Quote from soldier:

“I did enter the army with questions, maybe not the right questions, maybe not all the questions, but I did feel like ‘I’m a good Jew’, … that you have to walk around with question marks around your head. So I think I went into the army feeling I have the question marks. And one of the question marks was, ‘How will I be a good soldier in a shitty situation?’ … I thought I could be that soldier standing in a checkpoint smiling while cars are passing by, or I could enter a house walking around with candies in my pockets, and conduct a ‘moral occupation’. It took me a while but I realized this is a contradiction in terms. And when we started doing our actual service after almost a year and a couple of months in training, we started entering houses on a nightly basis, and searching houses on a nightly bases or going in to arrest people in the middle of the night you realize it’s impossible to be moral in an immoral situation.

”

President Barack Obama meets with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, right (Alma Mater St. Mary’s University, Texas), in the Oval Office, Sept. 9, 2010.  Also attending are, clockwise from left, Robert Cardillo, DIA deputy Director (and now Director of National intelligence for  intelligence integration and schooled at Georgetown), Deputy National Security Adviser Tom Donilon (Donillon attended la Salle Academy, earned a B.A. at:  The Catholic University of America in 1977 and is connected personally to the Biden family).  Rodney Snyder, Senior Director for Intelligence Program, NSS(Can not find any kind of BIO on him).  John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism ( Attended private catholic schools from his youth, is Alma mater at Fordham University and is former CIA), and National Security Advisor Gen. James L. Jones (Alma Mater Georgetown University)

I believe the Vatican and the Jesuits are at the top of the pile of evil in the world today! One man I know called the Vatican, “An old farts club that has lost its power.” I think anybody who thinks so is incredibly naive and woefully (or willfully) ignorant of history and the political influence of the Roman Catholic church! Such a person doesn’t even know the “Golden Rule,” namely, “He who has the gold, rules.” The Roman Catholic empire had well over 1000 years to fleece Europe and the world of its wealth. Money is power.

Did you know that Washington D.C. used to be called Rome, Maryland, and that Rome was the original community name of Capitol Hill, upon which the United States Capitol Building sits? Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome,_Maryland

I may be leaving Fedora Linux for good this time. Fedora 17’s added “features” were not a plus for me. Moreover, things that worked fine before became quirky. For example, switching to Japanese input using Ibus required me to press Ctrl + Space 3 or 4 times to make it work. Linux Mint Debian works instantly and gives me the added feature of merely pressing the Hankaku key (on Japanese keyboards).

All the apps I used in Fedora work fine. Wine takes a bit longer to load and the display font was incorrect immediately after installation, but after running from Terminal:

sudo apt-get install ttf-liberation

Wine works great! The Windows text to voice application, Text Aloud works fine, and it recognizes AT&T Natural Voices!

The default Mate Desktop Environment loaded unusually slow so I installed LXDE and am using it instead. Though LXDE as a few less features than Mate, it’s more responsive. And it has one feature Mate doesn’t have: LXDE aligns desktop icons automatically next to each other after deleting an icon.

Though I could install Dansguardian in Fedora 17, I couldn’t figure out how to get it to filter. The tutorial I wrote on http://linux.jamesjpn.com/how-to/dansguardian-install.html
didn’t work for Fedora 17. Using a tutorial on http://www.howtoforge.com/dansguardian-content-filtering-with-transparent-proxy-on-ubuntu-9.10-karmic works on Linux Mint Debian! There was only one command that I had to modify on that tutorial. It was:

sudo update-rc.d tproxy enable 5

rather than just

sudo update-rc.d tproxy

One of my Facebook friends posted this image. I think it pretty much shows the reason for the reason conflicts. As the Bible says, ¶From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? (James 4:1) All modern wars are fought for economic reasons, for the “haves and have mores” as George W. Bush told the elite in one of his speeches. The poor and common people don’t want to risk their lives to make the rich even richer, and so the government has to give them another reason such as “to protect our democratic freedoms!” etc.

