The Blog From Another Dimension

Ten

Pluto is no longer the farthest planet from the sun. And I am not referring to the period between 1979 to 1999 when Pluto's eccentric orbit brought it closer to the sun than Neptune (which won't happen again until 2226).

No, this is different. They have, so they claim, discovered a tenth planet.

The planet (photos here) is at least as large as Pluto and may be 50% bigger. It orbits the sun 9 billion miles out, three times farther out than Pluto, though its orbit is just as eccentric as Pluto's--at closest approach, the new planet would be only a little farther out than Pluto is at its farthest. It takes 560 years to orbit the sun, as opposed to Pluto's 248 years. It revolves around the sun at a 44-degree angle relative to the ecliptic plane which most planets inhabit (Pluto is the other exception, at 17.5 degrees off the ecliptic).

A name for the new planet has been submitted (but not made public), which is good because the present name of "2003UB313" would be hard to pronounce. It might be named "Xena," in recognition of (a) the TV warrior princess, and (b) how geeky these guys are.

Of course, there is a question of whether it's even a planet or not, as scientists are in disagreement that even Pluto is a planet; the eccentricity and deviance from the ecliptic could identify these bodies as captured objects, which wandered into the solar system from the outside and got captured in the sun's gravitational pull.

But seeing them as planets is way more fun.

Roundup

Yes, I know, I haven't been blogging about politics as much lately. I'm in one of those periodic burn-out modes. I have maybe a half-dozen half-finished posts that I can get back to at some point, and a few topics--like a look at Roe v. Wade, or what "strict constructionism" is supposed to be--that I plan to get to soon. But when I ask myself, what should I blog on, the idea of delving into any of the current stories seems less than appealing to me at the moment.

But how about a quick rundown of the top two stories?

Roberts is looking a little bit less confirmable with new information that both is and isn't coming out. After raging at the Clinton White House for not releasing every last document about everything, the Republicans are being even skimpier with their own sharing of paper. Specifically, what Roberts did in his job as the Justice Department's deputy solicitor general under Bush 41. The reason? Violation of privileged information. One problem: Roberts was representing the people of the United States. Or at least he was supposed to be. Otherwise, all documents released from that time and from his time working as counsel under Reagan will be released after a strict screening process--which, of course, means that they'll withhold anything that could hurt his nomination. Josh Marshall points out quite aptly the right wing's indefensible argument that the White House should have access to more information about Roberts than Congress will get. Otherwise, what we learn of Roberts is yet more and more that he has been an extreme partisan, including his figuring prominently in shutting down the vote count in Florida in 2000. Well, Katherine Harris got her payola. Why shouldn't Roberts get his, eh?

Rove & Plame: in a nutshell, everyone knows that Rove & Libby were spreading the story about Plame being a CIA operative. It now appears that the source of the information was very clear that she was undercover and that the information must not be shared. Now there are so many versions of what happened from Rove and Libby and McClellan and Novak and others that contradictions abound.

In a nutshell: the White House doesn't give a rat's ass about intelligence when there's a political point to be won. Case in point: in August 2004, the Bush White House ordered a fake terror alert, one of a series of many timed to take attention away from John Kerry whenever the news started going his way. The August leak, timed just a few days before the Democratic convention, was based on the claim that evidence found on one Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan's laptop computer indicated a plan to attack financial buildings in New York, New Jersey and Washington D.C. These claims were false, the "solid intelligence" trumped up. But in an effort to bolster claims of the legitimacy of the terror alert, the Bush administration leaked Khan's name to the press.

Now, why is that a big deal? Because Khan was a computer expert working for al Qaeda. He had many connections within that organization, and could potentially have access to information of priceless value. When he was arrested in July 2004, his arrest was kept a secret and Khan worked secretly as a double-agent--our greatest known source within al Qaeda. Under cover, Khan's value to anti-terror intelligence was immense. But then the Bush administration, in order to defend a political lie, blabbed the name of the covert operative to the press. Sound familiar?

So Khan's cover was blown. The intelligence agencies handling him scrambled to arrest his associates, the al Qaeda people they might have used to find the leaders of the organization and further terrorist plans, but many got away. The ones who were captured escaped full prosecution because not enough evidence had been collected to fully convict them of their crimes.

What's worse, the data on Khan's disks in fact did not point to American targets--the data did point to British targets, and the Pakistan ring's cover being blown by Bush has been connected with the recent subway bombings in London. In other words, had Bush not leaked Khan's name, the attacks in London could have been found out and stopped before they happened. This blog does an excellent job of explaining the whole issue. And not that this is anything new for Bush, he's got experience allowing terrorists to succeed because he's trying to play politics.

But maybe Bush and Co. feel vindicated: after all, the real enemy, John Kerry, was defeated. And if all they had to do to secure that victory was to let go their intelligence on capturing and stopping al Qaeda, and putting civilians' lives at stake, then maybe they feel that it was worth the price paid. Outing secret agents to secure the political agenda certainly seems to work as far as the White House in concerned.

Which vital national security source will the Bush White House expose to win their next political victory?

Stay tuned!

Birds of the San Juan Islands

I've been a bit remiss in getting these images up. These are some of the photos my father has been taking over the last several weeks up in the San Juans (a group of islands near Seattle, WA--you get there by ferry out of Bellingham). My folks have a cabin up there and spend the summer months in a less urban environment. I wish I could visit it more, but the air fares in August will clean you right out--often times the plane tickets are double the price of other seasons.

But my parents are up there right now, and since my father bought his Canon S2-IS, he's been shooting the local birds, and has gotten some great shots.

First, a Belted Kingfisher:

I love these birds, and would like to get this detailed a shot of the Kingfishers here in Tokyo. Then there's the Great Blue Heron, which is similar to Japan's Grey Heron in many ways:

Click for a larger version of the photo

Note the feather in its bill--it was just preening.

Here's another one, different coloring, and a different angle:

Click for a larger version of the photo

...And a nice picture of one on the water:

One more seabird for today: some Heerman's Gulls:

That's all for today--more to come soon!

Windows Tiger Vista

This article gives you a sneak peek at features in the new Windows Longhorn/Vista to be released in a year and a half. Essentially, most of the features described are directly ripped off from Mac OS X, from the icons to graphic transparencies to the tabbed/RSS browser to the virtual folders--right up to the exact location of the contextual search boxes in the upper-right corner of each new window.

Japan iTunes Music Store: August 4?

Apparently, some kind of "Apple Music Event" has been scheduled for 10 am on Thursday, August 4 at the Tokyo International Forum. Reporters have been invited to the event by Apple, so unless this is something completely unexpected, it's probably going to be the long-rumored opening of the Japan iTunes Music Store.

Still unknown will be the pricing (rumored to be ¥150, undercutting all other music download services in Japan) and the selection--Sony's rather large collection of music may likely not be available because Sony is trying like crazy to undercut Apple and its success with the iPod.

The Azure-Winged Magpie (Onaga • オナガ)

Well, finally. I've been trying to shoot one of these guys for a long time, almost as long as I've been photographing birds, which is maybe six months now. They've been somewhat elusive to me. I got a quick, low-quality shot of one at Tama Reien months ago, and would've gotten better had a bicyclist not scared them off. I almost got a beautiful shot of a mother feeding her young on a power line right in front of me, but they scampered off before I could get my camera out.

This time, I wandered into an area where a ton of starlings and pigeons were feeding in a field--upwards of a hundred birds or so--and I noticed a half-dozen or so magpies flying around the fringe of the field. I followed them uphill a bit as they moved, and wound up getting some nice photos.

The first one has two in a tree, and one of them is probably immature, seeing as how the black cap is still somewhat white, probably from baby down.

Here's what appear to be a few more in intermediate stages:

In this one, the magpie seems rather annoyed at an intruding Oriental Turtledove:

Here are some adults:

And you can really see in this one why the birds are named オナガ ("Onaga," or "Long Tail") in Japanese:

Chofu Fireworks

This has been my first chance to get these photos up, from last Saturday's fireworks show on the Chofu banks of the Tama River near where I live. Next weekend I might go out to Tachikawa and see if their festival is worth watching, but I haven't decided yet. In early- or mid-August, Seiseki Sakuragaoka, also near where I live, will have yet another.

And then here are some stand-alone photos, just the small versions--but still some nice images.

By the way, that's a train going through the bridge at the bottom of the photo above.

There might be more coming... I also have a bit of video. But this is all for the moment. I hope you enjoy them!

Costco's Cool

Not that I've ever said anything otherwise, but recent evidence only supports this, via DKos and the NY Times.

First of all, Costco treats customers well: it allows no more than a 14% to 15% markup on items it sells. That allows for fair pricing in some areas, and excellent pricing in other areas.

Second--and very importantly--it treats its workers well. The average wage earned by Costco workers is about $17 per hour, not too shabby at all. In contrast, Wal-Mart claims to pay an average of $10 per hour. And while average retailers require their workers to pay 25% of their insurance premiums, Costco only makes workers pay 8%--and that's only after the shareholders forced the company to take it to there from the 4% it was asking before. In addition:

This knack for seeing things in a new way also explains Costco's approach to retaining employees as well as shoppers. Besides paying considerably more than competitors, for example, Costco contributes generously to its workers' 401(k) plans, starting with 3 percent of salary the second year and rising to 9 percent after 25 years.

ITS insurance plans absorb most dental expenses, and part-time workers are eligible for health insurance after just six months on the job, compared with two years at Wal-Mart. Eighty-five percent of Costco's workers have health insurance, compared with less than half at Wal-Mart and Target.

Costco also has not shut out unions, as some of its rivals have. The Teamsters union, for example, represents 14,000 of Costco's 113,000 employees. "They gave us the best agreement of any retailer in the country," said Rome Aloise, the union's chief negotiator with Costco. The contract guarantees employees at least 25 hours of work a week, he said, and requires that at least half of a store's workers be full time.

Costco holds that happy workers are more productive, and there is less turnover and less employee theft.

Wall Street disagrees, saying that Costco's CEO "has been too benevolent," and that "he could force employees to pick up a little more of the burden." Apparently the conservative economic crowd just doesn't believe in a happy, well-paid middle class; those working stiffs have to "pick up the burden" for the wealthy stockholder class.

Of course, thhis view is contradicted by the fact that Costco has been performing well:

If shareholders mind Sinegal's philosophy, it is not obvious: Costco's stock price has risen more than 10 percent in the past 12 months; Wal-Mart's has slipped 5 percent. Costco shares sell for almost 23 times expected earnings; at Wal-Mart, the multiple is about 19. ... Costco's profit rose 22 percent last year, to $882 million, on sales of $47.1 billion.

Of course, this does not faze Wall Street analysts, who call Costco's offerings a "cult stock." Apparently, if you're not a mainstream, greedy, blood-sucking, worker-exploiting miser than you can't have respectability.

Furthermore, Costco's CEO Jim Sinegal, aside from being a multi-millionaire from stock holdings, gets a salary of $350,000 and a bonus of $200,000 yearly, making him one of the lowest-paid executives in America. Of this, he said, "I just think that if you're going to try to run an organization that's very cost-conscious, then you can't have those disparities. Having an individual who is making 100 or 200 or 300 times more than the average person working on the floor is wrong."

So we have a company that gives workers good pay and benefits, gives some of the lowest prices to consumers, keeps executive pay scales down, and is highly successful.

And they're a major contributor to the Democratic Party, while Wal-Mart contributes to Republicans.

What more could you ask for?

Shop at Costco, and stay away from Wal-Mart and Sam's Club.

(By the way, you might also want to check out this unrelated but very funny article at the WaPo; very Dave-Barryish.)

After a Certain Point, Being a Victim Starts to Look Like Being a Schmuck

When I was back in college, I recall a lot of my Japanese friends got a shock when they dealt with some of the more militant Chinese and Chinese-American population of the school. Here were a lot of people who were supremely pissed off at Japanese people, and didn't hesitate to dive in after them, wearing rather noticeably large chips on their shoulders. To a certain degree, one cannot blame them, but let's face it--every country has its dark past. China is not without its own.

Still, being upset and protesting is within limits. If I traveled to Hiroshima and someone whose parents suffered in the bombings started getting miffed at me in a representative way, I would move along and hopefully understand the motivation, if not the specific attempt to blame. Feeling as I do that the bombings were not necessary, I would not mind offering my apologies, at least on behalf of myself alone (not being able to speak for the whole country). Such is my personal choice.

But what if I was hit by a bus in that town and taken to a hospital--and said hospital refused to render medical aid until I expressly apologized for what my country did sixty years ago?

