The Blog From Another Dimension

Private Schools

I was surprised to discover that in over 1600 posts, I had not dedicated one to public and private schools and the whole voucher matter. Or at least not that my search engine can detect.

I cannot understand the strange attraction to universal private schools and the desire to dismantle or discount the public school system. It seems so obvious that such a plan would not work. I can only assume that the apparent success of a few private schools just dazzles many who do not think the whole thing through.

In the 60's, we knew different. It was the space age, and we were funding education well. We encouraged kids (well, at least boys) to study math and science. We built good college systems--California had a great one, still good today, but deteriorating. In the 70's, people started grouching about property taxes, Prop 13 got passed, and things went downhill from there. I still recall hearing an educator back then predict that Prop 13 would be the beginning of the end.

It also revolts me as to how right-wingers can be all about giving huge amounts of money in the form of tax breaks to rich people and corporations as if that were the cure to everything, and then squeal about how education problems can't be solved by "throwing money" at them. Somehow, paying a corporate executive $50 million a year instead of $20 million a year will solve all our problems, but the principle apparently never applies when it comes to teachers' salaries. And somehow, our economy can be fixed by giving already-flush oil companies billions of dollars in new tax breaks, but when schools can't afford to buy textbooks for their students, "throwing money at them," as if it would only go to waste, is never a solution. Clearly, that doesn't track. And just as clearly, education must be funded far better than it is. And even more clearly, to me at least, is the fact that private schools and vouchers simply will not work.

The most apparent reasons include the illusion of success and the availability of resources. Let's talk about illusion first. Private schools are regarded as superior. We all feel a touch of awe if someone says they went to a private school, especially one of the expensive ones. Different attitudes apply to parochial private schools, but those aren't the ones we usually imagine when we hear the words "private school." So how do these schools get to be so successful? One of the major reasons is the fact that they can screen their students. They have waiting lists a mile long. They can pick and choose who they take in. They can accept the best and the brightest, the most promising kids. Which means that the fact that kids in private schools perform better on average is a self-fulfilling image. It's a matter of input and output: you admit only smart kids, and smart kids will come out. Surprise!

In fact, a recent government study (don't know how Bush let this one slip through) found that once you factor out the artificial weeding of poorer students at private and charter schools, kids at public schools actually perform better than at private schools. Kevin Drum has a good chart showing the results, taken directly from the study (PDF file).

But it's not just admitting the good, it's also keeping out the bad and the costly. Private schools are not required to take difficult cases. Kids with problems. Kids with attitude. Kids with special needs. Kids with disabilities. Kids that the public schools have no choice to take. These kids require special attention, and they can wind up costing a lot of money. Most private schools simply reject them, which increases their own productivity while burdening public schools. Not because they teach better, but because they get to pick the best and easiest to teach.

Which leads us to resources. Private schools can charge a lot of money. Even parochial schools, which are cheaper, often depend on church staffs, which cuts costs for them by large amounts. By weeding out the needful and disruptive kids, these schools can avoid many of the costs that, in the end, must be borne by someone else. Furthermore, public schools are weighted down by politicians, who sometimes use the school system as a cash register, or burden the schools with expensive and often useless mandates; private schools can start clean, negotiate much tighter contracts and policies, and save a lot of money that way. And the private schools can hire better teachers.

Now, those resources sound pretty real, no illusions. So why not have all schools go private? The answer is simple: those resources are both artificially supported and they are severely limited. There are only X number of people who can pay those kinds of fees; few families can support those costs. There are only X number of the best teachers; try to expand and you lower their quality. And if you go universal, then the artificial supports created by accepting only the best kids disappear.

Trying to apply the benefits of private schools to all students is like trying to give all workers an above-average salary. It is simply mathematically impossible.

Those are the quick points, the ones that are immediately apparent to me. I don't understand why most people don't see them.

From there, you can predict what would happen if conservatives got their way and we started handing out vouchers nationwide. The first effect would be tied to the factor of availability: private schools are already swamped. If the government suddenly announced that they would make billions of dollars of government vouchers open to everyone, there would be few established private schools that could take any students, much less a few million of them. Suddenly you would have millions of parents trying to put their kids into private schools, and no schools with openings. As a result, thousands of new "private schools" would open up nationwide as entrepreneurs scrambled to take those billions out of the hands of parents. These schools would likely not be held to any standards, and as a result of that, profit-taking, and overnight industry-building, their average quality would be poor, much poorer than public schools today. Unlike most people imagine, we would never be able to take the most prestigious private schools and clone them everywhere.

Another problem would be costs: vouchers would rarely, if ever, pay the entire bill. Few private schools provide full education for the amount the government will be willing to pay, which means that many families with little income will be forced to pay thousands of dollars per year per child for a few decades in order to participate. As time goes on, that will only get worse as people want more tax cuts and inflation cuts into the budgets.

Public schools, in the meantime, would find themselves in dire straits: they would be forced to deal with the lowest-scoring, most expensive and most problematic students. To add insult to injury, public schools would also have their budgets slashed mercilessly because of the lowered number of students. As a result, the students who need the most help would be abandoned to a public gutted school system without the resources to serve them. However, the courts might rule that any private school that takes government money must take in any child that applies. If that happens, then the advantages of private schools will be even further reduced, and the costs higher.

Meanwhile, market forces would dominate the private school sector. The schools that do a decent job teaching children would find themselves in high demand. As a result, they would raise their prices. Which means that in addition to paying taxes to fund the vouchers in the first place, parents would have to pay a premium to get their kids into a school that comes close even to today's public school standards. This would fuel a class divide, with upper-class and upper-middle class parents being able to get a decent education for their kids, while lower-middle class and poorer families are left in the cold, having to choose either a substandard private school, or send their kids back to a decimated and hellish public school system.

There are all kinds of other problems that would arise as well. Either the private schools would go unregulated (and as is true with any unregulated business, the quality would suffer in many as the school tried to become more profitable), or there would be government regulation and sooner or later the private schools would be bound to the same expensive and troubling bureaucratic morass that public schools find themselves in. And since profit-taking would become part of the equation, a large chunk of money that would not be needed in a public school system would be subtracted, further degrading the quality of education for most, or it would alternately jack up the price.

In short, universal private schools are a dangerously attractive illusion which would destroy the public school system and replace it with something far worse. And, as mentioned above, even private schools today don't deliver a better result than public schools in any case.

So what's the solution? Easy: face reality, and understand that you get what you pay for. There's no free lunch here. You want a good education for our kids, then pay for it. And a public school system, well-run, is the best answer to that.

Already we have class divides in the public school system because most of the funding comes from the local level. Poorer districts, especially urban ones with high costs, deliver poorer education; wealthier neighborhoods fund their own local districts, meaning better schools. This is spread out a little because such varying neighborhoods are often mixed in the same district, but overall there is definitely a class division effect that penalizes children from poorer families. The answer: switch funding to the federal level, and distribute money on the basis of the cost of local resources. If people want a better education for their kids, then all the schools would have to be bumped up, making for better incentive.

Next: streamline the schools. This might take an act of Congress or something even more drastic, but the current state of public schools must be re-evaluated and re-written from the ground up. One example is staffing, faculty and administrative, and pay scales. Some school districts have more administrators than teachers, and administrators usually get higher salaries, not to mention control. Supposedly, we respect and prize good teachers, but that's not true. As Bill Maher says, we call them heroes, but we pay them like chumps. Reverse that. A new teacher would have minimal classes and a high administrative load at the lowest pay scale. If the teacher performs well in class, they will be awarded more classes, fewer administrative duties, higher pay, and more say in decision-making in the school. The post of full-time teacher should be the highest-paid and most sought-after position, and talent should be the means to achieve that position. The position of public school teacher should be one that young adults aspire to.

Next: de-politicize education. The politicians from the local school boards to the Congress must be cut out, completely, from the curriculum decision-making process. We don't want politicians making our medical decisions for us, why should we want them to make educational decisions for us? Only practicing educators, the professionals, should be making those decisions.

Next: fix the curriculum--but as covered in the previous point, this should be left to the experts. One thing they'd likely do first is throw out standardized testing for the failure that it is. But all that is a whole 'nother post.

And finally: throw money at it. Lots of money. Tons of money. Throw money at education until it hurts, and then throw some more. Teachers must be paid handsomely. Schools must be outfitted with the materials they need. I'm not saying just dump the cash on the school doorstep without a plan, but fully fund the program, dammit. Education is one of the best investments you can possibly make. It pays off a thousandfold twenty years down the line. Stop bitching about your taxes and realize that your penny-pinching today will cut the legs out from the national economy a generation from now. Along with public infrastructure and the space program, education is the most profitable investment we can make.

And in the long run, the public school system is the only way to cash in.

The IRS as a Political Tool, Redux

Remember the Nixon years, when the IRS was let loose to harass and destroy the president's enemies? Well, we're seeing it again under Bush. In 2004, before the election, a liberal-leaning church in California called Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive war a "failed doctrine," and urged parishioners to take all they knew about Jesus into the voting booth. The IRS responded by threatening the church with taxation, that it would lose its tax-exempt status and be virtually destroyed by the IRS if it did not apologize and cease any such talk in the future. (Video here.)

Now, frankly, I am against the intervention of any church into political matters. The difference here, however, is one of singling out a liberal church. I mean, if you look at that election, the Catholic church intervened big-time when it made a national call to refuse Kerry communion for his views on abortion--only in the election year, and only Kerry, and not Republican politicians with the same views. Or how about the countless southern churches which are heavily involved in elections, which collect large lists of parishioner voters and send them to the Republican party headquarters, and which regularly offer "voting guides" which condemn stands taken by left-wing politicians and praise the right-wing agenda? As far as I am aware, they do not get this treatment.

In fact, a Baptist pastor in Arkansas praised Bush for his performance while slamming Kerry for his views, while showing photos of both candidates on the church's AV system--the Bush portrait flattering, the photo of Kerry degrading. The IRS declined to investigate or take any action. Furthermore, the progressive church in California which is under siege by the IRS did not endorse either candidate, nor did the man who gave the sermon, who was just a guest speaker and not formally attached to the church. The Arkansas pastor was formally attached to the church and was far more blatant in his politicization. So why leave the Arkansas church alone, and go full-blast after the California church? According to reports, the California church was not even given the usual obligatory initial warning; the IRS came after them, guns blazing, from the very start.

In fact, the IRS has gone after other left-leaning churches as well as the NAACP for political speech, but not Pat Robertson or a host of other tax-exempt conservatives. Even the Catholics, famous for their intervention against Kerry during the 2004 elections, at the very same time called for the IRS to go after a liberal church in Florida. This article demonstrates two churches with heavily political speakers, one liberal (with Bill Clinton), one conservative (with Jerry Falwell and invited Republican representatives)--but only the liberal church was investigated by the IRS. Falwell was not investigated or punished even though he openly endorsed George Bush in a ministry newsletter.

As a principle, I think all churches should be forbidden this kind of political rhetoric. But if the IRS only goes after the churches critical of Bush and ignores the ones condemning Democrats, then what you have is a corrupt and, I believe, illegal state of affairs with the IRS being used as a political weapon.

Twenty Years Ago

Twenty years ago today, I had a class at the Computer Senmon Gakkou school in Toyama. I recall coming into the front office for the school, out of the snow. The staff there was excited, and asked if I'd heard the news. What news? They pointed to the TV mounted from the ceiling, where the news was playing. Very soon, they showed the clips available at the time, of the space shuttle Challenger blowing up. It was a devastating blow for me, as I had always been a fan of the space program. They showed it over and over again. Then I had to go to class.

