I am watching him live endorsing Obama. Why couldn’t he have spoken like this and had this bearing in 2000? He would have wiped the floor with Bush. So much lost….

Addendum: look at that huge crowd; it looks like the convention already. McCain will have to respond to this, and I do not envy him–any response he makes will look pathetic in comparison. Who will he get to introduce him who will compare? (George “Macaca” Allen maybe?) How could he possibly scare up so big and so enthusiastic a crowd? Will he even be smart enough not to use a pale green backdrop this time, or not to smile and giggle like an idiot? Maybe McCain should just lay low after this.

Second Addenda: Ah. McCain had to cancel a fundraiser at the home of a Texas misogynist who told women to “lie back and enjoy” rape, and so instead had a dry, cold press conference where he announced that he would open the floodgates on offshore oil drilling. And I was wondering how he’d out-do his green-screen follow up to the last Obama Big Speech. Ouch.

Dan Piraro’s blog has become one of my daily visits on the web, and today’s entry identifies a vital issue: the ability of Americans to vote against their own interests, and make insane choices with open eyes:

One thing I’m realistic about is the upcoming election. In a reasonable world, Obama would win in a record-breaking landslide: Bush is the least popular president in nearly 100 years, the economy is in the toilet and a finger is pressing on the flush handle, our reputation worldwide is in the gutter, gas will be $5/gallon by November, according to legal experts, our constitution is in crisis, McCain’s policies are the same as Bush’s or MORE in the direction that nailed us into our current coffin. It’s a no-brainer.

A part of me thinks Obama will win in spite of the combination of stupid, blind patriotism and racism that will account for 90% of the votes against him. But the realist in me is bracing for another close election that the Republicans can steal at the local level. I’m not an alarmist, but that would be national suicide.

If McCain wins, it will change this country for a very long time. Forget what disasters will befall our economy, our troops, our international reputation – the Supreme Court will become a fascist juggernaut for decades to come, and nothing short of an armed uprising will be able to stop them.

In my opinion (and probably Piraro’s as well), that trend began in 2000, and intensified in 2004 when the nation inexplicably said, “give me some more of that!” A lot of this goes deep back in time, and is part of human psyche; but you can’t help feeling that this alternate-reality feel-good-denial self-destructive inclination became a visible tumor writhing under the skin of society, growing to monstrous proportions, probably spurred on by the carcinogen of fear injected on 9/11, and that it is stretching the dermis of our nation so taut that it threatens to burst and… well, I could get into some pretty icky imagery here, but I haven’t even had breakfast yet.

Back to the more analytical side: Look at the economic charts before 2000, and then see where Bush took us after then. Reagan-Bush in the 80’s and early 90’s were a conservative trend that by all rights–and the true and actual votes of the 2000 election–should have continued to swing back after Clinton’s term. I know people love to ridicule Al Gore, and some roll their eyes whenever a compliment is paid to him, but despite all the no-difference talk in 2000, a look back makes it crystal clear that Gore was hands-down the far superior choice. He would have continued the trend Clinton started, handling the economic downturn of 2000 far more reasonably. He either would have prevented 9/11 with the Clinton counter-terrorism policies that the Bush administration abandoned, or he would have acted a thousand times more reasonably, focusing on bin Laden and building a new international alliance. He would have made real progress on environmental issues and perhaps we’d be well on our way to using alternative fuels and escaping our fossil-fuels dependency, and so forth. But most importantly to us back here in grim reality, he would not have gutted the Constitution, he would not have gutted the economy, he would not have made us an international pariah, he would not have started the quagmire in Iraq–in short, he would not have been the single most reprehensible “leader” in our history, and our nation would not be hurtling towards the precipice at quite so alarming a rate of speed. And yet here we are, with millions of Americans again saying, “give me four more years of that!”

