Impolitically CorrectThe man wrote that any president has the right to arrest American citizens and hold them incommunicado, indefinitely, and torture them! Now it's OK because he says it was a simple mistake and he didn't really mean it?
I guess what goes around comes around. Support those kinds of policies in Latin America and some people will think that's the American way. What an ironic twist to the Hispanicization of the US. ;-(
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Friday, January 21, 2005
Enough with the exit polls, already!
Stop taking exit polls please! They are a bad idea.
1) Just wait for the votes to be counted. Can't you just wait and do it right? The votes in the booth are supposed to count, not the &%$#! polls. Don't make people think it's over when there are still votes being cast.
2) There are a lot of people who don't answer exit polls, at least not honestly.
Well why should they? What's the point of a secret ballot if you tell some stranger about it? They shouldn't even go around asking people whom they voted for, especially when there are so many nut cases around who think the United Nations is taking over the United States, when the UN is lucky to be running its own bureaucracy.
Seriously, by now there are a statistically significant proportion of people who honestly think that the American news media, with the possible exception of Fox News, is controlled by Satanist Communists, or Illuminati, or gnomes of Zurich, or maybe all three together. Jesse Helms pioneered this with his "stealth voters" who suddenly appeared from no where when the ballots were counted but didn't register in the polling statistics. These people will not answer polls because they think they are run by evil conspirators in black helicopters.
But I won't answer exit polls because it's none of your business. Just wait until the voting is over and count the ballots. Why does the press seem to think their exit polls are worth anything and why should someone even answer them.
I'll get back to that issue of physical ballots later.
1) Just wait for the votes to be counted. Can't you just wait and do it right? The votes in the booth are supposed to count, not the &%$#! polls. Don't make people think it's over when there are still votes being cast.
2) There are a lot of people who don't answer exit polls, at least not honestly.
Well why should they? What's the point of a secret ballot if you tell some stranger about it? They shouldn't even go around asking people whom they voted for, especially when there are so many nut cases around who think the United Nations is taking over the United States, when the UN is lucky to be running its own bureaucracy.
Seriously, by now there are a statistically significant proportion of people who honestly think that the American news media, with the possible exception of Fox News, is controlled by Satanist Communists, or Illuminati, or gnomes of Zurich, or maybe all three together. Jesse Helms pioneered this with his "stealth voters" who suddenly appeared from no where when the ballots were counted but didn't register in the polling statistics. These people will not answer polls because they think they are run by evil conspirators in black helicopters.
But I won't answer exit polls because it's none of your business. Just wait until the voting is over and count the ballots. Why does the press seem to think their exit polls are worth anything and why should someone even answer them.
I'll get back to that issue of physical ballots later.
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Africa and a Marshall Plan
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1386173,00.html
Richard Dowden makes some good points that not enough people realize, such as that "The analogy between Europe in 1945 and Africa today is false. At the end of the war, Europe had peace and a highly skilled population. The job was rebuilding . . ." and that "Where rulers still pocket aid or spend it on guns, debt relief simply rewards bad government." and that "Ending agricultural subsidies, tariffs and import regulations in the rest of the world are key to Africa's economic success . . ." but he makes one big mistake in the article:
"The [African] ruling class has failed to create viable states . . . "
The African ruling class didn't create those states, colonialism did, and the borders of African "nations" are now far older than those of Europe. These African states are not just random lines on a map, they are deliberately designed to foster "divide and rule" strategies of outside control. Powerful states were divided by being attacked by several European colonizing powers at the same time. Traditional enemies were put together into the same "nations" as educational policies were put in place to make sure that some groups were more successful than others, and that every "tribe" would be suspicious of every other "tribe."
The result was to create unstable states that could not survive. Either they had to be combined into a Pan-African federation or they would collapse. The only surprise is that more of them haven't collapsed already.
Few of these states has been able to get more than minimum allegiance from their people, and in most cases the population is profoundly alienated. My guess is that many of them would support a United States of Africa, but that their leaders still just want to keep "borrowing" money on the national tab, putting it in Switzerland for their families.