When I first saw this image that somebody posted on Facebook, I wondered about the Iraq – Iran war. Who attacked first? Iraq did! Iran did not initiate the aggression; Iraq invaded Iran. Iran was also invaded in 1941 by Soviet, British, and other Commonwealth armed forces. History shows that Iran has not been the aggressor in modern conflicts with other nations.

It was fine weather when I started out from Niigata City at 10 a.m. My destination was Sayama City in Saitama Prefecture which is just to the north of Tokyo. The distance from home is about 280 kilometers, only half of the 560 kilometers to Osaka which I hitchhiked the previous week. I thought it would be piece of cake not only because the distance to travel was much less, but because it was a Saturday. Weekends are always easier to hitchhike. People are often traveling either to or from their home towns which means they are going further than they would be on a workday. Normally it gets easier and easier to catch rides the closer I get to my destination. Today was different!

The first driver was an architect who designs homes and buildings. I asked him if he thought that the collapse at near free fall of the World Trade Center buildings was caused by burning jet fuel melting the steel girders. “No way!” he replied. “It was done by an explosive called Termite.” I said, “Do you mean Super Termite or Nano-Termite?” The man was surprised I knew of those words. He said that termite is unknowingly being used in building construction. He said Termite’s chemical reaction with a combination of steel and aluminum is powerful.

The second driver was a lady, a young mother with her two young daughters, Chika (6) and Mei (3). It’s so uncommon for me to be picked up with little kids in the car without the father or an adult man present. Out of 2550 vehicles since keeping records from August of 2003, the total number so far is 45 cars which is 1.67% of the total, a number higher than I thought it would be. I wanted to take their photos but she said no when I said I wanted to post it on the Internet!

The third driver, a man by the name of Hidetoshi, said he just came from Fukushima only 25 kilometers away from the damaged nuclear powerplant. His job is to restore a fossil fuel power plant not far from the damaged nuclear plant. Hedetoshi said he likes America and its freedoms. I told him my experience of getting thrown in jail for 3 hours for passing out Gospel literature on the street at a western suburb of Chicago.

The 4th car was another mother with her child! It is possibly a first ever experience to be picked up by two mothers with little children in a single day! Ladies who pick me up are 15% of the drivers. Drivers with little children in the car are about 6% of the total number of vehicles but the father is usually present. Mothers with little children without their husbands present are possibly less than 0.01% of the total number of cars. The mother in the photo on this post has an older daughter who is 20 years old, just married and is herself about to have a baby! This is a gap of 18 years between bearing children. I asked the mother if she purposely wanted to have a 2nd child after raising one to adulthood, and she said yes! God bless her.

Her home in Fukushima near the border of Ibaragi was destroyed by the March 11, 2011 earthquake which forced her to move. She took me to Akagikogen in Gunman.

After waiting some 30 minutes at the Akagikogen service area, a highway patrol car pulled up and 4 men got out and questioned me. These guys are no police but have the power to ask me to leave. They are often followed up by police.

This time I was able to talk my way out of getting kicked out of the expressway service area! The last time I was stopped like this, they called the cops and I was escorted to a town from where I was told to catch a bus. But today I asked them if I could stand near the restroom area and ask drivers directly for a ride. After about 10 minutes of waiting and further negotiation, they got the OK from their boss. They made me promise not to step out into the street, a promise I kept.

After another 30 minutes a man offered to take me to the Takasaka service area in Saitama Prefecture. This is just short of where I wanted to get off the Kan’estsu expressway in Kawagoe! His highschool son was in the car and I spoke to him in English, something the father appreciated.

