Inogashira Park is always good for birding, if only sometimes for ducks. It’s also good for up-close birding, as the birds get fed by visitors regularly, and so are fine with people getting close to them. That allows for good, up-close photos.

One duck that is commonly found at Inogashira is the Mandarin, a very colorful drake along the lines of the Wood or Harlequin Ducks. Mandarins at Inogashira tend to gather right off a little, off-the-main-walkway path at the far west end of the park’s lake. Go along this path, and you can practically walk right up to them. They often rest in mating pairs on low branches near the water, and immature ducks can be seen as well.

Although not great in number, Cormorants can also be seen. This one below is doing what a lot of Cormorants do, holding out its wings in the breeze. A Cormorant’s feathers are not fully waterproof, so it must do this after swimming in order to dry off.

A common duck at Inogashira is the Tufted Duck:

The first is a drake, the second a hen. Both have the crest, but the male’s is much more in the style of Elvis.

The Northern Pintail is easy to spot; it’s a larger though more slender duck, with the namesake tail.

The Northern Shoveler is also easy to spot; it may have a superficial resemblance to a Mallard (see below), but the spoon-shaped bill and the beady yellow eyes are a giveaway.

Rounding out the seven common Inogashira ducks (the Spot-billed is not pictured here) is the Common Pochard, similar to American Redheads or Canvasbacks, except for its bill, which has a black base and tip and a lighter color in between (the Redhead has only the black tip, and the Canvasback has an all-black bill).

Swimming along with the ducks being fed along the main Inogashira Lake bridge was a Eurasian Coot. I’ve never seen one of these with the ducks at feeding before; usually they’re off at the west end by themselves.

A relative to the Coot is the Common Moorhen, smaller and more colorful. These can often be spotted along the main bridge, though usually they hang back at the rear behind the feeding ducks.

Finally, there’s the Little Grebe, a little fuzzball which can sometimes be seen at this park. This one came right up to a lakeside feeding area, to my surprise; usually they’re out on the lake doing their usual diving behavior.

Aside from these birds, there were the usual numerous crows, and you could easily hear the Brown-eared Bulbuls in the trees.

Next: the Tokyo Port Wild Bird Park.

For the past one month, I’ve finally been getting back to birdwatching. The first return was a month and a few days ago, and I was still on crutches, but able to balance enough without them so I could take photos between walking from place to place on the Tama River. Since then, I’ve made it to Inogashira Park, Seiseki Sakuragaoka a few times, and to the Tokyo Port Wild Bird Park. I just never got around to posting any of the photos. I got a few Life Birds along the way, but mostly just revisited species I’d spotted many times before. Still, there was some good birding in there, and I’ll try to give a good sample of all the species. None of the photos in this series will have larger versions on clicking.

First, the late February Tama River birding. Along with the usual assortment of crows and sparrows, there were:

Eurasian Wigeons. These Wigeons have been congregating at this particular stretch along the Tama River in Inagi since late last year. There are several dozen of the birds, always in the same spot.

And of course, the Great Cormorants. These birds are present in the area year-round, and were among the first birds I spotted when I started birdwatching here a little more than a year ago. These big fellas are almost as ubiquitous as the crows, but not quite. Still, you see them everywhere along the river and the bay.

Not quite as numerous but still nice to see are the Green Winged Teals. Pretty birds. Although Inogashira Park is flush with ducks, neither the Teals nor the Wigeons show up there, for some reason–but they are usual visitors to this part of the Tama River in Inagi.

Even more ubiquitous than the Cormorants are the inevitable Spot-billed Ducks. If you see a duck in Japan, odds are it’s one of these.

Less expected was a small group of Little Grebes. I haven’t seen these guys so much on the Tama before, but they’ve been regulars here for the past month or longer.

Returning after a short absence are the Egrets, in this image, a Little Egret (yellow feet). They’re always graceful and nice to see.

And where there’s water, there are Wagtails–a White Wagtail, in this case, the more common type. Japanese Wagtails (similar, but with a black head and white brow stripe) are less common. Wagtails are easily spotted by their signature slow-wagging tail, as well as their swooping up-and-down flight path and their peep-peep! peep-peep! call.

Not an exceptionally exciting collection, but a nice welcome back to birdwatching. Next: Inogashira Park.

The “Itsok” spammer is back. Though I have blocked the string “itsok,” the spammer seems to have caught on to that, and has introduced variations. I am trying to block them, but just to be safe, more than one URL per comment will trip the automatic comment block.

House Republicans passed H.R. 4437, titled the “Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005.” This bill is a sham that punishes the wrong people and will do very little to actually stop illegal immigration–instead, it will simply fill up jails with people who are just trying to look for work.

The key to illegal immigration has always been ignored. Politicians–and most people–seem to think that it’s the fault of the aliens coming across the border. They’re to blame, they believe.

Wrong. People streaming over the border is the symptom, not the actual problem. The problem lies with us, not the people starving for work. It’s very simple: aliens would not be entering the country illegally unless there were jobs being offered to them. And that’s where the problem lies. We’re the problem. We’re the ones who create the market. We’re offering the illegals jobs. We’re telling them to come.

A man desperate to find work to feed his family is not, by nature, a criminal. The criminal is the man who does not want to pay a fair wage or pay the requisite taxes that a citizen or legal immigrant would require, so he seeks out undocumented aliens to do the job, knowing it to be illegal.

And yet, we don’t want to admit that we’re the problem. So instead, after inviting illegals to stream over the border, we blame them for a host of problems we ourselves created, and then punish them for crimes which we are ultimately guilty of.

The solution to the problem is simple: stop the Americans who are hiring illegals. If there are no jobs for illegals, the word will get out, and they’ll stop streaming over the border. Read over the new bill. Try to find anywhere that outlines penalties and punishment against those who hire illegals. I couldn’t find it. The bill focuses only on immigrants, not one bit on illegal employers. The bill would make it a felony to cross the border or to help someone crossing the border–but does not strengthen the penalty or enforcement against those who hire illegals.

