If you’re a really, really big fan of soccer–excuse me, football–then you might want to cough up ¥2500 and stay up real late to watch it live in a movie theater. Toho Cinemas is having three late-show soccer broadcasts, somehow shown on screen via satellite TV, featuring games the Japanese team is participating in.

The first is on June 12 (Japan vs. Australia) and the second on the 18th (Japan vs. Croatia), both starting at 10:00 pm Japan time. The third (Japan vs. Brazil) starts at 4:00 am, on the 22nd/23rd (the time is listed as “28:00”).

By chance, my father and I were talking about a very similar thing just last week; he remembered going to see the World Cup years ago when it was shown to an audience at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. He managed to get out of the building before any rioting began when the transmission cut off in the middle of the game. I imagine that similar problems could arise here in Japan: the games will be broadcast during Typhoon season, when satellite TV reception can easily be washed out.

In the meantime, as far as actual movies are concerned, there are very few summer blockbusters opening on time in Japan, as is custom; for some reason, Japan is almost always the very last country to see films open. The DaVinci Code opened the same as elsewhere (and is still selling big), but M:I:3 is not opening here until July, Over the Hedge is not coming until early August, the late-June Superman Returns shows up in Japan in mid-August, and X-Men 3 is delayed until mid-September. The second Pirates of the Caribbean film is delayed, though only by three weeks. The delays are not caused by translation schedules, it has to do with the vacation season coming in August–though that does not explain July and September releases.

There are some beneficial effects of this phenomenon, however: Miami Vice: The Movie is not on the schedule at all. Thanks be to Merciful Allah.

I would blog fully on the Haditha Massacre, but Paul has already done the writing I would do, only better. Go read.

As a result of even greater waves of spam (I’m not the only one–a Google Blog Search reveals that one or more spammers are being even more obnoxious than usual), I turned on a few more protective layers of my spam filters. I don’t want to shut out legit users, however, so I’ve set up a throwaway account for you to email if your comment is blocked. Just drop me a line and let me know if you’re having any trouble with it. The throwaway is aptly set as: throwaway2 at blogd dot com. Thanks!

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had no problem with torture. He didn’t blink at violating the Fourth Amendment and spying on Americans without a warrant. He approves of secret prisons.

So what offended him so much that he almost resigned? The possibility that Bush might order him to return evidence from a search of a congressman’s Capitol Hill office.

Good to see that our AG’s got his priorities in order.

This is how spineless Congress has become: there’s a bill that will make it illegal for intelligence agencies to wiretap Americans outside of the FISA law. Except for one thing: that’s what FISA said. Clearly. So, Bush violated the law, and Congress responds by threatening to make a law that says it’s not OK to violate the law.

Here’s another idea: when Bush breaks the law, impeach him. Then arrest his ass and put him into jail. Or did I miss something between Bush swearing to uphold the law and the president not being above the law? Seriously, what does Bush have to do to get arrested in this town?

There’s a news report making the rounds about a team of researchers who claim that they will be able to produce an “invisibility cloak,” or a “cloaking device,” depending on whether you like Harry Potter or Star Trek more. The idea is that a “metamaterial” (“self-referential material”? Material that refers to itself?) will take light from one side of an object and bring it around to the other, as if it passed through the object. Thus, the cloaked object would be invisible–and not just to the eye. Light beyond the visible range as well as sound could also be warped to hide something.

Needless to say, I am taking this report with a grain of salt so big that nothing could cloak it. First of all, stories like this surface in the press every few months or so. Researchers somewhere claim that they’re working on something amazing, and they’re not too far from success in developing it. Usually it’s a clean, cheap, and plentiful new power source, but almost as often it’s some amazing gadget based on a startling new principle. The thing is, you always see news stories about these claims that they’re on the brink of getting the thing… but you never hear of them again, there’s never a report that they actually did it. See, that’s the gold standard I’m waiting for: show me the money. Show me an actual cloaking device, and I’ll be amazed. Tell me one is in the offing, just you wait, and I’ll interpret that as another Brooklyn Bridge deal. Especially when you use words like “metamaterial.”

But the real tell was in the details of the story:

He added that a cloaking material might not take long to develop, assuming there is sufficient research.

“If there is adequate funding, I’d have thought it would take in the order of five years,” he said.

“Five years.” Those are the magic words. (Not to mention “in the order of.”) You see, I once heard an engineer say that when a project is vaporware and the team has no idea whatsoever when the thing will be finished, if even at all, any question about when the project will be finished will be answered: “It’s five years away.” Somehow five years is the magic amount of time. Some engineer apparently figured that five years was just close enough to sound promising, but just far enough away to allow for something to intervene by the time the deadline came up. Or people would just forget by then. I mean, really, if these “cloaking device” guys come up with nothing in five years, will you actually remember and say aloud, “Hey! Where’s that cloaking device we were promised?”

Of course, the second tell was when he said the words “adequate funding.” That’s kind of a giveaway. Actually, it turns out that another team claimed that they were working on a cloaking device a few months ago. All this sounds like perpetual researchers vying for money from gullible people (like Dilbert’s “Vijay, the World’s Most Desperate Venture Capitalist”). Like this second team is trying to one-up the first team: “No we’re working on a cloaking device! Really! Give us the money!” It brings to mind that scene from The Life of Brian where Brian is up on his cross with other condemned people, and when a clemency order comes along for “Brian,” and he doesn’t respond, others chime in: “I’m Brian, and so is my wife!”

This is somewhat weird. In a prior post, I anticipated that the GOP would take full advantage of the FBI’s virtual indictment of Democratic Representative William J. Jefferson for accepting $100,000 in bribes. What was off my radar was what the FBI did in addition to making the accusation: they searched Jefferson’s office. His congressional office.

This has got all of Congress, representatives and senators, Democrats and Republicans, united in an uproar: the executive branch should not have the power to search the offices of members of Congress. So instead of the GOP making hay out of this, they are instead taking the politically unlikely course of demanding that the FBI return Jefferson’s files, and now. Like I said, weird. But they are, for once at least, acting on principle.

