Republicans were already way over the top when they became mock-outraged at the Democrats blocking 10 Bush judicial nominees, less than 5% of the total number passed. Republicans blocked 60 or more of Clinton’s nominees, some by filibuster, and most by a procedural method with the same effect of a filibuster–a procedural method they banned after Bush took office so as to deny it to Democrats.

Republicans have so far acted on this issue with nothing but extreme hypocrisy and dishonesty, and here’s the rundown. First they protested Democrats not letting a judicial nominee get a vote on the Senate floor; but then it was recognized that Republicans usually blocked Clinton’s nominees with the “blue slip” rule which prevented an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor. Hypocrisy.

Then Republicans railed against Democrats for using the filibuster, even citing times when it was used to block civil-rights legislation, with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist condemning the tactic of filibustering a judicial nominee, calling it “unprecedented.” But then it came out that not only had Republicans filibustered Democratic judicial nominees before, but that Frist himself had joined in one in 1994. Not to mention that the filibusters used against civil-rights legislation were, naturally, Republican filibusters. Hypocrisy upon hypocrisy.

Then they decided to do away with the filibuster, which they themselves had used and counted on in the past; this action is what Republicans themselves termed as the “nuclear option.” That term was coined by Republican Senator Trent Lott, and was used freely by Republicans–until their polling data showed that the term was viewed negatively by the public, upon which revelation Republicans not only switched to the term “constitutional option,” but went into a successful full-court media press to claim that Democrats had come up with the expression (which most of the press still reports, even though it has been thoroughly disproved). Even more hypocrisy.

So now they’re pushing the term “constitutional option,” which is, of course, inaccurate:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee calls the possibility of enabling a simple majority to end a filibuster the “constitutional option,” implying that the Constitution is on his side. The Constitution says two things relevant to his argument.

Article II, Sec. 2 gives presidents the power to “nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the Supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States.” It doesn’t say how the Senate shall grant this consent, and it makes no distinction between judicial and nonjudicial appointments.

Republicans read this language as requiring the Senate to provide an up-or-down floor vote on all judicial nominees.

Article I, Sec. 5, says that “each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings.” Senate rules require 60 votes to end a filibuster and — even worse for the Republicans — require 67 votes to end a filibuster of a proposed change in the rules.

In short, the constitution not only doesn’t prohibit the filibuster, it actually upholds the process. Not hypocrisy by the Republicans on this point, but certainly an out-and-out lie.

But now they’re going even further over the top, this time in attempts to smear Democrats in order to gain public approval. According to Republicans, Democrats are racist Nazis. And no, I’m not making that up.

Republican Senator Rick Santorum is now claiming that Democrats are acting like Nazis, comparing them directly to Adolf Hitler.

Republican Bill Frist is now hauling out the old canard that because one of the blocked nominees is black, that means that Democrats are obviously all racists (and probably sexists as well) because they fear putting a black woman on the bench.

All of this because Democrats had the gall to block a third as many Bush judicial nominees as Republicans had with Clinton, a sliver-thin 5% of all the extremist judges Bush sent their way. Rage, hypocrisy, lies, and ludicrous accusations of fascism and racism.

These people are certifiably insane.

As a testament to how a book can grab your attention and make it hard to put down, I pretty much mowed through the remaining chapters of Ring of Reduction in a matter of a few days. which is saying something when you’re trying to do proofreading and editing while working at your full-time job. So here are the remaining chapters of Ring of Reduction. The “whole book” and text-format files will probably follow this tomorrow or the next day (could be later, I have to construct a table of contents and perhaps churn out two differently-formatted files).

Having gotten used to stacking all three branches of government with right-wingers, Republicans now want to exclude any and all Democrats from juries in cases where a Republican is on trial, it seems. James Tobin, a political director for Bill Frist, accused in a phone-jamming scandal back in 2002 where GOP dirty-tricks operatives tried to block Democratic get-out-the-vote phone lines, is now saying that any presence of a Democrat anywhere in the system should be grounds for dismissal of the case.

Because the grand jury that indicted him may have had Democrats, the indictment should be thrown out, he claims. Why? Because Democrats were the target of the attack. By the same reasoning, of course, any trial where someone is accused of treason against the United States of America should have their indictment thrown out if anyone on the grand jury was an American.

But Tobin doesn’t stop there. Apparently, he’s now insisting that if his case does go to trial, the jury be untainted by any hint of non-Republicanism. Not only all Democrats must be excluded, not only anyone with left-wing leanings, but apparently anyone who has even seen liberals should be kept out. Anyone who has seen “The West Wing” or even “The McLaughlin Group” (it’s on PBS, and if you watch PBS you must be a liberal) would be rejected, along with anyone belonging to a union. Even watching “Crossfire” would get you axed, even though it’s both liberal and conservative, which means that even having been exposed to liberalism is bound to make you biased against Republicans. Jurors would be asked about what bumper stickers they had on their cars, what blogs they read, and what Internet chat groups they frequented.

