They Get 16 Months; We Got 4 Years

In an anticlimactic coda to the 2004 election scandals, two Ohio election workers have been convicted of working to subvert the voting process in their county. Everyone's dancing around the effect this might have had on the national election, and the prosecutor in the case won't claim that they artificially swung the election for the wrong man. But what they did was cherry-pick ballots so as to avoid a recount, which indeed might well have altered the outcome of the election.

We'll never know. Thanks to these fine people. And think - these are only the ones we know about, now, years after the fact. And meanwhile, certain people are out to make voting more obsfucated, less open, and more subject to manipulation.

He's Not Unraveled Enough

In the wake of recent revelations about his role in Plamgate, speculation abounds as to Cheney's eroding political capital. Given that it now is clear that he instructed Libby to leak Plame to the press, one might in a more reasonable age hope for him to be removed from office and put on trial - but even this mere political inconvenience may be enough to keep US troops out of Iran.

It may have to be.

Throwaway Email List

Want to keep your inboxes spam-free? Leery of giving your real email address to every forum and news aggregator you encounter? This handy list of throwaway, temporary email services may just save your day.

Whispers In The Dark

"This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
-Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Times is peddling the idea that King would be a supporter of Bush's war today. In an effort to counteract this sort of willful ignorance, we present the man speaking for himself, in his own words.

RAW Becomes Illuminated

And our world becomes that much darker, or at least less strange. Robert Anton Wilson has died.

Many people have said, at one time or another, "If so-and-so wins this election I'm leaving the country!" Mr. Wilson commemorated Ronald Reagan's election by moving to Britain for 12 years.

We salute a man of principle and ideas. That those principles and ideas were so deeply weird and so invariably interesting was quite the icing on the cake.

For the curious, some essential reading can be found here. This interview, conducted in two parts in 2004 and 2005, may be of use and interest as well.

"Wavy Gravy once asked a Zen Roshi, "What happens after death?"
The Roshi replied, "I don't know."
Wavy protested, "But you're a Zen Master!"
"Yes," the Roshi admitted, "but I'm not a dead Zen Master.""
FNORD

Useful Things

450 common problems solved, by discrete pieces of handy free software. Open source utilities are listed seperately.
Useful for the anti-rootkit section alone!

Why We Fight

It deserves a post of its own - for those still confused by American involvement in Iraq and elsewhere, Eugene Jarecki's Why We Fight will be like the lights going on in a dark room. Of course, this being the digital age, the entire thing is available on Google video.