Hater-in-Chief?

I hate to repeat hateful racist words, but here is why any discussion or debate about McCain as a viable candidate should be over. He's racist. He's stubborn. He's bitter. (He's also cruel, sexist, senile, ignorant, uniformed, and a hothead, but those are issues for another day.)

Feb. 18, 2000
Arizona Sen. John McCain refused to apologize yesterday for his use of a racial slur to condemn the North Vietnamese prison guards who tortured and held him captive during the war.
"I hate the gooks," McCain said yesterday in response to a question from reporters aboard his campaign bus. "I will hate them as long as I live."

I wouldn't judge John McCain. He has a right to hate. He has a right to free (hate) speech, perhaps, even under McCain/Feingold. But he has no right to imagine he is qualified to be president with unresolved anger issues like those.

What is amazing to me is how is how the old white male Republican is graded on a curve, and can get away with things that would drive the media to end th Obama campaign if the boot were onto the other head.
Discussion:
FAIR
Twin Cities Daily Planet
Seattle PI

End of the Voting Machine Error (almost)

I think it is worth noting that Diebold Election Systems, which changed its name to Premier Election Solutions about a year ago (perhaps as a tribute to Premier Joe Stalin? or more likely because its brand name is dirt), has admitted now that its voting machines (not its ATMs, which it also makes) don't work. They drop votes. They can't count. Unfortunately, it is too late to change the machines for the next election.

OK, then. Can we have the last 4 years back now?

I think I'm going to spill some links here (due to the Help America Vomit Act of 2002).

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/08/21/ohio_voting_machines_contained.html
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hM24D2P_dBmIDGu_u_mPKthDHpGQD92MVT580
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hM24D2P_dBmIDGu_u_mPKthDHpGQD92MTAI80
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/07/AR2008080703083.html
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20080822/diebold-premier/
http://wok3.wordpress.com/2008/08/21/premier-election-solutions/
http://blogs.computerworld.com/diebold_premier_fesses_lost_oh_votes
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=electronic-election-day
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jej6XIWrQn6-gw5O5bJa1ELx78DgD92LLDO00

Paper is the answer. It works and always has worked, around the world. If writing your candidate's name on a piece of paper is too challenging, a piece of paper on which you put an x in the box next to your candidate's name can be provided for you. Obtain paper. Have writing implements. If each person can count 500 ballots you will need one person to count for every 500 voters you get. 0.2%. It really isn't that hard (just like the notion of "health Insurance").

The images here are just a handful from a series of parody ads called the Diebold Variations by Rand Careaga/salamander.eps (c)2004-06.

Better Living Through Electronic Monitoring Bracelets

The increased use of electronic monitoring bracelets provides a hi-tech solution for law enforcement personnel who seek alternatives to the traditional American answers of incarceration, taser, and the British third way of continuous CCTV surveillance. Here are three stories involving the use of electronic monitoring bracelets I've read in the last day or so:

1. for illegal immigrant mothers in Mississippi
Catch, tag, and release IS more humane than catch, detain, torture, deport.

2. for sex offenders in Korea
Hey, who's gonna complain!

3. for kids who don't attend school in Texas
As if you couldn't track them by their twitter or cellphone.

DNC via C-SPAN not CNNj

Here in Japan we have CNNj on satellite TV. It was supposed to stand for CNN Japan. It has 0% Japanese content, unless you count the commercials. It seems that CNN came up with the name to mask the fact that it was just a direct feed from the US network, recycled. This year they have backed off from last year's programming. It seems that viewers in Japan didn't appreciate nonsense like Lou Dobbs any more than the failed Fox News. Instead, coverage shifts to Hong Kong in the early morning and to London later in the day.

Anyway, CNN is a network which is supposedly covering the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Their coverage consists of their own talking heads telling us how the convention is going. The convention is happening in the background, but they are ignoring 90% of it. Instead, we are expected to listen to the CNN talking heads telling us how the convention is going, when we can clearly see that they are neither watching nor listening to any of it.

While Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell was speaking, they were interviewing Rudy "9-11" Giuliani.

That's when I shut it down and changed to C-SPAN.

I am still monitoring CNN to document how miserable their coverage is. I won't be watching CNN until after the RNC is over thanks to them pulling that Rudy crap. CNN, you suck royally. What a massive waste of bandwidth.

Right now Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer is speaking. CNN has Wolfblitzer and a camera trained on Bill Clinton scratching his eyes.

Looked at the TV again. Wolf has shut up and they are now showing us Schweitzer. He is likely to get cut off in mid stream for a talking CNN head to lead us to the next commercial break.