I'm not one for conspiracy theories, usually. But I am not one to dismiss them out of hand, either. From the evidence out there, I believe that Flight 93 was shot down and a panicked Bush administration didn't want to admit it. I don't believe, however, that Bush or his people knowingly manufactured 9/11. If the evidence is strong enough or compelling enough, then I'll give credence to a theory, and will not allow fear of ridicule or popular disbelief sway me.

The Challenger disaster has always been a matter of suspicion for me. Before the shuttle lifted off, engineers from Morton Thiokol, the company that made the twin boosters on either side of the main fuel tank (the big orange tank the shuttle rides on), warned that the cold temperatures could lead to the erosion of the O-rings holding the booster segments together. If the O-rings went, the shuttle would explode. NASA officials dismissed the warnings and went ahead with the launch.

The question is, why did they do that? NASA has been famous for canceling launches at the drop of a hat. Now they were receiving warnings that the shuttle might explode (in fact, Rockwell engineers also warned about ice damage to the orbiter), and they dismissed them? Mainstream reports hold that NASA had been embarrassed by delays and cancellations in 1985, and that was what compelled them to override safety concerns and launch anyway. However, I don't fully buy that; it's out of character with NASA protocols and past actions. And there is an alternate explanation which makes much more sense.

Politics has always influenced the space program. Presidents and other politicians, though disdainful of the money spent and often ignorant of the commercial value of the space program, are always instantly ready to bask in its light and use it to their political advantage. The selection of Morton Thiokol and the segmented booster design, in fact, was influenced by Thiokol being based in Utah, the home state of the senator in charge of the committee which made the decision to buy.

But the major political influence of that day was the fact that President Reagan was set to make his State of the Union address just hours after the launch, and boast about how we had just sent a schoolteacher into space. That administration was famously known for its love of theater and backdrop, and was intensely committed to playing up such drama to the hilt. Education was to be featured in the address, a schoolteacher was on the flight, and already NASA had pushed back the launch by a week. The week-long space flight was originally scheduled to be ending just as Reagan gave his address. Another delay, and Reagan would not be able to use the majestic flight and historic teacher-in-space to his political advantage. The wording from the address that he was scripted to use was this:

Tonight while I am speaking to you, a young secondary school teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, is taking us all on the ultimate field trip, as she orbits the earth as the first citizen-passenger on the space shuttle.

Christa McAuliffe's journey is a prelude to the journeys of other Americans and our friends around the world who will be living and working together in the permanently manned space station in the mid-1990s, bringing a rich return of scientific, technical, and economic benefits to mankind.

Mrs. McAuliffe's week in space is just one of the achievements in space which we have planned for the coming year.

Adding to the legitimacy of administration pressure to lift off on Tuesday was the abortive flight cancellation the previous weekend. Challenger was schedule to take off on Sunday. Usually, because weather at the Cape is so volatile, the shuttle would be fueled up and the astronauts would board and the decision to launch would be made at the last minute. However, on Saturday night, bad weather was predicted for the next day, and NASA made an uncharacteristic decision to cancel the night before. The reason: if the launch was scrubbed on Sunday, then the unloading of fuel from the shuttle would mean they could not try again until Wednesday--which would be too late for Reagan's address. The fact that NASA cancelled early is a persuasive indication that the State of the Union address was a strong factor in the decision to launch.

Tragically, Sunday's weather was perfect, and had it lifted off then, Challenger would most likely have been safe. Instead, it was delayed until Tuesday. There was pressure from the engineers to scrub. There was pressure from the top to go. The question is, did the pressure from the top come from NASA, which was predisposed to safety? Or did it come from the White House, with Reagan chief of staff Donald Regan reportedly demanding, "Tell them to get that thing up!"

Unless someone makes a deathbed confession, we'll probably never know. But I do know which is more likely, and certainly which is much more in character.

Fear Itself

If you try to tell people that the government is using fear to manipulate them, they will not accept it. That's partly because few people want to admit to being fearful, but it's more because they have the image of "fearful" as nail-biting, shaking-in-your-boots, pants-wetting terror, which it is almost always not. You can feel perfectly calm and rational and still have fear and be manipulated through that fear. We all have fears. In fact, if you deny having fear, you're likely more easily manipulated. It's a question of whether you consciously recognize and acknowledge your fears, and then whether you allow them to change your behavior, not to mention whether you accept as real all the claims about things you should fear. Still don't think you have fear? Do you buy into the idea of the "War on Terror"? If so, how can it be "terror" and yet you have no fear?

Here's a small reality check. What concerns you more, terrorists or street traffic? If you answered "terrorists," then you not only have fears, you have irrational fears. Street traffic is far more dangerous for you. The chances of you encountering a terrorist attack is way, way down on the list of things that are likely to harm you.

Next test: are you willing to give up some measure of your privacy and liberty because the government says that it will try to protect you in exchange? If the answer is "yes," then you win the grand prize: you are being manipulated by fear. And in the current case, outright false fears at that; the perceived safety you gain as a result of surrendering your privacy and liberty is minimal if it even exists at all, and is more than displaced by other internal dangers you have opened yourself up to by surrendering those freedoms.

Franklin D. Roosevelt told us not to fear, and carried us most of the way to our grandest victory over fascism. George W. Bush is telling you to be afraid, constantly afraid, and tells you that you should give him virtually unlimited power, similar to what the fascists wielded, because we are in a "war." And while he makes sounds as if we will win this "war," a reasoned observation will inform you that the "war on terror" is, by definition, unending and unwinnable. In short, you're being conned.

Read this. I'm not kidding.

Bits and Pieces, 1/27/06

It's been a while since I've done one of these. Here goes.

Bush is out on the stump now, try another "Bamboozlepalooza" tour to get the public on his side. Before it was Social Security, so it is heartening that the results will be the same as he lamely tries to convince the public, through sheer gall, that his blatant violation of the 4th Amendment and the FISA Act, not to mention his unprecedented grab for authoritarian power (which makes Nixon look like a Boy Scout) is somehow not only in the best interests of the country, but actually legal as well.

It's legal, Bush tells us. No it's not. It violates the 4th Amendment. You can't get more illegal than that. But Bush is apparently hoping that by stepping up to the mic often enough and declaring it's not illegal, people will believe him solely because they won't believe the president would lie so blatantly. And it will work with a lot of Americans who believe that the press would surely point out he is lying or is simply wrong, if he is. But if you've been paying attention the last four years, that isn't what's been happening. The press today counts statements like that from Bush as "opinions" and reports them with stenographer-like efficiency.

It could have stopped 9/11, it could have caught the terrorists in time, but FISA got in the way, Bush claims. No, FISA would have fully allowed 9/11 to be stopped--it would not have gotten in the way, and in fact did not get in the way. Bush's inattentive and negligent mishandling of security did. FISA didn't stop the warrants, the Bush administration never asked for them. I covered that in this post and in this one.

"If I wanted to break the law, why was I briefing Congress?" Bush asks, smirk firmly planted. Because he wasn't--not fully, and not as much to Democrats as he was to Republicans. Not to mention that Democrats, no matter how they felt about it, were prohibited by law from speaking of it. They still are, to an extent--Nancy pelosi had to plead for a letter she wrote on the matter to be declassified, and when it was, we could see that Bush's "briefing" was less than enlightening. And then there's the possibility that Bush might actually believe that he is above the law, in which case he wouldn't blink at briefing anyone. Whatever the case, he damn well knows now that it's illegal, and whatever his views, past or present, on what laws the president can ignore, what he did and is still doing is illegal. Ignorance is not an excuse. Nor is megalomania.

I went over most of the Bush administration's scattergun defenses in this post a month ago, go take a look.

Remember those pictures I mentioned recently which featured corrupt and felonious "Bush Pioneer" (major fundraiser) Jack Abramoff introducing his lobbying clients to Bush in a photo op? Josh Marshall is all over the fact that a right-wing photo sales firm deleted those photos from the archive of Bush images that they hawk on CDs. And Laura Rozen at War and Piece has an excellent post on how this rings so similarly to the Stalinist days of the old USSR when photographs of Stalin were altered to delete persons that had become inconveniently embarrassing, and the parallels to Bush and his practices today. And no, I'm not saying Bush is equal to Stalin (though I am certain he wishes he had that much power), but it is always of value to note when our leaders adopt the habits and practices of homicidal dictators of the past. God forbid we should take that kind of thing with due consideration.

Thank God that at least Bush is on the case keeping the peace in the Middle East. Oh wait, he's not.

Ambitious politicians hoping for a second chance at least have some utility. Too bad the Dems are too wimpy civil to brandish the flag for the cause.

"I'm fully prepared to use the veto if they [Congress] overspend," Bush announced today. Just in time!

Of course, he won't. Or if he does, it'll be because the Republicans weren't able to slash Democratic programs enough while pushing their own record pork-barrel through, and a veto would help.

"Bush touted a five-year bill to cut spending on social welfare and other programs by $39.7 billion," the article reported. Now there's fiscal discipline! Except for the fact that Bush is pushing for another $90 billion tax cut for the wealthy, on top of the hundreds of billions already granted and the trillions that Bush and the GOP are trying to make permanent. And Bush is trying to claim that the Katrina cleanup--which he has all but forgotten about and is not funding adequately--is the reason why deficits are remaining in the $400 billion range every year, as if he spent anywhere near that amount (even though he lied at the time and promised a lot).

So now Bush is claiming fiscal discipline because he wants to gut social programs to feed, clothe, house, and give medical care to the poor. What a saint. And this is the guy who claims that liberals are waging a class war because we see these things and complain. Well, when one side is stealing billions from the poor and showering billions on the rich, and the other side is objecting, it's not hard to see who is in fact waging the real class war.

In the meantime, Halliburton posted their highest profits ever. Best in their 86-year history. Gee whiz, really? How did that happen?

So much corruption, so little time to note it all. And imagine, if this is all stuff that we're seeing, how much is there that we aren't seeing?

Addendum: Just as the Abramoff case is picking up steam, Bush appoints the chief prosecutor to a federal judgeship, vacating the position immediately, in mid-investigation. Bush claims the appointment is "routine," but that's bull. When someone who you are associated with, a big donor, is being investigated, "routine" promotions which interrupt the investigation are no longer "routine." You wait until the conflict of interest has subsided, otherwise it smacks of obstruction. Which this does.

The New "555"

You know how in TV shows, when they want to show a phone number, it always begins with the "555" prefix so that it won't accidentally reflect a real number? Well, now it's moved on to IP Addresses as well. Not the number "555," but something less noticeable unless you know about IP addresses. On CSI Miami--a few times, so far--they've shown "IP Addresses" on-screen, and I always get a giggle out of them. Their addresses always read something like, 631.260.356.0. Which, if you know about IP, is an impossible address. Each of the four numbers in any IP address is 8-bit, which means they range from 0 to 255. So any number above 255 is impossible, you never see it.

Which is not the only thing they fake. The techno- and forensic-babble on the show might sound legit, but wait till they stray into an area which you know something about. Suddenly they'll look ridiculous. Like when they so easily "lift" separate sounds from a recording. "Get rid of that voice talking over the other voice in this recording," Hiratio will instruct, and with a single click-and-drag, the CSI will easily accommodate--in a ridiculously impossible task.

Mixed in are a few real things, to give it the sheen of legitimacy--like a laser-produced virtual keyboard.

Addendum: my father tells me that a lot of prosecutors are having to fight what is called the "CSI Effect," essentially juries who've watched and believed the shows too much, and expect far too much from the forensics that the police are actually capable of achieving in reality.

