How long before lies that are minimally plausible pile up so deep that they become legally actionable? The Bush administration has been depending upon such lies for years, and now that there is actually some form of oversight, they are piling up faster and deeper than ever before. How many administration officials have excellent memories until asked about potential illegalities, whereupon their memories suddenly become completely blank? How many officials can come up with excuses for outrageous behavior that are barely possible but so unlikely that the laws of statistics would demand that several such claims would normally require billions of years for such events to occur naturally?

The most recent: that several years’ worth of Karl Rove’s emails were “accidentally” deleted from multiple locations. Rove’s lawyer claims that Rove deleted the emails from both his own email store and from the email server, believing that the emails were being saved somewhere else. Meanwhile, the RNC apparently did not archive their server data (something which is standard procedure for businesses and large organizations), while the White House says that five million official emails were “accidentally” lost from its servers when it switched from one email software package to another.

So, the instant that serious oversight begins and White House emails are demanded, we learn that officials inside the White House, in multiple separate incidents, “accidentally” erased huge numbers of potentially incriminating emails.

So the question of the day becomes, exactly how monumentally stupid do they think we are?

The answer, of course, is not that they think everyone to be stupid; it is simply that, with no other recourse available, they simply chose the explanation which would legally allow them to escape. Because the explanation, however asinine and contemptuous of reason, is minimally plausible, they can head off legal action, and, in the end, get away scot-free. And since this White House is already recognizably the most corrupt and criminal in history, they probably figure that one more incredibly outrageous lie won’t make that much of a difference.

Of course, all of this sets a dangerous precedent: this administration, if nothing else, is proving that you can violate the law as much as you please, but so long as you destroy the evidence and are able to claim it was an “accident,” no matter how many hundreds of “accidents” there supposedly were, no matter how many instances of memory loss you claim, no matter how unbelievable to rational people the excuses are, so long as they will stop any legal action from taking place, you can get away with it, and keep getting away with it, time and time again. Especially if you can generate fear in the populace and lead the press around by the nose.

It is so nice that George Bush restored “honor and dignity” to the White House, don’t you think?

A little while ago, I noticed that a new conveyor-belt sushi joint (kaiten-sushi in Japanese) had opened up along my route home, and so I decided to check it out. Usually, I go to a place called “Ganso Sushi,” which is a fair place. I’ll order a plate of maguro, and if it’s good, I’ll eat there that night (quality varies dramatically from day to day).

This new chain, called “Sushiro,” makes a big deal of their ¥105-yen plates (roughly a buck a plate, with each plate having two pieces of sushi), which is fairly cheap. This chain has started sprouting up everywhere, with the same building style as many “family restaurants” (Denny’s-style) in Japan–a second-story restaurant with a ground-floor parking lot.

Anyway, I stopped by one evening and went in–and very quickly freaked out. I can’t say exactly why, but something about the place just creeped me out somehow. Unlike most kaiten-sushi joints, this one had no central bay with the sushi chefs. The chefs were hidden behind a wall. There were, instead, three or four rows of booths clustered around conveyor belts that led back behind the wall leading to the kitchen. To order any special kind of sushi, you would talk to the chefs via an intercom, and in a minute or two, the order would come rolling out. How you could be sure that your order would not be snatched up by diners before you on the conveyor belt I don’t know, maybe they have a system for that, an order tag or something.

The thing is, the whole place gave me the willies. It just felt wrong. After figuring out how it worked, I simply felt that I had to get out of there and never come back. It’s one of those unconscious things that you can’t explain. Don’t ask me to be rational about it.

Obviously, I am not in the majority on this: the place was crowded, with people waiting in line to be seated. Every one of these places I’ve seen has people streaming into it, likely because of the low prices.

Still, you won’t catch me in one of those things.

So, it’s official. Apple’s Leopard will in fact be delayed until October:

iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones.

About three weeks ago, a site called DigiTimes predicted that Apple would be delayed until October. Everybody scoffed at the rumor, including me, because they got the other half of the rumor so badly wrong: they claimed that the delay would be caused by adapting Boot Camp to Windows Vista. So while it turns out that they were wrong on the reason, they were in fact right on the timing.

Reports say that Apple’s stock has fallen below $90 on the news, which is to be expected; the delay will disappoint a lot of people (not the least of which will be myself). On the other hand, this will end a lot of speculation about when Apple will tell everybody what those “top secret” features of Leopard are; that news will come at the WWDC in June. The bad news is also mitigated by the fact that while a Leopard delay is bad, it it much better than an iPhone delay; the iPhone is, for the time being, considered a much more important development by Apple. Another mitigating factor is the fact that Tiger is already a highly satisfactory OS, and while the features we know about in Leopard are nice, they are not yet something that people will miss yet–a positive side effect of not telling us what all of Leopard’s features are, I suppose.

