I have posted before on how Republicans, who before this year went apeshit whenever Democrats even hinted at a filibuster, have started using the filibuster far more in a few months than Democrats did in several years. It appears that this trend is not only continuing, but that Republicans are now cashing in on their obstructionism by blocking everything Democrats do and then turn around and call them the “do-nothing Congress.” Talking Points Memo comments on this:

For the last several years, Republicans, with a 55-seat majority, cried like young children if Dems even considered a procedural hurdle. They said voters would punish obstructionists. They said it was borderline unconstitutional. They said to stand in the way of majority rule was to undermine a basic principle of our democratic system.

And wouldn’t you know it; the shameless hypocrites didn’t mean a word of it. As Roll Call reported this week, 239 separate bills have passed the House, only to find Senate Republicans “objecting to just about every major piece of legislation” that Harry Reid has tried to bring to the floor, whether it enjoys bi-partisan support or not.

The fact is, the Democratic majority in Congress has been passing truckloads of popular legislation in the House, only to find Republicans filibustering like there’s no tomorrow, not allowing up-or-down votes that they so recently claimed were the only fair thing to do.

And before you think that this is simply a case of turnabout being fair play, keep in mind these facts: (1) Republicans are being far more obstructionist and are using the filibuster far, far more often than Democrats ever did; (2) Republicans reacted vehemently whenever the Democrats did this, crying foul like there was no tomorrow and threatening the “nuclear option” of doing away with the filibuster at the drop of a hat; and (3) Democrats, despite being obstructed far worse than they ever gave, are not objecting to the filibuster itself and have not even hinted at the nuclear option. They resent the obstructionism, but are not complaining about the method.

In short: the Democrats are being consistent, trying to play by the rules, while the Republicans are so shamelessly hypocritical and opportunistic as to boggle the imagination. This is not simply turning the tables, this is about as lopsided as it gets. and Republicans are not ashamed at all:

Indeed, Senate Republicans — the ones accusing Dems of being a “do-nothing Congress” — are proud of their efforts. Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott boasted, “The strategy of being obstructionist can work or fail. So far it’s working for us.”

And in the end, that’s all that matters to the GOP: if it works for them. Forget consistency, forget fairness, forget fair play, forget honesty, forget just about anything right or wrong; these are “null sets” to congressional Republicans. It either works for them, and therefore is good and right, or it doesn’t, and so it is evil and immoral.

In the first half of the first session of this Congress, Republicans have used the filibuster 13 times; compare that to the whole first sessions of the previous two Congresses,when Democrats used it a total of four times. If I’m reading that right, Republicans are filibustering at a rate 12 times more than Democrats did. Republicans have filibustered and killed the Employee Free Choice Act, a minimum wage increase, renewable energy and clean-energy bills, cheap Canadian pharmaceutical imports, a bill to allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices, and a large number of immigration bill amendments. Republicans are blocking bills from going to committee, blocking them from being debated, blocking them from getting the up-or-down vote they once said was a sacrament. Just go to this page and see how many times the word “Cloture” appears; it’s staggering.

And of course, the “liberal” media is completely ignoring the hypocrisy and instead are playing along with Republican spin. Surprise!

What a couple of days.

Friday, after shutting everything down, I worked to finish packing things up before the movers came. I wasn’t successful. As it turns out, there was a lot left to do… but not that it mattered at all. The truck required by Vanguard Towers (no more than 2 tons) turned out to be only big enough to fit my furniture, and no boxes or anything else. And not even all of my furniture–I had to throw out two pieces, one of which I really wanted to keep… but after seeing how the place here filled up, I suppose it made sense to get rid of it. Pity–it was a beautiful, pristine work desk, better even than the smaller one of similar style that I was already determined to throw out.

I spent most of the day stressing, and fairly badly, for me (I don’t stress all that easily). When I realized that only the furniture would fit and saw that I had a small room full of packed boxes, I began to thing that I would not be able to get it all here before my apartment closed down to me. I called the rental place and they could not substitute a larger van, sorry. So I put in a reservation for another van, same size as the first… and later stressed about how that might not be big enough.

Still, I took full advantage of the movers, more than I deserved to for ¥68,000 yen, I suppose. I kept begging them to fit more stuff in the truck, and in the end had to decide between a low shelf dresser and getting my bike shipped (the alternative being that I would instead ride it all the way in, a massive effort which I did once before and do not wish to repeat). But I also got them to throw out all my large sodai-gomi–including the two big desks, the double bed frame, two full-sized cabinets, a similarly-size metal shelf cabinet, the low drawers, a computer desk, and a large TV cabinet. They overloaded the sodai-gomi space, and I had to keep apologizing as I found yet another thing for them to throw out.