True, laws exist making it illegal to hire undocumented aliens–but they are rarely enforced. And that’s the dirty little secret: we push to punish the poor and the hungry who want a better life, and let the employers who encourage and exploit these people get away scot-free. In 2004, only three companies were cited for hiring illegal immigrants. (During the Clinton administration, more of an effort was made–417 businesses were cited in 1999, though still a tiny number compared to the total number of violators.) Employers are virtually unpoliced. Fines to employers can be as low as $275 per offense (no jail time), and are often negotiated downward.

Many believe we turn a blind eye on the employers because we need the workers–but that’s not true. We could bring the workers in legally, without too much hassle. But if we did that, then minimum wage laws would apply, and employers would have to pay taxes on the wages–and that’s the key to the whole story. To support these businesses in their desire for a cheap, disposable labor source, we instead heap invective, blame, and punishment on the backs of those who are being taken advantage of. The classic case of “blame the victim,” the high state of the conservative art.

H.R. 4437 will do little or nothing to solve the problem. Employers will still offer the jobs, and people starving for work will still risk all to get it. They’re risking their lives now, why should a felony arrest stop them?

You want to really stop the problem? Enforce the penalties against employers. In fact, make the penalties harsher, and then enforce them to the limit of the law. At the same time, create a guest worker program where aliens can get a work visa cheaply and easily if they have a legal sponsor. Documentation to be carried at all times, in the form of a wallet-sized card made extremely hard to counterfeit.

Employers will try to claim that they were fooled, that they believed the employee was legal. Solution: make it the responsibility of each employer to get the visa and bring the worker in, then send them out when the contract has finished. No more hiring from the back of a truck. The employer would be required to have a paper trail going back to the worker’s entry into the country. The bureaucratic machinery would have to be set up carefully so as to make it cheap and easy to accomplish this. I know it can be done: I am hired on exactly such a visa (in fact, a more elaborate visa), here in Japan. It costs my employer very little time and effort. A similar program in the U.S. would not make it an undue burden even for the lowest of employers.

Any employer caught hiring an illegal the first time would be slapped with a $5000 fine and a stern warning. Second offense: thirty days in jail and a $20,000 fine. Third offense: five years in prison and a $100,000 fine. No exceptions, no excuses. Prison time to apply both to the person doing the immediate hiring and to the owner and/or top officer of the business. (At least one bill in this spirit was introduced in 2005 by two Texas Democrats, but the Republican majority shunted this to a committee where it now languishes.)

But enforcement is key: take the bulk of the force hunting down illegals and set them to hunt down employers. Make it so that an employer hiring an illegal stands a better-than-50% chance of being caught.

Then watch illegal immigration dry up.

President Bush has long called for a guest worker program, and I have actually praised him for it–but only on the condition that he focuses enforcement and punishment on the employer, not the immigrant. Bush has used the issue in his long-standing attempt to draw Hispanic voters over to the Republican Party. Just days before everyone got sidetracked by 9/11, Bush said the following:

The truth of the matter is that if somebody is willing to do jobs others in America aren’t willing to do, we ought to welcome that person to the country, and we ought to make that a legal part of our economy. We ought not to penalize an employer who is trying to get a job done, who hires somebody who is willing to do that kind of work.

Which is why I don’t think the problem will be solved by Bush’s solution–he wants a guest worker program, but will never punish an illegal employer. And that, of course, will make any guest worker program a facade, a sham–illegal employment will still flourish, as will illegal immigration. The only result is that the hypocrisy will escalate to the point where politicians will blame the immigrants even more. They’ll say, “we’re offering them legal work, and still they come in illegally! They could easily get a visa, but they prefer to break our laws!”

When the truth will be that few legitimate visas will be offered (and all will be snapped up quickly), but the bulk of jobs offered to immigrants will continue to be illegal in nature.

It looks like Google is going full-bore to create what is effectively a web-centric software suite. Google started out with just searching, and expanded in that field to include different varieties of searches (images, video, blogs, maps), but then they started getting into software, and appear headed more in that direction.

It’s not all consistent, however; some Google software gets installed on your computer (like Google Desktop, Earth, and Picasa), some work wholly on the web using javascript to jazz them up (Blogger and GMail). Google does not appear to be going for the big time and making a whole operating system, or even to be creating what would seem to be the most obvious application for them: a browser. (There was a lot of speculation back in late 2004 that Google was developing a browser, but it fizzled and Google said it was not developing one.)

But more and more, Google is acquiring and developing new software, and even if there doesn’t appear to be a direction, there certainly is a lot of enthusiasm. Google bought out Urchin, a web site statistics program, and has renamed it Google Analytics. I’m interested because it seems to have the ability to filter out spam from the stats, something I can’t find anywhere else. Google also bought something called Writely, an online WYSIWYG word processor that can export a file in MS Word, OpenOffice, RTF, or PDF formats, among others. That would be great for my students, who are constantly losing essays due to corrupt files, or often (claim) they left them at home by accident. Writely would allow you to share files with anyone, so they could all allow the teacher to collect essays from online, and return them corrected in the same way. Both of these are in beta mode right now, though you can sign up for an invitation.

All of these products and services (to the best of my knowledge) are free, though some have “premium” levels where you can access advanced features at cost.

The latest new thing I got into is Google Page Creator (GPC). Clearly based upon the Blogger system, it allows you to easily create multiple web pages within your private web site from scratch. You could clearly call it a direct competitor to Apple’s iWeb, as it works in pretty much the same way, though GPC is much more primitive.

