Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

As Bush tries to do spin control on ever climbing levels of terrorism (more) and his stormtroopers wage campaigns to strike down America's human rights (more). It's become clear that torture and mayhem orders came right from the top (more), and with Bush ordering up a trillion dollars in murdergear (more), one really has to wonder how even the most uninformed fool could vote for this national suicide… and an “election” is coming up this fall.

I don't think many people around the world take seriously any more the idea that America is a democracy, and I think even inside America people are starting to wake up to that fact. As I'm sure you remember, to win the 2000 election for Bush, Florida “accidentally purged” about 50,000 voters from the voter lists, claiming they were felons and ineligible to vote — and as you know, it later turned out that they weren't actually felons, they were just Democrats. Oops, Florida did it again. Another 50,000 voters have just been scrubbed off the list (more). Many errors have already been found in it, but Glenda Hood (FL Secretary of State under Jeb Bush, the 44th Emperor President of the United States) defends it, saying “it's a lot more accurate than the last one!” (As if admitting that “you broke the law less this time than last time” makes it less of a crime).

Voting machines are a problem everywhere in the United States (more), but let's look at the latest tests of the Florida machines that they recently certified (more). Oops, Florida did it AGAIN! Turns out that they prooduce “inconsistent” log results (as a programmer, I don't even know how this is possible, barring tampering or genuinely extreme incompetence). A log file is pretty basic stuff. The fact that its log files don't even output correctly is terrifying… but, if you're going to fake an election, you don't want log files do you, and Diebold (one of the manufacturers) has promised to deliver Republican votes through the use of their machines (more).

What's interesting is that advocacy groups such as the League of Women Voters and National Federation of the Blind are actually campaigning against verifiable voting (more)! That is, they are demanding a form of electronic voting that does not log anything — meaning no recounts, no way to confirm that vote counts aren't just made up by the machine owner, and so on. Why would these groups do such a thing? Oh, maybe it's the million dollar donations they're getting from Diebold and other Republican companies that build these machines (more, more).

Is there anyone out there that can't be bought? Why do I always think of Krusty the Clown, who when asked why he would sold out, replied, “They drove a dump truck full of money up to my house… I'm not made of stone!”

The American public accepted all of this when it played out in 2000.

They'll accept it again in 2004, right?

I've just posted an experience update with I think about 240 or so new stories. Thanks as always go to the writers, Don and the volunteer review team, and to Mr1982 for being the cover model.

Later this evening I'm hoping to recode the guts of the search engine's build routines. Now, don't get me wrong, cataloguing well over ten million crosslinks over a third of a million URLs (that's how big BME is), and doing all that in an hour and a half is still a lot faster than the average code would do it. But an hour and a half is a lot more time than I think is appropriate or convenient, so I'm going to brush off my assembler skills I guess.

TREKPS. Ionize the hull plating!

Now, it's Dramatime. I wanted to recount here this hilarious bickering betweeen Greece (the host) and Australia about the Olympics. I don't really follow sports news, but I got a chuckle out of this all when I read it yesterday. Here's the (somewhat garbled by me) sequence of events.

It begins with a bomb exploding in front of the Athens police station, coupled with other violence over the last, oh, thirty years or more. Australia, as it does for many other countries, issues a “travel advisory”, warning Aussies not only that Greece is dangerous and other fear-mongering, but that its public transit system sucks (stuff like this — “The safety standards Australians might expect of public transport are not always met. In recent years many lives have been lost as a result of accidents on both inter-region buses and ferries”).

Greece, who considers Australia (host of the 2000 Olympics) a rival, says “Are you crazy? When these games are over, do you know what people are going to be saying? BEST. OLYMPICS. EVER. Not like the crappy ones you held in Sydney.” (Which, in a moment of irony, were in fact called the best Olypics ever by the head of the IOC himself).

Unfortunately that head of the IOC then had a bit of a slip of the tongue. When asked by a reporter what he expected to be saying at the end of the Olympics, he replied “Well, I might start by saying that these were not the best ever games, but…”

Bolstered by that, Australia stands by its previous recommendation, urging travelers to avoid Greece due to “bombs, hooligans, sexual predators, pickpockets, and improvised explosives” and added, “if you do go, avoid the Olympics.” The US then chimes in as well and (I kid you not) says, “You've only got 75,000 troops patrolling the Olympics? What about al Qaeda?” US Ambassador Thomas Miller actually went so far as to call Greece's security conditions “The Perfect Storm”, and iJet (a US business travel risks company) added “we think their stadiums may collapse — you have to be really emotionally committed if you want to go to Greece”.

Undaunted, Dimitri Platis, Greece's foreign minister responded — “Are you psychotic? It is a festival. It's not going to be Fortress Greece.” The top Greek official at the Olypics, “Cosey” Fani Palli-Petralia, added that Australians were just jealous, and that she remembered the Syndney Olympic experience as staying “in containers in the heat”, and assured the public that while it might seem scary before they tried it, Greek style wouldn't be such a pain in the ass, and that all their other girlfriends had loved it.

Australia brought it back to facts, asking, “look, did you or did you not have a bomb explode outside your police station last week?”

Defending his security arrangements, the Greek Prime Minister said, “yes… but if any planes fly over the city, we'll shoot them down.” After it was pointed out that that wasn't really relevant to the regular pipe-bomb attacks inside Athens, Denis Oswald of the IOC agreed, but did add “bombings happen not every day here, but from time to time. There is nothing you can do about someone throwing a bomb out of a car at 4am… kids will be kids.”

So next time you hear about a drive-by shooting, just be glad they weren't chucking bombs out the window like they do in Athens, I suppose…