What Tobin is looking for, of course, is an all-hardcore-right-wing jury that would naturally acquit him no matter what the evidence. He is essentially looking for jury nullification–the exact kind of thing that Republicans express outrage at if it is practiced by minorities.

But the conflict-of-interest argument is not just here, it is raged hypocritically in many American venues. Right-wing right-to-life groups are arguing that Judge James Whittemore, one of the two dozen or so judges to rule on the Terri Schiavo case, had an “perverse” and “overwhelming” conflict of interest and so was ethically bound to recuse himself from the case. Why? Because one of the former attorneys for Michael Schiavo–not one of the attorneys presenting the case, mind you, but an attorney no longer associated with the case–had been one of many members of a commission which had recommended Whittemore for a different bench seat some 15 years before. Talk about tenuous connections.

On the other hand, you’ve got a Anton Scalia, a right-wing justice on the U.S. Supreme Court no less, absolutely refusing to recuse himself from a case involving Dick Cheney even though the two were friends and had recently gone dining and duck-hunting together–a crystal-clear conflict of interest which Scalia pooh-poohed on the basis that Cheney had not “bought him cheap,” ignoring the incontrovertible fact that friendship is its own bias.

Republicans are now wholly, clearly, and unabashedly in the realm of utter hypocrisy.

Okay, I’ve finished editing chapters 4-9 of Ring of Reduction. Things are going faster than I thought, and with luck, I’ll be finished with the whole text in a week or so. In the meantime, enjoy more adventures of Harry Potter!

These two set weigh in a bit more than the last one, at 580 KB and 680 KB, respectively. A few stats for the record: so far, 113 people have downloaded the entire-book file for The Veil of Mystery since it was made available about four weeks ago, 24 have downloaded the entire book by chapter segments, and another 18 have downloaded the text file, for 155 total downloads. And since three days ago, 22 have downloaded the first three chapters of Ring of Reduction. Several dozen visitors have come in from search engines looking for Harry Potter fan fiction… though some of the search terms suggest that not all of them are looking for, um, this kind of story.

Hoh, boy. Anyone who’s been reading my blog for the past month or so will probably be able to guess how I would react to this article in the New York Times (free subscription). It’s an article on trash sorting and collection, and the certainly offending parts include:

Enter the garbage guardians, the army of hawk-eyed volunteers across Japan who comb offending bags for, say, a telltale gas bill, then nudge the owner onto the right path.

One of the most tenacious around here is Mitsuharu Taniyama, 60, the owner of a small insurance business who drives around his ward every morning and evening, looking for missorted trash. He leaves notices at collection sites: “Mr. So-and-so, your practice of sorting out garbage is wrong. Please correct it.”

“I checked inside bags and took especially lousy ones back to the owners’ front doors,” Mr. Taniyama said. …

Shizuka Gu, 53, said that early on, a community leader sent her a letter reprimanding her for not writing her identification number on the bag with a “thick felt-tip pen.” She was chided for using a pen that was “too thin.”

“It was a big shock to be told that I had done something wrong,” Ms. Gu said. “So I couldn’t bring myself to take out the trash here and asked my husband to take it to his office. We did that for one month.” …

One young couple consistently failed to properly sort their trash. “Sorry! We’ll be careful!” they would say each time Mr. Kawai knocked on their door holding evidence of their transgressions.

At last, even Mr. Kawai – a small 77-year-old man with wispy white hair, an easy smile and a demeanor that can only be described as grandfatherly – could take no more.

“They were renting the apartment, so I asked the owner, ‘Well, would it be possible to have them move?’ ” Mr. Kawai said, recalling, with undisguised satisfaction, that the couple was evicted two months ago.

Sorry, but if you ask me, these people are nothing more than nosy little self-important tyrants. Getting people evicted for improper garbage sorting? Shaming people for using a certain type of pen? Makes my own experience with the neighborhood garbage tyrant seem mild in comparison.

But the garbage situation has just been getting worse. When I came here, we had these big bins with covers and could toss out garbage any day we wanted without worrying about smell or animals; it also was easier for the collectors, who had machines to haul the garbage up into the trucks without the collectors getting their hands much dirty. But then the city banned that (though neighboring cities still have it, I’ve noticed), and a few years later, they came up with the famous colored-bag-purchase scheme, essentially a tax that will be raised as time goes on. I shudder to think of the day when this neighborhood, like the one mentioned above, will require us to personally identify ourselves on each bag so as to make it easier for the garbage tyrant to find something wrong and rub our noses in it. I recall that years ago, Tokyo tried to start such a system–require transparent bags and have everyone write their names on each–but that it did not go over well and was dropped.

And there is yet more to annoy one in the article:

In cities, though, not everybody complies, and perhaps more than any other act, sorting out the trash properly is regarded as proof that one is a grown-up, responsible citizen. The young, especially bachelors, are notorious for not sorting. And landlords reluctant to rent to non-Japanese will often explain that foreigners just cannot – or will not – sort their trash.