Climate Change

Talking about "coincidences," the right-wingers like to debunk and mock global warming as often as possible. Recent weather patterns, they tell us, are just the high end of a "normal" weather cycle, nothing to be concerned about. Well, if that is so, then explain this:

Last year was the warmest recorded on Earth's surface, and it was unusually hot in the Arctic, U.S. space agency NASA said on Tuesday.

All five of the hottest years since modern record-keeping began in the 1890s occurred within the last decade, according to analysis by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. In descending order, the years with the highest global average annual temperatures were 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2004, NASA said in a statement. "It's fair to say that it probably is the warmest since we have modern meteorological records," said Drew Shindell of the NASA institute in New York City.

"Using indirect measurements that go back farther, I think it's even fair to say that it's the warmest in the last several thousand years."

So, is that a "coincidence"? If it's the high end of a weather cycle, then it's still the highest end in thousands of years. And it's not just that and the fact that we had a record number of hurricanes last year, there is wild weather all over. How long will we live in the fantasy that we can dump 22 billion tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the earth's atmosphere each year, year after year, and not see any adverse changes in global temperatures?

And to those who guffaw and talk about how it's snowing more where they are, the overall warming trend does not mean it's getting warmer everywhere, it means that the overall increase is affecting and shifting weather patterns and creating global climate change--which includes more cold weather and snowfall in some areas. Like, say, here in Japan. "Global warming" is almost a misnomer; "global climate change" is perhaps more accurate.

Perhaps a little bit more serious consideration is in order.

Jack Who? Part Two

Last week, House Speaker hastert made the rather ridiculous claim that Jack Abramoff was unknown to D.C. politicians, despite being one of the most powerful lobbyists in town with iron-clad Republican credentials.

Now, despite the fact that around half a dozen different photos exist showing President Bush with Abramoff, Bush is now claiming that he also has never heard of the guy before. This, apparently, despite the fact that Abramoff was a major Bush/Cheney fundraiser in 2004, one of their special "pioneers," a status which usually guarantees face time with the president.

The photos, according to Time Magazine, show at least three different occasions where Bush and Abramoff were photographed together, including one that had them together with an Indian tribe that Abramoff was representing. Another set of photos has Bush posing with Abramoff, and alternately with two of Abramoff's sons. And then--get this--one with Bush, several of Abramoff's children, and Speaker Hastert--the other prominent Republican who has recently claimed never to have heard of Abramoff before.

Bush's explanation? Their mutual appearance in the photos was a "coincidence."

Um, yeah, that's right! A coincidence! Abramoff just happened to raise more than $100,000 for Bush, and then just happened to appear in photos with Bush and his lobbying clients! And on other occasions! How could that possibly be construed as any kind of relationship? What an absurd thought! Never mind that Bush remembered the names of Abramoff's children on a successive meeting! Just another coincidence! Nothing to it!

Books: Grisham from Screen to Novel

When I left home at the end of vacation recently, my father gave me three John Grisham novels to read. I had only asked for one for the airplane, but I didn't turn down the extras. I've enjoyed the movies made from his novels (The Firm, The Client, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker and The Pelican Brief), and figured it'd be interesting to see how the novels read. I was given The Broker, The Street Lawyer, and The Last Juror. They were certainly good enough. So I moved on from there.

I have a strange set of reading habits. I'll read books all the time, two or three per week, until I tire of it. Then, for another indeterminate amount of time, I'll read nothing. I tend to stay with certain authors and go through as much of their work as I can. When I was a kid, I went through science fiction that way--Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Niven, Pournelle. As a young adult, I got into Varley, Pohl, some of Zelazny (mostly the Amber series), Farmer (mostly the Riverworld series), and non sci-fi with Clavell and Clancy. Later, I got into Neal Stephenson, Brin, Chricton, Card, and others, and now Grisham. I'm leaving out a lot, but there are the highlights. Card I tore into at first, with Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, and Pastwatch. But then, as I started to read more of him, I quickly tired, especially of the repetitive abusive-older-brother theme. Stephenson was great for a lot more novels, like Snow Crash, Interface, and The Diamond Age, but a little during and more after Cryptonomicon, he started getting way too meandering and hard to follow. Clancy started going steeply downhill around the time of Debt of Honor, and became utterly unreadable.

Anyway, though I tend to re-read books often (a habit acquired in my early days in Japan when English-language media was scarce), I often "run out" of material, of books I want to read. So getting on to a new author is a good thing, and Grisham's got enough of a library built up to keep me busy for a while. I got back to my Amazon.co.jp account, and ordered three more--The Firm, The Runaway Jury, and The Partner. The last I've never heard of before, but the other two are movies--one I've seen, and the other one not yet. Today I finished The Firm, and found the story differences between the book and film are quite interesting. By the way, if you haven't read the book and/or seen the film, and you don't want the plot described, then do not read ahead.

Though there are, naturally, some additional scenes in the beginning, as you'd expect from a long novel translated into even a two-and-a-half-hour movie. Mitch enters the firm, gets busy, is approached by the feds, and starts scrambling to save his butt. But about halfway through the book, you can see where the filmmakers started to stray. It starts when McDeere makes the decision about what to tell his wife--he never tells her in the novel, and the reverse in the film, which changes a lot of the story after that point--and then there's a much bigger turn when, in the film, McDeere finds a way to satisfy both the FBI and the Mob, and keep his lawyer's license. In the book, that never comes up; in fact, he not only turns on the mob, he steals from them as well, big-time. A pretty big difference, one that made the entire last half of the novel completely new if you've only seen the film before.

The question is, which is better? And in a way, they both are, for their respective media. But I have to admit a preference for the film version. Though the whole "promise of you" ending was a bit too melodramatic along the lines of a Jerry Maguire ending, the rest is wrapped up into a neat package, a smart solution which keeps McDeere alive and kicking, and probably safe and in business. The solution for (and portrayal of) Ray McDeere is also more satisfying. The whole thing comes across more as a well-executed con game, at least a cleverly orchestrated plan, with the little guy playing the players at their own games and winning all around. The novel's ending seemed a bit too much of a break for the character, going from tax lawyer to millionaire outlaw sailor on the run from the Mob.

It should be interesting to do the reverse with another Grisham novel, reading The Runaway Jury first, and then seeing the movie.

For Whom The Net Tolls

Via Josh Marshall, a story about how the Telecoms are trying to find new ways to put new toll booths on the information superhighway. In short, they want to artificially slow or speed up the connections of retailers according to how much they are willing to pay. If, for example, Google outbids Yahoo, then Yahoo will slow to a crawl on your computer while Google speeds away.

This is, of course, nothing less than a will to gouge:

AT&T Chairman Edward E. Whitacre Jr. complained that Internet content providers were getting a free ride: "They don't have any fiber out there. They don't have any wires. . . . They use my lines for free -- and that's bull," he said. "For a Google or a Yahoo or a Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes for free is nuts!''

A false argument, of course: everyone already pays for the pipes. You think Google pays no money to connect to the Internet? Do you get a free connection? Of course not. We all pay, and the big corporations which do their business online pay a premium for fast connections and massive bandwidth. This is nothing less than the Telecoms realizing that they have a potential stranglehold on the livelihood of super-rich businesses--if the laws are changed so as to allow them to artificially punish any user that does not cough up exorbitant wads of cash for the privilege. It's kind of like power companies figuring that they could charge businesses a lot more for electricity than regular consumers: it has nothing to do with the actual cost of providing the service, rather it has to do with the service provider seeing customers with loads of money are figuring they can extort a lot of that cash their way by threatening to cut off an essential service.

The telecoms claim that they're just charging for what they provide, but their statements belie this easy falsehood, like when a BellSouth executive said they wanted to charge Apple 10 cents for every iTunes Music Store download. That's not charging for bandwidth, that's asking for a cut of all business profits. A high-definition movie trailer now provided free by Apple can take up twenty to thirty times more bandwidth than a song; will they charge Apple two or three dollars for each of these? Obviously not--so it's not about bandwidth, it's more of a 'protection racket,' like neighborhood thugs demanding shops to cough up a percentage--such a nice business you have here, it'd be a shame if something happened to it.

In the end, if this is allowed, the consumer will naturally be the one to foot the bill in the form of higher prices and lesser services, even due to less competition. And you have to remember that we presently have a Congress that cares nothing of your needs when rich lobbyists bring bags of bribes contributions to their doors, as we witnessed when Congress passed laws that screwed the public royally but granted multi-billion dollar boons to the pharmaceutical and credit card industries at our expense. So just because this works against the interests of consumers does not mean Congress won't consider it. After all, the Republican majority has it's own protection racket, and the telecom lobbyists are far better entrenched in D.C. than the dotcoms are. But at least the dotcoms are businesses that can cough up cash in the end, so there's a fighting chance that they'll be able to fight it.

Not So Big a Tent, After All

The GOP likes to pretend as if it's a big tent and is tolerant of other opinions, but saying it and doing it are two different things. In a recent political move in response to his getting his ass kicked last election, California Governor Schwarzenegger hired a Democrat as his new chief of staff. So are Republicans okay with the "big tent" in practice? Hell, no. They're setting up to give Arnie an ultimatum: fire the Democrat, or get kicked out of the party.

Republican activists disenchanted with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Thursday that they will try to strip the governor of the party's endorsement unless he fires his new chief of staff, Democrat Susan P. Kennedy.

Restive Republicans said they would rally conservatives behind a resolution, to be offered at the state GOP convention in San Jose next month, that may give Schwarzenegger an ultimatum: Dump Kennedy by March 15 or the party will withdraw its backing of his reelection bid.

In the past, Republicans have never really had a big tent. If you oppose the fundamentalist core, then you don't get to speak at the conventions and you don't get a voice in the party. The real working policy has been, if you disagree with us, then we'll let you cast your vote for us, but otherwise shut the hell up and hide in the kitchen when guests come to visit. Heck, I'm surprised they aren't demanding that Arnold divorce his wife because she's a Kennedy.

In other GOP news, Republicans are reacting badly to Bush's "guest worker" program. It's a proposal to supposedly fight illegal immigration by giving temporary work visas to immigrants as an alternative to coming here illegally.

America has long used illegal immigrants to do labor most Americans wouldn't do, in particular farm and textile work. These people, often risking their lives to come and take jobs that Americans offer them, are commonly taken advantage of, paid inferior wages while their employers skip their responsibilities to pay taxes. The law has penalized workers when caught, but rarely the Americans who employ them.

I have always believed that we need to admit as a nation that we need these people, and so treat them with respect, granting visas and making sure they are paid decently. But that would require not just the start of a visa program, but also the establishment of harsh penalties and even jail time for employers who hire illegals. Without the latter, any guest worker visa program would be a sad joke. But these are the same people who demand obeisance from the GOP, and so any hope of the GOP cracking down on these people is slim to none.

I've stated before that one of the things I admire Bush for is his long-standing stated goal of instituting a guest worker program--though at the time I noted that he'd long talked about it, but never acted on it. Well, after a string of humiliating political defeats and low poll numbers, he finally started doing something... but, of course, he's not saying anything about the penalty for employers who still hire illegals once the guest worker program is active. And the attempt to gain popularity through such a measure appears to be failing. Neither Democrats nor Republicans like the proposal, for different reasons of course. Some Republicans are vehemently against it, saying that it will only increase crime. And it looks like businesses are set to abuse the program, using it to hire more immigrants in the IT industry so they can displace available American workers who demand to be paid more.