There are two clear advantages to GPC. First, Google (in their usual online-disk-space largesse–GMail accounts now go up to 2.7 GB) gives you your own “googlepages” subdomain with 100 MB, free of charge, and no advertising slapped onto the page. It is essentially your web site, free and clear. You don’t have to register a domain name for $10 a year, and you don’t have to pay a web host anything. Second, it’s damned simple to use–just click and type. There are big buttons that make clear what they are, and every action–including making links and putting up images–is made about as plain as it can be made. It’s even easy to coordinate the many pages within the site, linking them together, using common images, and so forth.

There are down sides: in some respects, it is too simple. You cannot control the coding or appearance of the overall web page beyond the very limited choices GPC gives you. Your page is comprised of sections that must include a title banner, and either one, two or three columns, the center column always being the biggest. You can choose from 41 different themes, mostly color variations of 15 or so basic themes (very similar to Blogger). Beyond that, you can’t tweak the overall look of the page using GPC directly. Now, within each section, you are allowed to edit the HTML, and therefore apply more advanced coding than the few buttons provided in WYSIWYG, but that’s about it.

only four layouts to choose from

Blogger-ish theme choices

On the other hand, it is possible to upload pre-made web pages from your computer (using the upload window in the Page Manager), so advanced users will be pleased by that. You can also upload videos or sound files if you so choose. Meanwhile, novices will probably be quite satisfied with the native web page creation methods. Certainly, for a simple one-two-three way to slap a site up on the web, it’d be hard to get better than this.

There is currently a limit to the number of files–just 100 are allowed at present. Probably you don’t need that many web pages, and if you have more than that many images, you could use a site like OurMedia, one of several free file upload services on the web. I expect Google will raise or eliminate this limit eventually.

GPC currently supports Firefox (Mac and Windows) and IE (Windows only) browsers–you can’t touch it with Safari on a Mac, at least not yet. This service is currently tied in to GMail–you need a GMail address to use GPC. You sign in by using your GMail address and password, and the URL for your GPC site is based upon your GMail account name.

And that last part is, as far as I can tell, a big down side, as far as spam is concerned. Let’s say your GMail address is myname@gmail.com. When you get a GPC account, your site’s address will be http://myname.googlepages.com. In other words, your GMail address becomes the site subdomain address. And that means that a spammer could easily harvest GMail addresses simply by sending a spambot to scour the googlepages domain. I can’t understand why Google would set things up like this, even in beta mode. Now, the Google Page Creator preference page does list the site address as a configurable option (like Blogger allows), but currently that option is inaccessible; hopefully Google will activate it soon.

In the meantime, I would advise setting up a junk GMail account if you want to fool around with GPC, like I did. My main GMail account is my name, and I signed up weeks ago for GPC. I got the invite a few days ago, but when I found the URL problem, I decided not to publish. Instead, I set up a second GMail account which I don’t care if it gets spam, and asked GPC for an invite on that account. I expected another long wait, but the invite came the next day–which suggests that they’re getting up to speed on this, I suppose.

GMail itself is still in beta mode, and strangely it still does not allow you to sign up without an invitation from somebody (unless you want to sign up using your mobile phone). But once you have an account, you immediately get 15 invites, and eventually get up to 100. So if you want a GMail invite from me, just post a comment to this entry with your email address. I will intercept the comment in moderation, send you the invite, and then delete your email address from the comment so it never appears in published form (or will simply delete the whole comment if you specify so).

Set up the GMail account, and then go to the Google Page Creator web site and sign up for an invite to that, using the GMail address. Apparently, you can get as many accounts as you have GMail addresses, which ultimately is unlimited, unless they have some way of catching egregious account-makers.

My GPC account is http://blogds.googlepages.com. Nothing interesting there yet, just a placeholder page with a few other sample pages to show different themes and layouts.

Keep in mind that GPC is still a very early beta (some suggest it’s technically an alpha), so don’t expect perfection. But even for a beta, it’s pretty good for what it is.

This discussion-area post has lots of good information, suggestions, tips & tricks and other stuff.

I decided to redo the “amended” Bill of Rights under Bush, figuring that since the Bush administration is classifying everything they consider embarrassing, a “redacted” version of the Bill of Rights would be much more appropriate. I have included the secret finding signed by Bush to make it official. I hope the redaction shows up correctly–I had to fool around with tables a lot to get it to come out right. Let me know if it shows up okay on your browser.

George W. Bush’s Redacted Bill of Rights

Language has always been a battleground, and conservatives have been especially nasty in how they wield that particular weapon. Look at George H. W. Bush (41) in the 1988 election, taking off with the “L-word,” part of a wide-ranging conservative attack on liberalism–still raging today–which has at least partially succeeded in making the term “liberal” an epithet. Newt Gingrich went further with a wider linguistic attack when he distributed a memo titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” to be used by Republican politicians, operatives, and pundits. One section of the memo lists “contrasting” words intended to be used when describing Democratic politicians or their policies (such as “abuse,” “decay,” and “shame”), and another section lists “governing” words for describing Republican politicians and their policies (“active,” “empower,” “principle”).

That war is still raging, and Josh Marshall is onto one particular word that is being, and has long been, attacked–“Democratic.” Now, one thing that should be recognized as a solid rule is that when an organization names itself, everyone uses that name. If the Green Party calls itself the “Green Party,” you don’t call it the “Greenie Party,” at least not officially. Republicans, again using language as a weapon, are ignoring this rule in a very subtle but pointed attack on the very name of the party opposite them.

The party is called the “Democratic Party,” the adjective form of the name being “Democratic,” as in “the Democratic Senator from Wisconsin.” Republicans have long wanted to change the terminology, so that “Democratic” is never used to describe Democratic politicians or policies, but rather the word “Democrat” be the only form, as in “the Democrat Party,” or “the Democrat Senator from Wisconsin.”