Ever wonder how much dust and crap can accumulate under and behind furniture that you don’t move for seven years? I don’t have to wonder any more, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

They seemed unhappy that I was driving my scooter back to Ikebukuro via normal roads, apparently thinking that I’d come really late as they were taking the expressway. As it was, I even stopped by work to pick up some stuff… and still arrived ahead of them by half an hour. They must have hit traffic jams. At about 9:00 pm, all was finished and I had an apartment full of furniture… but nothing else, as they would not take any of my boxes, which had all of my underwear, pajamas, bathroom and kitchen goods… everything that wasn’t furniture or large electronic devices. Even though I cajoled them into taking one pillow and the bed sheets (no blankets), I could not see myself sleeping there that night.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to stay there; Sachi did not move until Saturday, so her place was still up and running. I went there and we supped on some McDonald’s and conbini drinks. I took a shower, and we slept, me in pajamas Sachi still had out, plus a fresh change of clothes ready for the next day.

Which is another story. More about today tomorrow. At some point I’ll catch up… but right now I’m way too tired….

Thank god the air conditioner removal guy didn’t come yesterday. They said it would have taken an hour. It took two. Had I let them come just before noon, they would have left around 2:00, making me an hour late for work.

As it is, everything happened right after I finished blogging this morning. The refrigerator takkyubin guys came 20 minutes early, and the air conditioner guy came right as they were doing their thing. Busy busy busy.

Right after I post this, I am shutting down the computer and main telephone here. If anyone wants to contact me before Saturday evening, they’d better do it by my PHS. I will be checking my email at school which means maybe once later today and not again until they (hopefully) get my Internet going at the new place Saturday afternoon or evening.

See you on the flip side!

It’s finally here… and now I’ve got a load of stuff to do. I unplugged the fridge last night (lukewarm water in the morning on a hot day… ugh!) so that it’d be ready for transport. I would have been ticked off at the Takkyubin people for calling me at 8 am, except that on this day I had my alarms set for 8:10, so what they heck. Sometime after that, the person comes to remove the A/Cs (hopefully).

Then, at some indeterminate time in the afternoon, the movers arrive, by which time I had better have all the junk cleared up and be ready to go. I pay them cash at the door, apparently, and that’s set up. After they get loaded up, then I lock the door after them and while they drive to the new place, I ride my scooter over to meet them there (stopping by at work for a few minutes along the way). At the new place, they unload everything… and that’s it. For today.

Tomorrow I’m getting a rental van. The movers are limited to a 2-ton truck, so they might not be able to fit everything in. In any case, I have to deliver my air conditioner and gas stove to some people who are buying them from me. So I’ll pick up the rental van from 8 am, may or may not pick up a friend who has volunteered to help, and then will head back here. After packing up the rest of the stuff and before leaving, the recycle shop people are coming around to pick up some stuff; I will probably disappoint them, as they’ll expect a huge haul, but all they’re getting is a computer monitor and maybe a few other small things.

After I’m through with the rental van, it’s back in the apartment to wait for Sachi’s movers to arrive, while I also wait for the KDDI people to hook up the Internet and phone service, and for the cable TV people to come in and do their stuff. Sachi arrives later in the evening, and the unpacking begins in earnest, taking up a lot of Sunday as well. The new bed frame arrives Sunday, and my Apple WiFi base station arrives Saturday or Sunday as well. Monday, it’s back to the old apartment for cleaning… and then the move is complete.

I need more sleep. Life goes on.

First they sued a disabled single mother in Oregon for downloading gangsta rap over Kazaa, including such titles as “shake that a– b-tch” and “f— y’all hoes.” The woman not only denied it, but actually proved that the Kazaa account was not hers, giving the RIAA the name, location, and phone number of the actual account holder.

But the RIAA was not satisfied. So they started stalking her eight-year-old daughter. In an attempt to get access to the young girl, the RIAA people had someone call her elementary school and claim to be her grandmother, after having called her apartment building to reach the 8-year-old directly.

Even for the RIAA, that’s despicable. And that’s saying something. What’s next, death threats?

Well, tomorrow is the big day. Things are beginning to happen. The piles of boxes are stacking up, the shelves are emptying, stuff is getting tallied. The Kodan inspector was just in a few minutes ago, tallying up the damage–he figures about ¥33,000, less than $300. However, all of my big furniture is still here, and they must know that some damage will not be apparent until the place empties. That puzzled me, why they would send the inspector over before I emptied the place out. I probably saved a lot of money that way. Though I have to wonder, if they find extra damage after all my stuff has moved out (I know he missed a few things, but I kept mum–am I bad?) will they charge that? I don’t know–after all, the guy signed forms and everything, including the paperwork to refund my deposit. And since this is a government operation, maybe they won’t do anything. We’ll see. At least he didn’t charge me as much as they’d warned me for losing my third room key.

…and I’m not finished yet.

But the big hit for me today will be the loss of my air conditioners. Though I move tomorrow, a person is coming over today to uninstall the air conditioning units. And that’s a big thing for me. You see, I tend to perspire quite a bit; it runs in the family, on the male side. I especially start to sweat a lot when I exert myself, like if I am cleaning my apartment out. So when a lot of the big work gets done tonight and tomorrow morning, I am going to get drenched. Fortunately, the water is still running, so I can shower off OK. But tonight I’ll have to turn off the fridge in preparation for shipping it off (it’s going to the faculty office at my school), which means no cold drinks unless I run down to the convenience store (there’s not even a vending machine closer than the conbini). So no cool air, no cool drinks tomorrow morning. How will I survive? I guess I’ll have to make do with the electric fan and rough it out.