Now, I know that foreigners will sometimes be this way, but I’m getting tired of the damned stereotyping. I’ll bet that the percentage of non-compliance among foreigners is not much higher than among Japanese–it’s just that we stand out more, and landlords who don’t want foreigners for other reasons just use this as an excuse for discrimination.

In the meantime, this article quote is a strange one:

Some 15 minutes later, Mr. Tokimoto was done. The town had gotten much cleaner with the new garbage policy, he said, though he added: “It’s a bother, but I can’t throw away the trash in the mountains. It would be a violation.”

Why would he mention that? It’s like saying, “I don’t have much money, but I can’t rob a bank–it’d be illegal.” It sounds like a translation error of some kind…. Of course, dumping is unfortunately something that a lot of people are not shy about doing. Having walked a lot of mountain paths in my recent birdwatching, I can attest to how often people drive up these isolated roads and dump loads of trash off steep embankments, making it near-impossible to clean up. What kind of weasel does this? If you’re going to dump garbage, at least be thoughtful enough to dump it where someone can clean it up without a major operation. But then again, people who dump garbage in the first place would be natural-born weasels anyway.

This part of the article, however, seemed to hold a very good idea:

For Yokohama, the goal is to reduce incinerated garbage by 30 percent over the next five years. But Kamikatsu’s goal is even more ambitious: eliminating [burnable] garbage by 2020.

In the last four years, Kamikatsu has halved the amount of incinerator-bound garbage and raised its recycled waste to 80 percent, town officials said. Each household now has a subsidized garbage disposal unit that recycles raw garbage into compost.

Hey, if they have that kind of subsidized unit on sale in my neighborhood, I’m getting one. Even if it means sorting more.

We just got hit by a big sudden thunderstorm, which left as suddenly as it came. In its wake, it left this:

Click on the image so see a 1000-pixel-wide enlargement

Not as visible in the photos as it was in person, but I do like the archway-style appearance between the two hillsides on either side of the open view of southern Tokyo City.

As I posted before, the final Star Wars movie is being released worldwide May 18-20th, with the sole exception of Japan, which will see it open on July 9th (with no good reason that I can see for the delay). But there is at least one thing that will make it a bit less late, if you really want to see it: advance screenings. Japanese theaters will often give advance showings one and two weeks before a film gets released. Warner/MyCal, an American-style theater chain in Japan, will have screenings on June 25 and July 2, tickets for which will go on sale on June 16. Toho Cinemas (formerly Virgin Cinemas, and so another western-style chain) will be having screenings the same day, though they haven’t decided when ticket sales will begin. The advance screenings will likely begin in the morning and go past midnight each day.

I frequent those two chains because of the theater styles. If you’ve been to movie theaters in Japan, you will know what I’m talking about, the concessions in particular. Stale popcorn with minimal salt and no butter, and otherwise a limited selection of supermarket-type snacks, some very odd to the westerner. Drinks often are sold from vending machines in tiny cups. The western-style chains have the full fresh buttered-popcorn, large drink, and more appealing snack routine–interestingly at prices that can often be less than at U.S. chains (though the high ticket prices in Japan make up for that). They also have designated seating–when you buy your ticket, you can see exactly what seats are available and choose where you’ll sit–though if you buy e-tickets, they make you choose blindly by section (dividing the theater into only a few large sections, meaning you could be seated way up front or far in back), a weird idea, making it less convenient to buy online (unless you don’t care where you sit too much).

Ticket prices are a standard ¥1800 for adults (almost $17), with advance tickets going for ¥1300 ($12) or ¥1500 ($14). Though they don’t have matinees in the morning or afternoon, they do have late shows (after 9pm usually) for ¥1200 ($11), and “First Day” specials on the first of every month for ¥1000 (just over $9). Wednesdays are usually “Ladies’ Days” with women getting in for ¥1000.

Sometimes theaters in Japan sell memorabilia for big movies, including movie program booklets, large-size glossy photo books introducing the movie, its characters, cast credits and other stuff like that.

There are stories hitting the press now (being widely spread by the right-wing and fundamentalist press) about a woman in Kansas, who, two years after being seriously hurt in a truck crash, has recovered from “Terri-Schiavo-like” symptoms. The symptoms? Brain trauma and a feeding tube.

What kind of brain trauma? Not mentioned. Was the woman missing her cerebral cortex, which was replaced by spinal fluid? Almost certainly not. Was she in a persistent vegetative state? No mention.

But she had a feeding tube! That means Terri Schiavo could have recovered too!

Oy vey.

But that’s not all they point to. There was this firefighter in Buffalo, New York, mentioned in the new articles, who recovered after ten years! That’s a lot closer to how long Terri Schiavo was out! She could have recovered, too!

But was he missing his cerebral cortex? Um, well, no. In a persistent vegetative state? Well, almost! The doctors said he was “close to a persistent vegetative state.”

For crying out loud.