This delay, however, has the effect of moving Apple closer to Microsoft’s sphere of incompetence; for a long time, Apple’s supporters (again, including myself) have been mocking Redmond for not being able to get a product out on time. There will no doubt be quite a bit of carping by Windows supporters about how Apple now sucks just the same. Of course, there are mitigating factors here, as well. One of them is the fact that this represents a delay of four months, not three years. Another is the fact that, as far as we know, Apple has not had to cut several key features of Leopard in order to get it out on time, as was the case with Vista. And finally, there will be the final release quality of Leopard: if it sucks like Vista, then there will be some justice to the carping, otherwise not so much. And, of course, there is still the fact that since Apple’s 2-year-old Tiger is still more advanced than Windows Vista, we can well afford to wait an extra four months for a new OS.

Let’s just hope that this is the last of the bad news from Apple for a while.

This is something that I have touched on in the past, but Josh Marshall, as part of his coverage of the US Attorney scandal, has an excellent, must-read post on how rare cases of voter fraud have been exaggerated beyond sanity as a political tool by this Republican administration (you should also read this NY Times article). In essence, “voter fraud” is a non-issue, represented almost entirely by (a) people paid to register voters who fraudulently sign up non-existent people, something which results in zero fraudulent votes, or (b) people who filled out forms in error, most of whom never even attempted to vote.

But Republicans have pretended that it is an epidemic of untold proportions, and have used the now-politicized Justice Department and their US Attorney cronies to “crack down” on it. The real aim: to bring back new versions of Jim Crow laws at the national level, discouraging or preventing minorities and low-income citizens from voting. And as a fringe benefit, they can remove people’s attention from their own widespread election fraud while making Democrats seem guilty.

What happened was that US Attorneys, acting as GOP attack dogs, specifically tried to make cases against Democrats (just as they lopsidedly prosecuted Democratic officials and left Republicans alone), but for all their effort, could only find 86 people to convict over 5 years (of which a third were for local elections, like sheriffs buying votes in small-town campaigns), barely more than one conviction per month nationwide–not enough in total even to swing the razor-sharp Bush-Gore deficit in Florida in 2000, even had all 86 been located there. Compare that to thousands of Democratic voters disenfranchised illegally by bogus “felon” lists, or Republicans signing up Democrats for voter registration and then destroying the forms–acts which, to the best of my knowledge, never ended in indictments or arrests, just like dozens of other well-documented cases of Republican election fraud. Meanwhile, the Republican effort to arrest Democrats for voter fraud wound up with people being deported or imprisoned for what amounted to clerical errors, while acquittals peppered a large number of the indictments.

Maybe they’d find more fraud if they stopped ignoring Republican offenders.

Yet another step towards a Brave New Conservative Country.

Apparently, something may or may not be revealed about the Steorn Orbo saga on Friday. For a rundown on what Steorn Orbo is, either check out my prior blog post on it, or read this blog on Orbo developments, but the Reader’s Digest version is that a company called Steorn says that it accidentally stumbled upon a way of arranging magnets so as to create a system which produces more energy than is put into it–the classic perpetual-motion “free energy” machine, which the company has now dubbed “Orbo.” Sounds just like any number of hoaxes and false claims that litter the landscape every year–but the twist is that the company isn’t acting like a bunch of fraudsters: they stopped sales and solicitations, took out a very expensive ad to call for a scientific jury to study and verify the technology, and are otherwise making the kind of noises that one would not expect from those perpetrating a hoax.

Now, Steorn has announced that on Friday, April 13, they “will be releasing the update on the Jury process and so on.” People are expecting this to mean that the company will be releasing at least preliminary results on what the jury has found, and perhaps identifying members of the jury and publishing some of their statements. “Other info,” possibly including some specs on the technology, are also expected. Steorn claims that they are producing around 100,000 devices that use the technology as samples, and that could be released anytime between now and July.

Will it turn out to be a hoax? Will it change the world? Is it just an incredibly elaborate publicity stunt to promote the TV show “Lost”?

One hopes, and yet one suspects.

UPDATE: False alarm. Steorn was just releasing an update to information already released. The only new information is the number of people on the jury, which is 22. Ho-hum. So wait until July, which seems to be the next date where they might come out with something. Or, from today’s experience, not.

