tonari no shibafu

Free documentaries online

A rich resource.

Some selections I'm interested in:

The Fog of War

Supersize Me

Outfoxed

Sicko

White Light/Black Rain

I've had this sneaking suspicion

that many of the people I've met who are considered by most measures successful are full of crap.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/lease.png

Recent things have convinced me I'm not alone in thinking this. First, the findings of Carnegie Mellon scientist Don Moore that demonstrated that people tended to value self-assuredness over expertise. Exempli gratia the way many behave on 'reality shows'. It would seem there's a current running through popular culture (American culture at least), that abnegates humility and, if not rewards then at least, abides immoderate bravado. Then I heard Judd Apatow, most of whose movies I really like, say in an interview (22:20) that he feels like everybody on earth is immature and that most people are a mess and they're either 1) covering it up or are 2) openly a mess -- granted that this may be true moreso in Hollywood than other places. He said that in his experience it was just as likely that a 60 year old would be immature/unevolved (my word) as a 16 y.o. This jibes with my experience. Both intro- and extrospectively.

Getting caught up with my reading

JAL CEO cuts his own salary to respond to poor performance and problems.

Esquire's 7 Best Stories via Kottke

Canada's Internet is Crap

Credit Default Swaps Demystified

Whassup

Ok, so I'm about 6 weeks late to the party. Still, on Ry's recommendation I checked this out and got a few good laughs. Well done.

Change

I wish my Dad was still alive to see this.

Catch phrase fatigue

I think if I hear one more person use the phrases 'Wall Street' and 'Main Street' in the same sentence, I'm gonna scream. Are all the political experts, pundits, and newspeople really so unimaginative?

Somebody buy a thesaurus.

Zizek Audio

Christopher Lydon talks with Zizek on Radio Open Source.

David Foster Wallace

I've never read any of his stuff before but this commencement address is compelling.

In looking around for stuff on Wallace I noticed something odd. In last November's Atlantic, Foster wrote:

Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea* one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”?* In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?

In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high price?

I could have sworn that Bill Maher (or perhaps one of his panelists) made this very case last week or the week before. I searched around the web and couldn't find the video to double-check.

Anybody know anything about this? Is someone plagiarizing?

Bill Maher, David Foster Wallace

Setting the record straight

Here's what I expect to be the first of many pages about Sarah Palin at factcheck.org.

Thanks again Bill

Bill Moyers talks again with Kathleen Hall Jamieson. This time (mostly) about the Republican National Convention.

Polls

Even though a good friend, probably Nate, told me years ago that sample size (after a certain point) does not significantly affect error, I've continued to have a bee in my bonnet about media sources not citing the margin of error when they cite poll results. It seems to me easy to do and therefore a red flag that they were hiding something from me.

Listening to the Bryant Park Project just now, they cited the results of a gallup poll which irritated my old wound and sent me a searchin'. So it seems to be true that the sampling error based on sampling size is fixed, but a greater determinant of the accuracy of a poll turns out to be the response rate, which is rarely reported.

Introduction to Sampling page at UC Davis

Frontline comparative health care

Frontline has a show that you can watch online comparing the health care systems of six countries including the US and Japan. Worth a look.

A discussion of John McCain's economic proposals

At economist's view what I found an enlightening discussion of some of the misperceptions and distortions that are being endorsed by economists that support McCain's presidency.

For what it's worth.

More Wire

Ed Burns on Fresh Air
Burns and Simon on Talk of the Nation
Simon and Pelecanos on Fresh Air
David Simon on Fresh Air

Ed Burns, David Simon, et. al.

The Time Magazine article. Read it.

Win Read Ben Stein's money comments ...

... about money

Spot on. Spot frickin' on.

excerpt:

Duh

It has always seemed to me that the majority of stuff on tv here falls somewhere along the range that runs from contrived to completely fabricated, so I can't see anyone being surprised when a network admits to falsifying their data. One of my favorite shows, which I would venture to say is representative, is based on the premise that some famous person (a different one every week) rides a train line (a different one every week), gets off at arbitrary stops, and goes into places that he/she finds while walking around. The week's host (as well as the shopkeeper/person in the midst of some odd hobby) then have to go through the obligatory step of pretending to act surprised. I have a few friends that run restaurants/cafes here and every time one of these shows has come to do a piece, they are told about it weeks in advance. For some reason, though, the 'look what I found' format seems set in stone, and people just take it for granted.

