Romney serves as an excellent example of the problem with today's wealth-favoring tax structure: Romney paid a paltry 14% tax on $42.6 million of income over the past two years. Aside from campaigning, how much actual work did he do? Probably little to none--in short, he just sat there as his assets made him more rich. What would he have done if his tax rate were 30% or even 40%? Quit investing and instead make no money? What a crock. But wait, Republicans will say--the job creators need that money to create more jobs!! OK, fine: exactly how many jobs did Romney create in 2010 and 2011? Directly, none. Not a single one. Indirectly? Not a single job more than if the money had been collected by the government and put towards, say, infrastructure or education. Had the income been taxed, in fact, the likelihood is that a lot more jobs would have been created--and that money would have been directed far more accurately at the American economy. The value of enriching Romney is dependent upon Romney's particular investments. Was the capital used to create jobs, or in the kind of destructive capitalism Romney himself used to engage in? Did he invest in American companies, possibly companies that maximized American profits? Or did the money go to create more jobs in China than in the U.S.? Considering what American businesses are doing now, if Romney's hoard actually did create jobs, they were far more likely overseas. If it's American “job creators” we're supporting here, then how about a tax credit for actually creating jobs in America, and not just profiteering in a way that could potentially create jobs, probably more in other countries, as a by-product of getting even more filthy rich? The whole “job creators” mantra is just as much a fictional piece of crap as everything else the right wing claims these days. Tax the rich at 40% or even higher, pour the money back into infrastructure, education, and research, and the country stands a chance of coming back with a roar. If you instead vote Republican and let the rich get off virtually tax free, you'll get exactly what you deserve for being such a gullible rube: poverty.

The GOP candidate that I most feared in the election this year was Huntsman; he could sound reasonable, perhaps even get a good chunk of the Democratic vote, while still being a dedicated right-winger, and thus be a real threat to recovering what little of America remains after more than a decade of Republican trashing. When the consensus seemed to be for Romney, my reaction was, “Are you kidding me?” The right wing wants to place as their candidate a plastic, super-rich, flip-flopping idiot like Romney? That's the best you can do? Now that the consensus seems to be swinging to Gingrich, my reaction is, “Are you freaking kidding me?” The right wing wants to replace Romney with a vitriolic, conniving, has-been serial adulterer with negatives as high as 60%? Sure, he's more politically savvy… but the man is a cesspool of hypocrisy and slime. Sure, Obama won't be able to make ads about how he got a blow job from a woman not his wife in a car while his kids walked past, or even hint about Newt's requesting an “open marriage” with his… which wife was that? But not a problem, there is way more about Gingrich to bite into than just the salacious stuff. I know their choices are bad this year, but to choose the worse of the bad is pretty pathetic. The only positive I see about Gingrich is that he'll galvanize the religious right while the Mormon Romney might have made them stay home. But I hardly think either has much chance against Obama--unless the rather obvious Republican efforts to crater the economy work better than they seem to be.

Tonight is the second day we've had snow this year, and it's coming down. What you see here may not look like much, but had been falling only a little over an hour by the time I took this photo. It was falling heavily at the time, but this is a time exposure and so the falling snow is not visible. (Click for a larger image.) It should be quite a blanket on the ground by the time it stops, probably around of just after midnight.

The bills are in storage but not necessarily dead. Their seemingly inevitable momentum, however, is, at least for the moment, halted. Ironically, these bills, which are supported by both political parties but overwhelmingly by conservatives, was taken down in no small part by something conservatives would have expected to come from the other group of business interests: a corporate strike right out of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. The thing is, the biggest giant to go on strike and stop producing for society was Wikipedia, a not-for-profit foundation. Yes, other for-profits joined in, like Google and Facebook, but those giants did not shut down, probably for the same reason true Randian corporate strikes never happen: they don't want to stop making money. Alas, the politicians are doing little but playing an evasive waiting game, knowing that momentum like we saw recently is hard to build, and they can just quietly come back to this issue in weeks or months. Hopefully, the protests will not subside.