Update: I got a reprieve. They told me that they’d uninstall the A/Cs in the a.m. today–but at 11:30am, there was no call and no show, so I called the moving company. They said that the person would arrive just before noon, and that the uninstall would take an hour. Maybe I’m unreasonable, but an 11:50-12:50 visit is not what I would technically call an “a.m.” visit. I have to go to work, and allowed for a 15-30 minute window after noon, but not a whole hour. They said that the person would come tomorrow instead–which is much nicer for me in any case. One more day of coolness! I won’t have to do my last day’s packing in the heat, thank goodness.

My father asked recently about when it gets dark here in Tokyo, and it got me to thinking. I noticed that while in Madrid, in April, it was light out until very late–well past 8:00 pm. My father noted that it stays light out in the San Francisco Bay Area until almost 9:00 in the evening–though of course he noted this at summer solstice.

In Japan, however, sunset is around 7:00 pm now. Seeing as how Tokyo and San Francisco share almost the same latitude, how is this? The same goes for Madrid.

As it happens, both Madrid and San Francisco are on the western edges of their time zones, while Tokyo is on the eastern edge of its zone; this accounts for a good deal of the difference. In addition, America and Europe enjoy Daylight Savings Time, while Japan has opted out of that plan–one of only three developed nations (including India and China) that don’t change their clocks.

As a result, it starts getting light before 4:00 in the morning, which means that birds start their early-morning chirping at about 3:30, which is how late night owls like me sometimes stay up until.

Seeing as how most of Japan is on the east end of GMT+9, it would seem natural to have DST. DST was implemented by U.S. occupation forces after WWII, but the Japanese government dismissed it immediately upon regaining independence. According to various sources, DST has not been implemented for several reasons: farmers hated it, educators feared it would keep students away from homework in the early evening, and one claim even said it was preferred in the gloomy postwar days, so everyone could get drunk and sleep instead of being depressed in the daylight.

However, it seems that we may be getting a break: this month, there is news that the government is now seriously reconsidering DST for Japan in the face of global warming, and, one would presume, rising energy costs. Hokkaido experimented with DST after a fashion–a non-mandatory shift of working hours. As slipshod as that might sound, it apparently worked, and has fueled interest in DST here. Look here to see a “man on the street” perspective.

Personally, I’d vote for Japan to join GMT+10 and have DST on top of that–then Tokyo could enjoy mid-evening June daylight like Spain gets, and the sun would rise at a civilized 6:00 am during the summer. Even early risers in Tokyo miss an hour or two of daylight, and most people miss two or three hours. I miss four or five, but then I’m weird.

SCOTUS has just ruled not only that it’s OK for the government to favor religious groups over secular ones, not only that it’s OK to give taxpayer money to religious groups to engage in activities which include the promotion of their religion, but that taxpayers can’t sue on the basis that it’s their money being used to fund religious beliefs they disagree with:

In an opinion joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that “the payment of taxes is generally not enough to establish standing to challenge an action taken by the federal government.”

Given the size of the federal budget, “it is a complete fiction to argue that an unconstitutional federal expenditure causes an individual federal taxpayer any measurable economic harm,” Alito said. “And if every federal taxpayer could sue to challenge any government expenditure, the federal courts would cease to function as courts of law and would be cast in the role of general complaint bureaus.”

That statement intentionally, almost belligerently dismisses the true intent of the argument and replaces it with a blatant straw man. The argument is not that taxpayers will be “economically” harmed by such expenditures, it is instead that taxpayers will be harmed because they will be forced to fund a religious belief they do not believe in.

The ruling was similarly dishonest in the end-run it made around the funding source:

He noted that “Congress did not specifically authorize the use of federal funds to pay for the conferences or speeches that the plaintiffs challenged.” Rather, those activities were funded from “general Executive Branch appropriations,” he wrote.

So, apparently, we can’t protest our tax money being spent on a religion we don’t agree with because it was spent by the president and not specified by Congress? What an insult to reason. Taxpayer money is taxpayer money, it doesn’t matter who makes the appropriation.

At the very least Alito and Roberts did not join ultra-extremists Scalia and Thomas in their predictable attempt to completely tear down church-state restrictions; instead, Alito and Roberts allowed it only with the “Executive” loophole. Still, it’s a loophole, and you can expect to see this administration start to tear that hole in the Constitution to be as big as they can make it.

Souter, meanwhile, led the non-wingnut minority in giving the rather obviously correct decision:

In this case, “there is no dispute that taxpayer money in identifiable amounts is funding conferences, and these are alleged to have the purpose of promoting religion,” Souter wrote. “When executive agencies spend identifiable sums of tax money for religious purposes, no less than when Congress authorizes the same thing, taxpayers suffer injury.”