Anyway, because so much of Japanese tv is either premised on deception -- similar to those shows that are called reality television in the states -- or thinly veiled infomercials for something or other, I could never believe that, for example, natto would help me lose weight.

PSA

Anyone back home interested in Fair Trade and farming issues should check this out:

Three Voices: What Fair Trade Means to Farmers
New England Speakers Tour Oct 23-28, 2006

Monday, Oct 23 Burlington, VT

Tuesday, Oct 24 Tufts University, Medford, MA
Fair Trade Banana Banquet, Haley House, Roxbury, MA

Wednesday, Oct 25 Smith College, Amherst, MA

Thursday, Oct 26 Harvard University, Boston, MA

Friday, Oct 27 Putney, VT

A banana farmer from Ecuador, a watermelon and vegetable farmer from Georgia, and an apple grower from New England.

via US Food Policy

Object+participle constructions in political discourse

An interesting and thoughtful post over at Language Log about how conservatives have come to own a particular rhetorical tool.

An excerpt:

The subtitle [of his book] was adapted from the ad that the Club for Growth ran during the run-up to 2004 Iowa caucuses, when Howard Dean was still the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. An announcer asks a middle-aged couple leaving a barbershop what they think of "Howard Dean's plans to raise taxes on families by $1,900 a year." The man responds, "I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading ..." -- and then his wife picks up the litany -- "... body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs."

<snip>

Of course there's no intrinsic reason why the right should have a monopoly on those compounds. Back in the day, people played just as fast and loose with stereotypes in depicting poor white Southerners as cross-burning, Bible-thumping, sibling-shtupping primitives -- not just Northern liberals, but white-shoes Republicans and "genteel" Southerners, too. You still see this sort of thing coming from liberals from time to time -- writing in the Chicago Sun-Times just after the 2000 election, William O'Rourke described Bush's America as "Yahoo Nation":

    It is a large, lopsided horseshoe, a twisted W, made up of primarily the Deep South and the vast, lowly populated upper-far-west states that are filled with vestiges of gun-loving, Ku-Klux-Klan sponsoring, formerly lynching-happy, survivalist-minded, hate-crime perpetrating, non-blue-blooded, rugged individualists� which contains not one primary center of intellectual or creative density.


<snip>


But actually liberals rarely talk this way. On the Web, Volvo-driving liberal outnumbers pickup- or truck-driving conservative by around 50 to 1, and when you do encounter a phrase like beer-guzzling redneck it's almost always offered either as a conservative caricature of liberal speech or in the spirit of a reclaimed epithet (as in, "...and proud of it, son!" In fact the word redneck turns out about 20 times more likely to appear in the pages of National Review or The American Spectator than in The American Prospect or The Nation, almost always set in the mouth of some imaginary liberal.

Whatever they privately believe, most liberals know that this sort of culture-stereotyping is counter-productive for the left, not just because it puts them on the wrong side of the faux-populist divide, but because it excludes from consideration the bowtie-wearing, port-sipping Yalies who are sitting around the National Review office cooking this stuff up in the first place. And even when they restrict themselves to purely political attributes, liberals can't really use those cadences nowadays without implicitly acknowledging the right's ownership of them. In the course of praising the cleverness of the Club for Growth ad, for example, Kurtzman suggests that liberals might think of responding with an ad "telling Bush to take his deficit-creating, war-mongering, gas-guzzling, corporate criminal-coddling, election-stealing, Rush Limbaugh-listening, civil liberty-seizing, Bible-thumping, right-wing dictatorship back to Texas, where it belongs." But that comes off as nothing more than a strained tribute to the right's mastery of this syntax, in something like the way anti-war Democrats' "lie and die" seems to validate the right's "cut and run" as the basic pattern for Iraq War sloganeering.

The great rhetorical achievement of the right, as I argue in the book, is to have reformulated distinctions of class as bogus differences in consumer culture. So it makes sense that conservatives should seize on the object+participle construction, whose function to turn activities into attributes -- politically speaking, that is, you are what you do (or more accurately, what you drive, drink, or otherwise consume). Whereas when people on the left are of a mind to make sweeping generalizations, they tend to draw the distinction characterologically rather than culturally, which is why they favor extended bahuvrihi compounds like narrow-minded, hard-hearted, and mean-spirited.