When the iPad was first announced, it was panned. People called it an iPod Touch on steroids, made fun of the name in its similarities to feminine hygiene products, bemoaned all the things they expected but the device lacked, and dismissed it because it brought nothing new to the game of mobile computing. I disagreed. And, as it turns out, I was pretty much spot-on. I noted that the paucity of features would be made up for over time, with software and hardware upgrades--and so it happened. I noted that the low capacity was OK because it's a networking device--I was right, and even more so, we now have the iCloud. I noted that the device's simplicity was an asset, that the user experience would be superior, and that the UI was a key to its success. That its success would lie not in bells & whistles, but in the potential of the software that could be written for it. Then, a week later, I made another prediction: that textbooks would be the killer app for the iPad. Well, the iPad took off without textbooks, but now it may take off even faster with them. Nice to see that I was not only right about the iPad when so many others were writing its obituary, but I was also right about why. In short, it was not just fanboyism, but recognizing what would and would not work.

While it's a slightly encouraging sign that the White House has signaled its opposition to the SOPA and PIPA legislation, it does so only on some technical grounds, not on what I would think are the more fundamental grounds, leading to the distinct possibility that the worst of these acts will eventually pass. If you get a copy of the legislation (PDF file), you'll note an entire section (starting on page 34) which allows a “qualifying plaintiff”--effectively a corporation holding copyrights--broad powers to act against anyone they feel is infringing on those rights. All they have to do is try to send mail (pages 35-36), if any addresses are available, and the action has started. If there's no mail or if no one responds in seven days (page 38), then their powers expand considerably. The corporation can then get a court order which will go into effect in any jurisdiction (no more of this filing individual actions in each district) which will, within 5 days, shut down the web site's account, force financial services (e.g., VISA or PayPal) to cut off their accounts (page 38-39), force advertisers to cut off all ads for the site which could include normal search engine results (page 40), and allow the corporation to send threatening messages to the site's users (page 41). If the site owner still hasn't shown up, the corporation can get a court to force them to comply and fine them (page 42). Let's say you have a monetized blog and a music label doesn't like how you quoted lyrics from a song they own. They can not only send you a cease-and-desist order, but now that is backed up by an effective nuclear arsenal of legal weapons which, within 12 days, can utterly destroy your web site. You might be on vacation, or simply didn't post an email address. Too bad, sucker--Sony Music just had your site taken down, all your links struck, all your accounts shut down, and sent threatening messages to everyone who left comments on your site or whose IP got any content from you. Or let's say you have an online business selling items, which may include items which make fair use of copyrighted material, say in the form of satire, protest, or other protected speech. If the corporation which owns that content wants to, they can take you down--and your powers to fight back are now excruciatingly limited, considering that they can smother your livelihood virtually at will. More to the point, they can threaten you with all this--unless you do exactly what they tell you immediately. If you want to fight it, you might have to travel a great distance at great expense on a very short timetable, hauling your attorney along with you--while the corporation threatening you has to exert only minimal effort and expense. This could make for the mother of all nuisance lawsuit runs. The proposed laws would effectively give the music and movie industries a host of powers they have tried to abuse in the past but could not. Instead of having to threaten lawsuits in which people could defend themselves, they can now threaten immediate action which could cost the accused even more if they tried to defend themselves. No more “pay us $3000 or we'll sue you” nonsense--now we'll start hearing about threats where people are forced to cough up much more, once the amount of damage they can incur with only minimal expense has increased greatly. Note also that these copyright holders are being given similar powers as law enforcement. I can't be the only one concerned about this as a trend, can I? The same copyright holders who routinely sue people for outrageous amounts based only upon an IP address, when it is clear the targets had nothing to do with the infringement? The same copyright holders who have made a habit of shaking down individuals for thousands of dollars apiece against the threat of costing ten times more to fight what may be specious allegations in a court of law--in effect, hundreds of thousands of sham nuisance lawsuits? The same copyright holders who then opened the door for innumerable scam artists to wield the same legal weapons as means for even greater shakedowns of the general public? The same copyright holders who paid off politicians to get the DMCA, and made it the law of the land that stealing one song could incur fines of up to $150,000? These same people are now paying money (let's face it, our government was up for sale long before Citizen's United) for legislation to get these new acts passed, ones where the copyright holders are given access to similar powers as law enforcement? Where they will be able to, with the same flimsy standards of “proof” that they have abused for years now, have any person they choose lose their web site and possibly their livelihood, have their access to advertising shut down, close off any methods of receiving income, and even force search engines to erase any sign that they exist? Even lead to their imprisonment? Yes, yes, I know they will not start doing this to everyone. But from their past actions, it is clear they will cast a wide net and will not hesitate to ruin people who are clearly innocent in order to maintain the illusion that they don't make mistakes because their system of collecting evidence is a sham. And yes, I know they are not becoming a new armed police force who can act independently and with impunity. But they are beginning to take on roles that traditionally have been wholly in the realm of public law enforcement. This is what concerns me most: the precedent that is being set. The precedent that corporations are now active participants not only in creation of absurdly lopsided legislation (which gives then extraordinary awards for pedestrian crimes, the effects of said infringements being in fact very much debatable), but are also becoming active participants in the process of enforcement of these laws. Corporations as police, corporations which can act not just to sue people but to immediately erase their businesses in an age where many businesses are based on the web. And then, later, sort things out and maybe impoverish them or send them to jail for a few years. Based upon legislation they wrote to their advantage and then paid lawmakers to make into the law of the land. Surely I cannot be the only one who sees this not only as an exercise in rabid plutocracy, but also as a trial balloon for future expansion?

Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks opines that religion survives despite its functionality being replaced by modernity because:

My answer is simple. Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live? … You can take science, technology, the liberal democratic state and the market economy as four institutions that characterize modernity, but none of these four will give you an answer to those questions that humans ask.

Sadly, what that boils down to is a fear of death. Finding meaning is part of that, as meaning gives a sense of fulfillment in the face of departure (having children or leaving works to be remembered by accomplishes this as well, but those also can be fulfilled without religion). Ultimately, we sense demise as oblivion, and fear it like nothing else. Religion gives us an escape from that which horrifies us to our core--and thus explains why, then, people become so intensely charged when their religion is challenged or questioned. Tearing down even a part of that structure is, to many, equal to tearing it down as a whole; this explain why, when confronted over even trivial matters, some religious folk become highly offended and extraordinarily defensive. You're not just questioning one part of scripture, you are, emotionally to them, trying to deprive them of their comfort in the face of absolute demise. What would truly challenge religion is not science, doctors, credit cards, or psychotherapists. Instead, people facing and coming to terms with their mortality would accomplish that. To find solace and satisfaction with the fact that you have existed at all, the gift that life is all in itself, or even to know that oblivion would carry with it an end to even fear. If we could find a way to instill a comfort with mortality, religion would take a serious hit. But not a mortal hit, because there is one other major reason religion survives: tradition. People passing religion on because they were immersed in it from their birth onwards, like an ancestral home. That all in itself has a powerful inertia, a momentum that could not easily be stopped.

When will Americans wake up to the fact that when Republicans say they will never raise taxes, they mean only on rich people? That Republicans are chomping at the bit to raise taxes on the poor and middle class? Look at Romney's new tax proposal: Contrast this with McCain from 2008, where the proposal was to cut taxes for everyone, but mostly for the rich and only a little for the poor and middle class. Note that in both plans, the cuts for the rich are not just bigger because they make more money, they grow bigger in terms of percentage of income. So it's not just a matter of getting more cuts because you pay more in taxes, it's a matter of getting more cuts simply because you're rich. Conservatives are not against redistribution of wealth, they are all for it--as long as it is redistributed upwards. A tune comes to mind… Dennis Moore Dennis Moore, Riding through the land; Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore, Without a merry band; He steals from the poor, And gives to the rich….

Fascinating how right-wingers are vilifying positive words. They started with “liberal.” That word, when you look it up, has associations like tolerant, unprejudiced, open-minded, enlightened, permissive, free, easygoing, advanced, modern, forward-looking, flexible, free, generous, benevolent, charitable, altruistic, unselfish, and enlightened--and is the opposite of strict, miserly, narrow-minded, and bigoted (words which are, not ironically, associated with “conservative”). They attacked the noble term as the “L” word and made it an epithet. They similarly have been trying to besmirch the word “Democratic” by severing the ending and truncating it to “Democrat,” emphasizing the “RAT” at the end. Then they went after “elite,” a word embodying the concept of exceptionalism (a term they favor), a word which signifies extreme talent and capability--the best, the crème de la crème. They then applied it to people who never suggested they were actually elite, and snidely implied that these “elite” were snobby, arrogant assholes who lorded their superiority over everyone else. Why? Because they “know better than you,” simply for forwarding their own agenda, something everyone in politics does. Now, when you hear Newt Gingrich (the original master of the art of subverting language to political means) attacking Mitt Romney, you hear another word being defamed and reviled: “moderate.” This is indicative of how extreme the right wing is getting: the new aspersion is aimed not at liberals but at the less extreme members of their own party. They are actually vilifying a word which describes someone who is not a frenzied radical. And that pretty much tells you where the mainstream of the Republican party is nowadays. So, if you want something good and clean to be soiled and besmirched, you know who the experts are.