Richard Dowden makes some good points that not enough people realize, such as that "The analogy between Europe in 1945 and Africa today is false. At the end of the war, Europe had peace and a highly skilled population. The job was rebuilding . . ." and that "Where rulers still pocket aid or spend it on guns, debt relief simply rewards bad government." and that "Ending agricultural subsidies, tariffs and import regulations in the rest of the world are key to Africa's economic success . . ." but he makes one big mistake in the article:
"The [African] ruling class has failed to create viable states . . . "
The African ruling class didn't create those states, colonialism did, and the borders of African "nations" are now far older than those of Europe. These African states are not just random lines on a map, they are deliberately designed to foster "divide and rule" strategies of outside control. Powerful states were divided by being attacked by several European colonizing powers at the same time. Traditional enemies were put together into the same "nations" as educational policies were put in place to make sure that some groups were more successful than others, and that every "tribe" would be suspicious of every other "tribe."
The result was to create unstable states that could not survive. Either they had to be combined into a Pan-African federation or they would collapse. The only surprise is that more of them haven't collapsed already.
Few of these states has been able to get more than minimum allegiance from their people, and in most cases the population is profoundly alienated. My guess is that many of them would support a United States of Africa, but that their leaders still just want to keep "borrowing" money on the national tab, putting it in Switzerland for their families.
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
GET BIN LADIN!
How did W get away with passing as tough on terrorism?
First of all, there is no war on terrorism, how can you have a war against a tactic? Are we attacking the IRA, or the LTTE in Sri Lanka? No, we were attacked by al-Qa'ida, and we should be going after them. Unfortunately the trail has gone cold, while the US military is bogged down in an irrelevant war against somebody who never attacked us and didn't have the power to. Meanwhile we have shown the Muslim world that they can attack us and get away with it, and that if they don't attack us we will attack them anyway.
Bush has blown the war big time, and anyone who cares about making America safe has to try to stop him, any (legal) way we can, and wake people up to the damage he is doing to national security.
The Republican Party is the party of National Security?
Please, don't take me for a fool.
When Bin Ladin attacked the US and Bill Clinton went after him a lot of Republicans insisted this was a "wag the dog" distraction from the real threat to the republic, Monica Lewinsky's mouth. Some of this is still up on the Internet:
World Net Daily
Cutting Edge
Free Republic (aka Freepers)
Salon.com
Marc Perkel Rantz
more Salon.com
(so much for liberal bias!)
more salon.com (and a few Republicans, including Newt Gingrich, did give Clinton the benefit of the doubt).
Worse than Wag the Dog?
CNN, if you don't believe the others
Some of them are still saying it!
Now they want to pretend that anyone who criticizes W is unpatriotic. How could anyone have voted for them. We have to wake people up!
First of all, there is no war on terrorism, how can you have a war against a tactic? Are we attacking the IRA, or the LTTE in Sri Lanka? No, we were attacked by al-Qa'ida, and we should be going after them. Unfortunately the trail has gone cold, while the US military is bogged down in an irrelevant war against somebody who never attacked us and didn't have the power to. Meanwhile we have shown the Muslim world that they can attack us and get away with it, and that if they don't attack us we will attack them anyway.
Bush has blown the war big time, and anyone who cares about making America safe has to try to stop him, any (legal) way we can, and wake people up to the damage he is doing to national security.
The Republican Party is the party of National Security?
Please, don't take me for a fool.
When Bin Ladin attacked the US and Bill Clinton went after him a lot of Republicans insisted this was a "wag the dog" distraction from the real threat to the republic, Monica Lewinsky's mouth. Some of this is still up on the Internet:
World Net Daily
Cutting Edge
Free Republic (aka Freepers)
Salon.com
Marc Perkel Rantz
more Salon.com
(so much for liberal bias!)
more salon.com (and a few Republicans, including Newt Gingrich, did give Clinton the benefit of the doubt).
Worse than Wag the Dog?
CNN, if you don't believe the others
Some of them are still saying it!
Now they want to pretend that anyone who criticizes W is unpatriotic. How could anyone have voted for them. We have to wake people up!
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