Why change it? The main reason is clearly because conservatives may resent the fact that Democrats have a name that evokes Democracy and Democratic principles; some conservatives clearly do not feel that Democrats are “democratic” enough to deserve the title–a highly ironic attitude considering what “democratic” means, and ironic that the name “Republican” is as equally fitting or unfitting a name, linguistically speaking.

Another reason for the desire is that the word “Democrat” can be differentiated from “democratic” (the name “Republican” cannot, as the root noun is “republic,” and no other noun form is commonly acceptable), meaning that conservatives can then smear the name “Democrat” without appearing “undemocratic.” Already that is being done. A Republican ad in 2000 flashed the word “bureaucrats” across the TV screen in various sizes, one of which cut off the first part of the word, leaving only the word “RATS” on the screen for a fraction of a second. Freepers instantly caught the signal and to this day still capitalize the last four letters of the word “Democrats” when they make reference to the opposition.

Liberals proved the linguistic strategy worthy when many ran from the very word “liberal” after Bush 41’s attack. While I think the name “progressive” is a good one–positive and accurately descriptive–I have mixed feelings because it in part represents a concession to conservatives that “liberal” no longer is a good name, despite the nearly endless positive connotations of the word itself. (Ironically, the word “conservative” has far more negative connotations, such as “stingy,” “unadventurous,” or “mean.”)

The problem, of course, is that this entire battle digs deeply into the philosophy that politics is perception, not reality–a dangerous paradigm that only serves to destroy the country. If politics is not based on reality, then unreal solutions will be applied to real problems–which is why the “war on drugs” is so badly failing, to cite one egregious example. It means that winning is more important than serving, and it only takes one party to steer that way for the nation as a whole to be led to ruin.

The entire political language war neatly encapsulates conservative thinking. Don’t make sense, just win the argument. Don’t serve the public, just mislead them and do what you want. And unfortunately, this conservative strategy fits perfectly into the current media age, where bile and anger win out over reason and science, where sound bites win out over considered, thoughtful explanation, and where a meaningless ten-word meme wins out over an unerring thousand-word examination of a critical issue.

CNN has some good people on the payroll, like Jack Cafferty (though they fired their best man, Aaron Brown), who recently delivered the definitive comment which destroys the fake Bush meme which says that the media is unfairly misrepresenting the real state of affairs in Iraq. Cafferty said:

…If somebody came into New York City and blew up St. Patrick’s Cathedral and in the resulting days they were finding 50 and 60 dead bodies a day on the streets of New York, you suppose the news media would cover it? You’re damn right they would.

There it is, in a nutshell.

Wow. Interesting case (PDF file). The Supreme Court ruled on a case out of Georgia concerning Fourth Amendment rights. The question: if one occupant of a house refuses to allow a warrantless search of a residence, can another occupant allow it?

In this case, it was a husband and wife with a child. They separated more than a month before the incident, and child custody was an issue. When the wife left originally, she took their son with her to Canada. When she returned (the reason not being apparent), the husband took the child to a friend’s house, fearing his estranged wife would again remove him from the country, making it far more difficult for him to win custody. An argument ensued, and the wife called the police. When the police arrived, the wife claimed the husband was a drug user, that there was evidence in his bedroom, and invited the police in to search. The husband refused the search and claimed his wife was the drug user. The police entered on the wife’s consent over the husband’s objection, found evidence of drug use, and arrested the husband.

Interesting issues abound. Precedent allows a search if an objecting party is not present to object. If the husband were still at the friend’s house when the wife invited police in, the search would have been legal; in that respect, the presence of the objecting party might seem more of a technicality than a principle. One commenter on the topic points out that an abusive husband could refuse a search when a battered wife wants police to see evidence of child abuse; another points out that if police believe there is a threat to one of the occupants, that overrules the objections and police could enter. In the case in question, the wife was estranged and not a current occupant of the household, instead visiting from another country. Did she hold common title to the house? This was a case involving child custody, which can get incredibly messy; what if she was trying to falsely incriminate the husband to gain an advantage for custody?

Souter wrote the majority opinion, which ruled in favor of the defendant–police may not search without a warrant if one occupant objects, even if another occupant does not. In the minority, as expected, was John Roberts, who wrote the dissent (PDF file), joined by Scalia. Alito did not participate, having joined the court too late.

What is interesting here is that Kennedy joined the liberal side of the court, with Roberts showing his conservative stripes in joining Scalia and Thomas on the other side. Is it possible that Kennedy could be turning to the left as a counterbalance to Alito and Roberts joining the court? Kennedy has in the past been less on the spot because O’Connor was clearly the swing vote. But now Kennedy, who stands between the two sides, is the man in the middle, and bears greater responsibility in cases which could swing either way. With Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito forming a solid right-wing clique, will Kennedy be comfortable joining them now that O’Connor is not there to take the bullet?

How many times have you heard right-wingers twist a criticism against the president or against the war into sounding like a criticism against the troops serving in Iraq? I’ve heard it countless times. When John Kerry directly and specifically criticized Bush, RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie immediately transformed that into Kerry blaming the troops. Or when Wesley Clark criticized Bush for allowing an unnecessary war in Iraq take resources away from finding bin Laden, a Fox News anchor directly accused him of denigrating the troops. This technique is used widely and often by conservatives to deflect criticism about the war, essentially using the troops as a human shield to make Bush and the conservatives in general impervious to criticism for their massive blunders and incompetence.

The essence of this strategy is simple: conservatives say that liberals, or any critics of the president, hate the troops. Liberals want to blame the troops for everything.

The irony here is, it’s Bush who blames the troops. Take prisoner torture, for example. Bush and Gonzales advocated torture as an acceptable technique. Bush advanced the use of torture in the military hierarchy, giving the go-ahead for its use. But when we actually see the horrifying images of how prisoners were treated at Abu Ghraib, who gets blamed by the Bush administration?

The troops.