Here’s where it gets dicey. Is what the FBI did a good thing, let alone legal? Many people have been saying that it’s about time, that members of Congress should be open to the same kinds of searches that we all are, and that’s an easy point of view to see, and agree with. Members of Congress are really up to their necks in corruption, almost as a matter of course, and I’m sure we’re all getting tired of that, and would like to see action.

But however viscerally satisfying it would be to see some congressmen frog-marched out of the Capitol Building, it would not, in the end, have much effect; the remaining members would simply restructure their corruption to work around the new obstacle. It probably wouldn’t even be that hard.

Much more worrisome is the fact that it’s not just the FBI, we’re talking about an agency of the Executive Branch here. In the Bush administration, we are witnessing a power grab, an attempt by one branch of government to wrest power away from another. Already the White House has said it can ignore laws that Congress has mandated, in the name of “national security.” If it also claims the right to search and seize congressional offices at will, this power will not (as explained above) stop or stem corruption, but it will become a blunt political weapon to help beat Congress into submission, or to embarrass members of the opposition party.

In the end, while I have no sympathy for Jefferson or anyone else, I see little good and much bad coming if we stand by and allow this chapter of the White House power grab to succeed.

That said, there are a few significant side points to be made.

The first is that Congress is showing that they can act, that they can stand up to the White House when they want to. So over the past few years, as the White House has robbed the people of their rights and freedoms, Congress simply has chosen not to stand up and protect the people they allegedly serve. But when their own rights are tromped on, they waste not one second, and even catapult themselves over angry partisan battle lines to stand together and rise up in protest. Protecting the people is something they should have done long ago, and something which they still can do–but I have no doubt that they will limit their protest to their own backyard, and once again fall silent to the Bush administration’s continuing violations of the people’s rights.

The second point to be made that that House Speaker Dennis Hastert may have an ulterior motive in this protest after all: it has been reported that the FBI is investigating him, fast on the heels of Jefferson. He may be next.

What effect this entire episode will have on the Democrats’ ability to play on the Republican scandals over the past several years is up in the air.

This is a cute little video showing a clever Mac Hack. Apple laptops include a hard disk motion sensor, intended to stop the hard drive whenever a sudden motion is detected; this was intended to prevent disk crash damage when a laptop was dropped or jarred too hard. But people have been finding ways to use the motion sensor to other ends. In this case, the hacker used to work with two monitors, but wanted to pare that down to one. So he used a virtual desktop app (one which creates two desktop/screen workspaces which you can switch between), and then keyed them to switch when the motion sensor detected a slight jarring of the laptop from the left or right. The result: when he smacks his Mac on the side, a side-to-side transition of desktops occurs, allowing him to switch between virtual monitors in a very tactile manner. Just watch the video, you’ll see.

A writer at CNet’s News.com web site tried out the “Upgrade Advisor” software provided by Microsoft to test the readiness of various computers to accept and run, without trouble, the next version of Microsoft’s OS. Which computer was most compatible, according to the tester?

An Apple Intel Mac Mini with 1GB of RAM running Boot Camp.

Go figure.

There is a point I wanted to make in addition: always upgrade your RAM. When you buy a computer, you’re buying from a store that wants to price things as low as they can go while still maintaining as high a profit margin as they can manage. So add-ons are one way they go: if they can sell you on a low base price, they can still claim they’re selling cheaply even after you bought a whole bunch of other stuff that they stripped from the machine to make it look cheap.

RAM is one of the first things they pare down, like an airline getting rid of yet another “perk” like, say, food. Most people know little or nothing about RAM. If you know, for example, that with a sufficiently powerful CPU, 256MB of RAM is more than enough to run Windows Vista while having three or more standard applications running, then you are one of the 9 of 10 people who know very little about RAM, because that statement is totally false. If you caught on to the falsehood before you got to the part of the sentence where I let on to the truth, then you’re the other one in ten who knows a little something about it. But since 9 in 10 don’t, stores can sell you a computer with too little RAM and you won’t notice.

In fact, having enough RAM is very important–but that won’t be apparent at the store. First, the store model (presuming that they don’t cheat and put extra RAM in) is probably just running one app. RAM is a finite resource which your OS takes a big chunk of, and then each new app you open takes another chunk, and so on, until you run out of RAM. I had a friend who could open Windows ‘Me’ really well, and could even work MS Word snappily–but if she opened a second app, her computer would reeeally slow down. Reason: she had only 128MB of RAM, and Windows + Word used it all up.

Why does a computer slow down when it runs out of RAM? Because programs need a certain amount of memory to temporarily store data while the CPU is busy with something else. RAM is that storage space, and it’s very fast. When RAM fills up, the computer may have to resort to using the hard drive–which is way slower. So when RAM runs out and your computer starts using the hard drive for everything, your computer slows way down.

Here’s another reason why the need to upgrade RAM doesn’t show up at the computer store: because the need is off in the future. In the story I started this entry with, I noted that Microsoft’s “Upgrade Advisor” checks your computer for Vista compatibility. One point of compatibility is the amount of RAM. That’s because Vista needs a lot more RAM than XP. XP needed more RAM than Windows 2000. 2000 needed more RAM than ’95. Et cetera. Just about every new version of any kind of software requires more RAM than the last version, sometimes significantly more. This is true with operating systems or application software. So, while that present-day showroom computer can run XP and Word 2003 just fine with 512MB of RAM, if will fail dismally at running Vista and Word 2007. They can ignore that at the showroom.

A lot of people actually end up throwing away their computers when they become too slow, without realizing that all they need is more RAM, and it’ll become zippier.

That’s why it’s a good idea to upgrade your RAM right away, when you buy your computer: it allows you to open up as many apps as you like without worrying, and it inoculates you from slowdowns when you upgrade your software later on.

That’s not to say that RAM is the only thing you need to worry about. The CPU is important, as is the graphics card, and some other technical geek stuff. I’ve heard Windows users sneer at Macs because of the prices, talking about $500 PCs. When you point out that the Mac Mini starts at about that price, they’ll laugh, and point out that it doesn’t come with an LCD monitor! No problem. Just buy your Mac Mini and use your old monitor, then you can laugh at them next year, when your Core Duo Mac Mini is running Windows Vista and Office 2007 in Boot Camp (or whatever new version Apple has by then) while they’re just figuring out that the weak-ass Celeron they bought can’t make the same upgrade.

