The election's long gone but the shrub lingers on

Trolling my list of refering sites I came across this well compiled collection of information about the 2000 Florida elections. In the wake of recent published flawys in computerized voting systems, its good to remember just how bad our manual systems were, and in many case still are. Worse still are the people who set them up and administer them.

I'm not saying that digital systems are inherently better than manual systems, it is clear they are currnetly wide open to fraud. However, it seems that someone could apply at least some brainpower to using a computerized front-end to present the voting information, collect the input, and then generate at paper trail that is verifiable by the voter. Is that really so hard?

My improvement to the process is that voters should be able to get a voting receipt that can be used at any later date to anonymously retrieve and confirm their voting selection and that is was counted correctly. Obviously this could not be done over the internet, only at secure terminal where only one person could see the voting preference. Verification of voting could be done by sampling voters, bringing them in and asking them to verify their vote. I suppose the problem then would be a certain number of people would forget how they voted, or deny that the presented vote was correct. How do you solve that? I don't know - I never said these problems were easy to solve! What is a vote anyway?

Maybe on voting day all the democrats should fly west and north and all the republicans to the south and east. No need to count the votes, just split the country in two and let everyone stay where they end up.

Tea-time, now with added darkness

The juxtaposition of my blogs title and its HTML colour scheme has been bothering me for some time. While it may have looked pretty to some designer at Blogger I didn't find it appropriate for a "long dark tea-time" blog. So, I switched to a mosty black, white and grey scheme for added darkness. It looks fine on my screen but please let me know if you're having problems reading the text because of the new colour scheme.

As a small consolation to the chromatically offended I would point I have added a search feature for this blog. Its powered by my old friend Google, just what would we do without Google? Google indexing of this site is usually about a week behind publishing, but that is usually easily enough to catch 95% of recent content and 100% of the archives. Anything you still can't find is your own problem (try your browser's search page feature).

Evasion Haiku

Thanks to Mezzanine Stairs for pointing out an entertaining NPR spot on The Existential Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld, a new book by Hart Seely.

I found it while looking at some of the 300+ sites that quote George Bush Senior on the dangers of occupying Iraq. The quote in full can be found a Chicken Or Beef where my unlikely trail towards Evasion Haiku started.

For the record here is the haiku...

    Evasion Haiku
    Donald Rumsfeld 12/3/2002
 
    I’m working my way
    over to figuring out
    how I won’t answer.

Its right up there with:

    In Command
    March 2003

    A government is 
    governing, or its not and if
    not someone else is

Or how about the non-Haiku...

  The End of the World
  4/18/2002

  Puffs of dust
  End up crawling
  Up your leg
  And hitting your knee
  Because it's,
  There might be
  As much as an inch
  Or two or three.

And finally, Rummy on Bush at Camp David...

  Camp David
  1/9/2002

  We had our dinner,  went to bed, 
  and I think he came in and someone said
  "Do you want to go to a movie?"
  I didn't want to go to a movie. 
  I'm not sure that was that night, 
  but it was one of those nights. 
  In any event, that's the last thing I need is a movie. 
  My whole life's a movie!

Yes folks these are the real deal. Poetic justice? I hope not!

The finest congress money can buy

Its good to know some thing never stay the same. While GWB is out raising over $200M, I read to day that the title of todays blog entry is actually a Mark Twain quote. I came about it as I was checking on whether Mark Twain ever really said "The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco". Apparently, according to Snopes none of his books, writings or private correspondences ever included the famous quote. Of course it doesn't mean he didn't actually say that to someone all those years ago and it never got written down, but the source of this quote is definitely questionable. Well you learn something new every day!

My favourite Twain quote?

"For every problem there is always a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong."

It sounds exactly like the kind of solution you get when you have

"The finest congress money can buy"

So go enjoy the summer and feel free to rebuke those who dare to impune its warmth with Twain's words.

Terminally speaking: Rise of the Machines

Well sometimes it helps to blog your thoughts out loud. Tonight Joanna dragged me kicking and screaming to "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines". Okay, so I wasn't kicking and screaming, but I was filled with trepidation. Since I'm damn glad I didn't see any spoilers for Matrix 2 and double damn glad I didn't see any for this movie I wont give any here, but...

