Slashdot Mirror

The problem of a post-agricultural society (and since the US is mostly post-industrial, it gets even more dramatic), is that people tend to think that life is sterilized for their convenience. Life is messy, it is both a triumph and a failure of a society to forget such things. Triumph in specialization, failure in disaster tolerance.

This is a country where there was a letter to a newspaper complaining about hunters harming animals, suggesting that they just buy their meat at the store instead (because no animals are harmed that way)!
(Kankakee Daily Journal, January 4, 2009)

Yes, they even have similar-looking noses, unless you're one of those freaks with a little pointy nose, in which case you need to undergo a medical procedure to fix this aberration.

Those clever Germans have already mastered solar power without the sun.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/4/13/its-true.html

http://moremark.squarespace.com/

Infectious disease doc who also makes a Zaphod reference in his FAQ.

I highly recommend his podcast. ep 20, 34,35,42 discusses the flu, but all his stuff is good, and he sites sources.

The world needs more Mark Crislip.

The flu* has a long history of re-serging.

The fact is you know NOTHING about the flu and how it behaves and that has made you suffer from arrogance from ignorance.

To the people who actually stupid this stuff, you are a complete buffoon. A buffoon you tried top make everyone around them as ignorant as they are. People like you need to learn to think.

The CDC and WHO acted exactly as you want them to. You might be too stupid to realize that, but they did. and no, there was no fear monger. They answered everything factually and properly as well as gave people the tool to find out information themselves.

*all types.

here isa good place to start:

http://moremark.squarespace.com/quackcast-list-mp3/

Episodes 20, 34, 35, 42

Yes he is sarcastic and doesn't stand you irrational thinking, but he is an expert, and he does site sources. So you can actual relieve yourself if that incredible burden of ignorance.
The bad thing about ignorance is that it's a burden for everyone, not just the ignorant.

Seems these people haven't heard of the Assassin 3D which was released almost a decade and a half ago. It was designed with similar goals -- ie. a trackball for aiming -- but was coupled with a real joystick for movement. This setup proved to be one of the great innovations for mouser haters. Indeed, I've had much fun fragging mouse+keyboard users since I bought my first Panther XL back in '98 -- the philosophical successor to the Assassin 3D. Nowadays I use a hacked/modified PXL where the mechanical 2-axis ( rotary ) sensor for the trackball has been replaced by the guts of a high end optical gaming mouse and the joystick electronics/sensor have either been modified to translate the joystick motion into eg. WASD key presses that are sent down a USB cable or in my case they've been replaced by a Panther DX USB joystick. ( The Panther DX is essentially the joystick component of the Panther XL )

jdb2

Nobody? Actually -- the current administration's Cass Sunstein does want to manage what is said. For example, there has been a push for "fairness" to make it so that every opinion article has to have a link to opposing views. What if you don't want to? Well, it's "voluntary" but they will make mandates if you don't comply. (video: http://trippstake.squarespace.com/journal/2010/5/17/is-this-america.html )

Anyway, this kill switch is also controlling what can be said. Silence is a total ban; why would you permit anyone to cut off all communication, large amounts of business, and god knows what else requires the internet?

One example can't be extended to all of 'em, logic fail. Please try again.

Try climateaudit.org or http://bishophill.squarespace.com/ in general.

Neither is in the pay of anyone, and have links to many, many more like themselves that are merely studying the science. This issue is big and important enough that it should be able to stand up in the full light of day.

Or talk to Judith Curry, one of the few climate scientists that are willing to point out the flaws in the current process, e.g. here: http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/04/squeaky-clean.html?showComment=1271462868897#c1343322932444511542

That's physical therapy, something a chiropractor may perform, but you can get the same thing performed by regular physical therapists. However, chiropractors also claim to be able to cure a huge list of ailments by manipulating bones, they claim they're parallel to proper medical doctors. "common knowledge" counts for nothing, see MMR myths. There's a reason why real doctors can't stand this "profession", go ask one some time. If you want to learn something about them, try quackcast, he's quite funny too.

I dont' know if this is sarcastic or really uninformed.

http://moremark.squarespace.com/quackref/#43

The skinny of the review:

Placebos do bupkis for anything but low level pain. Unless you can't take aspirin or ibu profin, forget it.

Anyone interested please read Bishop Hill's excellent piecing together of the hockey stick story.

Note this:

It is tied up in confidentiality agreements with the governments that provided it. The Met Office and the UK government say they are now seeking permission to publish it.

This is not true. When CRU was questioned about these alleged agreements there were found only to be a couple which prevented commercial reuse and that was it. The CRU page where this was shown has now been taken down, but that's what it was.

From here.
Apparently there's not so many confidentiality agreements after all.