That would be something very different. And maybe the Chinese city of Haikou is just responding to an immediate fad, or somehow politics is involved, but if you ask me, it's a seriously demented act. The hospital now sports a sign which reads, "Japanese people first apologize, then enter. Japanese people who 'decide not to admit to their crimes' are prohibited from entering."

When a Jilin City restaurant started demanding the same of Japanese customers before service was offered, that's different--you can just go to another restaurant. But a hospital? There's a point after which Victimhood starts becoming Schmuckhood. Even if you had an exception for ER cases, it's still way over the line. You don't deny people medical care over such stuff. Period.

Seriously. Imagine a New York hospital refusing to take in any person of Arab descent unless they personally apologized for 9/11. That might make a few American yahoos feel good, but most Americans would recognize it for the moronic trash it is. I can only hope that most Chinese people feel the same way, and that what we're looking at here is just a few extreme cases of idiocy unsupported by the mainstream.

Update: One day later, the hospital has lifted the restriction. Apparently, "not a lot but not a few" Japanese people attempted to enter the hospital that day, which may have eventually prompted the lifting of the demand.

Poor Web Page Color Coordination

Am I the only one who absolutely hates web pages with black backgrounds and white or bright-colored text? Perhaps my eyes are really sensitive, but whenever I try to read text on such pages I quickly develop after-images from the contrast that give me a headache. And yet such pages seem to proliferate, increasing rather than decreasing in number.

Maybe it's that the people who publish pages with such color schemes don't read their own pages in finished form...

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

I got the book last Saturday morning, and had it finished by Sunday afternoon. I haven't commented on it yet so as to give the readers of this blog time enough to get through the book before I reviewed it.

One of the hurdles I had in reviewing this book were the inevitable comparisons to my brother's own continuation from The Order of the Phoenix, a continuation my brother already followed through the seventh year of Harry at Hogwarts, and beyond. After having read even the first of my brother's novels, I knew I'd have a tough time trying to figure out which was better.

In the end, I choose my brother's Veil of Mystery over Rowling's Half-Blood Prince. I'll try to go into the details here, though any spoiler information for Rowling's book will go below the fold (if you are reading this in the archives, it's all here in one piece).

This is not to say that I didn't like The Half-Blood Prince; I did find it entertaining. However, it was not as good as it could have been, either for my brother's prose or for Rowling's herself.

A few things one has to take into account for the Harry Potter books is that Rowling's style is toward caricature, brooding, and more than a bit into darkness. Her characters tend to act in extremes, to the extent of often seeming unreasonable. Harry's brooding in The Order of the Phoenix was more than most would have felt reasonable, even for a 15-year-old. Snape's cruelty has always been almost cartoonish, as have Malfoy's nasty sneers and cowardly bullying. But then again, we are dealing with children's literature, so this can be excused--though for that genre, there is more than a little of the usual touch of darkness. In the first book, Harry had to face his parents' murderer, grafted onto the back of a professor's head, and when he touched the villain's face, it crumbled into ashes. Kinda dark stuff for kids--but maybe that's a big reason why it's so popular.

In that respect, Rowling is in usual form in The Half-Blood Prince. Harry's upset a lot again, Ron and Hermione are going to extremes to tick each other off, and Dumbledore is amiable yet mysteriously reticent. We learn more about Voldemort. There's a mystery afoot, misleading clues abound, and a truth is revealed at the end. These aren't spoilers--this could describe most if not all of the Potter books.

There are a few inconsistencies, however. For example, Rowling departs from her long-held writing style of third-person limited (writing about Harry in the third person, but limiting the action solely to what Harry himself experiences). The first two chapters of the new book center on events completely outside of Harry's experience; after the third chapter begins, however, we again pick up with Harry's limited point-of-view. This is a strange stylistic departure, especially given the nature of the opening chapter, when we learn of the British prime minister's contact with the wizarding world. What's strange with this first chapter is that it is completely unnecessary. Unless Rowling has something planned for the seventh book that requires this initial scene, it is inexplicable why she would want to start the book with it. The book's second chapter is more understandable; it introduces an important plot element which Harry cannot witness--though it could have been possible for Rowling to work this information into the story at a later time. But at least this scene would have made more sense as the book's opening chapter.

Once we get back to Harry's point-of-view, we see the usual course of events unfold: Harry at the Dursley's, the trip to Hogwarts, Harry getting into trouble and missing the Sorting ceremony, the introduction of the new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. All of these with the expected new twists and diversions, but the same routine all the same.

Once into the meat of the story, another inconsistency--albeit a consistent one--appears. Dumbledore, as usual, acts completely unwilling to tell Harry what the hell is going on. While Harry himself is more forthcoming in responsibly telling everyone what he thinks they should know, Dumbledore is yet again being frustratingly closed, cutting short Harry's questions, only giving out mysterious snippets of information for little-understood reasons, and then quickly hustling Harry out of the room, when he has so many questions to ask. While this is consistent with Dumbledore's past behavior, it is not consistent with the conclusion of the previous book, when Dumbledore apologizes to Harry for keeping him in the dark, and laments about how foolish he was not to tell Harry what he needed to know. And yet from the start of this book, he's right back at it again, as reticent as ever, for no reason we can figure. A bit annoying, that.

Aside from these nits, however, the book forms up well. We get the usual serving of Rowling's adventure, twists, and revelations, and the usual confrontation at the end, and the denouement afterwards. Of course I won't reveal--above the fold, at least--the nature of the climax, what we learn about Voldemort, or who the half-blood prince is. Suffice to say that none of these could be guessed at, all of them being original beyond any clues in past books.

Still, the book left me unsatisfied, beyond even the inevitable comparisons between this novel and Veil. It just seemed like it could have been much more than it was. The characters acted less than convincingly, and the story seemed to lack meaning. Perhaps this is an artifact of the being the lead-up to the final book; it does leave you wondering, at the end, about how much you've read really happened, and how much is part of some plan that Harry has not been let in on.

Nevertheless, it is an interesting yarn. Worth reading, but it could have been better.

More below the fold...

WARNING

• • • SPOILERS BELOW • • •

All right, you've been warned.

I am assuming that if you are reading this, then you have either finished reading the book, or don't care about reading spoiler details about the storyline. So here goes.

Above, I explained Dumbledore's unexplained secrecy as one example of inconsistent behavior. Another example is Hermione and Ron's. Rowling makes it clear in this novel that the two are destined to pair up (just as Harry and Ginny are, though that's been hardly less a secret). But of course, they can't just fall in love, get together, and be happy. They have to screw things up, and badly. Jealousy, mostly, gets in the way, as Ron and Hermione use for-the-moment lovers to hurt each other, with Hermione getting invited to exclusive parties and getting along too well with Slughorn suck-up Cormac McLaggen, and Ron retaliating by snagging Lavender Brown and making out with her rather outrageously in public. The whole thing goes more than just a little too far; caricature is fine, but you can't have too much of that and take the story very seriously. (Edit: on review of this paragraph, I should have called Ron & Hermione's behavior "outlandish" or "extreme" rather than "inconsistent.")

Hermione also has a few character flaws as well. One is when she remains pissed off at Harry for having made Ron think he'd taken the good-luck potion. Okay, while Hermione believed Harry really had slipped Ron the potion for use in a Quidditch match, her anger was understandable. But why should she still think it's unethical after Harry reveals that he just made Ron feel lucky? Where's the harm in a placebo, especially if Ron doesn't mind? It's just the equivalent of calming Ron's unreasonable nervousness.

But even more uncharacteristic is Hermione's reaction to Harry's use of the half-blood prince's textbook scrawls. Sure, Harry has an unfair advantage here. But he's not doing anything Hermione doesn't do on a regular basis, in that he's getting useful information from someone else's writing. Instead of being peeved at Harry for using the book, Hermione--once she recognizes that the book carried useful information--should have immediately asked Harry if she could read it herself, in order to learn more.

Of course, a big part of my dissatisfaction with how the characters act has to do with my brother's novel. When he wrote Harry Potter and the Veil of Mystery, he picked up where Rowling left off, but without her literary excesses. He wrote the story as if the characters were reasonable people--still flawed, but more understandable and sensible. Dumbledore opens up to Harry, telling him what he needs to know; when he keeps information hidden from Harry (such as the reason Fawkes bonds with him), it makes sense. Hermione and Ron fall into their respective relationships in an understandable way; perhaps too mature for teenagers, but far more realistically than Rowling has them acting. And particularly, there is my brother's handling of Snape, and why he is the way he is; I still don't know what Rowling has planned for Snape, but the idea of the Cleansing is just too good not to want to have it be part of the story. While Rowling's Snape is consistent and, especially at the end, scary, he remains much more an enigma, difficult to understand beyond just being a bad guy.

And while Rowling does an acceptable job of working moral values and cautionary tales into her story, The Veil of Mystery was far richer in its coverage of issues and the exploration of philosophy and major themes of life. This is something that you tend to miss after having gotten used to it.

A few interesting contrasts pop up between my brother's book and Rowling's. For example, in Veil, Harry becomes the Dark Arts teacher, and when he is introduced, Malfoy lets out an astonished shout from the students' tables. In Prince, Snape is given the position and Harry lets out the astonished shout from the students' tables. In both books, Dumbledore dies, but in Veil, the death is with significant meaning; in Prince, if there is meaning to his death, Rowling keeps it well-hidden. Perhaps it is just to isolate Harry and force him to mature and be independent; maybe it was planned so as to allow Snape to infiltrate even deeper into Voldemort's camp; or perhaps there is something about Dumbledore's death, or perhaps he didn't really die--something we'll find out about in book seven. But for now, his death seems unsatisfyingly empty.

One more contrast is the development of Harry and Ginny's relationship. A major theme in my brother's novel was that love could not keep two people apart, even if there is a great deal of risk involved. Despite the dangers inherent in being Harry Potter's girlfriend, Ginny insists on taking on those risks, the price otherwise being too much to pay. This was echoed in the most recent Spiderman film; even though Peter Parker planned to keep away from MJ, in the end, they both decided that the risk was one worth taking.

In The Half-Blood Prince, however, Rowling not only goes in the other direction, but does so with such brevity and lack of concern that it kind of cheapens the relationship. Ginny is unhappy, but simply accepts it and they both move on. It's not exactly a break-up, but it's not example a compelling confirmation of their feelings for each other, either. I like my brother's solution better--it not only conveys stronger feelings and values, but reinforces the concept of love being a strengthening component of magic, and as such, a self-correcting mechanism for proper use of power.

But what The Half-Blood Prince does very well is to keep the reader guessing. Who is this mysterious "R.A.B." who seems intent on pursuing Voldemort? Where are the other Horcruxes and how will Harry find them and then defeat Voldemort? Did Snape really kill Dumbledore, or was it somehow fixed? Will Dumbledore reappear, either alive or in some other form? Will he be a ghost, or perhaps a portrait? Is Snape really a bad guy, or a good guy with a hidden purpose as so many believe?

In the meantime, we can speculate. Some are suggesting that R.A.B. is Regulus Black, which would make sense in that Harry is now well-entangled in the Black family, having inherited Grimmauld Place and Kreacher's service; one could imagine Regulus working into this somehow, affecting Harry from those elements. My sister-in-law quite intriguingly supposed (and it seems that many on the Internet have had the same idea) that Harry himself will turn out to be the final Horcrux, having received a piece of Voldemort's soul upon the death of his mother and the application of the killing curse that gave him the scar--or perhaps the scar itself is the Horcrux. This makes sense, as it would explain how Harry came to possess so many of Voldemort's abilities.

We'll just have to wait another two years to find out....

BIG Earthquake

It's mostly over, but it's still rocking as I write this. That had to be the biggest earthquake I have ever experienced. More as news comes in.

It also felt close, by the way--while the later shakes were horizontal, the first ones were vertical.

Update 4:40: Okay, it's being reported as a 5.7 on the Richter scale, 90 km beneath Chiba. So it wasn't nearby (I guess the later shakes were the better indicator), but it was close enough, and it sure felt big as hell here in Eastern Tama. If it was that powerful here, I hate to think about what it must have felt like in Chiba...

Update 4:43: Just felt a small aftershock. The epicenter seems to have been close to Narita. Addendum: No, closer to Chiba City, with 10-15 km. Farther from Narita than from Chiba.

Update 5:20: According to this page (a Japan quake page I just discovered), the quake was felt most strongly in East Tokyo, even stronger than in Chiba. On the Japanese scale of 7, the quake registered a strong 5 in Tokyo's Adachi Ward, and a "weak 5" in Edogawa and Ota Wards. In Chiba itself, the quake registered only as a weak 5 in six locations. The quake registered as a 4 as far away as Atami City, Shizuoka, more than 100 km distant.