Travelling outside of Japan for the holidays?

You might want to rethink using HIS.

The nation’s largest discount travel agency, HIS, which also runs foreigner-friendly No.1 Travel, has based the price of some air tickets from Japan on the nationality of the traveler, possibly in breach of Japanese law, The Japan Times has learned.

Foreigners trying to buy discount tickets through the company were quoted higher prices than Japanese customers purchasing discount seats on the same flight.

via Japan Probe

The Roppongi traffic cops bag another one...

Gaijin talento busted for drugs:

Via Japan-Zone:

Russian talento Solntsev Ivan (24) has been arrested for drug possession. He was questioned by police in Tokyo's Roppongi district on July 1 because his car was illegally parked. They found 1.9 grams of marijuana in his rucksack. One half of Ivan and John, the first non-Japanese duo of assistants on the daily Fuji TV variety show Warratte Iitomo, the Moscow native has lived in Japan since he was a boy. He and American John were the 12th pair of regular assistants on the record-breaking afternoon show, appearing for three years until March 2006. They would do a little dance routine to warm up the studio audience before the arrival of emcee Morita 'Tamori' Kazuyoshi (61), who has hosted the show every weekday afternoon since 1982.

The Truth About the Estate Tax

An interesting post about the estate tax at Rox Populi.

Roxanne quotes Teddy Roosevelt

As a matter of personal conviction, and without pretending to discuss the details or formulate the system, I feel that we shall ultimately have to consider the adoption of some such scheme as that of a progressive tax on all fortunes, beyond a certain amount either given in life or devised or bequeathed upon death to any individual—a tax so framed as to put it out of the power of the owner of one of these enormous fortunes to hand on more than a certain amount to any one individual; the tax, of course, to be imposed by the National and not the State Government.

What me worry?

Gotta say that because of my blog I've gotten back in touch with Smitty, Smitty, and Double-O, made some e-friends, and have discovered some very entertaining writers.  Not to mention the fact that I've wiled (sp?) away countless hours reading the likes of Bill Simmons and searching for anything and everything under the sun.  I've only been connected -- in the internet sense, not the Sopranos one -- for 3 short years, but can't now imagine not having access at home.  Still, as time marches on, and this is in no small part due to my realization that folks who really know the way our current technologies work can wreak havoc on the unsuspecting, I have become increasingly concerned about privacy issues and our collective lemming-esque rush to make our lives public...and googlable.

I've been puzzled by sites like YouTube and others where the bandwidth usage would suggest huge cash outlays with little obvious revenue.  How are sites like that and others, for example the social networking sites that seem to be popping up everywhere, making any money? 

Perhaps the answer is that they aren't.  Perhaps there is a bubble growing based on future revenues. 

Transforming Risk Into Opportunity

I do my damndest not to pay too close attention to US news.  That is, I get my news from distinct places and therefore often don't have a good handle on what plays on mainstream media.  That said, I don't know how much press the Custer Battles thing is getting back home, but I read the article below on Firedoglake and ended up disgusted.  As a fairly staunch liberal...progressive...whatever the heck people are calling themselves these days, it comes relatively easy to spout my opinions about war profiteering in Iraq and Afghanistan.  It wasn't much of a stretch for me to believe that KBR and other contractors were making a killing in Iraq.  That under the premise that "privatization is always better", the American people on the whole were getting taken to the cleaners, and some people with current and former ties to the military-industrial complex were doing their version of the legislator to lobbyist metamorphoses that has been so lucrative in Washington.  But some part of me always wanted to be wrong.  At least by degrees. 

here's an excerpt:

Perhaps it was fate that Scott Custer, a former U.S. Army Ranger, and Michael Battles, a failed Republican candidate for Congress in 2002, joined together to form the "business risk consultancy" Custer Battles, LLC. (Whoever thought that putting "Custer" and "Battles" together would signify "success" was terribly misinformed.)

Custer Battles&#8217; rise from obscurity to winning a $16 million securities contract in Iraq was outlined in an August 13, 2004 article in the Wall Street Journal (full article posted at CB&#8217;s website):


In July [2003], Scott Custer and Michael Battles, two former Army Rangers in their mid-30s, found themselves in charge of a $16 million contract to guard Baghdad&#8217;s airport. Barely funded with credit cards and money borrowed from a friend, their nine-month-old company had neither guns, accountants nor guards. It had to hire Nepalese Gurkhas to staff the project.