OpenOffice

Sorry, but this thing is way too confusing for me. Trust me, I want OpenOffice to work. If it's a good alternative to MS Office, then by all means I want it to work. I don't know, maybe in Windows or Linux it's easier, but frankly I doubt it. Sure, I can open it up and do stuff, and yes, a lot of the difficulty is related to my being used to other apps like Pages or Word. Yes, it's worse quality, but it's free and I can deal with that just fine. Yes, it breaks the Mac rules and demands Control-key command shortcuts instead of Apple's "Command" key shortcuts, but again, I can deal with that. However, there are times when, trying my best, I attempt to do something that should be basic and simple, and I hit a brick wall.

Here's a case in point: the suite does not directly access my fonts--instead, it has its own collection of special fonts, most of which I've never heard of. I want others. Not too much to ask, right? But I can't figure out how. I go to the "Help" window, and find that I am instructed to follow a series of steps to add a font. It begins:

To integrate additional fonts in the OpenOffice.org software, proceed as follows:
1. Go to the {install_path}/program directory.

And wham, I'm stuck. Right there on the first step. "Go to the {install_path}/program directory"? Where? Under what menu and command? In the Finder? In a terminal app? And what the hell is the install path? Starting where? How should I type it? With what syntax? I'm no hacker, but I'm hardly a newbie either, and I cannot understand what I am supposed to do.

This is something I whined righteously complained about before: poorly-written documentation. Documentation is supposed to assist the reader in the most understandable way the authors can manage. But as with most documentation for non-mainstream software, it is written by programmers, who apparently are under the impression that everyone else in the world is a programmer too. Thus the instructions which I'm sure programmers can follow without problem, but the other 98% of us trying to use the software are hopelessly confused by.

So if you're OK with partial functionality, or if you know what the hell an "install path" is and know where and how to type it, then OpenOffice might be good for you. But frankly, I'd rather spend the eighty bucks on iWork than deal with that kind of frustration.

Snowy Saturday

Tokyo got its first serious snow of the season, and the second of the year, as I've been told (the first came when I was in the U.S. on vacation, in December). And we got a lot--maybe half a foot or so, throughout the day. I've always said, if it's gonna be cold and if it's gonna precipitate, then I'd much rather have snow than rain. I'm safe in calling that a universal, right?

Anyway, being the proverbial kid with a broken bone who has to watch the other kids out the window, here's a series of snow photos throughout the day.

The Yaki-imo truck has been coming by every few hours--just drove through a few minutes ago, in fact. I guess the idea of hot-baked sweet potatoes is more appealing in weather like this. The above were earlier in the day. Then it started coming down harder, and I spied some kids having a good time with it:

And the snow on the cars in the parking lot, to give you an idea of how much there was:

Then two more shots, of the parking lot leading into the forest behind my place, at day and night (the second being a 13-second exposure):

Okay, so it's not Pulitzer material. Pretty boring, in fact, especially if you get snow where you are a lot. But hey, I've got a broken foot on a snow day.

Update: News reports are saying that "Tokyo" only got two and a half inches of snow yesterday, but apparently they were talking about central Tokyo. That's more than two inches out there. They say Yokohama got 3 inches-plus, and Ibaraki got as much as six inches. I'd say we got a good four here in West Tokyo.

Hamster Movies

I recently remembered a few old home movies I'd made with iMovie, featuring my first hamster, Pika. (After all, the subtitle of the blog mentions hamsters, so I've gotta live up to that.) My second hamster, Mocha, has been featured on this site for a while now, in a short called "The Great Chicken Struggle," where she valiantly tries to get a chicken leg-and-thigh bone, bigger than she is, into her cage.

The Pika movies date back to before my blog, so they never got in here before. The first one is called "Pika Has Lunch," and features her doing what hamsters do as only they can do: stuffing their cheek pouches full of food. At the time, I had Pika on the dining room table and had given her a good supply of sunflower seeds. Sure enough, she stuffed her mouth full of them. But then she did something I hadn't seen before (or since)--she disgorged them, right after having stuffed them in. Then she calmly looked at them, and then at me, as if to say, "Get a load of that!" After a minute or so, she seemed to change her mind again and restuffed her mouth full of the seeds. Then she spat them all out again a few minutes after that. I think it was on her fourth time doing this that I got around to getting the camera out, and filmed her doing it at least two more times. I forget if she stopped herself or if I stopped her. In any case, if you've never seen a hamster with her head twice the size of her body spitting out her weight in sunflower seeds to a game show theme, click the image and check out this movie!

Another film I found is titled "The Tissue Caper," and is just Pika climbing out of her cage, going to a box of Kleenex, pulling a few out of the box and stuffing her cheeks with them, then going back to her cage and unloading there. But she looks pretty cute at the Kleenex box, seemingly eating tissues to a bluegrass version of "Turkey in the Straw." Of course, she would do this with anything that could be used as bedding. I have a curtain behind where her cage was that got all chewed up when I put the cage too close and she was able to get at it. Anyway, the film can be seen by clicking on this image:

I had a third movie which featured Pika rolling around in her hamster ball to the tune of "Speed Racer," but I couldn't locate it. An old hard drive died, and it may have been there, but I also likely backed it up on a CD or DVD--it's simply an issue of searching through my very large collection of discs to figure out which one it's on. If and when I find it, I'll post that also.

The above movies, by the way, are in QuickTime H.264 format, so you'll need the latest version of QuickTime to run them (free download). They weigh in at about 10 MB each, so this is not for dial-up, unless you're very patient. If they don't play properly when you click them (different browsers act differently), then just right-click and download the link target to your disk. If you have a recent version of QuickTime, they should play then. Let me know via comments how it works!

Despite the Image

George Bush has maintained a reputation for being strong and effective in the War on Terror™. But here's the question:

Why?

Look at the record. What has he accomplished? Okay, there have been no serious attacks in the U.S. by al Qaeda sing 9/11, but that says nothing. After their car-bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, terrorists did not attempt to strike again until 2000; it's not outside their pattern to stay dormant for years at a time. There is no evidence whatsoever that anything Bush has done since 2001 has prevented any kind of attack by al Qaeda, anywhere. Al Qaeda attacks have not declined worldwide, in fact they have increased, with London and Madrid as examples of an overall growing trend of terrorist attacks. So the fact that we have not suffered an al Qaeda attack does not speak one iota to Bush's performance in securing our country from attack, and if held to account on a global scale, he's certainly failed to stop al Qaeda there, despite massive eavesdropping on international communications.

So the only ways Bush could claim to have been effective are in preparedness at home, and taking the fight to al Qaeda where they live. Let's take a look at that.

Osama bin Laden and his chief deputies are still out there, as we so recently found. Had Bush not diverted troops and funds away from Afghanistan early on so he could invade Iraq, we probably would have folded these guys up by now. And if you think Zawahiri, bin Laden's #1 guy in Iraq was killed in an air raid that killed at least 18 including 10 women and children, then you've been watching the mainstream media--they reported the hell out of the news that we probably got him, and fell silent when the news came that we didn't. We have, according to the media (which has been taking dictation from the White House), killed bin Laden's "#3 man" about a half dozen times. These guys seem a dime a dozen, and al Qaeda's operations are likely completely unaffected by such losses.

Bush invaded Iraq, apparently so we could "fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here." So far, no evidence exists that Iraq has dampened al Qaeda activity in the U.S. In fact, the invasion of Iraq has helped to flood al Qaeda's ranks with new recruits, reaching as many as 18,000 as of a year and a half ago. And because of the invasion of Iraq, our own funding and military forces have been squandered in a quagmire; far more has been spent on the Iraq War than has been spent domestically to protect the nation. Iraq was not only unrelated to terrorism or any real threat to American security; instead, it has been a drain on security resources and an overall failure that has badly hurt the United States.

Meanwhile, homeland security has been "grossly underfunded" for years; in 2003, a report (PDF file) by the Council on Foreign Relations concluded that:

the United States is drastically under-funding local emergency responders and remains dangerously unprepared to handle a catastrophic attack on American soil, particularly one involving chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-impact conventional weapons. If the nation does not take immediate steps to better identify and address the urgent needs of emergency responders, the next terrorist incident could be even more devastating than September 11.

One would think that this would have prompted the government to spend more and cut down on the pork. But no. Since then, spending in key areas has been falling. Furthermore, George "I never veto pork" Bush has allowed Republican pork-barrel politics to siphon off huge amounts of what homeland security funding has been allocated. As much as half of the new spending has been spent on projects not related to security, shunted to pork projects when the Republicans in Congress simply tacked "defense" or "homeland security" onto the names of old pork spending proposals. To add insult to injury, flush American corporations, millionaires and billionaires have so far been granted billions more in tax cuts than has been spent on domestic security.

In the meantime, Americans have been hurt (unless you're notably wealthy). Republicans have used the fear of 9/11 to ram their entire legislative agenda down America's throat, in the process hurling us from miraculous Clinton surpluses to record Republican deficits, severely retarding the American economy. Our rights and freedoms have been curtailed and abused, and it looks like for the past four years, a very large number of Americans have been spied on by our own government. Today, you could be arrested on classified evidence, declared and "enemy combatant," stripped of your citizenship, and sent overseas to be tortured--but you'll be "secure" when it happens. While al Qaeda flourishes, America is slowly but surely being converted into a strikingly Orwellian police state under constant self-oppressive restraint due to fear created via an endless war that gives the president unparalleled and virtually unrestricted power.

Some Americans are all right with this because they think we'll be "safer." Even if that were true, it would not come even close to being worth it. And as I believe I have pointed out in my writing above, we are not in any way, shape or form "safer" than we were four years ago.

In the end, Bush and the Republican party have been far more damaging to this country than al Qaeda ever could be.

And yet, he maintains the image of being effective. Whoever said that politics is perception could not have been more right.

900

By the way, I reached 900 days of uninterrupted blogging on Wednesday. Also, a week or so ago, I exceeded 1600 total posts on the blog. There have been more than 3750 comments--and that does not include any spam. In the first 19 days of this month, there were 16,000 visits via search engines alone, and total daily readership averages at 1700 (including the post-New Year's lull). Total monthly readership has been in excess of 30,000 unique visitors after taking spam into account. Totally not what I expected when I started this thing almost three years ago.

Siamese Renality

I'd forgotten about this. A few years back, when I got an ultrasound during a medical checkup, the technician told me something I had not known about myself. I have conjoined kidneys.

Yep. That's right. They're joined at the... er, kidney, I guess. One big one instead of two little ones. Actually, they are, apparently, elongated and joined at the lower end, to make a kind of a "V" shape. Most bizarre thing I'd ever heard about my insides. I mean, I had never even heard of conjoined kidneys before. In fact, I'd never heard of conjoined anything in terms of one person's internal organs. But there they were, on the ultrasound, looking like... well, okay, I was looking right at them and had no idea what I was looking at. But I took the guy's word.

The tech said he didn't know exactly how common, or uncommon, that was, but if he had to guess, he said it was maybe one in every ten thousand people. I don't know, though--that sounds awfully high. Think about it--that's more than half a million people on Earth with conjoined kidneys. One would think that with that many people that way, you'd hear about it a bit more often. A Google search comes up with little about conjoined kidneys--mostly pages that mention them indirectly, or pages no longer up for viewing--and one butt-ugly rendition of a pair, though not as elegantly vee-shaped as my own. Certainly not enough hits to make one think that one could fill up all of Milwaukee with people like me. Besides, if I'm going to have any conjoined organs, I want to be more unique than just one in every ten thousand.

Fortunately, the condition doesn't mean anything, not that the doctor could come up with. Apparently people with one big 'ol kidney doin' the work of two never even know it--I certainly didn't, before the sonogram tech (who was checking for something else) mentioned it to me in a kind of by-the-way fashion. I won't bore you with how normal the, uh, renal output is, just take my word for it.