Update 5:42: Reports coming in: no deaths or even injuries reported so far. One partially-collapsed building in Edogawa, some small fires across Tokyo, and trains stopped and delayed all over the region. There's a fireworks show at 7:20pm in Chofu today (near where I am), and so some people might be delayed or inconvenienced by the train stoppages.

Bush Nominates a White Clarence Thomas

Well, I was wrong about one thing concerning the Supreme Court nominee: Bush did not choose a minority or woman judge in order to use those qualities to quash dissent by claiming racism or sexism. Instead, he went fundie all the way: a relatively young straight white male, a solid conservative with little if any paper trail. In other words, a white Clarence Thomas. Someone who seems like a straight arrow, but with very little experience (He has been a judge for all of two years); there's not much in the way of substance you can object to because there isn't much substance in the first place. Bush is throwing a fast ball right over home plate, daring the Democrats to take a swing at it. And there's one thing motivating the Democrats to take that chance: Roe v. Wade.

Bush met with a lot of people before announcing his choice (a week early, clearly intended to take the heat off of Rove), but it's clear that he kowtowed to one constituency only: the fundamentalist right, which is as happy about Roberts as it was scared of Gonzales. Roberts is their boy. And rather hardcore, at that: not only has he stated an aversion to Roe, he also filed briefs to the Supreme court in favor of a ban on flag burning and to allow prayer in public schools.

But it is Roe that is catching everyone's attention. The conservatives are pooh-poohing the idea that Roberts is against Roe, and you can easily understand why they might try: a very big majority, 68% to 29% (and that majority is growing with time), believe Roe v. Wade should be upheld. So the right wing is pointing to one quote by Roberts in his confirmation hearings to the circuit court a few yours back, where he said that "Roe v. Wade is the settled law of the land." However, this statement is meaningless, as it only refers to Robert's willingness as a lower-court judge to bow to a Supreme Court decision. If Roberts is confirmed and goes to the Supreme Court, he will no longer have to bow to the bench he sits at. In fact, in 1991, Roberts made quite clear his feelings about Roe:

We continue to believe that Roe was wrongfully decided and should be overturned... The Court's conclusions in Roe that there is a fundamental right to an abortion and that government has no compelling interest in protecting prenatal human life throughout pregnancy find no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution.

Some call this "contradictory" to his 2003 quote, but since that later statement referred only to a lower court position and gave no clue whatsoever about how he would rule on the Supreme Court, they don't contradict at all: both can be stated by an anti-Roe conservative. The "settled law" quote is little more than a weasel, an attempt to mislead and keep the truth off the record.

In fact, it is more likely he's anti-Roe: Roberts claimed that he was simply stating someone else's case, but his letter-of-the-law-but-not-the-spirit conditional response in 2003 made it clear he was against Roe but wanted to avoid answering that question. If he was pro-choice or really didn't care which way the case went, he would have said so. And the way conservatives are acting, it's just as clear that they believe this too, and are only in mock denial about Roberts being anti-Roe, while giving a wink and a nod to their pro-life constituents.

Not to mention, of course, that Roberts' career has been at the heart of conservative politics. From 1980 to 1981, Roberts clerked for the notoriously extremist right-wing Rehnquist. From 1982 to 1986, he served as a Reagan White House counsel. From 1989 to 1993, he worked for Bush 41 as Principal Deputy Solicitor General under Kenneth Starr, when he wrote those briefs that the wingnuts want us to believe weren't his opinion; he was nominated for the appeals court by Bush 41 in 1992 (and was rejected by the then-Democratic Senate), and he was subsequently a corporate lawyer. He worked for Bush-Cheney in 2000, and gave critical advice to Jeb Bush to block recounts in the incredibly partisan battle to get Bush appointed president. Bush then obligingly gave Roberts a circuit court seat in 2003. It would be hard to find a judge with even more conservative credentials than that.

When Roberts was a White House counsel, he worked for Fred F. Fielding, who now says, "I know he's conservative by talking with him about issues. ... [Roberts supported expansive presidential powers and tended toward a] more literal reading of the Constitution." It is therefore highly doubtful that Roberts is a closet pro-choicer who just happens to have been a rabid conservative all these years, forced to write legal briefs he personally disagreed with.

This year, in late November, two cases dealing with abortion are coming up. And even if the court continues to uphold Roe v. Wade, Roberts is, as a young conservative whose opinions will shape the court for decades to come, dragging the court towards the elimination of reproductive rights in this country. Already 30 states are ready to outlaw abortion should Roe be overturned.

Therefore, the Democrats have to stand up on this one. Naturally, they would like to be able to do it on some personal scandal or other quick-and-easy side point, but the likelihood is that this will not come up. And either way, I think that the Democrats standing up on Roe v. Wade is best. If a Clarence Thomas-like scandal does come up, the Republicans know very well how to handle that--and if the scandal is overcome, the Democrats will not be able to object as strongly on ideological grounds. Furthermore, upholding Roe v. Wade is worth taking a stand on, completely based upon its merits.

Now, Republicans will probably all support Roberts, at least enough to get a 50+1 majority, meaning that this will come down to a filibuster. And if that happens, the GOP will, without doubt, claim that the Democrats violated the "extreme circumstances" clause of the prior agreement to avoid the nuclear option (anyone who honestly claims that an anti-Roe Supreme Court nominee in not an "extreme circumstance" for a Democrat is an idiot), and may well attempt again to do away with the filibuster. And if they are successful in that, then Roberts is a lock for the position.

However, it is not assured that the Republican Senators will be so solid on this. Two-thirds of the American people solidly support Roe v. Wade. Furthermore, a similar 2-1 majority of Americans are opposed to doing away with the filibuster. As a result, Republicans could be in for a very bloody fight: if they go all the way on this, setting off the nuclear option and putting an anti-Roe judge on the Supreme Court, they could be pissing off most independents and even many Republicans--and next year is an election year. This could, in a way, be for the Democrats what gay marriage was for the GOP: a wedge issue that could tilt the balance of power come the next election. An unwavering Democratic stand on the issue would only make the influence of all of this more significant and visible come next fall.

This could be seen as a do-or-die turning point for the Democratic Senators. If they can't put up a fight when two-thirds of the country is behind them, then maybe we need some new Democratic Senators.

Google Moon

Google has launched one more map service: the Earth's moon. The map is not quite as comprehensive or detailed as you might want, but it does show where the manned moon landings were, and might get more detailed in the future.

For now, though, try zooming in on one of the sites, incrementally. You'll see a certain amount of increased detail each time you move the zoom slider up one more notch. But the real surprise comes when you get to the highest zoom, when you move the zoom to the very last notch at the top of the scale. Go ahead, give it a try.

So Long, Scotty

Among the news of the new Supreme Court nominee and Karl Rove, another piece of news came in: James Doohan just passed away, at age 85 (a good run, I wold think). Some things you might not have known about him: He landed on Juno beach on D-Day, and was hit six times by machine gun fire. One shot took off his middle right finger (which he hid on screen), four hit him in the leg, and one in the chest--which was stopped by his silver cigarette case (an ironic instance of smoking saving your life). He had 9 children from three marriages, and his last child was born when he was 80 years old. And he never got tired of "Beam me up, Scotty."

On a side note, Gene Roddenberry passed away in 1991, and DeForest Kelley in 1999.

PowerMic, SchmowerMic

I haven't had much to complain about with my new Powerbook, but one thing recently has me a bit miffed. That's the line-in audio. By advertising this, Apple knows people will assume that you can plug in a microphone and have it work. That, it turns out, is completely untrue. It's not a mic port, it's a powered sound input port, and practically no microphone you buy will work with it. I tried buying a regular mic, and nothing registered. I then read that it has to be a powered mic, so I got one of those. This registered, but waaaay too quietly--at full gain, the recorded audio was almost inaudible.

Apparently, to record sound, you have to either find a powered mic with very specific specs which Apple does a good job of hiding from you, or buy an adaptor which in itself costs about $40.

Sure, Apple doesn't outright say you can't plug in a mic. But it's a falsehood of omission--they know people are going to assume that's what the audio line-in is for. And I thoroughly read through all the information I could find, including Apple's manual, for any warning of this, and found none. In fact, the Powerbook manual reads:

You can also connect external microphones or other audio equipment to the audio line in port. The audio line in port is a stereo 3.5 mini-phono jack, which does not provide power to a connected device, so you must use self-powered peripherals.

So they're covered on the self-powered part, but I have one of those and it still doesn't work. I don't see any specs about what type of powered mic is necessary, or any other specs on this. If they exist, they are well-hidden.

Bad form, Apple.

Update: Before I posted this, I found a solution--a very messy kludge, but it works: if I plug my powered external mic into my digital video recorder and then plug the sound out from the camera to the Powerbook's line-in port, it works. As I said, messy, but at least I won't have to buy an expensive adaptor.

You Can Really Feel the Local Ones

Tonight there was a small quake, but from the moment I felt it, I knew the epicenter was close. And sure enough, the epicenter was less than 10 km away from where I live. You can feel it from the direction of the quake: if it feels like it's jumping straight up and down, it's local.

I might be wrong, but that's how it's always felt to me. I guessed tonight, and I guessed right.

By the way, it was a 3.6 on the Richter scale, at 9:14 pm, 60 km below the surface. Felt it here as a noise rattle and then a bump, all quick.

A Few More Nature Photos

I went out to see if I could find some more birds locally, and got a few. First, I found some baby Barn Swallows in the doorway of someone's home. The babies were just resting there on a sill near the ceiling of the porch, right out there, as if being just a few feet from visitors to the front door was no big deal. Got a nice close-up of two of the three:

You can click on that one to reveal a larger image (1000 pixels wide).

I also spotted a Grey Heron in flight, and followed it as it found a high tree branch and rested there:

I also stumbled upon a few more immature birds in low branches in a tree. The young'uns aren't nearly as skittish as their parents, and I got a few good shots, despite the low light of the shade:

I can't be sure of the species, but I'm fairly confident that the pair were immature Brown-eared Bulbuls.

Also, last Saturday, while I was at Koganei Park for a school BBQ party, I was able to spot the same Kingfisher I had before, It only was visible for a very short while, not enough for me to adjust my exposure time--but this motion-blurred pic shows a clear enough image:

Finally, I happen to come across a good number of cats--some feral, some not--in these parks. Not too far from the Kingfisher was a cat resting beneath an umbrella:

That's all for now. Some photos from my father in Washington State coming soon.

Google Maps Japan

Finally. Thought it would never get here.

Here's Mt. Fuji, by the way.

Fireworks in Japan

Summer is the season for fireworks in Japan. Unlike the U.S., where almost all firework shows are reserved for one day in July, Japan has them all summer long. Better this way, I think--you can go see them more.

Japanese firework shows are also pretty impressive; they really know their stuff here. Though this season's shows seem be be relatively short, an hour or so for most of them, I've seen shows an hour and a half and even longer in the past. And they don't scrimp, either--some pretty good displays get put on. One of their trademark moves is the shaped fireworks: hearts, stars, smiley faces, fish, and even Mickey Mouse and Doraemon appear in the lights in the sky. Usually, the show ends in one, long, continuous culmination of explosions, climbing higher and higher, with one really big one at the very end. Forgive me if this sounds mundane to you, if you've seen it a lot; I don't have much experience beyond my childhood to compare these shows to others in other countries.

Tonight there were a few well-known shows, one in Yokohama (a bit of a trek from where I am, so I didn't go), and one right in my backyard, at the Fuchu Racetrack--though I always neglect this one for some reason. Every year, there's a display where all I have to do is walk a few blocks and I've got a great view, and every year I forget to check when it is. And then I'm watching TV and I hear some booms outside, and I realize it's on. The problem is, this one particular show is only about a half hour, maybe a shade more. By the time I get there, there's only ten or so minutes left. But here are a few photos that came out OK:

Always pretty, they are.

A few more displays are coming up in this area. Next Saturday, the Chofu City fireworks, which I blogged on last year; I can see them from my apartment window, but they're better viewed up close, a few stations away. The Saturday after that, there's a display at Show Kinen Park in Tachikawa. Lots more in the area, too; here's a page in Japanese, another in English. (Be careful: there are discrepancies between the pages in terms of which day some displays are, and I don't know which page is right!)

Tokyo Wild Bird Park, July 15 2005 - Part 2

Sorry, it's taken more than the one day I planned to get this post up. To finish on my last bird post, here are the other birds, including most of the new species, that I saw at the Tokyo Port Wild Bird Park.

