It was almost exactly ten years ago that I first started working at Lakeland College, in our building on Shokuan Boulevard in north-eastern Shinjuku. The school had been there only a few years when I arrived; it was a building with a very small footprint, albeit nine stories tall, and served us well for those years.

But we found it necessary to move, and that process has just begun to end. After months of planning and working things out, the move was completed today; the new building stands full of bare-bones furniture nearly swamped in boxes that will have to be unpacked over the next week, as we make the new building home.

I had to do a lot of work on this myself, mostly in the form of planning the layout. Using Adobe InDesign, I made a to-scale map of the building and every component to be in it–I measured every nook and cranny of every room, along with every piece of furniture to bring it all together. Then I had to figure out other stuff, like how much room should each seat comfortably have for the occupants to work and still be able to push out from the desk, and have people walk behind them, while not taking up so much space as to fill up the building too soon. The color of flooring at the entrance, which furniture would go to which room, how to deal with a mold problem in the basement, and dozens of other issues had to be dealt with. Walls torn down, walls installed, wiring completed–it’s been a huge headache.

But it’s almost finished. We have worked on a tight budget, so we were not able to completely re-outfit everything; as raw as some parts of the building must be, we are getting it done. Our first semester may not look pretty, but it’ll work, while we get everything filled in and fixed up over time.

When I went in to work today, the old building was just an empty shell:

Since our old phone number remains active until tomorrow, we have had to keep a staff member in the empty room, answering phones left on a trolley cart. For some unknown reason, we were not able to keep our long-held phone numbers, despite only moving a kilometer away, and still in the same area code–hell, even the same neighborhood. But that’s the phone company for you.

I’d love to show off the new building, but it’s little more than a sea of boxes right now. Here are a few shots of the new faculty room.

A wider composite shot–I need to get a wider-angle lens for my camera… :

Tomorrow I go in to test computer networks and unpack boxes. Wheee!!

You may have heard about how McCain, and now McClinton both support a “gas tax holiday” for this summer, and argue that Obama is “out of touch” with regular Americans because he opposes the “tax cut.” The problem: the tax cut is so limited, in fact nearly worthless, that it works only as an election-year gimmick, not an actual solution to any problem. The tax stands at 18.6 cents per gallon, where gas costs $3.60 on average in the U.S. today. Let’s say that your gas tank holds 15 gallons and you pay the average price; you will save only $2.79 on a $54 refill. Wow! What a savings! That should fix a lot of people’s financial problems!

Truth is, you could probably save more money right now just by going to one of those web sites that finds the lowest gas prices, and save ten to fifteen cents per gallon that way. In my old ZIP code, there is a 23-cent-per-gallon difference between the highest and the lowest gas prices at stations within just a few miles of each other.

In short, the McCain/Clinton proposal is nothing more than hot air; Obama has got to be respected for speaking truth on this one, in contrast with Clinton’s jumping on the McCain publicity-stunt bandwagon:

Mr. Obama derided the McCain-Clinton idea of a federal tax holiday as a “short-term, quick-fix” proposal that would do more harm than good, and said the money, which is earmarked for the federal highway trust fund, is badly needed to maintain the nation’s roads and bridges.

In 2000, Mr. Obama supported a bill in the Illinois legislature to suspend most of the state’s 6.25 percent gasoline sales tax. But he later opposed making the reduction permanent, arguing that the state needed the revenue and that the measure had saved consumers little.

Mrs. Clinton, of New York, has also taken varying stands on the issue of gas taxes. In her 2000 Senate campaign, she spoke against repealing the federal gasoline tax, calling it “one of those few taxes that New York actually gets more money from Washington than we send.”

At a meeting with voters in North Carolina on Monday, Mr. Obama said lifting the gas tax for three months would save the average consumer no more than $30, a figure confirmed by Congressional analysts. Mr. Obama has previously dismissed Mr. McCain’s proposal as a “scheme.”

“Half a tank of gas,” Mr. Obama told his audience. “That’s his big solution.”

Well-put. Naturally, the Liberal Media™ will probably report that Obama is costing you money and how Clinton is successfully pulling for the little guy. Because the media is now far less about reporting facts than it is about branding images for profit.

Update: I was thinking of adding this when I wrote the above post, but couldn’t think of a way to phrase it succinctly and convincingly; Krugman, in a rare moment of not baiting Obama, put it extremely well:

if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.

Forgive me the omission.

Remember the recent “Pwn to Own” competition, where it was claimed that Windows security was so much better than Mac security, because the Mac was cracked nearly instantly on day 2, but the Windows machine lasted until day 3?

Well, people are learning the hard way that these competitions don’t necessarily reflect real life:

Hundreds of Thousands of Microsoft Web Servers Hacked

Hundreds of thousands of Web sites – including several at the United Nations and in the U.K. government — have been hacked recently and seeded with code that tries to exploit security flaws in Microsoft Windows to install malicious software on visitors’ machines.

Could it possibly be that this Windows flaw was not used at the competition because it was worth a lot more in the real world than it was in a hacker’s competition? Um, duh. Were such hacks not so valuable on the black market, the Windows machines at the competition probably would have been hacked immediately. That doesn’t mean that Windows is more secure–precisely the opposite, in fact. Mac hacks are relatively valueless enough that hackers would rather use them to get a free laptop. Windows hacks are valuable enough to sell to people who want to do serious harm.

