver. That worried me, but perhaps explained it--that he was going off-shift, and had to pick up the other driver. The problem was, where was he going to do that? After one minute? After an hour? I got out my watch, and pointed to it, hoping to express the idea that I was on a tight schedule and had no time for detours. He tried to express the idea that it would only take a few minutes. Very upset, and considering whether to stop him, get out, and flag another taxi, I waited as he went further from my destination.

The problem with switching cabs, of course, was that it might be hard to find another, and I don't speak Chinese--so there was a chance that things would just get worse. As I pondered this, the driver turned down a side road, a very deserted-looking country road, a dirt road in fact, and for a few seconds I feared that maybe I was going to get robbed or something. But within a few seconds, I spotted someone who looked suspiciously like another taxi driver walking toward us, and sure enough, the first driver stopped and let him in. He also did not speak English, but at least we were now turned around and headed in the right general direction.

After a mile or so, the first driver stopped, got out, and the new driver got in the driver's seat, and we were off again, sans the first driver. The new driver confirmed via the map I had and sign language that he would take A4, A20, and A1, so I relaxed a bit--until he turned on the meter. Since we were several miles out from where I was picked up, I insisted he turn it off again until we got back to where I had flagged the cab down in the first place. And as we reached that point, there was Ken--20 minutes later, still standing there, now waving the cab down--I got the driver to stop and talked to Ken. He had seen me going off in the wrong direction and had worried, but twenty minutes? At the crack of dawn? With no guarantee that I'd be heading back this way? That's a friend.

So Ken talked to the new (and more clearly-speaking) driver, established that everything was OK, and bade me off again, this time in the right direction. The ride then took about 45 minutes, and I got to the airport on time. But that's as much excitement as I'd like to experience for an international trip. Let's hope it calms down from here.

Note: It did. Got back, despite a really bad landing by the NorthWest pilot--even worse than the one to Shanghai (what, is it training week or something?), my luggage popped out almost right away, had a Frappuchino while waiting for the train (not a long wait), and was back home sooner than could've been hoped. Whew.

Angel in the Tower

I've decided to relatively slack off these last few days, and get more blogging done in the U.S. The Internet connections here are just far too slow to keep up with this pace, and I'll be back very soon in any case.

The other day, Ken and I went to a large tower in Shanghai, the Oriental Something-Or-Other Tower, the usual obligatory high vantage point of any big city you visit.

I will be posting several photos from there soon, of course, but I thought I'd post at least one now that I really like. A small girl, waiting pensively for her family to finish their viewing activities. I caught her in profile, using a zoom in relatively low light, but it came out nicely anyway.

Rave Reviews

One thing visitors quickly learn about in China is the existence of pirated DVDs. For a dollar and under, you can get DVDs of new or old movies; I mentioned this a few days ago.

What I didn't mention is how they seem to slap together the cover art, especially for newer movies. It looks legit, but if you read carefully, sometimes the writing is strange, or even not connected to the DVD's movie at all.

Today I saw one that was hilarious, for a movie called "Laws of Attraction." Obviously they lifted a review of the film and put it on the back of the DVD cover. But they also obviously could not understand what the review said. See for yourself:

Points of Amusement 1

Just as it is in Japan, in China there are occasional misuses of English. Here are a few I've noted in the past week:

This sign becomes more clear when one notes that the sign below it reads "Fire Hyd Rant."

A similar sign--they just don't know how to refer to a fire hose correctly.

The following are not exactly language errors, but do seem a bit useless:

After all, if a person is going to throw themselves in front of a moving train, forbidding it is not exactly going to do much good. As if someone would plan to jump, see the sign, and then decide that they did not want to risk breaking the rules.

Here's what was seen on a package of potato chips:

There are also things not linguistic in nature, but still rather amusing. For example, how Chinese males cool off in the hot and humid weather. In Japan, you rarely see a shirtless man, but here in China, they are fairly common, which makes sense; I don't see how Japanese salarymen survive humid weather in the 90's in full business suits.

Anyway, in China, some men will take off their shirts, but others will do something that can have a comical effect:

And that's not just a special case you see here. That's what I've seen dozens upon dozens of males in China, child and adult, do to cool down. Always the same, too--shirt rolled up to the chest, bellies exposed--just like pictured above.

The big, protruding stomachs really make the difference.

Hangzhou

For today's adventure, Ken and I went to a place he likes to go on some days off, a lakeside city called Hangzhou ("Hahng-zow"). We made sure to get up early so we could catch the train--it's a two-hour ride from Shanghai (I write this as we are taking the train ride back).

On trains in China (or at least hereabouts), you can get "hard" or "soft" accommodations (seats or sleepers), the "softness" referring to the luxury of the appointments. Not exactly the difference between "first class" and "steerage," but still, there is a difference. We're taking the soft seats, of course.

There's not really too much to say about Hangzhou; it's a nice city, fewer beggars and hard-tactic salespeople, but otherwise much like Shanghai--except you've got the lakefront, which is very nice. I'll let the photos below explain a lot of it. Shopping streets, a long lakefront park, that kind of thing. We walked, boiled in the heat, stopped to drink every so often, ate lunch (KFC--I can't get popcorn chicken in Japan), ate dinner (ramen, Japanese-style). Went back to the station.

Still, another day well-spent. Tomorrow, we take a day off, sleep in, shop locally, watch videos. I have got to give my feet a rest. They're killing me. And that's with good shoes.

They were selling bubble guns, and this lady was kind enough to demonstrate

For some reason, the KFC clerks were dancing outside... don't know if it was a promotion or a hobby...

Ken was able to chat with some very charming young women at the pagoda

A crowd gathered in the park around a man singing to musical accompaniment

A very nice Starbucks here

More photos later...

The Bund and Nanjing Road

One of the sights to see in Shanghai is a double, Nanjing Road and the Bund. Nanjing Road is a shopping street, and the Bund is a riverfront area famous for its view. If you like upscale shopping more than downscale, then Nanjing Road will suit you better; this is not as much a place for bargaining as Xu Jia Hui market, save for some back alleys where you can do some bargaining. But some things don't change, like the endless stream of Rolex salesmen and a good supply of beggars. One of them really hounded us, a woman with a baby, who not only followed us for a few blocks, repeating "Xie xie" ("shay-shay," or "thank you"), but also resorted to grabbing our arms, trying to pull us back to stay and give her some money.

Down an alley way between some of the regular stores we could spy a cheap-market area, like a mini-Xu Jia Hui. We went in to get an electric plug strip, a "brick" with a surge protector. On the way out, we stopped at a DVD shop, which had the usual display of pirate DVDs. This place, however, did not just have the thin cardboard holders with the DVDs, but also had more substantial, thick cardboard holders, like fair approximations of some commercial DVD cases. We asked what the difference was between the two, and were told that the ones in the thin cases were about one dollar apiece, while the thicker ones on the wall were $4 each. Why the difference in price, we asked; the guy in the shop replied, in an eagerly sincere kind of voice, "the more expensive ones are real!" Ken and I both laughed, as it was all too obvious that the "real" ones were just as fake as the others, given that they included titles like Spiderman 2 and Catwoman, movies still out in theaters and not yet released on DVD. In fact, the "real" ones were likely of lesser quality, as new releases are theater-camcorder versions, while the older titles are direct rips from commercial DVDs.

Nanjing Road

Other than that, I don't have much to say about Nanjing Road--for the serious shopper, maybe it has its charms, but I found little to do there. The Bund was more interesting, visually, at least. There was a beautiful view, definitely a nighttime sort of thing rather than a daytime one, for all the lights on display. There were a lot of people there, most for the light show. We enjoyed it for a while, then had some dinner at a small pasta shop on the way back, then took the train as far as it would go and finished the trip with a $5 taxi trip the rest of the way.

Views from the Bund at night

On the way back, Ken and I were finally able to ask someone--as it was, a taxi driver--what the price of gas is in China. We'd seen lots of gas stations, most of them the Sinopec brand, but they never showed a price. After much gesturing and figuring of vocabulary, we got the idea across to the driver, and he told us that the price was Y3.4 per liter, or roughly $1.60 per gallon. But the driver said that prices had gone up this year, as they probably have everywhere, and said the cause was the Bush administration and the action in Iraq. Not angrily, but just matter-of-factly.

Also in the taxi, I noticed some stores that I had not expected to see--including an Ikea store, of all things. There was also a UniQlo store, a popular clothing store chain from Japan, which Ken said is considered kind of pricey here, though in Japan it is more of a discount place. Other than that, I noticed several food store imports, including of course McDonald's and KFC, and then there is Starbucks, Pizza Hut, and the Japanese beef-noodle chain Yoshinoya.

One other thing--when on the train into town in the early afternoon, I noticed something that I hadn't noticed before: a nuclear power plant. Not a big deal, but it was a bit surprising to see the twin towers that in the U.S. have become synonymous with nuclear plants.

Tomorrow: Ken and I visit Hangzhou, a city to the south with some lovely lakeside views.

In a day or two: how Chinese guys cool off on hot days, and some pretty funny "Engrish," Chinese-style.

Downtown Shanghai

Due to a combination of matters of convenience and difficulty, I've decided not to take the side trip to Beijing this time around. Mainly it's due to limited time. Though the span of this trip is ten days, the first day I got here late evening and the last day I'll leave early morning, so it's really eight days. Traveling to an from Beijing would take the better part of a day each way, and so in the end 10 days would get pared down to 6 and change; either I'd spend too little time in Beijing or too little in Shanghai, and the side trip would add several hundred dollars to the trip cost, seeing as how I'd have to pay for plane fares and hotels for two. So it'll just be Shanghai this trip.

In any case, the itinerary for the second day was seeing people, dining, and shopping. First stop: Xujiahui (pronounced Shoe-jaw-hweh), where we went to Starbucks and were able to log on--though the connection was even slower than at the local Internet cafe. Then we met up with two more of Ken's friends, girls going by the English names Kitty and Flavour (Ken tried to talk Flavour into using the name Isabella, but she really prefers Flavour). Then it was off to the Oriental Market at Xiang Yang, a maze of stalls selling stuff at very cheap prices, so long as you negotiate well.

Flavour, Ken and Kitty at Xu Jia Hui market

As you walk through the area, the level of people reaching out to you, following you around, and calling after you rises far above the normal street level of this activity. And if you should happen even to pause to look at some stall, much less show interest in a specific item, the stallkeeper will jump out and start the sales process. First lesson: never agree to the asking price. I bought some cheap-looking plastic add-on to my glasses that would flip down and cover them with dark lenses. When I asked the price, the woman said it was 120 Yuan ($15). Without consulting Ken or his friends, I countered with Y30 (about $4)--which was a mistake. Kitty and Flavour showed surprise, saying it was worth only Y5 or Y10 (I simply hadn't expected the lady to mark up the price that much). I then haggled it down to ten (the ultimate bargaining chip is to start to leave, which is when they almost always cave in), but the lady was pissed, though trying not to show it in her expression. When I paid, she gave me back change so that she kept Y30. When I again insisted on ten, she complained that I'd said thirty, and tried to give me back only another ten so she could keep twenty, but I finally got all the change back from her. A rather inauspicious start to my haggling experience, but instructive.

It was kind of funny how some things worked. A lot of people were selling watches (including a hilarious watch with Mao waving his hand), and the hawkers would show you what was on display; when you showed non-interest in them, the hawker would look around and whisper conspiratorially, "Rolex?" and uncover a box full of Rolex knock-offs, crowing as if this were valuable treasure and as if dozens of other hawkers had not already shown you their stash.

After the market, we went to Yuyuan, am area with again, a lot of shops--but this time in an area of very nice architecture and a park in the center. This area was more expensive, so we did less shopping and more of just looking around, and stopped for a bite to eat as well. The garden area was nice--there is an apparently famous crooked bridge over the pond, but the architecture, a classic style from centuries ago (from what I could pick up, that is), was the show-stealer.

Later, Ken and I met up with another friend of his, Jasmine, who speaks amazingly good English despite never having traveled (apparently it is very hard for ordinary Chinese people to travel abroad), and we bored Ken with a lot of computer talk while we searched for a good restaurant to have dinner at. We were now in Xintiandi (Sheen-tyan-dee, or "New Century"), which is apparently kind of like Roppongi is in Tokyo, a high-priced area where all the foreigners hang out. A lot of nice places, but the prices can be easily ten times higher than local joints--and yet still, a fancy dinner for three came out to about $20 per person, the price of a low-to-midrange meal in Tokyo.

A young girl who agreed to pose quickly for me. She's wearing a popular headdress, a lot of kids and some adults have them. The girl caught my eye by staring at me--a lot of people do because foreigners are still often uncommon--but they always respond happily when waved back to.

After the night's festivities, we headed home-but because the outlying light rail shuts down at about 8 pm, we took the bus from Xujiahui. The bus ride, which should have taken half an hour, instead lasted more than an hour, in part because of the same aggressive salesmanship seen in most other parts of the city. On buses, there is a driver and a fare collector. The fare collector sits behind the back door of the bus, and aside from collecting the twenty-five or forty cents from passengers, he spends most of his time leaning out the window shouting at people out on the street. Apparently buses in China are less of a systematic thing and more like taxis, each bus vying to get more warm bodies through the door.

So every few minutes, we would pull aside to a stop--many times not at a stop--and wait between one and ten minutes while the conductor shouted and wheedled. The driver would help out by pulling out a little each time, as if to leave, prompting the prospective customers to hurry up and get on board--so they could wait another five minutes until we actually pulled out from the stop.

Add to this the fact that the buses seem to have no shocks, the seats are narrow and hard, and for most of the trip the malfunctioning backup beeping signal was going off in our ears, and the bus experience is not nearly as nice as it could be.

Begging is also something that you see a fair amount, often a woman and her child, with the child asking for the money. The most noticeable account was on the train into Xujiahui, when a woman led her boy, perhaps eight years old or so, through the train, the boy calling out for alms. This pair saw a great deal of success, mainly due to the fact that the boy was badly deformed. This was not too different from what I experienced in Spain, minus the kid.