[&#8230;]

"For us, the fear and disorder offered real promise," says Mr. Battles, 34 years old, a onetime bull rider who served three years as a Central Intelligence Agency operative. (emphasis mine)


I think that quote pretty much sums of the whole reason why I am doing this series. It&#8217;s not, "we wanted to help" or "democracy in Iraq is a good thing." No, it&#8217;s "show me the money!" Heartless bastards.


The company that became Custer Battles could hardly have sprung from shallower roots. In late 2002, it was still in search of a name. Its co-founders considered Azimuth Partners, after the name of a compass point, but instead chose to name the company after themselves. Mr. Custer, 35, a distant relation of the ill-fated Gen. George Custer, concedes they draw giggles in Iraq, where it&#8217;s often noted that Custer was defeated by the locals. "We don&#8217;t really have a comeback," he says.


Doomed from the beginning.


Two days later, the company won the contract, beating companies with long histories in the business, including Texas-based Dyncorp International, a unit of Computer Sciences Corp., and the U.K.&#8217;s Armor Group International Ltd. Custer Battles&#8217;s bid was cheaper, but more important, it promised to have 138 guards on the ground within two weeks, faster than the others.

"We got that contract because we were young and dumb and didn&#8217;t know better," says Mr. Custer, a former Army captain who studied at Oxford and Georgetown universities. "Anyone with experience would have said they&#8217;d be there in eight weeks." (emphasis mine)



So incompetence was a requirement&#8230; now that makes sense.


Frank Hatfield, the senior U.S. airport official in Iraq at the time, says speed &#8212; not cost &#8212; was the deciding factor. All he wanted, he says, was an assurance Custer Battles could handle the contract.

Custer Battles lacked more than experience. No banks would lend it money. In the end, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority lent it $2 million in $100 bills that Mr. Battles stuffed into a duffel bag and personally deposited in a bank in Lebanon.

They had only two weeks to set up the project. In mid-July last year, new hires mustered in Jordan and had to be convoyed across the desert. The company had to buy all its equipment from the U.S. with only three full-time employees in its Virginia office to help.

[&#8230;]

Less than 10 miles from the city center, Baghdad International Airport quickly emerged as perhaps the safest and best-placed real estate in Iraq. The company took full advantage. Custer Battles built kennels for 18 bomb-sniffing dogs beside the camp and has parlayed the animals into $16 million in Army contracts. It also used a terminal to house 40 Filipinos brought in to provide catering services. Frank Willis, one of several officials hired by the Coalition Provisional Authority to handle aviation issues, watched with shock and awe. As officials tried to get Custer Battles to explain the dogs and the Filipinos, the company had ready explanations. "It was always some colonel or ministry official who&#8217;d given the OK," says Mr. Willis. "These guys were absolute masters at working the chaos of a combat zone and cutting corners to make a profit."

[&#8230;]

They worry that a single calamity or mistake could topple their young operation [&#8230;] (emphasis mine)

The rest here

...the drug of a nation...

Ok, so I wish I didn't care what happened with Izzie and Denny.  And I still fall for all the camera tricks and music that is reminiscent of the revelation scenes in John Hughes movies.  But damn that Grey's Anatomy is addictive.  * Here is a link to the show's website, but it has sound and an annoying amount of flash effects, so caveat clickor.

Was there any chance that I wouldn't watch what must be the best role Shatner ever played?  Nope, no chance.  And the Parker Posey.  and the James Spader.  even if it wasn't the only show that addresses a serious social issue every week.  still be one of the most enjoyable hours of tv goin'.

So, I'm a little behind the study plan today.

Worth every damn moment.

Two options: laugh or cry

By now I assume that everyone has heard that the NSA has been accumulating data on domestic phone calls.  I have been reading a lot of different takes on this and actually had meant to post on this yesterday, but  a computer malfunction mid-post sent that idea into the ether.  Anyway, Bruce Schneier gives us his favorite comedic take on this so far.  Classic.

The end of privacy

Did you know that US customs can open international mail without a warrant?

