tonari no shibafu

James Fallows on David Brooks in China

The last line of the post:

Take a little time and look around, David. The parts that don't fit what you theorized before arriving are actually the most stimulating.

On my radar thanks to Gen.

Journalism

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

I just noticed this at the end of Big Bang Theory.

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.

Who You Should Vote For Barack Obama: 80%
Hillary Clinton: 60%
Ron Paul: 33%
John McCain: 27%
Mike Huckabee: 13%

Who you agree with on the war in Iraq: Ron Paul

Who you agree with on the economy: Hillary Clinton

Who you agree with on health care: Barack Obama

Who you agree with on taxes: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton

Who you agree with on abortion: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama

Who you agree with on gay rights: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama

Who Should You Vote For?

via Ollie

A not atypical Sunday

Woke up today around 8, which constitutes sleeping in for me. Checked email and worked through my newsreader while listening to the NPR 24-hour program stream. Then around 10:00 on to listening to Wait Wait. That brings us current. Now Misa and I are trying to decide what to have for breakfast brunch.

I have some studying to do for the kanken and also have to meet up with my boy Bunshi who's in town from Sapporo. He's staying in Gotanda, but I' not sure where we'll meet up yet. Usually we hang out at The Cow, but I'll have to check what they have on tap before we decide to go there. I might try to find a place in Sangenchaya. It is a really hip place with lots of eateries and drinkeries and is only a stone's throw both from the Yamanote and from Misa's place.

11:00-11:30 Filed some online reports for work.

Lunch and miscellaneous screwing around and trying to troubleshoot intermittent signal dropping on Misa's airport. That's (seemingly) fixed.

2:00-5:00 Kanji study with a small break around 3:30 to try out SKYPE

5:00-6:00 Watching Sumo

Sumo is on tv from about 12:00, but the high-ranked wrestlers don't come on until around 4:00, at which time they also start the English language broadcast on the sub-channel. This is the first tournament since the summer in which yokozuna Asashoryu is competing. He was given a two tournament suspension, but also had surgery to repair an injury during that time. He's been kinda the bad boy of Sumo for the last 5 years in spite of being one of the most dominant sumotori ever. I'm not a big fan of his style of sumo, but his ability is beyond dispute.

...

Just back from seeing Bunshi. It's amazing to me that we could've been such good friends for going on 7 years, as I feel like I'm just starting to understand a reasonable percentage of his Japanese. 運が良かったみたい。

Gonna watch the latest episode of Psych and hen hit the rack.

Who knew that Woody Allen had a talk show

Your Daily Awesome serves up the interview between Woody and Billy Graham.

via Your Daily Slacker

Thanks, Keith.

I'm glad that somebody's got our backs.

A confession

I have been woefully ignorant of the details of 'the Plame Affair' for months now. It's been one of those things that just was under my radar in terms of my regular news gathering activities, but with every mention on The Daily Show or that came up on sites like Crooks and Liars, I felt a little more out of it. Thankfully, I became aware of (forget from which site) this page from Frontline that has streaming videos of their coverage.

Perfect for a rainy Tokyo morning.

Don't have a cow monsieur

I've taken to reading Agence France Press occasionally. Ever since the days when I was living with Spike and Double-O, at which time I had a subscription to The Economist, I've tried to stay abreast of continental opinions of the goings-on in the American political system. I have nothing to say about the substance of this article on Barack Obama's announcement of his candidacy for president, it just struck me as funny that the location of the article is listed as SPRINGFIELD, United States.

Barack Obama Interview

A sober look at the candidate that everyone's talking about by Harper's.

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, puppy

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.

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.

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

Another great one

Boston University's World of Ideas series serves up another great one.  This time it is a debate about whether the US should promote democracy in the Islamic world.

I have a question mister president...

...how do we make military contractors in Iraq subject to some law, since they aren't subject to the uniform military code of justice?

President Bush: I don't know.

My humiliation as an American continues apace.

via Crooks and Liars

For the Massholes

I mentioned before (or at least i meant to) the push in Massachusetts to get rid of soda and junk food in public schools.  Parke, over at US Food Policy is all over this and recommends that people in favor of this start calling their representatives and members of the House Ways and Means committee.  Let's help to reduce the trend toward obesity and the concomitant health risks.

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.

George Bush Doesn't Like Black People Remix

I got it first as a podcast from Commonbits.org, but evidently it was up at Boing Boing first.  Pretty catchy tack actually.  Totally infectious hook.

There is hope for hiphop yet.

Olbermann's editorial

I never would have guessed while watching ESPN's SportCenter in the late 80s - early 90s, that Keith Olbermann would be reporting the (non-sports) news.  Having moved to Tokyo 4+ years ago, I have never acttually seen his show, but clips that I  have seen have shown that his skills in criticism, writing and oratory are far from limited to the sports genre.

His editorial on what is/has been happening in New Orleans is succint, and scathing.

via Bitch. Ph.D

Good night, America, how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans Louisiana,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

WGBH Lecture Podcasts

WGBH, the public television station in Boston is offering a weekly podcast of lectures.
This week's lecture is by Maureen Dowd.