Apparently, every person who recovers from brain trauma is somehow just “like” Terri Schiavo. As if there was only one kind of brain trauma, or that being “close” to one aspect of her condition is somehow worthy of comparison.

Now, if someone had been in an actual (not “close to”) persistent vegetative state for many years, confirmed by a number of doctors, and was missing their cerebral cortex, and then woke up and started to recover, I’d be impressed. But that’s not what’s happening with the Kansas woman or the Buffalo firefighter.

But the people furthering these stories hope that readers will not note the discrepancies or catch on to how the cases have no relation to each other. They hope that you’ll read that they were brain damaged, like Terri, and sometimes had feeding tubes, like Terri, and that means that Terri could have recovered but we let her die. The problem is, scores of people will buy into these stories. Which, of course, is why they’re being pushed in the media.

So take these “Terri-Schiavo-like” reports for what they are: political agendas masquerading as news stories, with no substance or relevance.

As promised, I’ve been formatting my brother’s second Harry Potter fanfic novel (year seven), Harry Potter and the Ring of Reduction, sequel to Harry Potter and the Veil of Mystery. When I did the same for Veil, I responded to requests and released the entire book before I was finished formatting and editing out typos, and as a result, the original PDF file was far from presentable (unless you’re not bothered by typos and bad formatting). So this time, I’m not releasing the whole book at once. Instead, I’ll be releasing it in eight three-chapter segments, and then when that’s finished, I’ll post the entire book as one file. Since school has started again, it won’t be blazingly fast, but I’ll do the best I can. If you don’t like waiting between chapter segments, then you might want to hold back and wait for the whole thing to come out at once.

I’ll be introducing new three-chapter segments in individual posts, but they will also be added to the main Harry Potter post linked to in the sidebar at right (which you’ll notice is now changed to add Ring of Reduction). So you can bookmark that page if you want to see all the file links at once.

Without further ado, here are chapters 1-3 of Harry Potter and the Ring of Reduction:

Bush’s Social Security push isn’t catching any steam, and it may cost Republicans next term. But that’s not the subject here. Rather, it’s about fake audiences. During the presidential campaign, Bush and Cheney became rather infamous for restricting audiences severely, packing the crowds with gung-ho loyalists only. Anyone who wasn’t vouched for or didn’t sign an honest-to-god loyalty oath wasn’t allowed in. People who did nothing more than wear attire criticizing Bush were summarily arrested, false arrest as a pretext for getting them out before any dissent or dislike could be seen anywhere near the top dogs. (Since when is dissent grounds for arrest?) And protesters? Forced to protest from great distances in obscene “free-speech zones” (clearly identifying any area near Bush or Cheney as non-free-speech zones).

Well, it worked for them, didn’t it? So why expect them to stop? They haven’t, of course, especially on Bush’s Social Security Bamboozlepalooza. Bush’s “town halls” have been again packed with people who slobber praise all over him instead of asking actual questions that most Americans wouldn’t mind hearing answered. One example: in March, when Bush was speaking in Denver, three audience members were removed from the audience because someone noticed a “No Blood for Oil” bumper-sticker on their car. They were escorted out by someone whom a Bush staffer referred to as a Secret Service agent, who wore the attire of such an agent right down to the earpiece. This man, who was not an agent (not for the Secret Service, anyway), hustled them out; the three were later questioned for a full hour by two men identifying themselves as working for the Secret Service’s internal affairs department, and were conducting a criminal investigation of some kind.

Furthermore, the first fake agent was spotted cleansing the crowds at several other Bush events in Arizona, North Dakota, and New Hampshire–the last report being that two women were arrested by this fraudulent “agent” for doing nothing more than turning their backs on the president. Oooo. Sound like dangerous types to me, good thing they were arrested, Bush was in real danger at that one.

And there is ample evidence that lists are being kept and audiences packed in order to create a false aura of popularity around the president and a deceptive perception that his policies are at all accepted by a majority of Americans.

I know, what else should I expect. But that doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t be constantly called on it. Just like his playing politics with homeland security. Remember during the election, when every time Kerry got a boost or good publicity, without fail the Department of Homeland Security would come out with a terror warning, stealing the spotlight? Remember how they insisted that it was all for real and not playing politics with security?

Well, ask yourself: how many terror warnings have been issued since the election? From what I can tell, none, aside from that plane invading D.C. airspace the other day. And Tom Ridge, who last week swore on the Daily Show that all of the terror alerts were kosher, is now admitting that administration officials were behind them, “aggressively pushing” for terror alerts when the Department of Homeland Security saw absolutely no need for them.

Add fake news stories sent to TV news shows to be broadcast as if they were real news. Reporters being paid large amounts of money to push administration policies. Press conferences rarely held, and when they are, are controlled and sometimes scripted by the administration. Lies to the nation about trumped-up “proof” of WMDs. Lies to Congress about the cost of Medicare. Lies to America about the Social Security trust fund, and about all aspects of Bush’s various plans for it. Lies about judges, lies about filibusters and who blocked more nominees. Lies even about who came up with what words (Republican Trent Lott coined the “nuclear option” term, not Democrats). Lies about just about everything.

