Japan blogging...

I've had a cold since getting here. Due to the cold meds, I accidentally dropped my toothpaste in the toilet bowl. I cannot throw it out; the cleaning folks won't remove it...

Back in Makuhari...

Japan hasn't changed all that much, but the change in the weather has kind of caught me by surprise, yielding one nice cold coming on...

Anyhow, I must be getting old; I sat among these guys on the plane, having decided that the plane was delayed enough to justify a business class upgrade.

Amazing; I am amongst popular musicians and I don't even recognize them, and they are apparently successful enough to fly business class.

See you in a day or so...

Time for travel to Japan...

Before I go: That mess in Lebanon

The latest news about Lebanon makes me cringe; this is simply one sh!t train of lies and obfuscation all around:

JERUSALEM, July 27 — Israel’s security cabinet met today to discuss expanding the offensive against Lebanon, a day after the heaviest fighting in the two-week-old conflict killed 9 Israeli soldiers and dozens of Hezbollah fighters, as well as at least 23 Palestinians who died in the continuing battle in Gaza.

Before the meeting, Israeli officials said they regarded the failure of an international conference to reach agreement on a cease-fire plan as clearing the way for further assaults on Hezbollah.

“We received yesterday at the Rome conference permission from the world,’’ Justice Minister Haim Ramon told Israeli radio, “to continue this operation, this war, until Hezbollah won’t be located in Lebanon and until it is disarmed.’

I didn't give them permission...

Mr. Ramon [said] “all those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah.’’

IOW, get ready for some ethnic cleansing...

Arriving today in Kuala Lumpur for a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended her resistance during the Rome conference to the push for a quick cease-fire. She said she was “willing and ready to go back to the Middle East at any time’’ for talks on a “sustainable’’ peace plan...

Wonderful; we now have the equivalent of our highest diplomat saying we don't give a shit about the carnage...that'll sure win us friends and influence people.

And sure enough, not to be left out of our attention, and expressing solidarity usually hostile Muslim sects...

Also today, Ayman al-Zawarhiri, al Qaeda’s second-in-command, vowed in a videotape released today that the group “will not stay silent with regard to what is happening to Muslims in Palestine and Lebanon.”

"What is happening to Muslims is a Crusader and Zionist war," Mr. Zawarhiri said, promising “we will attack everywhere’’ in response.

Off to present my recent research...

Patti Smith put it well:

what i feel when i'm playing guitar is completely cold and crazy, like i don't owe nobody nothing and it's just a test just to see how far i can relax into the cold wave of a note. when everything hits just right (just and right) the note of nobility can go on forever. i never tire of the solitary E and i trust my guitar and i don't care about anything. sometimes i feel like i've broken through and i'm free and i could dig into eternity into eternity riding the wave and realm of the E. sometimes it's useless. here i am struggling and filled with dread—afraid that i'll never squeeze enough graphite from my damaged cranium to inspire or asphyxiate any eyes grazing like hungry cows across the stage or page. inside of me i'm crazy i'm just crazy.

Relatively light blogging for the next few days...

I'm off to Japan on Friday, and there's tons of preparations.

If you need an outrage, consider that a senior UN official says there's about 250,000 active child soldiers in the world.

If you want to worry about things you haven't been lately, consider that bird flu has infected some cats, and it's not being well controlled in Indonesia.

On the other hand, if you've got a drunk rat you need to sober up, offer the creature a cigarette.

And on still another hand, GlaxoSmithKline says they've made a breakthrough on bird flu vaccine.

If you want something that's more useless than usual, consider designer ice.

Finally, be sure to check and see how many earthquakes we've been getting and where. It's looked really quiet lately...

Oh, might as well be topical: Hezbollah, in their own words can be found here. I cannot say I sympathize with them, despite the carnage in Lebanon - in fact I find a great deal of this stuff repugnant. They're certainly not doing what I would do.

Not a good defense of the theocracy charge...

One Ross Douthat at First Things has "reviewed" some of the recent works that point to the troublesome rise of the influence of "conservative Christians..."



The fact is, there have been folks that are theocrats, and James Dobson and D. James Kennedy are among them.

And yeah, they're far more of a threat to America than our indigenous Communists ever were.

What the hell is the difference between Iran and Pakistan?

Only one side has a bunch of ayatollahs, the other is one shah-like creature from being ruled by a bunch of ayatollahs.

And so that's why Bush stayed mum on nuclear proliferation in Pakistan?

Today's NY Times "Let them eat cake" quote...

It's not really so bad that cities shed their middle class residents, you see...