I'm not freaked or depressed by it or anything. I mean, think about everything you have two of and what it would be like if they were conjoined.

It could be worse.

Republican Reform? Yeah, Right

House Speaker Hastert (R) submitted a proposal which will presumably "clean up" the whole lobbying ethics scandal. The proposal, however, is worse than fake, it may even worsen the problem. First of all, the proposal does not touch campaign finance. Second, while the proposal pretends to stop lobbyists from giving congresspeople gifts, it in fact appears to make it more likely that gifts and cash bribes will prevail:

According to lobbyists and ethics experts, even if Hastert's proposal is enacted, members of Congress and their staffs could still travel the world on an interest group's expense and eat steak on a lobbyist's account at the priciest restaurants in Washington.

The only requirement would be that whenever a lobbyist pays the bill, he or she must also hand the lawmaker a campaign contribution. Then the transaction would be perfectly okay.

So in other words, instead of just getting free trips and dinners, the lobbyists would have to add campaign contributions at the same time. There would be more bribery and corruption under Hastert's proposal than otherwise. That's Republican "reform" for you. Remember a few years back when Democrats championed a campaign finance reform law that had so much teeth that it hurt them more than Republicans? Can you imagine the Republicans doing anything even remotely close to that? Of course not.

In fact, Hastert tried to deny that he or other Republicans had ever heard of Jack Abramoff:

Well, you know, a year ago most people around Congress couldn't tell you who Jack Abramoff was and didn't know who his associates were or what connections there are.

One of the biggest, most powerful lobbyists in D.C., with strong ties to Republican leadership... and "most people around Congress" had never heard of him? Well, maybe if you took all the Democrats and the few Republicans who weren't involved with him, then I guess you'd have "most people around Congress." But even then, I doubt it.

Then there's the news that Bush's Medicare debacle is even more corrupt than thought. Aside from the administration lying about the costs and the usual corruption like preventing the government from negotiation down prices from drug companies, it turns out that Bush's plan actually excludes many generic drugs from coverage--forcing Medicare to pay for far costlier drugs, and eliminating useful and cheap drug treatments.

This is the thing about the Republicans being in full control of the government: it's like a corruption salad bar. On any given day, there are so many stories on how they've committed yet another act of fraud, greed, sleaze, or corruption in general.

Core Duo iMac Review

Ars Technica, a great tech site, has an excellent and comprehensive review of the new 17" Core Duo iMac. The bottom line: it's fast if you're using "universal" apps (ones designed to work on both PPC and Intel chips), and acceptable if you're using PPC-only apps (which is still most 3rd-party apps). At $1300, it's an excellent value, according to the reviewer. Check it out.

Since I recently bought my Powerbook (less than a year ago), I have no great motivation to buy a new Mac any time soon. However, once I find that someone has a real and workable solution to dual-loading Mac OS X and Windows XP on an iMac, I will be sorely tempted--and may give in--to buying an iMac to replace my aging Celeron Windows box.

False Pretenses and Squandered Might

Iran is openly working on a nuclear program, and has terrorist ties. North Korea is openly working on a nuclear program, and has terrorist ties. So isn't it ironic, that out of the "Axis of Evil™," the only country that we did attack, invade and occupy was the only one that did not have a nuclear program, and did not have terrorist ties? What does that say about the true motivation behind the push for that war? And if building nukes and being buddies with terrorists were the primary reasons we went to war with Iraq, as Bush and his administration have repeatedly claimed, then why are we not attacking Iran or North Korea, countries far more threatening to us? Why, when Bush was so fired up and rarin' to invade Iraq, is he now striking this tone when the true and real threat from Iran and North Korea is so much more deadly?

"What we're doing now is beginning to lay out the strategy of what happens in the Security Council. That's what friends do: We consult; we talk; we strategize as to how to achieve an important objective, which is not allowing - for Iran not to have a nuclear weapon.

"And you're going to see a lot of public discussion about this matter. And the Chinese have got an opinion; the Russians have an opinion. We have opinions. Everybody has opinions.

"Our job is to form a common consensus. And so this is what's called diplomacy. I know you know that, Steve. I don't mean to insult you. But diplomacy is about talking to friends, allies and others about a common objective. This meeting has got a lot of diplomacy in it today, because this is a subject on which we spent a lot of time. I'm very interested in the chancellor's opinion on the subject."

The Chinese? The Russians? He's paying attention to them now? Their opinions matter? That's not what we heard in the entire buildup to the Iraq War. Remember, back then, all conservatives were saying, screw the Russians, damn the Chinese, to hell with the Germans, and let's make "French" a traitorous expletive. A common consensus was never a goal for Bush. Remember, he didn't even want to go to the U.N., he had to have his arm twisted to do that. And when he couldn't get the major powers aside from the U.K. to go along, he dismissed them, called them all "irrelevant," and dumped them on the wayside as he charged to war. And yet here he is today, saying the above, standing next to the German Chancellor.

Could it possibly be that Bush doesn't deem it all-important if a hostile nation is building a nuclear program and terrorist ties? Could it possibly be that this was never the reason he wanted to invade Iraq, which had neither of these attributes?

Or, perhaps it could be that he has so squandered American military might (excessively more than Clinton ever came close to, though something that conservatives castigated Clinton severely for, and yet don't seem to mind with Bush), that Bush has essentially rendered our military impotent to fight any nation that might pose a real threat to us?

So let's look at the scorecard, shall we? How has Bush done in his "Struggle Against Global Extremism™"? Iraq: not a threat, no nukes, no terrorist ties--we invaded, occupied, lost 2220 (and counting) American lives, killed tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, depleted our military strength. Iran: nukes, terrorist ties--Bush has done little or nothing of real consequence to stop them, and by invading Iraq, has probably prompted them to step up their nuclear program. North Korea: nukes, terrorist ties--Bush ignored them for years, let the problem fester, and now things are worse than ever.

Excellent job!

Corruption & Lawbreaking vs. Apathy & Fear

A few nights ago, Bill Maher guest-hosted Larry King and made a statement that surprised me: that he's OK with warrantless searches if it's in the name of fighting terrorism. But one problem with Maher is that he doesn't always do his research. And he's not alone--I've been hearing a lot of people say the same thing. And everyone who's said this obviously has not studied the matter or has otherwise bought into the Bush administration BS. The fact is: the warrants in no way, shape, or form hindered or delayed the legitimate search for terrorists. The retroactive 72-hour warrant allowed for immediate eavesdropping. The court approved more than 99.9% of all requests for warrants, and only objected to a few minor technicalities. The FISA court in no way hindered the intelligence-gathering that could have stopped 9/11--that was the fault of the Bush administration in not asking for the warrants in the first place. Hell, even Arlen Specter can see it was unnecessary and illegal.

But the right wing is excellent at lying, at making the public believe patent untruths. Almost as good as they are at corruption. Tom DeLay is now well on his way to prison, and his well-gerrymandered home district knows it--only 28% would vote for him. Republican poster boy for honesty Bob Ney is going up the river with DeLay--not just for taking bribes from Abramoff, but also for lobbying for Iran (where are all the conservatives who claimed Gore took money from Buddhists?). Who'll replace DeLay? Already the Republicans are eating their own, with Shadegg accusing Blunt and Boehner of being tied to the lobbying scandals--and the media is starting to pay close attention to Blunt, who claims he's locked up the leadership position. Even Ralph Reed is going down.

So, with all this and Bush at 39%, do the Democrats have a shot at gaining control of Congress next year? Bizarrely enough, that's far from a lock. The Dems should have it all sewn up, but are still so damned timid that they're not giving the people too much of an alternative. The Democrats should have put their foot down with Alito, daring the Republicans to trigger the nuclear option, whilst pouring out a river of outrage over the Congressional corruption and government spying in the media. I'm still waiting for them to grow some big brass ones. Until that happens, I am not overly hopeful that the Republicans' overt corruption and lawbreaking will be enough to repulse a public which seems ready to accept all that out of apathy and fear.

Bush's Aspirin Factory

For the past few days, Bush has been basking in the light of seeming effectiveness with the news that we probably got al Qaeda's #2 man, al-Zawahiri, in an air strike against a location in Pakistan near the Afghan border. But as we've just found out, the intelligence was faulty and rather than hitting an "al Qaeda compound" with Zawahiri, we instead hit three homes with at least 18 civilians, including five women and five children. Pakistan is outraged, has summoned our ambassador, and relations are now greatly strained.

I bring this up mostly to contrast something: on August 20, 1998, Bill Clinton ordered an air strike against what was believed to be a plant used to produce chemical weapons in Sudan, based upon the report of a CIA agent who allegedly took soil samples from the plant that showed a precursor to VX gas being produced. It turned out that the factory was not producing chemical weapons, but instead was bottling aspirin. Conservatives made endless sport of this error, and for years (even up to the present) have used it to ridicule Clinton for his ineffectiveness against bin Laden, his stupidity in hitting the wrong target, and his wrongness in taking out an innocent target.

So what are they saying about Bush, now? Clinton killed one man in the Sudan attack; are 18 people, including five women and five children, acceptable in comparison? Are they condemning Bush like they condemned Clinton?

Of course not. The Spin Patrol is still a little uncoordinated, but they're getting the story out: it was Pakistan's fault, they were heavily involved, and besides, it was an al Qaeda hideout, Zawahiri had just stepped out for a smoke, and most of the dead were extremists. NewsMax, for example, put quotation marks around the words "innocent civilians."

Not to mention that this is hardly the first time that innocent civilians have been hit in bungled attacks against al Qaeda; there's no telling how many men, women and children have been killed in these kinds of attacks--attacks that conservatives, and most Americans, will shrug off as regrettable but necessary. After all, the people killed were dark-skinned villagers in some third-world country, right?

Think that's too harsh? Unfair? Imagine this story, but instead we had bombed a village in England where we thought al Qaeda operatives were hiding, and killed eighteen white people, including five women and children. Would we have reacted the same way? The difference in our reaction to those two stories measures who differently we value the lives of people based upon their nationality and color.

We take the killing of people in "those countries" far too lightly, as if they didn't matter or count.

Say Goodbye to Roe v. Wade

As the Scalito hearings begin to dissipate and it seems certain that the Democrats could not muster the solidarity or courage to turn him down, we have to now look forward to a future where privacy rights will become severely curtailed, and Roe v. Wade will be either overturned or, at the very least, gutted. Who knows, maybe Roberts or even Scalito will surprise us, maybe all that talk about respecting precedent wasn't just slimy weasel talk--but I strongly doubt it. Fundie and wingnut organizations will, without pause, start an all-out campaign to get any and every abortion case put before the Supreme Court so that Bush's new court can sacrifice Roe v. Wade on the altar of fundamentalist conservative judicial activism.

What that means, in turn, is that reproductive rights will take a 180 back into the 60's and beyond. Wealthy states will likely keep it safe and legal, but the poorer and Bible-belt states will quickly drown it, trapping those caught in the most dire of circumstances with no choice, except the coat hanger or back-street butcher. Birth rates for those in poverty may well rise and create worse conditions, and the fundies who are popping champagne corks today will gleefully turn a blind eye to that pain tomorrow.