Technorati Tags: podcast, PBS

For the Kiwis

Welcome to the political shame party.

The former leader of a Christian party in New Zealand has been jailed for nine years for sex crimes against girls.

Graham Capill founded and led the Christian Heritage Party until 2003.

He pleased guilty to charges of rape, indecent assault and unlawful sexual connection with three girls who were all aged under 12.

After sentencing, Capill said he recognised the hypocrisy of what he had said in public and done in private and greatly regretted his past actions.

While it may seem like I'm picking on the politically active conservative christians today, it is just a happy coincidence.

via BBC

Family Farms and the Estate Tax

Like the good fan of the West Wing that I am, I have been curious since the episode 20 hours in America about the reality of family farming, esp. as it relates to the estate tax.  As an unapologetic left, progressive, Liberal, I have to wonder at times to what extent I have drunk the kool aid and to what extent my beliefs on certain things are just as I believe them to be.

So it tickled me to learn just how much bunk all the chatter about family farms being impacted by estate taxes is. 

I present you this from the New York Times:

    The number of farms on which estate tax is owed when the owners die has fallen by 82 percent since 2000, to just 300 farms, as Congress has more than doubled the threshold at which the tax applies, the Congressional Budget Office said in a report released last week.

    All but 27 farmers left enough liquid assets to pay taxes owed, the budget office found, although it hinted that the actual number might be zero. The study examined how much in cash, stocks and bonds these farmers left to pay estate taxes, but the report noted that no data existed on how much life insurance the farmers had put into trusts. Virtually all wealthy farmers own life insurance in trusts, say estate tax lawyers who specialize in working with farmers.

    These findings come as the Senate is poised to vote this month on repeal of the estate tax. Advocates of repeal have begun showing commercials criticizing senators who oppose repeal, like Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington. Many of the criticisms focus on a supposed threat to family farms.

My understanding is that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is supposed to be one of the most reliable sources of statistical research inside the beltway and that both the executive branch and the congress rely heavily upon their reports to back up their legislative agenda. 

Time to get the word out.

via US Food Policy Blog

Proud to be a Masshole

I'm not sure how I missed this...no wait I know, it's because my local paper back home suffers from the same thing that plagues many small town papers: bad writing.  Anyway, that keeps me out of the loop on most of the news with the exception of occassional contact with my brother and/or my boy Patrick. 

In any event, it seems that a bunch of anti-gay rights folks were planning to demonstrate outside of my old junior high (now middle school), because among the flags of countries of the world, they have hung a gay pride flag. 

“That's why we're coming,” Phelps-Roper said. “Massachusetts has become the epicenter of filth in this country, and we will be there to remind people that there is a God and there is a standard. There is a day of judgment, and it's not OK to be gay.”

Kudos to them for standing up for what they believe in and being willing to participate in social action.  Too bad that they're so sure about their conception of God that they think they need to be out proselytizing (sp?).  So, if my god(s) say(s) it's ok to be gay, or even better, has nothing to say on the subject,  what then?  The only way that something like what these people believe in could be correct is if all opposing religious views are wrong/invalid. 

It must be very liberating to be so sure of oneself...

Anti-Japanese Propaganda Posters from WWII

Found via del.icio.us

link

...and I will advertize it.

Milton Friedman and 500+ other economists have come out in favor of marijuana legalization in the United States. 

"There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana," the economist says, "$7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven't even included the harm to young people. It's absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes."

I guess when you're 92, you can say what you want.  I am not a supporter of Friedman, who was one of the primary architects of the trickle-down Reaganomics that augered the US's finances into the ground during the 80s, and helped to exacerbate the income gap that has been in the news again recently.  But hell, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

via Mahalanobis

btw The Economist supports legalization, for whatever that's worth

Jon Stewart, simply amazing

If you didn't get a chance to see Jon Stewart on Crossfire, go right now and watch it at Media Matters.

Why do people keep trying to call Jon Stewart out? Bill O'Reilly did it a few weeks back by trying to slander the viewership of the Daily Show. Slackers and pot smokers, one and all was the rallying cry. It is amazing to me that the conservative spin machine feels a need to debunk every opposing voice and viewpoint, even those of comedians. You would think they would realize by now that someone who is well-informed and who made their career thinking on their feet and dealing with hecklers is probably not the person to try to attack on a live news show.

In any event, Stewart, as he has done repeatedly during the past few months, tries to remind the hosts that what he does is in fact a comedy show and should not be compared to crossfire and the rest of the cable news shows. The problem, I believe, is that both sides are looking to win over as many of the 18-25 (predominantly male) vote as possible (or at the very least turn them against The Daily Show). I think that the Republicans are running scared at the thought that we may take one last choking hit, save our place on Medal of Honor: Rising Sun and head off for the polls to vote this time, and that if we do, President Bush will receive about the same amount of support from us as pizza places that don't deliver.

In any event, it is worth the time for the download just to watch Tucker Carlson get served...

via Gen Kanai