I will say that inspite of all the mediocre reviews I'd seen for T3 I have to say I really quite enjoyed it. As sequels go I'd rate it higher than Matrix Reloaded. While T3 has special effects a plenty, and cliches a plenty it just had more plot. I beleive that the people who gave this a "B" probably didn't watch the original two movies, or if they did and just filled them under "Arnie: Cool Action Flicks" and promptly forgot about them or the darker, more sinister story line.

Fortunately for me and Joanna (okay she was kicking and screaming, but I held her down and pinned her eyeballs open) we'd recently watch both T1 and T2, I can say that definitely helps. T3 is just one of those movies, where you really need to know what preceeded. Apart from the humour they didn't try too hard to make it stand alone and most sequels are just plain better to be made and viewed that way. Of course being a big Hollywood movie they do make some efforts to make it palletable to neophytes, however most of the laughs were all in references to the first two movies. And just like the second movie they did manage to introduce quite a few (okay, maybe too many) cliches from the first movie. But as a devotee of the series I've just gotten used to that even though it makes no sense at all in such chronologically fragmented movie.

As a fan of the "thriller" genre I prefer my thrills dead pan. I just do not really like any laughs with my thrills. When people laugh in a good thriller its a different kind of humour, very natural, just like real life and you're still on the edge of your seat. So if it was my one criticism of T2 and T3 it would be the self-referential laughs. If T3 or T2 had been like T1 then I'd be very happy - dead pan action and thrills. I really wish a directors of thrillers would film and produce alternate versions that have no superflous made-for-Hollywood humour, it would do us thriller fans a big favour.

Of course if they do that then it wont be another happy-go-lucky action flick that we can laugh off and say "That'll never happen". No we might actually go home wondering about how dark life can be and how we should try harder to make the world a better place. The unfortunately thing for me is, inspite of all the humour, inspite of it being just a Hollywood movie with an actor I'm all too familiar with, I can look at this movie and believe it really could happen. Its no joke. The only thing it takes is for people to be removed from the loop which wont be due to a sinister Skynet, or some unfortunate military chap plugging in his virus ladden laptop one morning. No, it'll be corporate profiteers secretly pulling the wool over our eyes while a government they have essentially hijacked does their bidding and sets the life=money=war=death train rolling. Wait a minute, didn't that already happen?

There, see I knew I could get politics into an otherwise perfectly mundane movie review :-)

Anyway, for those that haven't seen it, and saw T2 or T2 and T1 I'd recommend T3 as definitely worth a look. Relative to most Hollywood action flicks I'd give it 7.5 out of 10.

My one wish after seeing this movie: please don't make T4, its time to let the machines rest and let the humans stop having to watch over their shoulder for the next Disney Animatronic character chasing down the street. T3 was a perfect ending closing for the series closing all the loops and tying up the loose ends, and its hard to imagine that there is anything more to be said or done that doesn't ruin it all. So Arnie, just give me the word... tell me "I wont be back" and I'll rest easy tonight. After all it isn't every day that an actor gets to be a wrecking ball and a door jam in one movie, what more could he want?

Brilliant

My last blog had a link to the War Profiteers Card Deck from the Ruckus Society. Its such an excellent come back at the Iraqi most wanted deck (that someone actually gave me) that it deserves its own entry.

Notice the joker is actually "The Jerk". It gives a whole new meaning to "playing the jerk".

The Friendster Virus

Its seems like the Friendster virus is spreading rapidly. Friendster is a particularly infectuous meme infecting social networks all over the world as I type. Judging by the extreme slowness of their server(s) it may even be spreading exponentially.

The cynical side of me wonders if its actually the Department of Homeland Security that is running Friendster. They just want to find out which malefeasants know which, and if the yellow-cake road of interconnected friendsters will eventually lead them to the Axis of Evil.

Even if it is not, it is likely that the signal to noise ratio on Friendsters may soon make it useless for any serious use (if there ever was one). I would cite this posting and the testimonials it attracted as typical of the things to come for Friendster users. I'm still trying to work out if someone really wrote this, or if it is a brilliant parody of "totally kewl people-people". Was the juxtaposition of "i am a born-again christian and i'm allergic to corn!" inspired schadenfreude, or are we all doomed to die of the Friendster virus?

Just what were they thinking?

I find the news that the Pentagon was planning a "terror futures market" abosolutely astounding. Just what were they thinking? The idea was that they would create a market selling futures in the political stability of overseas governments, military events and the like. Their brilliant idea was that "markets have predictive powers" and hence they could use the market they create to discern how those events would actually play out and to find out who knows what about terrorist acts that might affect them.