Instead of taking responsibility for their own policy, for their own commands, they use the troops the same way they use low-level staffers, as the fall guy for their own crimes. Instead of standing by the policy they engendered and enacted, they instead claim that it was the troops, and the troops alone–not even higher-ranking officials–that are guilty, that shoulder all the blame. And then they send the troops to prison. Not that the soldiers shouldn’t have rejected illegal orders, but their culpability in this matter is definitely the lesser. The administration is guilty, they set the policy, they gave the orders. And they shove all the blame on the soldiers.

And they do this without shame.

But this should not come as a surprise. Bush has never given a rat’s ass about the troops–he regards them as tools, and has never seen them as being anywhere near his elitist level. This should have been obvious from how he used his family influence to escape going to Vietnam while castigating others for dodging the draft. As president, Bush sent troops into battle without sufficient armor, without care for their immediate or long-term safety, and without any consideration for an exit plan. You can’t say that he simply didn’t know they didn’t have armor, because the problem was highlighted and told to the administration early on, and yet still long afterwards troops were forced to dig through garbage to find scraps of armor to protect themselves with. Bush has more often than not cut soldiers’ pay and benefits, while callously using them as window dressing whenever he needs a PR boost. He hides from criticism by troops both by enacting the law that threatens prison for any active soldier who speaks badly of him, and by filtering troops, sequestering away those who don’t answer correctly when asked if they support him 110%. Instead of honoring fallen troops, Bush has tried to hide them so he won’t be embarrassed, not even taking the few seconds a day to sign form letters to their families.

Liberals are the ones who care about the troops. Al Franken becomes angered to the point of tears when the troops are unfairly criticized. Wesley Clark becomes furious when troops are criticized. These people actually and actively support the troops (Franken frequently goes to Iraq with the USO), they genuinely care, while conservatives only use the troops as a prop.

Like Wes Clark said, “Republicans like weapons systems; Democrats like the soldiers.” Republicans have gotten the reputation for being pro-military only because they vote for huge Defense bills, and have co-opted the military hierarchy into Republican-izing the military and pushing their agenda within. Liberals got a bad reputation in this when some, during Vietnam, thoughtlessly chose to blame soldiers en masse alongside the administration. But today, when it comes to actually giving a damn about the people, about the troops themselves, about the men and women who serve, it’s the liberals who care, the liberals who want to protect and honor the troops. It’s the conservatives who use the soldiery and then discard them like so much trash.

So I splurged just a little and got a new watch, one that monitors your heart rate. It cost $105 (¥12,200), what I guess is pretty good price at that, for what it is. I went to Victoria Sports yesterday, but all they had was one cheap-o watch that looked dodgy at best. Today I went to Yodobashi’s watch shop, and they had better variety, and better quality for the money. The one I got is a Casio (pretty much every watch I’ve had since I first got wristwatches has been a Casio), and has all the features I need.

It replaces the last watch I had, which conked out a few years ago, and I’ve done without for some time because I just used my cell phone clock instead. But now that my foot is more or less healed, I’m starting up on what I hope will be a consistent and building exercise program, and so having a heart monitor was a big plus. This one monitors your heart rate by use of a chest strap that sends the data to the watch by a radio signal. I had heard about watches like this, but had never looked at them. After testing it, it seems to work pretty well.

The watch also happens to match my other wants–it has a stopwatch, timer, alarms, an easy-to-change world clock, and most of all, the thing is not a huge chunk of plastic. Despite its relatively slim form, however, it still feels like it sticks out too much, especially under my jacket cuffs. But it might only feel that way because I haven’t worn a watch in over two years.

Not having exercised much in the past, I did not know about the Karvonen Formula. It’s a calculation that takes your age and your resting heart rate (the rate you experience before getting out of bed in the morning) and determines your target heart rate zone, or “training zone,” which is 60% to 80% of your maximum heart rate (which I presume is just before your heart becomes over-stressed). Maintaining that zone during exercise is best for cardiac exercise and fat burning, which is what I need right now. I’ve already lost 12 kilos off my top weight by diet alone, but I need to lose another ten or so to get into a healthier range.

After having been more or less immobile for three and a half months with a broken foot, I am way out of shape. Not that I was in great shape before, but now my legs start getting shaky if I walk up four or five flights of stairs. That exertion doesn’t get me winded–it just saps all the energy from my legs and leaves me weak-kneed. What better time to start an exercise program and try to make it stick?

Knowing the rate also helps me pace myself for longer exercise. I have an aerobic training machine, one that mimics cross-country skiing motions, with arm sticks and all. I started exercising on that, and found I could not go on for more than a few minutes before I couldn’t take any more. With the watch monitoring my heart rate (sitting on the handlebar in front of me so I could keep an eye on it), I was forced to artificially slow my pace to keep my heart rate in the zone–and doing that helped me handle the workout better without tiring out, and allowed me to continue going for a lot longer. Forgive me if any of this sounds obvious or too fundamental; I haven’t exercised outside of normal activity for some time. In high school, I was in great shape, having a weight training and aerobics-centered PhysEd course. But back then, we just worked out–no science, and no timing aside from simply going on until the end of the period.

Bush lied his ass off again today. I was going to post on this, but Paul did it quicker and a whole lot better. Video of the key event is available at Crooks and Liars.

As I figured, South Park‘s Stone and Parker are not going to let Isaac Hayes’ quitting the show to go without a thorough lampooning. A new episode, to premiere Wednesday, will have Chef exhibiting “strange behavior” and the kids will try to “save” Chef from damaging the town.

While they are keeping mum on how they will give Chef a voice, there are only three options that I can see: first, bring in a replacement actor (which I doubt); second, have Chef be mute (possible); or third–which I believe will happen–use their stock of Chef’s utterances from the past nine years to build “new” dialog. This would help explain the description of Chef’s behavior as “strange,” and could have him say almost anything they want, if they match it the right way with new dialog.

Whatever they decide to do, it should be fun.