But the trains are otherwise a pleasant alternative. They are cheap (usually about 40 cents), come often when they are running, have comfortable seating, and are clean. The down side is the early shutdown, added to the sparseness of train lines. In a city of millions, perhaps on par with a good part of Tokyo, Shanghai has only a handful of train lines to Tokyo's multitudes. But more are being built; Shanghai is quickly building up and up and up. You can see this especially in the construction of housing. Massive forests of apartment/condo blocks are everywhere, and just as many seem to be under construction.

Between and among these towers ride a large number of two- and three-wheeled bikes, manually or fuel-powered. In many cases, on most large roads, they have an adjacent side road (as big as a medium-sized road in Japan all by themselves) reserved for them. But at intersections, the bikes and cars mix dangerously, each vying for control of their part of the road. Even for someone like me, now well used to traffic in Tokyo, this place seems chaotic and dangerous, taxis sweeping in and out everywhere within inches of bicyclists, pedestrians weaving between slow-moving traffic, hastily getting out of the way of taxis which seem intent to go on through despite human obstacles. Not the perfect traffic environment, but survivable (hopefully) for another six days.

To Qingpu and Back

I got on at Starbucks--from downtown Shanghai today.

Qingpu (pronounced "Ching-pu") is a town near a small historical village on the banks of a river in the northwest area of Shanghai, and where Ken and I went today, guided by Ken's student Fanny and her friend Sally (not their real names, but nicknames assumed for our convenience), who are native to that part of town.

Before going out to the village, we ate lunch at a nice place in town, a good number of medium-sized dishes that we all shared, and didn't quite finish--apparently that's not uncommon, maybe a slight show of prosperity, ordering more than you can eat. There was one dish, a spicy chicken, that was very attractive visually--but not quite so great to eat. Served in a basket, it had as many cooked peppers as chicken, but the chicken itself came in small pieces, and each one contained a small bone. A bit too much trouble.

After lunch, we headed out for the historic site. The village itself, named Zhu Jia Jiao, is supposed to be about 300 years old, and consists of a network of canals (with Venetian-style gondolas and their rowers) and small streets laden with tiny shops where their keepers beckon you endlessly to take a look at their wares. A lot of special region-specific pork dishes and other foods for take-home were available, but there were a wide variety of other shops, many with items for sale at $1~$3, including items that appeared like jade and ivory but obviously had to be fakes. Any number of tourist trinkets were available, but we were able to avoid purchasing--even with hawkers as persistent as those we found.

To give you an idea, as we entered the village, we approached the river and saw a sign that indicated that people would release fish into the river, probably for good luck. And several women approached, trying to sell us baggies filled with small fish, including goldfish. They followed us down a longish street--perhaps more persistent than usual because we were foreigners, a group that usually splurges more. They kept getting in front of us, practically insisting we buy some fish to release into the river. You just have to avoid eye contact and not make any moves to your wallet--these people tend to key in on any move that could indicate a sale.

One place we did indulge ourselves was a small archery room, where primitive bows and ten extremely primitive arrows were available for 5 Yuan. I took five shots, and Ken and Fanny shared the other five. Kind of fun, but the equipment was far from accurate, and most of the shots missed. But it was fun. We also indulged in a gondola ride for half an hour through the canals and under the main bridge on the river, and went into a temple which is supposed to bring good luck to those wishing to have children--not going for that purpose, of course.

On the way back, Ken and I took a "chicken bus," as he's come to call them. They're buses that go along rural routes, which we needed as Qingpu is a few hours away from Ken's place by bus. One time, when Ken took the bus, a passenger next to him had a bag on the floor, which soon began moving around of its own accord. The other passenger soon kicked the bag--and upon doing so, a loud squawk came from it, and Ken realized that there were chickens--plural--inside. Ergo, the "chicken bus."

I didn't see any chickens when we rode it back from Qingpu, but the ride was considerably slow, long and bumpy as hell--not the kind of ride I'd prefer to take every day. In theory, we were supposed to transfer to another bus midway, but neither Ken nor I felt like continuing that ride, and so we got another taxi (this time just 60 Yuan, or $7.50) to go back to Ming Hang, this time to midtown where we ate some McDonald's (I wanted some predictability), and then walked back.

By this time, it was about 8:00 pm. On the way, we not only cruised by a lot of shops, but a ton of street vendors, selling, mainly, pirated DVDs and music CDs (a dollar apiece), jewelry, wallets, small pictures, and--for some reason--remote controls, like for your TV or VCR. A few strange stalls, like one run by a fellow who looked like he came from a Middle Eastern country, governing a huge mountain of nutcake of some sort--a salty mix of pieces of nuts in a gummy matrix, topped by candied walnuts, sweets, and dried fruit. A bizarre-looking concoction, probably popular somewhere in the world, but not quite our cup of tea.

An interesting day for the first full day in China, but not all that happened--a few more observations I'll fill out in future posts, like the scrawling of spray-painted ads all over the place, a wealth of demolished buildings and uncleared rubble in many places, endless housing projects, ostentatious entrance signs, and a preponderance of bicyclists, scooter riders and three-wheeled bike barges on streets where traffic is more of a struggle than a flow.

On a Slow Network to China

I have just successfully logged on to the Internet here in Shanghai. Ken's personal DSL has been switched off for the vacation season, and I got a scare that maybe blogging would be difficult, as you cannot put USB Flash or a CD-ROM into the computers at the Internet cafe--so I'd have to come to a hot, smoky room full of people playing video games, and uploading photos would be impossible.

But fortunately, the people here are incredibly nice--and they allowed me to hook up my Mac (a platform apparently rare in China) directly to their network, with a tech guy typing in the IP addresses and everything. Got on the network no problem--and now I can upload a blog entry typed offline earlier in the day, as well as upload photos and check on my email accounts using Eudora, again for offline consideration if I want.

The lady in charge, a Ms. Ke (pronounced "Kuh") just came over, and in her best English, welcomed me to the cafe and expressed a hope that I'd come every night--a definite possibility, especially if the Starbucks WiFi does not work out (and the closest Starbucks that has WiFi is an hour by train and bus each way, so...).

Still, the network here is slow. Ken tells me that any DSL around here can be relatively glacial (definitely much less than a megabit), and this cafe spreads the connection between a few dozen people. Just getting my email took ten minutes (though that was padded out by more than a hundred spam). That means that photo uploads from here may be pretty slow, so for the time being I can only append a precious few each time. I'll post more when I get back to Tokyo.

Ken and I in Qingpu Village today.

First Night in Shanghai

Got into Pu Dong Airport somewhat late last night, partly because it was a late flight, and partly because the flight was delayed. My friend Ken, who's putting me up in his spare bed and acting as my tour guide for the week, was patiently waiting as I came in at 9:30, and was even more patient as I got in a long line to change money. I had tried changing yen to Yuan in Tachikawa Citibank back in Japan, but they couldn't do it. No problem, I though, I'll change it in Narita, plenty of time. But at Narita, they couldn't change to Yuan either. I'm thinking maybe it's some political thing, some monetary restriction due to friction somewhere, something like that. Either way, it got me worried--if I didn't get Yuan at Pu Dong Airport, I was afraid I'd never get it at all.

But my worries were unfounded--the airport bank clerk said I could change yen to yuan in town, but still, it was good to get local money in my pocket. And I really have to get used to the local currency--8 Yuan to the dollar, roughly. And the biggest denomination is 100 Yuan, or about $12. Makes for a big stack if you're carrying hundreds of dollars.

In addition, many things are dirt cheap here. After getting into town by bus (Y18, $1.50), we had dinner at a small noodle place (beef noodles with a licorice-flavored broth!), and then as it was raining and taking the train/bus/walk would be a hassle, I agreed to spring for the taxi ride--which took more than half an hour. That kind of taxi ride would cost easily ¥5000 in Japan, or about $45, but here it was just 100 Yuan, or about $12, or not too much more than I pay for the 4-minute taxi ride from my apartment to the local train station in Japan.

On the way in, we had the driver stop so I could jump out and get some water, and Ken asked me to get a few "cold ones" for him. I thought he meant beer. He meant water, but I got enough of that too (trying to avoid tap water here as much as I can). But the beers were pretty cheap, 6 Yuan (75 cents?) for a 640 ml bottle which would have cost 4 or 5 times more in Tokyo. I got a few smaller cans which I thought were beer, but wasn't sure--they were in the same section of the cooler, but with a strange English brand name and the rest in Chinese, I could not identify them as beer. Until later, that is, when Ken pointed out that the brand name "REEB" was "beer" backwards. Ah. Okay.

No photos yet, but you can't snap many at night (unless you wanted to see Ken slurping noodles). I'm not able to connect to the Internet just yet, and may not be able to today--it's still tentative--but I've decided that if access is limited, then I'll just blog offline, add the entries when I get a chance, and then backdate them to the right time and day.

In the meantime, I am in the relative lap of luxury in China--Ken's place is in a dormitory for foreign teachers, and they get special amenities that most people here don't, like hot water and air conditioning. Cool. Literally. 'Cause outside it's rather hot and humid.

Ken has made an arrangement with one of his students out in the countryside so that we can get shown around a small village on the outskirts of the city today--probably a big photo op as well as a nice time. The photos may have to wait, though--if I can't eventually get to a Starbucks and make the WiFi connection work, then photos will be harder to upload.

News Bits

A few more tidbits before I fly off for China. I probably won't be doing too much political commentary for the next week or so, unless I can get a good connection to the web at Starbucks (there are 39 in Shanghai--I shouldn't be surprised) and can surf the web pretty well there. We'll see.

---

Barak Obama is going to walk away with this one. Among all Illinois voters, he has a 40-point lead over Alan Keyes, dominating the polling 65-to-24. Obama has an overwhelming 96-to-3 lead over Keyes among black voters, and he even trumps out Keyes amongst moderate conservatives and those who consider themselves "fairly conservative." Keyes' only lead over Obama is among the "very conservative," no surprise there--but even they only favor Keyes by 19%, or 55-to-36. When 36% of ultraconservatives go for the Democratic challenger, you know that you're an outright loser.

---

Kerry is getting even more support over the Swift Boat thing: William Rood (now a newspaper editor in Chicago) commanded a swiftboat alongside Kerry on February 28, 1969, when Kerry won the Silver Star. The Swift Boat Vets group attacking Kerry claimed that he exaggerated about what happened, but Rood tells a different story:

Kerry's critics, armed with stories I know to be untrue, have charged that the accounts of what happened were overblown. The critics have taken pains to say they're not trying to cast doubts on the merit of what others did, but their version of events has splashed doubt on all of us. It's gotten harder and harder for those of us who were there to listen to accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they come from people who were not there.

...

Ambushes were a virtual certainty, and that day was no exception.

The difference was that Kerry, who had tactical command of that particular operation, had talked to Droz and me beforehand about not responding the way the boats usually did to an ambush.

We agreed that if we were not crippled by the initial volley and had a clear fix on the location of the ambush, we would turn directly into it, focusing the boats' twin .50-caliber machine guns on the attackers and beaching the boats. We told our crews about the plan.

The Viet Cong in the area had come to expect that the heavily loaded boats would lumber on past an ambush, firing at the entrenched attackers, beaching upstream and putting troops ashore to sweep back down on the ambush site. Often, they were long gone by the time the troops got there.

The first time we took fire—the usual rockets and automatic weapons—Kerry ordered a "turn 90" and the three boats roared in on the ambush. It worked. We routed the ambush, killing three of the attackers. The troops, led by an Army adviser, jumped off the boats and began a sweep, which killed another half dozen VC, wounded or captured others and found weapons, blast masks and other supplies used to stage ambushes.

Meanwhile, Kerry ordered our boat to head upstream with his, leaving Droz's boat at the first site.

It happened again, another ambush. And again, Kerry ordered the turn maneuver, and again it worked. As we headed for the riverbank, I remember seeing a loaded B-40 launcher pointed at the boats. It wasn't fired as two men jumped up from their spider holes.

We called Droz's boat up to assist us, and Kerry, followed by one member of his crew, jumped ashore and chased a VC behind a hooch—a thatched hut—maybe 15 yards inland from the ambush site. Some who were there that day recall the man being wounded as he ran. Neither I nor Jerry Leeds, our boat's leading petty officer with whom I've checked my recollection of all these events, recalls that, which is no surprise. Recollections of those who go through experiences like that frequently differ.

With our troops involved in the sweep of the first ambush site, Richard Lamberson, a member of my crew, and I also went ashore to search the area. I was checking out the inside of the hooch when I heard gunfire nearby.

Not long after that, Kerry returned, reporting that he had killed the man he chased behind the hooch. He also had picked up a loaded B-40 rocket launcher, which we took back to our base in An Thoi after the operation.

John O'Neill, author of a highly critical account of Kerry's Vietnam service, describes the man Kerry chased as a "teenager" in a "loincloth." I have no idea how old the gunner Kerry chased that day was, but both Leeds and I recall that he was a grown man, dressed in the kind of garb the VC usually wore.

The man Kerry chased was not the "lone" attacker at that site, as O'Neill suggests. There were others who fled. There was also firing from the tree line well behind the spider holes and at one point, from the opposite riverbank as well. It was not the work of just one attacker.

Rood backs up Kerry's story over O'Neil's, and was in a position to do so. His story comes across as credible, not trying to give an omniscient I-saw-and-know-everything account, but rather a slightly removed view you would expect from someone being where he stood, with caveats and admissions of lack of knowledge. And yet, everything in the article confirms Kerry's story, and punches yet more holes in O'Neil's. (The Trib also has posted these photos.)

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That's not stopping the Swift Boat Vets Against Truth from continuing their attacks, however. A second ad is being aired, and this one is even more boldly false, showing video of Kerry on video, apparently accusing all vets of war crimes--when in fact, that video is edited, cutting out the part where Kerry explains that he is reading admissions by other soldiers of what they had done. Kerry is fighting back, not only showing up the lies and deception, but also pointing out the numerous ties between the Swift Boat Vets and the Bush administration, from the money ties to the direct support from the Bush campaign.