Can these people not lie or deceive the people about anything? And how stupid do so many Americans have to be to buy into it, when it is so blatant, so easy to see?

So I’m just sitting around my apartment today, doing odd jobs and getting ready for classes tomorrow, and I start hearing some sort of music being played, the muffled sound-from-the-next-apartment kind of music that anyone who’s lived in an apartment knows all too well. Wanting to know where it was coming from, I did the usual check: I listen at the wall joining my apartment with the next one (I live at the end of the building, for good reason, so there’s only one unit next to mine), I open windows on the other three sides to see if it’s leaking in from there, I even get up on the table to see if that makes any difference, in case it’s coming from above. But nothing seems to localize it. But then I put my ear to the floor, and that most certainly decided it–it was coming from below. And it was very recognizably an electric guitar, someone using an amp in their apartment.

Still, it was muffled and not too loud except when I put my ear to the floor, but after an hour I decided it was loud enough and sporadic enough to be a constant distraction and annoyance if I didn’t say something and get the person to stop. I would certainly not want this kind of thing to go on for a long time, unabated.

Now, you might think that if an electric guitar on an amplifier isn’t that loud, then the person must be showing some restraint. However, you might not know this type of apartment building. In Japan, there are two basic types of construction for multi-unit housing. They are typically referred to as “apartment” style and “mansion” style (Japanese use “mansion” to refer to condominium-style housing, no connection to large, expensive homes).

Apartments are built kind of like cheap hotel rooms; you can hear your neighbors quite well. I’ve had more than my share of these. My last place was like that, and I could hear every cough and snort and other unseemly sounds made by my chain-smoking next-door tenant.

Now, “mansions” are a different matter. They’re built strong, with concrete walls at least a foot thick. Noise is usually not a problem. Let me give you an idea: the couple who live next door to me moved in about 2-3 years ago, and when they did, the woman was pregnant, and gave birth soon thereafter. For all of that time, I did not hear a single baby sound from their place. I might hear the occasional muffled knocking around when they’re moving stuff in their closet, or if they’re nailing something into a wall. But not any sounds that don’t involve hitting the building structure. And I play my TV fairly loud sometimes, even after midnight, and I sometimes ask my neighbors if they can hear anything, and they always report that they never hear a thing.

So that’s why the guitar sound was definitely over the line. If it can be so loud as to come up from the floor below, through all that concrete, then it was way too loud. So I went downstairs, and before ringing the doorbell, listened at the door for a moment. And yes, there it was, seeming to come through the door. So I rang, and after a moment, a nice lady answered. When I asked her if someone was playing an electric guitar in there, she surprised me–she reported that it wasn’t coming from her place, it was coming from the apartment below hers.

Now, that’s noisy. It must have been terrible for this lady. I mean, when I did wall and window noise checks, I couldn’t hear the music very much–only from the floor did it sound loud, which means that it was not traveling through the windows (which seems kind of strange to me), and not really a whole lot through the building structure, either, or else it would’ve been strong from the walls as well, or at least I would think so.

The downstairs lady reported that there was a young teenage boy down there, and when his father was out, he would often play his guitar in a way that she could hear quite loudly. She told me that she had complained many times, but it didn’t really do much. She had not yet reported the noise to the complex management, though I certainly would have, and long ago. The kid must have been playing the guitar even more loudly than usual for it to get all the way up to my unit, two floors above.

So I went down one more flight, rang the doorbell, and sure enough, there was the kid, and sure enough, he was playing the guitar. He said he’d stop, and he did, but I still emphasized to him that if people two floors up could hear it, he should really use headphones instead of speakers for that kind of thing.

So I’m keeping an ear open for this kid now. The lady below me may be more tolerant, but if the kid keeps this up, I won’t have any reservations about reporting it to management.

Sure, I can still buy songs via the U.S. store because I still have my U.S.-based credit card with the billing sent to my folks’ house back home. And for me, that’ll do fine, because the Japanese store will likely be more expensive. Nevertheless, a lot of people here (such as my students, who would love such a chance to buy their music that way) don’t have that resource, and so would depend on a Japan-based resource. Right now, there aren’t many good alternatives; Sony Music Direct charges $2 per song or more. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported that Apple plans to launch the Japan iTunes store “this spring,” but there’s no sign of it happening soon. The expected date was March, but that’s come and gone. More recently, the Mainichi Shimbun reported that Apple is “poised” to enter talks with music companies here, and may have the store online by the end of the year.

Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway just got theirs, added to Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. Japan is the second biggest music market in the world after the U.S., but it is still stuck way back in the 80’s in that it is high-priced and more than a bit protectionist. Apple is being shut out while ten domestic online services sell music here, up to $3 per song. Music CDs still cost an arm and a leg here, and reports are that to sell CDs here for the ridiculous price of $30 a pop, special tracks withheld in the U.S. and elsewhere are added here to make the local versions more attractive. Bands are asked to record these tracks just for the Japanese market, which helps to discourage cheaper imports–so I hear.