Rick Santorum, speaking to a crowd in Sioux City on how liberals make people dependent on them by aggressively signing them up for Medicaid, said this:

I don't want to, to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.

What's interesting is that his speech for the most part was clear and fluent, but when he came to the part about “black people,” he hesitated and stuttered a bit, and the word “black” came out a bit slurred, almost as if he was trying damned hard not to say it but couldn't come up with something else quickly enough without coming to a complete rhetorical stop. Santorum later claimed, “I'm pretty confident that I didn't say 'black.” [I] was starting to say one word, and I sort of came up with another word and moved on and it sounded like black.“ Nope, it was pretty clearly ”black.“ It's hard to imagine what else the word could have been. But his denial only adds to the verbal stumbling in creating the rather clear impression that he is focusing on the idea that black people mooch off of whites, that this is what he believe is the real problem, but knows that would sound racist (because it is) and so, like creationists using ”intelligent design,“ dresses it up in more respectable clothes.

My iPad (first generation) has been more or less disabled by Apple. How? Because I upgraded to iOS 5, thinking that because I had not heard any horror stories about the upgrade on various sites, it must be OK. Huge mistake. If you have a first-generation iPad, DO NOT upgrade to iOS 5. Apple should be ashamed of itself for allowing iOS 5 to be approved for the iPad 1, considering how they will easily disallow upgrades on devices whenever they feel the user experience is not supportable with new software. How they felt that the iPad 1 could work under iOS 5 is completely beyond me. It's mostly a matter of RAM memory. Using iOS 4, I could count on about half of the iPad's 256 MB of RAM to be free upon a restart. This would often dwindle, especially when I used memory-intensive apps like Civilization Revolution. I noted that if free memory got down to below 10 MB, any app I used would be likely to crash. After “upgrading” to iOS 5, primarily because I wanted to use iCloud with all my other devices (Apple's syncing with all prior software sucked big-time), I started installing stuff--and began to notice that apps would start crashing all the time. I checked the free memory and found it to be below 10 MB. I tried restarting, and it jumped to about 30 MB--only to fall to 15 MB in a few seconds, and fluctuated below 10 MB regularly. I tried a new restore--same problem. I restored again, this time as a new iPad--same problem. I checked out various web sites and Apple discussions, and people claimed it was just the restore that would fix it. But then I stumbled across the correct answer, finding the culprit which was causing most of the grief. iCloud. Yep, the app which was pretty much the only reason I upgraded was the one which essentially wiped out the iPad's memory and made the device completely unusable. This was not something wrong with my iPad or mys settings. This was Apple's recommended basic setup. 15 MB of free RAM after a basic startup is ludicrous. What the fuck was Apple thinking? So I restored once again and this time didn't activate iCloud, and sure enough, memory cleared up--somewhat. Now I'll have as much as 60 MB of memory free upon startup--only half of what there was before--but now the damned thing at least will not crash all the time. I suspect that I won't be able to use many of the apps I took for granted before, and as such will have a half-lobotomized iPad. I intend to complain, loudly, to Apple and insist they do more than tell me that I'm screwed. Not that it will get me anywhere, but customers have to give companies grief if they pull crap like this.

Now when I see headlines like Santorum surges in Iowa, How Slimy Is Santorum?, or Murdoch Tweets That He Likes Santorum Surge‎, I have to wonder if they're double entendres. However, it seems pretty obvious looking at all the headlines that the media is trying its best not to create headlines which could be giggled at in light of the candidate's Google-bombed alternative definition. Let's face it, the most logical headline from Iowa in the past week should have been “Santorum Comes From Behind,” which this Catholic news site almost used. Had it been anyone else, it would have been the standard headline; as it was, nobody in the media used it except one guy in Pittsburgh, and that was intentional. My guess is that the “Liberal” media is holding it in and keeping it clean until Santorum fades away, which they expect will be in a few weeks anyway. Though one has to wonder if they would ever bring it up out front.