Like Bush's outrageous attacks on John McCain in 2000 (you think John McCain would've just sat there for seven minutes?), these attacks on Kerry are having an effect in the polls--but the story is not over. As more and more honorable people come forward to defend Kerry, and as more and more of the SBV claims fall to tattered shreds, one can only hope that this will in some way backfire on Bush--but that is far from certain. Lying smears and nasty attacks all too often work. Had they not, we might have had President McCain, and things would have been a hell of a lot better than they are now.

The Great Iraqi Giveaway

A month and a half ago, I reported that between one to four billion dollars had apparently been looted from Iraq.

Time for an update.

The figure is $8.8 billion. Maybe up to $13 billion now, I'm not sure if the previous stolen booty is included in the new total or not.

Well, at least now, it is. Far from acting fast and tightening up the cash drawer in Iraq, the Bush administration apparently just decided to allow the scope of the fraud to widen. Now it's not just oil revenues, it's billions paid to "Iraqi ministries," though lord only knows where the money really went to. Read the current telling of the story.

And of course, what will the media focus on next week? Probably the Swift Boat Veterans thing again. Those guys are worth their weight in gold to the Bush administration, smearing Kerry like mad and diverting attention away from Bush's corruption and scandal.

The Guy From Kojima Denki

So, as I mentioned in my previous writings on getting satellite TV, I had the people at the electronics store come over to check if I could get SkyPerfecTV. It's in question because there's a large building next to mine that might or might not be in the way--looking at SPTV's web page with a map locater, it might be blocking the satellite by just a few feet in one direction. So I went to the electronics store and asked them if they could do a check. It'll cost ¥2000 ($18), they said. I told them that was OK, better than going through the hassle of buying and only finding out then that I couldn't do it.

Now, $18 is not a king's ransom, but since they tell me they guy could figure out if I'm able to get reception, I figure the guy will come over with a little electronic doohickey that could measure the satellite signal strength or something. So I wait the few days for the guy to come. ("Between 2 and 5pm," they said--and he came just at 5pm. Typical.) The doorbell rings, I open up, and this scrawny little guy walks in. No gizmos. He pulls out a compass. Goes to the window I show him. Climbs outside, holds up the compass, says I won't be able to get the satellite signal--the next building is in the way. But in saying so, he points in a direction that seems fishy to me. I tell him there's another window, and he takes that in surprise, like he wouldn't expect a place to have two windows. He checks from the other window and says, "Oh yeah, sure, you can get it from here! No problem! It's perfect." This sounds great to me--except he's now pointing in an even more westerly direction than before to indicate where the satellite is. He's pointing in a much different direction that SPTV's web site indicates--they say it's more to the south.

So I take him inside and show him the SkyPerfecTV web site, I show him the map page with the arrows showing the direction of the satellite. He looks at it, and something seems to dawn on him. He goes back to the first window, looks at his compass again, and proclaims I can get the signal in that direction, the direction from the web page; reception will be OK, he promises. But the direction he shows me now is way off from the direction he showed me originally. So I question him about how he got that--and he starts talking faster, using words I don't know.

Here is where I explain to him that he has taken no readings that could possibly be even as accurate as the measurement I made on SPTV's web page, and so how could he really know if I could get it or not? Unsure how to answer, he leaves, makes a phone call, and comes back. "You can't get reception," he explains. "The next building is too tall." Now it's time for me to explain to him that I never expected to see over the building, but rather just to the east of it. Again, he's unsure about it. He goes outside and makes another phone call. He comes back in and proclaims, "it's too close to call." Well, hell, I could've told him that! I paid ¥2000 to have this joker who knows less than I do to tell me what I already know? I would at least expect him to know the general area of the sky which the satellite is in.

Fortunately, when I called up Kojima and told them about the fiasco, they promised to refund my money. Problem is, I won't have time to collect on that before I leave on vacation. Hopefully in early September, they'll still remember me and agree to give the money back. But for now, I'm still just as much in the dark. I just can't figure out why they think they can do that, charge ¥2000 to have a guy who doesn't know a satellite from a skyscraper to tell you fairy tales. Hopefully their guy who installs the units will know just a bit more then this guy. What scares me is that he might be the same guy.

The Assault on the Middle Class Continues

In their continued attack against the middle class, the GOP and President Bush ponder how they will institute a national sales tax, probably at around 25%. The anti-progressive tax would, in theory, replace the federal income tax, and would represent the greatest tax cut for the wealthy imaginable, a veritable Death Star for tax cuts for the rich. It would shift the tax burden squarely on the middle class and the poor.

Bush and the GOP are already spinning like mad, giving the new plan the name "Fair Tax" and claiming that it would make the middle class "invisible" to taxes. Invisible?? When you pay 25% extra on everything you buy? In addition to whatever state sales taxes you might pay?

The GOP stance is an absolute fraud, pure and simple. Wealthy people would be paying a miniscule proportion of their income for the tax--and would likely be rewarded immediately with big-ticket exemptions (under the guise of aiming those exemptions at the middle class, of course--SOP). The poor would find their tax burden skyrocketing, as just about everything they purchase would become about 25 % more expensive--including food, which for obvious reasons has always been exempt from state sales taxes. Everyone in the middle class would suffer similarly.

The idea has been so unpopular that Bush almost immediately flip-flopped on the issue, saying he didn't want people to think he was raising taxes. No, we've got to get those tax hikes through in stealth mode.

This is a seriously bad idea--not just for the above reasons, but because it will target taxes at purchases, which will hurt sales and be poison to the economy. Japan instituted a 3% federal consumption tax back in 1989, and hiked it to 5% in 1997--and both times, their economy dragged, contributing to a decade-long recession.

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On another front, the Bush administration, after losing four congressional votes on the issue, decided to use strict executive authority to enact their overtime overhaul. Republicans are trying to paint it as something that will just take overtime away from a few thousand wealthy people earning over $100,000 a year, and that a lot of other people will get more overtime. Few people getting overtime now believe this, however.

One thing is for certain: it's not what the Bush administration wants you to think. First of all, how many people who make over $100,000 a year get time-and-a-half? Like the law that says that rich people have the right to sleep under bridges, one can only suspect that this is a false-front way of making it look like a burden only on the wealthy.

Workers earning less than $24,000 will be exempt, but that leaves a huge hole between $24K and $100K, occupied mostly by the middle class. Who in that hole will lose overtime? That's the problem: the rules are torturously labyrinthine in that area, and even experts say they're unclear. Some examples of people getting their overtime pay cut include "pharmacists, funeral directors, embalmers, journalists, financial services industry workers, insurance claims adjusters, human resource managers, management consultants, executive and administrative assistants, purchasing agents, registered or certified medical technologists, dental hygienists, physician assistants, accountants, chefs, athletic trainers with degrees or specialized training, computer system analysts, programmers and software engineers." See the pattern? No? What, are you blind? Obviously the pay cut is aimed at.. er,... uh, whah?

And what if your job is not on that list? Does your pay get cut, or not? You'll probably find out when your employer cuts your pay--the rules are so unclear that they say employers should determine who gets the cuts on a "case-by-case basis."

Now, the claim is that this is intended to cut down on lawsuits concerning overtime pay, but this is doubtful: the vague and seemingly random targeting of the pay cuts will, in all likelihood, create countless more disputes and spark a tidal wave of suits. The real aim of the law, it would seem, will be to cut down on the chances of employees actually winning the overtime claims so many businesses despise.

The fact is, the rules confuse a great many people, but many distrust the new regs on the basis of its source--the anti-labor administration--and its backers, the people who pay the wages:

Monday's change is the culmination of decades of lobbying by business groups representing retailers, restaurants, insurance companies, banks and others that have been hammered by workers' overtime lawsuits, many of them successful.

I can relate to that. When I worked at a movie theater in college, my own employers withheld overtime pay, claiming they just didn't have the money for it (businesses never 'have the money' to pay employees), and promising future redresses that of course never materialized. I sued them in small claims court, and won.

I would be willing to bet good money that far, far more than the 107,000 workers will lose overtime, and apart from savaging middle-class wage earner's income, this stands as the first step of many to do away with overtime completely.

Add to this the refusal of conservatives to allow for even a mild increase in the minimum wage, and their incessant drive to give more, more, and even more tax cuts to the wealthy, and it becomes all too evident that the GOP is the friend of the wealthy only, and has nothing but contempt and abusive intent towards the poor and middle class.

Bits and Pieces, August 20, 2004

Iraq continues to be important for some, that is to say, the families of at least 20 people. George W. Bush may want us to forget about it until November, but the death toll is rising. 20 casualties in the past five days, double the death rate for coalition forces throughout the war.

This probably has something to do with the fact that the Iraqi soldiers that Bush wants us to believe are handling things--that's what happens in sovereign nations, right?--are deserting by the hundreds. We point them to go into Najaf and kill their fellow Iraqis, and go figure, a lot of them are not extremely hip to the idea. And the powers that be don't really want that known:

At an Iraqi national guard base near the border of Sadr City, the vast Baghdad slum that serves as al-Sadr's support base and recruiting ground, 1st Sgt. Khalid Ali described the death threats he and other Iraqi troops have received from the Mahdi Army. ...

But when Ali was asked about the number of guardsmen who have quit since al-Sadr's latest uprising, U.S. Army 1st Lt. Vernon Sparkmon cut him off.

"Certain things, you can't discuss," Sparkmon told Ali. "If somebody asks that question, that's, like, classified stuff."

Oooookay. And by the way, "like"? "Stuff"? Has the military gone Valley Girl?

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In the meantime, the Iraqi Olympic team, which Bush & Co. have been using as their poster boys for a happily-invaded Iraq, are not quite so happy about Bush using them for political gain. Apparently, Bush has been airing ads which say, "At this Olympics there will be two more free nations – and two fewer terrorist regimes." The Iraqi athletes, however, do not feel the same way:

Speaking after winning their group stage at the Games in Greece, one player said he would take up arms against US troops in his country.

And the team attacked Mr Bush for running re-election campaign adverts featuring the Iraqi team.

“Iraq as a team does not want Mr Bush to use us for the presidential campaign,” said midfielder Salih Sadir. “He can find another way to advertise himself.”

Not exactly what Bush wants you to hear, but real nonetheless--and keep in mind, Bush & Co. want you to think that these were the most oppressed people under Saddam, and most grateful for U.S. liberation.

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On another front, the Swift Boat Veterans for Smearing Kerry are not having that great a week. The New York Times and Washington Post (admittedly left-leaning publications, but hardly rags) have been tearing them to shreds. In short: the operation was funded by friends of Karl Rove and big-time GOP and Bush donors (most from Texas, wouldn't ya know), and the claims made by the veterans are falling apart faster than you can say "smear campaign." In case you need a scorecard, here's one.

And at least for show, Kerry has condemned an ad run by MoveOn.org criticizing Bush's record (no lies in them, BTW), but Bush still refuses to disavow the Swiftboat smear campaign. How long that can last, who knows--but when even Bill O'Reilly starts casting doubts, you know the case is weakening.

Another good-news point, Kerry has started hitting back hard against the attack ads. This is what he's known to do late in his campaigns, not to let the other side get away with crap, and to fight back harder and harder. And it seems the time is ripe: Kerry is doing well in the polls, and has a huge electoral lead (Bush seems tied or slightly in the lead because his support is deep in some states, which is bad for him electorally); many say that the race is his to lose. Considering that Kerry got no post-convention bounce and that in the past two weeks has been outspent massively by Bush, this is a rather surprising, yet welcome, sign.

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Other news: Oil is at $49 per barrel, perilously close to the psychologically critical $50 mark (some say $65 is not out of the question)--and a record high, and bad news for the economy. About 60 newspaper editors printed an "astroturf" (fake grass roots) form letter from Bush's web site. A 55-year-old social studies teacher just wanted to see the president speak, but had her ticket ripped up in front of her face, because of a small Kerry/Edwards sticker on her blouse. See, she was a real security threat. Senator Ted Kennedy was "accidentally" put on a terror-alert list that prohibited him from flying, and despite repeated attempts to get Ridge to take his name off the list, the well-known Massachusetts senator was banned from flying for weeks. Yeah, an "accident." Lots of al Qaeda terrorists named "Kennedy" are menacing the nation, I bet. Somebody in the Bush White House having fun, no doubt.

Great Sunrise

I just happened to look out the window at the right time this morning and caught a fantastic sunrise. Five of the better shots are displayed below--but the size restrictions of a blog column make the photos too small to really appreciate. Click each one to see a larger (1000-pixel wide) version.

Note the blueish highlights underneath the red clouds.

Scoring Some Pimenton and Chorizo

As I've written before, I've been looking for a good source of pimenton, that lovely smoked hot paprika from Spain. And though it is very hard to find in Tokyo, I did find an importer who had some and was selling. It was, in fact, almost comically like a drug purchase.

I went to the importer's office, which was really an apartment in a building in Kami-Meguro. It didn't feel like a business at all, but like visiting someone's home. When I was presented with the spice, it was not pre-packaged--it was put into a ziploc. And I almost laughed when they guy opened the baggie and invited me to take a taste. "Mmmm," I thought. "Some good quality shit here. I'll take half a kilo." I swear, that's how it came down. The illusion shattered when they gave me a printed receipt.

I'm not sure why they had to use the baggie, but it may have been because I wanted the picante, the hot pimenton, rather than the dulce, or "sweet." Apparently most people in Japan who use the stuff prefer the sweet variety; the importer told me that when he makes chorizo, he uses the hot variety. Thus he probably was selling me his leftover "stash" from making chorizo. If I'd wanted dulce, they could have sold it to me in the bag from the maker, La Dalia.