First, the Gulls. Previously, I had spotted a Herring Gull along the Tama River, but at the park the other day, I found two other types of gulls: First, the Black-tailed Gull, which in Japanese is called "Umineko" (ウミネコ), or the "Sea Cat":

This one may be immature, due to its lighter tail feathers and relatively dim red tip to its beak, but it is definitely a Black-tailed. See the head detail:

And here's another shot:

I thought I saw the same gull, very immature, as it had very light plumage, but it turns out that this is probably a completely different gull, probably the Glaucous Gull (Shiro-kamome • シロカモメ), though I am not 100% certain:

Then there were the Plovers. First, the one I'd seen before, the Little Ringed Plover; note the yellow ring around its eyes:

But there was another plover which I thought might be an immature Little-Ringed, but it turns out that instead it's a Kentish Plover (Shiro-chidori • シロチドリ), due to the black legs (the Little Ringed Plover has yellow legs, better visible in the first of the two above photos) and other markings:

Then we have the Sandpipers: first, the Common Sandpiper (Iso-shigi • イソシギ), which I'd spotted before on the Tama River:

And then the more interesting, curve-billed Terek Sandpiper (Sorihashi-shigi • ソリハシシギ):

And to finish off the series, a few picture of the Terek Sandpiper taking a bath, while we see, walking nearby, the Little Ringed Plover:

...And with the Kentish Plover:

The Keyboard of the Future?

Every once in a while, a new product comes along that stands to break long-standing paradigms. The GUI (mouse, windows, menus, etc.) is perhaps the most significant example. Cameras going from film to digital is another big one. The kind of change that opens up new possibilities for a piece of equipment, allowing you to use it in a variety of new ways. One that will probably change a long-standing (almost 140 years) keyboard paradigm may be coming soon: the Optimus keyboard, from Russian designer Art Lebedev. The keyboard is designed so that every key is a stand-alone, miniature OLED display:

Instead of each key's function being painted on simple plastic key caps, the function of each key is indicated by the display--which, of course, can change to whatever you want it to show. That means an instant keyboard switch, not just between languages and QWERTY-DVORAK layouts, but also to any controls that any application might require. Playing a game with keyboard controls, but having trouble remembering what key controls what function? It would all be visible, right there on the keys. Want to see all the key functions when you hold down the shift, alt or function keys? Want the key caps on your keyboard to reflect the font you're using? Want to redesign the keyboard completely? This keyboard would allow for that. Below is an animated GIF made from images from the Optimus' site, showing how the keys can change, in this case from English to game mode (for "Quake") to Photoshop and cycling back through:

The OLED technology means that the keys emit light, so they require no backlight. From what I can gather, the keyboard is wireless, but I haven't found out if it uses infrared ports, Bluetooth, or something else. Nor has it been specified whether it runs on disposable batteries, rechargeable batteries, or some other way of keeping the juice up, not how long the charge holds.

Though the keyboard is designed nicely and looks svelte, it is also looks pretty wide (an extended keyboard with extra keys on the left); you might not have the desktop space for it. Then there is the question of how the keyboard feels, an important point for many. And finally, there is the issue of durability: any key that sticks or blacks out permanently could screw up the whole keyboard. Will the keys be replaceable?

On the other hand, the makers are claiming that price will be between $200 to $300, a seeming bargain considering what you're getting; specialty keyboards can already cost much more than that, and even standard wireless keyboards can cost up to $200. So despite the new functionality, the price (which may fall considerably over time) will not break the bank and relegate the new keyboard to the backwaters of super-expensive toys.

Some have claimed that this is not even a real device, even a prototype, but is rather a design presentation, a graphic rendering only. If that's true, then they did a damn good job of it. Even if that claim is true and the product is only an imagining, I would think that it is revolutionary enough to spur production of the real thing. But the site claims that it could be out by next year, and a lot of people take this seriously. We'll see.

One additional note: this also is another step in the direction of Star Trek technology, just like today's cell phones imitate the communicators from the 60's series. In the 80's series Star Trek: The Next Generation, computer controls were portrayed as reprogrammable visual displays; you want to do something different at a work station, the keyboard would change for you. Hmm.

That Was Fast

The new Harry Potter book arrived today, from Amazon Japan. But then again, it's past midnight Friday in Japan, though not yet in the U.S. And just past midnight in the U.K. Not to mention that many (resellers and libraries) have had the book in their possession for some time now. In any case, I've got a bit of reading material now. It will be very interesting to compare this with my brother's work.

Update: apparently, Amazon Japan mistakenly sent a lot of the copies out a few days early. I got mine delivered within an hour after the worldwide release time, so not early but not really that late, either.

Beyond Spin

One thing that the GOP hasn't picked up on yet is that the Rove case is beyond spin. They should know this, they've used it to highly advantageous effect against Democrats in the past, especially Bill Clinton. When the general public has the solid impression that a wrong was done, spin stops being a cover and starts sounding like bullshit.

Right now, the GOP is spinning like mad, and it doesn't look good. Scott McClellan repeating "I've answered that question" when he hasn't, "I won't comment on an ongoing investigation" when he has. The president saying he won't comment until the facts are in when he said before he'd fire anyone involved, and Rove is by God undeniably involved. The Republican Senators still trying to attack Joe Wilson, with lies debunked years ago, and the attacks smack of partisan desperation in any case. The right-wing talking heads spinning every possible out for Rove: he didn't use Plame's actual name, he didn't know she was undercover, Novak spoke her name first to Rove, Rove was just trying to stop Cooper from saying the wrong thing. When the average American hears that stuff, it all sounds the same now: bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. The story has passed the threshold now, and no amount of spin can save it. More spin just piles the bullshit higher on the Republican party and its agenda. Hell, if the Media Whores™ aren't buying the bullshit, who do they think is? Sure, the party faithful, but you had them from "Hello."

Janet Reno had it right: when you've screwed up, you're screwed, and the best thing to do is claim responsibility, pay the price, and move on. But the right wing finds that impossible to do: claiming responsibility means sending Rove to jail, and they can't let go of Karl Rove. He's too much their boy, they're too much beholden to him. So they have no choice but to bullshit, despite how transparent it all is. And it's bringing the party down.

Do I disapprove? Hell, no. This is too much fun. Would I do differently? Maybe not. But this is what you get if you bullshit too much, too long, and you try to grab too much power without facing the fact that consequences are involved. Time to pay the price; try to stall, and the price just gets higher.

I can wait.

Wither Wristwatches?

A bit more than a year back, my last digital wristwatch went kablooie, and I never replaced it. Sometimes, in my classes, if I need to time something, I'll ask around for anyone with a wristwatch. And because of this, I haver noticed that almost none of my students wear watches. This seemed quite odd to me, until I realized that probably it was because they all have digital cell phones now that display the time in large numbers on the LCD screen on the outside of the phone--this serves the same purpose for most people, so why buy and wear a watch anymore?

Of course, the decline in wristwatch wearers might also have something to do with the fact that said watches nowadays tend to be the size of small aircraft carriers. I mean, seriously, when you wear one of those behemoths, can you even get your hand into your pants pocket? Since when did it become trendy to wear something on your wrist that couldn't possibly fit under your cuffs unless you unbutton them? This is the reason I don't wear one any more--I actually went shopping for one when mine broke down, but wasn't able to find one that had the features I wanted (stopwatch, countdown, multiple alarms) without also being bigger than my wrist after playing handball for ten hours straight.

At least my class problems are solved by the iChrono widget, which gives me a handy stopwatch to time my students' PowerPoint presentation projects.

iTunes Music Store Japan: Next Month?

Well, that's what they're saying now. And more people are saying it'll open in August sometime. Even Forbes said it as if it were definitive. Hmmm. I'll believe it when I see it, but here's to being hopeful.

Tokyo Wild Bird Park, July 15 2005 - Part 1

It was such a nice day out, I decided on the spur of the moment to head down to the Tokyo Wild Bird Park, seeing as how it had been three months to the day since I had been there last. I probably should have visited more often, especially in May, but somehow either never got around to it, or the weather was unfriendly. But I went there to\day, and picked up several new species--as well as getting some very nice shots of some old ones. I've divided this post into two because there were just so many birds, it'd make far too long a single post--and I'm not even displaying shots of all the birds I spotted today.

Among the species I saw but had spotted before: Little and Great Egrets, Grey Herons, Barn Swallows, Tree Sparrows, Great Cormorants, Spot-billed Ducks, Eurasian Coots, Little Terns, Little Ringed Plovers, Common Sandpipers, as well as Starlings and of course, Crows. The new species were: Greater Scaups, Terek Sandpipers, Kentish Plovers, Black-tailed Gulls and what I think was a Glaucous Gull. I heard others in the trees, but couldn't spot them. Seventeen species in all.

First, the best: Grey Herons (Aosagi • アオサギ). There was a family of them, staking out an area very close to the 1st watcher's blind at the east end of the park, so I was able to get some very nice pictures, as opposed to the single, far-off chance shot I had gotten before. This one is the best: the Heron is standing right in front of me, and relaxed its wings out to the sides:

Almost as if to give me a bit of a Heron fashion show, the bird turned around for a back shot...

And then a profile:

The Heron's offspring, still with immature plumage, was off to the side but still nice visible:

Previously, as I stopped along the Tama River before going to the park, I spotted the Heron's cousin, a Little Egret, and happened to snap it catching lunch:

From time to time, I'll spot a bird and snap photos of it, expecting it to be a certain species, and only discovering later on that it was something else. I almost absent-mindedly shot this duck, thinking it was a Tufted Duck or some other species I'd seen before--but it turned out to be a new one for me, the Greater Scaup (Suzugamo • スズガモ).

One more before wrapping up this post, another repeated bird: the Little Tern (Koajisashi • コアジサシ). Got a few nice shots as it rested on a post in the water.

Coming later: two Plovers, two Sandpipers, and two Gulls.

Audacity

A few weeks ago, I went on a bit about how to make a podcast, and I recommended a few audio recording and editing programs. I'm back to say that there's one I missed which outdoes all the others. It is a freeware app called Audacity, and it's a great program--so much so, you wonder why it's freeware. Maybe Peak LE does stuff that pros use which I don't know about, but as far as lay-people using apps to record and edit, this program has Peak beat hands-down.

It works much the way SoundEdit did, perhaps even better, and is a worthy successor. Audacity can open WAV, MP3, OGG, AIF and Sun AU audio files (MIDI import is also possible). THe application can save audio projects as proprietary Audacity files, and can export at WAV or OGG; you can also export as MP3 with the use of a LAME library file. You can also use Audacity to record via a microphone.

Once open, you can view and edit audio files in a variety of ways. In the example below, the left audio track is shown as a waveform while the right track is shown as a spectrogram:

You can split stereo audio tracks and edit them separately, adding or subtracting tracks as you go. You can change the view for or switch channels for each track:

A small control panel (shown at left) allows you to change the cursor mode between selection, edit volume (envelope), edit samples, magnify, move and multi-tools modes. The envelope mode is pretty neat, allowing non-destructive volume changes on the fly which you can edit back and forth without resorting to a dialog box, making permanent changes to the volume.

Another toolbar (shown at right) allows you to cut, copy, paste; crop in and crop out; undo and redo; zoom in and zoom out; and most useful, the last two controls allow you to quickly expand either the selection or the entire audio track to fit the window.

The tracks themselves are easily and intuitively expandable, allowing you to resize the display to whatever is most convenient for you.

The audio-out and audio-in volume are even presented just right (for my tastes at least). Almost everything feels like it was designed in just the right way. Complex enough to please high-end users, but simple and intuitive enough for a lay person like myself.

Furthermore, Audacity has a range of special effects very similar to SoundEdit, including fades, pitch/speed/tempo changes, amplification, bass boost, normalization, equalization, reverse/inverse, etc. etc. It can also generate tones and silence, sometimes useful and usually missing from other apps.

It's also available cross-platform, Mac (OS 9 and X), Windows, and Linux/Unix.

If you're looking for a good audio program and don't want to pay for a professional package, this is your baby.

Images, Hotlinking and Bandwidth

By the way, one other thing I found in looking at the stats of my blog site is that a lot of people are hotlinking to images from my site. "Hotlinking" refers to the practice of "borrowing" images on other people's web site to adorn your own. This is not about downloading an image from somewhere else and uploading it to your own site. Instead, it is the practice of leaving the image on the other person's web site, and by using simple HTML code, making the photo appear to be located on your own site--but really it's located on the original site, and every time someone visits your site, their browser takes a covert side trip to the site with the photo, snags the image, and plops it into the hotlinker's page, as if it were really located there.

