podpolia

This is absolutely fascinating. It's something I've been saying for a while, but they've done considerably more analysis on it.
I disagree with how they worked some of the numbers (younger adults vote at a lower rate than the general population, so the effects on votes would not be quite as pronounced as they indicate) but they also left out the fact that traditionally liberal 'revolutions' in society (think the late 1960s) occur when there is a higher than usual level of young people. With numbers of abortions as high as they are, liberals are risking going a long while without a revolutionary change to drive their policies. I don't know enough about the 'Reagan revolution' of the 1980s, but I do know that if the American left is unable to counter the revivals and renewals of the youth entering the American right, they're in for some long-term stagnation. Which is not good, particularly for the political left of ANY nation. If you're basing your policy on liberality and change, it's definitely not a good thing to stagnate. It would be interesting to see if legalized abortion continues if the political parties start to shift positions in a massive way.

…So I got invited into a chatroom by what I presume was an AIM bot. Consisted of much “click on my profile to see why you're here!” and then having said individual's (bots'?) profiles turning out to be links to free pr0n! passwords. Woohoo.
Sad and boring as my life is, I actually gave up reading “Measure for Measure” for about 15 minutes to talk about linux with a complete stranger in a pr0n advertisement.
And with that, adieu.

This is why nationalized health care is a bad idea. Yes, yes, it's about a rich guy who managed to pay for a cancer treatment, but the telling part of the story is that he was essentially considered not to be sick enough to need the treatment.

…Now this is a bar scene I could get into.

More news you won't see on major networks.

It's time for yet another “what I've been reading lately” post. Some of these are good, and some are not-so-good.
Selected Poems by Voznesensky
The Geneva Conventions (on various things)
Brave New World Revisited by Huxley
Flatland by Abbott
The Essential Calvin and Hobbes by Watterson
Democratization of the Church by Muller
The Illustrated History of Tunnel Warfare by Mangold
A Feast of Freedom by Wibberley
Suffering and Evil by Heagle
Rod Serling's Twilight Zone by Gibson
Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Spielberg
The Existential Imagination by Karl
American Tongue and Cheek by Quinn
The Tempting of America by Bork
I'll try to keep this fairly brief. Voznesensky's poems are allright, as far as modern poetry goes. Despite their having been translated, there's still somewhat of a rhythm to them. The Geneva Convetnions are intensely dull, but I felt I needed to read them to keep up with the political situation at the time. The inmates at Abu Ghraib did NOT count as enemy POWs, actually.
Brave New World Revisited is basically an analysis written around 1960 about how the world has actually moved towards the Brave New World that Huxley wrote about in the 1930s. Quite interesting, but very much non-fiction.
Flatland is an interesting story that analyzes dimensions, from the point of view of a two-dimensional being. Calvin and Hobbes is… well, a cartoon. Cartoons are good. Democratization of the Church is an analysis of the movement to… well… democratize the church. Focused mostly on Europe, but quite interesting nonetheless.
The Illustrated History of Tunnel Warfare is just what it claims to be. I never knew the extent of tunnel operations in the Vietnam War before reading this book, although i knew it happened. Gave a little more background to “The General's” character in the movie 'The Lady Killers.' A Feast of Freedom was written by the same guy who wrote 'The Mouse that Roared.' It's an excellent example of political satire. Just a hint about the plot: the Vice-President of the United States is eaten by cannibals.
Suffering and Evil is an interesting study on (suprisingly) suffering and evil. It's from the Catholic tradition, so it had a slightly different perspective on things than I'm used to, but interesting nonetheless. Rod Serling's Twilight Zone is a whole bunch of plots for 'The Twilight Zone' that were turned into short stories. The stories capture as well as the show did (and in my opinion, more accurately) the creepy nature of Serling's work. Quite good, really. As was Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Yes, the book the movie was based on. Also quite good. Creepy in many of the same ways as the Twilight Zone, but altogether a better psychological study, and really more sci-fi than most of Serling's work.
I've written in here before about The Existential Imagination. I do highly reccommend it to anyone who is interested in existentialism or just good short stories. I was highly impressed with several of the stories in this book.
American Tongue and Cheek gets its own paragraph. This book was excruciating. The major premise of this book is that the people who write books and articles about the 'proper way' to use the English language are all anal retentive and wrong. However, the reasons given for this are mostly long quotations from the Oxford English Dictionary, and a whole bunch of self-satisfied rhetoric against people who write about English. Basically, the author ends up sounding like a major hypocrite, the book is painful to read, repetetive, not particularly informative, and just generally sucks. A few interesting tidbits are in there somewhere, but really you'd just be better off buying a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary (or rather, going to a library that has it, as it costs about three arms and four legs) and looking things up yourself.
I'll end on the last book, appropriately enough. The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law is an amazing book. I've been taught bits and pieces about Robert Bork and his role in the Saturday Night Massacre along with (more particularly) his confirmation battle in the Senate. This book is an exposition of his judicial philosophy (which completely changed the way I look at law and the judicial process in general) and an account of his confirmation hearings and the situations around it. The more of the book I read, the more I was convinced that the country as a whole lost an excellent opportunity when Bork's nomination failed. I highly reccommend this book to anyone with any interest in politics or the judicial process. It's long and very complex, but well written. You have to pay attention to every sentence, but you come to the end and actually thoroughly understand what Bork was trying to say. Besides, he has a cool last name. BORK BORK BORK!
Ok, I've run out of book review and gotten silly. Enough for now.