And when he mentioned that he made chorizo, my ears perked up, and when I asked, he happily showed me the different kinds he made, proudly pointing out that there are no additives used in his product. In Spain, where he lived for five years, he says the chorizo usually is made with chemicals to preserve it. So I wound up buying a kilo of those (which was a lot more expensive than the pimenton). When I got home and tasted it, it was good, but not as good as other chorizo I've had. He may have varied the recipe to better suit Japanese tastes (though it is far, far closer to Spanish chorizo than the bland stuff they call "chorizo" in stores here), or the chorizo may have been intended more for cooking than for eating straight, which I prefer. I'll be trying the chorizo in future cooking attempts, see how it works out.

In any case, if you want some pimenton at a reasonable price in Tokyo, try Mr. Hiroshi Ojima at Serrano--but call first (03-3713-2171) to see if he has what you want. If you want to know how to get there, drop a comment and ask for directions (leave an email address, masking it if you like with a URL; if you do that, the email address is secure. You can also ask me to immediately delete the comment as well).

Japanese TiVo?

Right now I'm considering switching from cable to satellite TV, but that's not the main topic of this article. One piece of technology I've been waiting for is a TiVo-like easy-programmable device.

For those of you who don't know about TiVo or its poor (but superior) cousin ReplayTV, these are hard-disk-based video recorders, belonging to a new category of home electronics, the "DVR" (Digital Video Recorder). Instead of saving recorded shows to VHS or even DVD, they save the video to a hard disk. The advantages are many: you can "pause" ("Time Slip" in Japanese) live TV while the digital recorder saves the ongoing programming into the hard drive; you can save up to a couple hundred hours of programming on the disk, no need to keep them on tapes and wonder what tape is free, what tape has what programming and other hassles; you can access any part of any recorded show very quickly; but best of all, the service usually includes an interactive program guide.

The program guide (called "EPG," or "Electronic Program Guide" in Japan) is kind of the like the "what's on" channel on cable TV in the U.S. On a grid displaying time horizontally and channels vertically, it allows you to access any part of the schedule. But with the HDD recorder, you can use that guide to program the recording of a show. For example, go to the program guide and find the "West Wing" slot, hit "program" and tell it how often, and your DVR will handle the recording of that show from then on--often including information such as episode title, summary, and whether or not it's a repeat. My father uses this in the U.S., and I've been more than a little envious.

For me right now, well, I've got cable TV and pretty crappy cable at that. Not too many channels, and the channel can only be changed directly via the tuner. Which means that if I want to record a show, I not only have to set the VCR to tape the show, I also have to set the cable tuner to jump to that channel at that time. And aside from the extra work, the cable tuner is hard to program and de-program. Unlike a VCR which will only record from programming if switched off, the cable tuner will always switch to programmed presets, whether the tuner is on or off--which means that unless you de-program the cable box, it will skip to the programmed channel even if you're watching another show. In short, it's a huge hassle.

Hopefully, not any more, though. Toshiba now makes a machine (the RD-XS53) which, through a "control cable," will control the satellite TV tuner as well as its own recorder functions. So like with TiVo or ReplayTV, you just have to go to the channel guide, choose a show, and then forget about it (you can also program the recorder from your PC). But it has some other very nice features as well: it can record two different shows simultaneously (so long as they don't require the same tuner), and it has a built-in DVD-R/RW/RAM recorder, so you can save anywhere from 1 to 8 hours of programming on a single DVD-R (depending on the recording quality). So just leave the DVR to record a few months' worth of shows, and for the ones you like, compile them on $3-a-pop DVD-Rs, which now cost about the same as, and record just as much as standard VHS tapes. You can watch these DVDs in your DVD player, or on your PC, if it has a DVD drive. Alas, it is not possible to directly put the video files on your PC, despite the network connection--copyright issues, I'm guessing. No biggie, though.

The major drawback, and possibly a deal-killer for me right now: the Toshiba machine costs ¥148,000 yen (about $1350). There is a lower-end model for ¥104,000 ($950), but it lacks the ability to mesh with SkyPerfecTV. For a while I thought the low-end model could do the satellite TV control, since the guy at Yodobashi and the sales guy at Toshiba both seemed to indicate that was possible when I asked about the two models together. But after my first call to Toshiba, I did more studying, noticed a small asterisk, and called again--and found out, sure enough, only the more expensive machine could do the satellite TV interface. Major difference there. The Toshiba guy was downright sheepish in admitting it to me.

So I might just go with the SkyPerfecTV for now and wait for the Toshiba models to get upgraded and priced down in 6 months or so. But it's tempting, I have to admit.

One other problem for me, though--to get SkyPerfecTV, which is necessary for the cool programming features (not to mention far better programming than my local cable TV outfit), you need to have a line-of-sight to the satellite, which is relatively low in the southwestern sky--and there's a building smack in the way from my apartment. However, at the east-most window ledge of my apartment, the SkyPerfecTV satellite map seems to indicate that I juuuuust might be able to peek around the building, just enough to catch the satellite. So, out goes the call to the local electronic shop's technician, to tell me if I am go or not on the satellite.

And yes, I am a bit much of a couch potato and electronics geek, so no need to tell me so via comments.

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Update: I went to Kojima Denki, and they had the high-end model on sale for ¥120,000 ($1090) or thereabouts. The actual standard selling price for the model is ¥135,000, but Yodobashi sells at suggested retail and "gives" you the extra hundred bucks on your point card, so you'll spend it there. Kojima had it listed for 135, but with a kind of red writing diagonally over the price--which is an old Akihabara thing which means you ask the sales staff, they'll tell you the real discount price.

120 Puts it back into my ballpark, but only if I feel extravagant... which I might, if I can get SkyPerfecTV.

The Streets of Tokyo

Believe it or not, the street you see at right is a two-way street. Go ahead. Look at it. See if you can figure it out. And for perspective, that white truck parked in the back on the right, it's a mini-truck, no wider than an American postal jeep. And even two of those would have a hard time passing each other on this street--and yet, I saw a good deal of opposing traffic pass here.

Every twenty or thirty meters, there is an indentation in the street (you can see it at left in this photo, behind the parked scooters; the orange posts mark it). When cars come from opposite directions, the car most conveniently placed to get into the indentation does so, while the car from the other direction squeezes by. I know, but somehow they do it. No wonder you don't see Winnebagos in this country. Once I rented a truck to move my stuff from one apartment to another--and got stuck on a street wider than this one. When he saw the trouble I was having, the driver of the car going the other way actually got out and volunteered to drive the truck down the street for me while his friend maneuvered his car. Embarrassing, but I couldn't have made it otherwise--it takes real driving talent.

You might also notice the slight crook in the street in the photo here. Japanese streets are, more often than not, go in all directions; it is less common for them to be laid out in grids. And even those grids are more often than not irregular, with greatly differing block lengths, and tons of T-intersections, one-way streets, and dead-ends. But most streets seem to tilt and angle without any hint of planning or design, like they just grew there. And with no street names (except for large boulevards), no street signs (except for major intersections), and a confusing jumble of block numbers and area names, navigation can be extremely confusing. Take, for example, the sign shown at left. That's what the intersection looked like, honestly.

Add to that the fact that some neighborhoods are designed with one-way streets and prohibited turns such that it is impossible to exit save by one labyrinthine path; that streets are rarely more than two lanes in one direction, and usually not that; that sidewalks are sparse and properties have six-foot walls along the street, creating blind corners galore; and despite the expenses and difficulties of driving, multitudes seem to have cars, creating traffic jams all over; and top it off with scant parking, some pay parking lots charging a few dollars an hour... I am constantly amazed that people drive cars in Japan.

Oh, and gas runs about $4 per gallon.

The Content of Their Character

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Aug. 28, 1963

Look up that quote in a search engine and at the top of the list you will not see sites that have a full transcript of the speech, but rather a majority of conservative sites arguing against Affirmative Action.

And quite frankly, I am sick of hearing conservatives use the famous Dr. King quote to attack Affirmative Action. It is a disingenuous and dishonest attack. The right-wing claim is that since it judges people by the color of their skin, it is in itself discriminatory and hypocritical. Here is just one example:

Affirmative action is the 100% polar opposite of King's dream. Affirmative action judges individuals based only on the color of one's skin and certainly not by the content of their character, their achievements, qualifications or anything else. Affirmative action is a step backwards by justifying the very racism it was established to thwart.

There is no doubt about it: affirmative action creates discrimination. Those who argue for a color-blind society while supporting affirmative action are presenting a hypocritical belief. It appears that supporters of affirmative action are comfortable with discrimination, provided it is directed towards white men.

The rather glaring flaw in this argument--like in almost all conservative arguments against "Affirmative Action"--is that it completely ignores the constant presence of racial discrimination by whites against minorities. By conveniently disregarding any preexisting racial bias and treating what they call "Affirmative Action" in a vacuum, they make the case that since things such as quotas use ethnicity to decide immediate favor, it is racist and therefore hypocritical coming from those who state that they oppose racial discrimination.

What conservatives ignore, of course, is that quotas (which is what we're really talking about here, not Affirmative Action; see this post) are a reaction, not an action purely unto themselves. To address a reaction and yet fully ignore the action which prompted it is nonsensical.

Imagine that a conservative Japanese person argued that America was wrong because it attacked Japan during WWII, killing millions of Japanese people and conquering the country. What would an American say in reaction to that? Naturally, the reply would be, "you attacked us." Taken out of context, an American invasion of Japan seems unjustified. Add the component that the Japanese attacked first, and there's your justification.

But in the conservative argument against quotas, the initial action is removed from the equation, making it seem unjustified. Additionally, the claim will be made that the liberal ideology precludes the idea of taking action based on ethnicity. This is true only if there is no justification; in the context of quotas, where there is a preexisting discrimination that must be redressed, the conservative claim is utterly false. If that were not the case, then America could have been justifiably criticized for entering WWII.

Dr. King's statement about his dream of how people should be judged is a hope for the future nature of society free of racism, not for the nature of redress in a society filled with discrimination. King was calling for the end of racial discrimination, not for the end of redress in a discriminatory society. In a society without racial discrimination, quotas would indeed be a wrong thing. Today, they are not.

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Recommended reading: Rush, Quotas, and the Discriminatory Double Standard, which explains the nature of Affirmative Action and quotas and their differences, why they are justified, and how they are unfairly attacked.

Outages

My apologies for this site not being available over much of the past day. I am seriously beginning to think about looking for a new web host. First was Surpass Hosting's major outage of a month or two ago--I got away with only 8 hours off the air, but some were knocked off for days. Just a bit more than a week ago they lost an entire domain of mine (not blogd, but another one), taking up to a day to get it back.

And then yesterday, they were knocked out by the hurricane--but it has become apparent that this was not necessary. They advertise redundant power supply, but claim it malfunctioned. And then, for some reason, that they had to take all the servers off line for three hours to do something else... and now (I am writing this during the blackout, you are seeing this many hours later) the site has been knocked out yet again, for several hours now--and they are still blaming it on the hurricane. Even though other web hosts in Orlando, also hit by the hurricane, managed to stay on line without any problems. I don't know... I'll probably give them one more chance, but I'm this close....

In the meantime, anyone know a good web host?

Fahrenheit 9/11 DVD Release Date Set; Pre-Order Available

As Moore's film nears the $150 million mark (domestic and overseas), its position at the box office has fallen enough (making only a few million dollars a week, in only 700+ theaters now) so that the DVD release can be announced. So the release date has been set for October 5th--still giving the film enough time to make several million more at the box office, but coming out on video almost a month before the November 2 elections.

That is clearly in line with Moore's intentions to get as many people as possible to see the film. And since DVD sales often outpace box office sales, it is likely a lot of people will be getting the DVD.

If you're one of those people, Amazon.com is your likely shop of choice; Fahrenheit 9/11 is available for pre-order, for $19. The DVD will include: "The Release of Fahrenheit 9/11" featurette, a montage of the people of Iraq on the eve of invasion, Homeland security: Miami style, Outside Abu Ghraib Prison, Eyewitness account from Samara, Iraq, More with Abdul Henderson, Lila Lipscomb at the Washington, D.C. premiere, Arab-American comedians' acts and experiences after 9/11, Condoleezza Rice's 9/11 Commission testimony, and the Rose Garden press briefing after 9/11 Commission appearance.

The film, by the way, has been shunned by the supposedly non-partisan military establishment. The film is not showing in theaters on U.S. bases, despite the fact that every other film that makes so much money is quickly snapped up. The claim is that it was "too late" to put it into military theaters, among a host of other phony reasons, but the fact is that Lion's Gate made the film available from the beginning. It is not surprising, considering that the same people, in a "balanced" way, program Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura and Paul Harvey, but no liberal counterweight, on the armed forces network. The claim there is that they only broadcast "the most popular" radio shows. But not the most popular movies, which happen not to be in line with right-wing standards? Please.

I was hoping to write Part II of my review of the film after seeing it again yesterday, but since it was massively sold out, I'll have to refer to alternate sources to finish it; hopefully I'll have it ready in the next few days.

Fahrenheit 9/11 in Japan: Sold Out

The day's tickets, sold out by noon.

Well, I wanted to see F-9/11 again today, and planned to go with a colleague from school. It was playing today at the Ebisu Garden Cinemas, on both screens. My colleague and I agreed to meet at the theater at 2:30 so we could see the 3:10 show. But when I went, I figured I would be smart: I would get there at 2:00, a half hour early, so I could be sure to get a ticket.

Well, you can guess what happened. I was too late. By about four hours. Apparently, when the tickets went on sale at 9:30 am, there was already a big line, which eventually stretched out to longer than a city block. The whole day's tickets were already sold out before noon, and the tickets to the 3:10 show were gone well before that. Lauren Shannon, who went very early to get tickets for the 11:30 show, couldn't get anything before the 3:10 show, and eventually wound up giving her tickets to a couple who came all the way from Chiba and found the day sold out.

