Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Me and This Army

Radiohead - Me and This Army

Radiohead remixed with Jurassic 5, Ghostface, De La Soul, MF Doom, Gift of Gab, Kool Keith, and more. I haven't listened yet, but man that sounds good.

[via Boing Boing]

Friday, November 18, 2005

Saturday, November 12, 2005

Voter fraud

In the bookstore I read bits and pieces of Censored 2006, featuring the top censored news stories of the past year, as well as updates from previous years. It was a great read, and very interesting. Among the topics covered was the 2004 presidential election.
In order to believe that George Bush won the November 2, 2004 presidential election, you must also believe all of the following extremely improbable or outright impossible things.

1) A big turnout and a highly energized and motivated electorate favored the GOP instead of the Democrats for the first time in history.

2) Even though first-time voters, lapsed voters (those who didn’t vote in 2000), and undecideds went for John Kerry by big margins, and Bush lost people who voted for him in the cliffhanger 2000 election, Bush still received a 3.5 million vote surplus nationally.

3) The fact that Bush far exceeded the 85% of registered Florida Republicans’ votes that he got in 2000, receiving in 2004 more than 100% of the registered Republican votes in 47 out of 67 Florida counties, 200% of registered Republicans in 15 counties, and over 300% of registered Republicans in 4 counties, merely shows Floridians’ enthusiasm for Bush. He managed to do this despite the fact that his share of the crossover votes by registered Democrats in Florida did not increase over 2000 and he lost ground among registered Independents, dropping 15 points.

4) The fact that Bush got more votes than registered voters, and the fact that by stark contrast participation rates in many Democratic strongholds in Ohio and Florida fell to as low as 8%, do not indicate a rigged election.

5) Bush won re-election despite approval ratings below 50% - the first time in history this has happened. Truman has been cited as having also done this, but Truman’s polling numbers were trailing so much behind his challenger, Thomas Dewey, pollsters stopped surveying two months before the 1948 elections, thus missing the late surge of support for Truman. Unlike Truman, Bush’s support was clearly eroding on the eve of the election.

6) Harris' last-minute polling indicating a Kerry victory was wrong (even though Harris was exactly on the mark in their 2000 election final poll).

7) The “challenger rule” - an incumbent’s final results won’t be better than his final polling - was wrong.

8) On election day the early-day voters picked up by early exit polls (showing Kerry with a wide lead) were heavily Democratic instead of the traditional pattern of early voters being mainly Republican.

9) The fact that Bush “won” Ohio by 51-48%, but this was not matched by the court-supervised hand count of the 147,400 absentee and provisional ballots in which Kerry received 54.46% of the vote doesn’t cast any suspicion upon the official tally.

10) Florida computer programmer Clinton Curtis (a life-long registered Republican) must be lying when he said in a sworn affidavit that his employers at Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI) and Tom Feeney (general counsel and lobbyist for YEI, GOP state legislator and Jeb Bush’s 1994 running mate for Florida Lt. Governor) asked him in 2000 to create a computer program to undetectably alter vote totals. Curtis, under the initial impression that he was creating this software in order to forestall possible fraud, handed over the program to his employer Mrs. Li Woan Yang, and was told: “You don’t understand, in order to get the contract we have to hide the manipulation in the source code. This program is needed to control the vote in south Florida."

11) Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell’s declaration in a August 14, 2003 letter to GOP fundraisers that he was "committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes to the president next year" and the fact that Diebold is one of the three major suppliers of the electronic voting machines in Ohio and nationally, didn’t result in any fraud by Diebold.

12) There was no fraud in Cuyahoga County Ohio where they admitted counting the votes in secret before bringing them out in public to count.

13) CNN reported at 9 p.m. EST on election evening that Kerry was leading by 3 points in the national exit polls based on well over 13,000 respondents. Several hours later at 1:36 a.m. CNN reported that the exit polls, now based on a few hundred more - 13,531 respondents - were showing Bush leading by 2 points, a 5-point swing. In other words, a swing of 5 percentage points from a tiny increase in the number of respondents somehow occurred despite it being mathematically impossible.

14) Exit polls in the November 2004 Ukrainian presidential elections, paid for in part by the Bush administration, were right, but exit polls in the U.S., where exit polling was invented, were very wrong.

15) The National Election Pool’s exit polls were so far off that since their inception twenty years ago, they have never been this wrong, more wrong than statistical probability indicates is possible.

16) In every single instance where exit polls were wrong the discrepancy favored Bush, even though statistical probability tells us that any survey errors should show up in both directions. Half a century of polling and centuries of mathematics must be wrong.
The full chapter is available online here. The rest of the site is similarly useful.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

'Chemical weapons' vs. chemical weapons

White phosphorus burns skin and kills whatever it comes in contact with. It is classified as an incendiary rather than a chemical weapon, and thus technically not forbidden from use under international treaty. However, it is nasty, nasty stuff that leaves victims melted and mangled, and it was used in the siege on Fallujah.

The Army first claimed the rounds were used only for illumination, but after an article (PDF) describing their use appeared in Field Artillery magazine recanted, saying the rounds were used as psychological weapons to scare out insurgents who were then killed by the usual means.

According to one embedded journalist:
[Troops were ordered] to fire round after round of high explosives and white phosphorus charges into the city Friday and Saturday, never knowing what the targets were or what damage the resulting explosions caused. ...

They say they have never seen what they've hit, nor did they talk about it....
Sound psychological? Sounds a lot more like indiscriminately firing rounds of ultra-hot phosphorus onto unseen targets. A reporter for the UK's Independent says:
Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone ... I saw the burned bodies of women and children. Phosphorus explodes and forms a cloud. Anyone within a radius of 150 metres is done for.
The Army may not have broken any laws, but that's a hell of a way to win hearts and minds.

[via Daily Kos]

Tuesday, November 8, 2005

Same-sex marriage ban

Not that I thought it would get shot down - though I held out hope - but Proposition 2 is passing in the state of Texas today. An amendment to the state constitution will now define marriage as between one man and one woman, as well as refusing to deny same-sex marraiges from any other states. It makes me sick.