Probably the hotlinkers do a Google image search, find a photo from my site there without ever visiting it, and then use the URL of the image where they like. In doing this, anyone can display a photo on their web page, even though the photo is hosted by someone else. But the Internet is not really free, as much as it may seem like it sometimes. To host an image--that is, to keep an image file on a web server hard disk--costs money. Similarly, to transmit data, like the image file, is called "bandwidth," and also costs money. In other words, they're paying the rent and transportation, which you're hijacking to your benefit. While it may not be fully honest to grab someone else's image and put it up on your site, at least you're paying the rent and bus fare. Hotlinkers steal everything.

Some people hotlink to images because they feel they have no choice, like Blogspot bloggers who can't upload images--or that is, they couldn't before, but now they can but haven't learned that yet. Others maybe can't upload images from whatever service they're using.

Either way, it comes down to this: if you use someone else's URL in your image tag so they host the picture but it shows up on your site, then you're stealing bandwidth. It means that in order for your page to look good, I have to pay my web host x number of dollars for hosting the image and using bandwidth so people who visit your site can see it. It's like my using your phone line to make all the calls I like. But people do it casually probably because they don't understand what they're doing--or perhaps they do understand but just don't care.

I tried to engage something called "hotlink prevention," which would prevent such bandwidth theft, but as a result, many people with some browsers were not able to see the images I put up on my own blog, so that had to go. What I am left with is detecting which photos have been hotlinked, renaming each photo so affected, and then re-editing my own blog post which used the image so that the new name is recognized; that severs the link to the hijacker's site while keeping the photo visible on my own site. Sometimes, if I am sufficiently annoyed by someone costing me a lot of bandwidth, I'll change the name of the original and reflect that in my blog, but then I will also place a new image with the original file name--with a replacement image carrying a sharp graphic message telling the hotlinker to stop stealing bandwidth. They probably didn't figure that (a) I would be able to see that they stole the image, or (b) I could change the image and in so doing, change their site.

Recently, one image in particular has been hotlinked a lot, one I grabbed from a Simpsons episode. At least three different forum/member sites had this image hotlinked; one of those sites had the image in the main index, meaning everyone who visited would activate the link, and a different web site had several members who each had the image in their profile pages, as if one had used it and the others picked it up from them. The image was getting hotlinked more than 100 times a day because of this; at 20K a pop, that's 60 MB every month, just for that one photo. No thanks.

Is Japan a Militaristic Society?

I'm not trying to be jingoistic or anti-Japanese here, it's an honest question.

Ever since I can recall, I have always heard of modern, post-WWII Japan referred to as a peaceful nation. Scarred by the war and in particular by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan truly renounced war--not just because that was imposed on the country--and stood as a symbol of peace in a post-nuclear world.

Not to see how things are going in Japan today, though.

Right-wing newspapers, for many years, have been fighting an aggressive media campaign to convince the people of Japan that it is necessary to amend or rescind Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution--the article that says Japan forever renounces war. Back when I had subscribed to the English-language Daily Yomiuri, I remember frequent front-page headlines along the lines of "Japanese People Support Revision of Article 9." (Closer examination of the data suggest that a majority of Japanese approve of general revisions to the Constitution, but most oppose revising Article 9.) And a point could be made that Japan has technically, if not officially, crossed those bounds; for example, ever since the 80's, many have noted that though superficially only a self-defense force, Japan's navy is one of the largest and most powerful in the world. A few decades ago, the question was about how far above the legal % of GDP Japan spent on the military; today, Japanese "self-defense" troops are station in Iraq. And the pressure to get rid of Article 9 has only increased. Certainly, the present conservative government seems determined to take this path.

Furthermore, the media seems to be taking the same tack. Japan has never been big on self-scrutiny in terms of its wartime wrongs. Few films like "Platoon" get released here. Instead, the tone is more one of "we got framed." A 1999 film called Pride (which was lavishly budgeted as far as Japanese films go) took a revisionist tack, painting Hideki Tojo as a hero and presenting Japan's wartime actions as defensive. Current author Harutoshi Fukui, described as a "Japanese Tom Clancy," is seeing three of his books released as films this year alone, the first of which dealt with a Japanese WWII submarine foiling an American attempt to atom-bomb Tokyo. In short, you see and hear quite a bit in the media about a yearning for militarism, and less and less about peace.

Granted, a good deal of this probably has to do with the identification of the Constitution with a rule of law imposed on Japan by the United States. American bases with tens of thousands of soldiers still dot the Japanese countryside (one of them, in fact, is quite literally in my own backyard, the border fence just a few dozen meters behind my building). Whenever there is any infraction by an American soldier against a Japanese person, it makes national headlines. Japan has seen American culture, politics, and military needs trump its own. A lot of Japanese see Koizumi as Bush's lapdog and are not pleased with that. Perhaps this was better tolerated when Japan was on an economic high roll, but now Japan is more than a decade into a recession and the compensations may seem less attractive.

The history of relations between the two countries is also felt strongly here, especially one statement made by Douglas MacArthur during the occupation to the effect that Japan was/is a "nation of twelve year olds." Author Fukui addressed this, saying "We were 12-year-olds just as Americans said, but over the last five years, we think we've become at least 14-year-olds. There is a clear difference between 12 years old and 14 years old, when self-consciousness sprouts and the person reaches adolescence. ... It's like a person who says, 'The world is a scary place, and I should learn to fight like my father.' But the same person says, 'I want to get away from my father and go my own way.'"

Then there is the fright factor, just like Americans are reacting to with terrorism. Not only does the specter of al Qaeda hang over Japan, but North Korea is very, very close and is now the country's number-one boogeyman, firing its missiles over Japanese territory and sending its ships into Japanese waters.

And then there are those who say that Japan is and always has been militaristic, and has lost its way since America imposed a system where money rules. Certainly, with Japan's famous bushido traditions, there is support for this; however, it again reflects more what the ruling class has imposed, and not perhaps the true voice of the people, now more important in a more democratic society.

However, most of the factors bringing on militarism seem to crowd in from the outside, pushing the people instead of following their desires. Are the Japanese people militaristic, more often than not? A difficult question to answer objectively as an outside observer: an American asking that question to a Japanese citizen is just as likely to receive the answer which the Japanese citizen feels the American wants to hear. Not from deception, of course, but from a desire to avoid possible conflict.

This is something about which I intend to speak with some of my Japanese friends and acquaintances, and would like to hear your opinions as well. Is the recent trend towards militarism a product of the media, a push by right-wingers within and without the government, or is it really the will of the people? I am not asking if Japan is on the path to becoming like it was 60-plus years back, that would be taking things too far too soon. But is Japan on the general track of militaristic independence and possibly military influence, and if so, from where within Japan is that coming?

Bird Photos from the Island

My father just got the next generation of Canon digital camera from my own. I've got a PowerShot S1-IS, a 3.2 MP camera with 10x zoom; my father just got the S2-IS, a 5 MP camera with 12x zoom. He's getting the Canon tele-converter that goes with it soon, to bring him up to 18x zoom. A strange story with that, too--he called up Canon, and they seemed to claim that the S2 had no tele-converter from Canon. And yet, here it is, made by Canon itself. But try to go to Canon's web site and find it, and it doesn't seem to exist. Stranger still, the S2 seems to require a different lens adaptor and uses a different model tele-converter than the S1, despite the near-identical appearance of the two cameras. Why would Canon change that? Or is this just the next generation of tele-converters and adaptor rings? Additionally, the Canon tele-converter for the S2 is a 1.5x converter, as opposed to the 1.6x converter I have. Which means that despite the fact that my camera is 10x and my father's is 12x, the corresponding converter lenses will bring both to a total of 18x zoom. Why would Canon limit the new camera's add-on zoom to be the same as the old one? As I said, kinda strange. We should find out if my father could still use the 1.6x converter for a 19.2x total zoom.

In the meantime, he's taking photos with just the 12x zoom, and is having fun (a feeling I well know). Here are a few shots taken on the island (a place not too far from Seattle), of eagles fairly common in the area right now:

And here's an immature eagle, taken from about a quarter of a mile off. First, nearly the whole photo, reduced:

And then the eagle only, cropped:

Some nice photos! Coming soon may also be some egrets and kingfishers. I'm looking forward to them.

Harry Potter Fan Fiction Trilogy: Phoenix Intuition

And so we come to the third and (I believe) final installment in my brother's Harry Potter book series. His first two installments, Harry Potter and the Veil of Mystery, and Harry Potter and the Ring of Reduction, covered the sixth and seventh years of Harry Potter at Hogwarts, following Rowling's first five books (picking up at the end of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) and ending Harry's years as a student at Hogwarts. Veil and Ring were written in the same style as Rowling's books, covering one year at Hogwarts, and written in the "third person limited" point of view--that is, the story is told completely as the protagonist views it. Each of these two novels were also long, equivalent to perhaps a 1000- to 1200-page book.

This last novel, Phoenix Intuition, breaks those rules in many ways. First of all, it is not written in the third person limited; it is in the third person omniscient, and often leaves Harry to view other events outside of Harry's experience. Second, Harry is no longer a student and this novel does not restrict itself to the Hogwarts calendar--in fact, it starts several years before the main events in the story. Third, the novel is shorter, about half as long as the previous novels. And fourth, the story not only incorporates real-world events, but is set on a world stage. So if you're looking for a different kind of Harry Potter novel, written by someone whose writing is excellent and tested, then this will be a good read for you.

Since Phoenix Intuition relies somewhat heavily on the previous two novels by my brother, I would strongly suggest reading the other two before picking up this one, otherwise you won't know a lot about what is happening. Also keep in mind that these three fan fiction books assume a branching of events after the end of The Order of the Phoenix; they diverge--sharply, would be a sound guess--from the direction Rowling is taking in her sixth Harry Potter Book, The Half-Blood Prince, due out in less than a week. So if you read The Half-Blood Prince, assume its events take place in a different Harry Potter "universe" or "timeline."

Please find the novel presented here in PDF form, in two versions: U.S. Letter (8.5 x 11) size, for those who wish to print the entire book out on your printers (496 pages), and B5 (roughly 7 x 10 inches) size, for easier reading on a computer screen. A text-only version for those who will read on their iPod, PDA or other plain text reader will be released soon; look to this post or the main Harry Potter Fanfic entry.

Enjoy.

Rove Nailed

From David Corn:

...tonight I received this as-solid-as-it-gets tip: on Sunday Newsweek is posting a story that nails Rove. The newsmagazine has obtained documentary evidence that Rove was indeed a key source for Time magazine's Matt Cooper and that Rove--prior to the publication of the Bob Novak column that first publicly disclosed Valerie Wilson/Plame as a CIA official -- told Cooper that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife apparently worked at the CIA and was involved in Joseph Wilson's now-controversial trip to Niger.

To be clear, this new evidence does not necessarily mean slammer-time for Rove. Under the relevant law, it's only a crime for a government official to identify a covert intelligence official if the government official knows the intelligence officer is under cover, and this documentary evidence, I'm told, does not address this particular point. But this new evidence does show that Rove -- despite his lawyers claim that Rove "did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA" -- did reveal to Cooper in a deep-background conversation that Wilson's wife was in the CIA.

With the Republicans solidly in control of both houses of Congress and the executive branch, one can expect first-class protection for the GOP's golden boy. While I hope Rove gets sent to prison--and not Danbury minimum security--it seems very likely that he'll be able to feign ignorance of Plame's undercover status just well enough to escape serious jail time. Of course, it's obvious that he knew full well: revealing Plame's CIA status would have had no purpose for Rove unless she was indeed undercover.

One good thing that will come of this is that it will expose the Bush administration for what it is, with zero ability of the right wing to claim otherwise without looking like complete fools. Of course, that never stopped right-wingers before: Oliver North betrayed his country, violated national security, lied to Congress and the people and generally did a lot of loathsome stuff, and he's still a hero of many conservatives. It's the whole faith-based thing: believe no matter what.

Compassionate Words of Sympathy Pour out from the Right Wing for London Bombing Victims

"My first thought when I heard - just on a personal basis, when I heard there had been this attack and I saw the futures this morning, which were really in the tank, I thought, 'Hmmm, time to buy.'" --Brit Hume, Fox News Anchor

Brian Kilmeade, Fox News Host: ... I think that works to our advantage, in the Western world's advantage, for people to experience something like this together, just 500 miles from where the attacks have happened.

Stuart Varney, Fox News Commentator: It puts the Number 1 issue right back on the front burner right at the point where all these world leaders are meeting. It takes global warming off the front burner. It takes African aid off the front burner. It sticks terrorism and the fight on the war on terror, right up front all over again.

Kilmeade: Yeah.

