A few weeks ago I blogged on the MegaFattening MegaMac at Mickey D’s here in Japan. Since then, as reader Jeff pointed out, reports have come out that the MegaMac is so popular that it sells out too quickly–and McDonald’s stores have had to limit sales of the burger at each store to ration the item.

Customers who go away disappointed are given a rain-check coupon to get the MegaMac at another time for a discount–190 yen instead of the regular 350 yen. One such coupon is pictured below; Sachi got one when she tried to order a MegaMac and was told that they were sold out. (Though I have no idea why she would want one–hell, the burger is almost bigger than she is.)

McD’s outlets have limited sales of the special item to “dozens or hundreds” per store per day.

Frankly speaking, I smell a marketing scam. First of all, how could they “run out”? The MegaMac is essentially a Big Mac with two extra patties. Is McDonald’s running out of Big Macs and patties? Nope. So what’s the problem? Do they actual have the materials but their accounting system can’t allow parts for one burger to be used for a different burger? Sounds ludicrous, but I suppose it’s possible.

However, I think that it is more likely that McDonald’s saw an opportunity for a PR device. After all, just introducing a new product will not get them publicity. Even selling a huge number of them might not get printed up. But running out of a specialty product because it’s so popular and then having to give discount coupons… sure enough, that got McDonald’s into the press. That got people’s attention, and has probably generated a lot more sales.

But how can McD’s get more profit by turning away customers? Probably because those customers don’t turn away–they wind up getting something else on the menu. The coupon means they are more likely to return as a repeat customer, and will have the feeling that McDonald’s was generous and that they “won” something.

In the meantime, the franchise gets free press equivalent to free advertising, and their MegaFat specialty item gets the aura of being so popular that only lucky customers get one–kind of like the fast-food equivalent of Louis Vuitton handbags or something.

In the end, they get more money and your arteries get harder. So everybody wins!

Infractions committed by members of the U.S. military in Japan, sometimes even relatively minor ones, tend to make headline news here. So the question should be: when U.S. soldiers immediately come to the rescue of a Japanese man who fell onto the subway train tracks at Roppongi station (when no other bystanders moved to help), will this also be recognized in the Japanese media? Especially when such rescues are often reported when they do not involve American servicemen?

I’m not holding my breath. So far, only Stars and Stripes has the story of the rescue–which happened almost two weeks ago.

While the Mac OS has not yet been exposed to a virus or other malware that could actually spread and be a threat to anyone, there have been many “proof of concept” hacks and a host of “vulnerabilities,” or potential attacks that were never actually carried out. Many of these depended on a set of highly unlikely circumstances, like having two Bluetooth-enabled Macs which had not been software-updated within the past eight months operating in the same room with Bluetooth set to “Discoverable” and one of the owners foolish enough to manually allow a reported “device” that did not exist to be accepted by the computer.

Well, now Vista has joined that club–albeit in a way that makes Microsoft seem a hell of a lot more stupid than Apple ever looked. A new vulnerability reported on Vista just a few days after its release involves the OS’s speech recognition. Now, speech recognition on a Mac requires a keyboard button to be depressed while a command is given (with an option to instead have the user to speak a definable keyword before the spoken command). This is to ensure that speech commands will not be taken by the computer by mistake when the feature is turned on.

Apparently Microsoft didn’t take these rather obvious security steps. It seems that when Vista’s speech recognition is turned on and a microphone is active (which is usually the case, if there is a built-in mic), any speech that matches the commands in the computer’s vocabulary will be executed.

The potential hack: a sound file which starts giving speech commands to open Windows Explorer and delete files. Delivery is simple: a web site that starts playing a sound file when you arrive there. It could also be delivered in any number of other ways, including fake song files that begin with real music and then start issuing voice commands, or even a malware solution of some sort.

Now, like many of the Mac vulnerabilities, this Vista vulnerability is highly unlikely. While it will be common to find Vista users with active speakers and mics, it would be less common to find users who have speech recognition turned on. But the greatest unlikelihood would be the user who would just sit there and watch while their computer started speaking to itself, giving commands to delete files.

Now, on the other hand, this set of events is not impossible by a long shot. I have known a good many people who are computer-unsavvy enough that they’d be stymied long enough not to know what to do if their computer started doing that. Alternately, some users could be unlucky enough to be out of the room when the commands started being issued. Unlikely, yes, but not impossible. Still, I would doubt that this will ever really hit anyone.

Regardless of whether the hack ever happens or succeeds, the fact remains that it makes Microsoft look really stupid. I mean, that a computer’s security system could be overridden by a frickin’ sound file is just embarrassing. In their defense, Microsoft points out that because Vista no longer makes the primary user the system administrator by default, only files in the user’s directories can be affected. Which is small consolation, as that represents all the personal files of the user; it just means that Vista itself will not be hurt. Whoopee.

Of course, there is one other thing that makes the exploit truly unlikely: Vista’s speech recognition sucks. Okay, commonly available speech recognition all sucks, but Vista is certainly no exception, as this demo gone awry which I reported on six months ago clearly shows. Nevertheless, some people reported actually being able to make the sound file hack work.

It should also be pointed out that Vista is still vulnerable to some of the most common pre-exiting malware, which can blow through Vista’s much-ballyhooed defenses, and that Vista is not exactly immune to the host of new viruses that will inevitably appear in the coming months.

The RIAA sued Patti Santangelo two years ago, but when she fought back, they eventually dropped the suit–only to switch over to suing her 16-year-old son, Robert, and her daughter Michelle, 20. Michelle failed to show up in court and so lost by default, but Robert is fighting back–not only by fighting the claim, but also by filing a counter-claim saying that the RIAA damaged his reputation, distracted him from school and cost him legal fees. Further:

The papers allege that the companies, “ostensibly competitors in the recording industry, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and public policy” by bringing the piracy cases jointly and using the same agency “to make extortionate threats … to force defendants to pay.”