It may be the first day, a special showing and all--but the fact that so many people came, so early, and some from so far away, are all suggestions that this film will be a very big hit in Japan. Already this film has grossed $114 million in the U.S. and $32 million overseas as of a week ago--with Japan it will without doubt break the $150 million mark--and it still hasn't been released in Russia, Italy, Greece, Scandinavia, and a dozen other countries; receipts from Mexico, Egypt, Switzerland and a dozen more have still not been tabulated into that total. And then there will be DVD sales, often matching or exceeding domestic ticket sales. For a documentary, this is beyond extraordinary.

And the audiences are... sometimes interesting, as evidenced below. As many of us sat outside (having arrived early, I was waiting for my colleague, and others were taking care of a get-out-the-vote drive), we noticed two gentlemen in robes--clearly monks--talking to reporters outside the entrance. I would've loved to know what they were saying about the film...

Hurricane Outage

This site was down for a few hours just until now. The cause was Hurricane Charley hitting Orlando, Florida, where this site's data center is located. Hopefully, we'll be up continuously from now.

In Case There Was Any Doubt

President Bush's tax cuts have transferred the federal tax burden from the richest Americans to middle-class families, with one-third of them benefiting people with the top 1 percent of income, according to a government report cited in newspapers on Friday. (from Reuters: Bush Tax Cuts Heavily Favor Rich, CBO Says)

The report says that the top 1% of earners, with an annual income of about $1.2 million, will get a tax cut of $78,460, while the middle 20%, averaging a $57,000 income, will get $1,090.

The tax cuts for the top 1% represents a 6.5% cut, while the cut for the middle 20% is just 1.9%--less than a third of what the rich are getting. This is not just a disparate tax cut, it is an insult, considering the already unfair tax burden between the wealthy and the middle class.

Bush claims that rich people should get a bigger tax cut because "they pay more," and because it is "fair." But this claim is, of course, outside the concept of the progressive tax system, under which the idea is that the wealthy should pay more. Why? Because first, they can afford it more, and second--and most importantly--they owe more because it is the American system that allowed them to gain that wealth in the first place.

Instead, the wealthy are paying less than their fair share, even by non-progressive standards, and the gap is even wider than it appears because rising costs in fuel, slashes in federal programs and local government funding, as well as falling wages for middle-class earners--what could be called "Bush's hidden tax hikes"--all hit the middle class hard while leaving the wealthy relatively unaffected.

And there's even more bad news: "taxpayers whose incomes range from $51,500 to around $75,600, saw their share of federal tax payments increase" [emphasis mine]. Whereas two-thirds of Bush's tax cuts went to the wealthiest 20%, or those making over $203,740.

On the "fairness" issue: it is markedly out of context. Wealthy people have been getting the lion's share of tax breaks, not to mention the biggest tax breaks, for the past quarter century, while the overall tax burden for the middle class has risen. Only income and capital gains taxes have come down--the two tax areas which wealthy people pay most into. State and local taxes, as well as payroll taxes, which hit the poor and middle class most, have risen in past decades.

But wait, Bush will tell you--"the wealthiest 5% of Americans pay 38.4% of federal taxes! That's not fair!" This is the distortion fed to the American public to make them accept the tax cuts. But is it true?

No, it isn't: the bottom 60% of earners in the U.S. have less than 5% of the wealth, but pay more than 14% of the taxes. The wealthiest 5% have 59% of the wealth, but pay only 38.4%. Kind of looks different when seen in that perspective, doesn't it? So don't cry for people making six- or seven-figure incomes when someone tells you they pay "too much" in taxes. The fact is, they pay less than their fair share, not more. Part of that is because of their massive tax cuts over the past few decades, part is due to the transference of wealth to capital gains as opposed to direct salary, part of it is due to the differing burdens of state/local & payroll vs. federal income & capital gains, and a significant remaining part is due to all of the tax loopholes, shelters, and deductions available to wealthier earners which the middle class and poor cannot take advantage of. The wealthy, claimed to be in the 35% tax bracket, pay nowhere near that in terms of actual percentage of their real income. Nobody pays 35%. Those base numbers are science fiction. After all the special breaks, many wealthy people pay less than the middle class no matter which way you parse it out.

Look, people, the United States is in financial trouble. Bush's tax cuts are obviously not helping, as the "recovery" after three years of those tax cuts is still anemic. If you're making over 200 grand a year and you're not willing to pay your fair share, then you're not what I would call a patriotic American. Patriotism is not about being gung-ho about sending other people's kids to war--it's about sacrifice to make the country a better place.

Goss: "I Couldn't Get a Job with the CIA Today. I Am Not Qualified."

Matt Gunn has the details on how Rep. Goss, the controversial Bush candidate for heading the CIA, isn't qualified--in Goss' own words. The words were spoken in an interview made for Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, but were cut from the final film. Granted, he's talking about getting a job as an agent, but if a man is unqualified even to be an agent, can he be qualified to lead the entire organization?

Michael Moore has a clipping on the story, and promises video tomorrow.

Ten Words

"There it is. That's the ten-word answer my staff's been looking for for two weeks. There it is. Ten-word answers can kill you in political campaigns. They're the tip of the sword. Here's my question: What are the next ten words of your answer? Your taxes are too high? So are mine. Give me the next ten words. How are we going to do it? Give me ten after that, I'll drop out of the race right now. Every once in a while... every once in a while, there's a day with an absolute right and an absolute wrong, but those days almost always include body counts. Other than that, there aren't very many unnuanced moments in leading a country that's way too big for ten words."

--President Bartlet, in the West Wing episode "Game On"

In the game of "Ten Words," Bush has been winning the game.

Last September, after several weeks of claiming that he could invade Iraq without the permission of Congress (his staff even put together a list of legal justifications for doing so), Bush flip-flopped and put before the Senate a request to grant him war powers. Kerry agonized over whether or not to grant those powers; as other Democrats such as Barbara Boxer were saying that we should not trust the president, Kerry finally decided to back the resolution, but not without conditions or reservations:

"Let there be no doubt or confusion," Kerry said. "I will support a multilateral effort to disarm [Hussein] by force, if we ever exhaust those other options as the president has promised. But I will not support a unilateral U.S. war against Iraq unless that threat is imminent and the multilateral effort has not proven possible."

There was nothing in the resolution that guaranteed those conditions would be met. Nonetheless, he was one of 29 Democrats to vote for the resolution, which passed 77 to 23.

In his Senate speech, Kerry had said, "I will be among the first to speak out" if Bush failed to seek international support and go to war as a last resort.

It is important to remember that these were words Kerry spoke on the floor of the Senate last October, not this summer; it is important to remember that Bush had promised to exhaust all diplomatic options, to allow the weapons inspectors to finish their work, to build a true coalition and to get the full backing of the U.N. And it is important to remember that Bush broke those promises, and that he appears to have never intended to keep them at all; in this sense, Bush was a flip-flopper at least, and an outright dishonest liar at worst.

But that isn't stopping Bush from trying to make Kerry look like the flip-flopper instead of himself. The first criticism he laid on Kerry was, if going into Iraq was wrong, then why did you vote for it? That answer was easy enough for Kerry to answer: because you promised to go only as a last resort (ten words exactly!). So now Bush has formulated a different ten-word attack: Knowing what you know now, would you still vote for it?

"Kerry has always had this vulnerability of looking flip-floppy on the issue and Bush is using this very shrewdly," said Walter Russell Mead, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations. He added "Being silent on the question makes him look evasive, and saying something, anything, gets him in trouble with one side of his party or another." (NYT)

Kerry answered that he would have done so, but again, only if Bush had kept the same promise he had made before--to use force only as a last resort, and only with a true coalition and the backing of the U.N.

Unfortunately, that was not only just a little bit too long for ten words, but it also contained a conditional, which is a seeming contradiction in this context, if one does not examine beyond the ten-word limit. And Bush has been using the tip of that sword to skewer Kerry. And it is true, a lot of Democrats don't like Kerry's answer; I myself feel that even with what we knew before we found there were no WMD, that we shouldn't have gone to war--but I am comfortable with Kerry's conditions about what should be done first.

The problem is, Bush's great skill with the ten-word sword and the perception of Kerry unconditionally approving of what Bush did have been wounding Kerry in the media and in public perception recently.

Sometimes it is painful to know that your guy is right and the other guy is not only wrong, but also a lying, deceptive bastard, and yet you can still clearly understand how people can see it the other way around.

As Then, Is Now--He Just Learned How to Hide it Better

The photo at right kind of says it all, doesn't it? In a way, that is--there's more to it than just the punch. Bob Harris, over at the This Modern World blog site, explains how:

Incidentally, while rugby is a contact sport, every player knows that tackling above the shoulders is a foul. So is leaving your feet during a tackle. Either of these is serious enough that the other team is immediately awarded a penalty kick, often directly resulting in points for the other team.

So even without throwing a punch, Bush is already well outside fair play.

Grasping an opponent by the back of the head and punching him in the face is beyond the pale -- I've watched rugby avidly for years, and I've never seen it during an open-field tackle like this, honest -- and will typically result in a player being immediately sent off.

Of course, this is in line with a lot of other stuff Bush did in college. Arrested twice (once for stealing a holiday wreath from a department store, again for rushing another college's football field and tearing down the goal posts), interviewed in the national press defending the branding (with a red-hot coat-hanger) fraternity pledges, admonishing classmates for wanting to avoid going to Vietnam and then using family connections to do exactly that--lots of stuff of this nature. Gary Trudeau, writer of Doonesbury, was at Yale with Bush and describes him as being cruel back then: "He could also make you feel extremely uncomfortable. He was very good at all the tools for survival that people developed in prep school -- sarcasm, and the giving of nicknames. He was extremely skilled at controlling people and outcomes in that way. Little bits of perfectly placed humiliation."

Bush apologists say that these were "youthful indiscretions," but they do show character; people change a great deal, but many fundamental characteristics will last a lifetime, and Bush has carried some of these principles into his later life, as governor of Texas and as president. For example, while governing Texas, he refused to use his power to grant clemency, particularly in the case of Carla Faye Tucker, who was born-again and was doing good works, and pleaded to Bush for her life. Bush's response? To cruelly mock her in a purse-lipped, falsetto voice, mimicking her saying "Please don't kill me!" Not a youthful indiscretion--this guy is, in truth, fundamentally cruel. Look at a rundown of Bush's pre-presidential record, and see the category, "Bush and Character."

The Rich Will Get What They Want Anyway

If you've been following the election, then you know that John Kerry has pledged not only to preserve present middle-class tax cuts, but to augment them with targeted cuts, like tax breaks for people trying to send their kids to college. For wealthy people--himself included--on the other hand, he has promised to roll back the tax cuts for the rich, to pay for incidentals like Education and Health Care.

George Bush, on the other hand, has made no secret of his intent to protect, prolong and increase his tax cuts for the rich--and has done so by throwing meaningless bones to the middle class, and by fooling people of modest means that his tax cuts are somehow aimed at them. And many are happy with their tax cuts, despite having them wholly cancelled out by under-the-radar costs such as high energy prices, large cuts in government services, lower salaries and wages, and local and state tax hikes to pay for lower federal assistance.

Bush continued that streak by making two incredibly outrageous statements yesterday. First was his statement that Kerry's tax rollbacks for the rich would hit small business owners because, and I quote, "the rich in America happen to be the small business owners." Come again? Small business owners comprise the "rich" population in the U.S.? Give me a break. And Bush's awareness of that lie can be easily tested by asking him to limit his tax cuts to people earning over $200,000 to only the owners of small businesses. See how fast he dumps that possibility.

But then Bush went further. He said that raising taxes on wealthy people has failed in the past because, and again I quote, "the really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes anyway." So his official position is to give tax cuts to the rich because they'll find a way to get the money illegally anyway?

I am reminded of an old political cartoon I saw in a book many years ago. The cartoon was published about a century ago, and featured two overweight men, dressed in coats and top hats--the obligatory rich-guy getup in comics--both laughing hysterically at a piece of paper one of them is holding, on which is printed three words: "tax the rich." It apparently was as true back then as it is today, and this spirit lives on in the Bush administration.

The truth is, under the Bush administration, the IRS has been morphed into a "give the rich anything they want" agency. This policy of letting wealthy people get off without paying has even gone beyond helping them establish foreign-based offices so they can escape paying taxes in the U.S., they also help out people who can not or do not take that particular out.

22-year senior IRS auditor Remy Welling is now risking a jail sentence to make the people aware of this tacit assistance to the rich. She has blown the whistle on this practice, citing the specific case of Silicon Valley corporation Micrel, which the IRS secretly helped to avoid paying $51 million in taxes it was legally bound to pay--and then additionally helped the top executives get an additional $20 million by keeping information secret from its shareholders. Welling found this out when she was given the case and told that the IRS settled the deal before an audit of the company even began. And these guys are not "small business owners."

Under the Bush administration, face-to-face tax audits on corporations have been slashed in half. $311 billion in owed tax revenue went uncollected last year, nearly two-thirds of the current budget deficit.

This is not just giving tax breaks to the rich, this is the Bush IRS practically handing cash to rich people at the expense of middle-class taxpayers. That's how much he "supports" the working American.

Kerry Talks to Real Crowds, Bush Talks to Fake Ones

Remember a report recently where Kerry and Edwards traded shots with hecklers? It doesn't matter which one, it's happened so often (here's just one example--Google to find dozens more). Have you noticed that this happens to Kerry, even his wife, very frequently, and that this rarely happens to Bush? That's not a coincidence.

When John or Teresa Kerry and John Edwards speak to audiences, they're speaking to real crowds, mostly Democrats as that's the crowd they draw, but also to moderates and Republicans, for whom it is simple to get in. They pay the price for that--they get heckled constantly, Republicans coordinate to disrupt their events, we start hearing about groups chanting "Four More Years!" for Bush, and so on. It's a hassle, but at least Kerry and Edwards are honest in whom they talk to--it's no PR stunt meant for the local TV station, it's the real deal, so to speak. And the advantage is not only to be seen as authentic; they also get to speak to more swing voters in person this way.