So far, Mac security woes remain almost completely on the hypothetical level: reported vulnerabilities, proof-of-concept malware, and hack-purely-for-show demonstrations, which are almost the only examples used to claim that Mac security ain’t so great. The only other examples are social-engineering trojans which depend on tricking humans into circumventing the OS security, and even those number at two, possibly three.

Windows security, on the other hand, comes up short in the real world: tens of thousands of pieces of malware, worldwide virus and worm threats, attacks causing disruption and a great deal of time and money spent on containment and repair, and countless attacks on personal machines. Just this last week, my boss told me that his browser became completely useless because every time he tried to go to a web site, porn and other spam links were substituted; his security software (kept up-to-date) somehow missed it in screening and could not repair it, and so now he’s going to have to reinstall the entire OS and all his software. Many of my students who use Windows have reported similar problems, and I have had several friends over the past few years tell me about malware wiping out their Windows systems.

I know tons of people who own Macs, and despite none of them running any security software, none have ever reported any such problems.

So, when you read those editorials about how Windows actually has “better” security than Macs, understand that such reports do not always do not in any way reflect real-world situations. Maybe this will change at some point in the future, but sure as hell not yet.

RIM, which makes the BlackBerry, is reportedly developing a touchscreen version of their device which is code-named “AK,” for “Apple Killer.” Right away, you can guess that it probably will be nothing of the sort. I am pretty sure that when Apple designed the iPhone, while they may have been aiming to make a device that was far better than other devices, they were not focused on making a “BlackBerry killer,” or a “Nokia killer.” If they had, the iPhone would probably be a lot worse than it turned out to be.

Any time you design something based upon trying to beat someone else, you usually wind up short, because you’re basing your design on something other than the user’s actual needs or desires. If RIM were smart, they would simply hire the best engineers and tell them, “forget every other device; simply start from scratch and make the best communications device you can imagine.” Which is what I imagine Jobs told his design team.

Instead, they probably went to the engineers who were stuck in BlackBerry mode and told them, “imitate the iPhone, but make it better!”

Long story short, I’m not selling my Apple stock any time soon.

Say that three times fast! But hopefully, don’t catch any. I haven’t had any so far, but my dad just reported getting IM’ed by a spammer. Googling it, I found people who said they’d been IM-spammed on Skype frequently, to the point they were getting new spams every few minutes.

This was so inevitable, I am surprised I didn’t see it coming. Given the open directory of Skype, and the fact that many people will leave their settings open to it, and the fact that spammers gleefully crap all over and ruin any resource they think they can squeeze a fast buck out of, I am in hindsight frankly amazed that this hasn’t already become epidemic. Maybe it’s because so many people aren’t using Skype yet. We just recently used Skype to hold a conference between our Japan campus and our home campus in Wisconsin, and almost nobody there had even heard of Skype before.

Fortunately, there are steps you can take. Blocking spammers is useless, as they generate hordes of accounts and you’d be blocking them all day and night. Instead, go to your settings, and under “Privacy,” set it so that only people you have authorized can send IM’s or anything else. Spammers then can still pester you with unlimited requests to show your details or add them to your contact lists; under “Notifications” in your preferences, you can stop the sound from playing when that happens. On the Mac, that’s the extent you can stop them, but on the Windows version, you can also block pop-up windows or system tray notifications when they do that. Hopefully, they’ll add that to the Mac version soon.

You might wonder if spammers would bother to attempt to be added to your contacts list, as few people would fall for such a transparent scam, especially more than once. But remember, few ever buy stuff from spammers–but since spammers automate their spew and can send millions out per day, they don’t care if only one person out of a thousand is stupid enough to fall for it–that’s all they need, and they are likely to get it. Witness Nigerian bank account scammers, where you get emails from someone wishing to use your bank account to transfer X million dollars, and you get to keep 10~30%. This has become so famous it’s literally a joke–but they keep sending them, in large numbers, especially to email addresses found on web sites. Someone must still be falling for it. Hard to believe that someone so stupid could survive even daily life, but there you are.

I am trying to think of a non-Internet analogy to describe spammers, but am coming up blank. Where else in the history of the world has there been a small group of people who invade, defile, and nearly incapacitate large public forums, and yet get away with it so regularly that everyone simply accepts them as a force of nature or something? I mean, advertising in general is kind of like that, but not to nearly the degree that spammers have become a destructive force on the Internet.

Sachi and I are watching Japanese TV and a live picture of the Olympic torch run through Nagano. While there are some pro-Chinese groups, there is a very large pro-Tibet contingent in the crowd. People are throwing stuff at the torch bearers (the security includes runners with clear plastic panels to deflect projectiles), and at least a few people have tried to rush the runner. Unlike in European cases, the Japanese police are pretty good at riot control, and are successfully keeping the more active protesters from stopping the run. Japan Probe showed a preview of what the security would look like, and it was pretty accurate.

I know we shouldn’t respond to liberal-baiting by right-wing media loons, but I think that in this election season, there is a value to pointing out to people who consider themselves ordinary Americans exactly how sick and depraved the conservative side of things can get.

Case in point: Rush Limbaugh, while playing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas”–an obvious, racist reference to Hillary winning the Democratic nomination–stated on air that he dreams of, hopes for race riots in Denver to sink the chances for a Democratic win in November.