Republicans can’t resist invoking Lincoln. “The Party of Lincoln,” they love to remind everyone. As if that means they somehow have Lincolnesque qualities. It’s not just that they’re not of the same caliber, it’s that they’re not even of the same political hemisphere. Lincoln was a progressive, not a conservative; early Republicans were for modernization, not preservation of “traditional” values. The conservatives of Lincoln’s time were for keeping slavery, not ending it. (Conservatives, being against change, have been on the wrong side of most social and political progress, from civil rights all the way back to independence from the British crown.) The Republican Party has constantly shifted throughout the past one hundred and fifty years to occupy its current position at the far right of the political spectrum, one of the more notable shifts caused by opposition to Roosevelt’s New Deal. But the original Republicans, the Lincoln Republicans, were not the same kind of people who now represent the GOP.

To get a Republican off a we’re-like-Lincoln rant, just remind him that the Lincoln Republicans introduced the first income tax, and the first large federal deficit, along with a whole bunch of other taxes. Then watch their heads implode. If they want to claim the mantle of Lincoln, then they also have to accept the mantle of being the first tax-and-spenders.

A headline at CrissCross news:

Strong winds buffet Pacific areas of Japan

TOKYO — Strong winds hit extensive areas Sunday along the Pacific coast of Japan, with Tokyo experiencing the strongest wind on record for March, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.

A maximum wind velocity of 120 kilometers per hour was logged in central Tokyo at 5:48 p.m., topping the record for March marked only two days earlier, at 115 kph, it said.

No kidding. I tried to do some birdwatching along the Tama River Sunday, darn near got blown off my feet several times. By the time I gave up, the left side of my face was numb.

It’s about time someone tabulated this–you hear about Bush violating the Bill of Rights, it’s another thing to see the actual damage laid out. So here it is, the Bill of Rights, George W. Bush-style:

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Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion (Bush and the GOP have blurred the lines between church and state, giving clear endorsement to Christianity, in many different ways), or prohibiting the free exercise thereof (coming soon); or abridging the freedom of speech (Bush’s “free-speech zones” prohibit free speech elsewhere; those with criticisms of Bush anywhere near him are arrested), or of the press (this is a tough one–Bush has fought the periphery of this one, though has otherwise undermined the press so much that he doesn’t have to go that far); or the right of the people peaceably to assemble (again, “free-speech zones”), and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances (people are more and more forbidden to sue the government, and Bush allows people to be charged or otherwise punished with the evidence kept secret, making redress impossible).

Amendment II
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.

Amendment III
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized (Bush says he has the power to authorize warrantless eavesdropping and physical searches).

Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury (Bush and Congress have obviated this in the name of the War on Terror™), except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law (see above); nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial (You may be taken to Gitmo and held indefinitely without trial), by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law (only if your crime was in Gitmo), and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation (Bush now says this can be classified, sorry); to be confronted with the witnesses against him (also classified); to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor (impossible if everything is classified), and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence (see previous).

Amendment VII
In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law (see previous).

Amendment VIII
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed (partial–bail and fines are moot if you are held without bail and your livelihood destroyed), nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted (torture now allowed).

Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people (Bush appointed strict constructionists, who say if it’s not in the Constitution, it doesn’t exist).

Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. (see Amendment IX; also, despite making “states’ rights” claims, the Bush administration and the GOP in Congress overrule states whenever they are displeased with what states are doing; prosecution of distribution of medicinal marijuana is one small example)

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Did I miss anything?

It might actually be easier to list the parts of the Bill of Rights that Bush hasn’t violated. Of those, some are non-relevant because of changing times (quartering soldiers in private homes), some are ones Bush doesn’t want or need to change (exception for indictment under military law), or a combination of both (depending on how you read the Second Amendment); and some are on their way out (prohibiting the free exercise of religion–something which goes hand in hand with the marriage of church and state, just takes more time).

You might argue that these violations are not absolute–that most free speech is not infringed, for example, or that most people still don’t fall victim to warrantless searches. That argument is wrong. The Bill of Rights is not something you can “partially” uphold; they are absolutes. Violate them even just a few times, and they fall apart. Why? Precedent. Now that Bush has violated most of the Bill of Rights, those violations–unprosecuted, not found unconstitutional–may now be used to justify further incursions against the Constitution. What, did you think the only way the Constitution could be obviated would be all at once? Of course not. It must be destroyed while maintaining the illusion that it is still there. It is destroyed piecemeal, rights and liberties chipped away, until no incursion can be denied. These rights are not revoked, they are simply made weak so they can be violated at will. And so they are.

As for the argument that only some people’s rights are violated, that’s not just wrong, it’s dangerous–and unthinking. There has never been a dictatorship or regime so tyrannical that everyone is oppressed. There’s a word for those who agree with other people losing their liberties so long as their own are untouched: collaborators. Think about it.

This by Olbermann, from Crooks & Liars:

Olbermann: (reading from a U.S. News & World Report press release) “Soon after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, lawyers in the White House and the Justice Department argued that the same legal authority that the same legal authority that allowed warrentless electronic surveillance inside the US, could also be used to justify physical searches of terror suspects homes & businesses without court approval.  Doesn’t that send chills down your spine?

Turley: Well it does. It’s horrific, because what that would constitute is to effectively remove the 4th Amendment from the U.S. Constitution and the fact that it was so quick as a suggestion shows the inclinations, unfortunately, of this administration. It treats the Constitution as some legal technicality instead of the thing were trying to fight to protect.

Hard to say it better than that. It’s getting harder and harder to find an amendment in the Bill of Rights (aside from the second, of course) that this administration has not attempted to gut, with the Congress going along–the Republicans as willing accomplices, the Democrats as cowed and fearful drag-alongs. Clinton lied about sex, he gets impeached; Bush violates the Fourth Amendment, he can’t even get censured.