Sean recently asked me if I had seen Conservapedia, and though I had, it reminded me of a theme I’d been kicking around but had not gotten around to writing extensively on yet: revisionism. One of the favorite charges of conservatives is that liberals are revisionists about everything, “rewriting” history on everything from Iraq to the Constitution, from WWII to the Reagan era and so on. No clearer a case of projection could be found; conservatives are in the midst of nothing less than a revolution of revisionism, with history being only one small but notable aspect. The framers were all Christians and the U.S. was set up as a Christian nation, with our legal system founded on the Ten Commandments; conservatives are the heroes of civil rights for minorities because Lincoln was a Republican; Reagan won the Cold War single-handedly; Iraq was all about freeing the Iraqi people; and so on and so forth.

Conservatives are the ultimate revisionists. One of the key elements of conservatism is, after all, the desire to return to a “better” past, and all the revisionism of past times that is required to make it all seem like a sepia-toned paradise.

But it’s not just the past they want to revise, it’s everything. Aside from the obvious point of political spinning to revise people’s views on current political developments, conservatives have branched out into several other areas. Newt Gingrich spearheaded linguistic revisionism in the 1990’s when he sent Republicans a memo titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” on how to use language to spin reality. Republicans became “active, confident pioneers of reform,” while Democrats were “corrupt, self-serving traitors espousing a destructive welfare state.” This was nothing new; as you recall, Bush 41 spearheaded an attack on the very word “liberal”; Gingrich’s effort was simply more methodical and far-reaching. But the end result was a culture in which language became a tool to do far more than give immediate spin.

This branched out into the conservative war to control the media itself, either by pressure and influence or by direct ownership. It had its roots in the successful punditry of people like Rush Limbaugh, but fully blossomed with two developments: the foundation of Fox News and the establishment of the perception of the media as being “liberal.” These two elements work in lockstep.

I’ll begin with the second of those two, the “liberal media” lie. As I laid out in this post, the whole “liberal media” myth began with an unscientific survey which found that 60% of news reporters had personal political affiliations to the left of center. Though the study could have simply proven that more liberal reporters answer surveys than conservatives, and though the survey gave no evidence whatsoever that any such personal affiliations had any effect whatsoever on actual reporting, the “study” was used as “proof” that liberals ruled the media–despite a different survey which showed that in fact, editors and publishers, the people who really do rule the mainstream media, are 66% conservative. But once the “liberal media” perception got started, it was simply repeated as fact so many times that now it is an accepted “truth,” even in light of current media positions which are so blatantly conservative that a “liberal media” is unthinkably absurd.

The reason for the perception is yet another facet of revisionism and spin: if everyone can be convinced that the news media is liberal, then everyone will believe that the actual truth is more conservative than is being presented in the media.

Which leads us to the other piece of the conservative media play: Fox News. Conservatives are in a tizzy about how Democrats are “afraid of reporters” and are somehow “dangerously threatening a free press” by refusing to take part in debates hosted by Fox News. The reason why Democrats are shunning said debates is for a reason that should have been made more clear long ago: Fox “News” is nothing more than the propaganda arm of the Republican Party. In fact, it is so openly political that it is amazing that they can still make any claim to being an objective news organization at all.

But Fox has, from the beginning, made its biases perfectly clear. They followed the Limbaugh model on a large scale: they went for far more opinion and commentary than actual news, stacking the ranks of their broadcasters with some of the most brazenly partisan pundits that could be found. They eschewed formal news formats, and instead launched a new style of “journalism” featuring hard-edged and angry delivery of doctrine and dogma backed by riffs of rock music and flashes of high-tech computer graphics. They then called their unabashedly right-wing fare “fair and balanced,” in contrast with the rest of the “liberal media.” And when their ratings rose and challenged other news organizations like CNN, those organizations quickly rocked hard to the right in the hopes of regaining their faltering market share.

So as conservatives now saturating the airwaves consistently pushed the idea of a “liberal media,” the media tilted noticeably to the right, delivering a one-two punch to perception: a right-wing media perceived as being so “liberal” that the public would believe that the actual truth was even further to the right.