Sachi and I just felt a really strong tremor. Looks like it might have been a 5 or so in the Pacific to the south. Really shook us strongly here. Update: now they're saying it's a 6.8. Update: Now it's upgraded to a 7.0, 300 miles to our SSW. Despite that, it registers as being strongest from Tokyo northward to Fukushima. This one may have been distant, but it registered strong here. It had Sachi and me getting ready to look for cover.

This is my year, my fifth time around, so I'm turning 48 in June. Holy cow, I'll be 50 soon. Just after midnight, Sachi and I celebrated with a snack of ham, cheese, and nuts with red wine (a gift from a friend), not the healthiest of late-night snacks, but it's not like we do this every night. Even Ponta got a nice snack of rice and a little bit of cheese. 2011 was, well, a full year. I started out with a case of the flu in January. Since I got permanent residency in late 2010, we were in full house-hunting mode throughout the first four months of the year. We got scammed by our realtor who faked us into signing for our house (which, fortunately, turned out to be a house we're happy with, which does not excuse the scumball realtor). Between that and actually finalizing the deal, a 9.0 earthquake shook the whole of eastern Japan, causing a tsunami which killed as many as 19,000 people, and setting off a nuclear disaster which seemed to go on forever. Stores were low on supplies for weeks while the whole nation sat on the edge of their collective seats waiting to see how bad bad could get in Fukushima. My school closed for the remainder of the semester. Then we moved into our new house, with all the work and technicalities involved with all that. We bought a bunch of new furniture and settled in. In May, we landscaped our small garden and learned that bin Laden had been killed. Judgment Day came and passed, and then came and passed again. Sachi and I planned a housewarming party, but then her father, Junzo, passed away. We went to Nagano for the funeral. I fractured a bone in my right foot which I had broken some years back, which kept me on crutches for more than a month, foiling our plan to buy a puppy in late July. Then I fell and sprained my left wrist which made it hard to use crutches. I made a DIY PC. I stopped blogging on a regular basis just as the right wing went nuclear and the Occupy movement started gaining steam. After my foot got better, we got Ponta, for whom I started a blog. A typhoon hit, prompting my school to close early that day. Steve Jobs passed away. Sachi and I planned another housewarming party and had to cancel it as my mother fell ill and I had to take an emergency trip back to America. My mother passed away while I was there. I came back to Japan, finished my semester here, and bought a used car (having a car is a fairly big deal if you live in Japan). Then I went back to America for a two-week visit, and came back to Japan to celebrate Christmas and New Year's with Sachi and Ponta. It's hard to think back to a year as event-filled as this one, and brings to mind the Chinese curse about living in interesting times. But there's been good along with the bad, the most significant of which was getting Ponta, who has been a particularly bright spot in our lives. Let's hope this year will be a better one, Mayan calendars notwithstanding.

This Rand Paul quote won the Malkin Award at Sullivan's blog:

With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses. ... You have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you? That’s ultimately what the right to free health care would be.

This did not make sense to me the first time I read it; it sounded like a completely absurd non-sequitur, that having compulsory health care enslaves everyone in the health care industry. No doctor would ever be forced to do anything at gunpoint or by any other means of coercion, much less for no pay as the charge of 'slavery' would imply. He did make this rationalization:

Basically, once you imply a belief in a right to someone’s services — do you have a right to plumbing? Do you have a right to water? Do you have right to food? — you’re basically saying you believe in slavery.

The problem, of course, is that it doesn't work that way. I have a right to legal representation, but that doesn't make a slave of the public defender. Such public services are paid for by the government, and no one in the service industry is forced to participate, nor is forbidden from making their own private practice. So one has to wonder, is Paul deranged? How did he make the leap to slavery? I didn't see it at the time. However, reading it now, I see a code statement there which completes the “logic” circuit of the statement (if “logic” is a word that can be used here):

You have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you?