James Spader’s character on Boston Legal also spoke well last week:

When the weapons of mass destruction thing turned out to be not true, I expected the American people to rise up. Ha! They didn’t.

Then, when the Abu Ghraib torture thing surfaced and it was revealed that our government participated in rendition, a practice where we kidnap people and turn them over to regimes who specialize in torture, I was sure then the American people would be heard from. We stood mute.

Then came the news that we jailed thousands of so-called terrorists suspects, locked them up without the right to a trial or even the right to confront their accusers. Certainly, we would never stand for that. We did.

And now, it’s been discovered the executive branch has been conducting massive, illegal, domestic surveillance on its own citizens. You and me. And I at least consoled myself that finally, finally the American people will have had enough. Evidentially, we haven’t.

In fact, if the people of this country have spoken, the message is we’re okay with it all. Torture, warrantless search and seizure, illegal wiretappings, prison without a fair trial – or any trial, war on false pretenses. We, as a citizenry, are apparently not offended.

There are no demonstrations on college campuses. In fact, there’s no clear indication that young people seem to notice.

Well, Melissa Hughes noticed. Now, you might think, instead of withholding her taxes, she could have protested the old fashioned way. Made a placard and demonstrated at a Presidential or Vice-Presidential appearance, but we’ve lost the right to that as well. The Secret Service can now declare free speech zones to contain, control and, in effect, criminalize protest.

Stop for a second and try to fathom that.

At a presidential rally, parade or appearance, if you have on a supportive t-shirt, you can be there. If you are wearing or carrying something in protest, you can be removed.

This, in the United States of America. This in the United States of America. Is Melissa Hughes the only one embarrassed?

Video here.

They were expected to last 90 days. Sure, engineers always over-engineer, and leave themselves a comfortable extra margin. But the first of the two Martian rovers, Spirit, has lasted an amazing 779 days, or approximately two years and one and a half months of continuous operation, mostly on solar power, sending back countless photos and scientific data as it rolls along plains, up hills, across the face of Mars. It has traveled a total of 6,797 meters, or 4.2 miles, and finally, it is beginning to wear out. At the height of Martian winter approaches and sunlight wanes to a minimum, one of Spirit’s wheels has become stuck. And yet, the rover moves on, limping still, trying to reach a position on McCool Hill’s north-facing slopes so it can spend the rest of the winter in maximum sunlight. Every once in a while I still visit the image pages for the rovers, where you can see the latest landscape, a new rock-face, yet another panorama of Mars. Way, way cool.

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Google has won! At least for now, as the government will probably try to appeal. The snoops in the Bush administration want to peruse through your searches (like they want to sniff through everything else you do), so they can “fight porn,” despite the uselessness of the Google data in meeting that end. More likely, they are trying to set up a precedent so they can filch the files all they want in the future, and get more data about you–oh, I’m sorry, about terrorists–and probably have some nice juicy tidbits, like who searches for porn and how often. Answer: none of the government’s damned business.

So good for Google. Microsoft eagerly handed over the data, as they care little for the end user, and Yahoo caved in, as did others. Google stood and fought, and though a week ago it seemed that they might be forced to give up partial user search data, they eventually won out. Only 50,000 anonymous URLs, not user searches, will be given to the government. This is one of the reasons I use Google. Yes, they aren’t perfect–they caved in to China’s demands for censorship. But more often then not, they do the right thing. Also, they have lots of cool, free software and services, and are constantly developing more–like an online word processor, fantastic web page stats engine, and more. (Anyone have an invitation for the Google Analytics, by the way? Leave a comment with your email, I’ll intercept it in moderation and reply, the email address won’t get published.)

Not to mention that Google is the best search engine, and certainly does best by me–they send twice as many visitors to my blog than all other search engines combined–five times more than Yahoo, ten times more than MSN. They’re the biggest, best, and coolest. Or am I gushing too much?

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Bush uses straw-man arguments in his speeches. This is something new? I think not.

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In the meantime, Bush’s approval ratings continue to sink. Newsweek has him at 36% Rasmussen, the most Bush-loving of all polls, has him at 40%, the lowest they’ve ever ranked him. Everyone else has him well below the 40% mark. And yet not even 40% want to see Bush censured for violating the Constitution. Are we in Bizarro-land or what? More than that wanted Clinton impeached for getting a blow job. Too many Americans are deeply unbalanced.

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From DKos:

Have you seen the Patriot Act game? The game’s creator says, “I’ve had people complain to me that when they play, nobody wins. They say ‘We’re all in Guantanamo and nobody has any civil liberties left,'” he said. “I’m like ‘Yeah, that’s the point.'”

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Japan opens up archives of suffering and hardships of people in WWII.

Only of Japanese people, of course.

Son of a…

I check my stats after leaving them alone for 3-4 days, and I get a shock. About 30,000 more hits than could be expected. Roughly 12,000 more unique-IP visitors than normal. A one-day high on Thursday of 7500 visitors, 5500 on Friday, 4000 on Wednesday, when the recent average has been hanging around 1800. Huge spike in visitors.

At first, I think this may be because I got a link in from somewhere, some big-traffic site saw mine, put a link out, and thousands of people come to check out what I’ve been saying. But when I check my referrers and page stats, there’s not a single blip. Nothing to account for it all. And then I figure it out. I check the cellar of my referral list, and there they are. A massive hotlinking event.

What is a hotlink, you ask?

A hotlink is when one web site hijacks an image from another web site. You see an image on web site “A,” you think it exists there. Usually it does. But with hotlinking, the image is really from web site “B,” a different site. The owner of web site A simply told your browser to go to site B, get the image, and display it as part of web site A. Web site B hosts the image, owns it, pays for it–but web site A, the thief, gets the props for displaying it, and no one ever hears of the site that actually has the image. It’s like someone taking credit for something you did. You did the work, you paid the price, but someone else reaps the benefit and suppresses your name.