But the trend of revisionism didn’t stop there; it only accelerated with the election of George W. Bush, and gained a frictionless surface in the wake of 9/11. The Bush administration started revising everything it could get its hands on, most notably science itself. Global warming and Creationism became new foci of the revisionists. Scientists who depended upon public funding or worked for the government in any way found their reporting censored and edited at the highest levels, themselves sometimes even put under gag orders preventing them from telling people the truth, while the government spouted a revised form of science that upheld their political agendas. Even the public perception of science itself was attacked on the grounds of “fairness” and “opinion.” Suddenly, if any “scientist” could be found to oppose an idea, then all views on the issue were represented as “opinion”; no matter how many scientists stated firm acceptance of an idea that offended conservatives, there was “no consensus,” “the jury was still out,” and “more study” would be necessary. Meanwhile, any conservative yahoo who came to the table with an idea, no matter how ludicrous and unsupported by evidence, would have to be taken seriously, else there would be no “fairness” and science would be suppressing opinions. Suddenly, science from the schoolroom to the government ceased being a forum where evidence or even reason would be required; conservative credentials are all that one would need to have one’s theories presented side-by-side with arguments which had been steadily built over decades or even centuries by arduous, relentless study and piercing peer review.

Similar revisionism came to the legal establishment; this trend started in the 70’s with right-wing backlash against the Roe v. Wade decision. In the conservative view, any judge who rules in a way unfavorable to the conservative worldview is “legislating from the bench.” The political legal philosophy of strict constructionism, breaking into a myriad of branches in an attempt to rationalize the philosophy’s negation by the Ninth Amendment, attempts to completely revise the Constitution itself by narrowly reinterpreting it out of relevancy, making way for broad new insertions of conservative philosophy to act as a new core of judiciary standards. By interpreting wordings in our highest statement of law, there is no right to habeas corpus, no right to privacy, no separation of church and state, no protection against unreasonable search and seizure–virtually no right to anything save for keeping and bearing arms, when it comes right down to it.

So the arrival of the Conservapedia comes as absolutely no surprise to me whatsoever. Whether it turns out to be a new phenomenon in the definition of all things in the light of political agendas, or if it winds up being nothing more than a sad, pathetic joke, it makes no difference. It is simply the most obvious and inevitable development imaginable in today’s conservative revisionist movement to redefine anything and everything in a conservative light.

If there were any evidence that the White House has violated the law and is covering it up, this is it:

The White House said Wednesday it had mishandled Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts used by nearly two dozen presidential aides, resulting in the loss of an undetermined number of e-mails concerning official White House business.

In what was, by the confession of many involved by their own statements, a deliberate attempt to circumvent laws requiring accountability by leaving permanent records, many White House staffers used private email accounts to conduct official business. Because this in itself is in clear violation of that law, you should expect no one to be punished. This is the Bush White House, after all.

But now we hear that these emails have now been accidentally “lost.”

Gee whiz, really?

By the way:

Through the implementation of records management controls and other necessary actions, the President shall take all such steps as may be necessary to assure that the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of his constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented and that such records are maintained as Presidential records pursuant to the requirements of this section and other provisions of law.

Seems pretty clear Bush broke that law. In addition to all the other laws he’s broken, high and low.

Tourism officials in England are trying to stir popularity for the Lake District by taking poems by William Wordsworth, changing them and setting them to rap music, and then having it all performed by a guy in a giant squirrel outfit named “MC Nuts.”

I swear to god, you could not make this shit up.

According to a tourism official:

Wordsworth’s Daffodils poem has remained unchanged for 200 years and to keep it alive for another two more centuries we wanted to engage the YouTube generation who want modern music and amusing video footage on the web.

Hopefully, this will help them connect with poetry, the works of Wordsworth and the stunning landscape of the Lake District which inspired him.

It is more likely that the YouTube generation will connect with the floor as they laugh uncontrollably at the morons who put this together. If you watch the video, you can barely even make out the words due to the overdone reverb effect. (As if that were the biggest problem with the entire concept.)

True, this is getting the Lake District a certain amount of media attention–but it is getting that attention less as a popular tourist destination, and a bit more as a laughingstock. Attempting to fuse classic poetry with rap music and a guy in a squirrel suit? Maybe that made sense after a dozen beers at the local pub, but you would imagine that they would have sobered up enough in the time required to get the thing on video and post it on the web. I mean, seriously, check these guys out for psychedelic drug abuse, or possibly terminal idiocy.

The video ends with the words “Respect Wordsworth” flashed across the screen. A bit too late for that, I’d say.

Apple regularly demonstrates genius in design. Their laptops inspire comments of awe when people first see them. Their consumer desktops are emulated industry-wide and decorate desks of innumerable computer users on TV shows and movies. iPods rule the music-player market, and the iPhone is a thing of beauty. So why is it that Apple can’t build a mouse that doesn’t suck big huge hairy ones?