Neither did I.

via Schneier on Security

The trade act at issue is: 107 H.R. 3009.

Google, cookies and privacy

Color me nutty, but I avoid like the plague sites that require cookies.  The one exception to this being GMail (ok, ok, my fantasy NBA  league on Yahoo also requires cookies).  I just don't know enough about cookies and what they're capable of to not be wary of them on spec.

Also I have been reading some disturbing stuff over Professor Lenz's blog and elsewhere over the past few months. 

Is it just me, or does the idea of targeted ads freak anyone else out?  It felt to me like Google did an amazing marketing job getting people to move over to GMail en masse.  1. Offer 1GB accounts to all these users of other types of web-based email, whose accounts got full everytime someone sent us some digital photos.  2. Make the initial offering by invitation only, so that there is some cachet attached to having an account.  3. (And this is clearly not nefarious) offer more 'natural' ways of accessing emails (threads, searching, etc.)  And the small price that you pay is just to have ads targeted to you based on what is in your and your friends' emails.  Just a step in the evolution of the book recommendations from Amazon, right?  Right...? 

Well, check out this excerpt from a post at Schneier on Security:

Daniel Solove on Google and privacy:
A New York Times editorial observes:

At a North Carolina strangulation-murder trial this month, prosecutors announced an unusual piece of evidence: Google searches allegedly done by the defendant that included the words "neck" and "snap." The data were taken from the defendant's computer, prosecutors say. But it might have come directly from Google, which -- unbeknownst to many users -- keeps records of every search on its site, in ways that can be traced back to individuals.

I'm not sure what I am going to do about my current reliance on Google.  I really do dig GMail's massive inbox, but I may have to quit using it.  Also, I may move to clusty or some other search engine until Google works out it's privacy issues.

Anyone interested in the Google/Privacy issue should check out Professor Lenz's writings as well as the full post by Schneier above.  Enlightening.

Busted Tees

There seems to be a proliferation of internet tshirt sellers, which I don't necessarily think is a bad thing.  I've seen a few of the shirts from Tshirthell show up on tv (Scrubs if memory serves), and a shirt i got as a gift came from there as well.  So, Todd sent me a link to busted tees, and they have a few shirts that I found funny and would likely buy if i were slightly more motivated.

I'm not going home 'til this is rectified

Consider this from Salon:

Next time you sit down to pay your cable-modem or DSL bill, consider this: Most Japanese consumers can get an Internet connection that's 16 times faster than the typical American DSL line for a mere $22 per month.

Across the globe, it's the same story. In France, DSL service that is 10 times faster than the typical United States connection; 100 TV channels and unlimited telephone service cost only $38 per month. In South Korea, super-fast connections are common for less than $30 per month. Nations as diverse as Finland, Canada, and Hong Kong all have much faster Internet connections at a lower cost than what is available here. In fact, since 2001, the U.S. has slipped from fourth to 16th in the world in broadband use per capita. While other countries are taking advantage of the technological, business and education opportunities of the broadband era, America remains lost in transition.

via Undercurrent

After having had a computer (from this century) and broadband for only two scant years, I can't imagine going without it.  All three of my siblings own computers, which I guess says a lot for them as 40 somethings, but none has broadband at home.  As it is, I sometimes get impatient with my meager 10 Mbps DSL connection, but I can't imagine having DSL with speeds less than that or (heaven forbid) ISDN.   To be fair, DSL and cable internet access has come a long way in the 5 years that  I have been here.  When I arrived in 2001, I only knew a few people with DSL and now pretty much everyone I know has high-speed access at home and many of the apartment buildings here are going fiber optic.  I wonder what the problem is in the States.  I figure it must have something to do with the relative monopolies enjoyed by both telephone service and cable providers, but it seems to me that the States has the potential to be a connectivity utopia, and I wonder if there is possibly some conspiracy afoot to keep a relatively high cut off for the digital divide. 

I have been following the triabulations over at Blurbomat, and if someone with his technical expertise and resources can't get cheap reliable high-speed access, then I hold out little hope for the rest of the country. 

Oh, just to give people an idea of what we're talking about in Japan.  I pay about USD 50, per month for my connection, VoIP phone, email account, and homepage.  This is actually a bit pricey, but I have been too lazy to deal with having them come to upgrade me to 40 Mbps (for the same price).