podpolia

Putin says the election results are clear. However, he acknowledges the right for them to be challenged in court. Ukraine’s highest court has blocked the inauguration of Putin’s candidate. Meanwhile, CNN’s article gives details of the vote of the election board on certification of the results (11 for, 4 against) and gives some of the details of the alleged fraud. Turnout increasing by half a million votes in one region AFTER the polls close? These people make Chicago Democrats look like rank amateurs.

The US as well as Canada have announced that they will not recognize the election results as certified by the election board in Ukraine. They’re following Poland’s lead, and although they have said they’re not looking for a contest with Russia over it, things are slowly drifting that direction. Yushchenko has called for a strike to force the government to give way. Hopefully, this will have the desired effect, as both sides are willing to talk things over, but I’m not sure the government would want to accept a new election, or would manage to stop further election fraud if it was arranged.

Courtesy INDC we have a link to information of what’s actually going on in Fallujah.

Chrenkoff has a translation of a Polish article that shows what Poland is saying about the Ukrainian elections. This further illustrates what I wrote yesterday about the close relations between Poland and Ukraine; right-bank Ukraine in particular. Poland is naturally trying to counterbalance Russian influence in the region, as well as doing what they can to help democracy, much as they have done in Iraq.

Reading Chrenkoff’s article on the “City-Country Divide” (the article that he in turn refers to by Patrick Cox is also quite worthwhile) got me thinking.
And we all know that’s a bad thing.
Looking at all of the different things that the articles discussed as being the reasons behind them, I thought that I could try to check each of them, using the voting information from my own state. James Carville referred to Pennsylvania as (and I’m paraphrasing, he repeated it the other day when we were doing the questions and answers with him, but I forget the exact phrasing) “Philadelphia on one end, Pittsburgh on the other, and Alabama in between.” The vote in PA was moderately close, and there are definite differences in the demographics of different parts of the state. I used the census information from the Pennsylvania Manual and the census data, particularly from the DP-1 and DP-3 information. I don’t know what that means, but it’s a projection from a sample, so it’s somewhat prone to error, but it should be fairly close. This being the 2000 census data, some of it will be outdated, but apart from the election results, it’s outdated uniformly. I wouldn’t expect too much change in any of the numbers besides unemployment.
I looked at population density (dividing county population by county size, obtained here), race (whites, blacks, Native Americans, Asians, Pacific Islanders, others, two or more races, and Hispanics of any race), earnings, rate of military service, median age, unemployment rate (taken with a grain of salt in comparison with the present), and finally, proportion of house ownership to rentals. Before we get into the numbers, you might want to brush up on correlational coefficients.
Here are the coefficients to Bush:
Value: = Corr. Coeff.:
Density = -0.4
Whites/pop = 0.51
Blacks/pop = -0.48
Nat Am/pop = 0.07
Asian/pop = -0.48
Pac Isl/pop = 0.2
Other/pop = -0.3
2plus/pop = -0.44
Hisp/pop = -0.3
Earnings = -0.35
Military = -0.19
Own/Rent = 0.35
Age = 0.01
Unemploy = -0.23

…and the coefficients for Kerry.
Value: = Corr. Coeff.:
Density = 0.9
Whites/pop = -0.86
Blacks/pop = 0.87
Nat Am/pop = 0.03
Asian/pop = 0.63
Pac Isl/pop = -0.15
Other/pop = 0.45
2plus/pop = 0.55
Hisp/pop = 0.41
Earnings = 0.22
Military = 0.14
Own/Rent = -0.43
Age = -0.2
Unemploy = 0.27

