I was going to be bummed about missing the debates because I'll be at work. Then I found out they're not debates in any way, shape, or form.

(10.) They aren't debates!

"A debate is a head-to-head, spontaneous, structured argument over the merits of an issue," Rice says. "Under the ridiculous 32-page contract that reads like the rules for the Miss America Pageant, there will be no candidate-to-candidate questions, no rebuttal to your opponent's points, no cross questions or cross answers, no rebuttals, no follow-up questions -- that's not a debate, that's a news conference."

(9.) The debates were hijacked from the truly independent League of Women Voters in 1986.

"The League of Women Voters ran these debates with an iron hand as open, transparent, non-partisan events from 1976 to 1984," Rice says. "The men running the major campaigns ended their control when the League defiantly included John Anderson and Ross Perot, and used tough moderators and formats the parties didn't like. The parties snatched the debates from the League and formed the Commission on Presidential Debates -- the CPD -- in 1986."

I'm actually a bit scared that we're the ones trying to proselytize our brand of democracy to the world. All it takes is reading Zinn's A People's History of the United States or Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me to make me want to renounce my citizenship and move to a country with real freedom and democracy, like the Netherlands. It's not like my vote really matters, I'd be better off playing the lottery.

I wasn't aware of this until this morning: John Kerry was responsible for breaking open the Iran Contra scandal. The criminal activity of illegally selling weapons to the terrorist, drug smuggling Contras makes Watergate look like shoplifting.

In April 1986, Kerry and Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut, proposed that hearings be conducted by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee regarding charges of Contra involvement in cocaine and marijuana trafficking. Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the Republican chairman of the committee, agreed to conduct the hearings.

Meanwhile, Kerry's staff began their own investigations, and on October 14 issued a report which exposed illegal activities on the part of Lt. Col. Oliver North, who they contended set up a private network involving the National Security Council and the CIA to deliver military equipment to right-wing Nicaraguan rebels (Contras). In effect, North and certain members of the President's administration were accused by Kerry's report of illegally funding and supplying armed militants without the authorization of Congress.

It's safe to say that the Republicans might still be bitter about Kerry's actions, which nearly convicted and imprisoned their President, Vice President (our current president's father), Secretary of Defense, and other assorted Reagan administration officials. National Security Advisor John Poindexter and Oliver North were convicted of multiple felonies. They were overturned on technicalities.George Bush Sr. issued pardons for several of the terrorism-supporting officials involved in the scandal:

Bush pardoned a number of figures implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal on December 24 1992, including former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Weinberger had been scheduled to stand trial on January 5, 1993 for lying to Congress regarding his knowledge of arms sales to Iran and concealing 1700 pages of his personal diary detailing discussions with other officials about the arms sales. As Weinberger's private notes contained references to Bush's endorsement of the secret shipments to Iran, some believe that Bush's pardon was an effort to prevent an order for Bush to appear before a Grand Jury or possibly to avoid an indictment.

I wonder if, behind closed doors, George W. Bush is saying, "That man almost got my daddy throwed in jail!"

I stumbled onto a sobering article written by a guy who is conviced he'll never meet his match. It's humorous, but not nearly as funny as the crazed response written by a reader:

THERE ARE TWO THINGS I WOULD LIKE TO SAY ONE 1# WHO GAVE BIRT TO YOU
A CABBAGE LEAF YOU
CAN FROM WOMAN, IT HAS ALWAYS
BEEN ADAM AND EVE NOT ADAM & STEVE NO# 2 YOU NEED GOD IN REAL BAD WAY
, I WILL BE PRAYIN FOR YOU , YOU HAVE SOME WORPED
IDEAS, AND REALLY NEED HELP, I DON'T KNOW WHAT KNDA RELATIONSHIP
YOU'VE HAD WITH FEMALES IN YOUR PAST, BUT SPEAKING FOR ALL THE WOMAN
IN THE WORLD, THERE I THREE SIDES TO EVERY STORIE AND YOU PROBABLY HAD
YOUR FINGERS INVOLDED, AND IF YOU'VE NEVER
BEEN WITH THE FEMALE GENDER THEN YOU HAVE NO ROOM TO JUDGE ALL THE
WOMAN IN THE WORLD LIKEYOU HAVE, AND THIS TELLS ME THAT YOU LIKE MALES,
AND YOU REALLY NEED TO READ A BIBLE
AND SEE WHAT AWAITS YOU IN GODS WRATH, NOT TO MANY DAYS HENCE, NOT
EVERY WOMAN IS BAD
OR STUPIED, OR BABYMAKERS YOU GOT DEEP ROOTED PROBLEMS THAT MAY STEM
FROM YOUR PAST BUT
YOU REALLY NEED TO SEEK HELP AND YOUR SITE WAS NOT FUNNY IT
ONLY SHOWED HOW LITTLE OF A PERSON YOU REALLY ARE IN SIDE
AND HOW HURT YOU'VE BEEN ......