The White House, of course, was tickled pink that their bench-stacking was bringing such sweet dividends of Constitution-revising decisions:

A White House spokeswoman, Emily A. Lawrimore, said the decision “marks a substantial victory for efforts by Americans to more effectively aid our neighbors in need of help.”

Which, of course, was the entire idea behind the whole enterprise, right? Bullshit. The only single objective of the entire program is to merge church and state, to open the door for direct funding of religious activities with taxpayer money in direct violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution. They could give jack about “effectively aiding our neighbors in need of help,” as we saw so clearly demonstrated in New Orleans. This has nothing to do with charity, and everything to do with the advancing incursion of religion on the matters of governance.

Nor surprisingly, the media buried this story under the other ruling coming from SCOTUS about students not being allowed to make drug-related references in their speech, as they did when they unfurled a banner that read “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” As if that was somehow more critical a story than this ruling.

This latest decision by SCOTUS is of course in line with other recent moves out of this administration. PBS, which was once apolitical, has now become a propaganda tool for the religious right. The right wing always decried PBS as a left-wing bulwark, based apparently on the fact that it aired artsy-fartsy stuff and had good science documentaries that didn’t pay lip service to fundamentalist claims. Well, they fixed that. A recent documentary titled Wall of Separation was nothing less than an hourlong piece of wingnut agitprop, a slick tome claiming that there is no such thing as separation of church and state, and that we’ve been a Christian nation all along.

I watched more than half of it before succumbing to overwhelming nausea, and “slick” was exactly the term for it. It aped the PBS documentary format with near-perfection–the subtle piano music in the background, black backdrops to the interviews, panning shots of artistically depicted scenes from history–but they went too far when they coached their “experts” and “historians” to speak in the soft, lilting affected tones we’ve heard in PBS documentaries before. They sounded like they were talking to children, it was weird.

Nor should it be surprising: PBS has been run for a few years now by Karl Rove ally Kenneth Tomlinson, and the production company that made the “documentary” is made up of people with solid right-wing and Christian credentials.

Is there any doubt that the Constitutional protections against theocracy are now under full-fledged attack?

Today was the first of two “Sodai Gomi,” or “large garbage” days for me. In Japan, when you have trash that exceeds a certain size or is of a certain type, you have to use the sodai-gomi system to get rid of it. Since few people have vehicles suitable for carrying off large junk to the junkyard, this system suffices in its place.

The first step is to visit your city hall, where they can give you a list of prices for all different manner of junk, and a phone number to call for information and reservations. Then you go to your local supermarket or convenience store which sells tickets for sodai-gomi. These are adhesive stickers (not very adhesive, alas) which come in price increments of 250, 500, 1000, and 2000 yen (at least where I live–your city may differ). I bought 25 tickets all told. You’re supposed to put your name on the stickers, which might be a good idea since they can be removed rather easily, and are essentially money, like postage stamps. Then you make a phone call to the sodai-gomi center, and tell them when you’ll be putting out your trash. And finally, you put the trash out in the appropriate place for your street, with the stickers affixed. The haulers will come in and take it away.

So, last night, I hauled all of the junk that one person could carry to the gomi pile, and it was quite a haul. A video deck, three old carpets, two stools, two gas heaters, a gas stove, a suitcase, an old plastic mat, an old scanner, and two old printers. I also had two laser disc players, which involves a little story (as you may wonder why I had even one, much less two). Some years back, my brother and his wife used a laser disc player. They found that LD discs could be bought cheap here, and when I caught on, I bought a cheap player myself and got several discs. Of course, the machines are monstrous and the discs themselves huge, so as soon as they got the chance, my brother and his wife transferred them to DVDs. I figured I would as well, and since my machine was buggy and they no longer needed theirs (they had paid to get it fixed so they could do the transfers), I took theirs to do my transfers. Having finished, I had no use for either machine and so dumped them.

That was late last night, around midnight. This morning, I woke up and looked outside to see the gomi pile disturbed. At first I just thought that someone had knocked over my suitcase while putting out their pink-bag unburnable garbage.

But on a closer look, I found that something else had happened–a few items seemed to be missing: the laser disc players and the scanner. The person who took them had removed the sodai-gomi stickers and had stuck them on my suitcase. The suitcase was askew because the laser disc players had been next to them. Other trash had also been moved aside to get at them.

Now, I found this to be very bizarre. First of all, it was raining, not the most opportune time to snatch electronics from the outside junk pile. Second, who the hell wants laser disc players any more? I supposed that this person had a disc collection they couldn’t play anymore or something. And third, the scanner? I did not include the power cable, nor did I include the ancient SCSI cable–not to mention, who has a SCSI-capable computer anymore these days? It occurred to me that maybe this was the work of the junk shop people, but they would probably have passed up on junk like that, instead taking the still-functional gas heaters, or even the less-ancient printer. I also can’t figure out if the pasting of the extra stickers on my suitcase was a courtesy or a rudeness. I also have to wonder if this person will be dumping the machines back out on the gomi pile when they figure out that the machines (or at least two of them) are not functioning. Hopefully, I won’t even be around to have to deal with it.

