This from Kyodo News via Japan Today:

Education minister Nariaki Nakayama on Saturday said history textbooks used in Japanese secondary schools contain passages that are extremely “self-torturing” and suggest “Japan has done nothing but bad things.”

He told a news conference he should judge textbooks from a “neutral” standpoint given his capacity as minister in charge of screening textbooks. “Every country’s history has light and shadow. While we must reflect on bad deeds, we must not conduct education on the basis of a self-torturing historical perspective that everything that has been done was bad.”

So, exactly what is he referring to when he says that “everything” done was reported as bad? Was the Unification under Oda, Hideyoshi and Tokugawa represented as evil? Was the Meiji Restoration written as a bad thing? Was Japan’s post-war economic miracle never mentioned? Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki related as a bad deed done by the Japanese people?

I have the feeling that when Nakayama refers to “everything” done, he means “everything bad” that was done. For which he himself gives the answer: we must reflect on bad deeds. But by exaggerating to the point that “everything is represented as bad deeds,” he’s claiming an excuse to whitewash (excuse me–“view from a neutral standpoint”) some of the bad stuff–and you can guess primarily what he’s talking about. And no, it’s not the wars of the 6th and 7th centuries over the Soga clan’s rise to power. Something a lot more recent. Care to guess?

9/11 (noun phrase): a catchall reason to justify any Republican failing, support any Republican agenda, or excuse any Republican crime or malfeasance. See Get Out of Jail Free Card.

abortion (abomination): see partial-birth abortion or baby-killing.

accountability (noun): claiming responsibility while blaming others and accepting no punishment or penalty of any sort. See responsibility.

affirmative action (noun phrase): stealing jobs or university seats from deserving white males and giving them to shiftless, lazy minorities. See special rights.

alternative fuel source (compound noun): oil drilling in new locations, especially protected wildlife areas.

around the corner (prepositional phrase): “never going to happen.”

arrogant (adjective): see humble.

bipartisan (adjective): what Republicans are by default, especially when suppressing Democrats and ramming through a one-sided Republican agenda.

cognitive dissonance (noun phrase): a way of life.

constitutional amendment (noun phrase): veto power over the judicial branch when asserting unconstitutional conservative agendas.

darwin (proper noun): a godless heathen whose theories are an abomination except when applied to social and fiscal issues.

evil (noun): not conservative. See traitor.

fundamentalism (noun): see base.

grassroots (adjective): see astroturf.

homeland security (compound noun): an excellent vehicle for forwarding a conservative political agenda while stripping away constitutional rights disliked by the right wing. Otherwise meaningless.

homosexuality ( abomination ): a choice made by godless deviants so they can become child molesters and recruit everyone else into homosexuality.

humble (adjective): see arrogant.

indictment (noun): see DeLay, Tom, and denial strategies. Otherwise, a political tool to be used against Democrats.

legislating from the bench (gerund phrase): whenever a judge or justice interprets the law to your disliking.

lesbian (noun): acceptable in some video entertainment; otherwise: a woman who refuses to go out on a date with a Republican male.

medicaid (noun): a wasteful welfare program. If an American doesn’t make enough money, he and his family don’t deserve to live in health; see social darwinism.

moderate (adjective): regarding Democrats: a non-existent, mythical being (they are all extremists, especially when running for office); regarding Republicans: see traitor.

most liberal (superlative adjective): any Democrat who runs for president.

nation-building (gerund): what Democrats do when they involve themselves in any foreign affairs; null meaning when applied to conservatives (see liberating).

osama bin laden (proper noun): who?

partial-birth abortion (compound noun): a rare procedure which is used in extreme circumstances to save the life of a mother or when the mother’s health is in jeopardy and the fetus is non-viable. the most revolting form of abortion that could be found so as to be misrepresented as abortion in general.

pledge of allegiance (noun phrase): an excellent device to be used when real issues present embarrassing dilemmas.

pro-life (adjective): a philosophy that applies only to those who have not yet been born. After birth, social darwinism applies.

racist (adjective): any Democrat who dares to challenge an extremist conservative judicial bench appointment where the candidate is a minority. Also see affirmative action.

responsibility (noun): something to be avoided at all costs while appearing to embrace it.

science (noun): a field dedicated to proving correct the current conservative agenda. Otherwise, see witchcraft.

second amendment (holy script): the only sacrosanct part of the bill of rights (applies to second half of amendment only).