Russian Armored Vehicle Empire (RAVE)

Proposed revision of the Russian Federation flag, inspired in part by the AK-47 on the Mozambique flag.

Three Models Supporting an Obama Win

Those in the business of modeling may have some encouraging words for Barack Obama and his supporters. (Nothing to do with the suspected ex-heiress Pittsburg MotelSix.)

The Fair Model (by Ray C. Fair)

Bread and Peace: The Hibbs Model (by Douglas Hibbs Jr)

Macroeconomic Advisors (via The Economist)

Top 5 Reasons Why I Hate the Olympics

Reasons Why I Dislike the Olympic "Movement"

1. Nationalism
If 21st century Earth is a giant prison camp, nations are the gangs and their flags are the gang emblems. Watching people wave their banners is pretty depressing, just like watching what was that horrible movie Triumph of the Will? Why not allow athletes to compete as individuals? Alternatively, they could form teams based on blood type, favorite music, favorite color, or some other randomly chosen characteristic. Rotate it so while teams compete on the basis of blood type this session, they will go by favorite color four years from now.

2. Competitivism
Technically, that isn't a word, but the religion of competiveness is an empty shell. Races are won on the basis of hundredths of a second. Instead of laughing and giving everyone a prize, they give out the gold as though the one hundredth of a second really meant something. That whisker of a win was decided by how well someone shaved, whether they packed the right razor, or whether their clothes contained streamlined microfibers or not. What this is telling us is that everyone is pretty much equal and that the whole basis of the medals and awards is bogus. Maybe we need some kind of cooperative games or it is just time to retire the whole concept.

3. Regionalism
By regionalism I mean the egotism of the capital region. Beijing is an idiotic place to hold the Olympic games. Basically it is the center of an industrial complex. Maybe they could have gone out of town to somewhere more rural and unpolluted (less polluted, let's say).

4. Spectaclism
Just watching sports drives me crazy. I immediately want to move and wonder why I am trying to hold still and watch a screen and the people on the screen get to move. This is a general criticism of spectator sports. Unless you are handicapped, you should get out and move yourself. For every two hours you are playing, watch a game on TV for an hour, maybe. I suppose you could learn to improve your game, whatever your game is. There used to be community leagues for all kinds of sports; many of these dried up with the rise of spectatorism.

In connection with this is the crappy and nationalistic coverage of the media, and the bizarre kinds of games that exist. Subjectively evaluated "sports" such as synchronized swimming, and even basketball (sorry) are not real games. These are subjectively evaluated, scored, and refereed. A true game should have simple and self-evident criteria for winning. This is true of foot races, shot put, javelin throws, etc. Anybody can see who arrived first, which went farther, etc. It should be possible to measure the results with a machine such as a scale, sensor, or tape measure. The medieval Olympic games degenerated into circuses, too, and we are following that natural path of development or devolution. These circuses also distract people from useful social work which could be done on a global scale.

5. Class and Oppression
The Olympic games are usually a good excuse to tear down old buildings, throw poor people out of their apartments to renovate them to rent to visitors, beef up the police force, spy on citizens, fly lots of helicopters over the city, etc.

I could come up with a few more things I dislike about them, the environmental waste, the runaway corporatism, and so on, but this will do for now. It may seem like a good idea in principle to get the world's athletes together every once in a while for a massive series of games, but it has got to be overkill from the point of view of many. So many games are going on and most of them will not be watched or televised. It would be better to have a series of small competitions the way the world cup in soccer and other sports is done. I could probably be persuaded of some good effects of the games, but overall I find more to disgust me than inspire me.

Watching the Olympics makes me feel I am watching a row of dogs chained to their kennels, straining furiously at their chains, perhaps to see which one can get the closest to a passing cat. All the chains are the same length, but the cat may venture a little closer to one and one dog may feel that he really scared it and got the respect of the other dogs. The dogs are just hurting themselves the harder they strain to get the cat. Similarly, athletes are driven to do unhealthy things due to the money and politics of the games. The spectator fetish led to the corporate interest and money in the game, which led to athletes doping themselves, ruining their health and setting bad examples with their prostituted short athletic suicide lives, hopefully bringing down the whole decayed system to be replaced with the old family/neighborhood/community good-natured sports model, except now it is played with a Wii.

I do like China, though. And Taiwan. And the Dalai Lama. Long live Tibet! Can't we all just get along? I'm glad that China got a chance to hold the games, if it is important to them (and it is).