Okay, here’s where they go way, way too far.

In preface: President Bush has broken the law. And not just any stupid little law, one that directly impacts the fundamental rights of Americans. He acted in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, which in his his primary oath of office he swore to uphold, protect, and defend. Bush deliberately lied to the American people about intelligence reports in order to engage us in a war that Americans would not have entered into knowing the truth that Bush knew, sending us into a war that has killed two and a half thousand of our troops, tens of thousands of innocent foreign civilians, and alienated a previously sympathetic world from our country. He has blamed, abused, and distorted the intelligence-gathering institutions to the point where they are no longer functioning to protect the country and its people, but rather to support his own political agenda. His administration has blown the cover of a CIA agent engaged in discovering Iran’s WMD production, over a matter of political retribution directly linked to the president’s lies about the Iraq War.

These are the most significant but not by any means the entire list of charges that stand against Bush, and all of the above are absolutely, undeniably, and verifiably true. In any other administration, the president long ago would have been up on impeachment charges; Bush has escaped these by using the deaths of Americans and the fear of terrorism to claim that he is violating the highest laws of our country, stripping Americans of their rights, and destroying the intelligence infrastructure of our nation so that he may “protect” us.

And in this climate of fear and with the specter of being smeared in the midst of an election cycle, the Democrats are meekly pushing only to censure Bush, and only if they can win enough elections in November.

How does the right wing respond? Here’s where they go outrageously too far:

They defend the actions of the lying, dangerous, and illegal president by attacking one of the most noble, hardworking, and effective ex-presidents in American history. They are calling to censure Jimmy Carter, because his diplomatic efforts have led him to meet with unsavory world leaders in the name of peace; since pictures of Carter with Arafat and Castro allow them to smear an honorable man in the name of defending the most vile and cowardly of political slime. The commercial (wmv file) they are running unbelievably claims that Bush is “wisely” wiretapping “terrorists,” when it is millions of Americans they are listening in on, and then they lay vicious and untrue charges against Carter.

I am sorry, but this has got me majorly pissed off. This is beyond slime. This is beyond reprehensible.

In the past, I have kept relatively quiet about our need to impeach Bush, in light of how unlikely it is to happen, despite how necessary and justified an impeachment is. But now, I want nothing more than to shout it from the rooftops.

These people are not patriots, they are criminals by contribution and traitors to our country. Not for their political standing, but because they so vilely and dishonestly support and defend a president who is a criminal and who is working to destroy what America has always stood for and has always been, and because they do so by maliciously impugning the reputation of one of the most honest and patriotic men this country has had the honor to call one of our own.

This is what being in approval of Bush means. This crystallizes what Bush stands for, and why decent and truly patriotic Americans should not stand for this any longer.

Impeach. Bush. Now.

Don’t you hate those new “ad links” in web pages? They appear mostly in news or magazine sites, as green, double-underlined words; if your cursor moves over them, little javascript windows appear displaying ads even remotely related to the word in question. They block the text and take a small amount of time to generate and disappear. Now I have to be careful to keep my cursor away from the dang things or be annoyed. As if the ring of dancing, flashing advertisements all around the periphery–and sometimes in the middle–of the page are somehow not enough. Even pop-up blocking browsers like Safari and Firefox are not 100%–on both browsers, I have visited sites that somehow got around the blockers and opened pop-ups anyway.

Safari also has a bug I don’t like much. On some sites, like MSNBC, any attempt to select text results in a 5- to 10-second pause while the browser goes into spinning-beachball mode.

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I went birdwatching recently… inside Costco. The last few times I’ve visited, I’ve noticed Tree Sparrows flying up in the rafters. They congregate near the back of the store, where the open-topped bakery is–which makes me wonder, as I bite into those tasty Costco bagels, exactly how they keep the sparrow droppings from getting into the baked goods…

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Microsoft seems to be on a new-software kick; after releasing the MSIE 7 beta, they’re now releasing Windows Media Player (WMP) version 11, also in beta. The Washington Post has a piece on it, calling it an improvement, but still not a match for iTunes. It is also reported (that’s a link to one of those pages with the annoying green underline ads) that WMP, like MSIE, goes through the OS “validation” process to see if you have a non-pirated version of Windows.

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David Blaine, after living in a giant fish bowl for a week then failing to hold his breath long enough, has announced that next, he will “live harmoniously among wild beasts” in an as-yet undisclosed jungle. Observers have noted that if Blaine were places in true wilderness amongst feral creatures, he wouldn’t last long. Aren’t there laws to protect the mentally ill from themselves? Or to protect us from desperately pathetic attention seekers? Fortunately, I only hear about these things peripherally at best; I make a point of not paying attention to stories like Michael Jackson’s court proceedings, Britney Spear’s adventures in babysitting, or similar stupid stuff. I looked at the recent Blaine story solely to make fun of it here.

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Well, finally. Yet another Windows piece of malware came along the pike, this one big enough to momentarily distract the media from its weeks-long Macs-are-dangerous kick. This one is a trojan, called “Trojan.Mdropper.H,” and spreads through email, pretending to be a valid corporate MS Word attachment. When you open the attachment, you see Excel charts and Powerpoint presentations–and a piece of malicious code named “Backdoor.Ginwui” opens a back door in your system to allow hackers to gain control. It’s called a “zero-day exploit,” which means that it is not known to the general public, or does not affect it, meaning that system administrators get little or no advance warning of the malware before it hits.

Ironically, McAfee is calling this one a “trojan,” despite their recent scaremongering report, in which they said that a trojan was really a virus, justifying their ability to say “viruses infect the Mac!” Apparently, trojans are now trojans again, at least on Windows.

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Oh, boy. A Democratic congressman got caught taking payola. And it got filmed. The guy’s corrupt, should be jailed. But I’ll bet you dollars to donuts this is gonna be used big-time by the right wing to claim that Democrats are just as, if not more corrupt than Republicans, on the heels of successful yet wildly inaccurate rumor-mongering that the Abramoff scandal was equally spread among the two parties. I wouldn’t even be too surprised if the FBI was directed to try to get something on a Democrat to take the pressure off the Republicans, and it looks like the details of the case may have been leaked precisely for that purpose.