Now, foreigners have a history of taking this stuff, and I think we usually figured that we were the main ones doing it. But I’m pretty sure no foreigner was involved here, as they’re pretty scarce in this area. I know the only other non-Japanese tenant in this complex, and he didn’t strike me as they type.

This kind of thing is not too uncommon, by the way–Sachi put her sewing machine in the gomi pile a week or so ago, only to find it gone before it could be picked up.

It’s not that it’s a terrible thing–after all, it is junk, and if it can be used, great–but I did spend about twelve bucks on the tickets to haul those items away, which are now wasted. I guess the thing to do is to put your sodai-gomi out a week in advance, and what is not absconded with, then you buy tickets for.

Next week, the movers will put the rest of my sodai-gomi out, the big stuff–two book cabinets, a metal-frame cabinet, a computer desk, a regular desk, my bed frame, and a TV cabinet. Doubt that’ll get hauled off before the city people come, unless the garbage snatchers are very resourceful.

Update: It turns out that the printers are gone as well; I must have missed them before. Maybe it was the garbage guys. That would mean that you should set large junk out a week ahead of time without tickets, on the sodai-gomi pickup day; whatever doesn’t get taken, then you buy a ticket for. I could have saved about twenty bucks had I thought of that….

The more I consider the matter, the more I realize that the new apartment may be less noisy. I think I already mentioned loudspeaker trucks as one issue. In my current place, they are an endemic problem. On a regular basis, we have the junk dealers, the yam and gyoza salespeople, and whatever other vendors or special interest people that decide to harass us on any given day. In the winter, the kerosene seller comes through regularly with a mind-numbingly repetitive melody in dull but piercing electronic tones. And during election times, it’s a wall-to-wall scream-fest from morning till night for two or three weeks at a time. The new apartment building will be a lot less susceptible to that, as it is a single building along a major road, which noise trucks will be less likely to ply; it is not the sprawling residential complex with winding parking lot roads that attract these pests like magnets.

This week has been an example of that. For some reason, the issue loudspeaker trucks are out. I can’t make out what the occasion is, but several different trucks have been rolling by. One is for someone who might be a politician, but seems focused on telling one story having to do with AIDS–over and over again. The van, void of slogan banners, just a van with three loudspeakers mounted on top, passed through my neighborhood half a dozen times yesterday, a few of those times doing to drive-slowly-through-every-parking-lot thing. Another truck had a political party name and one candidate from the last mayoral election, but did not seem to be campaigning. Another truck had a banner for “Seikatsusha Net” (“生活者ネット“), which for all I can figure out, means “Living Net,” “living” in the sense of a person living a certain lifestyle. The noise truck passes are not regular and don’t follow a single theme. What the hell?

But perhaps the one element that is most relevant in terms of the timing of my move is a neighbor across the way. It seems that someone in the building right across from mine has gotten a new bundle of joy–a real screamer. And this tenant has chosen a room in their place to use as a nursery which faces right across from my place, maybe 50 feet distant. And this wonderful mother has decided to leave the windows, and sometimes the door as well, of her apartment open so as to give the child fresh air. Can’t fault her too much on either choice, I suppose, but the end result is that I’m getting treated to full-volume infant screaming on a regular basis now. Lucky me, this started just this week, days before I move out, and not a year or more before now.

OK, how can these guys do this? You’d think there was some law or something preventing the posting of massive amounts of copyrighted material like this. Interesting.

Seeing the latest buffoonery coming from the White House, I began to wonder about something. It seems that Dick Cheney is saying he is not part of the executive branch, nor any other branch of government, and as such is not answerable to such rules or oversight (which Bush backs him on). I mean, this is so ludicrously absurd that you would expect it to come from The Onion, and not from the White House.

So what I began to wonder was, how can Republicans possibly support this administration and not be utterly embarrassed and ashamed by it? I mean, it’s gone beyond simple partisan bounds. What Cheney is saying is so contemptible to sense and reason that anyone who is not embarrassed to support such people would have to have similar contempt for reason and the rule of law.

Which kind of sums it up, really.

But as the Bush administration becomes more and more absurd, it seems that they are pushing the envelope a bit too far. They have hit 26% in the polls and are pushing downward–almost to the point that Nixon hit months before he resigned in disgrace. But still 26% actually approve of crap like this–and even accounting for rabid partisanship, that’s still an awfully big number. I’m pretty rabidly partisan myself, but were this a Democratic administration, I would have jumped off the bandwagon long ago.

Via Pharyngula, here’s a Clever-Hans story of a dog that supposedly can work out complex mathematical formulas and answer theological queries in four different languages, responding by tapping his paw on the questioner’s hand.

Stan Tuten held up a board and scribbled down a basic algebra problem:

If a=2, and b=3, what is axb-1?

Micah, a terrier mix with penetrating eyes like black molasses, glanced at the board.

“Micah?” said Dr. Cindy Tuten, a physician and Stan Tuten’s wife. “Do you understand the problem?”