SOME big American cities are flourishing as at no time in recent memory. Places like New York and San Francisco appear to be richer and more dazzling than ever: crime remains low, new arrivals pour in, neighborhoods have risen from the dead. New York is in the throes of the biggest building boom in 30 years, its population at an all-time high and climbing. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg proudly promotes his city as “a luxury product.”

But middle-class city dwellers across the country are being squeezed.

n the San Francisco Bay Area, the percentage of households earning more than $100,000 a year rose to over 30 percent in 2000 from approximately 7 percent in 1970, said Joseph Gyourko, a professor of real estate and finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “Is that area worse off?” he asked. “At least so far, there’s a lot of evidence that economically they’re better off. Land prices are really high, lots of people want to move there.”

Edward L. Glaeser, a Harvard economist who studied 300 large cities with a range of levels of income inequality in the 1960’s and 1970’s, says he found little evidence that those levels later affected the growth of housing prices, income or population there.

Of course, cities need police officers, firefighters, teachers. But as long as they can get the labor they need from somewhere nearby, some economists say, middle-class shrinkage may not hurt. In Southern California, developers import construction workers from Las Vegas and put them up in hotels; costs go up but rich clients can pay. Firefighters who want to live in high-priced cities can work two jobs, said W. Michael Cox, chief economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “I think it’s great,” he said. “It gives you portfolio diversification in your income.” Pay for essential workers like plumbers and cabdrivers will tend to go up, he said.

You're not poor, you see, you just need "portfolio diversification in your income."

No kidding...

This "don't be afraid to shop for art" story from the NY Times, is illustrative of why some folks think they're elitist.

Kenise Barnes, who owns a gallery in Larchmont, N.Y., was formerly the specialist in charge of contemporary paintings and drawings at Christie’s East, which was the section for work under $50,000. She says she knows the feeling.

After moving to the suburbs, “I’d walk into galleries in Chelsea with my stroller and I’d been in the business and I’d be intimidated by the snooty little girl behind the desk.”

But it’s time to get over it.

“People don’t know they can go into an art gallery just like they can go into any other store,” said Judith Tannenbaum, curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design. “There seems to be some sort of mystique about it.”

Barbara Guggenheim, an art consultant and author who has built up the art collections of numerous celebrities and major corporations, goes even further: “There’s no difference between an art dealer and a used-car dealer — they both want to sell you something.”

It might be nice if the used-car world adopted some of the common practices of many galleries: they often will allow prospective buyers to take a piece of work home “on approval” for a short time to see how it looks en situ.

And, like Ms. Barnes, they can do an awful lot of hand-holding. While I was sitting in her gallery, she received a call from a repeat client who has a painting out on approval.

“Her husband has looked at it, the designer has looked at, she wants me to look at it, although I’ve looked at it many, many times,” she said. “It looks amazing, and I’ll say that again.”

Prospective purchasers should remember that gallery owners don’t just want one-time buyers, they want to develop collectors. So don’t be afraid to ask questions.

Ms. Guggenheim suggests that when starting out, don’t grab the first piece in your price range. Browse for a few months, because as you look, your eye will develop and change. Most galleries rotate exhibits fairly often, so if you discover one whose work you like, drop by frequently.

In the world I live in, people tastelessly decorate $1 million homes to sell to other people who are over-leveraged; if they can muster up the fortitude to buy one of them, you'd think they'd not care about snooty art types.

I don't.

Education and Inquiry...

It doesn't surprise me that Baptist colleges have problems with little things like freedom of inquiry.

GEORGETOWN, Ky. — The request seemed simple enough to the Rev. Hershael W. York, then the president of the Kentucky Baptist Convention. He asked Georgetown College, a small Baptist liberal arts institution here, to consider hiring for its religion department someone who would teach a literal interpretation of the Bible.

But to William H. Crouch Jr., the president of Georgetown, it was among the last straws in a struggle that had involved issues like who could be on the board of trustees and whether the college encouraged enough freedom of inquiry to qualify for a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Dr. Crouch and his trustees decided it was time to end the college’s 63-year affiliation with the religious denomination. “From my point of view, it was about academic freedom,’’ Dr. Crouch said. “I sat for 25 years and watched my denomination become much more narrow and, in terms of education, much more interested in indoctrination.’’

Georgetown is among a half-dozen colleges and universities whose ties with state Baptist conventions have been severed in the last four years, part of a broad realignment in which more than a dozen Southern Baptist universities, including Wake Forest and Furman, have ended affiliations over the last two decades. Georgetown’s parting was ultimately amicable. But many have been tense, even bitter.

