Hacking Democracy

Learn about vote fraud in America. I’m not sure how long this video will be up, but you can also see it on HBO:

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I said in ‘04 that I thought John Kerry possibly threw the election. The way he quit was odd. This video confirms that Kerry knew machines were incorrectly giving Bush votes he should have been getting. So, it seems all pre-arranged between the two men that Bush would win. Read my old blog from the Bush v Kerry election for vote fraud notes.

Private: Bring ‘em home… and 16 other things we should do.

What a mess Bush has created. Even 400,000 troops might not be enough and we now have under half that number in Iraq. Let’s get out for a bit. Let the place stabilize. It might do so faster if we aren’t there. We could try to keep other countries from going in. I think that’s the real worry of the neocons: if we pull out, some place like Iran will get Iraq’s oil. Meanwhile, the war for those last drops of oil is polluting the planet (military pollution = worst hole in the ozone ever), killing hundreds of thousands of people, etc. Let’s shift gears.

Try these things: 1) Get out of Iraq. 2) Grow bacteria that produce hydrogen and methane. 3) Be honest about Global warming and start fixing it. 4) Be honest about overpopulation and start fixing it world wide. 5) Be FREAKED OUT about the fact that the oceans are running out of fish and start fixing that problem. 6) Open all the evidence of 9/11 to the people of the world and bring those responsible to justice. 7) Eliminate income taxes which are only paying off debt interest, not paying for services. Eliminate the power of the privately owned Federal Reserve Banks to print our money. US govt. should be able to print our own money. 9) Stop vote fraud by having a re countable verifiable receipt, a paper trail. The technology exists for ATM machines already. 10) Stop fluoridating our water. 11) Stop using depleted uranium weapons. 12) Restore Habeas Corpus, the right to seek release from unlawful imprisonment. 13) Dump the Patriot Act which is resulting in violations of civil rights. 14) Close the secret prisons. 15) Stop torturing and bring torturers to trial. 16) Require speedy fair trials based on evidence and laws. 17) Make education a top priority, including lessons in skepticism to avoid another rise of fascism. [ $2.1 billion = 1 Stealth bomber = Annual salary/benefits for 38,000 elementary teachers ]

Okay, what am I missing? Let’s get the top 20 things we need to do to fix the world for the longest term betterment of our entire species.

Bush endures final insult as poll looms

IN the last hours of the campaigning for the mid-term congressional elections President George W. Bush took Air Force One to western Florida yesterday to suffer an embarrassment rare in the stage managed theatrics of a US president.Mr Bush landed in Pensacola, in northwestern Florida, to stump for Charlie Crist the Republican governor campaigning to replace Mr Bush?s brother Jeb. But Mr Crist didn?t show.

In a sign that the US is already looking to the 2008 presidential elections, Mr Crist snubbed Mr Bush at the last minute and instead made sure he could get to Jacksonville - on the other side of the state - to get the imprimatur of Senator John McCain, the current front runner for the Republican presidential ticket. -austrail

You can probably find election results here when they start to become available. Predictions are that the Democrats will take back America by controlling the House and perhaps the US Senate as well. Vote fraud is a real possibility, but there are a few good signs: Judge Allows Ohio Democrats To Add Elections Observers
This may be your last chance to speak out against fear and fascism.

Go vote for your state’s Democratic candidate.

Your life may depend on it because Bush is CRAZY.

The British fanatic who plotted to kill thousands

A British al-Qa’eda fanatic plotted to murder thousands of innocent people on both sides of the Atlantic, a court heard yesterday.

The detailed plans presented to terrorist handlers by Muslim convert Dhiren Barot revealed his goal of striking at major buildings and railway stations with gas bombs in cars, detonating a radioactive dirty bomb and blowing up a train under the Thames in London. …

Woolwich Crown Court heard that 34-year-old Barot had led a “sleeper cell” planning attacks in New York, Washington, London and across Britain.

In an encrypted document called Radioactive Children inside a file called Brad Pitt, the Londoner outlined plans for a dirty bomb in the capital.

Barot wrote that a radioactive device would “produce general panic, health consequences including immediate fatalities and long-term increases in cancer incidence, long-term denial of property use, disruption of services and property and facility decontamination needs”.

… Barot has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to murder and faces life in jail. He is expected to be sentenced today. Seven other men deny all charges. - telegraph

Message to the world from British intelligence: steganography and encryption are not going to work. If we say you plotted, you will be in jail for life. We can take you away from your life and lock you up. We can tell people you confessed if you did or not. We can torture you until you confess, guilty or not. Fear us. Fear ‘terrorists’. Fear being wrongly labeled a terrorist. Fear everything. Live in fear. Your fear makes us powerful. It also might help the US election tomorrow.

VOTE DEMOCRAT TOMORROW, IT MAY BE YOUR LAST CHANCE, AMERICA!

If someone did something, then they are a criminal and they need to be stopped. I’m glad the British Intel people are catching criminals … but let’s hear the evidence of an actual crime. Did he attempt to get any radioactive materials? Did he actually DO anything wrong? Or did he just think about it and write about it? Thought crimes result in life in prison now?

Tongues on the Mind

Brain scans reveal that people who “speak in tongues” have relinquished self control.