Ever since the beginning, Apple’s mice have never been good. Attractive, often yes, but not of any quality that would make people want to use them. Remember the hockey-puck mouse sold with the first iMacs, the one which, since it was round, your hand accidentally rotated it so it wouldn’t respond properly? Who the hell designs a circular mouse and doesn’t see the design flaw in three minutes? Then Steve Jobs got stuck up on the idea that a mouse should have a surface unbroken by seams, and hasn’t been able to get over it since. It took forever for Apple to finally release a two-button mouse, and longer still to fit a scroll wheel into it.

Well, today I am officially retiring my Mighty Mouse. After having used it for six months now, it has proven to be nothing but a pain in the ass for me. I know there are people out there who like it, but I am not one of them. I tried, God knows I tried. But the damn thing just sucks.

I went over some of the major reasons four months ago. The scroll wheel was hard to handle, the rocking left-right clicking mechanism doesn’t work well, and the side buttons are very badly designed. Well, I eventually got used to the feel of the scroll wheel, and still do like the flexibility of 360˚ scrolling, but then I discovered a new common flaw: it gets gummed up after a while and stops working properly. This should have been obvious to a skilled designer: after all, the whole reason we switched to laser mice is because the sensor wheels that drove the old ball mice would get gummed up by hand grime. It was a pain to have your mouse always become less and less functional, and to have to remove the ball every month or so and clean the rollers with your fingernails or some other sharp object. So what does Apple do? They create another ball-controlled object on their new laser mice, except that this one can’t even be removed for cleaning! Instead, you have to take a cloth with cleaning solution and roll the ball with that, and hope that it cleans the works sufficiently. Every month or so. Sorry, I gave up on ball mice to get away from that crap.

The left- and right-clicking mechanism is something I never got used to. I still have trouble with it, so that every 10th click or so is the opposite of what I intend. Message to Apple: put a goddamned seam in the thing like every other mouse maker on the planet, so the buttons will work properly for everyone.

And the side buttons are even worse than I thought. Aside from being hard to activate as I reported before, I found that they will activate for the wrong reasons. One mouse move I often make is when I am clicking-and-dragging and I run out of desk space before I get the cursor to where I want. When that happens, I lift up the mouse while continuing to hold down the left mouse button (such as it is), put the mouse down in a new position with more room, and then continue to move in the same direction. Doing this requires you to hold on to the sides of the mouse tighter in order to keep the left button depressed–which then activates the side buttons, with whatever function you have assigned to them, whilst simultaneously losing your click-and-drag. Bad, bad designing.

But it gets worse. The batteries run out all too quickly, and there are three different annoyances associated with that. First is that the Bluetooth software on the Mac OS is designed to flash incessantly in your menu bar to warn you of a low battery in your mouse and/or keyboard. I tried to turn this off and couldn’t get it to work. Bluetooth prefs allow you to turn off showing Bluetooth status in your menu bar, but mine would not frakking go away, even after restarting the computer. And I despise things flashing on my screen. What’s more, the flashing would start a good two weeks or more before the actual battery failure, so if I followed the warning immediately I’d be throwing out batteries with a good deal of juice still in them.

Then comes the problems associated with changing the batteries. The Apple mouse has an on/off switch which is badly designed. It doubles as a cover for the laser sensor, but because of the way it’s designed, it is virtually impossible to close the cover and turn off the mouse without accidentally clicking the mouse a few times before it turns off, thus screwing up wherever you left your cursor.

And then, when you put new batteries in and turn on the mouse again, it is not recognized immediately by the Mac. The first time I did this, I waited ten minutes for the computer to recognize the mouse, and it didn’t work. I tried turning the mouse off and on again, putting it closer and further away from the computer, I tried leaving it turned on in place for five minutes–nothing. (And yes, I had Bluetooth set to Discoverable, and the mouse was in the Favorites list.) Instead, I had to use Bluetooth File Exchange to browse the mouse back into recognition, and to do that, I had to dig up another mouse and plug it in first. Bad, bad, bad design.

I finally had it up to here with the damn thing, and after the hundred-thousandth mis-click, I just set the thing aside and plugged in an alternate wire mouse that I usually use at school (Spring vacation gives me another month before I have to buy a replacement for that). The Mighty Mouse will serve as an emergency backup, or I might use it as an alternate mouse at school.

Now, the other Bluetooth mouse I have, the Logitech V270, that works beautifully. Why can’t Apple just color the thing white and use that? Would it really kill them?

In the six years during the Bush presidency when Republicans controlled Congress, Bush vetoed only one piece of legislation, and that was for stem cell research funding. One reporter noted that this was the “cleanest record since the veto-less presidency of James A. Garfield. He was shot four months after he took office in 1881 and died several months later.”