This debate somewhat reminds me of a situation in David Weber's Empire of Man novels. In said books, the major antagonists are the Saints, a political entity whose state religion is based off of environmental fanaticism, and whose peasants starve and freeze in tiny "low-impact" quarters while their leaders live in huge, luxurious mansions.

This sort of thing is especially dangerous because environmentalism is a legitimate point of view and many environmental problems are legitimate concerns; well-intentioned people may be sucked in due to their wish to avoid worsening any supposed damage. I am myself agnostic as to the merits of the catastrophic-global-warming position, leaning towards against, largely because of their refusal to even talk to skeptics civilly. (As linked here, one major scientist refused to comment on the Climategate emails, and called security when the reporter asking didn't shut up and go away.)

As an active palaeoclimate scientist and also someone who has published in Nature I am deeply disturbed by this editorial. I have written to the editor and cancelled my subscription. There is no room in science for such closed minds. I fear that the editorial is now running behind the pack. By all accounts there is every chance the UEA investigation will be thorough and watching the Vice-Chancellor on television this evening he certainly was very careful to not defend CRU.

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/12/2/has-nature-overstepped-the-mark.html

Sure - I'd say most of these are pretty damning, esp. if you subscribe to this thing called "the scientific process":

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cuttings-33.html

There does appear to be a conspiracy though. The emails talk of the CRU coordinating with other universities and government agencies to keep the data from getting out. That fits the definition of a conspiracy. But while the pursuit of grant money may play some role, I don't think the grant money or new world government conspiracies play a major role. I think these guys are just committed environmentalists who are willing to fudge the numbers a little to make their case look stronger. There's a quote of one of them floating around from Discover(y?) Magazine where he says that in promoting global warming "each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective, and being honest.".

There are some good summaries and convenient links to the emails here: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cuttings-33.html#comments

My impression of the hockey stick issue is that the tree ring data barely corresponds to any of the temperature record. The divergence is particularly insidious because if these trees are diverging from the distant past high temperatures the way they are in the near past, the effect would be exactly what the deceivers would want, namely the flattening out of the medieval warm period. Making it look like it's suddenly hotter than it has been in a long time, even if it's really not.

The instrumental data is NOT in question, if you doubt it, I'm sure you can find microfilms of temperature reports in newspapers going back to the 1800s.

Your confidence is puzzling. Indeed the instrumental record is in question. It's very odd that it was only in the last couple years that the keepers of our climate data even bothered to check the quality of the measurement sites for problems like placement above asphalt. In fact the keepers of the data never did check it. It took skeptics to do a nationwide survey of the sites by volunteers. And they found the vast majority of sites were poorly situated. They say these problems don't affect the numbers much, but I find it hard to believe that you can build up a city of asphalt around a temperature station and not have that affect the trend very much. Going back to old newspapers won't tell you much if the city has grown up bigger and hotter over the decades.

It's hard to know what the truth about global warming is. On one side you have conspiracy theorists who will see a conspiracy in anything and spread any garbage information. On the other you have probably well meaning scientists caught red handed in a widespread conspiracy to deceive the public. Nothing can be believed on either side. The result seems to be great for companies like Exxon, because it only takes a little doubt to kill interest in spending trillions to halt global warming.

The effects on true believers whose religion has been shown to be false are so sad. You should have picked one of the traditional religions, which admit they are based on faith.

Anyway, all you have asked for has already been done and made available online many days ago.

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cuttings-33.html

I understand the NYT has been silent about the contents of these stolen and leaked emails, presumably because these emails did not endanger national security.

To cheer you up I leave you with this happy video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEiLgbBGKVk

I thought much as you did, until I saw this: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cuttings-33.html

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cuttings-33.html Nice summarized digest of the CRU et.al emails. Doesn't look good for the Hockey Team. Not good at all.

Here's the particular one you're after: http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=490&filename=1107454306.txt

The "trick" email is only one such email and flippantly dismissing it does you no credit. The significance of the leaked emails is not the claim that AGW is a hoax. That is nonsense. The significance of the emails is that they demonstratively prove that a small subset of scientists from leading universities have perverted the scientific method to promote their own eco-warrior beliefs about global warming. I would sincerely hope that Slashdot readers would defend the scientific method first and foremost above dogma.

Here is the shortlist:
(A more complete list can be found at: Bishop Hill) or (you can search the emails yourself at: An Elegant Chaos )

(1) Regarding the "trick" that you are so quick to dismiss. The quote below was taken from this thread at RealClimate.org)

"Whatever the reason for the divergence, it would seem to suggest that the practice of grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record – as I believe was done in the case of the ‘hockey stick’ – is dubious to say the least.