To conduct the study, psychiatrist Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and his colleagues recruited five African-American women who belong to a local Pentecostal congregation. All had been in the habit of speaking in tongues “almost on a daily basis” for the past 5 years, says Newberg. As a control activity, subjects stood and sang gospel songs with musical accompaniment, moving their arms and swaying. Then they were asked to repeat the behavior, but this time the researchers encouraged them to speak in tongues rather than sing. … scientists gave the subjects an intravenous injection of a radioactive tracer that provided, in effect, a freeze-frame of which brain areas were most active during the behavior, as indicated by increased blood flow. This was captured by then scanning the women’s brains in a single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) machine.

Glossolalia produced … a decrease in frontal lobe function, Newberg says. “The part of the brain that normally makes them feel in control has been essentially shut down.” Another notable change was increased activity in the parietal region–the part of the brain that “takes sensory information and tries to create a sense of self and how you relate to the rest of the world,” Newberg says. The findings make sense, says Newberg, because speaking in tongues involves relinquishing control while gaining a “very intense experience of how the self relates to God.” Interestingly, he notes, the glossolalia responses were the opposite of those seen in subjects in a meditative state. When people meditate on a particular sacred object, Newberg has found that their frontal lobe activity increases, while their parietal activity goes down. This conforms with the notion that in meditation one has a controlled focus while losing a sense of self. - scinow

I wonder if my brain does the same things when I improvise nonsense jazz sounds.

Viking-Era Silver Coins Found in Sweden

Archaeologists said Monday they found more than 1,000 silver coins in a Viking-era hoard discovered by chance on the Swedish island of Gotland.
The treasure, believed to have been buried in the 10th century, also included several silver bracelets and weighed about 7 pounds, local curator Majvor Ostergren told Swedish news agency TT.

Edvin Sandborg, 20, and his 17-year-old brother Arvid said they found the hoard last week when they were helping a neighbor with some yard work.

“By coincidence, I happened to find an Arabic silver coin that’s about 1,100 years old,” Edvin Sandborg told TT.

The brothers said they dug up more than 100 coins and decided to contact a local museum, which sent archeologists to excavate the site. Officials said the two brothers could expect a finder’s fee from the government, but it was unclear how much they would be paid. - examin

1984, the movie

“The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continued. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects.” 1984 (watch the full movie - sound messed up at the end) was written before 1950. Here we are in the year 2006 with a leader promoting endless war while taking away freedoms in the name of security, one by one.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (commonly abbreviated to 1984) is a dystopian novel by the English writer George Orwell, first published by Secker and Warburg in 1949. The book tells the story of Winston Smith and his attempt to rebel against the totalitarian state in which he lives.

Along with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four is among the most famous and most cited works of dystopian fiction in literature.^[2] The book has been translated into 15 languages and has left a profound impression upon the English language itself. Nineteen Eighty-Four, its terminology and its author have become bywords when discussing privacy and state-security issues. The term “Orwellian” has come to describe actions or organizations reminiscent of the totalitarian society depicted in the novel.

Global Warming Could Trigger Insect Boom

A rise in the Earth?s temperature could lead to an increase in the number of insects worldwide, with potentially dire consequences for humans, a new study suggests.

New research shows that insect species living in warmer areas are more likely to undergo rapid population growth because they have higher metabolic rates and reproduce more frequently. The finding has scientists concerned that global warming could give rise to more fast-growing insect populations and that we could see a spike in the number of six-legged critters.

The consequences could be more serious than just a few extra bug bites each summer. ?If they?re crop species, we could count on needing to use more pesticides and it could be very costly,? said Melanie Frazier, a doctoral student at the University of Washington and lead author of the study.

Insect-borne diseases are also a worry. Malaria, Lyme Disease and a host of others rely on insect vectors to spread among humans, and a swell in their populations could mean more infections. Already, scientists have observed a widening of malarial zones with new cases appearing in previously unaffected areas. - livesci

Great, the next generation will have something to eat when this generation of humans eats every fish in the ocean over the next 48 years.

Plastic trash vortex menaces Pacific sealife

Old toothbrushes, beach toys and used condoms are part of a vast vortex of plastic trash in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, threatening sea creatures that get tangled in it, eat it or ride on it, a new report says.Because plastic doesn’t break down the way organic material does, ocean currents and tides have carried it thousands of miles (kms) to an area between Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast, according to the study by the international environmental group Greenpeace.

This swirling vortex, which can grow to be about the size of Texas, is not far from the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, designated as a protected U.S. national monument in June by President George W. Bush. - more

Is this a joke? Has Bush really made a vortex of plastic trash the size of Texas into a National Monument?

Religion does untold damage to our politics.

Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of life and the greater antiquity of the Earth, more than half the American population believes that the entire cosmos was created 6,000 years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.

Those with the power to elect presidents and congressmen?and many who themselves get elected?believe that dinosaurs lived two by two upon Noah’s Ark, that light from distant galaxies was created en route to the Earth and that the first members of our species were fashioned out of dirt and divine breath, in a garden with a talking snake, by the hand of an invisible God.

This is embarrassing.

But add to this comedy of false certainties the fact that 44 percent of Americans are confident that Jesus will return to Earth sometime in the next 50 years, and you will glimpse the terrible liability of this sort of thinking. Given the most common interpretation of Biblical prophecy, it is not an exaggeration to say that nearly half the American population is eagerly anticipating the end of the world. It should be clear that this faith-based nihilism provides its adherents with absolutely no incentive to build a sustainable civilization?economically, environmentally or geopolitically. - msnbc