The fact remains that Republican scandals of the past years make things like this look like chickenfeed–and it’s a lot scarier on the Republican side, because they’re so much better at hiding it and getting away with it. Look what Tom DeLay and other Republicans had to do to get caught, and even still he might lawyer his way out of it. This Jefferson guy got videotaped taking the bribe and stashed the money in his freezer. Amateur.

Hell, this guy almost had to be corrupt anyway–he’s a Louisiana Democrat.

Editor’s note: Please read the entire post before you comment. Apparently, a lot of people read the first several paragraphs (or perhaps no more than the title alone) and then assume they understand where I stand on the issue. Also, it might not hurt to keep in mind the difference between gun control and a gun ban; despite my explaining it clearly in the second paragraph, it seems not to register with a lot of people. Thank you.

It’s hard to believe that I haven’t touched on this particular subject yet. It is, after all, how I first got started in debating on the Internet. This is one of those perennial issues that gets argued back and forth over time, one which has two rather galvanized sides, and rivers of different factoids and studies that unfortunately shed little real light on the issue. So let me do what I did that first drew so much fire over a decade and a half ago on the Usenet, and state my opinion on the issue. This will be a bit of a long post.

Most people see this as a binary issue: you either are for free gun possession, or you’re not. This comes from the usual right-wing misrepresentation of the opposing side of the issue, often intentional, I would believe, to make people think that “gun control” is synonymous with “gun ban.” There is, as usual, a middle ground: actual gun control–not a ban–which does everything possible to keep guns out of the hands of criminals while not hindering the right of lawful citizens to keep and bear arms.

But first, let’s start out with a little background:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

That, of course, is the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. Gun advocates read that to state a broad, sweeping individual right to possess and use any kind of firearm they wish, without any restriction. The Supreme Court, as well as several federal courts, read it differently.

At the time of the drafting of this amendment, the role of personal firearms was far different than what it is today. Firearms were the arsenal of the fighting forces of the colonies; men who fought would use their firearms to fight in the militia. While the same weapons were used for hunting and personal defense, it is their use in the context of the militia that is relevant here. That initial clause to the Second Amendment creates that context: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State….” Pro-gun advocates will dismiss the clause as window dressing, saying it is meaningless as a qualifier of the latter clause. One pro-gun site (cached) offers this possible wording to the free press clause of the First Amendment:

The ability of the people to criticize their government unmolested being a requirement of a free and open society, the rights of a free press shall not be infringed.

While the author of this site claims that such wording would not limit the press to only criticizing the government, he is incorrect; if the wording were written as such, the qualifying sentence, while not restricting the group which possesses the right, does restrict the purpose of the right. While it does not ban the press from doing anything save for criticizing the government, neither does it enable it to do anything else. Worded as such, a law, say, prohibiting the press from reporting on the private lives of celebrities would be entirely constitutional. Similarly, the initial clause of the Second Amendment qualifies the purpose of owning guns to militia activity.

Other gun rights advocates will say the clause is grammatically invalid. This argument falls to the rather obvious fact that the clause was set there intentionally; it is not meaningless, and it does qualify.

Then we get into what a “Militia” is. Gun rights advocates claim that everyone is a member of the Militia, and therefore the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right. This reading is usually justified by a reading of the Militia Act of 1792, which they usually quote as defining a militia as “every able-bodied citizen.” Of course, the original text cites “each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years,” and further details enrollment requirements, as well as details of armament including “a good musket or firelock” and other outdated accouterments. A detailed reading clearly requires active enrollment in such a militia, not just the fact of being over 18.

In fact, there is a distinct difference between the “organized militia” and the “unorganized militia”; the Militia Act of 1903 (a.k.a. the Dick Act) defines that difference, as described in Wikipedia’s entry on the Second Amendment:

Further clarification was provided in 1990, in Perpich v. Department of Defense, 496 U.S. 334 (1990). In this case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that, “The Dick Act divided the class of able-bodied male citizens between 18 and 45 years of age into an “organized militia” to be known as the National Guard of the several States, and the remainder of which was then described as the “reserve militia,” and which later statutes have termed the “unorganized militia.” … “In 1908, however, the statute was amended to provide [496 U.S. 334, 343] expressly that the Organized Militia should be available for service “either within or without the territory of the United States.”

Ergo, a “well regulated” militia is equal to the “organized” militia, which limits the Second Amendment to weapons used by the National Guard. It would be impossible to suggest that the reserve militia–essentially everyone not in the National Guard–is somehow “well regulated.” I’ve even heard some gun advocates say that the “well regulated” qualification in the Second Amendment only means that someone have a firearm in working order. I would beg to differ.

I would further point out that in the drafting of the Second Amendment, a reference to conscientious objection was considered to allow for those whose religions did not let them commit violence. If the Second Amendment was truly about individual rights and not about military service, then this consideration would not have arisen.

Suffice it to say that the Second Amendment does not imply an individual right to keep and bear arms. Now, having gone through all that, you probably expect me to conclude that a ban on guns in constitutional. That is not the case. The right to keep and bear arms is not, in my opinion, guaranteed by the Second Amendment. However, in my debates with gun advocates over the years, it has been pointed out to me that this right is bestowed under the Ninth Amendment:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Since there is precedence for rights to ownership of firearms in pre-revolutionary law, and since the right to keep and bear arms would fall under the Ninth, I see this as established (though I am hardly a legal expert).

So, now you perhaps expect that I approve of unrestricted gun ownership? Well, not so fast. It’s the “unrestricted” part that I have a problem with.

Every right comes with responsibilities. The Ninth Amendment does not guarantee unrestricted rights–in fact, I don’t believe any right is fully unrestricted. There are always exceptions, caveats, special cases. You cannot libel or slander, nor recklessly endanger through free speech, for example.

Some gun advocates have argued that there is a distinction between these exceptions and those imposed by gun control: gun control, they say, applies “prior restraint,” to mean that gun control applies “punishment” before an illegal act has been carried out. Gun control restrains not just those who would act illegally, but those who act within the law as well. Prior restraint should not be applied, they say; only punish those who use guns illegally, after the fact; gun control is oppressive.