The dream end of this is that this keeps up to the convention and we have a replay of Chicago 1968 with burning cars, protests, fires, literal riots, and all of that. That’s that’s the objective here. … Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don’t elect Democrats.

The fact that he called the riots an “objective” is what spurred many to understand that he was calling for, trying to instigate riots; with his “Operation: Chaos” history, the impression was that Dittoheads would descend upon Denver and spark the riots themselves, then blame blacks and Democrats for the violence. Rush denied this, insisting that he only expected blacks to riot and prayed for such an outcome, not that he would try to instigate such an outcome (which, after all, would be a felony offense).

When a caller confronted him with this the next day, he claimed that his conduct on the show demonstrated “nothing but love, care and concern for people,” then proceeded to call the woman he was talking to a “mush head.” Defending himself on his racist-toned Denver riot fantasy, he claimed that it was Al Sharpton who was reprehensible and responsible:

The fact is that the Democrat Party has members in it that have already said, ‘There will be riots,’ or something to that effect. Al Sharpton. He was throwing down the gauntlet to the superdelegates: ‘You take this election away from Barack Obama, and there’s gonna be trouble. There’s going to be trouble in Denver.’

Because, as we all know, if Al Sharpton warns of “trouble in Denver,” that has to mean race riots and nothing else, like a contested convention that could be harmful to the party. Reportedly, after making that statement, Sharpton then went straight to Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem and ordered an “M.F.’ing iced tea.”

I searched the web for any independent source of the Sharpton quote, and could find nothing at all. Rush either picked up on some stealth report of Sharpton’s words, or twisted Sharpton’s words so far out of context that it would not be possible to find the actual quote, or just made up the attribution out of whole cloth.

Whatever the case, whether Sharpton said there would be trouble or not, Limbaugh is showing the same propensity he did when he jumped on an L.A. Times article about the film archetype “magic negro” to launch a weeklong racial tirade against Sharpton and Obama. The pattern is to take a marginal statement out of the media and use it as cover for allowing his racist attitudes to take flight. It’s not him who is racist, you see–he’s just commenting on racial matters that someone else brought up.

Remember also that Limbaugh, while outrageous, is not some fringe loon–he popularly represents a mainstream Republican caucus. If you’re considering voting Republican, consider carefully the company you keep.

Anyone who thinks they know about Obama’s pastor and that he reflects badly on Obama should feel obligated to see him outside the context of a ten-second video clip. Here’s an excerpt from the upcoming broadcast:

Just watching that excerpt should be a good start for anyone who thinks that Wright is some anti-American loon. Go ahead.

I was listening to the iTunes podcast of Bill Moyer’s Journal, and he was discussing the idea of separation of church and state, beginning by reporting on the Pope’s concern that the United States was becoming a “secularized” society, as if that were some form of evil, like creeping fascism. I griped internally that it never fails to tire me when religious people try to force religion into the public square and down our throats. But in an effort to see things from both sides, I then reflected on the idea that maybe they see people like me in the same light: trying to shove my secularism and science down their throats.

But when I got through, I came out with the conclusion that secularism and science are appropriate as a public standard whereas religion is not. The principle behind that is the ultimate fairness of the neutral starting point: we begin at zero, with no pre-standing biases or beliefs–a level playing field, in other words–and work from that point forward.

Secularism is very close to, if not the embodiment of, that fair and equal starting point; nobody gets an advantage, all are treated equally. In contrast, having religious faith be a public standard is far from that; it disrespects those who choose not to have a belief in religion. And let’s face it, in most cases, people who say they want “faith” or “belief” in general to be the standard really want their faith, to the exclusion of all others, to be that standard–which is why Christians became furious when a Hindu was allowed to give the invocation in the U.S. Senate. And it’s not just other religions; when it comes down to it, any other sect tends to become the enemy just as easily. In which case it is not just the atheists and agnostics who suffer, it is every religious sect aside from the dominant one who suffers. Not a level playing field, by far. Thus, secularism is the best safeguard for the freedom of all beliefs, including religious beliefs.

Resentment against such fairness comes from the propensity of individuals to consider their preferred state as the starting point, instead of a truly neutral environment. A person of faith might actually consider a state of religious faith to be the “neutral” or fair environment from which to build; their bias could preclude them from considering the idea that others may not share their views, or that such people are by nature evil or at least lacking any sense of morality. But intolerance is not a good benchmark for equality, and thus the “equal” or “fair” judgment of such people falls somewhat short.

It’s kind of like arguing with militant smokers, who will not accept that a room with clear air is a fair starting point, instead insisting that the starting point is that you do what you want and I do what I want, and if you want me to stop smoking, then we negotiate from there–if I even feel like negotiating.

Again, I have to consider the idea that maybe my starting point of a blank slate is unreasonable, and I have tried to work that out. The answer I come away with is that the blank slate can always be fairly applied, whereas the “everyone is doing whatever they want” starting point, or the “my way is the natural way” starting point can easily be shown as unfair by applying it to any number of situations you would naturally recognize as unfair (e.g., you want everyone to have privacy, but I want to photograph you in the shower; shall we start from there?).