In Georgia and Missouri, disputes over who controls the boards of Baptist colleges led to prolonged litigation. In Tennessee, a clash over whether Belmont University in Nashville could appoint non-Baptists to its board led the Tennessee Baptist Convention to vote in May to remove the entire board. Belmont’s trustees are still running the university, and while negotiations are continuing, the battle for control could end up in court.

You're either on the side of education or ignorance.

Must be an election year...

Link

Rocker Richards pardoned at last

Rolling Stone member Keith Richards is set to be pardoned - for a 31-year-old driving offence in US state Arkansas.

The veteran guitarist was arrested in the town of Fordyce in July 1975 for reckless driving and fined $162.20.

After Richards referred to the incident during a March concert in state capital Little Rock, Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee offered to clear his record.

"I realised his impression of our state was marred by a misdemeanour traffic stop," he told news agency Reuters.

"I wanted to clear his record in Arkansas as a goodwill gesture."

Presumably the Stones will still do "Sweet Neocon" at their concerts...

More Science Sources

With the continuing attack on science by the right, I think it's helpful to list a few sites:

• There's the Genetics Policy Institute
• The Scientist
• Physorg has good general science
• New Scientist
• RealClimate.org is the best place to go about global warming
  

The Stem Cell Controversy: Loud Right Wing Screeching Debunked...

By way of Media Matters catching Rush Limbaugh in yet another lie, I'm reminded of this article by a one Michael Fumento over at National Review:

Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) receive tremendous media attention, with oft-repeated claims that they have the potential to cure virtually every disease known. Yet there are spoilsports, self included, who point out that they have yet to even make it into a human clinical trial. This is even as alternatives — adult stem cells (ASCs) from numerous places in the body as well as umbilical cord blood and placenta — are curing diseases here and now and have been doing so for decades. And that makes ESC advocates very, very angry.

How many diseases ASCs can treat or cure is debatable, with one website claiming almost 80 for umbilical-cord blood alone. Dr. David Prentice of the Family Research Council, using stricter standards of evidence, has constituted a list of 72 for all types of ASCs. But now three ESC advocates have directly challenged Prentice’s list. They’ve published a letter in Science magazine, released ahead of publication obviously to influence President Bush’s promise to veto legislation that would open wide the federal funding spigot for ESC research. The letter claims ASC “treatments fully tested in all required phases of clinical trials and approved by the U.S Food and Drug Administration are available to treat only nine of the conditions” on his list.

Well! One answer to that is that it’s nine more than can be claimed for ESCs. Further, there are 1175 clinical trials for ASCs, including those no longer recruiting patients, with zero for ESCs. But a better response is that the letter authors come from the Kenneth Lay School for honesty, as do the editors at Science.

If it comes from a right-wing source, it's probably false. Here the lie's by omission, not that you couldn't smell this a mile away by the operative words, "Family Research Council."

Well, yes, there's no ESC treatments. Know why? Behold:

20. How many human embryonic stem cell lines are there?
The available number of human embryonic stem cell lines is a matter of some debate. To date, over 100 human embryonic stem cell lines have been derived worldwide. However, most of those lines are not adequately characterized yet. And only 22 cell lines are eligible for federal funding in the USA. Detailed information on those 22 cell lines can be found at the National Institutes of Health Human Stem Cell Registry at http://stemcells.nih.gov. Information on several of the other cell lines can be found at http://www.isscr.org/science/sclines.htm. - updated 09.17.04

The International Society for Stem Cell Research is doing real research, and conducting real bioethical work in this area.

Also, work on embryonic stem cells is in the very early stages of research.

Naturally, this was all left out of the "National Review" article, and it was quoted by many in the blogosphere, as well as Limbaugh.

Joe Carter and NPR owe America an explanation...

Carter is no more trained to pontificate on bioethics than my son's goldfish.

Nonsense of the day...

• I wish Israeli spokespeople could go 24 hours without using the word "terrorist" or its deriviatives. They've got military combatants. And their people, who are either in the IDF or the reserves till they're a gazillion years old, are themselves "mixing in with their civilians."
  
  

  Israel has heard these arguments before. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said, “Proportionality is not compared to the event, but to the threat, and the threat is bigger and wider than the captured soldiers.”

  Israel is confronting a regional threat, she and the government argue, which begins with Iran and Syria and their proxy, Hezbollah, and stretches to the radical Islamic Palestinian group Hamas.

  Nor does Israel deliberately single out civilians, she argued, as Hezbollah and Hamas do through rocket attacks and suicide bombings. Intent matters, she said.

  But in Gaza and Lebanon, civilians are inevitably harmed when militants hide among them. And in Lebanon, she said, some of the dead may be civilians associated with Hezbollah, assisting it or storing its rockets.