I disagree with this on the grounds that the rights of one person do not exceed those of another; this is commonly expressed as “your right to swing your arm ends where my nose begins.” You have the right to travel, and to use an automobile to do so; but you do not have the right to jump into a car at age 16, untrained and unlicensed. We impose prior restrictions on dangerous activities, from driving a car to handling explosives. One must be trained, tested, and licensed. The same should be true, and also perfectly legal, in the context of gun ownership.

So while I believe that there is an individual right to keep and bear arms, I do not believe that this is an unrestricted right, free from obligations or exceptions. And those obligations and exceptions would entail gun control. If you want to own and use a gun, you should at the very minimum be required to demonstrate knowledge how to safely operate and store the weapon; in addition, you should be prepared to take responsibility for whatever happens with regard to the firearm you possess, and you should allow for whatever gun control measures that can inhibit illegal firearm possession and use, so long as they do not unduly restrict your right to own and use firearms.

So, what does this mean? First, I believe that one must be trained, tested, and licensed in firearm use and safety before being allowed to purchase a firearm. Such is precisely the process we undergo to drive a car, and we all are pretty much satisfied that this process is not an undue burden on the individual, when weighed against the safety considerations to society in general.

Here is where some in the gun crowd will bring up the Hitler gambit. What if, they say, the United States were to fall under the iron rule of a Hitler-like dictator? Gun registries were used by Nazis, they say, to round up personal firearms in WWII. I don’t know if this is true; it may well be. However, I do know that it is irrelevant, and not sincerely reasoned; it is an excuse, not a rationale. If an oppressive, fascist dictator were to take over the country (allowing for the right-wing stance that this has not in fact already happened in the past few years), then that dictator would not immediately go for the guns. Guns, in fact, would be a distant third on the list of things to oppressively control. The first would be communications, and the second would be travel. Guns would be a distant third because they would be relatively ineffective as a means of resistance or revolution. Any such dictator would, by definition, have to have the willing cooperation of the military in oppressing the people. And despite all right-wing “Red Dawn” fantasy scenarios, hunting rifles and handguns will pale in effectiveness relative to weapons owned by the military. As we have seen in Iraq, an insurgency does not fight like a Revolutionary War militia; handguns do not figure largely in the big picture.

Additionally, look at the history of the past century. How many oppressive dictatorships were overthrown by a people using personal firearms? Few, if any. Now, how many were overthrown by an unarmed populace? South Africa, the Philippines, and the Soviet Union come to mind as a few examples. Revolution does not come at the point of personal firearms, not any more.

So training, testing, and licensing should be required. Second: registration. If possible, bullets should also be registered, like they are in Switzerland (the NRA loves to bring up Switzerland as an example of universal gun ownership with low gun crime rates–until you point out their very strict gun licensing and registration laws). Just as explosives are tagged, a way should be found to tag bullets as well. If you bought a weapon and ammunition, you should be willing to face responsibility for what happens to these items; registration will help accomplish that.

Gun advocates point out that guns can have serial numbers removed, and that homemade bullets can be used. Well, license plates on cars can be switched or forged, along with other tricks, but we don’t give up on auto registration just because some criminals are resourceful. Most criminals are not, and registration of firearms and ammunition would help more than enough to justify the inconvenience involved.

Next, loopholes in gun control laws must be closed. One of the biggest is gun shows and gun trafficking. Criminals can easily visit a gun show in a state where there are few or no restrictions, buy dozens of firearms, then transport these to a state with strong gun control laws. Illegal gun trafficking is a major problem that could be fixed by simply limiting the number of firearms one person may purchase to one every few months, or, say, three every year. Special exceptions would be granted to law enforcement and security agencies, and licensed gun collectors and dealers. The restriction would allow lawful citizens to acquire a large number of guns over time, more than any ordinary citizen would ever need. But it would virtually halt gun trafficking.

Next, background checks should be universal. Such background checks have proved highly effective. In just four years after background checks were instituted in California, Florida, Virginia and Maryland, 47,000 illegal gun purchases were stopped, and more than a few wanted criminals were arrested trying to purchase guns.

One argument against gun control laws is that they are ineffective; despite these laws, criminals have guns, and they use them. Well, one reason is that gun control laws constitute a patchwork quilt full of holes, not a complete blanket over the nation. Gun advocates like to point to the legendary “20,000 laws,” supposedly the number of gun control laws that exist in the country; they point out that even with so many laws, gun control is ineffective. The truth is, gun control is ineffective because of the 20,000 laws. Since the NRA has been so effective at blocking gun control legislation at the national and state levels, individual municipalities have been forced to enacts sets of their own laws if they want to have them; ergo the large number. However, the fault is in the fact that many cities and states do not have gun control. That and other loopholes allow criminals to get their hands on guns in one locale and then transport them to a place with stricter gun control laws. This is why the vast majority of guns confiscated from criminals in New York, which has strong gun control laws, were bought out-of-state. The fact that criminals went to greater trouble and expense to buy weapons elsewhere in fact proves that the gun control works; the lack of gun control elsewhere is the culprit.

As a result, the “20,000 laws” should all be repealed, and one comprehensive, nation-wide gun control act with the details I have given should be enacted.

One of the problems that gun control has faced, however, is the fear instilled by the NRA that gun control will lead to gun confiscation and a gun ban. This is what frightens gun owners who would otherwise approve of gun control into blocking such legislation from passing. If the Ninth Amendment is not enough, then a new amendment should be drafted and passed, one which specifies gun ownership rights, but also notes the necessity of limited gun control. The purpose of such an amendment would be to relieve the concerns of gun owners who would support gun control, but fear the laws would go too far. With a new guarantee in place, better and universal gun control laws could be more easily enacted.

---

To sum up: individual gun ownership is guaranteed, but gun control is necessary and lawful. Said gun control should include mandatory training, testing, and licensing; registration of weapons and ammunition; background checks; and limits on the number of guns purchased at any one time. These laws must be universal. They would not unduly restrict gun ownership rights of lawful citizens, but would make illegal gun ownership much more difficult.

One more argument from the gun advocacy side remains: gun control will never stop crime. Well, duh. Of course it won’t. Nothing ever will. But effective gun control will make it far more difficult for criminals to obtain and use firearms. Not impossible, but far more difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. More criminals will be deterred, stopped, and arrested.