separation of church and state (noun phrase): see unification of Protestant Christianity and state.

social security (noun phrase): a type of welfare which should be ended as soon as is feasible while appearing to champion, reform and save it so as to garner the valuable senior citizen vote. Unneeded as anyone who is worth their salt will be wealthy enough to take care of themselves upon retirement. In the meantime, a good source of money to steal from. See social darwinism.

special rights/privileges/preferences (noun phrase): whenever a minority or non-heterosexual-male gender group is given the same rights, liberties or protections enjoyed by straight white males.

ten commandments, the (noun phrase): when publicly displayed, a catchall solution to any social problem; also a good wedge to open the door to unification of church and state. See indoctrination.

tolerance (noun): allowing Democrats to vote (or at least to think they are voting)

uniter (noun): someone who divides.

values (noun): what, by definition, conservatives have and liberals do not have. Otherwise, a vague catchall term to add apparent moral strength to any conservative idea.

voter fraud (compound noun): when someone votes for the Democratic candidate, particularly a minority voter.

women’s rights (noun phrase): see special rights.

Some words get bounced back and forth between languages. A good example of this is karaoke. The word is a combination of the Japanese “kara,” meaning “empty” (as in karate, or ’empty hand’) and the English “orchestra,” shortened in Japanese to “oke,” the Japanization–minus the “r”–of the first two syllables of the word. (When compound foreign words are used in Japanese, each element is typicallly shortened to two syllables, as in “seku-hara” for “sexual harassment.”) As a result, we get a hybrid Japanese-English word, karaoke.

What’s funny is that when the word gets mangled even further when brought back into English. The original Japanese word is pronounced “kah-rah-oh-keh.” In English, it gets pronounced “carry-okie,” with the English “orchestra” bent almost beyond recognition.

Not that this kind of bending of Japanese pronunciation in English is uncommon. Many Japanese words spoken by English speakers are unrecognizable to Japanese people. Saké is pronounced sah-keh, not sah-kee. Kamikaze is pronounced kah-mee-kah-ZEH, not kah-mah-KAH-zee. And “harry-carry” is a completely mangled form of “hara-kiri,” pronounced “hah-rah-kee-ree,” with hard “r”s. But we do pronounce tsunami, sushi and tabi correctly. Though “Mt. Fuji-san” is redundant, as “san” means “Mt.”

Just so you know.

The Marine Corps is now offering bonuses of up to $30,000 to its riflemen to re-enlist for an extra four years. Not that this is necessarily a bad idea; the men deserve the money, no doubt, and it is likely more cost-effective to retain trained men then to train new ones. And they say the strategy is working; the Marine Corps say recruitment is up 10-30% in some areas (though they are silent on other areas).

Nevertheless, throughout the article you will not find any mention of the unspoken corollary: why do they suddenly need to offer thirty large to Marines so they will re-enlist?

Any journalist worth his salt should have immediately spotted that and made it a focus of the story. In fact, the obvious conclusion should be a story in itself–but you never see it printed.

I never encounter it in daily life any more, and a lot of younger Japanese have never even heard of it, but in the 1980’s, there used to be an expression called “Christmas Cake.” Back then, the expression was used to describe unmarried Japanese women over the age of 25. In Japan, cake is a ‘tradition’ at Christmastime (along with love hotels and boxes or cooking oil, see this post). If it doesn’t get sold by Christmas–the 25th–then nobody wants it, is the idea. A rather rude and sexist idea, but it was the 80’s and at the time I was living in rural Toyama, and so it came up. I remember one young lady, named Miki, who worked in the office of the school I worked at. She married some guy through o-miai, a matchmaking tradition often used until recently in Japan. A matchmaker would try to match the bride a groom; the couple would usually not meet too many times before making up their minds to get married. At the wedding, in fact, the matchmaker usually has a special place in the ceremony.

All of this came back to me recently when I stumbled across the topic in this news story, which reports–and I have observed personally–that women in Japan today don’t worry about their marriage age as much, and Japanese men are not quite so obsessed with age when choosing a spouse–significant reasons why the term “Christmas Cake” isn’t heard much anymore.

I usually answer comments in the “comments” section, but this one I wanted to answer up front. It comes from a comment to the post “Cold Numbers” on The Expat, a post duplicated on Blogd. From that comment, by Ishmael:

But saying that Bush is going to “stay the course, so…” as if it is a bad idea, you are putting him in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. What would you be saying if he suddenly announced that, after all of those casualties, the US was going to be pulling out of Iraq?

