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Saturday, October 04, 2003
A British research study has discovered that happy images, when shown to the clinically depressed, can trigger a part of the brain associated with sadness in a normal individual. I'm fascinated by this discovery. I'd long wondered about this sort of thing: why do the holidays make people sad? How come people can feel terrible at parties? This discovery of a biological link goes far to satisfy one of my Burning Questions™. | Thursday, October 02, 2003
Does anyone else think the whole Rush Limbaugh-"McNabb Sucks" story has been overblown? I mean, Limbaugh's an ass, and we knew that. Is that really reason for 3 presidential candidates (OK, so 2 candidates who aren't Al Sharpton) to urge his dismissal? | When I first heard about it months ago, I didn't think the story about the mysterious outing of Joseph Wilson's CIA wife was going anywhere. First, I didn't have enough information. I thought her blown cover was likely unrelated to her husband and the white house, or maybe was just made up. Seemed too much like a conspiracy theory to me. Secondly, I didn't think anyone in the mainstream media would have the cajones to follow this one even if it were true. It's all about having the biggest flags, right? But, perhaps I was wrong on both counts. To look at the news these days, you'd think this is the biggest thing since Watergate. And who knows, maybe it is? Senators, including Arlen Specter (R-PA), are asking John Ashcroft to recuse himself from the investigation. There are calls for a special prosecutor. ABC has just reported the investigation has been expanded past the White House and the CIA to the State and Defense departments. I still don't have much to go on here. But I certainly support the investigation. As I see it, it's probably the only way we'll ever get to the bottom of more than one sticky issue cloaked in White House secrecy. By the wya, how stupid do you have to be to send an angry letter to Republican South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson (Note: Not the same Joseph Wilson) for letting his wife be involved in the CIA and then being a bad boy so the government has to out her? | The idea of making the money to reconstruct Iraq a loan instead of a grant has recently been circulating the Washington halls of power. Personally, I don't buy it. You can't go blow up someone's country, occupy it, fail to do your job under the Geneva Conventions, and then make them pay you back for expenses incurred in doing so. I like an idea proposed by The New Republic, and I beleive supported by Sen. Joe Biden - Pay for the war and reconstruction by repealing the tax cuts on people making over $1 million per year. As TNR suggests, "The president would then face a choice: He could show he was committed both to rebuilding Iraq and meaningful bipartisanship, or that he preferred his upper income tax cuts to a stable Iraq and that, as in the past, he was only interested in sham, self-serving bipartisanship. The choice seems obvious to us, but we wouldn't exactly hold our collective breath." | Monday, September 29, 2003
A corollary to yesterday's post on Bev Harris: While her "public interest" website, blackboxvoting.org, has been taken down at Diebold's demand, her "commercial" website, blackboxvoting.com, remains up. I'm not sure what the differences between the two sites were, but I'm given to beleive the answer is "not much." | Sunday, September 28, 2003
To call the issues raised in a recent Salon article worrying would be a masterful understatement. Entitled An Open Invitation to Election Fraud, it chronicles the story of Diebold Election Systems, America's #1 supplier of electronic voting machines. The article tells a story of low-security systems, exposed to the internet, with easily modified access logs. In other words, anybody with the right knowlege can log on and read the latest vote tallies before the government sees them, change said tallies, or even reprogram the machines - and leave no record of anything having happened. The article, based around an interview with Bev Harris, a writer who's spent the last year investigating the election equipment industry, quotes internal Diebold memos discussing the alleged flaws and discounting them as acceptable. And she quotes further memos from Ken Clark, Diebold's chief engineer, alluding to the fact that Diebold not only intentionally put back doors into the system, but had been actively using them to perform unspecified operations on installed voting machines, unbeknownst to state officials. The full text of those memos are no longer available. Diebold sued Harris' website to have them taken down. Their argument. Copyright infringement. Note that you can only claim copyright on something you actually did write... As to specifics, Harris mentions a few things that approach the territory of conspiracy theory. And as all good conspiracy theories do, she has disturbing evidence in support. Diebold's CEO, Walden O'Dell, is a major Bush fundraiser. He's on record saying he's "committed to helping Ohio [his home state] deliver its electoral votes to the President next year." When Diebold's machines were used for the first time in Georgia in 2002, there were 6 major Republican upsets, including the Senator's and Governor's races. As far as anyone can tell, Diebold updated the software on the voting and tabulation machines up to eight times in the lead-up to the election. Those updates were not examined by state officials. Further, the individual memory cards kept by each machine have been erased by Diebold, and they've overwritten the software on each of the state's tabulation systems. In other words, there is no longer any record of what votes were cast or how those votes were counted, save for the testimony of Diebold Election Systems, Inc. Had the machines printed a paper record of the votes (which they don't), the state would be legally required to hold those records for 22 months. Diebold lobbies aggressively against any paper trail requirements. Whether or not anything actually has happened, I'm worried. What's wrong with a paper and pencil? That's how they do it in Canada, with the votes counted on-site. Ever hear of Canadian voter fraud? | OK, I've got to admit I have no idea what message this cartoon is supposed to impart.
It does, however, raise a question: "Where can I get Pepe the Chili merchandise?" | |