And that’s the whole idea.

You’ve probably experienced this at least once: the weather is fine, if cloudy, all day long, but the moment you walk out the door, rain begins to fall. You know, the experience where you wonder if your front door is positioned over some ancient Indian rainmaking temple or something.

Well, twice this week I’ve had that experience. Almost three times, but the third time it started raining about two minutes after I walked out the door, so that doesn’t count. The other two times, rain started right on cue; I watched as the dry ground started getting peppered with raindrops. Twice in one week is enough to start you to think about laws of probability and so forth.

And then today, I got unlucky again in one way, and lucky in another. I decided to go out to Costco. All day long it’s been sunny. Only as I walk out the door do clouds begin to dim the direct sunshine, but still, most of the sky is clear, and it’s quite bright out. I get on my scooter and head off. Two minutes out, I notice the wall of dark clouds off in the distance, in addition to the overcast above. I figure that I have enough time to get to Costco (a 15-minute drive) before it starts to rain; on the way back, I can wear my rain suit, which I proudly remembered I had decided to bring along, just in case.

Three minutes out, and it begins to rain. A light sprinkle. Damn, I think. Okay, the Costco trip can wait for tomorrow. I turn around and head back. Turns out that was a very wise move. The rain gets heavier, then heavier still. Not quite so bad at first that I feel I have to pull over and suit up–I am just a few minutes out, and besides, there’s no shelter to change under, anyway.

But in the few minutes it took to get home, I got soaked. So badly that it even got through my leather jacket in spots. Just before I turned around, half the sky was clear. As I pulled into my apartment complex three minutes later, the whole sky was grey and it was pouring.

Good thing I decided to turn around. But, boy, does my timing suck this week.

Okay, I’ve been using Google’s beta web site statistics service for a little over a week now, enough to get data for the time-range analysis which is part of the software. This is a basic layman’s report on how Google Analytics (GA) works, what it offers, and how useful it is for a non-commercial blogger like me. This first part will give an overall review. Later I will go over all of the different statistical analyses the service provides, or at least the ones not concerning marketing. Keep in mind that I am still relatively new to GA, and so there may be features or tricks that I have not yet come across. (If you know any, please comment!)

First, the service seems to be aimed at (but by no means limited to) commercial sites, especially ones that use Google’s AdWords service, in that a good portion of the analyses are set up to measure the performance of that service. If you’re not advertising, then a lot of GA’s data sets will be empty for you. However, that still leaves quite a few highly useful statistics for you to peruse.

GA, like Google’s GMail, Calendar, and other services, makes extensive use of Javascript. There are a lot of toggled menus and pop-up windowlets that will expand your choices without having to regenerate the page view. When clicked on, graphs will acquire or lose labels, and pie charts will explode specific segments. In short, the app is designed in a very sexy way, much better than a simple web page with buttons and static graphic elements. Of course, there is still much that requires the page to be rebuilt, so some things take more time than a stand-alone app independent of a browser. But it’s worth hanging around for.

The way it works: because GA is not resident on your web site or domain, you need to append a small script to the end of every HTML script for your site. Blogs use templates to generate each page, so it’s easy to install in that sense. Every time a page so tagged is viewed by someone, the script sends the users’ data to your GA account, where it is accordingly tabulated to create the display. This system, while necessary for an off-site service, has a rather glaring flaw: files that cannot carry the GA script are not counted. As a result, GA cannot see anyone who only monitors your RSS feed, nor can it detect when non-HTML files (such as images or movies) are accessed by direct external links, including hotlinking. This creates a rather large blind spot for the service. GA does offer a way to track specific file views and downloads, but only if the referrer is from within your site.

On the other hand, the script tag does allow you to choose precisely which HTML files on your site you want to have tracked. For example, a huge amount of traffic on my site is generated by spammers, who focus primarily on the scripts that are not content pages in and of themselves. Spammers are constantly accessing my comment and trackback scripts without going through the actual pages of the blog, which are what I am interested in. As a result, very, very little of the spam that hits my site gets recorded, and despite the blindness to RSS visitors (which may constitute as much as 1/3 of my visitors), GA gives me a much truer view of the real people who come and read my blog.

Ideally, GA would be perfect as an on-domain script (like AwStats), which would directly monitor all traffic on the site–but still give you the ability to dictate which files are tracked and which are not. Even better would be a way for the data to be tracked from within the domain, and then compiled as a data package which an application resident on your computer could regularly download, allowing you to analyze the data far more flexibly and quickly.

Another downside to GA is the restricted filtering ability. GA allows you to dictate filters on incoming data; for example, if a spammer is hitting a page in your site, you can specify to GA through a powerful filter engine exactly what to block from coming in. That’s the good part; the bad part is that once the data has hit you, you can’t edit it out of the data you have already collected. This means that any spammer or generator of bogus data will have a permanent impact on your GA stats until you notice them and go to the trouble of applying a specific filter. If the files you track are frequently hit by spammers who constantly fake and/or rotate IP addresses, domain names, and other data, it will be a constant game of catch-up for you. The ability to purge the existing database of spammer activity you have noticed would be a vast improvement.

GA does offer you the ability to temporarily filter data as it is generated in the current display, but this ability is far too limited. First, it only allows you to include or exclude a single keyword. If you want to see only one element isolated from all others, it’s very good. But if you want to exclude more than one data element, it is more or less useless. One example: when GA lists all referrals (visitors who followed links to your site from outside sites), it does not differentiate search engines from other referrals (a rather glaring omission, in my opinion). The temporary filter will allow you to only exclude one keyword; that allows me, for example, to exclude all hits coming from Google, but I cannot also exclude all the other search engines, such as Yahoo, MSN, and so on–not at the same time. One other problem with these filters is that they are discarded as soon as you leave the particular analysis you apply the filter to; the filter cannot be remembered, and so must be re-input every time.

That pretty much wraps up all the major shortfalls I have noted so far; after that, it’s all gravy. As I mentioned, a sexy interface, tons of options, lots of useful and interesting data. There are dozens of useful breakdowns, lists, and charts. Almost every piece of data can be analyzed in cross-section–for example, when I view the chart showing new vs. returning visitors, I can break down either group by their region, browser type, or the keyword they used to find my site via a search engine. For example, most of the people who find me via a Google search for “eyelid twitch” only visit once; fewer than 5% return for another visit (within the same week, at least). The data GA collects is very flexibly viewable in these respects. You can also specify a range of dates within which to view data.