The RIAA responded publicly by issuing this statement:

The record industry has suffered enormously due to piracy. That includes thousands of layoffs. We must protect our rights. Nothing in a filing full of recycled charges that have gone nowhere in the past changes that fact.

Naturally, one can assume the claim is pure BS. As this blogger points out, the drop in sales was not due to piracy, it was due to the economy failing and the record labels simultaneously scaling back releases. The “thousands of layoffs,” if they ever really happened, were not connected to piracy, and the music industry itself was likely the most responsible for them.

In fact, when file-sharing began its meteoric rise, music sales were booming; this went on for a few years, in fact. The sales drop coincided with the aforementioned economic bust and the industry’s cutback in production, and there has been absolutely no correlation found between music sales and online piracy, according to this 2004 study reported in the New York Times.

So Robert Santangelo might have a strong case there. Go get ’em, kid.

Here come the mandatory drug tests for Nova teachers again, as seven Nova teachers from Saitama are arrested for pot and coke possession.

Just as the Zune was thoroughly hyped and failed to sell well, so goes Windows Vista. In Denver, initial sales have been slow:

Consumers in the metro area are apparently taking a wait-and-see attitude toward Vista – just as experts have advised them to do.

Stores haven’t seen hordes of consumers lining up to buy the new Microsoft operating system.

“We’ve been selling a fair amount. There’s definitely not high demand,” said Jarred Dotterer, warehouse associate at Micro Center at the Denver Tech Center. “We’re not low on stock.”

The same is being reported in Jackson, Mississippi (“Jackson store reports slow sales of Windows Vista”). And Chillicothe, Ohio (“New Windows Vista not breaking any sales records around here”). And San Francisco, California (“No one is lining up for Windows Vista in San Francisco”), where crowds lined up to buy Mac OS 10.4 in 2005.

In fact, sales are slow everywhere; while some stores had even a few dozen people lining up at midnight, sales dropped off after the few eager beavers got their fix. It seems that everyone is realizing that Vista just ain’t all that hot, just like they realized with the Zune. Unlike Steve Jobs, Bill Gates just does not know how to excite the fan base all that much–much less the public in general. Jobs has got everyone in a lather over a cell phone that’ll sell for up to six times as much as Vista, and one can bet that a lot more people will line up to buy OS X 10.5 Leopard when it gets released–despite Apple having only about 1/20th the market that Windows has. (Some suggest that Steve Jobs missed a golden opportunity and should have opened up the Mac OS to work on PCs.)

Factors detracting from Vista sales are, of course, the fact that it is not revolutionary and contains nothing truly exciting, that XP works well enough for most, and that many would have to pop for a new computer to satisfy Vista’s memory- and processor-hog appetites. And even some of its new features are disappointing–like the new-and-“improved” security, which is not only annoyingly intrusive, but also has been hacked and broken already.

What is happening is probably that most people are thinking, “ehh, I’ll just wait ’til I get a new machine, and Vista will be on it then.”

This cannot be good for Microsoft. Behemoth it may be, it is no longer a juggernaut. It has worked for five years to produce a single new version of an operating system, its flagship product, and virtually no one is all that interested in it. It will sell, eventually, if for no reason except that Windows comes on all new PC computers by default.

Some people are even looking at Macs because of Vista–and, factor in my Mac bias as much as you care to, it makes perfect sense, after all: if you’re going to buy a new machine anyway, why not get a Mac? Not only do they cost much closer to PCs nowadays, but they even run Vista if you want ’em to.

Though my school is Windows-centric, the faculty is virtually all Mac now. In addition to myself, three other faculty and staff were already Mac users (myself and one other having recently bought new machines), but three others have switched and bought new Macs recently, and one more is on the verge of getting a nice Macbook. Two of my students just bought Macbooks as well. Now, I’d love to take credit for it all, but most of these switchers did it on the advice of others, though they of course heard my input as well.

Naturally, that’s a microcosm. Hardly a trend. But then again, with Mac market share steadily rising, it is without doubt one small part of a much larger trend.

Senator Obama today introduced a bill for a binding legislation that lays out a plan for phased withdrawal from Iraq which accounts for a political solution, continued training of Iraqi troops, and anti-terrorism measures.

Bush and other Republicans have been pushing a lie which implies that their “Surge™” plan is the only viable one being offered, and that Democratic politicians have just been criticizing while not offering any serious solutions. Of course, this comes across in the media as if the Dems are not offering any solutions except for “cut and run.” Bush achieves this by demanding the opposition “offer an alternative that has a better chance for success” (italics mine). And, of course, they will never consider any Democratic plan to have a better chance of success than their own plan. And the Republican ploy to portray Democrats as not offering anything is working in the “liberal” media–as is expressed in the Boston Globe headline from the above link, which reads, “Bush says critics must offer alternative,” as if they haven’t.

The thing is, the Dems have been offering alternate plans, and for quite some time. As early as November 2005, John Murtha introduced a resolution to withdraw the troops from Iraq, deploy quick-reaction troops nearby in case of an emergency, and to pursue “security and stability in Iraq through diplomacy.” Ever since then, Democratic lawmakers have proposed one plan or another for withdrawal, and every time it has been dismissed by the White House as lacking in some respect or another, as was this more recent proposal just last November, which the White House dismissed as not being “fleshed out.” Two other plans proposed by Democrats last June were defeated by Republicans in Congress, and have been disregarded by the White House in any case. There have been many others.

And that’s simply the game plan the White House has set out to play: no matter what the Democrats or anyone else proposes, it isn’t good enough, so they aren’t really offering any “real” alternatives. After all, could you even imagine the White House hearing a Democratic proposal and saying, “hey, yeah, that’s better than our plan, let’s go with that”? Not in this universe. So Senator Obama’s proposal will without doubt also be found deficient in some manner, again on the presumption that the “Surge™” is the ultimate in perfection among plans for Iraq.

Yesterday, Sachi and I went to see An Inconvenient Truth. Since we did not get advance tickets or go to a late-night show, we paid the full ¥1800 ($15) face price for the tickets. (Somewhat ironically, popcorn and drinks cost less here.) Had we prepared in advance, we could have bought maeuri-ken, or advance tickets, which would have set us back only ¥1300 ($11). While that may not sound like much of a savings, it is still four bucks a head.

Click to see larger image

Maeuri-ken (literally, “advance-sale tickets”) are just what the name implies: tickets sold in advance of the film’s release, for a reduced price. The tickets are nice because they have a picture stub which you get to keep (see above), and they can be used at virtually any theater showing the film (though sometimes a limited listing of theaters is printed on the back). Technically, once the film starts showing, you’re not supposed to be able to buy the discount tickets–but many places sell them after the release anyway. The same shops can also be found selling special discount tickets specific to one theater or one chain of theaters, presumably sold to the store by people who get them by some private means.

Sometimes, tickets are sold at a slightly greater discount as “pair tickets,” presumably for dates and whatnot. These are (or at least were, last I bought one many years ago) ¥1150 ($9.50) a head, or ¥2300 ($19) for the pair.

Click to see larger image

I have a small envelope full of a bunch of tickets I have bought over the years, back to and including Aliens, which was released way back in 1986. One of the stood out, however: Crisis 2050 (aka Solar Crisis).

This was notable partially because it was a real dog of a movie. But I remember it particularly well for a few other reasons; one was that it was co-produced by Gakken, which was my employer at the time, and another was the reason why the ticket was on sale at ticket shops for dirt cheap. That reason: Gakken, foreseeing how badly the movie would stink, “suggested” to their employees that they buy something like ten tickets apiece. Having no choice, they bought the tickets–and promptly sold all they could to the ticket shops for what little they could get. I would be surprised if anyone aside from Gakken employees paid full admission price. At least, I hope not. The film was dreadful. And I specifically recall seeing the mostly-empty movie theater predominantly populated by middle-aged salarymen, something unheard-of for a sci-fi flick.

Florida, for two straight presidential elections, had no problem in identifying tens of thousands of non-felon Democrats as felons with their crooked “felons list,” a means of disenfranchising liberal voters.

At best, Florida Republicans could say that they were overzealous in keeping felons from asserting themselves.

Except, of course, for the fact that they’re not. According to this article, hundreds of felons are actually being granted permits to carry concealed firearms. Which, when you think about it, is probably just as intentional as the voting thing.

Glad to see that Republicans have things working the way they want it to work down there.

This post will just be a bit of a hodgepodge of photos I’ve been building up for the past week or so.

First, a slightly-oversized image, but it was the only way to crop it and have the width come out at my blog’s standard 450 pixels. It’s of a table-top stove setup. On the bottom is a mini-gas range, a portable unit that uses cans of gas fuel. The range cost about $17, and each can of fuel costs about a dollar. The first can has lasted two meals so far and seems to be good for a third, so that’s a pretty cheap setup. The grill on top is very nicely designed, rounded so the grease can drop into the gutters along the edge and fall into a water-holding trap below. Cooking with it creates almost no smoke, so it’s good for the tabletop. That part costs about $8, but already, the teflon or whatever coating it is seems to be wearing off after only a few good scrubs; still, it’s bound to be good enough so that the cost per meal will work out to only around a dollar a meal, at worst, and it’ll probably last somewhat longer than that.

Sachi and I agreed that the meal we had turned out even better than the ones we’ve had at yakiniku restaurants, which can run upwards of $40 or more; the food we got cost maybe $10 all told; factor in a few bucks for the per-meal cost of the tabletop grill, and it comes out to a big savings over going out to eat–and it’s an easy meal to prepare. What you see here is our second meal, where we cooked only meat, which we stuffed into tortillas to make fajitas, along with lettuce, black olives, peppers, green onions and a bit of cream cheese. With the yakiniku meal, we also cooked cabbage and onions on the grill.

Next up, from birdwatching, is a nice Black-eyed Bunting–one with brighter yellow coloring than any of the others I’ve snapped. They’re not the clearest photos I’ve snapped, but then you have to be incredibly quick to get some of these birds–first, you have to find them, and then in the few seconds they stay in one place, you have to zoom in with the camera and find a tiny camouflaged bird (Have you ever tried? It’s hard! This bunting may seem to stand out, but the image is cropped–the bird was only a tiny speck in the viewfinder), and then make sure/hope your settings are right, while trying to keep the camera stable enough because the low light won’t allow better than a 1/30th-second exposure. Yargh.

Out of a great many more attempts I was able to get this image of a female Bull-headed Shrike:

Above the birdwatching field that day: what appeared to be an AH-1 Cobra helicopter, without apparent markings identifying which government it belonged to. The thin body structure made it pretty danged noticeable.

And finally, on a coat hanger I bought today, a tag reading the same in Japanese (phonetically) as in English: Coating Hangar. Sounds like something else entirely, doesn’t it?

Robert Heinlein once wrote, “If ‘everybody knows’ such-and-such, then it ain’t so, by at least ten thousand to one.” Such “common knowledge” is all too often widely-accepted urban legend.

Miss Laura over at Daily Kos brings up an intriguing possible urban legend: that soldiers returning from the Vietnam War were spat upon. A broader read would question exactly how much soldiers were disrespected. This is an excellent test of the “everybody knows it’s true” fallacy. Certainly, there will always be nut-jobs who will do any crazy-ass thing you can imagine, but the perception is that disrespect for soldiers returning from Vietnam was rife, not rare.

I find the question intriguing because I have always simply accepted it as fact. However, reflecting on what has happened during the current Iraq War, I now have my doubts. I have seen how liberals have not only respect for the troops, but that they have far more respect and love for the troops than conservatives–it is the war they hate, and the president they despise, but not the troops.

And yet, there are endless right-wing diatribes about how liberals hate the troops. The most common is when a liberal specifically attacks the president or the war in general, it is almost instantly transformed by right-wingers into an attack on the troops. This is partly demonstrated in this blog, where I have repeatedly pointed out such attempts (a few examples here and here). The troops, in these cases, are not being disrespected by liberals; instead, they are being used as human shields by the right wing in an attempt to avoid facing up to the real and biting criticisms of the war. If an attack on the war can be transformed into an attack on the troops, then it can be easily disregarded and counter-attacked, like the straw man it is made out to be. My first experience of such a tactic was with Reagan, gutlessly using the honor and sacrifice of the 241 Marines who died in Lebanon as his own personal human shield–deflecting reporters’ question by cowing them, essentially signaling that any question of Reagan’s command decision to deploy them there was equal to saying that the soldiers died in vain.

So now I have to wonder if the whole idea of Vietnam vets being commonly disrespected was indeed true, or was it simply another means the right-wing had of demonizing political opposition on the left? Did it really happen often enough to make it more than just some random nutcase doing something stupid? Or was it only that random nutcase, who was then grabbed by an eager conservative pundit, who then amplified the story, exaggerated it, and it snowballed from there?

The most common retelling of the tale is how anti-war protesters were lined up at airports to spit on returning vets. Miss Laura quotes sociologist Jerry Lembcke’s dissection of that claim:

GIs landed at military airbases, not civilian airports, and protesters could not have gotten onto the bases and anywhere near deplaning troops. There may have been exceptions, of course, but in those cases how would protesters have known in advance that a plane was being diverted to a civilian site? And even then, returnees would have been immediately bused to nearby military installations and processed for reassignment or discharge.

The comments for the entry are even more interesting, up to more than 750 items at present, with the expected assortment of all kinds of replies–including those who claim to have heard that such abuse took place.

However, as one of the people commenting pointed out, such reports are always third-person or more remote–no one ever has a specific, detailed, first-person account of such a thing ever happening. There are, however, several former vets who posted comments who report having heard stories of such things, but never experienced it or saw it happen–and some report having received nothing but respect from anti-war activists.

Another person in the comments points to a relative who at first said he was not disrespected, but whose story changed over the years to reflect the “common knowledge” of how things happened. There are self-avowed hippies who reported loving the troops and trying to get them to not go to the war, and who report not knowing anyone in their cause who acted disrespectfully, and there are reports from people who say the opposite. There are also those who point out things like the phrase “baby-killer” never being mentioned in any of the literature from the period, from either side, not until the Rambo films came out.

All in all, a fascinating debate, and another sad reminder of how slippery history is, of how tenuous our understanding is of what happened even just a few decades ago.

I agree with TUAW, nobody does it better. A great Vista comic from The Joy of Tech.

One meme that has repeatedly emerged in news reporting is the idea of “giving both sides” of a story. If you are willing to presume that any story has two sides (as opposed to one or more than two), then that sounds quite objective and balanced, of course–until you come across a story where one “side” is not only an outright lie, but a demonstrably outright lie. And in the recent age of media manipulation by the right wing, such stories are more numerous than one can count.

However, one such case has surfaced in the past few days, one which is so egregious in its nature that it bears commenting on, even though the source (Fox News) is one that you would naturally expect to bear such falsified witness.

Sean Hannity, of Fox News’ Hannity’s America, has decided to air at least one of the deleted scenes from ABC’s now-infamous right-wing fantasy screed The Path to 9/11.

The scene to be shown is most likely going to be the one where a CIA sharpshooter literally has Osama bin Laden in his sights and requires a “go” order from the White House–and National Security Advisor Sandy Berger is represented as chickening out and denying the team the ability to take the shot. Thus, the Clinton White House was directly responsible for 9/11 and the War on Terror™.

This “event” was completely fabricated, is totally false. It never happened. Former CIA chief George Tenet himself said that the mission referred to never got close to Osama bin Laden; the mission had been scrubbed by Tenet himself a few weeks before it was scheduled because it was considered to have a very low probability of success. Berger was informed of the decision, that being the sum total of his involvement. The 9/11 report did say that “working-level CIA officers were disappointed.”

Therefore, the Path to 9/11 scene should have played much differently: a CIA planner wants to go on the mission, but the head of the CIA gets briefed and concludes that it probably won’t work, so “he alone” decides to “‘turn off’ the operation.” The CIA planner is unhappy. End of scene. Now, that wouldn’t be nearly as dramatic, so the Path to 9/11 writer decides to punch the scene up. Instead of simply planning a mission that has a low probability of success, the mission is on the field and has a 100% chance of immediate success; instead of the CIA chief canceling the mission because it probably wouldn’t work, a senior Clinton White House staffer scrubs the mission in a chicken-hearted panic. Yes, that’ll certainly punch up the drama!

Later, the movie’s writer, Cyrus Nowrasteh, admitted to “improvising” the scene. “Improvising,” in this case, meaning that it was rewritten in a way that made it a virtually complete fabrication, indicting real people of having made catastrophically stupid miscalculations that were complete and utter fiction.

In short, it was a lie.

Enter Fox News. (Or, as Olbermann more accurately calls it, “Fox Noise.”) John Finley, producer of Hannity’s America, believes that the story has merit as “news”; according to a Fox News attorney, despite Fox not having the required permission from ABC to air the scene, “officials there believed that the newsworthiness of the material put it under the fair-use exception to the copyright statute.”

But what really merits attention is a statement by Finley:

We here at Fox — and myself personally — feel the American people deserve both sides.

And that, in a nutshell, pretty much describes the attitude taken by Fox News and a sizable chunk of the whole news media, in how it handles the “both sides” philosophy: even though one side consists of an utter, patent lie, the public deserves to hear that lie presented as if it were a viable, honest “alternate view.” Instead of just telling the public the facts and the facts alone, tell them the facts and a big, juicy lie–and then, “let them decide.”

Welcome to the 21st-century news media.

NHK has always been a pain in the butt. I know that a lot of people like it, but personally, I do not. As for the translated English-language news, I can get far better from the Internet. As for their documentaries, National Geographic, Discovery, and Animal Planet on cable offer far better–and on NHK, all too often, they have all too often actually blacked out the English-language track on English-language programming. And in the past, I have noted a distinct political tilt to their news broadcasting. I got tired of them long ago, and haven’t watched them for a decade or more; were they to vanish, I would not even notice.

Except, of course, for the fee collectors. Like England, the public broadcasting in Japan is partly financed by fees collected from the people–whether they like it or not. Fortunately, while the fees are mandated by law, there is no penalty for not paying them. Foreign residents have traditionally avoided paying them, as have a very large number of Japanese as well–and for Japanese to refuse to pay fees when a government official comes to the door and strongly demands it, well, that’s saying something. As for myself, I last staved off the fee collector by pointing to my satellite dish and making it clear that I did not want NHK by any means or measure–and challenged them to cut off my NHK “service.” Please.

It got worse a few years back when embezzlement scandals within NHK caused public disgust, and more than a million households that had been paying fees stopped doing so.

So, what is NHK’s response? Are they working hard to improve programming or finding other ways to restore public trust?

Of course not. They’re suing the people who stopped paying.

That’s right. Taking a page right out of the RIAA playbook, they randomly chose 33 households that stopped paying fees, and are suing them for amounts ranging from $339 to $885. Now, admittedly that’s not too much like the RIAA in that they are not absurdly exaggerating the amount owed, but in Japan, any kind of lawsuit in court is considered a big thing. Japanese people are not nearly as litigious as Americans, and civil suits are famous for being lowballed.

The greatest similarity with the RIAA lies with the fact that, having lost the trust of the people who no longer pay, instead of leveling out and flying right, they are taking random people to court so as to scare all the others into line.

Good to see that they’re on the right track.

You have got to see this speech by Ted Kennedy on the floor of the Senate. After Republicans have introduced at least 179 amendments (no typo) to the minimum wage bill over the past five days, Kennedy hit the roof.

Republicans are trying to kill the minimum wage increase now after having prevented it from coming up repeatedly over the past decade. Amendments of all sorts have been attempted, most of them poison pills, adding up to $200 billion dollars in proposals not directly involved with the minimum wage. And there are another 70 amendments the Republicans plan to throw at the bill.

The Republicans’ main stated objection is that the increase in the minimum wage will hurt businesses, especially small businesses. Kennedy shot that down quickly, by pointing out that over the past several years, Congress has passed $240 billion in tax breaks for corporations, and $36 billion in tax breaks for small businesses–and despite a 42% increase in productivity, not a single extra penny has been mandated for the workers.

Then Kennedy got ticked off:

What is the price, we ask the other side? What is the price that you want from these working men and women? What cost? How much more do we have to give to the private sector and to business? How many billion dollars more, are you asking, are you requiring?

When does the greed stop, we ask the other side? That’s the question and that’s the issue. …

Do you have such disdain for hard-working Americans that you want to pile all your amendments on this? Why don’t you just hold your amendments until other pieces of legislation? Why this volume of amendments on just the issue to try and raise the minimum wage? What is it about it that drives you Republicans crazy? What is it? Something. Something! What is the price that the workers have to pay to get an increase? What is it about working men and women that you find so offensive?

The boldface on that last sentence I added, but with Kennedy’s passion, it very well could have been his.

Republicans are being shameless on this one. Begrudging Americans on the lowest rungs even a cost-of-living increase while piling huge mountains of cash on the few who are making record profits already. Kennedy’s question hits to the heart of the matter: Republicans must find the average American pretty damned offensive.

But this is not a surprise. The GOP passed through bills that supported huge pharmaceutical firms, making obscene profits, over elderly people of modest means just trying to stay alive. They voted for legislation that favored the credit industry, already flush with cash, over the poorer people of the nation. They gave billions and billions to Halliburton and other contractors, and billions more for weapons systems we won’t need or use, and then chintzed on the soldiery by not giving them adequate armor or supplies whilst cutting their benefits and VA care back home. Republicans will fight through hell itself to give another hundred billion in tax cuts to those who sit upon piles of cash, but will not move a finger except in defiance when it comes to a meager nod to the people who actually produce that wealth but are denied access to it.

Whatever their rhetoric or prose, Republicans have spoken loudly and clearly with their actions: they despise the average American, especially those working the hardest and reaping the least.

Conservatives in Congress, and one imagines the White House as well, continue to fear the Minimum Wage Increase as if it were the harbinger from Hell.

Now, Republicans have already made it clear that they favor businesses over the people, under the flawed “trickle-down” paradigm that says if you shower the top of society with money, enough will eventually make its way down to the lower classes that they’ll get more money and then spend it to power the economy. I’ve argued before that showering the same money on the lower classes would cause the money to flow upwards far faster and with greater impact on the economy, making more business sense. But Republicans seem far less interested in what makes sense for the national economy, and far more interested in serving the immediate desires of the business community, which is a very different thing.

Their long-standing objection is that a minimum wage hike would hurt small businesses. Now, the term “small businesses,” when used by Republican politicians, should make a lot of flags go up. It is used by right-wingers as an excuse to defend big businesses, the huge corporations and industries that really stand to have their interests damaged. It’s a natural political maneuver; after all, one cannot garner much sympathy by saying that something will make a dent in the huge profits of giant corporations. No one would give a damn. So the small businessman is trotted out to say how he’ll be devastated by whatever new proposal is being opposed. Or he’ll be shoved in front of the cameras to talk about how this new tax cut for the rich will let him keep his business afloat, which would otherwise fall into bankruptcy.

It is a mistake to believe that small businesses are somehow the only ones paying minimum wage. I have a feeling that corporate giants have far more minimum-wage workers on their payrolls than all small businesses combined. And let’s face it, small businesses do not have nearly as much political clout as the megacorps. I doubt that Republicans are so consistently worked up about people who won’t make that much difference in the next election.

But let’s take the view that size doesn’t matter; let’s take a look at the situation as a whole. The question being asked is, will the minimum wage hike hurt businesses? My own take on this is that the premise of the question is flawed.

Why? Because the question is being asked as if the only relevant time frame is the moment that businesses will have to hike wages. That’ll cost a lot more, and that’s where the hurt will come. However, that’s only a fraction of the story, and ignores the whole reality. In order to see the whole picture, one has to begin right after the last minimum wage hike, and look at what has been happening since then.

Now, this time period is often ignored because it is seen as unchanging. The federal minimum wage has been frozen over the past decade or so, and as a result, that period is considered as having a null effect on businesses.

The key missing element is inflation. Conservatives love to use inflation to play with the numbers. The common ploy is to simply ignore inflation–easy enough to do, as it is a slow process and most people don’t really notice it. For example, in defending tax cuts for the rich and the trickle-down philosophy, Rush Limbaugh argued that despite tax cuts under Reagan, federal revenue doubled in the 80’s. That “doubling,” however, was chiefly due to inflation, not brilliant economic policy. Factor inflation into the equation, and the results are far less impressive. (The rest of that lie is covered here.)

The minimum wage is no different. Conservatives focus only on the immediate effects of a minimum wage hike, and they completely ignore the fact that from the moment after the wage hike starts, inflation starts cutting down that wage, giving businesses a slow but constant form of economic relief.

We hear all about how businesses will have to fork over more money now. We hear nothing about how businesses have had to fork over less and less and less over the past decade. It is as if businesses never enjoy that constant windfall.

It is even more ironic when one considers the plain fact that inflation is simply another way of expressing the idea that businesses are raising their prices. Businesses that pay the minimum wage raise prices but do not share the increased revenue with minimum-wage workers.

That is, they don’t until such a thing is mandated by the government. In the form of a minimum wage hike. In the end, it evens out. Which is why minimum wage hikes never really hurt businesses–unless you want to take the view that businesses are hurt because they can’t cut the wages of their workers to even further below the poverty line.

One thing that never makes sense about the minimum wage is that it is not keyed to inflation. At the very least, it should be. I believe that the minimum wage should be set to a level where a single person working 60 hours a week could feed, clothe, and house a family of four, and have the option of setting aside an additional small amount in savings–and then that wage level be permanently tied to the inflation rate, with gross adjustments every year. Maybe every ten years or so, the wage could be reviewed in case other factors challenge the standard of living, and adjustments made for that.

This policy would not only be civil, humane, and fair, but it would also do away with those horrible, immediate wage hikes that Republicans fear and loathe so terribly much. Because of how they just devastate small businesses.

I thought I’d share a few things I’ve spotted on the streets as I go to work every day.

This first one is a view I get while coming up Meiji Boulevard. That “OMEN” sign stands out a bit ominously. In fact, it’s the Marui Men’s store; the “O” is really an “OI” (pronounced “Maru-i” in Japanese) with the “I” hidden behind other signs on the right side. With the “MEN’ sign below, it produces the creepy effect. I always find myself thinking, “is that a good omen or a bad one?”

Next is a label I started seeing on taxis a few months back:

And a close-up, from a different taxi:

Literally, the sticker reads: “CAUTION! MOTORBIKES — Two-wheeled-vehicle Accidents! Repeatedly Occur (Police Headquarters – Tokyo Passenger Vehicle Association)”

Though it’s a bit cryptic, the essence is pretty clear–the sticker warns people on motorbikes that they cause accidents frequently. I say that because it certainly doesn’t seem to be blaming the taxis, as taxis are not even directly mentioned. And if taxis were to blame, the sign would read something like “Caution — this vehicle makes sudden stops” or something like that.

Now, should a regular car bear such a sticker, I could see the justification–many bike riders do get out of hand. But for taxis to be bearing these is like a murderer calling a jaywalker “hard-bitten.” Taxis are dangerous sunzabitches. They constantly weave in and out of traffic–as bikers do–but then they also, often and without signal or warning, merge suddenly and/or hit their brakes and pull over to pick up or drop off passengers.

They also have a tendency to hog the road; on two-lane streets, they will straddle the center line, slowly weaving a bit right and a bit left, so they can command both lanes while driving leisurely, something which probably causes many of the aforementioned bike accidents. Bikers have enough room to pass on either side, and the taxi will often at the same time suddenly decide to choose one lane over the other–of course, without signaling or other warning–thus causing the biker to brake suddenly or veer off dangerously.

For that and other reasons, taxis and motorbikes are often natural enemies on the road. A further frustration for bikers is that taxis get a free pass from traffic police, who will instead over-prosecute bikers. I have seen literally hundreds of bikers pulled over for tickets, but only once in more than a decade have I seen a taxi driver given a citation. Same thing with truckers, who also (though less frequently) pull dangerous crap on the roads. I think the police cut a lot of slack to anyone whose driving is also their livelihood.

So to see so many taxis sport signs more or less accusing the bikers of causing accidents–especially when bikers are the ones who get hurt in the collisions–is a tad galling. Now, maybe I’ve got it wrong and the signs are not meant to be accusatory–but frankly, I doubt that.

But on to a lighter subject: the Construction Sign of Doom! (Sorry, Sean, I ripped that moniker off from your satchel.) This is the one I mentioned last week, and I got it on film this time.

It’s a bit different from what I recalled an hour after having seen it for only ten seconds or so, but my recollection mostly holds true. The big, dull red arrow at bottom was pulsing; the orangish smear above the green-backed construction signs was an electronic scrolling text sign; the three yellow arrows were flashing on and off from left to right; above them, those yellow lights were the flashing roller lights, and above those, the pizza-slice rotaters, with flashing green lights at their centers.

Sadly, the guy with the light baton was absent tonight (I guess they figured out how irrelevant he was), but if you can picture it in your mind, he was only tall enough so that his construction-site helmet only reached the bottom of the big, pulsing arrow near the bottom of the sign.

This has to be the most outrageous warning sign array I’ve seen on Japanese roads. Now that I’m aware of them, I have noticed that other signs use the exact same elements of this one, except they only use half as many parts at most–like the pulsing red arrow and the green-backed warning signs only, or some other combination of bits and pieces that make up the sign. Maybe on this one, someone got too enthusiastic and just threw in everything but the kitchen sink.

This SotU speech is a strange one to be certain. In the face of approval numbers averaging dangerously close to 30%, this speech is not just to put forward Bush’s agenda,but to try to boost his numbers above the abysmal levels they are at now.

At least in the beginning of Bush’s speech, he sounds conciliatory, but as I noted before in regard to Bush’s 60 Minutes interview, it is a false expression of friendship, bipartisanship and humility which is belied by his actions and the veiled meaning beneath his other words. The soft words are aimed not at the Democrats, but at the American people, whom Bush hopes to swoon now that his numbers are lower than ever before.

And he strayed from his scripted speech in one insulting regard: even as he “reached out” to the new Democratic majority, he called it the “Democrat majority.” Used as an adjective, “Democrat” is a considered pejorative from Republicans, who refuse to associate the idea of democratic principles with the Democratic Party. Bush’s script read “Democratic majority,” but he spoke differently, betraying how he truly feels.

Some in this Chamber are new to the House and Senate — and I congratulate the Democratic majority. Congress has changed, but our responsibilities have not.

Translation: now that Democrats are in charge, I will start calling for congressional responsibility and accountability.

Yet we are all held to the same standards, and called to serve the same good purposes: To extend this Nation’s prosperity …

…which Bush has trashed…

to spend the people’s money wisely …

which Bush has not done, wasting it on Iraq, tax cuts for the wealthy and on engorged corporations, and on Republican congressional pork like no pork-spending spree ever before…

to solve problems, not leave them to future generations …

Do I even need to point this one out? How Bush has squandered our future in almost every way it can be squandered? Environmentally, financially, politically, militarily… remember, this is the guy who said he would leave the mess in Iraq to “future presidents.” A president who has turned a budget surplus into a record deficit for future generations to pay off or suffer from. A president who has done everything within his power to stall global warming relief, to sabotage even the idea that it is happening. A president who has depleted the military and poisoned the recruiting well for a generation to come. For Bush to lecture Congress and America that we should not leave problems for future generations is like John Wayne Gacy telling children not to be naughty.

to guard America against all evil, and to keep faith with those we have sent forth to defend us.

Translation: I want to (yet again) use the honor and sacrifice of the soldiers I sent out to be killed to further my wartime agenda, so I can send more of them to die. 

We are now in the 41st month of uninterrupted job growth — in a recovery that has created 7.2 million new jobs … so far.

I covered this one last year–same story, same exaggerations. Of course Bush is going to claim the economy is strong, what else can he do? It’s still a weak-ass claim–job growth a fraction of what it was under Clinton, the good jobs being outsourced overseas, wages not rising when inflation is factored in and Bush’s number-juggling is discounted, etc. etc.

Bush next delivered three economic proposals:

First, we must balance the Federal budget.

Oh, now he wants to balance the budget–now that Republicans are no longer in a position to rifle the treasury with pork.

We can do so without raising taxes.

On the rich, at least.

What we need to do is impose spending discipline in Washington, D.C.

After six years, and only when Democrats take charge, he discovers this new principle.

We set a goal of cutting the deficit in half by 2009 — and met that goal 3 years ahead of schedule.

This chart belies that falsehood. Not to mention that Bush is talking about the estimated deficit, not the actual one, along with other economic jiggery-pokery. This article tells the real story:

William Spriggs, Howard University economics department chairman, said the increasing federal budget deficit means that the nation has been borrowing from the rest of the world at an astounding rate to fuel our consumption.

“The current account deficit has mushroomed from about 4% of GDP in 2001 to 6.8%, as of the third quarter of 2006,” Spriggs said.

However, there is a good chance the deficit will fall much more than it has–but not because of Bush, rather because Democrats will not go spend-crazy like the Republicans did. What Bush is doing here is planting a stake so he can later claim it was all his doing.

Next, there is the matter of earmarks. … The time has come to end this practice.

Again, now that Republicans no longer have free run of government coffers. And after Democrats have already started moving on this. These are two of Bush’s new strategies: call for fiscal restraint by Democrats he never hinted at with Republicans, and start claiming credit for Democratic successes.

With enough good sense and good will, you and I can fix Medicare and Medicaid — and save Social Security.

You know that whenever Bush talks about saving these programs, it means he wants to privatize them so they benefit the upper class and then and then destroy the remainder of the programs.

The No Child Left Behind Act has worked for America’s children — and I ask Congress to reauthorize this good law.

Oh, swell. Continue a program that lionizes teaching to the test, that encourages corruption and manipulation which does harm to the students most in need, sucks creativity out of education and injects politics–and even that is underfunded. And then claim success by using standards that are educationally meaningless. Yeah, let’s keep on doing that.

Tonight, I propose two new initiatives to help more Americans afford their own insurance. First, I propose a standard tax deduction for health insurance that will be like the standard tax deduction for dependents. Families with health insurance will pay no income or payroll taxes on $15,000 of their income. Single Americans with health insurance will pay no income or payroll taxes on $7,500 of their income.

This sounds very good–and I hope that it actually is. But I am unfamiliar enough with the insurance and tax systems that I cannot independently judge it. I’m going to wait for the post-game analysis on this one, but with hope I can find something to agree with Bush on (there’s very little on that as it stands). Natural concerns: assuming the proposal is real and workable, that Bush actually follows through on it. And the question why Bush waited six years to do this; is it his true goal, or is it a chip on the bargaining table?

My second proposal is to help the States that are coming up with innovative ways to cover the uninsured. States that make basic private health insurance available to all their citizens should receive Federal funds to help them provide this coverage to the poor and the sick. … We need to expand Health Savings Accounts …

Here’s where flags start popping up, when Bush starts using the word “private” and “accounts.” Again, I am uninformed on the topic and will await hearing the analysis, but I have strong doubts about this one.

Already there is a hell of a lot… and I’m not even halfway through. One note on the speech in general: Bush does at least seem to be trying to give more than just platitudes to Democrats, though most of it (like immigration reform) is stuff he wanted anyway, but couldn’t get past Republicans. He’ll probably get a boost for bipartisanship (incredibly ironic, considering Bush’s past, including the very recent past), and at least for a short while, his numbers may go up.

I have to eat and get to work… more later.

Except for one thing: Bush mentioned Iran five times in the speech. Four times to mention that they sponsored terrorists (twice about Hezbollah, twice about Shia extremists), and once to mention that they are developing nukes.

Echoes of 2002… Not encouraging.

I think George W. Bush may have been sexually abused by his high school Science teacher or something. It would be hard to otherwise explain why he hates it so much, except possibly that Science–which, after all, is a form of truth–is counter to so much of the conservative agenda. Which is why, for the past six years, Bush has been working so hard to steadily deface Science in all of its attributes, most notably in three forms: choosing politically-oriented scientists who will break with the norm and state the scientifically inane which supports conservative causes; rewriting scientific findings made by the government so they appear to support the conservative agenda or at least appear not to contradict it; and gagging scientists who would tell the public about certain truths that would be uncomfortable for the conservative agenda.

So it comes as no surprise that Bush would take whatever opportunity he could to demonize Science in the name of yet another conservative cause. But it was a subtle stab this time:

“Our challenge is to make sure that science serves the cause of humanity instead of the other way around,” the president said in a telephone call piped over loudspeakers to a Washington rally of opponents of abortion rights.

It’s one of those flowery statements that most people don’t think about too deeply, and just assume that it means the same as whatever else is being said at the time. But parse the statement. Bush is talking about abortion, which in this context is meant to represent killing babies. And he says, by direct implication, that allowing babies to be killed is equal to humanity serving Science. Ergo, Science on its own will kill babies.

It looks like Bush has found a new enemy for the right-to-lifers to hate: Science! Science is in fact a heartless machine that would kill us if we don’t stop it. We must make Science bow down before us and our political causes else it will destroy us. Heaven forbid if we see science as a tool, a non-moral process which is used by us, not the other way around. Nope, it’s those scientists and their god Science that are the evil in this world!

Okay, maybe I am making a bit much of a mostly overlooked snippet. But then again, it’s the subtle stuff that tends to be the most dangerous.

Oh, and by the way, did you notice that Bush never actually appears at these right-to-lifer anti-abortion rallies? He always phones it in. Every time. Wonder why….

When Bill Kristol appeared on The Daily Show a few weeks back, Stewart nailed him in a way that seems to have been overlooked, pointing out Kristol’s common wingnut double-standard in regarding Bush:

Kristol: Bush has been right about taking the war to them, not letting them come to us, he was right about the fact that with aggressive tactics…

Stewart: So he was, waitwaitwait, I heard a phrase that I hadn’t heard, waitwaitwait. He was right about…

Kristol: …the fact that with aggressive tactics on our part we wouldn’t be attacked, for the last five years, which is something he deserves some credit for, I think.

Stewart: I disagree.

Kristol: Really?

Stewart: Yeah. I mean, 1993 …

Kristol: We all thought we would be attacked again…

Stewart: 1993, they bombed the World Trade Center, and they didn’t bomb again until, what, 2001. That’s what, eight years? So, Clinton needs more credit than Bush, it would seem.

Kristol: Well, they attacked us, unfortunately, they attacked in Africa in 1998…

Stewart: If we’re gonna add in attacks in Africa, we gotta go Spain, we gotta go England, and then we gotta say, they actually have attacked us, quite frequently, since…

Kristol: Yeah, and you know, we’re in a global war.

I noticed this when it got played last week on the International Edition of The Daily Show, and just got around to looking it up now. You can find a video clip of the of the interview, as always, on C&L here; the part I transcribed above starts at about a quarter of the way into the video.

What surprises me is that when you look at the commentary on the interview, nobody notes that Kristol’s argument was completely hypocritical, and that Stewart completely nailed him for it–or that Kristol just shrugged it off, instead of thoughtfully reflecting, “Hey, you’re right on that one.”… because for right-wingers, there’s nothing wrong with that kind of “logic.” It’s the standard double-standard for Clinton and Bush that right-wingers love; in this case, Bush gets all the credit for no major attacks, but Clinton doesn’t because there were overseas embassy attacks in his 8-year stretch of quiet, ignoring all the overseas attacks during Bush’s term.

The thing is, how can someone of Kristol’s media stature, one of the top-tier conservative intellectuals, get away with such openly sloppy “reasoning”? Unless, of course, everyone simply shrugs it off as Kristol did, and considers it ‘par for the course’?