What is worse, this signals a greater change in the course of civil rights and our observance of the Constitution overall. Roe v. Wade is not just about access to abortion, it also signals a right to make one's own personal choices without the government deciding your beliefs and forcing medical decisions on you. But the new court will have an even broader effect: for example, with Roberts and Scalito on the court, the outcome of the recent Ten Commandments cases--McCreary v. ACLU and Van Orden v. Perry--would certainly would have been different, and the separation of church and state would have begun its collapse. It will simply take a little longer for that to happen now. Say goodbye to privacy rights. Say goodbye to equal rights, as much as they currently exist. Say goodbye to a lot of rights and liberties, because the new majority of Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, Roberts and Alito will soon begin to systematically tear them down. And because these guys are young, Bush's neocon stamp on the court will last for decades.

This is not a good day for the country.

The Rockford Files

I just finished watching the first season DVDs for "The Rockford Files," one of the usual set of DVDs that I buy from Amazon every Christmas when I go back to visit the family. Yeah, I know, you get it on cable where you are. I don't. And I don't like having to deal with the commercials, either.

Watching the shows brought back some things about the show that I'd forgotten about. One of those was how in almost every episode, the writers found a way to make it so that Rockford didn't get paid. While a lot of people enjoy this kind of running gag, I find it a bit annoying. An extreme example of this was with the Steve Martin/John Candy movie "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles," a film that I am sure was funny, but was about the most painful experience for me to sit through. In the film, Candy causes Martin to suffer an endless number of problems and annoyances, from the trivial to the harrowing. Essentially, Martin's character just gets beaten down and humiliated throughout the film, subjected to one setback or failure after another. Some people enjoy that, and if it's cartoonish and extreme enough I can get into it, but make it even close to realistic and it grates on me. Ergo my mild annoyance with the stick-it-to-Rockford gag--though it does make it nicer when he actually does get paid.

The other thing I'd forgotten about was how much driving there is in the series. It seems like one third of each episode is spent with Rockford driving his car around. And I'm not talking about the time spent on car chases or characters having a dialog in a car. I mean just minutes on end of watching this car go down that road, or that car turning that corner and going that way. A lot of it is one car tailing another, but sometimes it's just driving. Atmosphere, I guess. But it feels more like killing time most of the time.

Don't get me wrong--I love the series, and I'll keep getting them as they come out. The main reason is Garner himself, and the writing for the series. Rockford's sardonic and cynical style is priceless, and the driving and not getting paid aside, the plots and episode development are very, very good. One of main regrets is having to wait until the season five DVDs come out to see my all-time favorite episode "White on White and Nearly Perfect," with Tom Selleck as Lance White, the Anti-Rockford. One of the best episodes in TV history, if you ask me.

Interesting Prediction

I've just been re-reading some of my Heinlein, and in his Expanded Universe anthology volume, there's a very interesting piece called "Where To?" Originally written in 1950, he makes predictions about the year 2000. Prediction #4 reads thus:

It is utterly impossible that the United States will start a "preventive war." We will fight when attacked, either directly or in a territory we have guaranteed to defend.

In a 1965 update, he restates that idea, writing "'Preventive' or 'pre-emptive' war seems as unlikely as ever, no matter who is in the White House." Technically, Heinlein was right, in that Iraq happened after the year 2000 (and if you do not consider Vietnam a 'preventive' war).

More to the point, Heinlein's prediction seemed to me to underscore how radically Bush has changed our policy. However, what surprised me even more was how easily Americans seem to have taken to it. I have always assumed that American policy has always been stridently opposed to the concept of first strike, pre-emptive or otherwise (officially, at least). In one of my first blog entries, made in August 2002 (a handmade blog page, before I discovered Movable Type), I wrote:

It would also shred our own values and long-held respected policies, most importantly the policy not to strike first without provocation. And sorry, but an alleged meeting between a terrorist and an Iraqi agent coupled with completely unsubstantiated reports that Saddam could develop nukes "any time now" does not qualify as "provocation." We do not, as a nation, attack other nations simply because we think that maybe, at some future time, they could attack us in some way. Bush Jr. and Cheney warn about the penalty of waiting for someone to hurt us first, but the reason why we have held exactly that policy for so long is because it is the right thing to do. Would you teach your children to sucker-punch other kids based on the suspicion that the other kid might have started a fight later? Do you go around town shooting people you suspect might at some point break into your home? Sure, the children your kid punches out might be mean, and the people you gun down might be criminals--but it is not how we do things. Believe it or not, we wait for provocation, and then we fight. Not a moment before. We pay a price, as we always do, for our principles, but the price of abandoning those principles would be far higher.

What, am I just totally mistaken about American principles? Did I hear it wrong? I was shocked when John Kerry, in a presidential debate, answered John Lehrer's question on his approval of a preemptive war with this:

The president always has the right, and always has had the right, for preemptive strike. That was a great doctrine throughout the Cold War. And it was always one of the things we argued about with respect to arms control.

Now, possibly, Kerry was weaseling out of a direct answer--note how he changed "preemptive war" to "preemptive strike." But it sure seems like he was in favor of preemptive war, when I was expecting him to take Bush to task for it. Maybe somebody could set me straight on this, but I could swear that America had--proudly--stood by the policy of not initiating a war.

But Do They Do Windows?

Okay, Steve Jobs introduced two new Intel Duo Macs today--an iMac and "MacBook," both sporting dual-core CPUs, iSight built-in, and the usual round of goodies. But conspicuously absent from the keynote--and, to my surprise, also from the post-keynote web coverage--was the question of whether the new Macs can run Windows, and if one will have the ability to launch both side-by-side, switching easily between the two, without overtaxing the CPU. Although Microsoft's representative appeared on-stage during the keynote and promised that MS Office for Mac would be supported for another five years (I could have sworn they'd stopped development with the last version, but apparently I'm wrong), neither she nor Jobs uttered a word about how cool it would be to run both systems on a Mac computer.

In fact, I had to do a search before I found anything on the subject, and found an AP story on Forbes reported that Apple has reiterated its claim that it will not "thwart" users who want to install Windows on the Mac. However, it's pretty clear that Apple is not facilitating that option--yet.

Which means that if dual-boots and switching are possible, it'll be a third-party hack, for now, at least. Intel's Virtualization Technology promises something more advanced, and you've got to figure that Apple is going to jump on the bandwagon once people start doing it more.

One possible reason that Apple is holding back is the foreseen developer's conflict, where software makers may drop Mac versions of software if they feel that Mac users will all be running Windows in tandem anyway. Perhaps Apple is not quite ready with it's Dharma project (if true), and wants to introduce and popularize the development toolset before actively encouraging the dual-boot idea.

Goodbye, Powerbook

Not mine. The whole line.

So the keynote is over, and we have quite a few new toys to play with. I'm not going to go over the software, because frankly, from the sound of it (reading the feed from MacRumors), all the software updates sound marginal. It's the hardware that's going to make the difference. New Intel iMacs and... MacBooks, the (slightly questionable) new name for the high-end portables (no more PowerBooks). Dual-core iMac and MacBook. Very fast-sounding, cool-sounding machines.

Just one thing. There was no mention whatsoever of dual-booting OS's.

What's up with that?

It's late, and I gotta get to sleep. I guess I'll find out in the morning, if anyone knows by then....

Why to a Flag?

Perusing a story about the pledge of allegiance, it struck me: why pledge to a flag? Yes, you're pledging to the Republic as well, but why to the flag? Because it's a convenient symbol? Maybe, but there's a big problem there: anyone can hijack the symbol. Why not simply make a pledge to the Republic alone? It can also be hijacked (witness the present), but at least it's quite a bit more difficult--and it's usually accomplished by hijacking the flag first.

Even better, why not make the pledge to the Republic and the Constitution upon which it is based? The flag can be twisted to represent all kinds of bad stuff, but the Constitution, that's got the foundation for a nation of laws printed right on it. A bit harder to grab that and use it as a symbol of crushing someone's rights and liberties. It specifically enumerates what we're supposed to do and how. More general symbols, such as the flag and the sacrifice of past generations can be far more easily subverted by claiming that they stand for what you want them to stand for; the Constitution is much less forgiving of people trying to create meaning out of whole cloth.

So hang a copy of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights on the wall of classrooms, and make a pledge to it. "I pledge allegiance to the Constitution of the United States of America, and to the Republic based upon it: one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all." Give the "Under God" bit back to the Knights of Columbus who got it stuck in there during the McCarthy Era by using fear and manipulation; there's no need for it in that pledge anyway, least of all for those true to their God.

And while we're at it, let's stop making kids recite the pledge until they can demonstrate real understanding of what it means. Mindless indoctrination was supposed to be something we're against, right? Why are eight-year-olds reciting it? Most kids don't have a clue as to what half the words mean, and I don't ever recall a teacher explaining them. Heck, for years I thought that I was pledging "allegiance" (whatever that meant) to an "invisible" nation. I thought it was weird, but then, the whole Pledge thing was, to me, back then. Still is today, to the extent that it's more a political tool than a meaningful pledge. Ergo my suggestion for changes.

Back to School

So tomorrow is the first day I have going back to work after the Winter vacation. I caught a break in timing, in that the semester started on a Friday, and I don't have classes on that day. This week, Monday is a holiday. Tuesday, tomorrow, will be my first day back. And a good semester it should be. I have three classes, but they are back-to-back on two days of the week, which means slightly longer but many fewer days. I've got the web site up to speed, and it all looks well-prepared and ready to go. I just have to figure out how to deal with it all with a broken foot.

One particular point of interest will be the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, with Jobs' keynote coming at (I believe) 2 a.m. on Wednesday morning, Japan time. (Rumor roundups here and here.) If, as is predicted, the new Intel Macs come out, this should change the computing landscape some, and that'll mean changes possibly for my students as well. It's always good when something big is happening in the field you're teaching, it gives you a chance to go over all the aspects with your class.

In the past, I have set aside half of one class session each semester to demo the Mac OS, in part to give students another point of view to better understand what an OS is, and in part to show them how cool the system is. Perhaps more than that, they see how I use it myself every day--my monitor is almost always mirrored on the class monitor, and they can see how I navigate through things. And every semester, a good number of students come back very interested in the Mac, despite having seen little else but Windows machines all their lives. I know that if I could tell them they could get Mac and Windows all in one package, a lot more of them would make the switch.

So it should be a fun semester. Heck, if I'm lucky, I'll be able to convince my school of the wisdom of shelling out a few bucks for a Mac Mini, should it become available with Intel and Windows. Our IT people wouldn't know what to do with a Mac, but hey--I can do maintenance that side of things a lot easier than they can. It'll take me a lot less time, and be cheaper for the school to boot!

Violation of Privacy

Your cell phone records are, apparently, not private. In the U.S., at least. For $110, anyone can obtain a list of everyone you have called, when, and for how long.

This may just be a temporary loophole, but it does raise questions of privacy. Seeing something like this is a bit of a shocker, mostly because it drives home the fact that this can have an impact on you (well, most of you). Would you really be okay with anyone for any reason digging through your phone records?

In writing this, I paused to think about possible situations to give as examples of how you would not want your cell phone records searched. I had come up with a few, like a stalker expanding his knowledge of your life, or your workplace trying to catch dirt on you, when I realized something: it doesn't matter what the examples are. Privacy is a blanket right, and when you start trying to single out the most shocking examples, you begin to differentiate between the 'less private' and the 'more private.' And that's a mistake, because then someone will argue that the 'less private' parts of your life are not worthy of privacy.

Not to mention that there are a lot of people who will argue that you don't have a right to privacy at all--at least no legal right. I would rather strongly disagree, and so would the 9th Amendment, not to mention a few other amendments and the Supreme Court. We're a territorial race, and privacy is fundamental to our makeup. We expect privacy, we demand it. We require it. None of us is completely open, no one. How could this possibly not be considered a fundamental human right?