When the iTunes Music Store finally does break through, it will likely not be for the 99 cents we pay in the U.S. But the question is, how much will it be, and when will it be allowed in? You know Apple has to be chomping at the bit to open up the online store here (any claims of “they aren’t trying” will fall flat), and in addition to their reputation in the U.S., Apple has a killer interface with iTunes and a popular delivery system with the iPod–which may be why they’re being locked out. Despite lagging sales, Japanese music labels don’t want to surrender the astronomical prices, and complain that Apple’s digital rights management (DRM) is insufficient–Japanese online stores all have heavy copy protection that does not allow burning onto a CD at all.

In the meantime, I’ll just recommend to my students that they get a U.S. credit card and find a friend there whose address they can use for billing, until they finish up school here and move to the U.S.

I’ve only got time to do a little blogging here today–my classes for the new semester start tomorrow, and I’ve been working on class prep for the past several days. But I took the time out today–the weather being so nice–to do some more local birding. And I got some very good results.

First, I went a bit south to Wakabadai, a newly developed area. Too developed, however, as most of the treelines to the forest were occupied by construction teams, almost a whole kilometer of them. Still, there were enough open spaces that I was able to find a few birds lurking. One of them presented itself in song long before I saw it. It skipped along the ground like a Dusky Thrush in some ways, but the Thrush doesn’t sing like this. And I was right: it turned out to be a Skylark (which I had only heard of in Japan from the name of the family restaurant here). It has a noticeable crest, though it is often kept down, and only goes up at certain times. I caught a few of those times.

I did find a nice nature trail and followed it, and I heard some interesting birds, but only saw the same old Bulbuls everywhere; I’m beginning to get very tired of them. They’re darned noisy, too. I even saw some Azure-winged Magpies up close–a pair, probably mother and nearly-full-grown child, as one seemed to be feeding the other, danced on power lines just a few meters above me, but stayed only for five or so seconds, no long enough for me to get the camera ready.

But on the way back home, I decided to try a hilly area near where I live and happened upon a road upon a high bank that overlooked the treetops of the trees from the street below–and ran into a full-fledged flock of Long-tailed Tits, or “Enaga” as they are called in Japanese. This was exciting because I’ve been trying to get the little buggers for the longest time, and only just the other day got the first halfway-decent images of them (see prior post), but this time they were all over the place, and a few even stayed still for a while. A few of the images I got are here:

You’ve got to admit, they are incredibly cute little balls of fluff.

With the weather so temperate and still, I decided to go in a new direction for birdwatching today, into the hills close to home. I simply hadn’t thought of it before. It netted me some very nice photos.

The first was one I’ve been trying to get on film since I started; a bird I had in my sights months ago, but my autofocus failed me. The Long-tailed Tit (Enaga • エナガ). The thing is so flighty, hopping from branch to branch so quickly, in trees with enough branches to cause focusing problems, that I had never been able to get it before–but this time I got lucky.

I then followed a trail about half a kilometer into a small farming valley (lots of those in Japan), and heard a high-pitched chirping song. After waiting five minutes for something to show, something did: a Meadow Bunting (Hoojiro • ホオジロ). But this time the conditions were right and I got a few very nice shots.

After that, I wandered around quite a bit, and was almost ready to call it a day, when I realized that the lens cap for my zoom lens was gone. Missing. I’d dropped it somewhere and hadn’t realized it. And I had been going for quite some distance, walking on a road along the hills, going in and out of side roads and dirt lanes. I figured my chances for finding it were not all that good, considering the road conditions, traffic and all that–I figured that by the time I found it, it’d be squashed by a car or something, if I found it at all.

But along the way, something surprising happened. As I stopped to rest on one of those beat-up old side roads, I saw a bird in the distance. It moved in a motion that was somewhat familiar, a kind of smooth start-glide-stop-start motion, almost leisurely, something I’d associated with Wagtails. The bird started out quite some distance away, but it kept getting closer, and closer, and finally, it just came up and sat on a power line right smack where I was. I got my camera out of my backpack, convinced that the bird would fly away before I could snap a photo, but it stayed there, almost as if it were giving me something to cheer up about after having been frustrated with the lost lens cap. The bird, with a bright yellow breast, had just caught a grub of some sort, and was resting before gulping it down, I can only imagine. It turns out that the bird is a female Grey Wagtail (Kisekirei • キセキレイ–named so despite the yellow), notable as a female because the males have a black chin.

It flew away when a train came along the nearby tracks, but it stayed long enough. And to make a good situation better, I found the lens cap laying on the side of the road, undamaged, just a few minutes later.

I’ve been told by people over time that the linkboard (top right side of the main page) takes too long to load; it did, after all, consist of 38 separate images adding up to a total of about 70KB. The total size was a bit much already, but the 38 different files that had to be loaded each time the page was viewed, that’s undoubtedly what slowed down most browsers. I’ve been meaning to fix that for a while, and I finally got around to it.