Bush, on the other hand, seems terrified of speaking in front of a crowd that isn't 100% full of gung-ho supporters--even in the military, which is strongly Republican. Remember his secret flight to Baghdad so he could serve up plastic turkey? The GI's who got to enjoy the Thanksgiving dinner were there only because they had answered a written questionnaire in which they supported the president a hundred percent--and those who answered less heartily were sent to their barracks to eat MREs. True story.

And it's no less true on the campaign trail. Bush has been doing videotaped "town-hall" meetings, and wouldn't you know, the crowds are all enthusiastically supportive of the president, the questions are softballs and there is not a dissenting or truly challenging voice to be heard. Some people don't even ask questions; they simply stand up, spout out effusive praise of Bush, and then sit down to thunderous applause. Bush spokespeople claim that these are not staged, that they never know what people will say. Riiiiigghht.

Cheney is making his rounds of the speech-and-town-hall circuit as well, and with him as well, they're not letting in anyone but the party faithful--it's invitation only, to which members of the public are wondering, "Since when does a town hall meeting feature 'invitation only' participants?"

But Bush and Cheney's standards for who gets in can be severely draconian. Nowadays, to get into one of their appearances, you actually have to sign a loyalty oath, pledging to back the president and vote for him in November before you can be given tickets. Bush people claim that they foiled organized attempts to disrupt their rallies, which is baloney--if all you have to do is sign a loyalty oath, determined protesters aren't going to stop at signing them. But the GOP goes farther than that, requiring identification as a registered Republican or other credentials which will guarantee that you will do nothing but cheer heartily once you're inside.

This fake popularity, exercised predominantly by the GOP, has its advantages--when Bush and Cheney appear on television and in news reports, they come across as wildly popular. One can only guess that this is all that Bush's people care about, and if you have to insult and piss off a whole lot of people to do it, well, the TV audience is bigger than the crowd that didn't get in.

But as the GOP continues to dismiss Michael Moore for using his craft to create false impressions, this Bush policy makes it very clear that the GOP is far more adept at creating false impressions--or as Moore would say, creating a "fictitious president."

Were Bush or Cheney to make an appearance before a real crowd of Americans, not stacked, not hand-picked, not just the party faithful, but a group of true-blue, everyday Americans, they would surely falter under the lack of enthusiasm and sometimes outrage that they have generated. The cheers would be more realistically scattered, the silence of much or the crowd thick in the air, the dissatisfaction palpable.

Which, of course, is exactly why they stack the crowds.

Why Do They Do That?

I just got my passport back from the Chinese Embassy today, and they did something that frustrates and mystifies me: when they put in the tourist visa, they placed it five pages after the last full page--in other words, they skipped over four blank pages in my passport that now will be avoided and unused in the future, as immigration officials usually place stamps after the last used page. Essentially, the Chinese embassy just wasted one quarter of the empty pages in my passport. And this is not the first time--several years ago, in my last passport, a Japanese immigration official did the exact same thing, though for a one-year working visa.

On top of that, a simple tourist visa is now an adhesive label which takes up a whole page--twice the size of a 3-year working visa from Japan--further filling up the passport. A simple 9-day trip to China is taking up 5 of 16 free pages in a brand-new passport, meaning I'm probably going to have to get replacement pages before the passport is even halfway to its expiration date.

Has anyone else had the skip-four-pages thing done to them?

Well, That Didn't Take Long

Keyes is already suffering from foot-in-mouth disease, and unabashedly so. He said of his opponent Barak Obama:

"I would still be picking cotton if the country's moral principles had not been shaped by the Declaration of Independence... [Obama] has broken and rejected those principles he has taken the slaveholder's position."

We're already beginning to see why Keyes has badly lost every race he's gotten into. It'll be very interesting to see the polling data for Illinois next week. And because of the very high-profile nature of this race, it may have an effect on many other races as well. If there were ever a race that better showcased the true principles of each party, this would have to be it--and the Democrats could not ask for a better representative than Obama.

The Bush/GOP Smear Campaign Hits Full Stride

You have probably heard the Swift Boat Veterans for "Truth" advertisement, in which they go around saying, I served with John Kerry!" and then denounce him in a variety of ways. The group claims to be non-partisan. Their ad, however, is so full of lies, that if the truth were told, the ad would sound very different--imagine "Swift Boat Veterans Under Truth Serum":

"I didn't serve with Kerry, but I was in Vietnam at the same time as he was, and now I'm a partisan Republican who is really pissed at him. So I'm here to smear him any way I can, and use the fact that I was in Vietnam to do so."

"Me too. I never served a day with him, but I was over there at about the same time. I don't like the fact that he spoke out against the war, so I'm trying to keep him from being elected now. But if I just say that I don't like him for his anti-war protests, that wouldn't be so convincing, so I'm pretending that I knew the guy and that I have the right to criticize him."

"I didn't serve with Kerry in action either, and I initially claimed Kerry lied about what happened in Vietnam. But it was my statement that was a lie. I don't know how anyone would have taken the risks he took in combat just for the glory of running for office. It was a terrible mistake probably for me to sign the affidavit with those words. I'm the one in trouble here. . . . I knew it was wrong. I really don't know anything first-hand."

"I didn't serve with Kerry, but I met him at an officer's club once. As I recall, he complained that we didn't get enough air support, and that's about it. But I'm willing to make him sound like a coward and a traitor because of my political leanings."

"I kind of served with John Kerry in Vietnam, in that I worked for someone on a different swift boat, and I heard somewhere that Kerry needed a lot of supervision. I'm willing to make that sound as bad as I can."

"I served on a different boat than Kerry, and I saw from just a few yards away when he was supposedly wounded, and he was lying--he wasn't wounded and there was no enemy fire, and he ran away. Well, actually, he wasn't a few yards away, he was a few hundred yards away. And actually, I'm claiming he ran away and there was no enemy fire, which doesn't make any sense. And the guy whose life he saved and was right there with Kerry completely contradicts me. Hmm. Maybe I'm lying."

"I treated Kerry for one of his wounds in Vietnam, and I'm here to testify that he clumsily shot himself and then demanded a purple heart. Of course, I'm kind of lying, because I never treated Kerry, and I actually have no idea what really happened, I just claim that I heard something from these two guys, though they both completely deny telling me anything."

The above, of course, is a mixture of actual quotes, and fictional quotes based upon actual observations (see factcheck.org). And here's a real veteran:

"My name is John McCain. I think the ad is dishonest and dishonorable. As it is none of these individuals served on the boat Kerry commanded. Many of his crewmates have testified to his courage under fire. I think John Kerry served honorably in Vietnam."

Furthermore, the group is hardly "partisan." The initial funding came from a Texas Republican who has given millions of dollars to the GOP; other funds come from another Texas Republican, and leading all of this is John O'Neill, who was hand-picked by the Nixon administration to try to smear and renounce Kerry, and has been gunning for him ever since.

This is the biggest salvo yet in the now months-long campaign to try to smear Kerry, a campaign which started with fake claims of Botox injections, ginned-up photos of Kerry and Jane Fonda, completely fabricated claims that Kerry had an affair with an intern reporter, and a phony claim that Kerry tried to dodge the draft. Now there are shadows of the Nixon dirty-tricks teams; just like the Nixon con men who rode up and down in elevators all day talking loudly about completely fake smear stories about Democrats so people would overhear them and repeat the stories, their modern counterparts are using the Internet, spreading emails that Teresa Heinz Kerry gave money to terrorists and paid for Saddam Hussein's attorney--and God alone knows what other venomous crap is out there.

This is more than just anti-Kerry advertising, we're now in the middle of what we all fully expected: an all-out, pedal-to-the-metal dirty-tricks smear campaign against Kerry, orchestrated by the GOP for Bush's benefit. So far, there hasn't been much public reaction against Kerry, who has been doing extremely well in battleground state polling, and if we're lucky, the smear campaign will backfire. But we have to remember, the GOP is extremely good at doing this kind of thing. So we watch (while suspending belief in the commercials and anything coming from the right wing about Kerry), and wait.

How Do I Look?

The site, that is. I just fixed a stylesheet problem that should make the blog and the right-hand sidebar display correctly. But each browser (especially Explorer) has its quirks, and a web page will display differently on different computers, on different browsers (with different versions), and with the monitor set at different resolutions.

Unfortunately, most people (60% of the visitors here) still use Explorer, despite its flaws and lack of features, even despite the security flaws that constantly pop up to the extent that experts have warned everyone not to use it at all (PC World comments, "It's hard to imagine that anyone would continue to use Internet Explorer faced as it is with such massive security issues"). But Microsoft owns the desktop, and they put Explorer there, so people use it for no better reason that it's the only one there. (Honestly, Mozilla / Firefox are far superior and easy as pie to download and install, from Mozilla.org.)

So most people use Explorer, but many use Mozilla/Firefox, a good number use Safari, and the rest use Netscape, opera and a few other odd third-party browsers. Some people have large monitors set to higher resolutions, some still use a 600 x 800 setting; some people use Windows PCs, and the rest of us use Macs. Which means that your web page has to be designed specifically to fit each and every one of those combinations.

This site will always be best-optimized for Mozilla/Firefox, but I try to make it fit as many conditions as possible.

So let me know: does the site display poorly for you? You should be able to see the sidebar at right, with the Linkboard, the "Best of" list, calendar and other links; all the text should be visible, not obscured or shifted askew, not unduly large or tiny.

If something is displaying wrong or poorly, please add a comment and let me know, and kindly include your platform (Mac or PC), OS version, the browser you're using, the browser version, and if you know it, your screen resolution (e.g. 1280 x 854).

Your help is much appreciated!

Barak Obama vs. The Instant Hypocrite

As reported earlier, the Illinois GOP has badly mishandled the Senate race there. They faced a popular, well-respected contender in Barak Obama. When candidate Jack "Family Values" Ryan left the race due to a sex scandal, they tried to engage a string of celebrities, millionaires and party faithful to take on the campaign, but they all failed; then they turned to the race card, paring the list of hopefuls down to two African-Americans, hoping that would counter the fact that Obama is black. They claimed it was mere coincidence that their finalists were both black, but in a party which is overwhelmingly white, it's like saying that you just "happened" to deal yourself two straight-flushes in a row and that no, the deck is not stacked, why do you ask? The GOP clearly hopes that by making their conservative candidate black, that African-Americans in Illinois will somehow feel that Keyes is just as appealing as Obama.

Alan Keyes, however, carries the burden of instant hypocrisy: in 2000, he forcefully criticized Hillary Clinton for carpetbagging, or running for a seat in a state she had no relation to, saying that it represented the destruction of his beloved federalism, that she would "go into a state she doesn't even live in and pretend to represent people there, so I certainly wouldn't imitate it." And of course, that is exactly what he is doing now. Is he destroying federalism? Of course not! You see, he felt that he should leave Maryland and go to Illinois in order to "defend the land of my spirit and my conscience and my heart. If indeed that land is the state of Illinois, then I have lived in the Land of Lincoln all my life."

Ooooohhh, I see! He's been a spiritual resident of Illinois since birth! What an amazing revelation! I should do that! After all, I can't vote for California state Senators or Representatives because I live overseas and don't pay state taxes--so I instead will claim residence in Texas, which has no state taxes. Actual physical residency? Posh! It's been my spiritual home since birth! Yes, that's the ticket!

What an outrageous hypocrite.

In addition to the hypocrisy, Keyes also brings with him a record of being the perennial loser. Even in his home state, he lost two Senate races by landslides (in 1988, getting only 38.2% of the votes, and in 1992, getting 29%--they love him there!), and was a Republican presidential contender in 1996 and 2000, again finishing way, way last. So now he's gearing up for embarrassing loss #5, right on time for his every-four-years failure. And this time, he's promising not to pay himself a "salary" from campaign contributions (read: stuffing donations into his own pocket) like he did in 1992.

This should be fun.

The Best of BfAD

Well, vacation is now fully underway for me, and so I took this opportunity to tweak the site a little bit. There are a few small cosmetic changes, like moving the calendar down below some other items on the right-hand sidebar on the main page (I don't think many people ever use that), and the elimination of the calendar on individual entry pages (where the calendar never functioned anyway). The main addition, however, is The Best of BfAD.

This blog has gotten so big--766 posts as of this one--that surfing the main categories sometimes leads to a hundred or more posts coming down. It becomes harder and harder to find just the topic you might be interested in. And as much as I might like to think that every word I write is riveting, I am fully aware that a person going through these posts might find less of it as armchair-gripping as I might. Searching for exactly what you want is just fine, but you have to know what to search for. So I went through all 765 existing posts and found the ones that I thought were most noteworthy--133 of them in all, or nearly one in every six. The top 25 are now listed just below the linkboard on the right-hand sidebar. At the bottom of that list is a link to the "Best Of" special page, which lists all 133, categorized and summarized in a single line each.

After looking through all the political posts, I think I could probably paste them together into a book or something; it's hard to believe I've done that much essay-writing on the topic. But they do hold the basic principles of my political ideology, and a lot of important facts and views that I think people should read, particularly before this coming election.

Other categories on the "Best Of" page include Japan Information & Resources, Audio/Video Posts, and Other Popular Posts.

Enjoy!

On July "Volatility"

One of the Bush apologists coming to comment on this site, remarking on the dismal May-July job numbers, tried to fob off the slump to the idea that July is a "volatile" month; specifically, he wrote: "HINT: July is typically a very volitile month for employment numbers."

This is what comes from believing everything you hear from the Bush administration and right-wing econopundits. The idea that we are gaining more and more jobs, and it's just that July is traditionally volatile, so we'll jump back up in August--it's a pipe dream, no more and no less. First, volatility goes both ways: it might get you numbers lower than are real, but it also might get you numbers higher than are real. Second, whether or not a month is often volatile is no guarantee that the numbers for this July were actually volatile. In other words, it's all just blowing smoke.

Let's take a look, shall we?