If it were as you say, then he put himself into a “damned if you do/don’t” situation, not I. But it is not as you say. Your argument is the classic “either-or” fallacy–you assume there are only two courses of action: Bush’s way or hightail it out of there. There are other options, some of which are still open but Bush will never take, some of which could have worked but Bush pissed them away or simply wasn’t capable of doing.

The former sort include admitting he made mistakes and opening up Iraq to true international participation (not limiting his “coalition” to simply those who, for whatever reasons, will bow to him and do whatever he wants). If Bush were to collect a true team of skilled diplomats, not just yes-men and party hacks, and get them to represent him, giving them full powers to act on behalf of the U.S., there could still be a chance to open the doors and assign true legitimacy to a peaceful, democratic change in Iraq. But it would mean opening the doors not just to the French, Germans and Russians, but to key powers in the Middle East–like his father did before–and letting go of total U.S. control of the oil fields and of business contracts. Our men and women died, supposedly, for peace in Iraq, not for the oil fields or Halliburton contracts, so we should not give a rat’s ass about them if they get in the way of succeeding there. But in order for this to be pulled off, Bush would have to truly open his arms to the international community, and that would mean doing what Bush pledged he would do in the 2000 elections: be a humble nation. Something Bush has done anything but since he was elected. And that includes saying aloud that he made real mistakes, and that we need help.

And guess what: that is God’s own truth. We do need help. We can’t do everything by ourselves. Doubt me? Look at the casualty counts. Look at the situation on the ground. Are you really so naive as to think that an election where the Iraqis choose between U.S. puppets in January will really solve the problem? If you do, then you also probably thought that the summer handover of power was gonna calm things down, too. They didn’t. It won’t. We’re building bases in Iraq, permanent bases. We’re going to be there at least ten years. Period. It’s not going to get better. It is only going to get worse.

The latter was to have formed a true coalition from the beginning, especially getting the Arab states involved, get them truly involved, because no primarily external influence is going to make people in Iraq feel that there’s even a chance of being free. But the other Arab states don’t want to get involved, so that means we would have to get them involved, not an easy task. If Bush could have done that from the beginning, shown that he wasn’t going to maintain an iron grip of control and use the country for his own purposes–if the people in that country believed that they really could have their independence and freedom, that they could get the real deal even if it meant a parliamentary democracy to balance the internal groups, then there wouldn’t be a fraction of the insurgency there is now, and it would be fought from within. But all of that would require (a) humility, which Bush does not have an ounce of, and (b) an extremely high level of diplomatic skill to balance and handle the vested interests of all the different participants–diplomatic skill which Bush isn’t even within light-years of having.

And then there’s the other “coulda” option: not invading Iraq in the first place. Believe it or not, it is not the worst option. The worst option is another Vietnam, which is where we’re headed (Vietnam actually started much smaller than Iraq did). The worst situation is that in ten years, we’re still occupying and yet hundreds of our soldiers are dying every month, sometimes every week, because we just can’t bear to let go of the region. You phrased the mindset yourself: we stay like we are now or we pull out. That’s how Bush thinks: there is no other option. And if that’s how we stay for the near future, if we refuse to leave unless we can leave a stable, orderly and truly Democratic Iraq, then we’re not leaving anytime soon–and the longer we stay, the more of our people die, the greater our investment will be, and the less willing we will be to leave, lest we make it seem that those who died did so in vain.

Hussein was a butcher. But so are a dozen other dictators around the world. Kim Jong-il is a far bigger butcher of his people than Hussein ever was and he has a real nuclear program and we know it. There are butchers and madmen on the thrones in many countries, killers of their people all, and yet we survive despite them staying in power. Hussein would have been a nightmare for his people, but now we are a bigger nightmare than he was for the Iraqis, and they are no more free. How many thousands of U.S. soldiers are you willing to send to be killed so we can be “more secure” by invading and occupying them so they become a quagmire? Face it: Iraq. Was. Not. A. Threat. Bush wildly overstated what Hussein was doing and would do, and don’t try to say “we all thought Hussein was an immediate threat,” because I didn’t, and most people didn’t. Bush sold that to the people, got it pushed through Washington with political tactics, and sealed our allegiance to his plan with the blood of our soldiers, after which Americans became afraid to admit Iraq was a mistake for fear of besmirching them (something impossible to do, each one died with personal honor completely removed from the actions of the president, no matter what the outcome in Iraq).