Out of context, that just sounds like a statement which supports the wild claim of enslavement, but it actually opens a window on the basis of the entire view (with the word “ultimately” in the next sentence modifying the sentiment). This is something I did not realize before because I had not heard a core belief of Libertarian anti-taxation reasoning. The reasoning is this: taxes are mandatory, which means that if you steadfastly refuse to pay them, the government will, ultimately, send people with guns to your door to force you to pay. Therefore, taxation equals theft at gunpoint. This reasoning is especially applied to compassionate acts, government activities to benefit the downtrodden. This is bad, as the use of tax money to do good acts is essentially use armed robbery to accomplish charity, and that is wrong. You can't force people to do good things. For some Libertarians, especially those of the Randian stripe, this is a fundamental concept which is thoroughly ingrained in their thinking. In light of that reasoning, re-read the Rand Paul statement above, and suddenly his thought process becomes apparent. He wasn't thinking through a real-life scenario where the issuance of the Affordable Care Act would literally lead to him being dragooned into medical thralldom. Instead, he was taking the Libertarian maxim that taxation (especially for government acts of compassion) equals armed robbery, and applying it to the context of health care reform. Since taxation means that eventually the government forces you to pay at gunpoint, he reasoned that the equivalent is that compulsory health care eventually means that doctors will be forced to treat at gunpoint. From there, he got to the idea of health care workers being enslaved. Confusing the point is his statement that it was not an abstraction--but that's exactly what it was. It just wasn't an abstraction for Rand Paul, because the idea of taxation being armed robbery is so solidly hard-wired into his world-view that he takes it completely literally, and thinks it is a concrete step in a chain of reasoning. Without the Libertarian concept in mind, one gets lost along the way. Paul could see the sense in it, as could many who have the same core philosophy. Without that knowledge, however, his claim sounds not just ludicrous, but wholly nonsensical. This is the problem with any kind of interpersonal communication, really: many of us have basic assumptions which may differ greatly from those held by others. Since we form chains of reasoning which employ these assumptions, we come to conclusions which confuse other people because they lack that assumption. For example, let's say that I believe that computers put out radiation which causes all manner of health problems with just limited exposure. Let's say that it is so core a belief that I either assume that everyone else knows it or can't imagine anyone else not knowing it. Consequently, when you take out your laptop when you are around me, you will not understand why I get upset or accuse you of trying to kill me. I'll sound like I'm insane. In short, the key to understanding the madness on the conservative side of politics today is to know what particular brand of utter bullshit the people you hear talking take for granted. That will allow you to better understand their lines of thinking which lead them to believe that Obama runs death panels and other crap along those lines. Alternatively, all too often there is no line of reasoning--they believe all manner of demented nonsense simply because they heard it somewhere and want to believe it. They'll hear bullshit from sources like Fox News and simply assume that there is a line of reasoning which leads to the story they enjoy hearing. That's how, for example, they can believe Obama is a communist and a fascist at the same time--they heard one pundit say he's a communist, and another say he's a fascist. They trust both sources and simply accept whatever they say as truth. Since they did not go through the thought processes which lead to the conclusion, nor did they question either conclusion, they believe both at the same time and see no problem with it.

Rick Perry knows how:

“Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil that we don’t have to buy from a foreign source,” Mr. Perry said in Clarinda, earning a loud round of enthusiastic applause.

One has to wonder exactly how many people in that crowd of supporters actually noticed the error. One thing that you find out from being around Canadians (as I have here in Japan, where the working holiday visa has drawn a disproportionate number) is that they don't particularly enjoy it when Canada is naturally assumed to be a “part” of the United States. If you want to really annoy a Canadian, ask them if Canada became a state before or after Hawaii. One interesting by-product of the resulting conversation is that you will learn how many and which Hollywood stars are actually Canadians.

2011 has been a long year for us, with unusually extreme ups and downs. This was the year of the Tohoku earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis. It was also the year we lost Sachi's father and my mother. On the other end of things, however, we bought a car, got our brilliant little puppy Ponta, and bought a new house. I was even supposed to get Spanish citizenship, though that was thwarted at the last moment by Spanish bureaucracy (I'll almost certainly get it later, though). Things have changed fast, making life today almost unrecognizable from what it was a year ago. So here's looking towards a bright future, with greetings from us here in the Poza household. Here is our Christmas Card (enlarge on click) for this year: And yes, I photoshopped the license plate, we don't really have all fives. If you would like to see Sachi's souped-up and doggie-fied version of this, go check out the post at Shiba Me. Merry Christmas!

