Let me tell you a little secret about myself: I can sense the ghosts of dead people, and I’m not using a metaphor here. I really mean ghosts, or souls, or spirits of other dead people. Call them whatever you want. I can feel them, and they used to scare the shit out of me.

This started when I was a kid. The apartment where my parents raised me had a badly-lit corridor with the living room on one end, my parents’ bedroom on the other, and my own bedroom and a bathroom in between. Often, on my way back from the bathroom, I would have a slight feeling that someone was behind me, just standing there looking at my back. I would turn, and each and every time I was unable to see anyone or anything. However, I felt, I knew there was somebody there, some presence staring at me. I would hurry up, run back to my room, and close the door behind me.

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Look at this video. This is how typical anti-nuclear protesters in Japan react when you try and talk to them.

So violent. How do you reason with someone like this? This is why you hear so much from anti-nuclear protesters, but you don’t hear from us pro-nuclear: anti-nuclear are many, irrational, violent and (most of them) don’t understand what they’re talking about. Because of this, pro-nuclear people feel threatened and prefer not to say anything.

Most of the song is insults, threats and yakuza-speak, but he also manages to drop a nice amount of lies (maybe just because he doesn’t understand what he’s talking about).

Let me clarify a few of them:

With technologies like solar power and other renewables, we can get all the electricity we need without nuclear power… and cheaply, too.

No. This has been discussed again and again in many places. Most of these aren’t economically viable, or just won’t work in a country like Japan that doesn’t have the resources. But hey, maybe I’m mistaken. Show me real data that proves that we can depend on the renewables, and I will happily agree with you.

More after the break.

Yesterday there was a blackout at home while I was at work. It lasted about two minutes, and I learnt about it because one of my monitoring systems at home sent me a notification saying that two of my servers had rebooted.

You know, I’m not used to blackouts because this is the first one in the 10 years I’ve been living in Japan. Usually I wouldn’t really care about the power going offline for a few moments, especially when I’m not home. However, I’m sharing my room with two little ferrets. They don’t stand the hot weather very well, so I keep the air conditioner on during the whole summer for them. Yes, 24×7. And yes, it’s expensive. When I came home yesterday I found the air conditioner turned off because of the blackout, and the room temperature was very high. Nothing happened to my ferrets this time, but it could have.

Read on for my opinions about all this anti-nuclear movement.

There are several things going on in the world right now that I consider worrying enough to write about. These are (in no particular order):

• Religion
• WikiLeaks
• Animal abuse
• Nuclear power
• Political corruption in Europe
• Intellectual property

I’ve started writing about a couple of these (nuclear power and intellectual property), but I never seem to be able to finish because there’s always something new happening that changes my priorities: Julian Assange is denied the appeal for extradition, or a new anti-nuclear demonstration, or the political party that got Greece in all this trouble wins the national elections again.

Since I can’t decide what to write about first, I thought I’d just write this post summarizing what my opinions are, and then decide on a subject based on what gets me the most death threats. Please note that I’m not talking about posting a tweet or two, but writing multi-page posts containing real information about the subject.

So here we go.The following are my opinions.