It was after 5 p.m. and dark when I arrived in Takasaka. The service area was crowded with people and cars, but everybody seemed to be in a busy mood. From experience I knew I was in a bad situation. When the service area is too crowded, nobody seems to car about the lone hitchhiker. And because it was dark, it made the situation even worse. I knew there had to be a train line within walking distance from the service area. After 20 minutes of vain efforts asking drivers for rides, I opted to leave the service area out the back way and walked the regular road toward the distant lights of a town toward the east. I knew the train line was in that direction. This paid off and in 30 minutes I arrived at the Kita Sakado train station! From there it was only 570 yen to get to Sayama city.

God is good.

It’s been about half a year since visiting the Kansai area of Japan. “Kansai” literally means, “Western Barrier” and consists of three main cities, Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe. You might ask, “Is there an Eastern Barrier? Yes, there is. It’s called the Kanto plain with Tokyo being the main city. “Kanto” literally means “Eastern Barrier.” This all has to do with Japanese history from the Samurai times of 500 years ago.

Japan is divided into political regions called ken in Japanese or Prefecture in English. Prefectures are similar to states of the USA or provinces in Canada. There are 5 prefectures between Niigata Prefecture and Osaka spanning a distance of 500 kilometers or 315 miles.

Thanks to expressways that go that entire distance, it’s actually easier for me to make in all the way to Osaka from Niigata in one day, a distance approximately 100 kilometers further than hitchhiking to Aomori city. Now with 2 hours less daylight than in the summer, I often cannot catch the final car before dark and have to take a train the rest of the way.

I left home at 7:00 a.m. took a train to Sanjo city (25 kilometers from home), and got to the Sakae Parking Area on the Hokuriku Expressway around 8:30 a.m. It was a warm and bright sunny day. Three cars took me to the Tokumitsu Parking area just past Kanazawa, about the half way point arriving just after 3:00 p.m. But the weather had changed and it was raining heavily! I stopped for lunch hoping the rain would subside, but it didn’t. Even though I had an umbrella, I knew from experience standing near the parking area exit where cars would re-enter the expressway in the middle of the rain would get me nowhere. Drivers have rarely stopped for me in such a case. I stood under a covered area next to the parking area and walked out holding a sign that said either “Fukui” (the next Prefecture” or “Osaka” depending which way I turned the sign. Many of the vehicles had Fukui plates but everyone I asked turned me down.

Though I stood under the covering most of the time, my legs and left arm got wet from the rain. An hour and a half past and it began to get dark. If I was going to Aomori city, I would have stopped hitchhiking at this time and opted for the train. But in Ishikawa prefecture, I had no such recourse. I was nowhere near a train station.

I was in a desperate situation but remembering that I’ve been in worse gave me comfort. I prayed asking God to supply my needs — the need of a driver going to Osaka! It wasn’t absolutely imperative that I arrive to my destination that evening, but I was facing an uncomfortable night if I didn’t. There is no long bench to sleep on at the Tokumitsu Parking area like there was at Adatara in Fukushima Prefecture. (another story).

It gets dark early in the Japan in Autumn, Rather than stand in the parking area under heavy rain, I stood next to the entrance of the parking area’s restroom and showed my A4 paper sign to all which said “Fukui” the next Prefecture on the way to Osaka. After many rejections, at 5:55 p.m. an man said,

“I’m going to Osaka, not Fukui.” I turned my plastic case of A4 signs around, showed him the Osaka sign and replied, “Osaka! Yes, I want to go to Osaka! Would you take me please?”

He replied, “Sure, just wait where you are now till I have some dinner.”

I replied as he left toward the restaurant in the parking area, “Don’t forsake me!”

The man is a truck driver and true to his word, he took me to Osaka, and quite close to my actual destination! Because of the rain, waiting for rides and the fact the truck driver got off the expressway at Tsuruga and took the regular road along the western shore of Lake Biwa to Kyoto and Osaka, the entire trip took 16 hours.

In contrast the return trip to Niigata on Sunday took only half the time, about 8.5 hours. It was sunny weather and a weekend. Saturdays, Sundays and holidays are always better for me when hitchhiking. People on their day off are more likely to pick me up than those going to work or back. There was little waiting time. An elderly couple took me from Shizugatake in Shiga Prefecture to Nadachihama in Niigata, a good 300 kilometer distance! And I made 3 new Facebook friends!