We could have lived with Hussein. I have yet to hear anyone who favors the Iraq War explain how North Korea was and is a lesser threat to our security–it obviously is not. And yet Kim is still there, his people are still dying, he’s really making nukes, and he’s really got ties with terrorists, but somehow it’s not as big a problem as Hussein would have been? Please. As galling as it may sound that we might have left Hussein in power, he was contained and containable, and there are far worse things than that. And we are headed straight for one of those worse things right now.

Bush has been on the wrong course from the beginning, and at every turn, he “stays the course” and steers away from any possible workable solutions. So yes, I say it is a bad idea to “stay the course.” And I mean it. And I’m right.

A new poll by the Nihon Keizai Shimbun says that while only 25% of Japanese want their troops to stay in Iraq, 61% want them to leave. This is not surprising, because it would be difficult for the average Japanese person to see what benefit there is in the endeavor–even if their troops were fulfilling some worthy cause–and it is difficult for the Koizumi administration to sell the extension for what it is, in effect, a wedge to begin remilitarizing Japan and eradicating the anti-war Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution.

First off, if the conservative Yomiuri Shimbun had taken the poll, I’d put good money on them finding a majority wanting the troops to stay–the Yomiuri has been vociferous in its support of repealing or de-clawing Article 9, and ever since I came to Japan in the 80’s, they’ve been running constant stories about how most Japanese just can’t wait to get rid of the pesky provision. Since the Nihon Keizai is much more moderate, I trust the poll results to be very likely accurate.

Second, what will the outcome be? My own expectation is fairly strong that the LDP will extend the mission. I don’t think they care much about 60%–80% maybe, but not 60%–and besides, that 25% that wants to stay on is likely their core base. And Koizumi seems quite persistent in his quest to change the face of Japan’s military.

Reader Sean alerted me to this story about a mother dying of heart failure after seeing her son return, dead, from Iraq. Nothing new, in fact–I’ve seen similar stories over the past year. But still, with people now so used to hearing about soldiers die, this story brings home the reality of the tragedy we’re involved in. The pain and suffering only of Americans who have lost loved ones is horrific enough. Then there are the 17,000+ who have been injured in battle–another number the Bush administration wants to hide–with uncounted hundreds maimed, thousands with lifetime disabilities. And we’re not even counting the possible tens of thousands of Iraqis killed, far more wounded and maimed for life, numbers not certain because the military intentionally avoids counting them.

I remember in the first few months of the occupation, conservatives on the forums I attended were constantly crowing about how much better things were in Iraq since Hussein was ousted, how many schools were open, or how much electricity had been restored.

They don’t talk about that any more.

The name “Godzilla” (who will make his ‘sayonara’ appearance in Godzilla: Final Wars coming out in a few weeks) is not a randomly chosen one. In Japanese, by the way, it is pronounced “Gojira,” and is not about God or reptiles. It is a composite of two words: “gorilla” and “kujira” (Japanese for “whale”). We can only assume that, in the story, a gorilla mated with a whale, before or after being zapped with radiation. Gojira became “Godzilla” when the film was first brought to the United States. The film series was prompted by a 1954 incident in which a Japanese fishing boat was exposed to fallout from an American H-Bomb test at the Bikini Atoll, killing 1 of the 23 crewmen and making the rest seriously ill. For the Japanese, Godzilla has represented nature’s revenge against the nuclear weapons that America used against Japan at the end of WWII.

After their attempt to slip in a provision that would allow the GOP to see anyone’s tax records and release them publicly without regard for privacy or ethics was caught by the Democrats, they are now flailing about madly trying to claim that it wasn’t their fault, they didn’t do it, and that they are more outraged than anyone else. “I have no earthly idea how it got in there. Nobody is going to defend this,” said Senate majority leader Bill Frist on television. This comes after Senator Ted Stevens tried to pass off blame on “some staffer” who, apparently, we are to believe drafted the legal document and put it into pending legislation on a lark.

While Democrats are calling for “appropriate punishment” for those who are responsible, Republicans, represented by Frist, are saying that “accountability will be carried out” against the guilty party. But since Republicans over the past several years have demonstrated continuously and strenuously that “accountability,” in their book, means “say it’s your fault but at the same time blame someone else and receive no penalty whatsoever,” we can expect the same here. Maybe a specific staffer will be set up as the fall guy, but either they won’t get fired, or they will and then get immediately re-hired somewhere else within their organization.