The more reasonable approach to the injection of religion into public affairs is to say that “my religious faith is part of who I am, and I cannot leave it behind when I act in public.” The pope expressed this when he warned of the dangers of secularism:

“Is it consistent to profess our beliefs in church on Sunday, and then during the week to promote business practices or medical procedures contrary to those beliefs? Is it consistent for practicing Catholics to ignore or exploit the poor and the marginalized, to promote sexual behavior contrary to Catholic moral teaching, or to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death?”

This claim is reasonable only up to a certain point: when it stops being about what the person of faith does related to their own private lives, and starts being about what other people choose to do. When your faith begins to impede on the free choice, beliefs, and actions of others, you have crossed a line that cannot rightly or fairly be crossed.

The pope skimmed very close to the line of being objectionable (and crossed the line when he touched on abortion); he held back only by saying that it was wrong to promote actions or ethics the church found unreasonable, or to commit actions that could universally be regarded as wrong. Okay, as far as that goes, I agree; I would not expect a Christian opposed to abortion on religious moral grounds to promote abortion for the sake of secularism. It is, however, a completely different matter if that same person tries to ban abortion for those very same reasons. Not promoting is a personal choice; banning is interfering with the choice of others, which clearly crosses the line.

And that line is defined by a neutral starting point: neither one person’s Catholicism nor another person’s Atheism is the defining standard from which we must move forward, nor is anyone else’s belief system. It must be a neutral starting point. What likely ires many militant religious people is that a neutral starting point, to them, seems like Atheism. That’s why they tend to see Science as some Atheist plot; in order to stay true to scientific principles, you must begin from a neutral, objective starting point–which is also why Science is appropriate as a subject in public schools, free from interference by “faith” or religion: Science teaches us only what is observable and demonstrable. If the real, measurable, observable world comes across as an “attack” on your religious faith, then that shows up a problem in your religious beliefs, not a problem with the fairness of the science curriculum in our schools.

And it is no reason for me to surrender the precious and invaluable gift of secularism (a gift to those with religious faith as much as it is to everyone else) just because those with “faith” cannot bring themselves to play fair.

She won by 9 points, and barely even that. Despite almost every media outlet reporting a ten-point spread (only about one in ten reports mention a 9-point spread, and then only as a question, as if it’s not really clear), the fact remains that Hillary won by almost exactly 9.1%.

So why is everyone reporting 10%? Because of double-rounding. Clinton got 54.55% of the vote in PA, and Obama got 45.45%; that’s just a hair’s breadth from the midline for both numbers, but just barely enough so that Obama’s number is rounded down and Hillary’s is rounded up. Since the media uses the rounded numbers to calculate the distance between the two, it comes out with the 10% figure–despite that number being wholly inaccurate.

Although with how the media has behaved in recent years, it surprises me not at all that their math sucks, too.

Wow, the right-wingers are really showing their true colors as bigots. They just filibustered (what, the 5,349,816th time this session?) a bill that would make it possible for workers to sue for pay discrimination, essentially killing it. Obama and Clinton returned to D.C. to vote for it, and McCain stayed away, signaling that he would have voted to kill it anyway.

Let’s rehash: this is based upon a scummy re-interpretation of law by the Bush administration. The original law was intended to make it so that if you found out your employer was paying you less than another worker for the same job because you were the wrong gender or race, you could sue them, so long as you filed suit 180 days after the last occurrence of the discriminatory pay. That was obviously meant to be structured so that the 180 day deadline happened after the last disparate paycheck was issued.

In a suit based upon this law, an employer tried to claim that the 180-day deadline started when the initial decision was made to issue unequal pay, taking advantage of wording that was just nebulous enough to allow for that interpretation (if you’re a complete idiot). Co-workers don’t immediately disseminate how much money they make to all coworkers, and employers often strongly discourage (or even try to prohibit) such sharing in any case. Finding such disparity within 6 months of the initial pay difference is so rare to discover that the law would essentially be meaningless under the new interpretation. It’s about as obvious as it can get that this was not the way the law was supposed to work.

The plaintiff, Ms. Lilly Ledbetter, won her case, and all the appeals until it reached the conservative-stacked 11th circuit (a spin-off of the 5th circuit, the most conservative in the country)–whereupon the law suddenly changed to support discrimination. Then the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, and naturally, the Bush administration jumped on the company’s side, filing a brief in support of the bigotry, in opposition to the EEOC’s rational application of the law in accordance with decades of precedence. And the 5-member Republican majority on the Supreme Court voted along straight party lines to uphold the ludicrous reinterpretation that essentially gutted the law. (Message: if you’re a corrupt, lawbreaking corporation, now is the time to get your suits before the high court! Get the payoffs while they last!)

Some right-wingers used the “it’s the law’s fault” defense, saying that they’d like to fight against discrimination, but darn it, the law is just so clearly written to be stupid, we have no choice but to follow it and be stupid ourselves. The Bush administration made no such dodges; they simply claimed [PDF] that once a decision was made to discriminate, a corporation could not be expected to remember that it had initiated such discrimination beyond 6 months, and it would be a travesty if people were allowed to sue after discrimination had continued for years and years. (They even made the deranged argument that the Ledbetter law would discourage allegations of discrimination from being “expeditiously resolved.”)

So if a corporation got away with discrimination for 180 days, then they were home free–untouchable from that point on. As I pointed out before, this asinine view of the law just begs for abuse, and is even institutionalized in posterity if pay increases are decided as a percentage of initial pay levels.