A friend posted this on Facebook today. Rather than share it only with my Facebook friends, I thought to share it with the world. Of course it’s also posted on numerous other blogs and articles. It’s so refreshing to see a person stand up for moral convictions even though it means personal loss!

This blog was using two WordPress plugins to block comment spam, Akismet which is about 97% effective, and SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam which requires the commentator to type a code he or she reads from an image.

Today I learned of a WordPress plugin that is supposed to be 100% effective called Spam Free WordPress. It’s said to be better than Akismet not only because it blocks comment spam 100% with no false positives, but also because unlike Akismet, no spam comments are saved in the blog’s database. This means a WordPress blog can operate more efficiently.

Because Spam Free WordPress is supposed to be 100% effective, I figured I didn’t need SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam anymore and deleted the plugin. This makes it easier for anyone to add a comment if he is she is a legitimate commentator. Moreover, it’s good to limit the number of plugins to the least amount necessary to improve loading speed.

Will it work? I’ll update this post when I find out.

Westboro Baptist church hate signs

Oct. 4, 2012: Yesterday I listened on YouTube what two granddaughters of Fred Phelps, the pastor of the infamous Westboro Church in Topeka Kansas, had to say, “I’d rather the whole world go to hell. Yeah, that’s just fine with me because … whatever God’s Will is, is great by us.” (From http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gX-vQ5sMOw )

And then they talked about disasters and future disasters as the work of God and laughed about it! It grossed me out. Their attitude is the exact opposite of the Message of the Bible!

1 Timothy 2:4  Who (God) will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.

These girls are literally laughing at people dying and burning in hell! Does God do that? The Bible says:

Ezekiel 33:11  Say unto them, As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?

I was particularly disturbed by the “God hates you” sign held by one of the members of the Westboro Baptist church. Does the Bible say that? I did a Bible study using the nifty Theophilos Bible software. It was created for MS Windows but runs just fine in Linux under WINE. Theophilos Bible uses the good old KJV, the most authoritative English version of the Bible.

There are only 17 Scriptures in the Bible with the combination of God and either hate or hateth, and not one of them talk about God hating a person! It talks about people hating God, or people hating God’s people, or God hating some sin or deed, but not the person. Below is the output of a search of a combination of God and hate, a total of eight verses:

• Exodus 20:5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;
• Deuteronomy 5:9 Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me,
• Deuteronomy 30:7 And the LORD thy God will put all these curses upon thine enemies, and on them that hate thee, which persecuted thee.
• Psalms 68:1 To the chief Musician, A Psalm or Song of David.>> Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered: let them also that hate him flee before him.
• Amos 5:15 Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate: it may be that the LORD God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph.
• Amos 6:8 The Lord GOD hath sworn by himself, saith the LORD the God of hosts, I abhor the excellency of Jacob, and hate his palaces: therefore will I deliver up the city with all that is therein.
• Matthew 6:24 No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
• Luke 16:13 No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

There are 36 verses with the combination of Lord and hate or a grammatical form of the word hate, and only one of them, Psalm 11:5, say that the Lord hates wicked people, specifically the person who loves violence! Who would love violence? People who profit from waging war, international bankers who profit from war, and individuals who receive blood money. I think most of the world hates that kind of people as well. But though they may be still powerful in the world, they are an exceedingly small minority of people!

In contrast, there are 96 verses with the combination of Lord and love, and 90 verses with a combination of God and love. These include grammatical forms of the word love.

Adding it all up, verses with God and love are 3.5 times more than verses containing the words God and hate with only one verse which says God hates those who love violence.