  “Terrorists use the population and live among them,” Ms. Livni said. “It’s difficult to target like a surgery. Unfortunately, civilians sometimes pay the price of giving shelter to terrorists.” Under pressure or not, she said, citing Israeli intelligence, many civilians in southern Lebanon have Katyusha and other rockets under their beds.

  
  
  
  But this kind of talk I think I can live with:
  
  

  “When you go to sleep with a missile,” she said, “you might find yourself waking up to another kind of missile.”
  
  Those arguments leave Lebanese and Gazans cold.

  
  
  Earth to Lebanese and Gazans: she was using "missile" as a metaphor for penises.



• Joe Lieberman can't stop acting like Joe Lieberman even for a brief, 3 month election season.



• Most folks haven't beeen making lots of money in the past few years, and the economy sucks. Right-wing media, stop trying to put lipstick on a pig.
  
  


• News reports have been typically saying there's 25,000 Americans in Lebanon, a population of about 3.8 million people. Were similar proportions of Americans to be living in China, there'd be more than 657,000 Americans in China, and another similar number would be living in India, or almost 1 of every 200 Americans in those countries. Which leads me to wonder: how many of those Americans in Lebanon are, you know, spies?
  

Must read on Mexico

James K Galbraith lays out some pretty persuasive evidence that the Mexican election was stolen, and the Bush regime couldn't be happier that democracy is thwartwed right next door.

Two weeks have now passed since the presidential vote in Mexico, pitting Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the party for a Democratic Revolution (PRD) against Felipe Calderón of the ruling National Action party (PAN). The candidate who trailed, López Obrador, has explicitly charged that the count was cooked. He has challenged the result in court. No final resolution is due before September.

Yet the stalwarts of democracy outside Mexico are silent. Bush has congratulated Calderón, not waiting for the court to rule. Reuters and Bloomberg echo the confidence of the elites that Calderón will win in court - never mind whether he won at the polls. When The New York Times is heard from, the headlines tell us of the "leftist claims" about the occurrence of fraud, while Calderón is described as "presidential." The Times never doubted that fraud did occur in Ukraine. In Mexico on the other hand, it seemingly renounces any duty to examine the facts on the ground.

Here's one difference between the two situations. In Ukraine, it was extremely hard to learn exactly what the evidence of fraudulence actually was. In Mexico, it is extremely easy. That is because the Mexican electoral authority, known as IFE, posted the ongoing count on its website in real time, an initiative called PREP. Independent scholars kept a record of PREP as the night progressed. A statistical analysis of that record does not, of course, constitute proof. But it brings to mind Henry David Thoreau's remark that circumstantial evidence can be very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

To begin with, a simple matter. According to an article by Roberto González Amador in La Jornada, the vote totals don't match the percentages reported. Given the just over 15m votes Calderón was said to have earned, the percentage reported for him, 35.89%, could only be obtained by including invalid ballots in the total reported. If, on the other hand, one takes the overall vote total and the percentage reported for Calderón as correct, then his total vote must have been substantially less than was reported.

The same is true for AMLO and the other candidates, and there is a total shortfall of over a million votes between what can be justified by the official percentages of the valid votes, and the sum of votes reported. The discrepancy proves nothing, but even if it is only a simple error, it certainly seems to cast doubt over the competence of the count.

Let's turn to the harder stuff. An analysis by the physicist Luis Mochán of UNAM based on the realtime evolution of the vote count and the distribution of vote totals by polling place can be found here, and in greater detail in Spanish, here. It's not easy reading, but is immensely worthwhile. It's possible that Mochán's work inaugurates a new era in realtime checking for vote fraud, made possible by the simplicity of Mexico's first-past-the-post direct vote and the rich electoral data sets that can be made instantly available. Call it the age of transparency, in collision with an oligarchy of thugs.

Wal-Mart's Lawrence Welk Coolness

Yes, folks even Joe Carter gets something right once in a while. Give him credit for finding this article about Wal-Mart trying to create an astro-turf "My Space" called "The Hub."

Wal-Mart has branded itself into a corner: it's cheap, dowdy or plainly low-class clothes and products are only bought as a last resort, which kind of limits their ability to grow into markets.

No kid past the tween years is ever going to want clothes from Wal-Mart.

I can't wait till the spoof videos appear...

Such nonsense

US News & World Report whitewashes the Lieberman narrative:

• Vote for Alito before he voted against him.
• Voted for the bankruptcy bill before he voted against it.
• Had no problem with Alberto Gonzales, or Abu Ghraib.
• He's no fan of womens' rights' to her body.
• He equates brain dead people with people.