Remember when the Nixon administration used the IRS as a political weapon to crush their political enemies? Apparently the GOP yearns for the good old days, because they tried to slip in exactly such a provision into the must-pass spending bill in the Senate–and got caught red-handed by the Democrats.

If you recall Representative John Conyers in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (“Sit down, my son. We don’t read most of the bills.”) then perhaps you will see what the Republicans thought they were doing. The spending bill is 3,300 pages long, and the provision that would allow two Republican committee chairmen and their assistants the ability to read anyone’s tax record and make them public, regardless of privacy considerations, was slipped into the bill in the middle of the night just before it was scheduled to pass.

Sen. Ted Stevens, responsible for the provision, has apologized–after being caught, of course, and by way of blaming the whole thing on a staffer.

This after the GOP already snuck in language that would over-rule laws that require doctors and hospitals to fail to inform patients of all family planning options, as well as other measures aimed at prohibiting free choice in choices relating to abortion. When Democrats found the language, they protested a great deal and stalled the vote, but the need for the spending bill was too great and the Republicans too stubborn, and the bill passed with the provisions. Though largely symbolic, the language nonetheless signals the GOP’s persistence and dedication to overturning Roe v. Wade, if even one small bit at a time, paying off their fundamentalist base.

However, after the entire scandal of re-writing their accountability rules to allow Tom DeLay to remain party leader despite being indicted by a grand jury (they inserted a provision to oust any party leader under indictment in 1993 when some Democrats were in trouble, and hyped the rules as proof of their ethical superiority), the Republicans already look dirty and corrupt as hell. These latest spending-bill scandals simply emphasize the corruption. But then, this is the time for them to pull this stuff–a full two years away from the next election, and they know full well that voters don’t remember this stuff so well after all that time.

In other words, more of the same BS as always from the GOP.

You pay $1000-plus for a piece of electronic machinery, you expect it to work. I’m speaking of the DVR I got, and blogged about here.

After two months of use, the machine froze at one point. Not unexpected, it is, after all, a computer with an operating system. You run it that long without restarting–which I did, neglectfully–it will crash. But at least after that, you can expect that upon restart, it will function okay. The first time it happened, I restarted–and a good portion of the presets were trashed. I had to work for the better part of an hour to figure out that the local channel setup had to be reset in order for the schedule screen–and thereby everything else–to work. I found all my programming for shows in place, but with the channels erased, so those had to all be reset. Some other stuff too, but suffice it to say that it ate up 2 hours of my weekend (it always happens then, just when I can’t call up support). But at least I figured that if I shut down and restarted the machine properly every so often, I could avoid this from happening.

No such luck. Today it hard-crashed. Twice. Both times as I started to play a file. Once just after I had spent an hour prepping a few dozen shows for DVD burning–only to find after the crash, my edits had been wiped, and I’ll have to do them all over again.

What’s worse is the prospects for the future. Now I’ll be nervous every time I start to view any file I have saved. I’m pretty sure that if I call Toshiba, they will tell me that either I have to re-initialize the hard disk(s) in the machine, or I’ll have to send the machine in to them. Both are unsavory prospects. I have so much stuff on the disks that it will take so much time to catalog in DVD form–if the machine doesn’t keep freezing or fall apart completely–I will have to spend every moment of free time for a week just clearing the system. And not everything will fit neatly on DVDs at that, meaning some mostly-empty disks. Worse, having to send it in means not having the machine at all for two or three weeks or even more. Unless they send me a loaner–which I doubt–that means a huge hole in my current cataloguing of shows, which is what I bought the damn machine for in the first place.

So, in short, I am becoming less and less impressed by this machine. Either I got a lemon, or the machine is just very poorly designed. And either way, dealing with Toshiba’s dismal support system will be a nightmare all in itself.

My top-rated Canon Powershot S30 is showing its age–and its damage in that I’ve dropped it on concrete a couple of times. It has served brilliantly over the past couple of years, taking beautiful photos and having the flexibility I really enjoy in a camera. But now the shutter window is kind of messed up from the concrete-dropping (it tends to close shut at the slightest touch and is often difficult to open), and with digital cameras, a couple of years is a long time. So it’s time for a new camera.