There are also verses where God using the first person singular “I” says He hated Esau, but that was in comparison for His love for Jacob! God blessed Esau and he became prosperous. And though Esau hated Jacob for deceiving his father Isaac to get the blessing that was supposed to come to him, he didn’t hold a grudge forever and welcomed Jacob’s return.

God does not hate the world in general, the Bible says that God loves the world!

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. – John 3:16

The Bible does say, “Love not the world” (1 John 2:15) but it is talking about “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (verse 16), not hating people.

Conclusion: Those poor relatives of Fred Phelps who comprise the majority of his church follow only him, not the Jesus Christ of the Bible, nor what God’s Word says in the Bible. If they don’t have love, they don’t know God for the Bible says:

He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.– 1 John 4:8

I pray they wake up and realize they are a cult following a cult guru: Fred Phelps.

On Nov. 22, 2011, Mark Levin the host of a Chicago’s WLS radio talk show received a phone call from a neurosurgeon. According to the neurosurgeon, under Obama’s health care plan, patients are called “units” and all patients over 70 years of age who need advanced neurosurgery will be given “comfort care” instead! Comfort care: “Medical care that is focused on relieving symptoms and optimizing patient comfort. Comfort care does not seek to cure or aggressively treat illness or disease.” (Definition from http://dying.about.com/od/glossary/g/Comfort-Care.htm) In other words, patients over 70 needing advanced brain surgery to save their lives will be denied the surgeon’s care!

Listen to the short 4 minute 47 second audio:

Phone_call_from_Neurosurgeon_32bps1

This morning I was asked if I could extract the audio tracks of certain Youtube videos and make a compilation of them on an audio CD in order to listen to them using a CD player. “I don’t know how or if it’s even possible,” I replied. “Come on!” she said, “I know you can figure it out if you tried.” And so I was faced with another technical challenge. But thanks to the ease of looking up information from the Internet, in only minutes I learned I have all the tools I needed on my Fedora 17 Linux PC.

You might wonder, “Why would anybody want to do that?” In her case, it was to be able to listen to some guy’s seminar without using a PC. He was just standing there talking. What he had to say was much more important than watching him say it.

First we must download the Youtube. I use a Mozilla Firefox add on called “Flash Video Downloader Youtube Downloader”. It gives me a choice of what format to download with. In this case I downloaded in .flv format. The file downloaded to Downloads of my home directory.

First open Terminal and enter the following commands based on the name of the files you downloaded:

• $ ffmpeg (This is to make sure you have ffmpeg on your system: If you get a command not found message, install ffmpeg)
• $ cd Downloads
• $ ffmpeg -i nameoffile.flv -vn -acodec copy yourfile.m4a
• $ ffmpeg -i nameoffile.m4a yourfile.wav

Now the file is in wav format, perfect to make audio CDs out of. Just use your favorite CD Burner application to make an audio CD out of it. I use K3b.

If you are a Windows or a Mac user, I’m sure you can get the tools you need for this job, but it they may not be freeware.

Dr. Kent Hovind is one of my heroes. He is now suffering what the Apostle Paul suffered for boldly proclaiming the Truth of the Creator and the message of Jesus Christ: Persecution resulting in imprisonment.

Dr. Hovind urges creationists to define the word evolution before entering into a debate about Evolution verses Creation. He teaches us the 6 meanings of evolution:

1. Cosmic evolution: the origin of time/space/matter from nothing in the supposed “Big Bang”
2. Chemical evolution: all the elements “evolved” from hydrogen
3. Stellar evolution: stars formed from dust clouds
4. Organic evolution: life formed from non-living matter
5. Macro-evolution: plants and animals produce offspring different than their ‘kind’
6. Micro-evolution: variations develop within the kind such as big dogs and little dogs; bacteria becoming resistant to drugs; etc.

Only ONE of these definitions for evolution is true SCIENCE—Number 6. The first five are part of a RELIGION that adherents must “believe” in since they have NEVER been observed or demonstrated.