Well, no problem–just re-word the law so that it clearly states the obvious intent. But there’s a big problem–no, two big problems: one, the president–who vowed to veto the reworded bill, and now the Senate Republicans, who just filibustered it to death before it could even get to the president’s desk.

So the conservative wingnuts in all three branches of government have not voiced their intent to let bigotry reign.

Ready to vote yet?

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: the insidious Liberal Media™ continues to call Republican obstruction “blocking” or “denying” in their headlines, even eschewing the correct term “filibuster” in the full text of most of the articles covering this story (the few that there are, that is). They showed no such reluctance to use the word “filibuster” almost endlessly in the far more rare cases when Democrats blocked a handful of the most extremist right-wing judicial nominees.

Oh, and here’s a bonus bit of Republican hypocrisy:

Republicans said Democrats were playing politics, by timing the vote to give the Democratic presidential candidates, Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, time to return to the Capitol from the campaign trail. Both senators spoke in support of the bill before the vote.

Yes, how terrible that they allowed senators time to vote on legislation. As opposed to four years ago, when Kerry returned to D.C. to vote for a veteran’s health care vote… and the Republican leadership delayed the vote so Kerry couldn’t vote on it. Those Republicans are just pips, aren’t they?

Apple reports their quarterly performance today after the markets close. They’re supposed to outperform expectations (after their stock “adjusted downwards” 40% after forecasting a poor quarter earlier this year). But Steve at Marketing Apple has an interesting observation to make:

if Apple had underperformed it would announce its earnings on a Friday (to let the market cool down over the weekend.) If it had over-performed, it would announce on a Thursday (to allow the market to run up the stock price.) So what does announcing on a Wednesday tell us?

As I said, Hmmm. Cautiously optimistic.

One point less than is being reported, though many points more than I expected (and of course hoped for). That is to say, Hillary didn’t win it by 10 points–the results right now have her with a 9.39% lead, so let’s establish that and stay with the facts. It may seem like a quibble, but you can be certain it is one that the Clinton campaign (and unsurprisingly, the media) wants to claim: a double-digit win instead of a single-digit one.

But even that is relatively meaningless, because for all the fuss being made, what I said before the election and what has been established for some time still stands true: Hillary needed a lot more than this to have a chance at winning the nomination.

She made no more than an 11-delegate gain, although perhaps as small as an 8-delegate gain. After the results so far tonight, CNN has Obama ahead by 138 delegates; MSNBC by 133; CBS and USA Today/AP by 126.

The polls show Indiana (84 delegates) as going either way, but certainly closer than Pennsylvania. North Carolina (134 delegates, the last big state left) shows Obama beating Clinton by as much as she won Pennsylvania by. Clinton will probably then get West Virginia (39 delegates) and Kentucky (60 delegates), Obama should get Oregon (65 delegates), Hillary Puerto Rico (63 delegates), and then Obama probably gets Montana (24 delegates) and South Dakota (23 delegates).

But remember: like tonight, winning a state does not take all, and even Clinton’s 9% lead did not give her 9% more delegates–at most, she’ll get 6%, but perhaps even as low as 4%. That’s how it works. Now work those numbers. Let’s say Indiana is a tie, but that Hillary gets a 20-delegate gain in Kentucky, 15 in West Virginia, and maybe 5 in Puerto Rico. Not even counting Obama’s gains, that still leaves Hillary more than 80 delegates short of Obama, and Obama has been picking up superdelegates far faster than Hillary has been. Even if Hillary steals away Montana and South Dakota, that would only add a paltry half-dozen delegate-lead, if even that much. And Obama is set to add at least 10 (probably 15 or more) delegates in North Carolina, and another half-dozen or so in Oregon, keeping Hillary almost a hundred delegates short of just catching up.

But winning? Preposterous. And the superdelegates are professional enough to see that. The math simply denies the possibility. Somehow I doubt they’ll start stacking up for Obama after Pennsylvania–it would seem too much like trying to overturn a popular vote (never mind the cumulative totals). They’ll probably creep up over the next few weeks, but I expect to see movement in early May, after North Carolina and Indiana. Hillary will try to make as much as possible out of Pennsylvania, but even nothing but Clinton victories from here on out would not put her ahead in pledged delegates–she’d need to powerhouse overwhelmingly just to get the superdelegates to hand her the race, and the likelihood of that is near to zero percent. That even with the media continuing to bash Obama mercilessly as they have been in the past several weeks.

Chris Matthews put it this way:

“…But I really do think it’s a strange time because we’re all watching to see who won, but as Nora pointed out, 4 out of 5 ,or so, of the Hillary voters today believe she’s still in the running. That this is still up in the air and I think that was probably a mistake of the media. I think in the effort of the media, to try to keep this game going, we’ve created the delusion that somehow this race is still open. I don’t think it is open. I think if you look at the numbers Barack has to really blow it in the weeks ahead to lose.”

The only thing going for Hillary is that she now reportedly is ahead in the popular vote as opposed to delegate counts. But that won’t win the nomination for her, even if every last superdelegate goes her way. The fact is, you’ve simply got to ask for far too much for Hillary to win, with the faint possible exception of stringing it out to the convention and then winning it with back-room politics… and I simply cannot see the party letting that happen.

But hey, I was wrong about Pennsylvania. I just hope I’m not wrong about this.