I can only wonder at the proclivity of Americans to be so utterly foolish as to even consider any of this, but to me, the choice was just as crystal clear back in 2000. You had a man who was intelligent, who saw the value of the Internet back before anyone else and acted upon it, without whose support the Internet would have died stillborn, who was boldly making his cause an unpopular message of environmental prudence, who looked and talked a bit funny but was still so clearly the better candidate. And he was running against a cocky, juvenile, frat-boy-demeanor failed oilman not too long weaned from drug addiction, the first presidential candidate with a criminal record, for Christ’s sake, a smarmy, stupid, silver-spoon dunce who couldn’t speak straight, who lied so smugly he actually smirked, who attached himself to shadowy people, who used sickeningly slimy tactics against opponents in his own party, and who basely pandered to the fear and greed of people rather than to their better natures. It’s not like we couldn’t see this back in 2000, or in 2004.

McCain is not nearly as bad personally as Bush, giving him some social camouflage, but there is so much there that echoes Bush. McCain was not a draft-dodger or a drug addict, nor does he have a criminal record, nor is he as stupid or altogether pathetic as Bush is or was. But the same lack of character is there, and the same set of policies and abuses is rather brashly being presented to the American people as if they were real, viable, or even constructive courses of action for our nation to take.

There are several reasons to vote for McCain, but as Piraro pointed out, almost all of them are base: fear, greed, hatred, distrust, blind patriotism and blind partisanship.

I truly believe that this is a test for the United States of America. We are being given one last chance to make the right choice. If we fail the test, the United States of America that has existed up until this time will only accelerate in its disintegration, its transformation into something different and far less and without the heart or soul that made the country great. What would remain would be a pale, pretending shadow. If you’re thinking, “oh, they were saying stuff like that back in 2000 and 2004,” then take a look around you–we were right.

There’s no guarantee that Obama can stem the profuse bleeding and bring the nation back to health, nor that the nation won’t turn back toward self-destruction soon after he leaves office. But the choice right now is so clear it is blinding: vote for McCain and you vote for the ruin of America. Vote for Obama, and we have a good chance of making it. If that makes me sound partisan, then too bad; partisanship is not a sin if it is open-eyed and a result of attention to the truth. Nobody criticizes a policeman for being a partisan for public safety; no one questions a doctor for being a partisan of health. The question here is not why I support Obama, the question is, why doesn’t everyone.

A Japan Telecom blog reports that the iPhone will cost ¥20,000 ~ ¥30,000 here in Japan with it’s released in four weeks’ time, but no official price has been announced. This was supposedly said by Masayoshi Son, head of SoftBank–but the blog cites no source, gives no exact quotes, and the news does not appear anywhere else. The entry says:

Softbank Mobile Corp. CEO Masoyoshi SON said on June 13 that an iPhone handset itself will effectively cost ¥20,000-¥30,000 when its user selects the installment and discount plan.

The cost in the U.S. is $199 (about ¥21,000) for the 8GB model or $299 (about ¥32,000) for the 16GB model.

The company will unveil the program(s) for the basic monthly fee by the end of this month.

Take that for what it’s worth. Even if accurate, the “installment and discount plan” could make the pricing anywhere from cheap to prohibitively expensive. Best-case scenario: SoftBank will offer the price as a subsidy with their cheap “White Plan” (about $10/mo. basic charge, some calls free) and a reasonable data plan add-on. That’s wishful thinking, however; they might demand a more expensive contract and the data plan that tops out at ¥10,000 per month.

So now we know little more than we did a few minutes ago. Isn’t this fun?

Here is a video of a debate between surrogates for the Obama and McCain campaigns on Communications and Technology Policy. Former FCC chairs Reed Hundt (speaking for the Obama campaign) and Michael Powell (McCain campaign) face off on issues of Network Neutrality, Media Ownership, and other pressing issues of the information age.

What struck me most about this debate was the stark difference between the two. One of them showed himself to be sharp, clear, well-spoken and thoughtful of evidence, support, and meaning; the other dealt in platitudes about witnessing marvels, vague and theoretical to the point of obfuscation, long on stories and short on substance, dismissive of specifics, condescending, and a sop to big business. It is not even a little challenge to see these differences or figure out who is dealing what. Hundt, quite frankly, swept the floor with Powell. Which was not quite fair, considering what each was given by his candidate to deal with. But you get that feeling the Hundt probably would have done it anyway, evidence notwithstanding.