Taken from http://www.kenthovindblog.com/?p=980

The charts show the percentage of obese people per population among 34 nations of the world.

I found this data and the Japanese chart from http://www2.ttcn.ne.jp/honkawa/2220.html

Japan is the lowest with only 3.5% of the population and America is the highest with a whopping 35.9%! S. Korea is only 4.1% whereas Mexico is 30%. North Americans definitely eat too much sugar!

The red lines shows my route to Aomori, and the blue back the route back to Niigata

On August 4 and again on August 10, I hitchhiked nearly a complete loop twice around the Hohoku region of Northeastern Japan.

The total distance hitchhiked for the two trips was 1940 kilometers in 27 vehicles. This averages out to approximately 72 kilometers traveled per vehicle. However the average distance per vehicle on the returned trips 113 kilometers compared to only 47 per vehicle on the way to Aomori. This is because I took the Hokuhoku Expressway back home, the route that passes Sendai and goes through Fukushima prefecture. Drivers are going much further distances along that route.

Though the Tohoku expressway route is 100 kilometers further, it’s actually faster than Route 7 along the Sea of Japan, and it’s definitely cheaper, usually no money for transportation all all. Why? From experience hitchhiking on Route 7, I cannot always catch the last ride before dark. Rather than hitchhike at night, I opt to catch a train the rest of the way home. But taking by the Tohoku Expressway, I have no such recourse. There are no trains I can catch in time. This means stretching my faith a bit more and relying wholly on my Creator to bless me with kind Japanese people to pick me up.

You may wonder why I don’t take the Tohoku Expressway through Fukushima on the way up to Aomori as well. I don’t because few cars are going that direction from Niigata. Traffic is greater from Fukushima toward Niigata because many drivers are going further than Niigata, destinations as far as Kyoto and Osaka.

Highlights of the two trips:

• Of the 8 cars I traveled in the first trip to Aomori, half of them were ladies. The average percentage of lady drivers in the past 2901 cars since keeping record from August 2003 is only 15%.
• I met again by chance a lady from Hirosaki who picked me up on Nov. 22, 2009, Ms. Eriko.
• Two people confessed that they suffered from depression. Both were women. Both take mood altering medication. I told them that spiritual problems can only be effectively dealt with by using spiritual methods.
• Got bit in the arm by a driver’s little dog which put a whole in my white dress shirt! The driver bought me a brand new shirt to replace it. Though there was a mark on my arm that day, by the next day it totally disappeared.
• A Christian lady who is a teacher at the prestigious Keio University took me all the way from Hirosaki to Fukushima, a distance of 430 kilometers. She has quite a few friends in high places!

I’ve been telling my Japanese friends that the entire Tohoku area, the northeastern part of Honshu which includes Fukushima prefecture (but not Niigata), could fit into Lake Michigan. To prove that to myself I took two screen-shots of Google Map, both to scale. You can see the Great Lake if overlapped on top of Tohoku would extend well into the Kanto area.

Later after looking up the areas from Wikipedia, I learned that the land area of Tohoku is 66,890 sq. kilometers or about 13% larger than Lake Michigan’s surface area of 58,000 sq. kilometers. Not quite a fit after all. But Tohoku could fit easily in Lake Superior which has a surface area of 82,100 sq. kilometers.

Only the southern shore of Lake Michigan was my old stompin’ grounds, the area from Evanston, the northern suburb of Chicago to the sand dunes of the state of Michigan. I had never even been to the state of Wisconsin in my childhood, and only once when 27 years old driving to Canada. In contrast there is hardly any place in Northern Japan I haven’t been. That includes the northern island of Hokkaido.

Lake Michigan, the second largest Great Lake, is 86 times larger than the largest lake in Japan, Lake Biwa near Kyoto. It’s the only Great Lake entirely in U.S. borders and the largest large in the world that doesn’t share a border with another country.

The red marker points to Lake Geneva Canopy Tours of which my friend, Mike Goril, is the general manager.