Goodbye, Mr. President.

Have YOU ever been called “two faced” by a former KGB officer?

News editing — the hidden story.

I've been spending some quality time with the polls and the Wall Street Journal's electoral college calculator. My analysis at this early stage of the game is that Pennsylvania and Florida will be the two key states to this election. Both candidates are fairly close to one another, the poll numbers are indecisive, and both hold a large number of electors (PA has 21, FL has 27).
My initial hunch is that PA will go to the Democrats and FL to the Republicans, throwing the election to Bush. If I were George W. Bush right now, I would dump Cheney as a running mate and choose Tom Ridge, and then work hard to win Florida. Ridge (who would undoubtedly fare quite well against any of Kerry's prospective VP candidates in a debate) would likely hand PA to Bush. That way, if Bush lost Florida, all he would have to do to win would be to get an extra two electors somewhere. This might not be easy, but if Bush is going to run on a campaign of national security, Ridge would probably be a good choice and would help Bush's argument in states besides PA.
I sincerely hope that one prediction I have seen does not come true, which is that the race might tie up at 269 to 269 electors. That would be an absolute nightmare — the high degree of criticism from various corners of the results of the 2000 election would be amplified and could lead to real problems with accepted legitimacy of the electoral system. Hopefully this would not escalate into violence, but I'm making no guarantees. In the case of a tie, the choice is given to the House of Representatives. The representation of each state is given one vote, and so the candidate with more states in his column wins (assuming the representation reflects the vote for president). In such a case, Bush would probably win. However, if the House of Representatives fails to decide, the backup rules are defective: as President and Vice-President are elected on the same ticket now, the Senate would be unable to vote to choose the Vice-President, and so the position could theoretically remain vacant. There would be a large degree of uncertainty of how to proceed in such a case — the Constitution is rather unclear on the whole issue (see Amendments XII and XX).
It is really too early to be predicting who's going to win an election that's just over 5 months from now, but it's an interesting intellectual exercise. The economy is growing, employment is going up slowly but steadily, the handover of sovereignty in Iraq is coming up in about three weeks, and as long as Bush can hold the ship together, I think it's likely that he'll be reelected. One unknown will be how the country would react to a terrorist attack between now and the election. Theoretically, at least, terrorists might be able to throw the election to Kerry by saying they were doing the attack because of Iraq. However, with sovereignty being given to Iraqis later this month, such a statement will not have as much of an impact in September or October, particularly if Bush pushes the good things being done in Iraq as part of his campaign.
It would not be overly hard for Bush to act as a strong leader following a new terror attack, point out how much better off Iraqis are under democratic rule (thereby painting those who commit acts of terrorism as being anti-democratic, something that really raises hackles in the US) and act as a leader to weather an attack. Kerry, however, would have to walk a fine line between criticizing Bush for not being able to stop the attack, tacking the blame for the attack on the war in Iraq, and yet not openly being too vocal against Bush as he acts as a leader.
Too soon to say, really. But if I happen to predict anything right, remember where you read it first!