Here’s something to do: while watching this video, ask yourself–which of these would you rather have as a boss?

Update: The thought just occurred to me: it seems that Hundt came armed with specific policy points, factual evidence, examples, concrete arguments–while Powell came prepared with little more than flowery language, anecdotes, and general college-level Econ theories dressed up with technobabble buzzwords, expecting that to be the level of the debate. In short, It was Hundt bringing a gun to Powell’s knife fight.

This is not just charisma. This is anything, anything but an empty suit. This is one small corner of what the man is like. This is character, real character–not a PR job, not a political hack claiming to have character, this is not crafted, not speechwritten, not false or phony in any way. If you have not heard this person make a speech, then listen to this speech; if you think “oh, he’s only about words,” then listen to these words. Listen:

I defy you to find one person who is so utterly cynical that they cannot listen to that full twenty-four minutes, and see the promise of this speaker, dismiss what he says as “only words,” or claim that the only thing here is charisma and nothing else. If you can find that person, then have sympathy for them because there may be little or nothing at all that can bring them back to hope.

This was a speech. This is what sets the man apart from that pale imitation of a president who is running on the other side. This is not golf gear, this is not four more years, this is not a painfully sallow false smile against a sickly green background.

This is the real deal here.

I truly do. IE6 is without much doubt the single crappiest browser in existence, and yet–thanks to Microsoft forcing it on everyone for years–it is used by a majority of people surfing the web. Thanks again to Microsoft for not making it easy for people using XP to upgrade to IE7 (there is no automatic prompt, and they demand to be able to scan your computer for pirated software), most of those users are not changing.

Which means that if you want to design a web page, especially for a business (as I am trying to do), you can’t afford to show an ugly page to a majority of visitors–so you are royally screwed by IE6, forced to work far harder and to accept lower standards for the end product. I wanted to make a beautiful set of pages for my school’s site, so I taught myself CSS and really worked up a very nice design. It looks fantastic in Firefox and Safari on Mac and Windows, and even IE7 likes the way it looks. But IE6 blows it all to hell, making every single design element an excruciating torture to find painfully twisted workarounds, which lead to scatterings of new problems in their wake. I should have seen this coming–IE6 has torpedoed several other of my attempts to build nice web sites, including an attempt earlier this year.

The result is that I am spending 90% of my time working around bugs in that piece of crap IE6. I swear, I am just about ready to buy a plane ticket to Redmond so I can personally strangle Bill Gates.

That said, there are workarounds. One of the many problems in IE6 is that it does not recognize pseudo-elements. If you recall from my tutorial on CSS, you can create new HTML commands–called “elements”–and so define your own styles in a way that can be easily expressed. One that I wanted to use was small caps. The coding is easy: scaps { font-variant: small-caps }. Insert that into your styles and the use of a “scaps” tag will get you small caps. Except in IE6, where you can’t define elements like that. You can re-define elements that already exist, but you can’t create new ones.

That presents a problem for my small caps idea: you either have to add small caps to an existing style (in which case you can’t have the small caps by themselves) or you have to create a class for small caps, in which case it is again necessary to piggyback on another existing style. It seemed impossible to create just small caps without having it go along with something else, so I came up with another idea: hijack an existing style I don’t use. I chose the “u” tag, because it’s bad style to use underlines on a web page–people will think they’re links. So I did this: u { text-decoration: none; font-variant: small-caps; }. In essence, that tells the “underline” tag to subtract underlining and to add small caps–I just turned “u” into a “small caps” command. I could probably do the same with “s” and “strike.”

A bigger problem with IE6 was the lack of support for “position: fixed,” which allows you to set the position for any element–a table, a paragraph, an image–so that it appears exactly where you want it on a page, as defined by distance from top, left, bottom or right by universal units of length. IE6 won’t recognize that, however, and that was a key element in having one part of my site render correctly. This time the fix was not easy, so I couldn’t do it myself. Looking on the web, I found many people who offered various fixes; some of them led to jerky scrolling, but one actually did the trick pretty well. You can see the solution on that page; it’s a bit hard to describe, except to say that it fights fire with fire, using a different IE6 bug to fix the “position: fixed;” bug. Clever. It still leaves me with scroll bar problems I’d rather do without, but you can’t have everything.