Update:I thought the popular-vote-for-Clinton claim sounded fishy. MSNBC gives the real figures: Hillary wins the popular vote only by cheating, as you have to count both Florida and Michigan, and even then you have to deny Obama the “uncommitted” votes, most of which were clearly for him; Obama didn’t campaign in Florida (ha has always narrowed Clinton’s lead by campaigning), and he wasn’t even on the ballot in Michigan.

But since neither Florida nor Michigan had a “real” primary that gave them the chance to see both candidates equally and in person, and more importantly, because those primary contests broke the rules and so do not get included in the actual count, you have to discard those numbers… which leaves Obama with a half-million-vote lead in the popular count.

Today was one of our ceremony days. I don’t usually blog much directly about my school, but I figure it might not be a bad idea to start. In the next few weeks, as we welcome the several hundred new students, move into a new building, and start several other new projects, this is probably a good time for me to give some blog time for introducing the college where I teach.

Today’s ceremony is a big gala bash kind of thing that we have every year to welcome the new crop of students to the school. Both my institution, Lakeland College Japan, and our local administrative affiliate, NIC, hold a common welcoming event.

As usual, the party is held at the ANA hotel in Akasaka, near Tameike Sanno and Roppongi (our graduation ceremonies, in contrast, are held at the Century Hyatt in Shinjuku). With all the students, faculty, staff, parents, and special guests, it fills up a pretty large room.

The first two hours of the ceremony are a bit, let’s say, “official”–it is a series of speeches, either in Japanese, or in English with translation. The directors of the NIC, the Vice President of our college, two visiting scholars, two student representatives, and two guest speakers (one a U.S. embassy official, the other a doctor and professor, author of a book on health) each give a speech. You see the two student representatives below, but the longest speech–more than a half-hour–was given by the author/doctor, and most of us in the faculty on the sidelines couldn’t follow a bit of it.

After that, we gather for a huge group shot–this image is a bit washed out because the flash didn’t take on this shot and I didn’t get another chance before we were shooed together for the official shot–but I wanted to include it to give you an idea of the sea of people it formed.

And then the real party started, lasting about four hours. It began with a toast and a buffet lunch–and if you’ve never had a buffet spread at a Japanese hotel event, you’re missing out on a delicious if high-caloric feast… if you’re fast enough to get your share before the food runs out. More than a dozen entrees, all of them very good. I get this four times a year at our various events.

The opening ceremony always has class, including this string quartet (accompanied by piano in this shot) serving as a nice background for the dining.

A little more official business–in this case, an introduction of the two or three dozen visiting representatives from consortium schools in the U.S. and U.K. (more on that in a future post).

Then came the highlight of the evening: an occasional guest at the opening ceremonies is Toshi, of X Japan fame. X Japan was a very big rock band in the 90’s, and Toshi was a co-founder. The band has recently re-grouped and sold out three Tokyo Dome concerts a few weeks ago. Toshi became a fan of one of NIC’s directors, Hiroko “Zukie” Hirota, after his wife read Zukie’s book and introduced them; he frequently sings at events Zukie organizes.

After treating us to a song, Toshi showed incredible charm and patience in agreeing to take a group photo on the stage with the students who cared to join in–and was swamped in a rush of 18-year-old fans to the stage.

After that came student performances; first was a cheerleading squad, which I happened to catch in an apparent defiance of gravity:

Then a karate demonstration. While breaking the boards never impressed me as they get broken along natural striations in the wood, this guy broke a wooden baseball bat with his foot and a concrete block with his hand. His first attempt that the cinder block didn’t work and you could hear the thunk and see it was not a styrofoam stand-in. Even our librarian, a martial arts practitioner, was very impressed with the guy.

Then came a dance group, two members of which are shown going at it here:

And then another celebrity (a future one, at least), this time one of our own–Hiromi was a student with us six years ago, and releases her first CD soon. (Here’s her blog, where she posted already on today’s event, and on meeting Toshi.)

The evening ended with a few more performances, and then a san-san-nana byoushi clap. I don’t fully understand it yet actually–it seems to be half-cheer, half-good luck tradition. Everyone claps in unison: three sets of three claps followed by a single clap, repeated three times. The father of a former student led everyone, and then we wrapped.

Quite a party, all in all. Welcome, students! And more on my school soon.

But still, this news is rather interesting:

NTT Docomo says the logo will go into regular use from July 1st. It is being introduced as part of a broader overhaul of strategy which the company hopes will help it regain momentum in the mobile market. If you want to read the new mission statement, it is here (Japanese).

Hmm… A new logo and a push to “regain momentum in the mobile market”… which just happens to take place at almost exactly the time Apple is expected to release the new 3G iPhone and version 2 of the iPhone software, namely after the June WWDC conference in mid-June.

Like I said, maybe I’m reaching, but nevertheless coincidences like this should raise red flags.

Hillary is still acting as if winning the nomination is a strong possibility for her, when it clearly is not–like when Hillary said she’s consider Obama as a vice-presidential candidate, it was almost comical in its presumptuousness. But that is what Hillary has to do, because if Pennsylvanians go to vote and figure that she really has no chance, then she will lose, no matter her lead over Obama in the polls: Democrats will vote for Obama, even if they favor Clinton, because they recognize what is best for their party as a whole. It has been made pretty clear to enough people that a Clinton victory would only prolong the inevitable and hurt the party, and I think that this is worth quite enough that Obama stands a good chance of getting a surprising number of votes this week.