The LinkBoard is still there, but now it is an image map–that is to say, a single image (now 24KB, 1/3 the size) which has the links assigned to each “button” in the image by code. It should load a lot faster and work exactly the same. It just took a bit of effort to set the coding, which is why I put it off for so long.

I’ve also changed the links a bit, getting rid of old and broken links, and adding links I’ve found more valuable as of late.

The feeder I set up outside my window is really for the smaller birds, and usually, because it’s intended to be hung from a high place, only small birds should be able to reach it. But the structure of the building outside my windows–solid concrete with no hooks or other purchase–doesn’t allow for hanging things, so I had to jury-rig a fastening along the bottom of the feeder, setting it atop the clamps that hold my satellite dish in place. But that also means the bigger birds can reach it–as you can see in this photo, with an Oriental Turtledove (Kijihato • キジハト) enjoying some seed while a somewhat apprehensive Tree Sparrow looks on.

Not that these slimeballs are anything new–they’ve been infesting my comment spam for some time–but now they’ve added referral spam to their repertoire, and have overwhelmingly hammered my site–more than 3,000 referral spam hits in just five days. And they’re rotating IP Addresses, so it’s completely screwing up my original-visitor stats.

Please, please, please someone finally come up with an app or plugin for your site that will filter out referral spam from the log files, and one that does not require programming expertise to use. The bandwidth they’re eating up I can handle, but they are making a hash of my stats, and the fact that they are doing that to me on my dime is all the more frustrating.

What we need is a programmer who can design an app that will work like MT-Blacklist, except instead of filtering the blog comment database, instead it filters a site’s referral logs, deleting from those logs all hits that match specified parameters. This would at least allow for logs to be cleaned up, and give you a chance to really know who’s visiting your site. Ideally, the people who make AwStats should have built this into their software long ago.

And yes, I’ve tried setting a .htaccess file–and it doesn’t work. It stops the spammers for a matter of hours, but then they just blast right through it.

It happened at 4:52 a.m., but it would’ve been hard to sleep through. Although the quake was only 4.3 on the Richter scale, the reports say that the epicenter was in the Eastern Tama Region. Meaning it was literally smack under my feet. And it felt different as well. There was a precursor sound a few seconds before a definite crack of the building moving and shaking. It was short, but packed a wallop.

These are nothing new to me, but I got a few good photos of Oriental Greenfinches (Kawarahiwa • カワラヒワ) and a few okay ones of the relatively elusive Meadow Bunting (Hoojiro • ホオジロ). The Greenfinches were alternately perching high up in a tree and swooping down to inhabit and area of low green brush.

Click to see a larger image

The Buntings are always in the same location along the river when I go, but they’re hard to catch. They tend to get down into the brush, and are skittish to boot. But I got a few photos while one was resting in a tree, though it was against a bright sky:

And this one I caught in the brush, though it was mixed with Tree Sparrows (Suzume • スズメ) and I didn’t even notice it was a bunting until I came home and saw the full-sized image:

A few more images will be in the “continued reading” section, linked to directly below:
Read more…

So what’s the definition of judicial activism? When a judge defies the law in favor of his or her personal political agenda. That’s something most people can agree upon. But the question is, are the charges of judicial activism being blasted out shotgun-style by conservatives justified? Well, let’s take a look. Here’s a rant by a right-wing writer in the National Ledger on the subject:

Circuit Court Judge George Greer of Florida is an activist judge. In the days leading up to the removal of Terri’s feeding tube, Judge Greer made four lawless findings.

What were the findings she found to contradict the law?

1. [H]e denied a request by the Schindler family for relief based on an earlier mistake he made. At an earlier hearing, Judge Greer allowed the self-serving hearsay statement of Terri’s “husband” Michael to qualify as evidence that Terri did not want to live in a persistent vegetative state. Hearsay is a legal term for a statement that is told through another individual. Because of the inherent untrustworthiness of such statements, Florida law forbids the admission of hearsay statements as proof in situations like Terri’s. Judge Greer ignored that law.

This is the most oft-quoted attack on Greer as an “activist” judge: the “hearsay” argument. It’s clearly gotten through the fundamentalist grapevine because anti-Greer posters always use this point. And, of course, it’s dead wrong.

The fact is, Florida law allows hearsay to be admitted in court under some 30 or so special circumstances, but this 1990 High Court ruling is what says it most clearly:

The [court acting as] surrogate must be satisfied that the patient executed any document knowingly, willingly, and without undue influence, and that the evidence of the patient’s oral declarations is reliable;

The statute clearly allows for “oral declarations” to be acceptable as evidence. That’s the key point, but the whole legal argument is here; read it all for clarity. In short, Greer was acting within the law when, as surrogate guardian of Terri, he judged as to her wishes in the case as best he could with what evidence was available. And as that decision was legal (as was upheld in higher courts, right up to the U.S. Supreme Court, and by a large number of conservative judges), Greer’s denial of relief against that decision was valid, as was also backed up by higher courts. It was also backed up by a physician reporting directly to Governor Jeb Bush:

The court then served as proxy decision maker, essentially assuming the role of legal guardian. The privacy interests of the person, as established in the Florida Constitution, and as articulated with specificity in Browning (In re Guardianship of Browning, 568 So. 2d 4 (Fla. 1990) ) served as the legitimate legal bases for the court’s conclusions to withdraw life support consistent with Florida Statute, 765.