So why are there so many people who stridently oppose the idea of a legal right to privacy? Do these people really feel that no one has a right to expect any privacy? Probably they don't. It's really about abortion, and the fact that major decisions such as Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade are based upon arguments of privacy. So "the right to privacy" has become a nasty epithet to many conservatives, a sign of "judicial activism" and something that neither you nor I possess. I really doubt that conservatives would be OK with the idea that they have no legal right to privacy any more than liberals would. But in the conservative world, expediency is the name of the game (e.g., winning elections supremely trumps ethics), especially where civil rights are concerned--probably because most conservatives smugly believe that violations of such rights won't likely happen to them.

Privacy is an extremely fundamental human right. Consider laws against breaking and entering, trespassing, accessing personal records, and, oh, I don't know, maybe the Third and Fourth Amendments--a plethora of statutes designed to do what? Protect our privacy. Both physical privacy--no one can enter our homes without our permission--and informational privacy--your business is your business--are considered sacrosanct. If someone says they disagree, then tell them to sign a legal waiver that allows you to dig into their financial and medical records--and when they refuse, tell them to shut up.

However, as with all rights, it has limitations. We do allow law enforcement officials to transgress on that right. But we do that on two conditions only: when specific probable cause can be demonstrated, and when a judge takes on the responsibility of signing off on the warrant. But only if those safeguards are in place--because if they aren't, then we no longer have a right to privacy. Any government official could delve into any of your private information for any reason. That is antithetical to the very concept of privacy, which is why we have those protections in the first place.

Hmm. Privacy. Warrants. I wonder what I could be leading up to?

<COUGH>, <COUGH>

A Year and a Half Late...

David Pogue gave a report on Bill Gates' presentation of Windows Vista, the next OS version after XP. It's due out about a year from now (unless it's delayed yet again, not an unlikely event). Pogue comes down on it pretty hard as mostly being a Mac OS X ripoff:

If I seem to be laying on the "stolen from Apple" language a bit thick, you're darned right. Ordinarily, I'm careful about making accusations like this, because I know I'll get hammered by Apple bashers. But in this case, there's not a shred of doubt: most of the features Microsoft demonstrated last night were pure, unadulterated ripoffs from Mac OS X. I could hear actual whispers of recognition from the audience around me.

Pogue did mention that they had a few original features, but they didn't sound like much to get excited about (go ahead and read yourself). But a lot of Vista's big features--widgets, application switcher, fast search--are features that will be one and a half years old on the Mac before Vista comes out. A few new features, like photo organization and tabbed browsing, have been standard on the Mac for a lot longer than that. Pogue seems satisfied "to have these features on both platforms," but why wait 18 months or even a lot longer to get them?

Meanwhile, Apple accidentally revealed (on its web site, a common place for this to happen) a new application coming out at MWSF: iWeb, apparently a consumer-level web page creation program. No details on it yet, but it might be styled after Pages, and could have easy drag-and-drop media capabilities.

Update: This site has a few nice videos which take the audio from Gates' presentation of Vista and matches it with a movie-screen-grab of Mac OS X Tiger, showing the stuff that Gates is saying Vista will have a year from now has been available on OS X for the better part of a year already.

Skype and the Intercom Effect

For some time, my father and I have been experimenting with using some kind of voice chat, but for some reason, we were never able to get anything to work. And then a week ago, just after I got back from the U.S., we tried Skype, and after working out a few bugs, we got it to work. And it's great, too--very good sound quality, easy to use.

After using it for just the one week, we've discovered something very interesting about it: we use it very differently than we would use our telephones. With a telephone call, we would wait as much as a week or two between calls, and there would have to be more than just a casual reason to call. But with voice chat, it feels different. It feels like an intercom, and that my family is right next door, and not halfway around the globe.

I realized that this morning, when I decided I'd call my dad and just chat about things I wouldn't have made a phone call for. I'd seen Bill O'Reilly on Letterman, and just felt like commenting on it with him. Particularly on how Letterman, before O'Reilly came out, stirred his pencil in O'Reilly's coffee mug, and then later reacted when O'Reilly drank from it. And, while we were at it, about Robertson's yet-another-idiotic-remark event with Sharon's stroke being God's punishment for dividing Israel. Stuff we might discuss in the course of a regular telephone conversation, but not enough to trigger a telephone call in the first place.

It's hard to define why there is a difference. Mechanically, it's not much different than a telephone; it even uses the same ringing sound effects as a telephone. A call is placed, is answered, and at the end, we hang up. But still, somehow, it feels different. It might be financial--even though our phone plans have gotten international dialing rates down to under ten cents a minute (low enough that we don't even think about the expense any more), there remains the fact that it does cost money, and the clock is ticking, even if we don't think about it as consciously as we did before. Kind of like taking photos: with chemical film, I was always conscious of the cost for each photo, and restrained myself from taking more than one or two at a time. But now, with digital cameras and no cost per photo, I snap away incessantly.

Or maybe it's something as simple as the increased sound quality, capturing more of the ambience of the other side, and giving the other speaker more of a 'presence,' as if they were much closer. There was a bit of the same effect, I believe, when international phone lines were improved to the point where sound quality became the same as with local phone calls.

It could be because I've set this up only with my family and no one else, so it feels more like a private connection. Or perhaps it's something as simple as the fact that I was just over there, in the U.S. with my family, and am still in the mode where I feel I can start chatting about anything.

However, I get the feeling that this will be a bit more permanent than that, and maybe it's due to a combination of all the above factors. I think we'll be using the telephone a lot less, and this a lot more, despite the limitations. Those limitations include the fact that we can only make calls when both laptops are on and not closed. Also, because of terrible feedback problems, we are forced to use headphones which tether us to the computers, and we can't move far. Even so, there is something compelling about this kind of communication, closing even further the distance between us.

I compare this to when I first came to live in Japan, when telephone calls cost a few bucks each minute and were of terrible quality, and voice communication was more for emergencies, a luxury we couldn't much afford. As with so much else, things have changed.

Flash! MRAM?

Here's a bit of Mac news, some more speculation on what will be released at MWSF in a few days. They're saying that new Mac laptops may use flash memory associated with the CPU so that startup and general performance is increased.

Huh? Let's go over that. First, you have to understand what "volatile" means in computerese. See, a computer's CPU and RAM (like its 'brain' and 'memory') can only hold data while they are turned on. Switch off the power, and they go blank. That's "volatile." Imagine it's like you lose all your memory whenever you go to sleep, and have to re-learn everything when you wake up. That's why a computer takes so long to start up: it's loading all the data from the relatively slow hard drive (which is non-volatile) back into the relatively fast RAM and the CPU--a lot of information taking a long path to its destination. The main point is that when you boot up, the computer has to 're-learn' how to work.

Using flash memory speeds that up. Flash memory is both chip-based and non-volatile. Shut down the computer, and the flash chip still retains all the data. Turn the computer on, and the data (stored in a "cache," located on or near the CPU) is instantly available. Your computer should be able to start faster and perform better.

This would simply be the first step in a line to even faster computers, however. Many researchers are working to perfect something called "MRAM," a magnetic-based chip technology which would make CPUs and RAM (not just the caches) non-volatile. In other words, if you turned off your computer, it would never forget anything. Turn on the power, and the computer turns on instantly, like a light switch.

You would probably still need to re-boot the operating systems from time to time as they get unstable when used continuously over time. Still, it would be a great feature--like changing from a crank-start automobile to a push-button Prius.

But until MRAM becomes a common reality, flash caches will do quite nicely, I'm sure. It does make me wonder, however, at how many innovations will really come out of Apple at the MWSF, so many have been reported. Probably, as usual, fewer than half will be true. But the closer we come to the keynote, more accurate information will start leaking out.

Remember What It's About

As Bush tries to divert attention by using fear in a new offensive against Congressional Democrats, the media seems to be buying into it, giving Bush good press and riffing on his themes. CNN ran a recent TV-headline titled "Bush's Staunch Defense," and failed completely to point out a number of facts completely contradicting Bush's claims.

But one item I think is worth noting is how this all got started in the first place. By now, most Americans have probably bought into Bush's recasting this as the Democrats trying to kill the Patriot Act--which is far from the truth. The politically-named act is complex and has many provisions. Many are needed, but some are controversial, and Democrats hold that those controversial provisions threaten Americans' civil liberties. One example of this is Section 215, which allows the government to look at the personal records of Americans, such as financial, medical, phone, internet, student or library records, without probable cause, in conflict with the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Already, some sections of the act have been ruled as too vague or outright unconstitutional by courts.

The current mess came up when Democrats and some Republicans refused to agree to make many of these controversial provisions permanent, instead insisting on sunset clauses that would allow renewal of the provisions upon future review.

Let's make sure we understand that. The Democrats (plus some Republicans) were not trying to shut down the act. They were not even trying to shut down those provisions. They were only trying to make it so that the most controversial provisions would have to be renewed every few years. That's all. That's it.

So, why did the act almost expire? Because Republicans decided they would rather see the act expire than to agree to the sunset clauses on those few provisions. Because they saw they could make a political play--act like the Democrats were trying to kill the law, frighten people into thinking it would expire, and then blame the Democrats for everything.

Even as the Democrats were offering a temporary extension so debate could continue, Bush and the Republicans were screaming at everyone who would listen that the Democrats were trying to kill the act. When, in fact, the Democrats were ready to approve the full act for a number of years, and the Republicans were the ones refusing to accept these extensions.

Essentially, Bush and the GOP want everything or nothing: give us 100% of what we want, or we let the act die and blame the Democrats.

While I am sure they really want the provisions which threaten our civil liberties to become permanent, I am convinced that this is more about simple opportunism: the GOP is in bad shape for the 2006 elections, and Bush is in huge trouble with his domestic spying program, so they are fabricating a non-existent issue in hopes of eliciting fear among the American people. That's their way of gaining popularity, after all: frightening people. As Aaron Sorkin once wrote for the title role in The American President,

He is interested in two things, and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who's to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.

Sorkin got the Republican playbook down to a tee, didn't he? Because that's exactly what Bush and the GOP are trying to do here: make you afraid, and tell you who's to blame.

Thief

Boy, does this bring back memories.

It was the first time I had been hired for a real supervisory role, aside from a rather half-hearted string of assistant-manager stints at movie theaters while in college. I worked for a language school in Tokyo, had worked there fore nine or so months as a regular teacher. There were four local schools, and four supervisors, one for each school. Two had been forced out by union activity, and the other two were leaving anyway, so the school had to hire for the whole local chain. The four that had been there each had 40-hour-a-week schedules, 30 hours supervising and 10 hours teaching. Each was paid a rather handsome amount by language-school standards, I believe in the range of $50,000 a year, if memory serves.

When the word had been put out that they were seeking replacements from within the school, I was interested, of course. The pay was good, the hours no worse than I'd been working, with more desk hours, which at the time was attractive (it was the 50-minutes-teaching followed by 10-minutes-prepping cycle that could burn you out rather easily). So I applied. What I wasn't ready for was the idea that the school was planning to screw me over royally.

My first missed clue was when they planned to hire three of us instead of four. I should have guessed that they were planning to take advantage of the clean sweep to try to make a huge savings. This was in the early-to-mid-90's when the economy was dropping out and business was getting tougher. But instead I saw what the guy I was to replace was making and figured I'd be taking over the position, with the salary intact. Certainly, the school did nothing to disabuse me of the idea, said nothing about any change in status.

