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Florida is the New Florida Although many discussions of voting anomalies focused on Ohio, a statistical analysis of Florida voting patterns performed by sociologists at University of California, Berkeley suggests that electronic touch screen voting in Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade may have credited George Bush with up to 260,000 extra votes in Florida. The discrepancy is not enough to change who won Florida, but it could have narrowed Bush's lead to 90,000 votes instead of 350,000, highlighting the need for better auditing of elections with electronic voting.
comment posted at 8:48 PM on Nov-18-04

10-year old "miracle" toasted cheese sandwich with image of "Virgin Mary" back up on Ebay, a bargain at $16,000
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Hack the Vote: the short version by Chuck Herrin. Hasn't this made the rounds here yet?
comment posted at 11:00 AM on Nov-18-04

Stand on the shoulders of giants. Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.
comment posted at 7:51 AM on Nov-18-04

The arrival of secret law. Americans can now be obligated to comply with legally-binding regulations that are unknown to them, and that indeed they are forbidden to know. This is not some dismal Eastern European allegory. It is part of a continuing transformation of American government that is leaving it less open, less accountable and less susceptible to rational deliberation as a vehicle for change.
comment posted at 7:57 AM on Nov-18-04

An interview with Michael Koubi. Koubi was an interrogator with the Israeli security services for 21 years, and its chief interrogator for 6 years. He claims he can make anyone talk.
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Real-Time Biological Natural Gas Generation. A research lab has discovered that microbes living in Wyoming's Powder River Basin are generating methane (natural gas) through their natural metabolism of local coal beds. In relation to the many Peak Oil discussions here, could be way to get more energy for the future. (via SpaceDaily.com)
comment posted at 1:10 PM on Nov-18-04

RFID to track students in Spring, Texas... the information is fed automatically by wireless phone to the police and school administrators. That's right: constant and continual monitoring of all the schoolkids in the district by the local police department.
comment posted at 10:00 PM on Nov-17-04

Texas officials wary of plan to hunt by Internet. Hunters soon may be able to sit at their computers and blast away at animals on a Texas ranch via the Internet, a prospect that has state wildlife officials up in arms. "We were looking at a beautiful white-tail buck and my friend said 'If you just had a gun for that.' A little light bulb went off in my head,"
comment posted at 10:23 PM on Nov-17-04

Diebold does it's part to protect the Constitution.
comment posted at 10:15 PM on Nov-17-04

Oh crap. Rumours are starting to emerge that following the death of his favourite consort Kim Jong-Il has retreated into virtual seclusion allowing the the military to take over in a defacto coup.
comment posted at 10:47 AM on Nov-16-04

The Urban Archipelago. "It's time to state something that we've felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion--New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on. And we live on islands in red states too--a fact obscured by that state-by-state map."
comment posted at 9:59 AM on Nov-16-04
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Yale Law School Dean : "I might have been an unwitting accessory to fraud" Ian H. Solomon's belated realization : "Could we have been so naive?....by my presence, along with other Democratic lawyers, I lent an air of legitimacy to the voting process....We should have had trained observers - computer scientists, not lawyers! - verifying the integrity of polling data from machine upload through the tabulation of countywide and statewide results. Somehow we neglected the most vulnerable step....I realized that I might have been an unwitting accessory to fraud....The time is now for voters from all states that used electronic voting machines to request an audit of results and a manual recount of ballots if possible."
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Dollar's Decline Is Reverberating All this talk about blue state, red state. How's the state of the one thing we all think about equally in common coming along? Isn't it time for a serious, non-partisan, "morally" neutral dialogue on the state of the US economy?
comment posted at 7:16 AM on Nov-16-04

Welcome to the Orgasm & BrainWash Engineering Center where "BrainWash" is defined as an alternation of gene and enzyme expression in your 3 brains - the head, gut and pelvic cavity.
comment posted at 10:21 PM on Nov-10-04

2004 U.S. Election controversies and irregularities The Wikipedia, on the 2004 election controversy - "After the U.S. presidential election on November 2, 2004, some sources have made allegations of significant data irregularities and systematic flaws..."
comment posted at 9:41 PM on Nov-10-04
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Arafat is dead. I cannot help to think that the fact that he had an iron grip on the PLO for so long made this issue so hard to resolve...but maybe after all this time there CAN be a final resolution on the question of the Palestinian state? Will we see massive internal warfare amongst his followers after he gets put in the ground? Interesting times, indeed.
comment posted at 10:25 PM on Nov-10-04

YELLOW PERIL
"Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government--which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man."
Sax Rohmer's tales of the sinister Dr. Fu Manchu and his arch enemy Sir Denis Nayland Smith of the British Secret Service (the nephew of Sherlock Holmes whose name is also invoked in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow), have fascinated readers and cinemagoers alike for the best part of the twentieth century. Two things make Fu Manchu all the more monstrous a villain: his proximity to the West, and his intellect. His base is in Limehouse, the Chinese area of London. So by allowing him to live in the country, England is vulnerable to his insidious plans (and so becomes a validation of strict immigration policy). His intellect comes from Western learning, and it is often emphasized that he has been educated in a University. So we see the evil Asian as using the West's own knowledge against it.
It is up to Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie to stop Fu Manchu's plans in each story. As Smith remarks in The Hand of Fu Manchu, "the swamping of the white world by Yellow hordes may be the price of our failure." (more inside)
comment posted at 8:03 PM on Nov-10-04