It's like I said -- 40 people dead, 150 seriously wounded, 1,000 wounded, out of over 1 million people in that transit tube. It's not a successful terrorist attack, folks. --Rush Limbaugh

This Happens Whenever I Turn on CNN

I've stopped watching CNN regularly because their reporting is so terrible (they're not as bad as Fox News, but they're trying to be), but with the recent bombings in London, I've had the Babble Channel on from time to time to see what's going on in the video news world. And, as usual, once the direct reporting of the big story is over and they turn to the commentary, I can't listen for three minutes before they say something outrageous. This time it was in a story about the Madrid train bombings last year. The story included a good amount of detail on finding the suspects in the bombing and how that investigation ended up. The reporter mentioned about how so many Spaniards took to the streets to protest terrorism, but then he went on about how they voted out of office the conservative government which had gone into Iraq despite its unpopularity--and mentioned how this was seen as a capitulation to terrorists.

In other words, after a year and more, after the story should be settled enough to be clear in retrospect, they're still regurgitating the Bush administration spin rather than reporting the whole story; they are still intentionally editing out important, even overriding facts which put a completely different light on that election.

The conservatives did not lose the election because of the bombing; they lost it because the Spanish people were angered by the government's attempt to play politics with the bombings. After the train attacks and just before the election, the Aznar government blamed the attacks on the ETA (Basque separatists) and withheld information about possible al Qaeda suspects and evidence that pointed away from the ETA. An ETA attack could have given more credibility to the conservatives:

Spain's ruling Popular Party went down in defeat to the Socialists in Sunday's national election. It did so amid accusations that the government had withheld information on the bombings in an effort to influence the forthcoming vote.

A tough line on ETA had long been part of the Popular Party's platform. If indeed such a horrific ETA attack occurred, it would be certain to win Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's chosen successor the prime ministership. But with the Iraq war strongly unpopular among Spaniards, Islamic jihadi involvement in Thursday's nightmare would have grave implications for the Popular Party's votes, and it indeed did.

In short: the Spanish people voted out the Aznar government because it tried to manipulate the attack for political purposes on the eve of an election.

It was people like the Bush administration who went into high spin mode after this humiliating defeat for the so-called "coalition of the willing" (90% of the Spanish people were not "willing"). They painted the election results to say that the Spanish people caved in to al Qaeda out of fear. However, the huge anti-terror protests following the bombings showed they were spectacularly unafraid and unintimidated; far from being cowed, they were outraged and resolved.

The truth about why Aznar lost the election is not a secret, nor is the story hard to find or even disputed by any actual evidence whatsoever. It was absolutely clear why Aznar lost.

And yet, here we are, one year and four months later, and CNN is still spouting the Bush lie; the CNN reporter, who clearly looked into the story well enough to find the truth, plainly omitted the fact that the Aznar government manipulated the bombings and withheld evidence (the CNN story included details about the al Qaeda suspects, after all), and just as plainly ignored the entire scandal that changed the election.

Like I said, this is why I stopped watching CNN, and why I would be even more disgusted were I to even try to watch Fox News. Journalism has gone from reporting the truth to choosing a spin to cover--and then perpetuating it. Just like the Jessica Lynch story and the tearing down of the Hussein statue--both stories fabricated by the Bush administration, and yet knowingly swallowed whole by a willing press, who still report them as true even today--the Spain election story is yet another in the line of conservative rewritings of modern events that is maintained and preserved by these shilling media whores.

To Reveal a Source, Or Not?

You remember the Valerie Plame case: Joseph Wilson was asked by the U.S. government to investigate claims that Niger was selling uranium to Iraq; he found and reported that the claims were bogus; Bush ignored these results and "relied" on debunked foreign reports to the contrary, citing the Niger case in a State of the Union speech as rationale to invade Iraq; Wilson spoke publicly on the matter; Karl Rove went ballistic, and in an act of revenge, called reporters under the cloak of the anonymous source, revealing that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA operative, blowing her cover and putting her life and the lives of others at risk. Essentially, a treacherous act against our own intelligence community in the name of political payback.

You may have heard recently about the developments in which two reporters, Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller, have been threatened with prison if they don't reveal their sources for the information about Plame. Even though the disclosure of these sources would help reveal crimes committed by the Bush administration, few if any liberals have been cheering the idea of reporters forced to reveal sources; most have reservations, and some stand strongly against the idea. (Imagine the situation applying to a Democratic administration; a lot of conservatives would be out there demanding the reporters reveal the source or go to prison.)

I'm in the "strongly against" category. I don't think that a reporter should ever have to reveal a source. This despite a strong personal abhorrence for how the anonymous source is abused, both by dishonest reporters and by dishonest sources. And it even must cover reporters when a crime was committed, else the oft-used cloaking lie about "national security" (which can be applied without fear of exposure to make just about anything a crime) could be used to pry any source from any journalist.

That said, I also believe that Cooper and Miller should have, from the very beginning, willingly revealed their source.

Why? Because they were used. Not just politically, but criminally. While the state should not be able to force disclosure of anonymous sources, journalists should not be bound to secrecy if the anonymous source was not acting in good faith. Once these reporters realized that Rove had used them to commit a highly illegal act of political vengeance, they should have outed him without even being asked.

The confidential source is supposed to be all about protecting whistle-blowers who feel compelled to uncover secrets, either government or industrial, which could lead to retribution against them, personally, legally, or both. "In the public interest" is supposed to be the yardstick; why not use it? If the public interest is not being served and the reporter was misled or otherwise used by the source to commit a crime or attack innocent people, I would think it would be against the interests of the journalist to protect the source, as it would only encourage further abuse in the future. So long as journalists made this principle clear, then anonymous sources coming out in the public interest would not feel any lack of trust in being protected by the journalists they speak to.

Case in point: back in the days of the Iran-Contra scandal, Oliver North was testifying before Congress about why he had lied to them about what he had been doing. North claimed that the Reagan administration feared leaks from Congress, which could not be trusted to keep secret information without blabbing about it all to the press. When pressed for an example of a Congressional leak, North pointed to a case where information was divulged to the media regarding how the U.S. tracked a plane carrying the Achille Lauro hijackers bound for Tripoli. North called this a breach of national security, and berated Congress for putting our intelligence sources at risk. And that was his rationale for lying to Congress about Iran-Contra.

Here, North was trying to cover his own ass for working against the public interest and then lying about it to Congress and the people, and at the same time he was attacking the Democratic Congress, blaming them for violating the public trust when it was he himself who was responsible for it.

Of course, Congress didn't leak that information to reporters. In fact, Oliver North himself did that. And in that case, the Newsweek reporter who received the information from Oliver North came forward and outed North as the source. Quite rightly, and quite justly. If an anonymous source abuses their anonymity, they should be revealed for what they are. (The reporter who ratted North out, by the way, tells the story himself and expounds on the Plame investigation.)

By the same token, Cooper and Miller should have exposed Rove the first time they were asked. Nothing Rove told them was of value to the public, quite the contrary in fact. And Rove was only hiding behind the anonymity to commit a federal felony, the purpose being payback for embarrassing him and his boss. Do reporters want this kind of thing to happen? I know the argument about the principle of confidentiality, but as I said, if the lines are drawn clearly and publicly enough so that everyone understands them, then confidentiality can be preserved, sources can feel safe and protected, and journalists can be shielded from this kind of abuse.

Can't This Guy Stay on a Bike?

Image from The Londonist

Yet again, our fearless leader fall off his bike and go boom. This is, if I am not mistaken, the third time he has taken a bike spill, not including the time he fell off of a Segway (which takes talent). This time, in England for a G8 summit, Bush collided with a police officer, who was immediately shot taken to a hospital.

As usual, the White House press office insists that Bush was going really, really fast and it had been raining. Maybe, but take that with a huge grain of salt: the last time this happened, in Texas, they also claimed it had been raining and the topsoil was loose, but when someone checked the weather, they found out that it had not rained for more than a week.

So we know they lie about the weather to make it sound more dashing and less stupid; we still have no confirmation that Bush was actually riding super fast ("pretty good speed" and "quite a clip" are the terms used). It is not unlikely that in both cases, Bush was going slowly when he crashed. One piece of contributing evidence: if you're really booking along and you collide with someone, you usually get more than just a few scrapes and bruises. Bush's injuries are more consistent with lower-speed falls. So the high-speed thing is possible, but not likely. The whole thing with the press office trying to make Bush seem macho when he falls off his bike is laughable and not just a little pathetic. Simply say he had another spill and don't embellish.

"You know what really makes this embarrassing? The other day the president said the leaders in Iraq are 'ready to take off the training wheels.' That's what he said, 'take off the training wheels.' Then he goes out and falls off his bicycle. And they wonder why the rest of the world doesn't take us seriously." —Jay Leno

First Official Podcast

About a week ago, I made a podcast and was successful in getting listed in the iTunes Music Store. That first podcast wasn't really an "official" cast, though--I just needed something to fill the space, and so I read the post I made about podcasting and uploaded it. Since then, I've been waiting for the right topic to start the real series of podcasts. Alberto Gonzales seemed to be a good topic. As may be the case with a lot of the casts I may do, this was not just a quickie with little detail; I tried to make it fairly extensive, without getting too gabby or getting into boring detail. Still, it runs just shy of ten minutes. But hopefully it'll give you a good idea about a man who might be a Supreme Court nominee.

So I've uploaded the podcast (and deleted the first episode from the RSS feed). However, iTunes is of two minds on podcasts: they have the searchable listing in the Music Store, and then there's the subscription in your podcasts window. The subscription can be updated immediately, and will show you the new podcast. However, the searchable listing in the Music Store may take a day or more to update. You can still search for "BlogD" or "The Blog from Another Dimension" and find me, but you won't hear the Gonzales podcast unless you subscribe and go to the Podcast window. More on how that works when I figure it out.

So from now on, I will make a post to announce when I have published a new podcast. The XML feed for the podcasts is here. The episode on Gonzales can be found here (you can either click to listen in your browser, or right-click and download the file to listen with another application). I am also including an iTunes icon into the title of each post with a podcast; you can click the icon to download the podcast. Let me know if the HTML code within the title looks screwy in any way or in any situation.

Sometime soon, though, I'm going to have to buy an actual microphone; I'm using the built-in mic on my Powerbook, and the quality is not what I'd hope for.

A Fix, Maybe

For those of you who have been following the perils of this blog lately, you know that the latest implementations of perl/mysql/cpanel have knocked out some of the Movable Type scripting that makes comment and entry posting-and-rebuilding work. The dreaded "500 - Internal Server Error" messages have plagued both commenters and myself alike. It's all very technical, but let me see if I can lay it out so that maybe you can clear it up if you're having these problems yourself.

First of all, the errors are not fatal. They only occur on a save-and-rebuild with making new blog entries and with making new comments. The entries and comments are saved, but the pages are not rebuilt. That can be solved by a manual rebuild. Everything gets saved and eventually appears on the site, it's just that the rebuilding must be done manually.

The fix: in the perl scripts, downgrade the DBI to 1.47, and downgrade the DBD::Mysql to 2.9006. If you don't run your own server, then ask your web host to do it for you. However, you must also tell them to reset the cpanel autoupdate for your site so that it does not automatically reload the upgrades every night. My web host did this once, and it worked for 12 hours or so, then reverted. I told them of this, and again, they fixed it. They did not tell me if it involved further settings changes, but it was likely something in the cpanel that continued the autoupdate. So stress to your web host that the cpanel autoupdate must be verified as turned off, and then wait 24 hours to make sure that took hold. I'm still not clear as to whether the problems will return yet again, but it is clear that they are fiddling with the right toggle which gets rid of the bugs. I'll let you know when the problems have stayed away for more than a day.

This should end your MT blog problems for the time being. Word has it that the developer of DBI::Mysql has versions 3.0000_0 and 3.0001_0 out by now, but whether that will fix the Sql/MT bug or not, I cannot say. More news as it comes in.

Update: for four days in a row, my web host tried to disable the automatic upgrading of the site, and on each day the fix worked--for about half a day. The auto-update kept kicking in and the errors would return. Well, maybe five times lucky: my host has disabled the auto-update completely now, so let's see how that plays out.

As If She'd Ever Even Heard of Tempel 1 Before

You know it had to happen, somewhere. NASA is being sued by an astrologer in Russia for disrupting her work. She claims that she cannot accurately calculate horoscopes anymore since the Deep Impact probe hit the comet Tempel 1.

"It is obvious that elements of the comet's orbit, and correspondingly the ephemeris, will change after the explosion, which interferes with my astrology work and distorts my horoscope," Izvestia daily quoted astrologist Marina Bai as saying in legal documents submitted before Monday's collision.

Ms. Bai wants NASA to cough up $300 million.

The article goes on to state that "NASA representatives in Moscow were unavailable for comment." Apparently they have not finished laughing yet.