In the past six weeks or so, Bush has issued threats against no fewer then sixteen different pieces of legislation, and it looks like he will probably follow up on every single threat. The bills threatened include the current war funding bill, bills on minimum wage, union rights, medication negotiating rights for Medicare, a sheaf of bills on open government (FOI requests, presidential library donor disclosure, and whistleblower protection), and the same stem-cell bill that Bush vetoed last year. And reports say that the real conflicts have yet to come.

It’s good to see Bush backing up his vow for bipartisanship with action.

Shintaro Ishihara just got re-elected for a third four-year term in Tokyo:

Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, an outspoken nationalist who is fond of riling Japan’s neighbours, has secured a third term leading the world’s largest metropolis.

Mr Ishihara, who has used racial slurs for Chinese and Korean residents and has described women past child-bearing age as “hags,” had an unassailable lead over his rivals for a four-year term, Japanese media said.

He was first elected chiefly from name recognition, having been the famed author of the nationalist screed The Japan that Can Say “No”, and seems to have gained popularity with his rather overt demagoguery.

Ishihara is not at all loved by the foreign community here, as he has a history of stereotyping and scapegoating on racial grounds, distorting statistics to make it look like foreigners are a criminal menace, and inciting fear among the local population as a means of creating support for his administration. This is in part why you get comments like this:

“I voted for Ishihara as I think Tokyo needs a leader who is convincing and has strong leadership,” said Manabu Koiso, a 24-year-old fish market worker.

In a very real way, it is the same kind of effect that Bush gets when he makes people afraid of terrorism, with the understood linkage to Islam and people of Middle Eastern origin, or that Republicans in general get when they play the race card on immigration (see Bill O’Reilly’s latest meltdown where he tried to connect his immigration scare with a recent drunk-driving tragedy).

For those of you not familiar with Tokyo’s charming governor, here’s a sample of his tasteful commentary:

Roppongi is now virtually a foreign neighborhood. Africans — I don’t mean African-Americans — who don’t speak English are there doing who knows what. This is leading to new forms of crime such as car theft. We should be letting in people who are intelligent.

He has also referred to Koreans, Taiwanese, and Chinese as “sangokunin,” a derogatory term from Japan’s colonial days. In his speech, to Japan’s military forces, he said that these foreigners “are committing heinous crimes over and over” and suggested that such foreigners should be rounded up in case of a natural disaster, otherwise they would “cause civil disorder.” This was evocative of the panic following the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, when rumors spread that Koreans were poisoning wells, burning buildings, looting, and even planting bombs; as a result, as many as 2,500 Koreans were killed by Japanese mobs of vigilantes. For Tokyo’s governor to be stirring up the exact same fears even before another quake strikes is reprehensible beyond belief.

But at least he’s a strong leader.

Blathering. If they decide that cell phones can be used on airplane flights, I want them to create “talking” and “no talking” divisions in the Economy-class cabin. The talkers get put in the back of the plane, and that’s where all the people with crying babies will be seated. Fair is fair.

Today, I had a bit of an upset stomach, so Sachi and I agreed that we should eat light–a simple salad, that’s all. This is what Sachi cooked up:

Sorry the photo is a bit washed out; it doesn’t do the dish justice. The thing is, for Sachi, this is a “quick and simple” dish. Every meal she makes she calls “simple,” no matter how elaborate. I try to do my share of the cooking, but in sheer talent and the number of different meals one can produce, she’s got me beat hands-down (though I do make a mean salmon casserole, and can serve up steak with the best of ’em). But really, there’s no contest.

Sachi has this one original dish that floors me every time. It’s a simple dish of ground hamburger and veggies (mostly negi, or green onions), cooked in a mix of spices, and then poured on top of diced tofu. It may not sound like much, but it’s one of the best dishes I know.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo of that, but here’s another random sample of a “simple” dinner by Sachi:

Seriously, I gotta watch out or I’m gonna gain weight again.

Kinuk in Poland linked to a fun little web page game about a month ago: in ten minutes, see how many of the 50 states in the U.S. you can list, or how many of the 192 U.N.-recognized nations you can type. As you can see from the image below, I got all 50 states with 1:12 to go–but in all fairness, (a) I am an American, and (b) this is a game I’ve done before whenever I’m bored an it occurs to me–maybe I do it once every few years. But this web page offers a much more organized way of playing the game than pen and paper.

The web page is well done; you don’t have to capitalize correctly, but you do have to spell exactly (so Massachusetts might waste some time for you). You don’t even have to hit a button or type “Enter”; when you complete the name, it’s automatically added to the list and the text box is cleared for the next one. You can type the states in any order you like, and they will appear on the page alphabetically.