2004 Ohio vote count integrity
Bay Village: 9948
Fairview Park: 9948
North Olmstead: 9948
Rocky River: 9948
Westlake: 9948
comment posted at 9:00 PM on Nov-9-04

Theo Van Gogh, murdered last week by a muslim in retalliation for a movie called Submission, a fictional short film critique of how women are treated within Islam. If you were curious about whether the film was worth dying for, the folks at iFilm have it on their site. It's basically an imagined monologue between a woman and Allah. It's 11 minutes long and is safe for work.
comment posted at 8:30 PM on Nov-9-04

Discovering Japan. As a perennial outsider at loose in Japan, writer Donald Richie captures the joyous freedom of being foreign. The foreign observer is likely to be happy only if he sees his foreignness as an adventure, and recognizes that he has given up a sense of belonging for a sense of freedom, traded the luxury of being understood for that of being permanently interested. Richie, the philosopher-king of expats in Asia for the past half-century, arrived in Tokyo in 1947 as a typist with the U.S. government and never really left, writing dozens of books , on Japanese movies, temples, history and fashion, while enjoying himself as an actor, musician, filmmaker and painter. The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 is a monument to the pleasures of displacement. Richie watchers can observe, more intimately than ever, a man who is generally happiest observing. More inside.
comment posted at 8:38 PM on Nov-9-04

Let the Eagle Soar [mp3] John Ashcroft has resigned as attorney general, saying "the objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." He leaves behind a legacy of DOJ Accomplishments in the War on Terror (many of which seem to have been accomplished by non-DOJ parties) despite not actually convicting anyone of terrorism. I feel safer already.
comment posted at 8:41 PM on Nov-9-04
comment posted at 8:42 PM on Nov-9-04

The Mormon Peanut Butter Assassin David Race Bannon was serving as a Mormon missionary in Korea when he was caught up in a peanut butter smuggling ring that led to his imprisonment and eventual recruiting by Interpol for project "Archangel," a team of assassins trained to hunt down and terminate the leaders of child sex rings. Whew. Oh, and he has a book out. Is it just me, or does this sound a little . . . odd?
comment posted at 10:27 AM on Nov-9-04

Is a government-sponsored Web any kind of Web at all? Iranians will soon find out, including MeFite hoder, prominently featured in the linked piece (and, worrisomely, recipient of his very own death threat this week). More information on Iranian and Persian bloggers here.
comment posted at 9:30 PM on Nov-8-04

Southern Conservativism explained from the inside. "I get very antsy when I see this entire election outcome being blamed on radical conservatism or on ignorance or stupidity. Because really when people talk about "radical" conservativism, what they really mean is Southern conservativism, specifically the kind that originated in the Southern Baptist church in the late 70's/early 80's. And that makes me unhappy. I am an ex-Southern conservative." An interesting read coming out of the election fallout.
comment posted at 9:01 PM on Nov-6-04

A bizzare pattern of impossible anomalies This has long been known : the welter of financial ties of Diebold and ES&S to the radical religious right (with stakeholders currently, it seems, on the secretive CNP) and Bob Fitrakis notes : "Wherever Diebold and ES&S go, irregularities and historic Republican upsets follow." Howard Ahmanson was the original funder for Bob and Todd Urosevich's Data Mark,which became ES&S, Bob later left to head Diebold ,maker of HAVA Act mandated touch screen voting machines used in Ohio and Florida and elsewhere....Ahmanson is a Christian Reconstructionist (a form of Dominionism ) who has talked of imposing Biblical law on the US - including the death penalty for gays and drunkards - and is also a main funder of the Chalcedon Foundation. However, the most bizzare patterns of anomalies in Florida came not from touch-screen but optical scan machines. Florida's central vote tabulator also is Diebold made, raising questions on the a bizzare pattern of anomalies in which a large number of counties in Florida had increases in Republicans votes over expected levels - by an overall average of 50% to 100% and - in one county, as high as 700%. Meanhwhile, here are graphs of variance between exit poll results for battleground states.
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Post election demonstrations and protests in Portland, San Francisco (pics). And a few more.
comment posted at 7:26 AM on Nov-4-04

Electing to Leave - A guide to expatriating (via blogdex)
comment posted at 6:36 AM on Nov-4-04

While you were re-electing a president:
Senator-elect Jim DeMint: Thinks that unwed pregnant women and gays are unfit to be schoolteachers.
Senator-elect Tom Coburn: Wants the death penalty for abortion doctors.
Senator-elect John Thune: Mr. School Prayer Amendment.
Voters in 11 states voted to ban same-sex marriage. The lowest margin was 57%-43%. The highest (Mississippi) was 86%-14%. Kentucky's also bans civil unions. That one was 75%-25%.
The Senate will likely be split 55-45 in favor of Republicans, creeping closer to a filibuster-proof supermajority. Meanwhile, 89% of these guys are older than 65.
Enjoy your tax cut, America. You're going to need it.
comment posted at 7:29 AM on Nov-3-04
comment posted at 7:47 AM on Nov-3-04

It's unOFFICIAL! yet again!
Bush wins re-election! And Nader nowhere to shoulder blame.
The consequences.
The deciding demographic? The Evangelical vote. (Interestingly, look how the vote went for Carter, born-again Southern Baptist, in the '76 election.)
So who's to blame? Personally, I point the finger at the PR. Because everyone should damn-well accept the fact that it's not about the issues.
Let the recount and litigation begin!
comment posted at 11:57 PM on Nov-2-04
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As the polls close election results come in. (A full list of official election result websites inside.)
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comment posted at 12:45 AM on Nov-3-04