She held one hand high in the air with a bowl of cut tomatoes and cooked chicken (the dog’s reward) and the other out for the dog’s answer. Micah tapped his paw once.

“Once means ‘yes’ and twice means ‘no’ ” she said. “So he’s telling us he understands the problem. Micah, what is the solution to the problem?”

The dog stared at the food, then tapped Tuten’s palm five times.

“Very good, Micah,” she said and fed him a treat.

Clearly, what’s happening here is that they have trained their dog to tap on the hand of a person until that person registers a reaction to seeing a dog answer difficult questions correctly. The dog then stops and gets a treat. At that, the dog is very smart for its species. But the humans involved are incredibly stupid, as they seem to believe that the dog actually understands what is being said and formulates the correct answer independently. As if a dog knows algebra. Even if dogs could understand math, who taught the dog? Keep in mind that the dogs owners are a doctor and a Math teacher, people who should really know better. Or perhaps they do, and this is all a publicity stunt. But maybe not; read on:

“He can calculate problems given in English, Spanish, French and German,” Cindy Tuten said. One member of the small audience gathered in the Tuten’s living room wondered if maybe she was unknowingly giving the dog signals or secret messages. The visitor, who’d never before seen Micah, threw out a question.

“Nueve menos tres?”

Micah stood still for a moment, and then tapped his paw six times for the correct answer.

“We were speechless,” Cindy Tuten said. “We were also skeptical.”

Skeptical. Yeah, riiiight. So skeptical that they ignored the obvious explanation and instead figured it was a Jesus moment.

Deeply connected by their faith and Christian beliefs, the Tutens began to pray.

“How many persons are in the God head?” Cindy Tuten asked.

Micah tapped three times.

“How many God’s are there?” The dog tapped once. …

It is the belief of this family, that beyond math and games, Micah was put on this Earth to teach people Jesus is coming soon, the Tutens said. …

The Tutens are convinced their dog’s mission is to become an evangelist and witness.

“God gave him an extraordinarily unusual ability to communicate with anyone through tapping out his response in my hand or in the hands of a select few of our friends who are in Christ,” Cindy Tuten said.

Which explains their intellectual blind spot: they want to believe it’s a god thing. It’s a weird phenomenon, that when some otherwise highly trained, very intelligent people who are also strongly religious consider matters of religion, they turn off their intellect and suspend disbelief.

Apparently, their idea is that god sent the dog to Earth with the knowledge already in the dog’s brain. Okay, plausible explanation. But of course, the Tutens were “skeptical”–so skeptical, in fact, that they have not seemed to carry out the simplest test to demonstrate whether or not the dog’s abilities are genuine. The test is simple, really: have someone ask the dog a question to which no human in the room knows the answer.

There is no mention in the article about such a test. Gee, I wonder why not?

There’s a six-month security report out on how Vista is doing, and according to the report, Vista is the most secure operating system out there. The report shows Vista to have fewer “high severity” vulnerabilities than OS X 10.4, closely followed by XP, and then various Linux brands. The catch: this report was authored by a Microsoft executive. Gee, I wonder if it skews the facts at all?

Naturally, criticisms have started to come out as to the validity of this claim. For example, the definition of “high severity” vulnerabilities is being challenged; if a Vista vulnerability allows someone over the web to take over the computer, and a Mac vulnerability allows a physically present user with an admin password to take over the computer, can both be grouped together in the same category? Some “high severity” vulnerabilities are far more easily exploited than others. Then there’s the fact that the report discounts third-party vulnerabilities in Windows, which depends more heavily than the Mac OS on those types of apps. The count does not touch on all of the viruses, worms, spyware, or other malware which counts for the bulk of attacks that most people suffer from. And it does not factor in how many of the vulnerabilities are actually exploited in the wild.

In other words, just about every way the list could be skewed in Vista’s favor, it has been skewed. Skew things the opposite way and Vista could be made to look like the worst OS ever. For example, this article sifted through the data released in the Microsoft report and discovered that Vista had fixed only 12 of 27 total vulnerabilities, unlike in XP, where in the first six months, 36 of 39 had been fixed.

But the fact remains that whatever you say about vulnerabilities, Vista is still susceptible to, and has been attacked by a wide variety of viruses and other malware, including adware and spyware, while the Mac has not suffered a single actual virus or worm attack in the wild, and has zero spyware or adware. The bottom line is that if you buy a Mac today, you’re not going to have to even think about security, while if you get a Vista machine, you can still easily get infected by a lot of malware out there. And in the end, that’s the only thing that matters to actual, real-life users.

As I’ve mentioned a few times, the new building we’re moving into next week (just one week! Still, time is craaaawling by…) has a small supermarket on the 1st floor, open 24/7. It’s more than just a convenience store (in Japanese: “conbini”) as it has supermarket-style selections, including a full meat and fish section, as well as fruits & veggies, a baked goods section, and so on. But it does resemble a convenience store in the pricing.