The 192-nations list is harder, and is not as much a test of memory as it is a typing- and spelling-skills test. With the U.S. game, I got 45 in 5 minutes, and so could take my time with the remaining few. With the U.N. game, I was still typing away when time ran out. Twenty minutes for the U.N. game would be a much better challenge.

Another problem with the U.N. game is that it is not just unforgiving with spelling (you try spelling “Herzegovina” or “Kyrgyzstan”!) but also with the exact full naming of nations, like the “Democratic Republic of the Congo,” “Saint Vincent and the Grenadines” (not, as commonly thought, a 50’s singing group), or “Antigua and Barbuda.” You lose a lot of time trying to name the more difficult ones (it must be “Bosnia and Herzegovina,” not hyphenated, and not given separately), or remembering how their names have changed since you last studied Geography in high school or college.

So I wound up with an unrespectable 78 out of 192. Among the names I left out but shouldn’t have were Belgium, Angola, El Salvador, Haiti, Iceland, Kenya, Nepal, Singapore, Turkey, Portugal, and Ireland (though I was typing that last one when I got cut off by the clock). I did get Tuvalu, Djibouti, Mauritania, and Kazakhstan, so I’m not a complete loser. Given 20 minutes, I probably would have gotten more like 120 to 130, I am guessing. Not stellar, but then, I am guessing that it would be a better score than your average American would get. The average international citizen, I’m not so sure.

Since you’re not going to get all the 192 nations anyway, it’s also a matter of strategy. Had I been more prepared for the exact-spelling and democratic-republic-of-the-one-state-and-the-other stuff, I could have done much better. Focus on the easy-to-spell nations and leave the others off your list. If you’re not 100% sure you know how to spell it, then forget it. That should help a lot.

In any case, a fun and educational diversion when you have some free time.

I bought this T-Shirt near Meguro today:

If anyone wants to wear this on a tour of the White House, let me know…

Breaking news: on 60 Minutes this week, John McCain will say that it is a “sign of progress” that he only needed three Blackhawk helicopters, two Apache gunships, 100 armed troops and a caravan of armored Humvees so he could go shopping in Baghdad. He calls this “progress” because he claims that they wouldn’t have let him do this at all in times past.

Ironically, there was a time when you could go shopping there, or just strolling, completely unarmed and unprotected. It was when Saddam Hussein ran the place.

Now, that’s irony.

When it gets safe enough to go shopping with only one Apache gunship and a twenty-troop escort, let me know.

The new story out: viruses attack your iPod! Errr… sort of. The report is that a virus app called “Podloso” now can affect your iPod directly. Providing, of course, that you are a stupendous idiot. It’s yet another proof-of-concept virus:

“We’ve seen it happen over and over in the malware world. Someone will do a test, creating a simple thing that does no real damage. Once hackers see that the approach works, they continue to tweak it and use it for malicious intent,” said Dee Liebenstein, director of product management at SecureWave, a Luxembourg vendor of security software that helps companies control when and how portable devices connect to corporate computers.

Gee whiz, another security company being the source of a bogus Apple virus threat–who’da thought?

The “approach” for this virus that hackers will follow? Well, first you have to install Linux on your iPod. Then, if the virus is on the iPod, you have to intentionally run the virus. Yeah, that “approach” should work just great! All hackers have to do is trick iPod users into installing the Linux operating system onto their computers and then installing and loading the virus after that. No problem!

The article then mentions that iPods carried a Windows virus last fall; even though they added the caveat that such a virus doesn’t actually infect or affect the iPod itself, the addition of this information in an article about an iPod “virus” only adds to the misconception that something is going to affect their iPod. In truth, the iPod as sold is completely unaffected, as it was with the Windows virus.

The problem with these “proof of concept” viruses for Apple products is that, at least so far, all of them require the user to both have some kind of unusual setup on their product, and then after that, do something monumentally stupid in order for the “virus” to work.

Plus, we’ve been hearing these reports of waves of viruses coming to Apple products for quite some time now, and still nothing has materialized. It was two and a half years ago that the rootkit “Opener” was announced, and two years since Symantec announced that “it is now clear that the Mac OS is increasingly becoming a target for the malicious activity that is more commonly associated with Microsoft and various Unix-based operating systems.” Almost a year after Symantec’s panic warning, the “first” Mac “virus” came out, except that it was actually a trojan, and required someone to click on an image and the type in user authentication to run it. If I recall correctly, all of one people were affected by it.