Allow me to demonstrate. Look at the “Links” button at right. The image appears here on my site, blogd.com, right? Ha! Fooled you! It’s not on blogd.com at all! It’s on one of my other sites (www.teach-japan.com, a site forever under construction). If you looked at the coding for this blog page, you’d see that the image address is really at the other site. But by a simple web page command, I was able to integrate the image into this web page, so it seamlessly appears to be located here. My other site gets no credit, no one knows it came from there.

Well, what’s wrong with that, you ask? Plenty. You see, hosting a web site costs money. You pay for disk space. You also pay for “traffic,” also called “bandwidth,” meaning that every time you visit my site and see the images, they are being sent (“downloaded”) to your computer. If the image is 100 KB in size, then I get docked 100 KB in traffic by the people who host my site. Every month, I pay that web host a fee for disk space and traffic.

When someone hotlinks to one of my images, it appears on their web site, but I’m paying for the storage and transport of that image. It’s as if someone not only steals a painting from your house, but they also charge you for the gas used by the getaway car and the fees for the storage locker to keep the stuff they stole from you. It’s more than that, since the image is repeatedly stolen by each and every visitor to their web site. If they hotlink to an image 100 KB in size, and 1000 people visit their page, then I get docked for 100 Megabytes of traffic fees. Now, I pay a flat fee for a lot of traffic, but still, it’s my traffic.

Hotlinking is considered even more of a no-no because the hotlinker appears to be taking credit for the image, and the person who is paying for it remains uncredited, not getting so much as a link-through. If they had made the image into a link and I actually got thousands of new visitors to my site, that’d be OK, because I want new visitors. But they didn’t–they hotlinked without credit, so they got the goods, and I got shafted.

Usually, when people hotlink from me, it’s people at places like Xanga or MySpace (where people set up “free” sites), or people on discussion forums who want to show images but aren’t allowed to upload them to the forum space. Usually I find out when an image gets downloaded from my site hundred of times. I find out where it’s going, then I either allow it, or I swap out the image.

But this time, it was a commercial site, one that sells advertising. A movie rumor site called “Ain’t It Cool.” And they hit me for 30,000 image transfers, which cost me about 1.5 GB in traffic before I caught it.

Well, I showed them. One of the dangers of hotlinking is that they don’t control the image! I do! So I changed it. Instead of the image they wanted to have on their site, I replaced it with a plain-text image ad for my site! The image is this:

The beauty of it is, they probably won’t even see it until someone points it out to them. Their own browsers already have the original image in the browser cache, and so the new image only shows up when new people come to visit. See if you can spot it, the page is located here. As long as it’s up, I get free advertising on a hot web site! Whee!

UPDATE: They yanked the image. Ungrateful wankers. They stole 1.5 GB of traffic from me, then erased my ad within just a few days. I’d like to say, “that’ll teach ’em,” but from the comments on this post, I gather these guys are simply contemptible lowlifes, and they’ll keep on doing it. But not to me, if I can help it. I’ll have to be more vigilant about watching the stats for hotlinkers.

Alas, I come too late. The mass of the hotlinking wave is past, 12,000 people saw the original image, and I might only catch a few thousand (and probably few of them will actually come and see my site). But still, it’s fun to punk someone who’s filching from me.

In case you haven’t been reading the news about Macs, the contest is over: a method to install both Mac OS X and Windows XP onto an Intel Mac has been developed. The method is posted (in Wiki format) on this page.

In theory, this will allow you to dual-boot both Mac and Windows OS’s without them interfering with each other. There are some caveats, however. First, you need a Windows PC to create the customized install CD to put Windows on your Mac; presumably, to create that install CD, you need a generalized Windows install CD (not one keyed to a specific machine). Next, the process is not a snap; probably only advanced users could carry it all out (I could probably do it if I really bore down and concentrated on it, though I expect there’d be three or four frustrating I-can’t-get-this-to-work roadblocks along the way). Next, it requires further fine-tuning, such as remapping the keyboard (to get ALT-CTRL-DEL or the Windows button to work). Installing Windows requires a hard disk reformat, which means you have to wipe your hard drive. And finally, it doesn’t work perfectly; there’s no good video driver that’ll work, so high-end video games or anything else needing special graphic support won’t work yet.

That said, the dual boot is described as working very well, and most of the software and hardware works well, certainly better than one might expect just days into development.

Since this is so new, information is still scarce; I have not heard yet how it works, like how does one switch from one OS to the other. What key command is used? Does Windows appear in a window, or is it a full-screen switch? Nor have I heard about performance issues–if you are using a Core Solo, the slowest chip, does the dual-boot operation slow down the computer significantly? How much RAM is needed?

As more users implement the hack and start building experience, we’ll hear more about it. Moreover, one would expect development to progress quickly. I presume that in time (several months from now?) someone will sell or give away (open source) an easy-to-use package, which will–one would hope–simply require you to insert a Windows XP Install CD, then it would generate a customized install CD image which you could burn on to a new CD. From there, you’d use the new CD to install Windows, hopefully without much hassle. Alternately (and perhaps to avoid digital rights issues), there might be an app you could run that would “handle” the original install CD, adding the needed hacks as the install takes place. By the time a simplified solution exists, most driver issues should be fixed and you could use both operating systems with only minor inconveniences.

Even at that, it wouldn’t be something just anyone could do, and until it becomes officially accepted by Apple and Microsoft, it’ll probably stay that way. And I’m guessing that that won’t happen in the near future. Apple clearly is not encouraging this, at least not yet (or else they’d have worked to make it possible themselves), and Microsoft owns Virtual PC, which means that the new dual-boot solution could cost Microsoft a few hundred bucks per Mac every time people use the open-source option instead of Virtual PC (which is still under development and doesn’t work on Intel Macs yet).

More news on this as it comes out.