These numbers are naturally tilted towards Kerry (as he won the state, and therefore the majority of votes). Kerry (naturally) got significantly more votes in urban areas. The higher the proportion of African Americans living in an area, the better Kerry did. The higher the proportion of whites in an area, the worse he did. We knew that already too.
There does not even seem to be much of any significant correlation beyond this, even in areas with a higher proportion of residents in the armed forces. I’m not sure how the census takers count soldiers, though, whether from the area they are from or the place in which they reside. I rather suspect it’s the latter; if it were the former, there are only 7626 soldiers from the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, total. Not very likely. This system of counting would throw it (as the numbers seem to show) towards Kerry, as sizeable military bases tend to be in or near cities.
Just out of curiosity, I checked the correlation between military service and unemployment, and got a 0.90 correlation. Maybe this explains why many liberals say that only people who can’t get a job would join the military… the places you’d see soldiers living are places with higher unemployment. This does NOT, however, mean that unemployment is high where they are from. I’d like to be able to find information on what counties Pennsylvanian soldiers are from so I could compare the unemployment numbers meaningfully with them. I suspect there’s no correlation there.
Anyhow, the numbers didn’t come out as black and white as I had hoped, but it did give some indication of the lay of the land, and reminded me (as well as the 4 1/2 of you actually reading this) that these issues are never as clear cut as we’d like to make them out to be.
If you want the spreadsheet I worked all of this out on (the links to the information are all in this post), email me. I’ll post a link to the file on here later if I can figure out how to upload it. But if nobody emails me and asks for it, I may just not bother with it.

I’m glad that my school doesn’t seem to be as bad as Columbia University. While I definitely disagree with a lot of my professors on some things, I don’t think any of them have their heads shoved up their rectal cavities like these people do. For a few of the professors here, I think it’s a case of them understanding that this is a fairly conservative area (Shippensburg straddles the line between Cumberland and Franklin counties) and that shenanigans like that would not be put up with here. However, I’m sure most of them are simply not that dense.
Link via little green footballs.

From Power Line we have this link. It’s good to see that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will actually print something so critical of the media in general.
It amazes me that the media reports so much on the American casualties in Fallujah. With all the reporting they’ve been doing from the side of the terrorists (just look at the photos the Associated Press and others have of ‘insurgents’), they HAVE to know what they are saying, how many casualties they have, etc. But to present a balanced picture, detailing casualties and their effects on the morale of both sides? Not a chance.
In other news, somewhat related, our “ally” has been up to media shenanigans again. Not only have they permitted Hezbollah to keep its television station running in France. The tacit agreement between the two groups that both will ignore the actions of the other (9th and 10th paragraphs) is what strikes me as really amusing. For the curious, here is some other stuff Hezbollah has been up to lately. Powerline also has an article from MEMRI about further French housing of terrorists. I’m beginning to suspect that one of these days France, like Holland, will regret ignoring the true nature of groups like these.
In an unrelated (at least, not directly, though Hezbollah does link the two) note, Debka has information on the Iranian nuclear program and the logistics of an American strike on them. Don’t expect a sudden build up and then an attack on Iran; I suspect that they’ll do something stupid like openly attacking American interests, and THEN we’ll go after them. Iran would be somewhat more difficult to fight through than Iraq, but many people (especially the youth) in Iran are quite fond of the idea that their government would be overthrown and a democracy built up to replace it.
We shall see.

It’s good to know that at least SOME people are standing up and fighting against revisionist history. I personally am sick and tired of hearing people pass speculation on historical figures’ sexuality off as legitimate scholarship. And I’m not even going to get into general political-correctness driven historical revisionism.
In other news, it\’s not just anti-Semitism in Europe. Nice to see the British standing up against it, though, and the pictures and captions taunting the Spanish are quite amusing.
My cat is attempting ot eat one of the pens on my desk.
This is not pleasant news. Japan went to war in World War II partially over oil, and China seems to be just as desperate right now for it. We shall just have to wait and see how this turns out over the next few years as China keeps growing economically.

This is absolutely great. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone who could do such thoughtful analysis of the positive developments in the region.

Power Line has quite an interesting piece on Natan Sharansky. I’ve heard quite a bit about this man lately, and given my affinity for Solzhenitsyn, I may have to look around and see if I can lay my hands on anything he’s written.