Did they really think that sane, right thinking people wouldn't find it totally and utterly tastless to be allowing people to openly create a market to wager on death and destruction? Did they just think it was a simple step from wagering on boxing or the stocks of military companys to betting on death and destruction?

And aren't they admitting that the predictive power of markets is essentially based on the proliferation of insider knowledge. If they can really figure out insider knowledge by market analysis why don't they start by analysing the regular financial markets. That way they can find out which executives are breaking all the SEC insider trading rules? Of course they wouldn't do that because it would point to too many of their own and too many public people with a lot to lose. Much better to create their own terror market to ferret out the "evil-doers".

No doubt the conspiracy theorists are busy shouting "told yer so" right now. After all, as they have been saying all along, the last time anomalous trading in a financial market predicted future terrorist events, the date was about 9/11/2001. So can anyone tell them why the government let the trail go cold? I guess they were too busy setting up their own terrorist futures market.

Terminally speaking

By all accounts I no longer have to think about the horror of millions of befuddled Californias voting for Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor. Or at least not this time around anyway. Its possible he might stand at a future date, probably when we've all had to endure the pain of cleaning up the huge deficit the "free market" power debaucle left us with. Of course none of those "free market" exponents are making much of how it actually meant shovelling money into the pocket of Enron who had interpreted it to mean "free money".

Anyway, I digress. Suffice to say for a while longer I can now watch Terminator, without having to worry about mixing the fiction of Arnorld "The Terminator" working for SkyNet (the evil power mad machine), with the reality of the Arnorld "The Governor" working for GW. Bush (the evil power mad humman).

Joanna bravely said she'd come with me to see Terminator 3 "The Rise of the Machines". As she hasn't seen the first two movies I insisted we rent those on NetFlix and catch her up and meanwhile give me a welcome refresher and a break from "chick flix". Now I'll be the first to admit I always liked the Terminator series which are some of the earliest and finest examples of the genre I call "Dick Flix" (I'm told that has a different meaning in the gay community so I'll probably have to find another name for it). But I've heard and read some reviews that indicate T3 isn't going to be up to snuff. Even so I'm sincerely hoping that T3 has at least some redeeming qualities. If it turns out to be like Alien 3 then I''ll be wishing I never saw it (Alien 4 was a mild improvement over 3).

However after re-watching the movies on DVD I can honestly say my opinion of them has improved even more, especially Terminator 2. The reason was a bunch of deleted scenes for Terminator they dug up and the extra 15 minutes of footage in the T2 "Extreme" version. It turns out that both versions had some very substantial and important material added. The ending of the first movie takes on a whole new significance with the delete scenes. And Terminator 2 gains some significant character development and has a much more human story as a result.

For anyone who enjoyed the movies (or hasn't seen both) I can highly recommend you get go rent the DVDs and check them out. Furthermore for the extreme movie buffs, the T2 Extreme DVD has an interactive mode. With it you can watch the entire movie with continuous subtitles and overlays indicating all kinds of information on the movie including information on where every scene was shot, how it was shot, stuff about the location, music, lighting and even background info on movie making. Plus the regulation voice over sound tracks, and a whole second disk of material I didn' even see (NetFlix doesn't include it).

Now having got Joanna to suffer through four plus hours of brutal dark portent, I'm just hoping she's still up for seeing Terminator 3 "The Rise of the Machines".

All in all, its just another bug in Windows

Yes, that was a Pink Floyd reference in the title. In case you didn't get the reference, the original words were "All in all, its just another brick in the wall". There's some irony in the implied juxtaposition of bricks in walls and bugs in windows. Another brick in the wall helps build the wall and walls are for keeping things inside inside and things outside, outside (as the Roman emporer Hadrian knew all too well). However a bug in windows just makes it less safe and as well all know windows are pretty transparent at the best of times so its a bad name for a product that makes an claims to be safe. Maybe someone should be selling Window Bars for Windows?

Oh, in case you don't know what I'm prattling about, its the latest bug in Windows. It just goes to show that you can't even trust the file types that Windows marks as "safe", especially ActiveX which has long been derided as a vast sinkhole waiting to open up and swallow your entire hard-drive. Now with the lid blow off ActiveX do you really trust the Windows setting of "allow only safe scripting"? As all you grown ups know even safe sex has its little dangers, so why should we trust "safe scripts"?