I am not looking for more megapixels. Really, 3.2 (what the S30 provides) is more than enough if you’re not printing 8×10 glossies, which I never do. More megapixels is mostly for print quality–though it could be used as a quasi-zoom, messily–and I use my camera 99% of the time for digital storage, rarely printing images on paper, even 4×6 sized. So I don’t mind a 3-megapixel camera. Which is what I’m going for.

In steps the Canon S1-IS (pictured at right). Not new, it’s about 8 months old; I’ve been waiting to buy on the off chance that Canon will introduce a new version, but it looks like that won’t happen in time. But the S1 has a lot of what I want.

First and foremost, the 10x zoom with the image stabilization (the “IS” in the name). On far too many occasions I wanted to zoom way more than my 3x S30 will allow. Digital zoom just ain’t the same thing. And from what I’ve read, the image stabilization–a big selling point for such a strong zoom lens–really does work, allowing not just stable long-zoom shots, but also good low-light shots with a relatively fast shutter speed–another thing on my wish list. And the zoom works fast, smooth and silent–allowing zooms to be made during movie shooting.

It still has the wide variety of settings and features that the S30 has, with manual focus, aperture and shutter settings, allowing for special photographic effects like extended exposures and depth-of-field tricks. Improvements include full-frame, full-TV-quality video shooting. Though it takes up lots of space, I intend to buy a 1GB Compact Flash card (I’m glad they’re staying with that format) that can hold about 8 minutes of video; as such, it will almost replace my digital video recorder. The longest shutter speed is still 15 seconds (why not 30?), but the fastest has doubled to 1/2000th of a second. And it will work nicely with my Canon printer, plugging in directly so that photo printing–when I want it–will not require the computer to be involved.

I thought the fact that it eats 4-AA Alkaline batteries would be a disadvantage, but after consideration, it beats out the expensive, proprietary battery packs–it’s cheaper to have rechargeable AA’s, and if the available rechargeables all lose their juice, standard AA’s will work nicely.

The down side is the form factor–being a bit bulkier with more protrusions, it will not fit into my shirt pocket like my S30 does–but I can live with that. Maybe it’ll still fit in pants or jacket pockets. The lens cap is a nuisance, but can be dealt with. There are a lot of buttons and controls, but not so many that I’ll be lost or anything. I also expect the flash and low-light focusing to be sub-par–a common failing among Canon cameras, but well-made-up-for by the image quality and feature set.

Finally, the price is right: about $320 to $350. Though I have to buy it in the U.S.–ironically, the cameras are quite a bit more expensive in Japan, at $510–even with the 15% point-card “discount,” it’s still a big chunk of change cheaper in the U.S.

I plan to order in the next couple of weeks so that it will be delivered to my folks’ house before I arrive for Christmas vacations. The 49ers-Washington game my father’s taking me to should provide a good test for the zoom.

UC Data, part of UC Berkeley’s Survey research Center, has come out with a statistical analysis (PDF file) which they claim all but proves that electronic voting machines in Florida gave Bush 130,000 extra votes (seen as 260,000 if the votes were switched from Kerry to Bush). From the summary (PDF file):

• Irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 excess votes or more to President George W. Bush in Florida.
• Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush between 2000 and 2004. This effect cannot be explained by differences between counties in income, number of voters, change in voter turnout, or size of Hispanic/Latino population.
• In Broward County alone, President Bush appears to have received approximately 72,000 excess votes.
• We can be 99.9% sure that these effects are not attributable to chance.

This report echoes an analysis done a week or so ago which showed reported Republican turnout in Bush-friendly e-voting counties to be ridiculously high, while Democratic turnout was inexplicably low, also suggesting e-voting fraud.

Even if this does not turn the election, it is still an indicator of massive fraud, which is always a serious crime–and it must be investigated. If you ask me, e-voting is and always was a seriously flawed idea. With so much talk about constitutional amendments going around–amend the constitution to ban gay marriages, amend the constitution to ban abortion, amend the constitution to elect Arnie–how about this one: amend the constitution so that all the voting methods be constantly tested, and only the one shown as most accurate and effective would then be used in every precinct in the country–with tamper-proof physical records and an easily verifiable recount system built-in. And no dependence on electronic memory. At all.

CNN’s page doesn’t say a thing about it today. CBS has a little Iraq news, but isn’t covering the body count. USA Today has nothing on Iraq at all. MSNBC and Fox cover Iraq stories, but not the big one. Only ABC is talking about it.