Lieberman's time was over long ago; he was, as another Joe, Joe Pesce in Goodfellas might of put it: he was a rat; his whole caucus was rats, if elected he'd have been a rat.

James Dobson: Karma

The Carpetbagger's caught this bit on Dobson:

The Dobsons were members of the Nazarene Church, a denomination of evangelical Christianity that believes human beings are inherently evil but can be saved if they repent and put their faith in Jesus Christ. Followers believe fervently in Judgment Day, when the Lord will return to the earth, the dead will be raised, and the faithful will be reunited with their loved ones in Heaven. Nazarenes believe that after a person has had an initial born-again experience, the Holy Spirit will seek to perform a second work of grace called “entire sanctification” or “baptism with the Holy Spirit,” which purges all sin. Gil Alexander-Moegerle, a former Focus executive and once one of Dobson’s most trusted advisors, writes in his 1997 book James Dobson’s War on America that this “Holiness” principle is key to understanding Dobson’s worldview: “James Dobson believes that he has been entirely sanctified, morally perfected, that he does not and cannot sin. Now you know why he and moralists like him make a life of condemning what he believes to be the sins of others. He is perfect.”

With his born-again experience, James Dobson was on his way to fulfilling a family prophecy: His great-grandfather had told the family that he received a message from God informing him that four generations of his family would rise up and serve the Lord. Dobson’s father often spent three to four hours a day on his knees; the child attempted to pray before he learned to talk. Being the son of an itinerant, evangelical preacher was hard on young Dobson, an only child. While his parents spread the gospel, the boy often was left with relatives. Sensing his son’s loneliness, Dobson’s dad bought a house in Bethany, Oklahoma, and for the next 11 years his wife, Myrtle, looked after their child while he traveled from farm to church, sowing God’s word.

In the Dobson household there were “a million rules,” the son would later write, “regulations and prohibitions for almost every imaginable situation.” He was chewed out for using the expression “Hot dog!” and forbidden from uttering “darn,” “geez,” or “dad-gummit” because they were considered shorthand swear words. Yet Dobson was a rambunctious and mischievous kid. He loved roughhousing with his father; one of their favorite games was kick fighting. The elder Dobson would encourage the boy to kick him in the shins, blocking the blows with the bottom of his feet. “Jimbo,” or “Bo,” as his father called him, would fight back like a tiger, prompting his dad to “tap” him on the shins with his toe. “We would end up laughing hysterically, despite the bumps and bruises on my legs,” Dobson writes in Bringing Up Boys.

Once, as Dobson writes in The New Strong-Willed Child, Jimbo provoked a fight between a pug bulldog and a “sweet, passive Scottie named Baby” by throwing a tennis ball toward Baby: “The bulldog went straight for Baby’s throat and hung on. It was an awful scene. Neighbors came running from everywhere as the Scottie screamed in terror. It took ten minutes and a garden hose for the adults to pry loose the bulldog’s grip. By then Baby was almost dead. He spent two weeks in the animal hospital, and I spent two weeks in the doghouse. I was hated by the entire town.”

Myrtle Dobson was an amiable and social woman, but she didn’t hesitate to whack her son with a shoe or belt when she felt it was required. Consequently, Dobson writes, he learned at an early age to stay out of striking distance when he back-talked to his mother. One day he made the mistake of mouthing off when she was only four feet away and heard a 16-pound girdle whistling through the air. “The intended blow caught me across the chest, followed by a multitude of straps and buckles wrapping themselves around my midsection.” The girdle incident did not dampen his defiance, however. One evening, after Dobson’s mother forbid him from going to a dance, the recalcitrant teenager told her that he was going anyway; she picked up the telephone and called her husband. “I need you,” she said.

“What happened in the next few days shocked me down to my toes,” writes Dobson. His father canceled the next four years’ worth of speaking engagements, put the Oklahoma house up for sale, and took a pastor’s job in San Benito, Texas, a small town near the Mexican border. Dobson had two years of high school left, and when he started classes he found himself the target of a couple of bullies. Rather than turn the other cheek, Dobson wheeled around and threw his schoolbooks in the face of one annoying youth. “By the time he could see me again I was on top of him,” Dobson writes. Dobson also tried a little bullying himself, targeting a boy whom he sized up as a “sissy.” But the boy gave him such a thrashing that Dobson concluded bullying wasn’t for him.

Read the whole article; it's scary that someone who's so abused and frightened and credulous (the Ted Bundy incident's recounted in the article) has the influence that he does.

It's also a warning to parents everywhere, to cultivate discipline over themselves.