New iTunes Cell Phone

Apparently the cat is--or might be--out of the bag: three days before an official announcement is expected, Engadget has posted photos and an iTunes screen shot of the new phone. It uses a TransFlash card for memory, the biggest size for that format being 256 MB. The phone appears to have some video function as well. However, the nature of the video function, or even if the phone includes a camera, is unclear. There is also talk about whether this is the real deal, or if it's an older proof-of-concept version of an existing phone model, and not the final product. The same site showed this image of what was then also rumored to be the new iTunes phone. So nothing is certain--except that there will be an iTunes phone, and we'll likely know its real final form by the end of this week.

TV Guide, Japan

About 8 months ago, I switched from cable to satellite TV here in Japan. When I was on cable TV, there was a program guide mailed to me every month; however, with satellite TV, there's no guide. Yes, there's a live "what's on" channel that you can go forward for one week, and they even have an English version for it--but it's clunky at best.

So for six months, I subscribed to an English TV Guide magazine, which gave all-English listings for cable and satellite channels (not the terrestrial Japanese-language channels). That was good, but it was also expensive--¥800 ($7.20) an issue, with no price break at all for 6- or 12-month subscriptions. At almost ten thousand yen per year, that's a pretty pricey TV guide--especially if you only use it for half a dozen channels or so.

I was about to re-subscribe, however painfully, when I figured I'd give it a pass for at least one month. During that time, I found out something that made me feel a bit foolish: you don't need to pay for it. Each channel publishes its full schedule on their web site, and most--even though they're Japanese companies in Japan--publish an alternate schedule in English. Each one is presented as a PDF file, and these files are sometimes almost identical to what I'd been paying so much for. All you have to do is visit the sites for the channels you watch each month and print out the PDF file: instant TV guide in English, for only a few pennies. Like I said, I felt like a fool for dishing out that much.

Strangely--or not so strangely, considering--the Fox channel (entertainment, not news) is the only one I watch that does not publish and English-language schedule. Which kind of figures; Fox is also one of two, maybe three channels on all of satellite TV (another is the Disney channel) which does broadcasts bilingual (Japanese and English) in a non-standard format that defies the usual technology for extra audio channels. With other channels, like Super-Channel or AXN, you can set the channel to bilingual mode and it will always be in English from then on. But with Fox, you have to switch from Japanese to English every time you change the channel. Furthermore, it's not easy to switch; at least on my set, you have to activate the menu, move up one level, across one, and then down to, and then set--pushing five different buttons six times just to change the audio. But worst, the audio cannot be controlled from my DVR--meaning that I have to manually switch audio for every programmed show recorded off of Fox. A huge pain in the neck.

All whining aside, here are the pages where you can download English versions of monthly programming schedules:

AXN
Super Channel
LaLa (a cumbersome PDF, takes a while to display)
Movie Plus
Cinefil Imagica (click "Schedule" on the left)
Fox (Japanese only)

Weird Spam

This site is always deluged with spam, but every once in a while, some very subtly weird spam comes along that just catches your attention. The most recent has been a series of trackback spam from fake blogs. As I've mentioned, trackbacks are when other blogs refer to and link to this one, and their site software "pings" mine, or sends a special message to mine alerting me to the reference. Spammers fake such pings in order to get a link on my site to theirs.

But these latest fake pings don't make much sense. There has been almost one a day for the past several days; all are fake blog posts on fake blog sites; all have an address which would indicate a recent blog post. The address includes "/archives/2005/07/" and then a blog article file name--all looking rather authentic. In each case, the message contained in the trackback ping is very similar: "Excerpt: You can read about it also on my blog page," "Excerpt: More info can be found on my page," and "Excerpt: Look at my page for more info...."

Now, I would expect in each case for the bogus blog addresses to be a shell domain with a redirect: go to the address given, and you're automatically redirected to a different domain with hideous porn spam. Instead, when I visited each site to find out what was going on, a 500 Internal Server Error was returned. For the entire site, not just for the one page. And it's not a 404 error or a domain not found/doesn't exist error either.

There is one possible explanation: by ironic chance, these spammers got foiled by the exact same perl scripting bug that's been plaguing this blog for the past several days. In short, the redirect software which they use to transfer you to the hideous porn site is incompatible with the new perl software, causing the error messages. Which would be both funny and all too fitting.

It's also possible that these spam are fake fakes--spam which doesn't connect to a spammer. I've gotten these before. In the past, spammers have sent me referrer spam pointing back to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and spammers sent a lot of people referrer spam that claimed to come from the John Kerry web site. My guess is that these are either hoaxers, or they're spammers testing out a software configuration and not leaving their own address in case something goes wrong. Even fake blogs have been the seeming origin of spam before--although in the past, these fake blogs showed a specific address ending in "/archives.html", which is not a real location in any blog that I know of.

Nevertheless, it does make it all a bit interesting. For me, the main thing is, none of this gets onto my blog anymore, so it's just a nuisance or a curiosity. Even my anti-referral patch for AwStats is working well--I've been getting almost no referral spam this month so far. A few are leaking through, but can only manage to get one or two hits on my site per day, like a few small leaks in a dam holding back a deluge.

Movable Type Malfing

Everyone, please be patient while Movable Type gets its stuff together. Recently, upgrades to perl and mysql have been upgraded on web hosts all around, and it appears that the new versions may not be compatible with Movable Type, this blog's operating software. This means that certain events on this blog will not function properly, such as posting to comments. If you try, you may get a "500 - Internal Server Error" message. However, your comment will have been saved--it's just that the Movable Type script that's now incompatible with perl can't go on to rebuild the post or give you any other message. It is also possible that this is worse with TypeKey than with unregistered commenters, at least for the time being. The malfunction also makes it harder--though not impossible, as you can tell--to post new entries for the blog.

I am trying to see if I can get my web host to downgrade the elements that are causing the problem, so the site can go back to the way it was before--but I have the feeling that the elements are server-wide and so cannot be changed just for me. Otherwise, I'll have to just wait for Six Apart to fix the problem on their end and issue a patch or an upgrade (3.2 is due out soon).

So please be patient, and I'll get things back to running smoothly again as soon as I can.

Update (July 4): my web host has downgraded at least part of the new software that might be causing the problems--but I'm still experiencing errors. There might be fewer errors than before, it's hard to say. Still looking for a way out of this mess.

Gonzales and the Supreme Court

What a country this is. Less than ten years after being a lowly legal counsel for the Texas governor, helping him get out of jury duty because it might expose a drunk driving charge, Alberto Gonzales is now Attorney General and currently at the top of a list being considered for Supreme Court Justice. Amazing where you can go if you help a friend weasel out of a political scandal.

Bizarrely, Gonzales would actually be a better choice than most candidates one can imagine Bush nominating. And considering Gonzales' stand on prisoner torture, that's saying quite a lot. Of course, the question is, in the torture issue, was Gonzales conveying his own beliefs, or was he simply doing dirty work for the administration? And how tightly will his friendship with Dubya hold him to decide conservatively when he's got a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court and is suddenly answerable to no one or nothing except the Constitution and his own conscience?

If his loyalty is greater than his conscience, he'll do what Bush wants; he owes his entire career to Bush, who hired him as an advisor, elections officer and liaison with Mexico. Later, he became Bush's legal counsel to the governor's office, then appointed him Secretary of State and finally to the Texas Supreme Court. When Bush became president, Gonzales left the TSC to become Bush's legal counsel in the White House, only to be named Attorney General this year. And now he's in line for being a SC Justice. Let's face it, if it weren't for Bush, Gonzales would probably still be a junior partner for some legal firm in Houston, doing adjunct work as a college professor on the side. It is wholly possible that he will allow that bond to influence his decisions as a Supreme.

Strangely, Gonzales will be protested by both sides. Die-hard conservatives dislike him because he tends to be pro-choice, once deciding that pregnant teens in Texas had the right to have an abortion without the permission of an adult. Liberals will remember the torture memo and the hiding of Cheney's energy policy meetings.

I wrote, two years ago in 2003, when Gonzales was still a White House counsel, that he was a candidate for a SCOTUS position; it was no secret ever since Bush took the White House that Gonzales would be an obvious choice. No one doubts his friendship with Bush, but there is also the less-than-attractive but very real fact that he is being considered because of his race, which would make it much easier to confirm him--and as I've noted, the right wing remembers how Clarence Thomas was able to get confirmed, despite a practically blank record and charges of sexual harassment against him. The GOP is acutely aware that the best way to get a hard-core right-winger on the bench is if it's a minority or woman. Furthermore, let's face it: Gonzales has been riding Bush's coat-tails for the past decade. Does anyone really believe he'd be considered for a SCOTUS seat if he hadn't been a political flunky of the president? These do not bode well as professional qualifications.

Frankly, I'm on the fence about this one. Gonzales seems to be at least moderate on social issues, when he's given the chance to speak his mind. He did call out Priscilla Owen when she tried to exceed the law and go activist in restricting reproductive rights in Texas, calling her guilty of "an unconscionable act of judicial activism." And he is more likely than other possible nominees to swing left, at least on some issues. But his loyalty and debt to Bush is troublesome, as he has shown that he's willing to get into some pretty nasty stuff to please the boss. He might agree to serve on the high court on the condition of taking marching orders, even if for a limited number of issues, or only as long as Bush remains in office.

But here's a question: will Bush ever nominate someone who is even half as acceptable as Gonzales is?

Typinator

I just bought a new piece of Mac shareware and thought you might be interested in it. The software is called "Typinator." What it does is essentially the same as what Microsoft's AutoCorrect function does--it looks for you to type specific text strings, and when you do, it replaces them with other text strings that you have listed in the app. For example, if I want to type "The Blog from Another Dimension," I could abbreviate it in Typinator as "bgd"; then, whenever I type "bgd," the entire phrase is automatically replaced.

This function is also similar to the long-time Mac app called "TypeIt4Me" (around for close a decade), but from reports it works a lot better. TypeIt4Me works in the input menu, meaning you can only use it with the standard keyboard layout, and not, for example, Dvorak or any language other than QWERTY English. Typinator works differently, so you can use it with any keyboard layout; I've tried it by assigning English letters to activate Typinator to place Japanese characters, and it works. Typinator also allows for you to input images by typing specific strings. Typinator can also deliver date and time stamps, pre-formatted the way you prefer them. Finally, Typinator is cheaper, $19 shareware compared to TypeIt4Me's $27.

In my case, I plan to use it as an AutoCorrect feature, system-wide. I want to switch over to using Pages more, and rely on MS Word less. However, Pages lacks an AutoCorrect feature; Typinator now fills that need, and not just in Pages--it does it everywhere. If I visit a blog and want to leave a comment, people usually require an email address, and I might want to type my own blog's URL--but that can sometimes be a hassle. Yes, I know, I'm lazy as hell. But it's nice to be able to type just a few easy keys in each text box and have a full email address and URL in a second or so.

Another good feature is that Typinator allows multi-line fill-ins. MS Word 2004 for the Mac allows this also, but not on Windows. For example, you can enter your entire multiple-line home address into Typinator, and get it back in a split second. Another good use would be in scripting web pages; if I want to make a quickie web page, it's a hassle to type the basic HTML, HEAD, TITLE and BODY commands; takes a few minutes. But I can type them once, copy and paste the whole lot into Typinator, and from that point on I can insert the whole structure with only a few keystrokes. I can create similar fill-ins for TABLE or FORM tags, or any tag and attributes I please--which could save a lot of time writing basic HTML.

Typinator can also pay attention to your capitalization, so that if you have the string "typinator" with the trigger string "tpn," then typing "Tpn" will similarly capitalize the "Typinator" expansion.

Typinator does have a few down spots. For one, whenever it's activated, the automatically-replaced expansion text gets placed into the clipboard, kicking out whatever was in there previously; this has caught me up a few times, but I can live with it. Typinator is also a version-1.0, having just come out of Beta, so it's not as feature-rich as it could be. Future versions may include a workaround for the clipboard problem, and other new features, whatever they may be.

I also had some concerns about security. What Typinator does seemed to me to be similar to what a keylogging program might do: watch what you type. I emailed their support department, and got a detailed reply back explaining why that was not a problem. Typinator uses an Apple feature introduced in Panther called the "event monitor" which allows them to watch what you type without logging anything except very temporarily; furthermore, password fields in Mac OS X are protected from prying eyes (Typinator can't see what you type in a password field). It uses a completely different kind of technology to do its job. It would be easier for a hacker to simply create their own keylogging program than to somehow use Typinator for that purpose, so the security seems tight. Good enough for me.

TidBits reviewed Typinator, and you can find some user reviews on its download page at Version Tracker (assuming the reviews are genuine and not sales-related), or you can go to the product page at Ergonis. You can use Typinator as a trial, but it will only remember five expansion strings and no more, until you pay for the license.