Next:

2. Judge Greer denied the Schindler family’s request for more medical tests. Because the removal of Terri’s feeding tube was based upon a finding that she was in a persistent vegetative state (“PVS”), that diagnosis had to be accurate. The Schindler family contested the PVS diagnosis. Florida law requires medical tests demonstrating that the PVS finding be “determined and diagnosed as permanent prior to the withdrawal of life-prolonging means.” The permanence of Terri’s PVS state was called into question, but Judge Greer ignored the common sense questions and the law.

Terri was examined by many physicians who testified in court:

Through the assistance of Mrs. Schiavo’s treating physician, Dr. Victor Gambone, the physicians obtained current medical information about Theresa Schiavo including high-quality brain scans. Each physician reviewed her medical records and personally conducted a neurological examination of Mrs. Schiavo. Lengthy videotapes of some of the medical examinations were created and introduced into evidence. Thus, the quality of the evidence presented to the guardianship court was very high, and each side had ample opportunity to present detailed medical evidence, all of which was subjected to thorough cross-examination. It is likely that no guardianship court has ever received as much high-quality medical evidence in such a proceeding. [bold emphasis mine]

Of course the physicians disagreed, due to their respective biases (though the court’s own physician declared that Terri was in a PVS), so the judge had to listen to the arguments and decide; that he decided for the determination of PVS is not unlawful, it is simply not what the right-wingers wanted.

And as for the allegation that Terri’s medical state was “called into question,” of course it was called into question by the Schindler’s lawyers; that does not mean that adequate evidence was not presented. If all an attorney had to do was question the evidence, the judge would never be able to come to a conclusion. There was more than sufficient examination and presentation of evidence; the right-wingers simply don’t like what the judge decided was more convincing. But the judge was fully lawful in that decision.

Next?

3. in an astounding decision, Judge Greer denied the Schindler family’s request of oral reintroduction of food and water after the removal of the feeding tube.

This is sheer idiocy. Of course he denied it, because the medical evidence told him that Terri could not swallow. Were someone to try to feed her orally, that could have killed her right then and there. According to the report made to Governor Bush:

Evidence regarding the persistent vegetative state consisted of highly credible medical testimony and documentation reflecting both early and recently performed neurological examinations and a case history that included early swallowing studies conducted multiple times nearly ten years ago. … independent sets of swallowing tests were performed early in Theresa’s medical treatment: 1991, 1992 and 1993. Each of these determined that Theresa was not able to swallow without risk of aspiration (and consequent infection).

And finally?

4. Judge Greer denied the Florida Department of Children and Families [“DCF”] request to intervene as guardian on behalf of Terri. DCF submitted several claims of abuse by Michael to Judge Greer. DCF argued that because Michael was the sole suspect of Terri’s abuse, he could no longer act as her legal guardian.

None of the accusations of abuse were ever proven or shown to be legitimate. All evidence pointed to was consistent with her bulimia and medical treatment subsequent to her collapse, and no one at the time made any claims of abuse; those claims came later, after the right-to-lifers entered the picture and started viciously attacking Michael Schiavo.

In short, the claim that Greer is an activist judge is based upon 1. his decision that Terri had orally declared that she would not want to be kept alive, which was within Florida law; 2. his decision to deny further medical tests, which was justified in that extensive tests had already been performed and a judgment on her condition was well-established; 3. his decision to not allow food and water introduced orally, because the evidence showed that this was impossible and in addition to failing, might actively cause immediate death or deterioration; and 4. that he did not allow a politically biased organization to take over as guardian, on the grounds that accusations of abuse by Terri’s husband were completely unfounded.

Greer in fact followed the law to the best of his ability, and so, by definition, is not an activist judge. But don’t tell that to a right-winger nowadays.

An interesting side note: the same right-wingers are livid that Democrats only approved 95% of the judges Bush put forth, and that they did not admit Texas judge Priscilla Owen, who is–you got it–an activist judge. But who called her an activist judge–probably some pansy liberal, right? Nope. Alberto Gonzales, Bush’s own top stooge and now Attorney General, did so himself back in Texas a while back, saying she was guilty of “an unconscionable act of judicial activism” when she tried to impose burdens on minors for obtaining an abortion which were far in excess of what the law mandated.

So the wingnuts want to lynch a Florida judge who followed the letter of the law, and are pissed at Democrats for blocking the confirmation of a judge who is a proven activist. But then, I never claimed that the wingnuts weren’t rabid hypocrites.