What next, JPG files considered harmful? Of course there's some patent infringement aspects to worry about with .jpg, lets hope that PNG files will remain safe otherwise we'll be stuck with plain old TXT.

For my part, I only completely trust information delivered to me in thin-tree format (that's paper to you youngsters). Its better to be safe than sorry.

Comic relief for the day

Okay, so Hunter S. Thompson pissing down the throats of Nazi's may have been a bit much for some of you. So for a bit of balance here is some comic relief. The video is streaming from Nippon TV in Japan so it may be a tad slow to load, but its worth the wait.

Quote for the day

Yesterday I came across the following quote from Hunter S. Thompson. After some investigation I discovered it is from an essay in his latest book "Kingdom of Fear : Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century".

We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world--a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us....No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we'll kill you. Well, shit on that dumbness. George W. Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world. We didn't vote for these cheap, greedy little killers speak for America today--and we will not vote for them again in 2002. Or 2004. Or ever. Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? They are same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American Character. They are the racists and hate mongers amon us--they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them. -Hunter S. Thompson, 2002

The essay in full is here.

Freedom: Texas style

I have previously written on the realities of adopting US standards of life, liberty and imprisonment, and the current levels of incarceration. However today I learned that the US average figure of one in forty two being either in prison, on parole, or awaiting sentancing is just that, only an average.

The state of Texas currently (as of 2002) has one in twenty-one Texans are under the care of the department of corrections. Texas is #2 in the country for percentage of its people actually behind bars having 762 per 100,000 locked up. Louisiana beats them with narrowly with 776 per 100,000 locked up. Staggering as these figures are, they are worse when you get a historical perspective. In 1980 the rate of incarceration in Texas was 210 per 100,000.

Why isn't anyone stopping to question why in this supposedly so great country, so many of its inhabitants are choosing to check out of society and get checked behind bars courtesy of the local Dept. of Corrections? And we are not talking minor misdemenours or deviations from the constitution, we are talking major crimes. This country has 1 in 110 men surving in excess of one year in jail. 1 in 11 black men in their late 20's surving at least one year.

Folks, the reality of America the Brave, America land of the Free, or America the whatever the government is raming down our throats and the media is raming into our heads, is a travesty of the reality that is witnessed by our prison population. Its time people stood back, took a look at their country, their leaders, their employeers, their detractors, their society, themselves and ask the very important question:

Is our current direction of pursiing life, liberty and happiness based only on monetary goals, leading our society into an untenable state?

To me the answer seems, most definitely yes. We have to change direction and stop the pursuit of goals based purely on financial costs, and change direction right now!

Homeland security for dummies

GWB is busy fending off assertions that he deliberately included a falsified claim about Iraq and nuclear weapons in the state of the nation. That's a calculated lie to the nation, one far more heinous than Clinton's "I did not have sex with that woman" claim, and far more worthy of impeachment. He can shovel the blame on all his advisors all he wants, but for just once Bush she take the pie square in the face and admit, "mia culpa".

In the mean time, the department of Homeland Security is awarding a huge contact to Microsoft. So don't they know anything about security? Did they really buy Microsoft's claims that Windows Server 2003 was invulnerable. They of all people should know these are as good as Oracle's still advertised claim that Oracle Server is "uncrackable" inspite of it being cracked the very day it was launched. So just to prove the point, for the clinically dumb, today's press release shows Windows Server 2003 has had its first critical security flaw which came close on the heals of four moderate security flaws which were only moderate because they weren't apparent in the default configuration. That's almost like saying a critical flaw in a cars engine isn't critical because the default car configuration as supplied by the dealer is with the engine off...

Commenting on the bug Microsoft could only say "we knew it was coming at some point". So, I'll tell you the day someone hijacks all the Microsoft PCs used by the Department of Homeland Security and turns them into a porn distribution system will be the day I post here "we knew it was coming at some point". I'll also tell you for free, right now, ahead of the time, that... Someone in the government should be running Microsoft through the grinder for equiping every US home and business with one, two, or many more PCs that run an OS that is demonstrably insecure, does not include easy to use security controls, and includes dozens of technologies that are known and unprotected vectors for thousands of known and unknown viruses, worms, trojans, and other malfeasant code that can hijack and disable an US computer in seconds.