When I went to check it previously, they were having a sale, so I couldn’t judge the prices accurately. Now that the store-wide sale is over and they just have the usual odd items on sale, like any supermarket, I figured it might be interesting to check out the differences in pricing between the new store and the supermarket I’ve been using for seven years in Inagi.

Now, you could say that it’s not a fair fight; after all, one store is way out in the boonies and has massive floor space, while the other is downtown with a small footprint. The smaller, new store (“Pororoca”) does not have the facilities to prepare the meat, bake the bread, and so on. So it has to ship it in from some other place where it’s prepared.

And it shows in the pricing. While some items were priced identically (an imported strawberry jam, a liter carton of milk, a packet of spaghetti sauce, a few different kinds of snacks) and fewer still were actually cheaper at Pororoca (carrots, for some reason, and a few other items on sale at the time), most of the items were more expensive. While a few meat products were priced the same at both places, some meats at Pororoca were priced at two or even three times the cost per 100 grams than they were set at my local Sanwa market. Fruits & veggies were more similarly priced (I guess they just get shipped in the same way wherever they go), and many other items ranged from slightly more expensive to about 50% more expensive.

So, Pororoca will be the emergency backup market–kind of like a convenience store (like the dozens of convenience stores within walking distance of the new place), but far better stocked. You can’t get materials for entrees at a convenience store unless you’re really creative. So while our main shopping will probably be at the Seiyu a few minutes away, if we’re in a rush or need something really late at night, we have a place to go get it.

When I first asked KDDI to set up an Internet connection at our new apartment, they said it would use the telephone line and I’d need a splitter, a vDSL box, and a router-modem, just like I do now.

Later, they corrected themselves. They would do it through the LAN ports built into the wall; all I would have to do is plug in directly, no problem.

Today, I got another call. Guess what?? Yep, another version of events. Now it seems that they’ll use the fiber-optic cable port (on the left in the image above), and so will need to have some kind of modem box after all.

I can barely wait to hear what their next version of events will be!

Actually, though, I expect that the F/O cable will yield the best results, in terms of speed. But we’ll see….

As I have explained before, street layouts in Japan are somewhat complex, following a different system than is used in the United States. And despite the fact that relatively few people in Japan have cars, the streets tend to be full of them at any given time. Sure, it may not be as bad as you hear New York is at times, and as I ride a scooter, a lot of the frustrating traffic jams are for me more an exercise of finding a way past the stopped cars through the gaps and crevices.

As a result, driving down the main drags can be, well, a drag, if you’ll forgive the piss-poor pun. Streets are not quite so tidy as they are in the U.S. They angle, they turn, they merge, they don’t usually run parallel. So it’s not easy to find a backstreet route in the first place. But it can be even harder because of a phenomenon I like to call “the neighborhoods of no through passage.” I discovered these early on, when I tried to take shortcuts. I would drive down what looked like a promising street to cut through a mass of houses and other buildings to get to an objective that was blocked by traffic on the main roads. (Sometimes there are no gaps to ride through.) A few minutes later, I found myself dumped back out on the road I started from, having found that You Can’t Get There From Here.

In the U.S., when a neighborhood wants to cut down on traffic cutting through, they usually install speed bumps along the main roads and 4-way stop signs at every intersection. This slows people down enough to discourage those who are trying to find an alternate route. In Japan, however, they have found an alternate method: creatively designated one-way streets. Take a look at the scan below, of an area in central Tokyo:

Note all those blue arrows. They designate one-way streets. Now, starting from the big red street along the bottom, try to take any of the streets heading upwards to the top of the map, without going against any of the arrows, and without going to the yellow street on the left. Go ahead, try it. Similarly, try finding a route from the yellow street at the left all the way to the right side.

Now imagine trying it without the benefit of a map.

Pretty clever, huh? They do an excellent job of blocking you out. Oh, a route can be found, but it’s extraordinarily tricky, especially without a map to guide you. (And even then it’s still hard!) The residents probably come to know the area well enough to be able to get where they want to go easily enough, but strangers quickly become ensnared and no matter how hard they try, they can’t get to where they want to go. As a result, drivers tend to avoid taking the back streets.

And no, the streets aren’t one-way because they’re narrow. In Japan, streets that would be so narrow as to be back-alleys in the U.S. often serve as two-way streets in Japan, as I pointed out in this post. The one-way system has got to be for keeping shortcut-seekers out.

Now, the thing is, there usually is a workable backstreet route–but it’s hard to find. It takes trial and error, and some time studying maps. Or, an easier method: follow the taxis.

Taxis do this kind of thing for a living. They know all the back streets. Which is why all the photos I took of backstreets here (all are of streets between Shinjuku and Ikebukuro, which will be my route to and from work) have taxis in them. So if you want to go from point A to point B, just follow the cabs, and you’ll get there. The back streets that allow for a path from one place to the other are full of cabs, as well as the other practiced drivers who have found the routes. The back streets may be narrow and tiny, but they’re well-used.