Mike Mann’s response speaks for itself. (by the way RealClimate.org is run/moderated by Mike Mann --not the most reliable source given these emails).

"No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, “grafted the thermometer record onto” any reconstrution. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum."

Now go re-read the email about the "trick". email in question

(2) Purposefully denying, lying, and deleting emails and information that were requested in a Freedom of Information Act request. Hiding information on the grounds that the other party only wants to find faults with it.???? Really? What about the idea behind repeating results and falsifying hypothesis. Isn't that what science is all about.

(3) Calling contacts at the BBC to find out why a skeptic article was allowed to be published.

(4) Basing the "hockey stick" graph on 14 hand picked tree samples as proxys to 1960 and smoothing the average flat, then using real temperature data forward in time with padding to project an upward trend, but not the same smoothing used on the pre-1960 numbers. (by the way trees only cover roughly 15% of the earth. Taking 14 samples from that already small sample area does not make for "global" evidence)

(5) Revkin quotes von Storch as saying it is time to toss the Hockey Stick back in 2004.

(6) Truncating data to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results.

(7) Admitting to each other that they cannot account for the lack of warming in recent years.

(8) Funkhouser says he's pulled every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. Doesn't think it's productive to juggle the chronology statistics any more than he has. Wigley discusses fixing an issue with sea surface temperatures in the context of making the results look both warmer but still plausible.

(9) Only having papers reviewed by a list of "known quantities" that will give favorable reviews. At the same time making sure that skeptical papers cannot get published in legitimate journals. So, they say publicly that if skeptics were practising "real" science they would be peer reviewed, but behind the scenes they were doing everything in their power to prevent published of any skeptic papers. For a scienti

# Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)

# Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709). Analysis of impact here. Wow!

# Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as "cheering news".(1075403821)

# Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)

from here:

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cuttings-33.html

How about this story. The emails hint at two crimes, tax evasion in Russia and deleting data to dodge a freedom of information request (Jones did happen to "lose" the data and was unable to fulfill a freedom of information request. If the email is true, he discussed deleting the data prior to the "accident").

Moving on there are several instances where the emails imply manipulating the data to reduce undesired features like the Medieval Warm period or recent cooling. And they of course attacked several journals that published certain rivals.

If these emails turn out correct, it shows a serious disregard for the scientific process among a number of top researchers in the field, opens up a void in historical world temperature measurements (Jones and Mann apparently owned most of the data for that), and perhaps even jail time for someone.

For those who want a summary of some of the emails, go read http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cuttings-33.html
Where you can read that the person most responsible for the famous Hockey Stick graph discusses how to destroy a journal that has published skeptic papers.
Yes, it's a political thing that has corrupted the scientific process. Who would'a figured?

Look to his campaign donations, and which high paid lobbyists are hanging around.

Herein lies the trouble with western democracy:

"The amount that lobbyists charge their new clients has increased by nearly one hundred percent in that same period, according to The Washington Post, going up to anything from $20,000 to $40,000 a month. Starting salaries have risen to nearly $300,000 a year for the best-connected people, those leaving Congress or the administration.

The total spent per month by special interests wining, dining, and seducing federal officials is now nearly $200 million. Per month. "

See http://hankedson.squarespace.com/saving-democracy-by-bill-moyer/ and many other sources for details..

Both sides of the political spectrum.

Ask and you shall receive:

1. There were two congressional panels, not one. The one done by the statistics experts that upheld MM's findings was headed by Edward Wegman - its report can be found here: http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/WegmanReport.pdf

A commentary by McKitrick explaining the report can be found here: http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/WegmanOp-Ed.pdf

2. The National Research Council report can be found here: http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/NRCreport.pdf

From what I understand, you have to read this one carefully - apparently the report and the media spin are in opposition. An op-ed discussing this can be found here: http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/NAS.op-ed.pdf

Documentation of the dishonest approach used to get the "hockey stick" into the IPCC report can be found here: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html

Additionally, you will also find these links of interest:

http://www.climateaudit.org/?page_id=354
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/McKitrick-hockeystick.pdf

Now, you talk about the "denialists" (which isn't a real word - trust me on this, I write and edit for a living - the word you want is "deniers"...a "denialist" would be somebody who studies or specializes in denial) as though they are either a conspiracy nut or part of a conspiracy themselves. It's not the case with scientists in the field - why would it be the case with commentators inside and outside of it?