Spread the luv and get lucky

It appears the Google "get lucky" myth is spreading rapidly. Folks, get lucky just picks the #1 link and saves you a click. However, so long as your target stays #1 why not? So go get lucky at Google with "Bush and Blair endless love". I still think "Bush and Blair at the gay bar" is better, but the more the merrier. Enjoy.

Recall Bush

Californian (or in some cases not Californian) Republicans have been out collecting votes to recall Governor Davis. Supposedly this is because he lied about how large the California deficit would be. Why do I say "supposedly"? Well surely a Republican couldn't believe misleading voters about the size of the deficit is a cause of recalling a leader? Because if they did then they would have to be marching on Washington to recall George Bush. Today he blew estimates for the federal budget deficit by over 50% to give the largest dollar deficit in US history. Naturally this is not the first time this has occured - every deficit since GWB came to power has exceeded the "estimates" that GWB based his unprecidented orgy of tax cuts on.

And if GWB claims that he didn't lie about deficits, he was just relying on his advisors estimates, then he should be firing every sycophant croney that is feeding him the BS that his policy is based on. Of course he wont fire any of them because he has "complete faith" in every one of them, inspite of their continued and egregious errors that are misleading the country about our economic future. Yes folks it time to recall the President (or the president pretender) for continuing to ignore the truth and continuing to feed the nation his brand of bushit that matches his "perceived truth".

Election Fraud for Dummies

This article published at Scoop details how easy it is to rig an election with the latest electronic ballot machines. All you need is a default password, a handy timestamp editing utility supplied with the counting software, and rudimentary Microsoft Access knowledge. Apparently some elections using this machine by Diebold have already been compromised. An open FTP site used to transfer ballot files is a sure way to give a new meaning to "public access" to elections.

Bush and Blair

Sometimes my judgement about prejudice is just all wrong, but I find this Electric 6 video hilarious, not to mention brilliantly edited and lip-synced. I mean, it has to be that the juxtaposition of Bush and Blair, with doing evil in the place they would most fear to tread, the gay bar, is funny. Isn't it?

Or maybe I just got it completely wrong...

The lunatics are on the grass (again)

Apparently this blog has been pigeon-holed into the Loony Leftists On the Web category. Its always good to know where you stand with the Raving Right. Just remember folks, the majority of the peoples vote in the last election was on the loony left side of the asylum, so ya boo sucks to all the supporters of Monster Raving George reading this.

Sorry, couldn't help it, I was just acting out my sterotype...

Unfortunately the real truth is that the real heart of America is the Muddling Middle. That fifty percent or so of Americans who never turn out to vote because they:

• couldn't care less to vote (apathy rules),
• can't vote (at work, in prison, not a citizen),
• don't know who to vote for (13% of 17 year olds are functionally illiterate),
• think it doesn't matter if they don't vote (why bother, nothing ever changes),
• distrust all politicians intensely and would rather the government quietly went away,
• or just plain feel dis-enfranchised by a two party system that never offers anyone approaching their politics

The right and left always try to field candidates that appeal to the mass middle, but in reality they never attract many of them. The truth, like the evil-doers, is still out there. Probably we'll never find out what they think until the GOP has down trodden them so much that one day Bush II, Bush III or Bush IV (however long it takes) will say "let them eat cake" and they'll rise up and take the country back (so finally they get what the second ammendment was for).

The thing that really gets my goat up, is that the Raving Right actually associate my politics with Bill Clinton, Carter and Johnson et al. No sirs, the problem is the democratic party has never yet fielded a candidate approaching what I think, or I'll wager, any of the loony left (if that's the corner you insist on painting me into). Who ever I might vote for, if I did (see above), would probably be yet another compromise of "us" against "them". So don't paint me with the brush of previous Democratic Presidents and try to tell me how bad Clinton's foreign policy was, and how good Bush's is. GWB just doesn't have a foreign policy, he has an army and a reflex action that drives it that is worse than Dr Strangelove's jerking right arm.

So why don't you raving right wingers just shut up for a bit, and get back to your own asylum while the loony left plays on the grass?

The Madness of [King] George

Read it and weep. For those who don't know their history, King George III was the King of Great Britain at the time of the Declaration of Independence. Poor King George III was mad, quite mad. It was said of him 'that he had addressed a tree as the King of Prussia, [and] insisted on ending every sentence with the word "peacock"'. Phew, at least he didn't start every sentance with "God said ..." and end it with "... rid the world of evil-doers".