Back to work…

In the age of persistent video and YouTube, one can have so much fun with someone who speaks out of both sides of his mouth! Here seen happening both figuratively and literally:

Publish this wherever you can… there should be lots more like this to come.

Due to last week’s knifing rampage, “authorities” are suspending Akihabara’s “open street” Sunday. In Japan, many heavily-visited shopping areas close the street to motor vehicle traffic and allow pedestrians to spill into and take over the entire street in order to avoid congestion and create a bit more of an open market atmosphere. Akihabara is not the only place where this happens; in Tokyo, the Ginza and I believe Shinjuku Boulevard also open up on Sundays. In fact, I can see a permanent “open street” from my balcony–Sunshine Street in Ikebukuro. Akihabara has been opening their main drag for visitors for 35 years.

Closing the street is not being done for safety reasons; after all, concentrating people on the sidewalks would, if anything, make it easier to kill more people. Perhaps in the sense of Akihabara Open Street being a famous event so it draws attackers, closing the street might seem useful–until you realize that an attacker looking for a famous area to attack would simply move on to one of the other open streets (which I believe are still open), and lacking those, would move on to other kinds of venues. At best, it would only displace the attack elsewhere. Not to mention that in 35 years, the open street hasn’t exactly been a murder magnet or anything.

No, this seems to be nothing more than an official attempt to make it look like the authorities are doing something. You know, like making everybody take off their shoes at airports. In Japan, this is a common reaction to a tragedy with no easy fix. I recall a while back, after the terror attack on a Spanish railway, some train lines in Japan reacted by removing trash cans from train platforms. Yeah, that really put a dent in terrorism. I bet scores of terrorists threw up their hands in surrender once they noticed the trash cans were gone.

In this case, beefing up and publicizing psychiatric counseling services would probably be a far better and more effective reaction, but would be harder, more expensive, and less sexy. So instead, they’re closing down the open street and beefing up police presence. Unfortunately, that’s another over-reaction: the police are now not only patrolling in gangs, but they are openly wielding nightsticks–not holstered, but always in hand–while stopping people seemingly at random and questioning them.

That ought to do wonders for business in Akihabara–I don’t want to go near the place already.

So we get these stupid over-reactions instead of doing what’s sensible–better psychiatric care (not a cure-all, but it would help) and a more sensible police presence all the time, not just after the fact. They ought to do something other than just make it seem like something is being done.

You just can’t get more ironic–nor more bitingly convincing of the moral bankruptcy of Republican practice–than this:

Ouch.

McCain is at it again. His propensity for lying in only thinly veiled disguise is pretty stunning. A week or so ago, he said that our troop levels are at pre-surge levels, then he denied he was wrong, trying to pretend he never said “pre-surge” in a way that was pretty blatant. Today, he’s lying even more outright–listen:

So, essentially, he’s saying that he’s not for privatization, those damned nasty liberul Democrat Party meanies will twist his words and claim he’s for privatization, but he’s not. Instead, all he wants to do is allow for people to put money that would otherwise go to Social Security payments and instead place them in personal accounts. In other words, privatization. (Oh, no! I just twisted John McCain’s words! I’m going to hell for sure now!)

Josh Marshall points out how Republicans, similar to the way they blamed their own “nuclear option” terminology on Democrats, backed off from “privatization, saying the that Democrat Party™ was responsible for it all along. They switched to ”private accounts,“ and when that didn’t work, ”personal accounts,“ the language McCain just used in aggressively denying he was for privatization. It’s kind of like watching an intelligent-design proponent vigorously deny he’s a creationist when all the time he’s thumping on a bible.

Undoubtedly, we are taking him out of context yet again, which is now McCain’s knee-jerk response to any public mention of his numerous lies. So, for context, here is the word from John McCain himself:

So, what do we have just recently? McCain claiming that Obama lacks knowledge and experience about Iraq, while claiming that our troops are at pre-surge levels, and that all violence in Iraq will magically disappear soon after he takes office. (This built upon repeated McCain gaffes and blunders about Iraq, from his famous ”marketplace stroll“ fantasy to his inability to discern Shiite from Sunni.)