I went to the web site of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and found a page with all the job data since 1994. I then copied that into Excel, translated the table to columnar form, and then started banging out charts. Here's the first, and most relevant to the topic at hand--job growth figures for 2004:

What's the first thing you see? It's glaringly obvious: a spike in March, which then declines in a nice, steady curve up through July. That ain't no blip you see in July, and it's not volatility--it is a smooth, regular trend. In fact, if you see this as a straight-line trend rather than a curving one, then July's numbers should have been lower, suggesting that volatility made the July numbers appear higher than they should have been. It is possible that with next month's report, we may see July's numbers revised downward.

So much for the Bush jobs surge, and so much for Bush-favoring "volatility."

I figured that I had done all this work to get the chart made, let's look at a few others. Here's one that shows job growth during the entire Bush presidency:

Here's where we see the overall job loss during the Bush Jr. years. Note how the numbers seem to have been trying to go up in mid-2002? See how they sputtered and began falling again? That's where the job recovery should have been. And that's where it would have been, had Bush not done everything wrong. And if you add all those positive and (mostly) negative numbers together, you'll see where those 1.1 million jobs disappeared to.

But to get a real feel for how Bush anemia has stacked up against the Clinton job juggernaut, look at this chart:

Blue is total number of jobs under Clinton, red is total number of jobs under Bush. There's really no contest at all, is there?

You want jobs? Good jobs? Well-paying jobs? Or heck, even any job at all?

Vote for Kerry.

Sometimes He Lets the Truth Slip

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful - and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people - and neither do we."

--George W. Bush, during a signing ceremony for a defense bill, Aug. 5, 2004

Update: Thanks to Mark at VuDeja for pointing me to this audio file of Bush's statement (now hosted here).

July Job Numbers a Dismal 32,000; May and June Numbers Revised Downward

After a few months of tepid job growth, the Bush administration tried to paint the economy as "recovering"--in fact, they tried to say that it was great, never better. In June, the number of new jobs dropped to 112,000, way below what anyone would consider "strong," and in fact, was below the 150,000 new jobs required simply to keep up with population growth. Republicans countered that this was only a blip, that June was artificially low, and that July numbers would prove the recovery was truly back. Nevertheless, they only projected 220,000 jobs for July, as high as possible to make things seem rosy, as few as possible so as not to look bad if numbers were not really too high. But some hopeful estimates were for as many as 300,000 new jobs.

Well, the July numbers are now out. How many new jobs?

32,000.

Not only that, but revised estimates for May and June revealed that those months actually added 61,000 fewer jobs than was previously estimated. Therefore, relative to job numbers assumed true last month, there was negative job growth of 29,000. It turns out that May increased by 208,000 jobs (as opposed to 242,000), and June by only 78,000 (as opposed to 112,000).

This means that total job growth over the past three months has been, on average, only 106,000 per month, a great deal lower than what is necessary to cancel out population growth--and it is most definitely on a downward trend.

It will be extraordinarily hard to support any statement that claims we are in a "recovery."

This is what the Bush administration's tax cuts for the wealthy has wrought. And please don't try to tell me about any tax cuts for the middle class, there haven't been any; after skyrocketing fuel costs, lower and lower wages and salaries, rising local taxes and the cutting of services, in addition to all the other costs due to Bush policies, whatever money you got back from the government has long since been sucked right back out of your pocket--and as a result, the economy remains stagnant. This is not the way to go.

What we need is to have a president who will not throw hundreds of billions of dollars (as well as a thousand soldier's lives) into an unnecessary war, who will allow corporate greed and job exportation to go unchecked, who will continue to take money from the poor and funnel it to the rich. We need someone who will provide for good health care instead of sacrificing it so that drug companies can make even more obscene profits. We need someone who will not throw boatloads of cash at energy companies who are already flush at the expense paid by the average Joe, but instead have energy policy written for the people, not the energy corps. We need a president who will give tax breaks to people who need them, and who will roll back welfare-for-the-wealthy and use those billions and trillions to pay for good education (the best-payment investment for the future!) and good health care. We need a president who will give companies tax breaks for keeping good jobs here, instead of giving tax breaks to corporations that send them overseas. And we need a president who does not encourage or even allow corporations to make a huge profit and then pay no taxes by having a P.O. Box in the Cayman Islands.

Four more years of Bush will not only prolong this recession, it will also depress whatever natural recovery comes along, a recovery that even just without any action would have been here in truth already.

The only way to really recover is to get Kerry into office, evident not only by his clear-cut and rational plans (or download their book, "Our Plan for America," a 1.36 MB PDF file), but also by the historical fact that Democratic presidents always deliver the jobs.

---

Quick Update: Hugh over at DAJ commented that if you want a new job nowadays, try out for prison guard: 2 million Americans are now in jail, and despite losing so many manufacturing jobs, Bush created at least 206,000 new prison guard positions--probably more, since that last number was a 2002 stat.

Turning Over a New Cicada

Every summer in Japan you get cicadas, or "semi" (蝉) in Japanese. Not the type that come out once every 17 or 18 years, this bunch comes out every summer, and man, do they make a lot of noise. The Japanese characterize this noise as, "meeeee, meeeee, meeeeeeee." To which I then comically note how selfish they are. That is what Japanese people refer to as an "Oyaji gyagu," (親父ギャグ) or an "old man's gag."

The cicadas, meanwhile, are everywhere, buzzing and mating. And as the mating cycle dies down, you start seeing a lot cicadas on the ground. But just because you see them belly-up, it doesn't mean they're done for--these cicadas, it so happens, have a very tough time righting themselves once they've got six legs in the air. I've seen them do it, but usually they just lay there, immobile and apparently dead.

So the thing to do--unless you really hate cicadas, that is--is to gently nudge them over with a toe, to get them righted. But be prepared to jump away, though: the cicadas will, unless really close to death, immediately start buzzing up and away in the apparent random fashion that bugs are wont to do.

More Engrish

If you haven't been to Engrish.com, you should go there--an on-line collection of all sorts of funny English spotted and photographed in Japan. Not that I don't see a whole bunch myself. I remember back in Toyama in the mid-80's, I found a hairdressing salon that sported the name "Hair Salon Bow-Wow." I kid you not. I already posted about a parking lot sign that somehow misspelled a common two-letter word, the only word on the sign, and about a shop that was unclear on the concept of how sales are "on."

Yesterday, I was going to the travel agency to pay off the last of my plane ticket to China, and in the entrance of the building there was an ad on two panels of a glass wall to the business there. First you see:

And then:

And so:

I still have some other funny-English photos from the past. I'll try to post some soon.

China Has My Passport

I forgot that when you apply for a visa, the embassy or consulate in question requires you to leave your passport with them when you apply. So until Tuesday next week, China has mine. Despite missing out on the discount price of ¥41,000 ($367) and having to spend ¥60,000 ($537) on the air ticket, I figure it's worth it--I have a friend living in Shanghai who'll still be on vacation when I go, and can show me around--I'm not likely to have that opportunity again soon. So it'll be maybe 5 or 6 days in Shanghai and 2-3 days in Beijing, should be fun.

The only concern: how will I be able to blog? My friend tells me that you can buy a card to have wireless access in Starbucks (of course, they're everywhere), so if that works out, I'll still be able to post every day. If not, I'll have to figure out something else, like an Internet cafe. I hope for the Starbucks Wi-Fi, though, as it'll allow me to post photos.

More About Pimentón

I blogged about this about a year ago, this great Spanish spice called Pimentón, a smoky hot paprika used in Chorizo, but I have become so fond of it, I use it on all sorts of foods. It's good on beef, chicken, gyoza, eggs--anything you can imagine that could take a hot spice. The problem is getting the right stuff. I first found out about Pimentón when I went to Spain and asked where the taste of Chorizo comes from. I brought back to Japan with me three 175-gram tins of the spice under the La Dalia label, and when I visited the U.S., I found a few other different brands, Chiquilin and La Chinata. But La Dalia beats them easily--much richer flavor.

The problem was, I was not sure how I could get some, especially from Japan. A friend found some pimentón advertised for sale here, but the price was exorbitant. But as my supply dwindles, I started looking on my own--and found a few different ways to get some. I found an import company in Naka-Meguro called Serrano, and they sell it by the 1-kg bag (and I was just in that neighborhood today, before I found out--dang!). They sell the 1 kg bag for ¥4410, which is $10 higher than quoted in other countries, but considering shipping costs, may not be bad at all! The shop will be open through Monday August 9th, then be on vacation through the 15th, and will re-open on the 16th. Alas, I am too tired to trudge back into town again, at least not today, and am going in on the 10th to get my tourist visa and a dental exam, so I might not get to them until after mid-month.

Yahoo's ChefShop sells it by tins, but I'm not sure how hard or expensive it would be to have them ship it internationally.

And then there's the company itself, La Dalia, which has an English version of its site. I am asking them if they can ship and if so, how much it will cost. They list international distributors, but the closest is in the Philippines.

I'll let you know what comes up, what is the best way to get it, and how much it'll cost.

The GOP and Illinois

You know, the GOP usually has its act together. So what's up with the race for the GOP-held Senate seat in Illinois?

The Democratic contender, Barak Obama, used to be pit against Jack "Family Values" Ryan, the ex of actress Jeri Ryan, whose divorce testimony turned up accusing Jack of trying to get her to perform explicit sex acts in public. After withering for a while, Ryan quit. After Obama made a fantastic keynote speech at the DNC, he skyrocketed.

So the GOP scrambled for a replacement. They tried celebrity Mike Ditka, but (forgive the football imagery) they fumbled it rather badly, and Ditka declined. So they fished around some more, with contenders yanking themselves out of contention almost as fast as the GOP can consider them, and then they stumbled upon the brilliant idea: Obama is black, that must be why he's winning, so let's find a black Republican candidate! In standard Republican fashion, they set about trying to find the rather unusual combination of black and GOP-brand conservative, and they came up with two names: former presidential candidate Alan Keyes, and former Bush deputy drug czar Andrea Grubb Barthwell.

Of course, the GOP had to look like color wasn't a factor; a Republican representative said, "These two were selected because of their strengths, not because of their color. Voters are smarter than that. That clearly wasn't the intent." Yeah. Right. Barthwell also said, "I don't think that this committee is playing any kind of race card here. I think they have looked at the candidates and the strengths they can bring to it and how they position themselves on the issues." But Barthwell is pretty much an unknown on the issues. And since (a) the GOP is looking at two prominent black candidates to fill the spot, and (b) prominent black Republicans are extremely rare, it's pretty clear exactly what's going on.

And there are more problems: Barthwell, it turns out, stands accused of Clarence-Thomas-like sexual harassment, a staffer saying that she made statements which were "lewd, derogatory and called into question his heterosexuality." Read Marshall's column for the unsavory details.

Well, that leaves Keyes, right? And despite being radical, not to mention having willfully thrown himself into Michael Moore's mosh pit in 1996, there is one other problem: he's from Maryland. Why is that a problem, when he can become eligible for Illinois citizenship well in time for the election? Because in 2000, on Fox News, when it was suggested that he run for Senate in New York, he responded sharply: "I deeply resent the destruction of federalism represented by Hillary Clinton’s willingness go into a state she doesn't even live in and pretend to represent people there, so I certainly wouldn't imitate it."

Oops.

So the GOP is going with someone up on sexual harassment charges, or someone who would become an instant hypocrite.

Don't you just love it when a plan comes together?

For even more GOP ineptitude, read this DailyKos article about how a GOPster got slapped upside the head by Donna Brazille when he suggested that Kerry wasn't distinguished as a senator.

News Bits -- August 4, 2004

Haven't done this in a while, but there are a few peripheral stories of interest out there today, so...

Conservatives and conservative news organizations were allowed unparalleled access to the Democratic National Convention (will Al Franken get a desk at the RNC? Hope so, but bet not), and unsurprisingly used that access to best sabotage and derail the Democratic message. After each speech, hard-right-wingers like Tucker Carlson, Ralph Reed and others were given the chance to smash & smear the Democrat who had just spoken and Democrats in general. Fox News had a desk there, but used it to do little more than deride the Democrats--they spent very little time showing the convention at all. Mostly it was Bill O'Reilly taking pot-shots at Democrats. For example, when Gore came up to speak, O'Reilly quipped, "We might listen in for a minute or so, but we're trying to stay away from partisan speech in both conventions this year." Stay away from partisan speech at conventions? Isn't that a bit like staying away from sand at the beach? And there's mlittle doubt that at the Republican convention, they'll decide that very little is "partisan."

Fliers from Boston to D.C. were forced to wait two hours while their plane was diverted to Albany, N.Y. Why? To pick up stranded passengers who had been stuck there because their plane had mechanical difficulties. The passengers were told of the diversion just as the plane was getting ready to take off, and they were not happy at all. None of them had ever experienced or even heard of such a thing before (and indeed, airline experts say that this is "extremely rare"). Unhappy, the fliers sat through the prolonged flight, and when they arrived in Albany to pick up the extras, guess who waltzed on the plane with a secret service entourage? That's right: Jenna and Barbara Bush. The US Airways representative claimed that this happened "often," but no one is buying it.

Cheney has someone new to blame for higher oil prices: the Democrats. Yep, it's them pesky Democrats at work again. Apparently, the administration's war in the Persian Gulf, failure to seriously pursue alternative energy sources (despite the tremendous lip service given) and reckless economic "stimulus" packages (i.e., forking over tax dollars to the wealthy) are not nearly as responsible for higher gas prices as the Democrats, who, according to Cheney, drove prices up at the pump--how? By not voting for every last bill for more drilling and oil company tax breaks that Bush tried to ram down the Congress' throat. Yeah. That must be the reason.