One of the reasons I got fooled was the liaison, the American head teacher for the whole company, call him John (not his real name). John, I realized later, would have been great on a used car lot--he had the same ethics but had a more wholesome, almost deacon-of-the-church image he presented. He engendered trust, was good at selling, had the palaver down and had a talent for stringing you along, making you believe that the check was in the mail, though he'd been telling you the same thing for months and it had never arrived. (I should have figured it out when I found out he was an Amway salesman on the side.) That, and I was still gullible at the time.

Another big clue we (I and the other two candidates) were going to get hosed came when the hiring process was about done. We were the final candidates, but the managers were keeping too much from us. They refused to tell us how much the positions would pay, for example. We knew we would be hired as "assistant" supervisors, but it was made clear that this was only temporary, and that after a probationary period there was the chance of formalizing the full position. It had also been made clear that while we were on probation, we would receive probationary pay. But they did not tell us what that probationary salary would be, nor what we would get once we passed probation--they left us to assume it would be the full amount. It turned out there were even more layers to it than that, in fact. But again, we were trusting, and fell for all the salesman pitches they threw at us, like them asking strongly and repeatedly if we were going for these jobs "just for the money." Truthfully, I could reply that I wasn't--the experience would be valuable, I knew--but there was no denying that the money would be nice. We knew what the previous guys had been paid, and the managers knew we expected to get the same.

When they asked us to make our final decisions, we asked how much we'd be paid. They said it hadn't been decided yet. Now, when have you ever heard of anyone not being told how much they'd be compensated before they were asked to commit to a job? But they had the power and we were gullible, and they had the money-doesn't-matter responses in their pocket, and they knew we wanted the jobs and expected enough. So we said "yes." And immediately after that, they told us what the pay would be, as if we wouldn't see that they lied a few minutes before when they said the pay hadn't been decided yet.

And the pay was dismal. Almost $15,000 a year less than the previous supervisors. More than that, we were expected to do more with a lot less time, a fact also revealed only after we'd committed. Where the previous four supervisors had 30 hours desk work and 10 hours teaching, we three were given 15 hours desk work and 25 hours teaching, each. For the supervisory work, a drop from 120 man-hours a week to just 45, about 1/3 as much time to do the same work. For about 30% less pay than the people before us.

If we'd been smart, we would have told them to shove it right then and walked away. But that would have entailed quitting altogether, a very hard thing to do, and there was still the prospect of full pay after the probation.

Here's another point. If you are told that you are being hired on probation, how long would you assume probation would be? Again, the fact that we still trusted them to be fair worked against us. We assumed the standard three months. I had never, ever heard of any probation being other than that period of timed without said time period being specified. We all assumed three months. And so, after three months, when we asked when the review would come, John replied, as if sincere, that the probation was of course one year, why would we ever assume three months?

Well, we were pissed again, and we groused amongst each other again, but the alternative would be to quit and we still weren't ready for it. By the end of one year, however, that changed.

This is where the Dilbert cartoon becomes relevant. You see, I performed very well not just in the first year, but in the first month. The previous four supervisors had worked 120 man-hours a week, and most of their work went into scheduling. The school's schedule was flexible, which meant people were changing hours frequently, and finding substitutes was a constant task. The previous supervisors had binders with clear-plastic slip covers for each page, with each teacher's schedule on a single piece of paper, the book full of all the teachers' schedules. If a sub was required, the supervisor would have to go through the binder, sheet by sheet. First they would leaf through to find teachers who had that day off, and would call them, one by one. If they could not find a sub that way, they'd have to start leafing through from the beginning, this time looking for someone who could tack two or three hours onto their current schedule, thus filling part of the sub time. They'd call each teacher on the list for each segment, and if they found someone willing, they'd tell that teacher to hold on and then start yet again with the binder list, this time looking for teachers to fill in the remaining hours. If they found no one to complement the hours filled by the first willing substitute, they'd have to start all over again. And since teachers were often unreachable by phone (this was before cell phones became ubiquitous), the process was extended even further.

When I started working (and was given two of the four schools to manage), I found it was impossible to do the same job with the reduced hours. I essentially had the job two people had done in 60 hours weekly, and had 15 hours to do it in. Their system was impossible with the time they gave me. After two or three weeks of working dozens of unpaid overtime hours and still being swamped, I invented a new system out of sheer necessity. Staying late at the office several nights, I redesigned the sub-finding system with a computer using a spreadsheet program.

Instead of having a binder with separate pieces of paper for each teacher's schedule, I made daily schedule sheets with everyone's schedule for each day of the week on one page; each row would contain one teacher's schedule for that day. Teachers were lined up, sorted by starting hours. All the teachers with the day off were at the top; all the working teachers listed below, with teachers starting early nearer the top, down to the teachers working late at the bottom. Each teacher's phone number and availability info was right there. When one teacher called in sick, took a personal day, took a vacation, or otherwise got time off, all I had to do was pull out the sheet for the day in question and immediately see (a) who was fully free and (b) how I could divide the shift between the remaining teachers. That last point saved the most time: in advance, I could build scenarios and groups of matched teachers who could fill slots, thereby limiting the number of people I had to call, allowing me to focus on the most likely combinations first. Usually, just by asking a few people strategically instead of almost everybody in alphabetical order, I could fill the slot. A task that would have taken hours became a quick activity.

I then made up sheets such as these for the other supervisors as well, and kept them up-to-date. As a result, our jobs suddenly became doable; had I not come up with that solution, the school would have been forced to give us more desk time or hired more supervisors. Right there I saved the school tens of thousands of dollars a year.

That was not the only thing I accomplished, either. I settled the school down from its union jitters. The union had dissipated when the sole holdout had left for greener pastures, but there was still a great deal of friction between management and teachers. I helped allay a lot of that by making further refinements to the supervisory position, which allowed us to throw out a lot of rules the teachers hated. I made it so that the teachers would not have to request time off more than a month in advance. I refined the paperwork so the school saved more money and the teachers did not have to fill out so many forms. I had a lot of east-west liaison knowledge under my belt, and smoothed a lot of the Japanese-management-and-western-teacher friction that had contributed to the prior union mess. And so on.

So when the one-year probation period ended, I knew I was sitting pretty. Every time John had come by, he had nothing but praise; when I asked if he had any comments on how I could improve, he always remarked on what a great job I was doing. I knew I had not made any screw-ups worth mentioning, and I had made a lot of major accomplishments. The promotion and raise in pay would surely be mine.

What an idiot I was.

When the time for the meeting came, John again mentioned what a good job I had been doing. Except... the Japanese office manager, my immediate supervisor, had noted several months before that I had made a mistake. Frankly, I do not recall the exact details, but the incident was one where this manager and I had miscommunicated. We never had found the root cause, and it was likely a language error. But it had been between just the two of us, had cost nothing in productivity, and had been all but forgotten a few days later. But John brought it up as an "example" of my poor management skills, proving that I was not ready for a full supervisory position. When I asked for even one other "example," John refused to do so. When I pointed out that I had asked him if there was anything I was doing that needed improvement and he always said I was doing great, he dodged the question and said it was upper management's decision. When I pointed out how much I had achieved, John stressed the importance of trust with upper management and so forth. But in recognition of all I had done, John said he would personally push for me to get a $100 a month raise.

In short, I was Alice in the Dilbert cartoon. I was getting royally screwed. Served me right, for trusting them after they exhibited such weasel-like dodges from the start, but it hurt no less for that realization. I let them screw me, and should have known better. From that point on, I knew that keeping a job was far less important than maintaining my dignity and self-respect. I should have been ready to fold and leave the table after the first signs that they were being dishonest with me. But for most people, quitting is like failing, even if the fault is not your own. And the uncertainty of finding a new job is frightening. Both of these combined are enough to make you withstand far more than you really should. I learned that lesson. Fortunately, the next serious job I got is the one I have right now, which is the best I've ever had. The conditions are great and my relationship with my employers is excellent. But I'll never again place myself in the situation I suffered before.

Knowing all this, you can likely now understand my reaction to the Dilbert cartoon. To be of immense value to a company which then uses a stupid, useless, piddling charge to deny one the rewards the company owes. But maybe its something you can't truly feel unless you've been through it.

Anyone got stories?

Marijuana

How sick is the federal government's campaign against marijuana, especially medicinal marijuana? In 1996, California voters passed Prop 215 to legalize marijuana used for medicinal purposes. In what has been a bipartisan effort, both the Clinton and Bush 43 administrations have fought to overturn state laws to allow for the drug to be used. Most of this activity seems aimed at California, where last month federal agents raided more than a dozen establishments dispensing the drug for medicinal purposes. They are using federal law to trump local laws (under the argument that even intrastate medicinal marijuana growing may possibly impact interstate drug trafficking) which allow the drug to be prescribed and used. Nevertheless, many states have a variety of medicinal marijuana laws that are still in effect.

One question: why is marijuana being targeted? Marijuana is less addictive than tobacco, less inebriating than alcohol. It is less of a "gateway" drug than either of those two, if it is even one at all. That it is illegal is an accident of history, and is not due to the deleterious effects of the drug. So why is the federal government wasting so much time and energy to combat it when there is so much else to do?

The government's attack against medicinal marijuana is incomprehensible. Doctors prescribe drugs far more dangerous and far more addictive on a regular basis, and yet somehow marijuana is the danger? You may pull out studies which claim that marijuana does no better than other drugs (which usually turn out to be funded by drug companies with in interest in pushing their own meds), but there is a great deal of evidence that shows it is useful, especially in the stimulation of appetite and the control of nausea, and helps in most cases where other drugs fail.

Where government policy is most outrageous is in the use of marijuana in terminal patients. I mean, come on. Who the hell is worried about addiction in these cases? People dying of cancer in hospices, prescribed with marijuana by doctors, buying it legally from a pharmacy or other legal distributor--and the feds feel they have to bust that kind of thing up? How sick is that?

So what am I missing here? Why is the federal government so adamantly pursuing a relatively harmless and potentially beneficial drug? Is it true that pharmaceutical companies are behind the push so as to do away with a cheap competitor, or is that a conspiracy theory? Or is the cause simply that members of congress and administration officials are scared of looking weak on law enforcement if they don't hunt down and destroy the "killer weed," pushed forward by the ignorance of a general public that believes it is a dangerous narcotic? Does the government seriously think it's a threat? What's your take, what have you heard?

Spam Spam Spam Spam

The title here is a bit of a defiant chant more than a Monty Python bit. As I may have mentioned before, spammers seem to get a perverted kick out of making blog posts which talk about spam a specific target of their spam-spew. They deliberately target any entries on spam, apparently using the word "spam" as a target text string. Well, spam them. Spam them all to hell. I can rename categories and individual pages faster than their spambots can catch on, and so their autospam programs wind up sending the spammy spam to non-existent addresses, which has resulted in hundreds of 404-page hits on my spam-free site in less than half a day. Spam!

They are currently in their now-traditional beginning-of-the-month spamfest, trying to rack up as many hits as they can so they can get to the top of the top-referrer lists. Of course, they're idiots because nobody has top-referrer lists any more--not that such a fact bothers them much. Strange that they have ramped up their referral spam, and their assaults via blog comment spam and trackback spam have waned, considering that more bloggers allow the latter types of spam to go unchecked, and the former type probably gets them little or nothing. It's almost as if they've stopped caring about the efficiency of their spam, and are now just using it, as much as for anything else, to vandalize sites which call them on their bullshit.

One thing I refuse to be is intimidated by these clowns. I'll continue to chronicle anything and everything I can on the subject, and continue to block their garbage with 100% efficiency. That's not a New Year's resolution, it's simply a way of life for a serious blogger nowadays. So spam away, Spamholes.

And for everyone else, a Happy New Year!