If I hadn’t checked the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count page I would not have even noticed it.

Our soldiers are getting slaughtered out there.

Since November 8, when Bush threw the troops into the Fallujah maelstrom after having decided it wouldn’t hurt him so much politically anymore, 95 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq, almost all of them from hostile fire. We are losing an average of more than ten soldiers a day. Even though the casualties started only ten days ago and the first week of the month had few deaths, November has already become the bloodiest month of the war since it started in March 2003. At this rate, November will become the first month in which more than 200 soldiers die–and there is no indication that this will abate anytime soon.

It is also significant to note that in the first three years of the Vietnam War, from 1962 to 1964 (when we had 17,000 troops in-country), the casualty rate was 0.38 per day. Even after massive escalation began in 1965, the average casualty rate was 5 per day. Over the course of the entire Vietnam War, an average of 15 soldiers died every day. Factor in the fact that there were far more troops total in Vietnam, and the numbers become even more significant.

Bush apologists will talk about how many more died in WWII, or on that one day in the Civil War–but that comparison is ludicrous as those wars are quantitatively different: they were not wars fighting local insurgencies in a single country, and they involved far, far more troops. They were not wars of attrition or occupation. Like Vietnam, Iraq requires few in the first few years–but it is very likely that more and more troops will be required as time goes on, just as in Vietnam.

Saw these fellows laying in wait the other day. The embankment they’re next to overlooks an underpass. The underpass has two lanes, separated by a yellow line. On days with good weather and heavy traffic, these guys wait up here on their perch, scouting the traffic below. They’re looking for motorcycles that cross the yellow line. A completely innocuous offense, never any danger–the underpass is no more dangerous for lane-changing than anywhere else on the street where there’s no yellow line, but it’s a rule, and the rules rule here. So it is a technical offense, and you can get a ticket for it. So the cops take up their perch and hand out a steady stream of tickets.

Their position is well-chosen: though it’s not clear in the photo above, they’re overlooking the bottom of the underpass just after the road that crosses over it (see right). To see them, a driver would have to look up over their left shoulder just as they come out from under the overhead street, and none do; the cops, meanwhile, have a bird’s eye view of people as they drive by. In other words, it’s shooting fish in a barrel.

The ticketing in fact makes no real sense. The offense, as I mentioned above, is a technical one and poses no more danger than any regular merge in traffic. It’s not a high-danger area–I go past there every day, and that’s not where accidents happen or where traffic is at its trickiest. Furthermore, there will never be any end to offenders–too many new people going through. Nor will it “teach a lesson” to any regular drivers–the cops are always in the same place, every time, so when a driver spots them once, they know where the cops will always be–which in fact frees the drivers to break traffic laws elsewhere, confident in knowing where the cops are located.

The only reason they are in that location is because it’s easy to catch and fine people. Period. That’s it. I’ve noted this kind of thing before, in this post from a year and a half ago. But it’s nice to note that their consistency hasn’t waned. Too bad their incompetence or uselessness hasn’t either.

First, the big news most people know about is the game of musical chairs going on in the Bush administration. While Ashcroft’s resignation was welcome, his replacement is no great consolation prize. Alberto Gonzales is getting the job not because he’s the country’s best lawman (same as Ashcroft), but because he’s been Dubya’s best bud since his governorship, has been helping him get out of jams and fixes since then, probably has a load of dirty laundry on Bush, and his ethnicity will make his confirmation somewhat bulletproof. Among Gonzales’ early work that ‘qualifies’ him for the top law enforcement official was cleaning up Bush’s messes:

And then there was the infamous 1996 juror incident. At that time, Bush was randomly selected for jury duty. Wanting to make a PR stunt out of it, Bush made a big deal about how he was just an ordinary guy, and of course, he would do his duty and serve on the jury. He claimed to the press that it is “a feeble excuse” to say he’s too busy or important. When he was given the forms for jurors to fill out, there is a section where jurors are required to detail prior arrests and court proceedings they experienced. Bush left that section blank. Apparently, the court did not want to bother the governor with such legal niceties, so he was not required to fill it out as everyone else is. But then Bush ran into a bigger snag: by chance, he was assigned to a drunk driving case, and, as a potential juror, he would without doubt be asked, under oath, if he had ever been arrested for drunk driving before.