Connections was the coolest documentary show I've seen. I watched three episodes when I was seventeen, and it stayed with me for the last 9 years. James Burke takes you on a trip through history to show how seemingly unrelated events led to modern day technology. For example, during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt the French soldiers bough woven shawls and broght them back to Europe, leading to a craze and a huge demand for intricately woven fabric. This led to automated looms controlled by punch cards, which let to the punch card-driver ENIAC computer, which in turn led to the computer you're using to view my site. I'm very interested in buying the 5-DVD sets of each season...but they're selling for around $150. I'm going to have to see if they're at the library.

Update: Woot! They have season 2!
Update 2: Tons of Burke stuff.

Whoo! Yeah! Bacon!

See what happens when you replace everyday things with insects (and arachnids). It's neat, in an Ugly Zoo kind of way.

Anomalous Data describes an incident at a local school's meeting with parents, children, and teachers present. This is politics at it's most disturbing.

The teacher told of an exercise wherein he read from both the Bush and Kerry websites. He read where each of the candidates stood on the main issues of the campaign. He didn’t say who was who…just “this is what candidate one says, this is what candidate two says”.

The kids made tally marks about each thing they agreed with from each candidate.

Then the kids voted on the issues.

Four kids voted for Bush. 26 kids voted for Kerry.

At any rate, Eden Prairie has grown a crop of Bush/Cheney yard signs that rivals the corn crops of neighboring rural towns. This is Bush country, make no mistake about it…
…as illustrated by the fact that most of the kids who voted for John Kerry were greatly upset by it. They booed the results of their vote. They were upset that they had voted for the “wrong guy”.

Fortunately Bash.org comes through with many, many of them. They're arranged in such a way that they're insanely, bladder-burstingly funny.

Ben174 : If they only realized 90% of the overtime they pay me is only cause i like staying here playing with Kazaa when the bandwidth picks up after hours.
ChrisLMB : If any of my employees did that they'd be fired instantly.
Ben174 : Where u work?
ChrisLMB : I'm the CTO at LowerMyBills.com
*** Ben174 (BenWright@TeraPro33-41.LowerMyBills.com) Quit (Leaving)

They Fight Crime!

He's a superhumanly strong flyboy dwarf with no name. She's a man-hating goth bodyguard who dreams of becoming Elvis. They fight crime!

Just go here and keep clicking "Try Again!" for non-stop laughs.

A small study conducted in Bonn, Germany has revealed a antibody-based therapy for Alzheimer's whch looks promising. It's too early to say what will come of it, but it's moving to a large scale, double-blind study. It certainly makes me a slightly less afraid of getting old.

...or at least start (ahem) acquiring episodes of Ali G in Da House. I've got to learn more about Kazakhstan. Borat kicks ass.

I don't know what's so offensive about these candy wrappers. Everybody knows fruit don't have genitals, so what's the big deal if they're getting down on the wrappers?

This is too amazing to be a coincidence. God punishes the republican-voting counties of Florida.

It's very suspicious that the Gallup organization's poll showing a 13% lead for Bush was inordinately republican-heavy. Well, maybe not so suspicious when you take into account that the CEO of the organization is a GOP donor. Thanks, Metafilter.

This is just waaaaay too good. Use Amazon to reserve the book you're viewing at your local library. I haven't tested it with the Multnomah County Library yet, but I'm really hoping it works.

Senior Military officials aren't exactly optimistlc about Iraq.

Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He adds: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends."

So, we lost Vietnam because the Vietnamese were supporting a political ideology. We underestimated their dedication to communism, and as a result were slaughtered. This happened in spite of the fact that we dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did in the duration of WWII. W Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College's strategic studies institute, says the Iraqis are going to be even more devoted to their religion, and that's not good for the administration's plans:

"If you are a Muslim and the community is under occupation by a non-Islamic power it becomes a religious requirement to resist that occupation," Terrill explained. "Most Iraqis consider us occupiers, not liberators." He describes the religious imagery common now in Fallujah and the Sunni triangle: "There's talk of angels and the Prophet Mohammed coming down from heaven to lead the fighting, talk of martyrs whose bodies are glowing and emanating wonderful scents."

Firefox is a great browser. I wasn't a big Netscape fan, but this is far from Netscape. It's hands down the best browser in the game right now, and it's free. Microsoft isn't really a player in the browser market anymore, having achieved their goal of vanquishing the threat to their platform. Their browser has only in the last month made a noticeable change from when IE 5.0 launched. Meanwhile Firefox is blowing up: skins, cross-platform functionality, extensions, standards compliance, tabbed browsing...the list goes on and on. Don't take my word for it though, go get it yourself.

The Bush Administration revealed that the "War on Terror" is complete doublespeak by welcoming anti-Castro terrorists into Miami.

It's Ok though, because they're on our side fighting against communism. Wait, wasn't Osama bin Laden on our side, fighting against communism, back in the 80s?

The fourth man, Luis Posada Carriles, was the most notorious member of this anti-Castro cell. He is an escapee from a prison in Venezuela, where he was incarcerated for blowing up an Air Cubana passenger plane in 1976, killing 73. He also admitted plotting six hotel bombings in Havana that killed one tourist and injured 11 others in 1997. Posada has gone into hiding in Honduras while seeking a Central American country that will harbor him, prompting Honduran President Ricardo Maduro to demand an explanation from the Bush administration on how a renowned terrorist could enter his country using a false U.S. passport.