Al Franken will be on TV starting in September--or at least on cable TV, the Sundance Channel. I think it's good news, but not nearly enough of it. He's only getting one hour a week (correction: once a day, rebroadcast three times), and supposedly it is slated only to last until the election, though Franken hopes it will last longer than that. I would hope that they get a longer time slot, on a more watched channel (Bravo or something). Still, one can't be too grabby--Air America Radio is still in its infancy, and though its initial key demographic ratings are excellent, it is still in the stages of building an audience. And yet, better TV exposure would help the new network attract more listeners.

In the meantime, we'll be holding our collective breath for this Friday's employment report, which will tell us how many jobs were gained or lost during the month of July. This will be a rather crucial report: June's numbers were down significantly (to 112,000), and if July's are lackluster as well, it would indicate that the "recovery" that Bush grasped at this Spring may have been more of a blip than a recovery. Current estimates report that perhaps 200,000 jobs were created in July; if true, the Bush administration will jump on them, essentially saying, "see? That sounds like a pretty high number!" But it should be kept in mind that 150,000 is considered 'treading water,' the number needed to match population growth. Meaning an extra 50,000 jobs, while an improvement over June, would still be pretty anemic. In the meantime, the market has been down, consumer confidence and consumer spending have sagged, and energy prices are soaring. If this is a "recovery," on can get an idea of what a "normal" Bush economy would be like.

On the lighter side, NBC has offered Clinton the chance to host an episode of Saturday Night Live this season. If he takes it, it should be interesting--and probably damned funny. James Carville had a good story, reported by a member of the Democrats Abroad Japan mailing list: "Back in 2000 a Republican friend warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we'd lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what? I did vote for Gore, he did win, and I'll be damned if all those things didn't come true!"

Using Fear as a Political Tool

A few days ago, as you are almost certainly aware, the terror alert was raised to "orange" the the D.C. and NYC areas because the Bush Administration told the public that from a raid in Pakistan it had just uncovered a plot to attack the stock exchange and The Citigroup Center in Manhattan, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank buildings in Washington and Prudential Financial Inc.'s headquarters in Newark, N.J. Police shut down streets, banned trucks from driving anywhere near those buildings, started searching vehicles and asking people for documentation. A police presence can strongly be felt around these areas, and it is clear that very large amounts of money and other resources are being spent on this alert. Bush told the country that "What we're talking about here is a very serious matter based on solid intelligence."

Well, now it turns out that although the information was just uncovered this week in Pakistan, the information itself was three to four years old--pre-9/11.

So why did we immediately jump to high alert and put massive resources into protecting these buildings as if the attack were coming tomorrow? There's no good reason. You act suddenly if you find information that is current--but not just because you currently found information which is old. The dated evidence would indeed explain why the Bush people said that they knew "where" the attacks would be, but "not when." And Bush & Co. claim that their sudden panic response is justified because they are hearing chatter that an attack will take place sometime before the election--despite the fact that there is absolutely no connection between the aged Pakistan data and the current chatter data.

It's like you find an old newspaper from a few years ago that carried a warning that a tornado could strike somewhere in the U.S.--and so you panic and immediately hide in the southwest corner of your basement. Everyone else would think you to be a fool, and after a few hours, even you begin to wonder exactly how long you should stay down there. The Bush reaction to this data is similar: the information is years out of date, and in that time any number of factors could have changed. There's no reason to believe that these plans are the current ones by al Qaeda, or anywhere close to being the only plans--there could be far more targets easily switched to, or any number of other terrorist plans that we know nothing about. And how long will millions of dollars and countless man-hours of resources be spent? After three weeks and no action, will we still but shutting down the traffic around our financial centers and stopping everyone who goes there? And even assuming that the terrorists were, after 3 or 4 years, just now on the verge of carrying out such an attack, what would keep them from simply changing their target?

It comes as no surprise to me that CNN is downplaying this point to the extreme. Watching their coverage, they only obliquely refer to the aged data, and otherwise paint this as a strong, smart and effective response to critical data. This is simply one more reason why I am, in disgust, abandoning CNN as much as I can--even to the point of trying to get satellite TV instead of cable, since on my current cable plan CNN is all there is for news.

Many sectors of the media, especially television, are turning sharply against Kerry now, portraying him in a "losing" light, while showing Bush in a "strong president" light. The news agencies are covering Kerry only in the context of "where's the bounce?" even as they carry, in the immediate wake of the Democratic convention, nothing but stories on the hyped-up terror threat and how Bush is reacting to it, cheerleading the president all the way.

The fundamental point I'm leading up to on these events is the fact that the Bush administration is rather blatantly using fear as a political weapon, and the media is lapping it up. But how can the administration so easily wag the dog, so flagrantly play on people's fears, and not have people recognize it?

A lot of it has to do with the fact that people do not want to admit that they are afraid, and even more, do not want to admit that they allow their fears to dictate their actions. I suggested as much to one person I was debating with on the Internet, suggesting that fear was being used as a tool--and that person completely rejected the possibility, as if it were ludicrous to even suggest that it could be done.

But it is a classic political weapon, used down the ages. Make the people afraid, and then tell them you are the one who can save them.

Think about how it has affected you. I mean, really, seriously consider it. If you are on an airplane and you see a group of Arab-looking men, would you be at least nervous? After getting off the plane hours later, would you not be even a little more willing to support racial profiling in screening passengers for security threats? What if you worked at one of the buildings being watched in the current alert? Wouldn't this whole scare make you think twice about going to work, and would it not make you more eager to support actions to thwart the terrorists? If the answer to those questions, and others like them, is "yes," then congratulations: you have just had your political views adjusted by fear.

Fear is not only a weapon, it is perhaps the most powerful weapon that can be used in politics. And Bush is brandishing this weapon like no other, using it without concern of the consequences. He knows that people will respond to it; every terror alert he issues, no matter how flagrantly false, buys him votes. It's a win-win strategy: if there is an attack, he looks justified in warning us, no matter how misdirected that warning would be; if there is no attack, it looks like he prevented it. And as few who are fooled want to think they've been fooled, he can herd great portions of the public in his direction in the knowledge they will continue to flock toward the voting block.

Don't allow fear to influence your political decisions. Don't accept simply what you see and hear from the television media--the print and web media tends to have more information, better grounded--use Google News to help find your sources, not Fox or their wannabe-twin CNN. And vote based on the facts, not the hype.

I myself have a fear: that Bush and the GOP are just too damned good at lying, cheating, and stealing elections. But that's not what is driving my vote. It is, however, driving my determination to stop what I regard as the greatest threat to America since Joe McCarthy: Bush and Cheney.

Kamakura

From the 12th to the 14th centuries, Japan was ruled from Kamakura by the Minamoto shoguns. Today, it's a seaside resort (near Enoshima), and is famed for having a large, outdoor statue of Buddha. And that's where I went last Friday with a friend. After enjoying some really good noodles (they make 'em in front of you) at a shop in Yokohama's Chinatown, we headed over to Kamakura in the hopes that maybe the on-and-off Typhoon (#10) weather would clear well enough so we could enjoy the beach. Alas, no--even though we reached the beach and the sun was out, the waves were too high; a red flag was flying, meaning you can't go in there, bub. And laying on the beach didn't work too well, either--the sun was just too danged hot to stay under it for too long.

Still, we enjoyed the town, and went to the Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shrine, where the photos below were taken, save the last one. We didn't go to the shrine per se, but visited the lotus flower gardens named after the Heike and the Minamoto (two clans that battled each other), each with different-colored lotus flowers. The place has quite a bit of wildlife--the trees are filled with herons, large white long-necked birds, and the ponds are inhabited by rather lively turtles that come up out of the pond when people come to feed them.

While taking a leisurely walk around the neighborhood, we came across a shop with a rather imposing name:

And we took a side trip when we saw direction to a temple called "Komyoji," supposedly one kilometer distant. However, despite following directions, we never found it--only new signs to other temples and shrines, which we decided not to follow. After all, "fool me once, shame on me, fool me, can't get fooled again." Or something like that.

But what we did find was a local temple that had this rather imposing fellow guarding the outside. He seemed rather annoyed to be having visitors, so we quickly prayed and skedaddled.

One of the topics that came up from seeing the Heike pond, by the way, was the Heike Crab. It's a crab found in Japan with the face of a scowling samurai on its carapace. I remember first seeing it in Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" series quite a while back, as an example of accidental forced evolution. The idea is that of the crab that were being collected by the fishermen, one had a mutation that made its carapace look a little like a face. Superstitious, the fishermen who caught this crab and its descendants threw it back--so it survived and reproduced, more than the others. Over time, successive mutations made the face more and more like a scowling face of a samurai, the best carapace a crab could wish to have to avoid being eaten.

The legend of the crabs is that they were created after a terrible water-borne battle between the Heike and Minamoto clans, which the Heike lost. The dead samurai, lost to the waters, are said to have be reborn as the crabs--hence the name "Heike Crab." The crabs with the human faces happened to emerge in that area at about that time. And it was that battle which led to Minamoto dominance and the beginning of the Kamakura Era.

Just a little fun fact there.

Stop Election Fraud

"It's election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers from the challenger's campaign see employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county official, typing instructions at computers with access to the vote-tabulating software.

"When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on whether there was tampering with the electronic records."

That's the beginning of Paul Krugman's most recent article in the New York Times, describing his view of the perils of voting machines. This article in The Nation has even more disturbing information on how your vote could be changed, erased, or outnumbered by false votes with frightening ease.

Ironically, the vote fraud in the 2000 election--particularly in Florida--was supposed to bring about reform, but instead has thrown open the doors far wider to fraud under the "cure" of electronic voting. Pitched to the public as a way to make voting easier to understand so that the "butterfly ballot" fiasco in Florida would not happen again, the machines being set up as we speak do indeed solve that problem--but they open an even more dangerous threat to accurate counts: no means of verification. At least the votes in Florida could have been recounted had the Supreme Court not shut down the definitive count. But with computer ballots, it'll only be the malleable, easily-tampered-with electronic number, and if anyone doubts its veracity, there will be no recount. Because it won't be possible.

Here's how it might work. You go to vote. You and so many others in your area leave your votes on the voting machine, which shows you verification only on a monitor; when you leave the booth, the monitor is wiped. You get recorded as having voted--but there's no physical record of the vote. It's all ones and zeroes on the machine. It might be that a bit later, a representative of the company that makes the machines (a company whose owner is a Bush campaign manager, no less) comes up to that machine, and as Krugman described, starts fiddling with it--and presto, votes are changed. Fraud you call--but can you prove it? Not a chance. Another form of fraud might be even harder to spot. The software which runs the machines could be tampered with beforehand, completely out of your site. It could be set to do anything, such as to count votes for one candidate double and for the other candidate half--or just completely make up numbers based on whatever scheme the programmer wishes. If the computer is programmed the right way, all evidence of fraudulent programming could erase itself afterwards.

And those committing the fraud can just deny it, as it will be near impossible to prove, and if they are caught, they can just call it an honest error. Think they could never do that? Just look at Florida. In not one, but two presidential elections, a list of voters to be removed from the voter rolls was fraudulently compiled by the Republican administration in that state, both times flagrant, both times proven as dishonest--and both times called an "honest mistake" and no one was prosecuted. That's a case where something a lot more blatant than electronic voter fraud was committed, and not only did they get away scot free, they tried it twice and still no one is being prosecuted! Why not? Because the party in power is the one doing the fraud, and the party in power has the attorney general who gets to decide what crimes will be prosecuted.

This coming November, if nothing is done to stop them, up to 2 million votes will be counted on these machines and will automatically be suspect. What happens if the e-votes suspiciously tilt towards Bush, who wins by a small margin? Will there be proof? Nope. No paper trail. Even if fraud is proven beyond any doubt whatsoever, will the results be thrown out and a new election held? Of course not. The constitution did not provide for this, and mandates a decision within a certain time frame. So even if we know Bush did not win and there was massive fraud, once again we will likely throw up our hands and in the name of stability and avoiding a constitutional crisis, we will again agree to let a man who was not elected take office and power for another four years.

But you can stop that. Call your local election official. Ask if electronic voting machines will be used. And if they say "yes," then get off your ass and find out how the votes will be verified. The only system that can work is that with independent paper verification. In other words, when the voter casts his or her vote, not only does the vote register in the machine, but a slip of paper prints out with the voter's choices on it, and that vote is both checked by the voter for accuracy, and is given to the official in charge and kept in case a recount is called for.

Anything less, and you should immediately take action to remove ALL electronic voting in your district. You have to act, though--just reading about it or talking about it will not accomplish anything; if there is fraud, the other side will simply say that you did not object in any official manner, and you'll be screwed. So do it, and contact people you know in other areas and have them do it.

Do it NOW.

I'm not kidding.

That's One...

Although I started this blog about 15 months ago, it was last year, August 1st, that I last missed a day of blogging--which makes today the 366th consecutive day of blogging for me.

The blog will hopefully get cleaned up a little during my August break (working at a university has its perks, long vacations being one of them). Other BfAD news: while the four-month increase in viewership (which peaked in June) has slowed, the number of visitors is still growing and is now nearly double what it was in February. July had roughly 10,300 different people visit the blog (as the IP counts), with an average of 680 daily visitors downloading almost 7 GB of data.

The blog successfully made the transition from Myacen to Surpass Hosting without any hitches (despite a short outage a few weeks ago), and Surpass is so far doing OK. You have to stay with a host for 6 months to a year before you can really gauge their effectiveness, so we'll see.

Otherwise, we've survived a barrage of blog comment spam and referral spam without yet resorting to requiring registration for commenting, and although "eyelid twitching" is still the most-searched-for term, the category "Reasons to Vote for Kerry" is right up there near the top, which means that people are looking at Kerry more--and "Bush" is not anywhere near the top of the search terms, despite the fact that I mention him almost every other entry. "Air America" fills out the top of the search list, as befits their good performance in the radio ratings.

Google sent 3,910 people to this blog this month, followed by Yahoo with 2,048, and MSN with 1,361. Among the more exotic locales from which visitors came are Latvia, Syria, Niue (huh? Oh, it's in Polynesia), Lebanon, Belize, and the Cocos Islands.

Now for year two.