Sachi made a very nice dinner last night, even including Ponta in the festivities. It was a nice chicken meal, spicy dark meat with carrots, onions, and pumpkin, and a nice avocado salad, with rice and a cheese/tomato sauce on the side. Ponta had chicken breast with toast in pumpkin soup with carrots and some kibble. Afterwards, Sachi and I had a nice dessert--a homemade winter log cake (not uncommon in Japan) with sweet whipped cream/cream cheese frosting (yum!): It was a great Christmas Eve--how could it not be with these guys?

Unless you consider yourself to belong to the upper class--that is, if you are worth less than a few million dollars or make less than a hundred thousand dollars a year--then if you vote Republican, you're a total idiot. Republicans want to do away with most taxes on rich people by lowering the marginal tax rate by more than half to 15%, and by lowering to zero the capital gains tax, which is a major source of income for the wealthy. At the same time, they want to raise taxes on the poor, as evidenced by (1) the 15% flat rate which would instantly raise taxes significantly on the poorest Americans, (2) their intense disgust that people making a pittance don't pay income taxes at all and should start doing so, and (3) their favor of de-emphasizing income taxes (which presently favor the poor) with sales or VAT taxes (which would favor the rich and hurt the poor). All this despite their pledge to never raise taxes--a pledge they only seem to honor if it refers to taxes on wealthy people. Then there's representation. Republicans love the idea that corporations are people and elevated the practice of lobbying to a high art, assuring that institutions of wealth, controlled by the wealthiest people, have the most powerful representation and influence possible. Meanwhile, through voter ID and other laws based upon utterly false claims of election fraud, they seek to suppress the ability to vote amongst the poor, the elderly, the young, and especially among minorities. This tendency is accentuated with the use of practices like voter caging, false representation of voting times and places, fraudulent registration scams, illicit “felons list” disenfranchisement, and a host of other exercises in what is actually election fraud. But, according to Republicans, it's liberals who are engaging in “class warfare.” You might say that Democrats will raise your taxes. See above--unless you're in the upper class, it's the Republicans who have come out clearly for raising your taxes--while Democrats have lowered your taxes, though you probably failed to notice it. You might say that Democrats spend more. This despite the fact that Republicans show every propensity to spend as much as if not more then Democrats. Not to mention that Democrats want to spend the money on things that you probably want, like Social Security and Medicare, while Republicans want to spend the money on Defense and fighting massive land wars in Asia, which you might approve of but nevertheless benefits you not at all. And yes, Obama has spent a lot--but most of it has either been spending Republicans pressured him to spend, or else has been spent trying to undo the mess Republicans got us into. Had Obama become president in 2000, it is likely he would have massively underspent Bush. You might say that you're social conservative--but even that's not much to go on. Most of the stuff right-wingers go on about in terms of social issues are things that are not real, like the “War on Christmas” or other imagined attacks on white Christians (usually males), or are things that Republicans are not actually trying to change because they work so well to rally voters like yourself. It could very well be that there are things that Republicans actually fight for and achieve that you really believe are more important than all the things they do which make your life worse--but the chances are against it. And if you long for the classic Republicans, the Republicans of the Reagan years, for example, then look no further: they call themselves “Democrats” nowadays.

You have to wonder what kind of checking and oversight they do on spelling when creating these banners: Now, that's a natural misspelling, very understandable: the spell checker would not catch that “whopping” was a misspelling of “whooping.” If these are random, then they are at least explicable if not acceptable at that level. Fox News, on the other hand, seems to intentionally make errors. The easiest place to see this is where they paint disgraced Republicans as Democrats, usually with a “D” before their name: If this happened just once, even twice fully at random, then maybe... but it has happened several times under specific conditions. That's not an error, that's a pattern. True, Fox sometimes makes actual errors out of sheer stupidity, as they did with the graphic of Japan showing a nuclear reactor in Tokyo named “Shibuyaeggman.” This does not, however, mean that all errors are due to ineptitude; quite few are demonstrably intended. A real tell was with this screen: No way that was a typo. That graphic could not have been made in “error.” It was clearly intentional, intended as a swipe at Romney. In essence, Fox intentionally makes “mistakes” to even further slant the “news” they present.