The terrorist backgrounds of Posada's three comrades-in-arms are as well documented as their leader's. Guillermo Novo once fired a bazooka at the U.N. building; in February 1979, he was convicted and sentenced to 40 years for conspiracy in the 1976 assassination of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his American colleague, Ronni Moffitt, in Washington. (His conviction was subsequently vacated on a legal technicality.) Gaspar Jimenez was convicted and imprisoned in Mexico in 1977 for murdering a Cuban consulate official; he was released by authorities in 1983. Pedro Remon received a 10-year sentence in 1986 for conspiring to kill Cuba's ambassador to the United Nations in 1980. These are violent men. Panamanian prosecutors said they had planned to detonate 33 pounds of explosives while Castro was speaking at a university in Panama. Had they not been intercepted by the authorities, the blast not only would have killed the Cuban president but quite possibly hundreds of others gathered to hear him speak during the inter-American summit.

It's not the first time we've sponsored terrorism. Remember the Contras From that Iran-Contra fiasco? Yes, that was us.

But hey, we're safe from Terrorism because we iinvaded Iraq and won the hearts and minds of every man, woman, and child in the middle east, right? Well, we were before we gunned down 80 civilians and a reporter on live television.

I'm not every going to war. Period. I say this because I know that if I do so and I'm taken prisoner, the precedent for adherence to the Geneva Convention set by my county guarantees I'll be tortured, hidden from the Geneva convention, and possibly sodomized. Thanks, assholes.

The Guardian reports that as many as 100 prisoners were hidden from the International Red Cross in Abu Ghraib in what is a stunningly blatant violation of the Geneva Convention. It's astonishing to watch our country's leaders and military misrepresent and embarass us like this, knowing that the country remains almost perfectly divided over which candidate to elect in the upcoming election. I'll be perfectly frank: even if Osama bin Laden were running against Dubya, I'd vote for Osama in a heartbeat.

"But why would you do that, Barry? Osama is an insane religious fundamentialist, bent on destroying our government!"

Remember, the republican party is the party of Grover Norquist, who said "“I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Yeah, and Dubya's bee Born Again, and Pat "Mullah Omar" Robertson says God personally told him that George Bush will win in a blowout. Fortunately, Pat's hotline to God has very poor reception (or God just likes to jerk Pat around!).

In other news, the United States comes closer and closer to a single-payer health care system.

Who doesn't love the A-Team? I can't wait for the A-Team to come out of DVD. In the meantime, I'm keeping myself going with the help of this A-Team fan fiction!

Play The Virgin Game and try to spot the virgin. It's harder than it sounds.

The news in haiku,
concise, distilled and succinct,
with relevant links.

Daily updates on the world around you, presented with poetry.

I was considering souping up my laptop with an external 200 GB hard drive. However, now that I've seen Hitachi's 32 Petabyte Array I'm thinking about waiting.

To put things in perspective:

• 1 Petabyte = 1024 Terabytes
  
• 1 Terabyte = 1024 Gigabytes
  
• 1 Gigabyte = 1024 Megabytes
  

The best thing about Levitated isn't their amazing flash, although it's definitely quite interesting. The best thing is the fact that they're open source, meaning you can open the code up and play with it.

I wouldn't say I hate dogs per se, but I definitely am more cat-centric. I definitely got a chuckle when I stumbled across the dog hate blog.

George Soros wasn't very happy when Dennis Hastert called him a drug kingpin, and wrote him a letter about it.

Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling (Pauling being a 'communist sympathizer, Life Magazine called the award 'A Weird Insult From Norway') grew up on Hawthorne Street. I recall someone informing me that a famous scientist grew up there, and I stumbled across the article about him today while surfing Wikipedia.

Further evidence that Portland produces top-notch communist sympathizers.

Read the Car and Driver review of the Cadillac Escalade EXT, which is absolutely the funniest auto review I have seen in my life.

The CEO of Diebold, the voting machine manufacturer, has promised to deliver the important swing state of Ohio to George W. Bush in the upcoming Presidential election. He didn't explain how.

Black Box Voting explains the gaping security hole which leaves millions of votes susceptible to fraud.

Issue: Manipulation technique found in the Diebold central tabulator -- 1,000 of these systems are in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time.
By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.

This program is not "stupidity" or sloppiness. It was designed and tested over a series of a dozen version adjustments.

Is it just me, or is irony alive and well? George W. Bush skips out on Vietnam, and Republicans rally around him, mocking decorated veteran John Kerry with purple heart bandages (George did wear a decoration, but he didn't earn it. That's an offense punishable by 6 months in the brig by the Uniform Code of Jusice). Dubya flip-flops on the war on terror, and Republicans call John Kerry 'Flipper'.

Some people hailed 9/11 as the death of irony, but I'm noticing that it's alive and well.