Then there are the polls: as I have noted, they are all over the place. This is probably due to the pollsters trying to figure out how to weight the numbers. For example, will young voters or old voters have higher turnouts? Each pollster makes different decisions like these, and therefore we see a 20-point spread in polls with supposed margins of error far smaller than that. But as I note above, I think there will be an effect beyond polling: the polls measure which candidate is supported, and that is not necessarily who they will end up voting for. In my case, right now the idea of a Clinton candidacy is galling–but if the delegate counts were reversed and Obama had as slim a chance as Clinton has now, then painful as it might be, I would vote for Clinton for the good of the party. And that’s saying something.

Not to mention that both Ohio and Texas had semi-open primaries; Pennsylvania’s is closed. That means we’ll see fewer “Limbaugh” Republicans crossing the lines to get the candidate they want, and that could have an effect as well.

This close to the end, with the damage from a prolonged campaign so clear, and the real conclusion of the race so evident… I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict Obama will, if not win, at the very least lose by no more than 4 or 5 points in Pennsylvania. I would favor, however, something much closer, near a tie.

The question is, how will Pennsylvania be spun by the high and mighty media? In the past, Obama has been hurt by high expectations; his advancing in the polls in the days just before other elections made him seem like the favored candidate, and that hurt him mightily–look at New Hampshire, where the polls saw him jump from a double-digit deficit just a week before the primary to the 5-to-10-point favorite on election day–only to lose by a slim 3-point margin. Hardly a stunning victory for Clinton, who had as much as a 16-point lead just days before–but because the polls gave Obama such momentum, it looked like a stunning victory, and perception is everything.

So how will they spin, say, a 5-point Clinton victory here? Some polls say that is what will happen, some say Hillary leads by 18 points or so. We haven’t seen a poll that had Obama tied or ahead in more than two weeks–but will the media cling to that former image of Obama catching up? You can guess where my money is–the media is addicted to this race, and if they can help Clinton, they will. A 5-point Clinton win will probably be called a Clinton “victory,” despite the doom it spells in terms of delegates. There might be some small caveats in the small print, but the headlines will probably trend Hillary’s way. I would think that only if Obama comes within two or three points of a tie will the media abandon the pretense.

The question is, even if Obama wins, will Hillary finally give up?

China’s pissed:

“Reaction [in China to protests in Japan] would be huge in comparison to the reaction against protests in France,” in which Web sites called for a boycott of French products sold at Carrefour stores, an international issue expert said, pointing out that negative feelings toward Japan remain strong in China due to historical issues.

A man in his 30s who runs a Web site that is popular with many Chinese “patriots,” told The Yomiuri Shimbun, “Chinese people won’t forgive [Japan] if the Japanese do the same things as the Americans and Europeans, such as making distorted reports about the Tibet issue.”

Well, China asked for it, and now they’ve got it. Seriously, did they expect that they could hold a summer Olympics and not have Tibet take the opportunity of a world spotlight to rebel? And when scattered protests break out in various nations, do they really think that threatening other countries is the way to make things better?

As for Japan, I bet they must really be scared at the threat this guy is making. Because, after all, Japan is so used to and dependent upon China forgiving it. Haven’t the Chinese been just the picture of forgiveness? Not that Japan hasn’t gone the full distance in asking for it, but China has come even less close to giving it.

If nothing else, these Olympics will serve an important purpose: to demonstrate that China is not ready to be an internationally respected leader of any global interest. Hell, they might even outdo the Bush administration.

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But then again, Japanese right-wing extremists have been behaving badly themselves:

At a special preview of “Yasukuni” demanded by rightwing groups, some of the 150 members criticized the controversial, but award-winning, documentary about the so-named Tokyo war shrine and even threatened to sue the state for subsidizing part of its production. Rightwing groups arranged the preview so their members could have an opportunity to watch the film before passing judgment on it. Lawmakers demanded and got an earlier preview. …

One in the audience suggested he and his like-minded colleagues should sue the agency and the state, demanding the return of the film’s subsidy. Another said the movie should not be shown in Japan because it would give the impression that the war Japan waged was an act of aggression. “This is no good,” he said. “I absolutely do not want this movie to be screened.”

Mitsuhiro Kimura, one of the preview’s organizers and the president of Issui-kai, a rightist group, “I would like to produce a pro-Yasukuni movie with about ¥15 million” in agency subsidies.

My first reaction is, “right-wing extremists can force the government to give them a special screening so they can trash the film?” How did that happen? Lawmakers getting a screening I can understand, but the extremists? What official say do they have in this?

Of course, the rightists are extremely vocal about such things, and people on the other side tend to shut up, especially when the rightists threaten them with loud, hostile protests and even violence. These extremists have something of a hold over social commentary in Japan, often getting their message out in a louder and more aggressive fashion–and they are not shy about intimidating others.

An interesting contrast would be the 1995 Smithsonian exhibit of the Enola Gay fuselage. When text for the exhibit was released and it seemed to show sympathy for the Japanese victims of the bomb, American veterans and right-wing groups protested that the text was an “attack on America’s conduct in the war,” and successfully got the Smithsonian to tone down the message to a minimalist description. Historians then objected right back–but they did not have the clout that the right-wingers did. Conservatives controlled Congress at the time, and started threatening the Smithsonian with budget cuts and investigations. Intimidation of a different sort, but still intimidation.

And, oh yes–Japan protested as well, as they did with a similar Enola Gay exhibit in 2003. Hmm. Someone want to remind them of this in light of the Yasukuni protest?

It’s not as if Japanese cinema doesn’t get its share of right-wing sops; from heavily anti-American documentaries on the Tokyo Tribunals to a right-wing revisionist love letter for Hideki Tojo, Japanese cinema has without doubt leaned toward right-wingers’ view of history. Even Akira Kurosawa, long neglected by Japanese viewers, enjoyed a popular comeback when he produced a film about Nagasaki which featured Richard Gere delivering a heartfelt apology from America to Japan.

But films which portray the other side of things tend to get this kind of reception in Japan. Not to say that this doesn’t happen elsewhere, but at least in debates on such subjects in the U.S., both sides tend to get heard. Right now, there is some doubt that this movie on Yasukuni will even see the light of a public film projector.

While some polls have Obama keeping even with or even gaining a little on Clinton after the ABC “debate,” many polls–especially Gallup’s tracking poll–show Obama losing ground. Little wonder, considering how the debate seemed designed to tear Obama apart and allow Hillary to pile on and look better at the same time.

Some might disagree that the ABC fiasco was “designed” to do that, but look at some of the evidence that is piling up. Aside from the fact that George Stephanopoulos, a former Clinton official, literally took notes from right-winger Sean Hannity on how to smear Obama with irrelevancies, there is now proof that ABC actually sought out an anti-Obama Pennsylvanian woman who has been featured before in the press as being obsessed with Obama’s lack of flag lapel pins.

Clinton is following this up with a new strategy: despite Obama’s classy “you just gotta brush these things off” reaction to the attacks, Clinton is now labeling Obama as a “whiner.” As if somehow, she and her media allies can ruthlessly smear Obama, and if he rebuts–which is universally agreed upon as a necessary response to such attacks (and which Clinton has done before herself)–then he’s a “whiner.”

But since rebutting is whining in Clinton’s book, then surely she will have no reaction to yet another witness to Clinton’s disrespectful 1995 remarks about voters. Theda Skocpol was there when Hillary reportedly told Bill to screw the voters (insert your own Bill Clinton joke here), and while she can’t confirm or deny any exact words, she did get this directly from the notes she took that day:

… there was extensive, hard-nosed discussion about why masses of voters did not support Clinton or trust government or base their choices on economic as opposed to what people saw as peripheral life-style concerns. Hillary Clinton was among the most cold-blooded analysts in attendance. She spoke of ordinary voters as if they were a species apart, and showed interest only in the political usefulness of their choices — usefulness to the Clinton administration, that is.

In other words, she cares.

Insipid, shoddy, despicable, ridiculous, tawdry, astonishingly miserable, embarrassing, inane, frivolous, historically poor quality, stupid, disgusting, a really, really horrible freak show, a trainwreck, an unmitigated travesty, and the biggest sham I’ve ever seen. These are all descriptions taken from various blogs and editorials about the “debate” tonight, where former Clinton staffer George Stephanopoulos took notes from Sean Hannity on how to smear Obama, and Charlie Gibson acted even worse. The first half hour was nothing but Obama-bashing, talking about lapel pins, the Weathermen, “Bittergate,” and Wright–with Hillary piling on. The “mediators” were even booed by the audience at the end. Even arch-conservative Jonah Goldberg called it “nothing but Republican water-carrying,” and many expressed the belief that John McCain was the big winner of the debate.

Like Kevin Drum, I am thankful I was not able to watch it live. The problem: from what I have heard of the freak show, it was a microcosm of “media” coverage of the Democratic race: primarily a long streak of candidate-bashing, manufacturing fake “controversies” so as to boost ratings and prolong the “exciting horse race” which is this disaster of a primary season. The “press” is thoroughly and apparently unashamedly invested in turning this into festival of scandal, while not reporting on trivial stuff like the Vice President, Secretary of State, and Attorney General gathering in secret to discuss how often a child’s testicles may be crushed as they quietly repeal the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

Of course, this may all just be the infamous “Liberal Media™” at work….

Some are suggesting that this will backlash and Obama will receive a surge of donations and maybe even a boost in Pennsylvania (I’m considering donating myself, if for no other reason than to make a statement). I am hoping for a bigger backlash against the so-called “journalists” and the noxious, steaming river of manure they are calling “news” these days. Some of this is expressed in this roundup by The Moderate Voice.

Update: Obama wraps it up:

Hillary has been making a huge deal about Obama calling working-class Americans “bitter.” The media, wanting to prolong the primary battle, has accommodated her, making a “huge political firestorm” out of it for her.

Now we learn that in 1995, Hillary said of the same people: “Screw ’em.” That’s a verbatim quote:

In January 1995, as the Clintons were licking their wounds from the 1994 congressional elections, a debate emerged at a retreat at Camp David. Should the administration make overtures to working class white southerners who had all but forsaken the Democratic Party? The then-first lady took a less than inclusive approach.

“Screw ’em,” she told her husband. “You don’t owe them a thing, Bill. They’re doing nothing for you; you don’t have to do anything for them.”

Let’s see if this becomes an issue the media picks up on. Any wagers?