GA also has a Help Center which covers a surprising number of topics. Usually such “help” areas are lacking, leaving you in the dark about how to use the software. GA breaks that trend, explaining a wide range of features and issues, and doing a very good job at that. The explanations are not too technical for the casual user, usually favoring a complete omission of the hacker-level stuff. Support forums, in the form of Usenet groups tracked by Google’s Beta Group search engine, exist to highlight any specific requests or exchange of information between users.

Next: What you can see, and how you can see it.

I remember an episode from the TV show Babylon 5, when Vir Cotto, the aide to Centauri Ambassador Londo Mollari, is assigned to be the Centauri ambassador to Minbar. As part of his assignment, Vir writes intelligence reports on the Minbari for the Centauri royal court. Londo, being “helpful,” intercepts the reports and makes Vir change them:

LONDO: No. No, this report is totally inappropriate. You have to do it again.

VIR: But Londo, why? I’ve spent weeks working on this report. I didn’t even sleep on the flight back from Minbar so I could go over it again. I’ve checked every single detail myself. It’s absolutely accurate.

LONDO: Yes, Vir, I’m sure it is. And that is the problem. Here, you say: ‘The Minbari have carefully preserved their cities over the course of centuries.’

VIR: That’s right, absolutely.

LONDO: No, what you should say instead is: ‘Their cities are very old, indicating a decaying culture.’

VIR: What?

LONDO: And here: ‘The Minbari put great emphasis on art, literature and music.’ Say instead: ‘They are a decadent people, interested only in the pursuit of … of dubious pleasures.’ The ‘dubious’ part is very important. It doesn’t mean anything, but it scares people every time. All right?

VIR [outraged]: Londo! Every time I make a report, you do this to me!

LONDO: Yes, Vir, I’m trying to help you! A report that will be circulated at the Royal Court needs to be phrased carefully to make sure they appear less civilized than we are! It keeps the Emperor happy!

VIR: I thought the purpose of filing these reports was to provide accurate intelligence!

LONDO: Vir, intelligence has nothing to do with politics! Here: “They are tolerant of differences among other cultures.” [Scratches it out.] No. Make that, “They have no well-defined sense of morality.” They’ll love that back home!

The scene is funny, until you realize that it is precisely the way things work in the Bush administration (via Kevin Drum):

A number of current and former intelligence officials have told me that the administration’s war on internal dissent has crippled the CIA’s ability to provide realistic assessments from Iraq. “The system of reporting is shut down,” said one person familiar with the situation. “You can’t write anything honest, only fairy tales.”

The New York Times and others have reported that in 2003, the CIA station chief in Baghdad authored several special field reports that offered extremely negative assessments of the situation on the ground in Iraq—assessments that later proved to be accurate. The field reports, known as “Aardwolfs,” were angrily rejected by the White House. Their author—who I’m told was a highly regarded agency veteran named Gerry Meyer—was soon pushed out of the CIA, in part because his reporting angered the See No Evil crowd within the Bush administration. “He was a good guy,” one recently retired CIA official said of Meyer, “well-wired in Baghdad, and he wrote a good report. But any time this administration gets bad news, they say the critics are assholes and defeatists, and off we go down the same path with more pressure on the accelerator.”

In 2004 Meyer was replaced with a new CIA station chief in Baghdad, who that year filed six Aardwolfs, which, sources told me, were collectively as pessimistic about the situation in Iraq as the ones sent by his predecessor. The station chief finished his assignment in December 2004; he was not fired, but according to one source is now “a pariah within the system.” Three other former intelligence officials gave me virtually identical accounts, with one saying the ex–station chief was “treated like shit” and “farmed out.” …

“The CIA’s ability to speak honestly is gone,” concluded the official, “which is extraordinarily dangerous to our country.”

Life imitates art. In many ways, Babylon 5‘s creator and chief author, Joe Straczynski, was years ahead of his time in much of the political commentary and cautionary storytelling involved in the series. Which is, of course, to say that he is a keen observer of history.

What was comedic in Babylon 5 is tragic in reality, but the TV precedent is quite telling in its warning of the corruption of an intelligence system to satisfy the depravity of a political institution.

The Bush administration is not interested in facts, rather in perpetuating an agenda. One question is, who is getting fooled? Does the administration know the truth but is demanding false intelligence so they can say they are acting on intelligence? Or is the administration truly blinded by its own desire for their world view to be accurate, and they really believe what they demand the intelligence community provide them?

All along we have suspected that the “intelligence” coming out of CIA and other agencies has been directed by the Bush administration, so they can blame someone other than themselves when things go wrong, as they so badly have gone wrong. This new information offers substantiation: the intelligence community has been trying to tell the truth, but Bush has been carefully training them not to, punishing them when the truth does not match what they want it to be.

This Bush policy has damaged the nation to an unbelievable degree, endangering national security, killing and wounding our soldiers, putting the entire nation at risk.

Anyone who now believes that Bush is doing anything but an abysmal job at national security is dangerously mistaken.

Remember how the Bush administration and their media flacks tried to convince us that the NSA domestic telephone database didn’t invade our privacy because is was anonymous? Because it just had phone numbers, and no names or addresses?

Well, any intelligent person would know that it’s easy for the NSA to get a name and address from a phone number. But for the rest of you (snark), here’s an Apple widget that lets you do it. I downloaded it, and within seconds I found my family’s name and address by entering the telephone number. I then started trying single-digit differences from that number, and got names and addresses of lots of people who lived nearby.

Anonymous, my ass. The government is logging every call you make, and they know exactly who you are, who you’re calling, and where both of you live.

Welcome to George Bush’s America.

I just spent 15 minutes drafting an email to someone in GMail, and my browser crashed. I was going to the CNet site and checking out reviews of laptops to refer to in the email, and one page of the CNet site crashed Safari (and did so twice more when I tried to access it again). Damn, I thought–fifteen minutes of writing gone. I had failed to save what I had written (though when do you make saves of web-based email drafts?).