Time for a feeble excuse to come to the rescue. Bush asked to be dismissed from jury the night before the trial, and was helped by Alberto R. Gonzales, his legal counsel. (Bush later appointed Gonzales to the Texas Supreme Court, and later as a legal counsel in the White House.) The excuse? “It would be improper for a governor to sit on a criminal case in which he could later be asked to grant clemency.” Huh? How often was Governor Bush asked to grant clemency for drunk driving? He was obviously taking positive action to hide his past from the public.

Since then, Gonzales’ record has been less than spectacular.

Meanwhile, the only moderately good man in the Bush cabinet, Colin Powell, is leaving, and will be replaced by Condi Rice–though everyone saw that one coming miles away. You have to wonder what in the name of all that is holy Powell was thinking about when he decided not to run for president but instead served as a futile voice of moderation in this chimpanzee’s cabinet, constantly and consistently run over by morons and fanatics. While he remains far more respected and legitimate than those he is leaving behind, his credibility is nevertheless decimated by his willingness to prostitute himself for Bush’s agenda (at least publicly). What a waste.

One thing the new appointments make clear is the fact that this will not be a moderate second term for Bush. Flunkies, fanatics and loyalists are the people in charge now, no more voices of moderation. At the CIA, Porter Goss is busy purging the agency of anyone not completely loyal to Bush (good to see that he has his priorities straight).

Some images from this year’s Arts Day Festival at the college where I work. You’d be surprised by the talent that exists around you but you don’t know because you don’t see it… until a day like this. Or like the first Arts Day last year.

A gospel choir

…and a versatile deejay.

My own contribution was a 16-minute video of the students preparing for Arts Day, shot by Iyo, Hitomi and Moto, which I edited together, adding music, transitions, and effects. The video is linked to by the image below. It is a QuickTime movie (QT required, if you do not have it installed already), and although compressed and reduced in size, is still 44 MB, at 17 minutes running time. After watching it, you may have a better idea as to why I did not blog much in the past week or so–it took a lot of time to put it together using nothing more than iMovie.

Note: the movie was not displaying properly, but is now fixed.

46 52 U.S. soldiers killed in just five days (Nov. 8-12), and one British soldier killed in the same time period, making it amongst the bloodiest of the entire occupation, coming close even to surpassing April 2004 in our death toll. 1,176 1,183 U.S. soldiers killed, 74 British and 72 from other countries.

And George W. Bush intends to stay the course, so….

[numbers revised upwards for casualties throughout 5-day period after new DoD press releases–ed.]

Via Kevin Drum, more evidence that the election was rigged, this time in the form of an academic paper by Steven Freeman (PDF file) on the subject, doing a statistical analysis of the exit poll numbers versus the actual tallies. Take a look at this chart showing what the exit polls predicted, what the actual counts were, and–most significantly–what the difference was between exit polls and the reported counts:

Note how the tallied votes in every battleground state save one just happened to differ from the exit polls in favor of Bush. Had this been simple statistical margin of error in the exit polls, then roughly half the error should have gone towards Bush and half to Kerry. Instead, we see a near-universal shift from exit polls to tallies favoring Bush–a near statistical impossibility.

Look at Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, the key battleground states. In Florida, final exit polls showed Bush leading by only a fraction of a percent–but Bush walks off with a 5% win. In Ohio, Kerry was ahead by 4% in the exit polls, but the tally gave the state to Bush by 2.5%, a 6.7% surge. And even in Pennsylvania, where Kerry won, Bush still surged 6.5% in the tally vs. the exit polls. Only in Wisconsin did the polls hit the nail on the head. But outside of Wisconsin, the final Bush tally exceeded exit polls by an average of about 5%. None of them showed a shift to Kerry.

Freeman still gives the benefit of the doubt to the idea it might have been a methodological flaw in the exit polling consortium, one that we don’t know about, but frankly, this is yet more evidence to me that there was indeed fraud involved. My reasons: almost all the errors favor Bush. In Florida, the statistics for the voter turnout increases in counties using voting machines made by Bush-friendly Diebold and ES&S… all favor Republican turnout. In Ohio, machine miscounts went to… Bush. Reports of errors by voting machines almost universally reported votes being switched from Kerry to Bush.

It’s like flipping a coin and having it come up “tails” a hundred times, like dropping toast and having it fall butter-side up a hundred times, like rolling dice and getting snake-eyes a hundred times. Once, fine, three times, OK, ten times, maybe… but almost every time? There is a point where you have to suspect that something is seriously wrong.