As a side note, this app, along with the Dictionary now integrated into Tiger, make up the key elements I felt were lacking in Pages, which is now my first-string word processing application.

700th Day, and I'm on iTunes

Today is the 700th day in a row that I've blogged, no breaks. August 2nd will be the 2-year anniversary for nonstop blogging.

On a side note, the iTunes Music Store has finally recognized the audio blog. Do a search in Podcasts in iTunes for "Blogd" and you'll find it. As I mentioned before, it's just a dorky little trial recording, so don't expect to be blown away.

Now to tune up the RSS feed to get the details straight (and by this I'll find out how fast the iTMS updates its listings via the RSS feed), and then record a real podcast. Or at least try to.

Spam Control

Well, it's the end of the first day of the new month, meaning I've got a new start on the stats. Now I can see how the referral spam is working. It is supposed to use the MT-Blacklist to filter out spam as it arrives (there's no getting rid of it once it's in, not yet), but there's a snag: I just upgraded to MT-Blacklist 2, which does not publish a blacklist. And there was no way to enter new strings into the existing blacklist file. Fortunately, someone posted a script which would allow MT-Blacklist 2 to export a blacklist. However, there's a snag.

MT-Blacklist 2 is supposed to import your old blacklist and incorporate it into its own, but mine clearly did not do that; there are 400 or 500 entries fewer in the new list than in the old one, obviously all of my custom entries. And since the referral spam is a mix of old and new spammers, I need all the data from both lists. And MT-Blacklist's import function is badly broken (don't start it, it will never end). Worse, the new MT-B seems to lack the ability to add new strings more than one at a time--which means that re-entering the strings from the old list would be a very laborious task.

Feeling that most of the spam I'll get will be from new addresses, I decided to archive the old list and use a newly-generated list. And so far, the results are a mix of good and bad.

The good: it does seem that the referral spam is being blocked. After one full day, only 8 of the top 25 referrers are spammers, and most of them are brand-new ones that slipped in only a few spam before I caught them. So the list looks like it may be a lot cleaner than before. Additionally, the total tallies from last month's referrals was encouraging: 17 of the top 25 were spammers, and the spammers in the top 25 unleashed a total of 1,637 spam. That is opposed to May's figures, where fully 24 of the top 25 were spammers, who unleashed 10,000 spam hits. On top of that, June's figures include unblocked spam from the first five days, 867 spams from that time span alone. Meaning that there was less referral spam in the last 25 days than there was in the first 5. So clearly the AwStats patch is doing its job.

The bad: the patch is not doing a perfect job. One gay porn spammer, for instance, has been leaving one spam hit regularly every four hours or so--and they're somehow getting past the filter, despite being on the blacklist. Which means that there is a way around it. And if there's a way around it, then eventually it is likely that all spammers will find their way around it. This is the part I was talking about earlier when I said that it was a constant battle of putting up defenses and the spammers working to get around those defenses.

So we'll have to wait and see how long this solution works. At least I've got pretty airtight control over the comment and trackback spam. (Knock on wood)

Oh, Shit

Sandra Day O'Connor has announced her retirement from the Supreme Court.

Everyone expected Rehnquist to be the one to step down, and while it would have been bad for Bush to get to appoint a Chief Justice, at least he would have been replacing someone who we know is a rabid right-winger; the worst that could have happened was that someone just like him could have come in; at best, Bush could have appointed someone who looked like a right-winger, only to have the new person turn left on him, as has happened several times in the past. Warren, Brennan, Blackmun, Stevens, O'Connor, kennedy and Souter all proved more liberal than was hoped for by the Republican presidents who appointed them.

Nevertheless, the idea of O'Connor leaving is a body blow. She has been a swing vote on abortion, the death penalty, and even more recently, the ten commandments ruling. Were it not for her, Rehnquist's rabidly "anything goes" merge-church-and-state ruling would be law today. And if Bush and the GOP get their way, the replacement will be sufficiently right-wing, and wingnut conservatives around the country will start scrambling to get new test cases on every conceivable issue up before the Supreme Court so that they can change the legal landscape of the entire country.

What's worse, Republicans have been getting much, much better at getting the people they want on the court. Justice Clarence Thomas is an excellent case in point. The replacement for Thurgood Marshall who just "happened" to be black, Thomas was supremely unqualified for the position, except in one way: politically. He was a far-right-winger, without much of a track record that could be held against him in hearings, but most importantly, he was one of those few minorities who is rabidly conservative. Any attempt to deny him his appointment could, and was, painted hypocritically and opportunistically as racist. And Thomas was also discredited by accusations of sexual harassment, remember--and the right wing fixed that by going on an all-out rampage to smear the accuser. It worked. And since then, they've gotten even better.

How much money you want to bet that Bush puts forward a jurist who just happens to be a woman (coincidentally, of course), but also a wingnut glad to overthrow Roe v. Wade? Or maybe Bush won't feel to pressured to put a woman on the court, as Ginsburg is there? Somehow I doubt he'll put forward a white male, as one of the GOP's best ways to work the system is to put up women or minorities as bulletproof bulwarks against criticism, enabling them to accuse Democrats of racism and sexism when the objections are clearly about politics and professionalism.

If anything is for certain, it's that the GOP is now gearing up for a fearsome battle, will try to get a right-winger on the court who will be 99% guaranteed not to go lefty on them--and that the fundamentalists will have more than just a little say in who gets nominated.

The question is: will Democrats be gearing up just as strongly? They'd better, This will be the fight of their lives. And now, I must admit that I was wrong in my opposition to the deal made between moderate Republicans and Democrats to back off from the GOP's "nuclear option" of doing away with the filibuster. While there is no guarantee that the GOP won't go balls-to-the-wall in trying to rekindle efforts to axe the filibuster again, it is at least in place for now, and might even make it possible for the Dems to force the Republicans into compromising, even a little.

But my hopes are not high. If the past five years have taught me anything, it is that the GOP will go to almost any length imaginable, commit almost any act, tell any number of lies, and will put on a show-of-horrors PR campaign of such dishonesty and corruption that it would make Satan's scrotum shrink in embarrassment. They've shown that they will go to practically any length to get everything they want. And they won't turn into shrinking violets now.

Then there is the fact that Americans who might not have felt their rights and liberties at stake before will not have another election before O'Connor is replaced. And Bush will probably still get to replace Rehnquist--though we can only hope that Democrats will gain back control of the Senate before that happens.

Senator Ried, Howard Dean: this is your moment of truth.

Minimum Wage

I used to work for minimum wage. But it's not like it was some great inconvenience to me. At first, I was a high school and then college student just making a bit of money, with my folks covering the food, shelter, clothing and health care parts of the equation. Later, returned from stints in Japan, I got minimum wage jobs at movie theaters because they were not a strain in terms of hours worked and were good for getting in study; also, I was mostly living off of savings I'd made while working in Japan as I got my degrees at the state university.

But actually living off of minimum wage, with no one to fall back on, no one to help support you, and no savings to use, even in a pinch... that's a scary thought.

The minimum wage is currently $5.15 per hour, and has been since 1997, for eight years now. While that sounds like a goodly amount more than the $3.35 I used to get right out of high school in 1982, one factor runs that illusion into the ground: inflation. Your money doesn't get you what it used to. In 1998 dollars, the 1981 minimum wage was $6.15. In 2005 dollars, that would have been about $6.50.

The minimum wage today has again dropped to very low levels, and if you look at this chart you'll see that before the Reagan era, in which minimum wage was allowed to fester and stagnate, the minimum wage in 2004 dollars was between $6 and $7 an hour for the previous two decades. Currently, Congress is talking about hikes in the minimum wage, but there is the usual argument over how great a hike it should be. Do I even need to tell you that the Democrats are pushing for the biggest wage increases, and the Republicans and shutting them down, arguing for far lesser increases, and trying to weasel in a great number of exceptions and amendments for even more tax cuts for wealthy people?

Senator Kennedy is aiming high, for a $2 hike in the minimum wage, which would bring it back up to where it was in the 1960's. The Republican response if for a $1.10 hike, which would be treading water, similar to hikes in 1991 and 1997, or to the middle of the Reagan era when the wage was in a historic downward slide. But more than that, the Republican plan would double the minimum-business-income exemption to paying minimum wage from half a million dollars a year to a million, meaning a lot more people would be getting a huge pay cut, not a raise. The plan also calls for doing away with a requirement for the minimum wage to be paid if the business deals in any kind of interstate commerce. Another large group of people would get their wages slashed.

The GOP would also allow businesses to play with their worker's pay periods so as to maximize their ability to avoid paying overtime. Republicans claim this is only if the worker agrees, which is another way of saying it is mandatory. I worked on a minimum wage job in the early 80's where if you worked overtime, you got paid just the regular wage; after one employee sued, the bosses simply had us re-work our time cards so that the overtime was spread out so little or no overtime appeared to be happening. If we did not agree to sign these, we would have been fired. (On a side note, when I quit later, I successfully sued that employer in small claims court for unpaid overtime hours--but could not reclaim the overtime after they made me re-work the time cards.)

What is it like to live at the minimum wage today? Morgan Spurlock, the guy who at only fast food for 30 days in the divisive "Supersize Me" documentary, carried the idea over, in a way, to a much higher and more respectable level in his new 6-part series on the FX Channel, called "30 Days." In each episode, a person from one part of society (usually representing a group thought of as more "normal") would spend 30 days in the life of a culture very different from their own--a sort of "walk a mile in another man's shoes" concept. The first episode had the filmmaker Spurlock and his fiancé spending 30 days living at the minimum wage.

The experience for them was brutal. Spurlock worked one and often two full-time jobs, his fiancé worked in a restaurant with meager tips (although there is a national exception for restaurants, not mentioned in the show, to include tips in deciding the minimum wage for their workers). Even with a cheap, under-heated apartment over what was recently a crack house, free clothes and furniture from a charitable organization, and three full-time jobs between them, they went way over budget due to hospitalization. (They could not even come close to affording insurance; Spurlock had to see a doctor for an injured wrist, his fiancé for a urinary tract infection. And remember, these are the kind of people who will be hit hard by the recent Republican cave-in to the credit industry, the new law that will make it harder for poor people to escape debt, even in medical emergencies.) And that was without kids.

And it is examples like this which make a mockery out of plans to offer "vouchers" for public schools which would give families thousands of dollars less per child per year than it would require to pay for schools. And it gives new emphasis to providing national health care, insuring tens of millions of Americans who presently have no insurance. We know the Spurlock and his fiancé are headed back toward a better life after their month is up, but seeing them talking about not being able to afford to get a health concern looked after, having no choice but to work when sick or injured--it's a scary thought.

And yet countless millions of Americans live in this hole from which it is next to impossible to escape. Let the Republicans who spout on about how people can become wealthy if they only got off their asses and tried, let those assholes try living like Spurlock did for a month--hell, for a year--and see how much they talk about how easy it is after that. Betcha they'd shut up real fast.

Simply put, minimum wage is not enough to live on. A single full-time job would earn only $10,712 a year, $4,000 below the poverty line for a family of three. But imagine single parents, who have to somehow arrange day care, whose children suffer if the parent must work overtime, without even the luxury of having two parents able to work. Live like this for a while and you'll begin to understand what a mockery the minimum wage is. Even Kennedy's proposed $2 hike would only barely push that working single mother just a hair above the poverty line. And if you think that's good news, ask yourself if you'd like to live just a hair above the poverty line.

In the meantime, the Republican Congress continues to stall and push back minimum wage reform. Even the paltry hike they proposed didn't get through--despite the fact that they could easily push it through with only a minimum of effort, which tells us that even when they talk about raising the wage a bit, even with all their new loopholes and exceptions--they're lying about it even then. They don't want to raise the minimum wage at all.

And what's their reason? The same tired old argument: that raising the minimum wage would result in economic disaster. Well, they argue that every time, and there's no evidence for it at all. The last two wage hikes took place right before and right in the middle of the biggest economic expansion in recent history. Raising the wage didn't even cause a hiccup.

Henry Ford was far from a wonderful human being, but he had a very good viewpoint when it came to paying workers well: workers should earn enough money to buy the products the companies make. That's what drives the economy. Strange, when it comes to giving trillion-dollar tax breaks to the wealthy, Republicans are all about injecting money into the economy. The whole idea of "trickle-down" economics was that the lower classes would bolster the economy by spending money (once it filtered down through the rich). And Republicans are all about the common people working hard for a living. So why is it they suddenly run in circles, screaming and shouting death and disaster, whenever someone suggests that workers get paid a fair, living wage for a hard day's work?

All the corrupt societies are top-down. We should be bottom-up.