But I got a pleasant surprise: when I restarted Safari and reopened GMail, expecting to have to start from scratch, there was my prior draft! All nicely saved as a draft by GMail, automatically. Even typing which I had finished no more than one minute before the browser crashed was still there. Very, very cool. Do Hotmail or Yahoo do that? Maybe I should experiment…

Add to that the newer features available with a GMail account, including Calendar (now I can share my schedule with my students more easily, allowing them to sign up for appointments better) and Google Analytics (a more detailed report on that coming sometime soon). Now, if GMail could only check all the POP email from my various domains as well…

You’ve gotta just love the new Republican strategy for winning the midterms this year: “if the Democrats win, they’ll investigate President Bush.” And maybe they’ll investigate other Republicans, too.

And we all know that if Republicans were in control of Congress while a Democrat were in the White House, they would never ask for investigations!

The biting irony is that Republicans ran a virtual investigation madhouse for the entire eight years of the Clinton presidency, primarily investigating him on sexual matters and charges of alleged (yet despite massive investigations, never proved) bribe-taking dating back years before Clinton entered the White House. But they also demanded investigations on any rumor that floated up from the muck, no matter how spurious or unwarranted. And tragically, Clinton’s actual governance during those eight years was excellent–yet it is remembered more for the investigations than for anything else.

And now, after this president has committed grave crimes in office, including an actual, clear violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, and other offenses that have endangered the security of the country, supposedly the thing we should most fear is the Democrats actually investigating this president! How dare they! It’s not like Bush got a blow job or anything!

This Republican strategy is two-fold: not only do they hope to stir up public opinion against the idea of investigations against Bush and themselves, but they clearly hope to get Democrats to swear up and down not to investigate Bush or any Republicans if they take control of the House and/or Senate. The Republicans are masters at this–witness how, despite the fact that current corruption is almost exclusively Republican in nature, they have succeeded in fooling a whopping 76% of Americans into believing that Democrats are equally complicit in the GOP’s graft.

Frankly, if Democrats do win and if they do start investigations, not only will it be fitting turnabout on Republicans–for them to be investigated for significant and damaging crimes after spending the 90’s investigating Clinton for insignificant and often specious charges–but it will, hopefully, actually have the effect of curbing some of the costly, rampant Republican corruption and dangerous White House attacks on the rights of Americans.

And if the Democrats do investigate, they won’t have to go back years for some Whitewater-like charge–though Bush’s past is full of investigable stuff, like use of hard drugs, several SEC violations, and (oh, the irony!) lying under oath while Governor of Texas. No, there are charges galore they could look into that stem from Bush’s behavior in the White House–though a single, focused investigation into Bush’s Fourth Amendment and FISA violations alone would probably do it.

As for Congressional Republicans, it looks like the Democrats would have a field day there as well, with the Cunningham-Wilkes scandal apparently set to blow its lid sometime soon.

As far as I’m concerned, the Democrats shouldn’t run and hide from this issue, as the GOP certainly hopes they will. They should turn around and campaign on it. Say, “you’re damned right we’re going to investigate! And we’re not afraid of what those investigations will uncover.” Then launch into detailed descriptions of the Republican corruption that has rotted Washington and cost Americans far more than just money.

Well, it’s finally out. Starting at $1100 with a dual-core 1.83 GHz Core Duo CPU and a 13.3″ glossy widescreen LCD at 1280 x 800 pixels. The mid-level model comes with a 2GHz Core Duo, with a SuperDrive instead of a Combo Drive, for $200 more. The next higher model, strangely, costs another $200, but the only thing you seem to get different is 20GB more on the hard drive and a black enclosure. Obviously, the mid-level model is the best deal. In fact, it’s pretty close in specs to the lower-end MacBook Pro, for a lot less. Compare this to my PowerBook G4, which I bought less than a year ago; mine cost almost double the new MacBook, and will be almost half as fast. For a consumer-end laptop, the new MacBooks have a respectable amount of power.

Of course, you have to add RAM (though the on-board 512MB is not horrible, at least 1GB is more like it) and pay $200 for Windows XP. That would make the mid-level model $1600 for a powerful laptop with Mac and Windows combined under the hood. Not too shabby.

For those of you who think the reporting out of Iraq is being slanted and is “too negative,” keep in mind facts such as these:

I read stories each day about bodies being discovered in Baghdad neighborhoods, in garbage dumps outside the city, or in remote Iraqi outposts. They’re often found wrapped in plastic tarps, or disposed in mass graves.

Victims turn up showing signs of being tortured, such as having had their eyes gouged, or their bodies punctured by a drill. More victims of ethnic violence in a nation where it seems the scores will never be settled.

… Ministry of Interior sources say that since the December 15 elections, on average, 50 bodies are found in Baghdad daily.

Sectarian violence in Baghdad alone results in around 50 deaths a day. That’s 20,000 dead each year, give or take, in Baghdad alone, from sectarian violence (not the insurgency). Saddam is reported to have killed 61,000 people in Baghdad over his 23-year reign; that’s just over 7 people per day. The present bloodshed is far worse, and yet the same conservatives who don’t want the current killings reported have repeatedly emphasized how much killing Saddam did. They said it was so terrible that it justified the invasion in the first place. And yet, somehow, horrific killings seven times more frequent are supposed to be no more significant than news about how many hours of electricity the city gets daily? When your neighbors are gouging out your son’s eyes and drilling holes into his head, then dumping his mutilated body onto the street in a tarp, I don’t think you give a crap about how long the lights stay on at night. It’s pretty much all darkness at that point.

Forgive me for saying so, but to criticize the press for covering stuff like that instead of school openings is crassly and overtly political. I don’t care if they open a hundred schools a day and everybody gets water and power up and running 24/7. Fifty people brutally tortured and then dumped on the streets in sectarian violence trumps that so significantly that it’s not even close. Criticism of the media “slanting” coverage by reporting the deaths has absolutely nothing to do with representing the reality of Iraq, and has everything to do with trying to whitewash the violence there so as to improve Bush’s image and the GOP legacy; it’s an attempt to fool the American people into thinking that we’ve achieved “success” in Iraq. At best, it is self-delusion.