Viruses will eventually come for the Mac, and maybe even someday for the iPod. However, don’t let these scare articles released by self-serving anti-virus vendors trick you: so far, there is still no malware out there for Apple products that actually works worth a damn.

Proof. In the Religion vs. Science issue, there is apparent confusion over what Science is. Science is not a belief system, and despite what some “scientists” say, it does not “disprove” God or prove that God doesn’t exist. Science is all about, in short, what we can see and verify in a quantifiable manner. And despite the claims of some in the religious world, Science does not attack religion or try to disprove it; it does not deny the existence of what cannot be observed, it simply does not include it. All Science does is to record what we can observe. The conflict between the two comes when people in the religious world, in an attempt to “prove” that their faith is correct (another point of confusion: it’s “faith” because it can’t be proved), take interpretations from their scriptures and attempt to apply them to the real world (e.g., counting days and years from Creation to the present and coming out with a 6,000-year-old universe), and then get upset because their applications of interpretations of scripture are contradicted by that which is visibly evident in the real world. “Science” isn’t attacking their views, reality is. But in their anger, they blame “Science” as being their enemy, and therefore try to denigrate, obviate, infiltrate, and disintegrate Science. But Science isn’t a belief system, it is simply a collection of what can be observed in the real world.

This effect can best be expressed by the old joke: who are you gonna believe, me, or your lyin’ eyes?

You’ve heard the story a thousand times: someone is hit by a bullet aimed at their heart, but an object in their breast pocket (usually a small bible, but also some other item such as a lucky coin, a locket, or some such) stops the bullet and saves the person’s life.

Well, here’s the 21st century telling of the tale: an iPod stops the bullet. U.S. Army Sergeant Kevin Garrad of the 3rd Infantry Division was on a street patrol in Iraq. As he rounded a corner, he came face-to-face with an insurgent. Both men open fire at near-point-blank range. The insurgent was killed, and Kevin almost was: the insurgent’s AK-47 fired a bullet which, at that range, probably would have penetrated his body armor–except that his iPod, in his left breast pocket, took the bullet instead, slowing it down enough so the MP3 player likely saved the soldier’s life. Photos from tikigod at Flickr:

I don’t even have to speculate as to whether someone at Apple will see this and send the guy a new iPod: apparently they did, and they will.

Cool.

So. John McCain (adulterer, divorced & remarried younger heiress) now looks like a fool on Iraq, has flip-flopped on half the issues in an attempt to suck up to the religious right, and is doing dismally at raising funds for his campaign. Oh, and it looks like he approached several Democrats over the years, inquiring about becoming a Democrat.

Rudy Giuliani (adulterer, twice divorced & twice remarried, annulled his marriage to his second cousin, announced second divorce to the press before telling his wife) is getting less and less of a rosy image as people see how tissue-thin his real rep as “America’s 9/11 Mayor” is. His infidelity and dalliances, his associations with Bernard Kerik, his screwups in New York (like putting the emergency response center in the WTC after the WTC bombing), his history of backing the police on outrageously criminal violence cases, and his less-than-hardcore-conservative credentials (he supports public funding for abortions, as one example) are making him less and less appealing to Republicans.

And Newt Gingrich (adulterer, twice divorced & twice remarried, served divorce papers to his former wife when she was in a hospital bed suffering from cancer), aside from having past negatives far in excess of anything Hillary has to fight, is already botching up his chances before he even had had the opportunity to announce his intentions for running. His recent (and very belated) admission that he cheated on his wife and lied about it at the same time that he attacked Clinton for doing the same doesn’t help much, of course. However, more recently, he spoke out against bilingual education, saying that it encouraged “the language of living in a ghetto.” To clean up the mess, Gingrich denied that he meant Spanish (which is the obvious inference which he clearly did mean), and instead said that the word “ghetto” “historically had referred as [sic] a Jewish reference originally.” Well. That’s much better.

So far, Mitt Romney is the best candidate in the quickly-self-destructing GOP field, but his Mormon beliefs will likely keep the Christian right-wing core away from the polls.

But hey, Republicans seem to be forgiving of personal flaws. After all, they elected (kind of) a drug-snorting, drunk-driving, McCain-smearing, draft-dodging, hypocritical, cruel, bloodthirsty, perjuring, silver-spooned, and ultimately corrupt nitwit to the White House, at a time when “character” was supposed to be the most important thing in a president. So maybe there’s hope for the Scarlet Letter candidates after all.

The GOP’s shining hope? Actor Fred Thompson. Swell. Another actor.