Some of the back streets are actually quite pleasant; they wind past parks and are sometimes tree-lined. You wonder why more people don’t know about them. But then you look at the map of the area and you can see why. They’re so far buried in convoluted mazes of streets, it sometimes seems a wonder that people can find them at all.

One thing I do know: without a map, you can get lost in Tokyo really easily.

This from a legal conference in Ottawa:

The conservative jurist stuck up for Agent Bauer, arguing that fictional or not, federal agents require latitude in times of great crisis. “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling Season 2, where the agent’s rough interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist nuke, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand.

“Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?” Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. “Say that criminal law is against him? ‘You have the right to a jury trial?’ Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so.

Scalia drawing legal frameworks based on popular culture are nothing new. Ignoring the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, he cites Fox Entertainment and the completely unsupported idea that torture elicits useful information to essentially circumvent the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, not to mention a slew of international laws and treaties.

And this is not the first time Scalia has done this. He was one vote short of voiding the separation of church and state, and based his legal argument (PDF) of the basis of religious incursions in popular culture:

Presidents continue to conclude the Presidential oath with the words “so help me God.” Our legislatures, state and national, continue to open their sessions with prayer led by official chaplains. The sessions of this Court continue to open with the prayer “God save the United States and this Honorable Court.” Invocation of the Almighty by our public figures, at all levels of government, remains commonplace. Our coinage bears the motto “IN GOD WE TRUST.” And our Pledge of Allegiance contains the acknowledgment that we are a Nation “under God.” As one of our Supreme Court opinions rightly observed, “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” …

With all of this reality (and much more) staring it in the face, how can the Court possibly assert that “ ‘the First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between . . . religion and nonreligion,’” … and that “[m]anifesting a purpose to favor . . . adherence to religion generally,” … is unconstitutional?

In other words, because minor violations of the First Amendment have gone unchecked in the past, we should simply chuck the whole idea. Which is kind of like saying that since a shopkeeper didn’t have a shoplifter arrested when they stole penny candy a few times, he has no right to call the police when the same person robs the store of thousands of dollars. Religious advocates get all hot and bothered when people challenge “small” and “insignificant” religious incursions, saying that things like mentioning God in the Pledge simply isn’t worth getting upset about. But when the Supreme Court is on the verge of removing our most vital protection against theocracy based upon that “small” and “insignificant” incursion, it takes on a whole new light.

Of course, the overriding problem is that we have an ultra-right-wing nutjob on the Supreme Court, someone who should never have been allowed near the institution. Thomas is little different, he’s simply been more quiet about it.

Conservatives love to credit this to Reagan as part of their gut-based truthiness (as opposed to fact-based truth). The idea is that Reagan simply spent so much on the military that the Soviet Union collapsed because it couldn’t keep up. Never mind that Reagan spent less on the military than Carter proposed in long-term budget proposals; that’s the kind of irrelevant “fact” that goes against the gut-check, like the fact that Bush 41 instituted the post-Cold War “Peace Dividend” that cut military spending, which is a lot less satisfying than the truthiness of blaming Clinton for gutting the military.

But from the conservative American Enterprise Institute comes a paper by a man named Yegor Gaidar. He is the director of the Institute for Economies in Transition in Moscow. Between 1991 and 1994, he was acting prime minister of Russia, minister of economy, and first deputy prime minister. And he says that the Soviet Union collapsed for very simple reasons: grain and oil, and the Soviet policies concerning them.

Reagan acolytes may still say that Reagan’s spending was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but if so, it was more along the lines of coming upon an enemy who has already been beaten half to death, and simply poking him in the shoulder, then watching him fall down. Had Carter been re-elected and Mondale followed him, the results would have been the same, except Carter would not have given away so much to the wealthy and to corporations, and our own debts would have been lesser.

Hat tip to Marc Andreessen.

There were two recent incidents where the Barack Obama campaign made stupid mistakes. One was when they pushed a story that Bill Clinton used 9/11 for making money off of private investors, and the second was using a quasi-slur in criticizing Hillary Clinton’s ties to India. The first was mistaken because Bill Clinton did not make the appearance on 9/11, he made it via video from the U.S. on 9/10–it was 9/11 halfway around the world. Clinton attended charity events and other non-profit gigs on 9/11. The second was in reference to a joke made by Hillary that she could “certainly run for the Senate seat in Punjab and win easily.” An oppo piece was circulated by the Obama campaign referring to Hillary as “D-Punjab.” This was not seen as funny by those in the Indian-American community.

In both cases, Obama has taken responsibility for the error, noting that while neither was authored or personally approved by him, “I consider the entire campaign – and in particular myself – responsible for the mistake.” Which is certainly the right tone to set.

The question is, after two such errors in rapid succession, is this less a random overreach by an ardent but foolish and tasteless staffer, or a sign of the culture of the campaign? If Obama corrects this, as he promised most recently to take “appropriate action to prevent errors like this from happening in the future,” then he should recover without difficulty. But if stuff like this continues to pop up, it could cause greater problems to his image–which, after all, relies on him being a likable, straight-talking guy who strongly favors inclusion.