McCain claiming that Obama will raise Americans’ taxes by ”thousands of dollars,“ that ”Americans of every background would see their taxes rise,“ claiming that McCain is the middle-class tax-cutter when in fact, Obama would cut middle-class taxes much more than McCain, and would only raise taxes on people in the upper class while giving small businesses and middle-class workers big cuts; McCain, meanwhile, gives the lion’s share of his tax cuts to the rich.

According to McCain, Obama is dirty because one of his Veep Vetters simply worked for Fannie Mae, while McCain’s own Veep Vetter was a paid lobbyist for Fannie Mae.

And that’s just in the past week or so. Keep going back and it’s practically anunending string of stuff like this–reversals, lies, and double-standards.

My question is, how long will it take for the media to recover from the softening effects of the Kool-aid-drinking McCain barbecues and start reporting even half the obvious truth about McCain, showing him up to be a liar, a flip-flopper, and a hypocrite on levels that makes even George W. Bush pale?

Five minutes after that happens–if it ever does–expect the right-wing PR machine to go into high gear, claiming that the (a) Liberal Media™ has (b) gone back on the May-I-Get-You-A-Pillow-Senator-Obama Bandwagon and (c) is unfairly demonizing John McCain for no good reason.

About half an hour ago, Sachi and I woke up to the building swaying: an earthquake, and a relatively sizable one. The building swayed strongly enough for us to notice pretty easily in bed, and the doors made creaking sounds as they swayed (probably what woke us more than the movement). The swaying here lasted for several minutes. The epicenter was 240 miles (400 km) distant.

My usual quake sites report a 6.7 on the Richter, but the TV is saying it was a 7.0; in Japanese quake scale terms, it was a “strong 6,” which is pretty huge. No major news stories on Google News yet.
No tidal wave concerns–it was way inland. Probably not too much fun in Iwate or Akita, in norther Honshu where the quake was centered–but the epicenter looks fairly sparsely populated. Still, probably a few small villages just got wiped out.

An analysis of both candidates’ tax plans has been released (PDF) from the Tax Policy Center, a respected source of analysis on such matters. And guess what: Obama’s plan is far, far better, unless your surname is Hilton or Gates. But if you’re an average working schmoe, then you’re definitely going to want to vote for Obama.

On the plus side for McCain, he cuts taxes for everybody. On McCain’s bad side, he gives the biggest cuts the super-rich, with only a paltry handout to anyone making less that $38,000 a year. Even up to incomes of $66,000, you’re looking at a $320 cut–not very good, considering that recent hikes in gas prices probably have already eaten up much more than just that. But millionaires can look forward to saving more than a quarter million per year–sweet, if you’re rich.

Obama, on the other hand, gives everyone with incomes up to about a quarter million dollars a year a cut of up to almost $3000, with the cuts spread much more liberally at the lower end than McCain’s. While McCain would give low-income earners an insulting $19, Obama makes a huge difference in their lives with a $567 tax cut. All the way up to earners of $112K per year, Obama gives more back to the earner than McCain. And even for the upper middle class, Obama’s plan is not bad–with a tax hike of a mere $12 for those making up to $600,000 a year, I think it’s reasonable to say that you’ll have to really have tons of money before Obama starts taking anything away from you. And while Obama really socks it to Bill Gates, I think that people making eight figures or more can well afford to pay their way after the cash cow days under Bush.

Neither Obama’s nor McCain’s tax plans look hopeful in terms of balancing the budget anytime soon, but the report makes one thing clear: while neither will balance the budget, McCain’s tax cuts will cost about a trillion dollars more over the next ten years. McCain claims that he’ll offset this by spending cuts, but what he means is that he’ll increase spending for the military while slashing stuff like Medicare. McCain may claim that he’ll get it by cutting pork, but there simply isn’t even close to that much pork to be found.

Here’s the total breakdown of the tax plans by income level: