Since it’s an election year, GOP politicians are trying to find a way to blunt the Democratic weapon of the minimum wage. Since the GOP has consistently, for the past nine years, killed repeated attempts by Democrats to get a minimum wage hike passed, it’s pretty clear in the minds of the working class who’s on their side.

The GOP, however, hopes to muddy the waters by introducing a $2.10 (40%) increase to the minimum wage, but only if it is tied to slashing the estate tax, which would represent the Nth tax cut for millionaires and billionaires. Since Democrats have vowed to kill an such estate tax cut, Republicans in Congress know that the minimum wage tax is likely to fail, and so it’s safe for most of them to vote for it (though some vow to vote against it anyway, being diametrically opposed to anything with a minimum wage hike in it).

The estate tax cut proposed would boost the exemption from $2 million to $5 million (from $4 million to $10 million for couples), and would cut the tax rate beyond the exemption to 15% up to $25 million and to 30% beyond that.

Hopefully the Democrats will be able to shoot down the GOP poison pill, and the voters will not be fooled by the inevitable subsequent campaign ads portraying Republicans as the champions of the poor and the Democrats as the villains who shot down their pay raises. Whatever the outcome, it was probably the best political move the Republicans could make–their forte (always better at politics than at serving the people’s actual needs), and they’ll need it since polls are increasingly showing that voters are ready to show the GOP the door this November.

Update: Apparently, Republicans are not being too subtle about all of this being a manipulative political ploy: from the NYT, via TPM:

Representative Zach Wamp, Republican of Tennessee, said Democrats were upset with the legislation because Republicans had found a clever way to link the two. “You have seen us outfox you on this issue tonight,” Mr. Wamp told Democrats in the floor debate.

Microsoft seems to be giving itself some elbow room in their claims that Vista will not suffer any more delays. While they still predict a late-2006 release for businesses and early-2007 ship date for regular people, they are at the very same time saying that “Vista will ship when it is ready. Quality is job one,” and that Vista will be evaluated “milestone by milestone.”

So, essentially, they’re saying that they hope to ship it when they said they would, but there might be problems, and if there are, there will be yet another delay.

Short-short version: It’ll ship on time, or maybe not.

Well, that’s encouraging! Already, the very late OS is still suffering from problems, including core features being axed to save time and late release dates for beta versions foreshadowing more delays; many analysts and businesses are already preparing for the release date of the final product well into 2007. My bet is that they’ll release it late and slightly buggy. And even if it does come out on time and is not buggy, who wants it? What features will really be useful for the end user? Mostly new eye candy, some patched security holes, and new versions of Microsoft applications–mostly stuff that’s been available with the Mac OS for a few years now.

Other complaints include the fact that the Digital Rights Management is geared for businesses, and not the end user, meaning you will be inconvenienced on the assumption that you’ve stolen your software and content. The eye candy is reported to take a big hit on computer resources, slowing things down; even for the basics, most existing computers won’t be able to run Vista very well at all. And the security upgrades, while not as good as those on the Mac, are already annoying beta users as they are too much in the way. This is the best Microsoft can do after six years of work, and it’s probably going to be late and won’t work great out of the box.

For this you should pay for an upgrade? Hrmph. Stick with XP for the time being.

What went wrong with these guys?

My luck with web hosts has not been spectacular, though it has probably been about par for the course. Although my current web host has done the best so far, two that I stuck with before had to treat me pretty badly before I left. In every case, the thing that has torn it with me with web hosts has been flaky service–site outages and things just generally falling apart. But the two hosts that really let me down went farther than that.

If you like to read people who vent their whining, read on below the fold–I won’t inflict my incessant whinging on those visiting the main page. Essentially, I go into detail about how the two web hosts were very, very sucky, and how I had to revisit one of them just the other day, in a way that brought back all my memories of just how sucky the suckers sucked. If you for some bizarre reason don’t like to read other people moaning and bellyaching (what’s wrong with you?), then just go on to the next post.
Read more…

From Wikipedia:

The Chuo Line, one of Tokyo’s major train lines, is so infamous for people committing suicide that many English editorials in Japan have taken to using the word Chuicide to refer to the means. Its relative popularity is partly due to its practical ease, and to avoid causing a nuisance to one’s family, though families are often charged or sued by the railway companies to compensate for the trouble caused by the accident. A typical suicide may cause delays between one and a few hours on one or more lines and is certainly unpleasant for onlookers who may be present.

Another interesting trend related to train suicide is to wear a brightly colored cap (orange) to help shield your face. This is done out of concern for the train conductors, so that they may not be caused any trauma by seeing the face of the person about to be hit. It is also useful as a sign that the person is indeed intending to commit suicide, and that no one should risk their life in order to save them.

The costs to the surving families by the railway companies’ “delay fee” is often in the 100 million yen (approx. 850 thousand U.S. Dollars) range. [Mainichi Shinbun, August 18, 2002]

Now, that last bit is cold. Your family member commits suicide, and the train company bills you close to a million dollars for their inconvenience as a punitive measure. It brings to mind the Chinese government’s practice of billing the families of executed criminals for the cost of the bullet. I’m not sure if the billing works as a disincentive–probably not, considering that people keep on doing so in such large numbers–but even if it did work, I’d be squeamish about being so cruel to those who have just lost people they love.

This article in Wikipedia reports that of the 1,210 people who have committed train suicide in Japan since 1995, 156 of them, or about 13%, have done so on the Chuo Line. The article claims that the “high speed and frequency of the trains” is what draws people to it. But such things have their quirks. For example, more than a thousand people have committed suicide by jumping off of the Golden Gate Bridge–but only one or two of all those jumpers chose the side of the bridge facing away from the city. It may be a matter of access, but if you’ve seen both sides, you’ll know that the city side is indeed a far more desirable view than the ocean side–although it’s an interesting question as to whether such a thing matters to someone about to leap to their doom.

I hadn’t known about this, but during the 2001 census for many English-speaking nations, hundreds of thousands of people gave an interesting response to the query of what their religion was. This was most popular in Great Britain, where fully 390,000 Brits said that their religion was “Jedi.”

As such, the Jedi belief ranked fourth, after Christian, Muslim, and Hindu, not counting the responses of “no religion” and “no response.” As such, followers of “Jedi” outnumbered those of “Buddhism” (sorry, Paul). Apparently, one out of every forty people in Brighton are members of the Jedi order. The results of the nationwide census:

• Christian: 72.0%
• No religion: 14.8%
• Chose not to respond: 7.7%
• Muslim: 3.1%
• Hindu: 1.1%
• Jedi: 0.7%

I think this is a brilliant idea, and for the next U.S. census, we should pick this one up and run with it.

A few more quotes that I liked on the topic. These are less about what I believe, and more about how religion should more be recognized as. I’m an agnostic, by the way.

“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

–Stephen Roberts

“If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.”

–Edmond and Jules de Goncour

“A thorough reading and understanding of the Bible is the surest path to atheism”

–Donald Morgan

“It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.”

–Ilka Chase

“I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.”

–Bertrand Russell

“I don’t want to see any religious people in public office because they’re working for another boss.”

–Frank Zappa

And this last one is for fun:

“It’s hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.”

–Calvin, in “Calvin and Hobbes” by Bill Waterson

Addendum: Interesting. I just looked up the 2000 census numbers, and apparently, the fastest-growing belief system is… “No Religion/Atheist/Agnostic.” Christians dropped from 88.3% of the population in 1990 to 79.8% in 2000; the fastest-growing Christian group is “non-denominational Christians” (+2.5%), with “non-denominational ‘other’ religions” following close behind (+1.2%).

But “No Religion/Atheist/Agnostic” grew from 8.4% of the population in 1990 to fully 15% in 2000–more than doubling in just a decade. The “no religion” crowd apparently clusters mostly in the northwest, with the greatest number being in Washington state, fully 25% of the population. I wonder how that will look in 2010…

At my heaviest, I weighed in at 206 lbs. (94 kg); that was about three or four years ago. I stand at 5′ 10.5″ (roughly 179 cm), so that’s a bit on the big side. (One doctor, maybe three years ago, didn’t speak English very well, so he just looked at me and said, “obesity!” I didn’t take that too well.) Before I started my newest slimming-down drive, I was down to about 196 lbs. (89 kg), which was mostly due to mild dieting, but nothing serious.

Starting at the beginning of the year (no, it wasn’t a resolution–it was the broken foot that started all this by showing me how out of shape I was), I started on a serious health kick, pretty much eschewing beef, pork, and almost any sugar product. I started eating oatmeal in the morning (okay, that stuff has sugar in it) with berries, a 6″ sub sandwich (mostly veggies) for lunch, and chicken and salad for dinner. Along with that, I worked my way up to half an hour of Karvonen-Formula exercise most days of the week, and more general exercise-style hobbying, like my birdwatching.

Put that together, and you get weight loss. I had an initial drop to 83 kg (183 lbs.), but that seems to have been the easy part–heck, that was even before my foot healed and I could exercise. After I could start working out, I got down to 81 kg (178 lbs.) without too much trouble, but then on a visit to the doctor, I was told to drop at least three more kilos, to help get my triglycerides down (I still have a bit of a cholesterol problem, why I don’t know). So I lost the weight. From what I understand, the slow way is best–I dropped only a few pounds a week, but it worked and stayed off (except for the temporary salty weight gain, all gone now), and upon seeing the same doc a month later–today, that is–I weighed in at 78 kg (172 lbs.).

Apparently they didn’t expect me to actually do that; the nurse who weighed me (and took blood) couldn’t speak English, so after I went back to wait in the lobby, she came out with a nurse who spoke English, and they asked me if I was feeling okay–they were actually concerned that I was losing weight unhealthily fast. That was nice. But it was also based on a misunderstanding–the nurse subtracted a kilo for my clothing weight, which the nurse a month ago didn’t do, so they were under the impression that I lost a bit more than four kilos (almost 10 lbs.) in four weeks.

The preliminary blood work came in by the time I got in to see the doc just a few minutes later, and my blood levels were all within normal range. The doc even calculated my ideal body weight–at just one kilo, or a few pounds, below what I am now–how about that. I certainly am slimmer than I’ve been since my early thirties, but that’s not to say everything is perfect–still too much of that “ideal” weight on my waistline, not enough in the places where it should be. Buff I am not.

Hey, it’s something else to work on.

You know one other thing that’s better about Japan relative to America? No rebates. I hate rebates. They’re nothing but a sucky scam. At the very least, they represent a dishonest economic trick: speed up the money coming in, slow down the money going out. Instead of actually being a savings of some sort, it’s a way to keep money in the hands of the seller for long enough so that in large volumes, they’re making a lot of money off of the interest by keeping you from getting the rebate back for as long as they can manage to. Not to mention that they make more money from direct marketing by getting all your personal information and whatever else they can con you into adding to the rebate form.

But it doesn’t stop there. They also depend on laziness, impatience and disorganization to simply walk away with your money. They make a big deal about how you get this incredible saving, even to the point of advertising the price-after-rebate in huge numbers, and the fact that it depends on a rebate in the smaller print. That makes you lean towards buying their junk because you now believe in the after-rebate price and usually go for the lower figure. But then you have to fill out forms, get all the required bits and pieces together, mail the stuff, and then you face a 2-3 month wait, minimum (some people wait half a year). If you sent everything in before the time limit written in very small print. A lot of people will say the hell with it, and just eat the $50.

Sometimes people can’t get the rebate because they buy the product and throw out the bag and the packaging, leaving the rebate for later–and when they get around to doing the rebate paperwork, they realize that they need the receipt and some obscure tag from the discarded packaging. Not to mention receipts with more than one rebate item on them–you have to choose just one, because they each need to include the original receipt, not a copy. Not that all of this is made clear, you usually then have to go through major hoops to figure out how to handle non-straightforward situations.

Sometimes the rebate process is even more convoluted than that. One of my first experiences with rebates was with Warner Bros. DVDs, but it was so serpentine and confusing that I just gave up on it. Look at the people in this thread… first buy a whole bunch of expensive DVDs, then buy another set, but it has to have a sticker, and there are some forms inside, but not all sets have them, and there’s a web site, but it doesn’t work… and that’s just getting started. You know that there’s a very good chance that the rebate will be late or just won’t come and you’ll have more pain and frustration if you try to track it down. That’s when most of the people who paid for the crap in the first place throw up their hands and declare that’s it’s not worth the freakin’ hassle.

This article in Slate goes into some of the details of rebate scams. Ever wonder why most rebates are for $50 for electronic goods? Probably because it’s a cutoff point. Some rebates see 90% of buyers fail to cash in; the more lucrative the rebate, the more people ask for their money back. Some rebates fool you with dates, some require near-instant cashing… the scams are varied and creative. You know that every time a “rebate” is constructed, experts figure out the best way to maximize the chance that buyers won’t get their promised money. And the scam is growing, worth $1 billion in 1999, and $4 billion in 2003. Rebate scams abound.

That’s why I’m glad they haven’t caught onto the whole rebate deal in Japan, and when I see a “rebate” deal in the U.S., I treat it as science fiction, and add the rebate to the price to see what I’ll really be paying. Frankly, I’d sooner try to check out what that Nigerian oil executive wants with me.

Kevin Drum noted this story in the New York Times:

The federal government is moving to eliminate the jobs of nearly half of the lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service who audit tax returns of some of the wealthiest Americans, specifically those who are subject to gift and estate taxes when they transfer parts of their fortunes to their children and others.

So the message from the Bush administration to wealthy people is, sorry we couldn’t get the estate tax repealed like most of your other taxes, but don’t worry–just don’t even bother paying taxes in the first place. We won’t audit you. We fired all the auditors, see? Cheat away!

Why doesn’t the Bush administration just drop all pretenses and tell everyone who makes a million dollars a year or more that they just pay no taxes whatsoever, and they’ll get a rolling amnesty for as long as the party can swing it?

This violation of the Executive duty of upholding the law is brought to you by the people who have already ignored half the Constitution and most of the laws passed by Congress. Have a nice day.

Who needs an alarm clock when they start jackhammering outside your window at 8:30 am sharp every single weekday morning? They’ve been doing that for so long now, I woke up at 8:28 without an alarm. They’re installing decorative tiles. Swell. Why can’t they start at 10? And it’s been weeks, and they’ve just been doing the foyer right below me. There are about a dozen more in the building. So apparently, I have a lot of incredibly noisy mornings to look forward to without the chance of sleeping in. With vacation coming up, too.

Who needs %#*$@ decorative tiles?

I always do it this way, figuring it out at the last minute. This time, I was washing dishes, and heard some loud pops, like fireworks. It was still light out, late afternoon, so I figured that maybe it was a local display, maybe something inconsequential. But it reminded me that I had not yet found out the fireworks schedule for the summer, and so I checked.

In the U.S., we have fireworks displays usually only at special times–the Fourth of July being the most notable. Sometimes at New Year’s, and at special events, maybe at some ballgames, and Disney does it a lot, I hear. But in Japan, it’s an all-summer thing. There are big displays, usually on the weekends, throughout July, August, and sometimes later months.

Near where I live, there’s an annual fireworks show by Chofu City, on the other side of the Tama River. The display is actually held on the river itself, and is one of the biggest local shows. And all too often, I forget to find out when it is, and miss half of it. This time, I didn’t expect it because it was so early–usually this show is later, and once it was in October even. But when I checked the schedule after hearing the booms, sure enough, this was it–and just 20 minutes from when I checked. So I made sure I had a clean flash memory card, packed up the tripod and the camera, and took off. This time, they blocked off the river street entirely, so I had to take back roads in, and got settled maybe five or ten minutes after the show started.

And got these shots. Enjoy.

Often they include smaller shaped shells, including hearts, stars, cats, mice, and as pictured here, smiley faces.

There always seem to be more trains than usual going by during the display–I think that in itself is considered an attraction, to be on the train while you ride by the show.

The people along the river nearby as we watch the show.

I won’t say much on it today, because I already made my case in this post seven months ago; if you want to see my full opinion on private schools, vouchers, and how to really make the school system work, then read that post.

But I will note today that the whole private school voucher push from the right wing is not about giving your kids a better education. That was made clear by the fact that the Bush administration is still pushing vouchers even though their own studies say that private schools offer little or no advantage over public schools.

So why are they trying to privatize education? A lot of reasons. One is religion. You can’t push religion in public schools because of that damned First Amendment, but privatize and you can proselytize to your heart’s content. It’s also religious subsidization: churches will boom in the private school market, receiving a lot of money and a lot of new converts. Another is class warfare: privatization and vouchers will finish off the job conservatives have been doing for decades of tearing down public education, leaving a hellish shambles left for those who won’t have enough money to add to vouchers to get into a private school. Authoritarians in government and religion have always benefitted from a poorly educated population, with the better-educated living within their own fold.

This is a common theme in the Bush administration, and Republican government in general: dismantle environmental protection and call it “clean air and water”; destroy social security and medicare and say you’re “saving” them. The same goes for education. Every system the conservatives want to utterly destroy they first say they will rescue.

There’s a VoiP program called “Gizmo.” They’re offering a deal that will likely ratchet up the VoiP war, namely free calls from a computer to a regular telephone. I just tried using it, and frankly, I’m not all that impressed.

First of all, you have to read the fine print. The free calls only apply when you and the recipient are registered with Gizmo, the recipient is in your contacts list, and is in one of 60 countries on the free-call list. I didn’t see the first two of those three points until after I made a call to a number in Japan, and after 6 minutes got a robotic and incomplete “You have… seconds!” message twice during the call. After hanging up, I noticed that a charge of 24.5 cents had been noted. Upon researching, I found out that you get 25 cents free–so I was just about to get cut off when I ended the call, it seems.

The thing is, now that I’ve used it, I don’t think I’d really want to. The reason: the quality is really bad, like a bad cell phone connection. Lots of streamed audio artifaction. Even Gizmo points out that Skype–what I’m used to using–has great sound quality in comparison. But the question would be, if I’ve got Skype, why use Gizmo?

I guess the answer would be, if I needed to call a phone number instead of a computer–like, if I wanted to call my father in the U.S. on his cell phone while he was out of the house. But where Skype is usable, it is of far better quality.

Still, Gizmo has an interesting idea–and it may be a good solution for some of my Japanese students, who will go to live in the U.S., and whose parents may not be tech-savvy enough to allow Skype to work.

From IMDB Studio Briefing:

The executive editor of Frontline, produced by Boston’s WGBH for the Public Broadcasting System, has taken exception to a new directive from PBS on how programs are to deal with language that could result in an FCC fine. Writing in Current magazine, Louis Wiley Jr. noted a paragraph in the directive saying that “if the F-word or the S-word were uttered to camera so that viewers could recognize it from the speaker’s mouth, the lips must be pixelated.” Wiley speculated that at first he imagined such pixelated scenes turning up on the late-night talk shows. “My next thought? If public television producers are forced to not only bleep words but also to pixelate lips, most will simply cut the scenes, no matter how powerful or relevant, rather than see them turned into a joke.”

Seems strange to me; with the technology available with today’s television broadcasters, wouldn’t it simply be easier to do a little Photoshopping? I would think that the main objection by broadcasters would be the ridiculous appearance of lip pixelation, not the offense to deaf people and lip readers. The area of the speaker’s mouth, saying a non-offensive word, could be lifted from some other part of the interview and superimposed on the swear word. Unless the available footage had no extra material using the same camera angles and lighting, it wouldn’t be too hard, and the end product would be good enough to fool anyone but the experts–and the lip readers, who would see the strange juxtaposition of the non-offensive word (“I don’t know what the horse I was thinking!”)

Of course, this all is within the context of living in a country with such stupid censorship laws, and such ridiculous fines that can now be imposed. But let’s not get into that.

As it turns out, Hirohito strongly objected to the enshrinement of Class-A war criminals at Yasukuni shrine in the late 1970’s–so much so that he stopped visiting the shrine. The information came from interviews between Hirohito and the former Imperial Household Agency Grand Steward Tomohiko Tomita. Ironic that Yasukuni and the people who most strongly support the war criminals being enshrined there also profess fealty to the Imperial throne. But as is usually the case with people of that stripe, there is little doubt that they will easily find a way to ignore, explain away, or otherwise reconcile this information while still retaining their views.

Update: I was right, but it looks like they’re not even trying to explain how they reconcile the fact–they’re simply ignoring it:

When asked if the reported note will affect his decision on whether to visit the shrine before he steps down in September, Koizumi replied: “No, it won’t. (Whether to visit Yasukuni) is up to each person. It is a personal matter.” …

Asked how he felt about the fact that neither Emperor Hirohito, now referred to as Emperor Showa, or his son, Emperor Akihito, have visited Yasukuni since it enshrined the war criminals in 1978, Koizumi said he could not comment on their decisions.

Republican porkbarrel spending during the last four years of the Bush administration has been astronomically high, with graft and corruption at unheard-of levels. Tax cuts have abounded for every wealthy person and corporation from every angle, multiple times. A torrent of purely political legislation has been tearing through Congress with Bush’s implicit and complicit approval. Bush has never vetoed any of it. Not a single corrupt bill laden with pork.

So when Bush finally does use his first veto in almost six years, I suppose it is only appropriate that he has chosen to use it to stop stem-cell research legislation. After all, it is only an issue that two-thirds of Americans and the vast majority of scientists support, an issue based on good, hard science and medicine, and legislation that could save millions of lives and end the suffering of millions more. The reason? To protect the human rights of a blastocyst ten times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. The same blastocysts that are routinely and legally destroyed anyway (as many as 100,000 per year) in the process of in-vitro fertilization methods. To enshrine those discarded cell clusters at the expense of born infants, of children, of adults of the elderly, of real people in anguish and in peril of death. To pander to the most extreme religious elements of the political spectrum to the detriment of the people as a whole, and firmly set America’s medical science in the fundamentalist backwaters of the world.

And it is hardly surprising that the Republicans are angling to use this to their political gain, even after Republicans in Congress shot down any chance of a veto override. Yes, it’s a red-letter day for Bush and the Republican party.

On Saturday, I related the story about how I was hit by lightning, complete with an audio recording of the incident. I was amazed by being hit, wondering what the odds against that were.

Today, I found out something that makes the odds beyond astronomical, almost beyond belief: one of my co-workers, a professor whose desk is right next to mine, was also hit by lightning–same day, approximately the same time, and same intensity of electrical shock, but in a different part of town.

I know, your first reaction will be that they are pulling my leg. No way something that unlikely could happen. Probably they’re having fun with me, maybe they didn’t believe my story and are being sarcastic. What a sucker I am, right?

I’ll admit, I can be gullible, but I can guarantee you that this is not the case this time. I trust this person implicitly; their personality is completely incompatible with that kind of a gag. My brother-in-law, that would be a different story. By this particular co-worker, not a chance. It’s true: we were both hit by lightning the same day, at roughly the same time.

My co-worker, as it turns out, was jogging in a park near her home at the time (about 10 km away from where I was). Like me, she had misjudged the weather, and was caught off-guard by the sudden thunderstorm. In her case, it was already raining a little and she was wet when the lightning hit. She saw a flash and felt the electrical shock down her left arm as the thunderclap and lightning flash hit. Like me, she was startled, though my reaction right after that was, how cool was that! whereas my co-worker was much less enthralled by the experience. She ran for the nearest shelter, a small utility shed in the park, and waited out the lightning storm there.

But really, what are the chances? I calculated the odds, very, very roughly, of both of us being hit at 90 billion to one–but that’s just for any two people being struck by lightning, and does not factor in the circumstance that we both work together in a small office. I have no idea how to factor that in, but I’m sure that if you did, the odds would go up to the point where you’d need a few sheets of paper just to contain all the zeroes involved.

Stranger than fiction….

Well, Pete Shinn has started to play the martyr, and has now about-faced and says the whole thing about falling for the Onion article was a joke, which “obviously thousands of you didn’t get.” Strange, then, that his article (now headed by a graphically bloody abortion photo) didn’t have even the slightest hint of humor nor any indication that it was anything but serious.

So now, after feigning pre-knowledge that the Onion is satire (while still putting the word “satire” in quotes and referring the the “author” as a real woman), he now proudly makes claims to cunningly “turning the ‘satire’ right back at them.” A rather feeble attempt of covering up his mess, considering that before the Onion piece, virtually no one was reading his blog, and no one from the other side of the debate had ever left a comment or any sign that they were reading the blog until after the Onion piece came out. So if almost no one was reading his blog, and he had no evidence that pro-choicers were even coming close to it, then who was the alleged satire-upon-satire aimed at? Clearly, Pete’s lying here.

I will say this: many of the comments left by antagonists on his posts were unacceptably abusive–not the kind of people with whom I’d like to be associated with. I won’t defend them, and I will condemn them–they were out of order by far. That said, if I put up a pro-choice post which was as foolish as Pete’s and it also became widely known by the other side, I would expect nothing less and probably much, much more in the way of viciousness and threats. Still bad, but hardly the one-sided issue Pete tried to make it out to be.

The comment count was up to a bit over a thousand on his initial post when Pete “shut down” the comments. That is, he shut down the links to the comments on his blog, though the comments still live on Haloscan, which hosts them–but you need the links to find them (here they are).

Pete’s excuse for “shutting down” the comments? Someone posted his phone number and home address in them. No explanation as to why he didn’t just delete the comment(s) that bore that information (which it seems he did anyway, the information is not there anymore). So what’s the real reason for no more comments? Probably the same reason Pete only paid attention to the most vile of comments which made him look good as a victim, and completely ignored the cogent ones.

It turns out there’s even more irony here: Pete himself posted his name, home phone, and home address, all on the Internet, easy for any fool to find with a 30-second Google search. In fact, it’s still up, on the pro-life “American Life League” associates page, right under his web site address. I won’t link to it, but I will ask: how can Pete complain that his detractors were guilty of underhanded tactics when he himself posts this information online, and then continues to leave it up?

Furthermore, Pete had no problem when a much more chilling post was made by one of his compatriots wrote a comment beginning, “I think it is morally jusified to kill a babykilling abortionist if that is the only way to stop him/her from murdering more innocent babies.” Again, irony abounds, as the comment was in response to this post, in which he lambastes a liberal radio talk show host for playing a sound effect of a gunshot; Pete sadly noted that “To many liberals, freedom of speech means they can say anything.” He apparently had no problem with the commenter then condoning murder. He even wrote that “if” pro-lifers said murdering abortion doctors was OK (as if many pro-lifers hadn’t maintained that for many years now), then the pro-life community as a whole would shun them. Well, a commenter immediately said that, and Pete didn’t say a peep or delete the comment. Hmmm.

Deepening the irony is the fact that it has long been a strategy for the pro-life side to publish the names, addresses, phone numbers and photographs of those the pro-lifers disapprove of, a most recent example being this guy in North Dakota who has been taking zoom-lens photos of all women who enter a clinic where abortions are performed, as well as photographing their license plates, and then posting them on the web.

In the end, Pete comes across looking like a pompous fool (falling for the Onion article), liar (denying he fell for the Onion article), coward (dumping the comments for no viable reason), false martyr (posting his own personal info online and keeping it up, then complaining when others “post” it), hypocrite (blaming others for his own act of posting personal info; blaming others of “ruining” the comments, while accepting far worse comments and actions from his own side), and clueless (apparently not realizing that the comments were not really shut down, just de-linked from his blog).

Again, I very much don’t like the over-the-line abuse that many commenters heaped on the guy. That does not, however, make the guy anything but what he appears to be–which is a mainstream pro-life activist, too wrapped up in his own crusade to be concerned with things like fact or reality.

Here’s the heart of a letter sent by a soldier in Iraq to a right-wing blog, addressed to the New York Times, about the banking surveillance story:

You may think you have done a public service, but you have gravely endangered the lives of my soldiers and all other soldiers and innocent Iraqis here. Next time I hear that familiar explosion — or next time I feel it — I will wonder whether we could have stopped that bomb had you not instructed terrorists how to evade our financial surveillance.

Apparently, this soldier is unaware of the fact that the IEDs that are killing his comrades are not being supplied via international terrorist funds. Instead, they are made from the explosives stolen from Iraqi armories at the beginning of the war because Bush stupidly did not provide for the plainly obvious development of post-invasion looting.

Of course, since soldiers currently serving in the armed forces can be arrested and jailed for criticizing the president, maybe this guy just had no one else to blame. However, seeing as how he sent it to a right-wing blog and not the Times itself tells you something about his built-in bias, blaming the Times for something not even remotely connected to his own situation.

I started with just a few, but found too many to put in one post. These are among the many that resonated with my own beliefs:

“I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure — that is all that agnosticism means.”

–Clarence Darrow

“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”

–Susan B. Anthony

“The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.”

–Sir Richard F. Burton

“My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests.”

–George Santayana

“I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use.”

–Galileo Galilei

“To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.”

–Cardinal Bellarmino, during the trial of Galileo;
he also said, “Freedom of belief is pernicious.
It is nothing but the freedom to be wrong.”

…and quite apropos to the current administration:

“A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider godfearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.”

–Aristotle

Sources: here, here, here, and a lot more here.