For example, I'm a writer, editor, publisher, and grad student. I got into this as an interested party with a critical mind, and the more I looked at the field, the less it made sense. The more I looked at both sides, the more I saw the deniers using critical thinking and attacking the results and methodologies, and people like Mann and Al Gore launching character assassinations in response. One of these "refuted arguments" is the Medieval Warm Period being warmer than today, but the evidence is so overwhelming in favour of it that Mann put that data into a folder with the word "CENSORED" in it for his own analysis. You can't disprove the existence of the Roman Empire in Europe by stating that the Mayans of the time didn't encounter Romans, but Mann attempted to do something similar with his own work.

Are all climatologists fraudsters? I very much doubt it. But Mann did commit what amounts to an academic fraud that changed his field, and in the process undermined a lot of the research in it and relating to it. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and in order to understand its relation to the greenhouse effect, accurate temperature over time measurements are necessary. But Mann skewed his data and created inaccurate temperature over time results - so any analysis based on that "hockey stick" is using inaccurate information, and is in error. This goes outside of the field - a lot of work is being done to determine the role of solar activity in climatology, but if a researcher is using Mann's results, he's not going to be able to make an accurate analysis.

The analysis from the entire field of climatology since Mann's "hockey stick" is now on very shaky ground, and a lot of work has to be redone before the data is trustworthy again. Mann has become a scientific superstar, but the damage that has been done to our understanding of climate is incredibly high.

"They get called deniers because that is exactly what they are: in the face of overwhelming evidence, they continue to deny, using logic that is identical to 9/11 wonks, moon hoax nutters and, yes, even Holocaust deniers."

And what about proven scientific fraud?

A couple of years ago, two Canadians named Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick (aka MM) decided to try to recreate the famous "Hockey Stick." As I recall, one was an economist, the other a mathematician - their work was just to reproduce the results Mann had published using Mann's own model and technique.

They couldn't do it.

In fact, they found two things:

First, Mann and his team had cherry picked their data. They took only the lowest samples from the Medieval Warm Period, and only the highest samples for the modern period. In the case of the former, quite a lot of data was collected and then withheld, data which placed the Medieval Warm Period as considerably hotter than today. This is the equivalent of a historian trying to erase the Roman Empire from history.

Second, Mann's model itself would generate a "hockey stick" out of any data that was fed into it. MM fed a number of samples that were actually random noise into the model, and every single one came out a hockey stick.

Once MM corrected the graph and collected more representative data, what they found was a Medieval Warm Period quite higher than temperatures today, followed by a dip in temperature, and a rise in temperature in the last few years, but NOT one that was out of the ordinary in terms of size or scale.

The paper in which this was published ( http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/mcintyre.mckitrick.2003.pdf ) raised enough questions that in 2006 it was put before a committee led by a statistics professor named Edward Wegman, which performed an independent review of both Mann and his team's "hockey stick," as well as MM's work on debunking it. Not only did they find and report to Congress that the "hockey stick" could not be reproduced, but also that the entire paleoclimate field had become isolated and often unwilling to share important data, or clarify their methodologies - in some cases claiming that a bad methodology was fine because the answer was correct anyway. MM's work was upheld, and the "hockey stick" was debunked.

Sources so far:

http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/WegmanOp-Ed.pdf
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html
http://www.climateaudit.org/?page_id=354

When it comes to the IPCC report, the committee broke its own rules to use Mann's "hockey stick." This is documented here: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html

This is very far from "logic that is identical to 9/11 wonks, moon hoax nutters and, yes, even Holocaust deniers" - it is, however, a damning observation that the emperor is wearing no clothes.

Wrong, here is some more info on this.

You were doing so well, until you veered off into the realm of liars, charlatans, and people who do math badly. IPCC? Pfft. Trash. realclimate? A blog by the fanatic who invented the hockey stick graph. It's a climate myth GENERATING site. For myth busting, try a statistician. For a detailed recitation of just how little you can trust realclimate, read this.

Personally I suspect a good many scientific disciplines could be improved by a sound thrashing by a statistician.

"When international summit [royalsociety.org] after international summit [pik-potsdam.de] after international summit [nationalacademies.org] all recognize global warming and the human influence how can you still deny it? When from every article [sciencemag.org] in a referred scientific journal about climate change from 1993 to 2003, there isn't even ONE that disagrees with the consensus that that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities, how is it not obvious? When even international panels like the InterAcademy Council [interacademycouncil.net] and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [bbc.co.uk] can agree on the human impact, what "controversy" is there?"

Because the statement of a scientific consensus is, among other things, propaganda. And furthermore, a number of climatologists have been caught making specious claims for what appears to be publicity's sake. The findings of the IPCC have also been called into question, in peer-reviewed journals.

So, let's go through some of the list here...

First, the "hockey stick" graph was discredited a few years ago when two Canadian mathematicians tried to reproduce it, and found that the data used had been cherry picked - only the lowest data points were used for the Medieval Warm Period, and only the highest data points were used for the 1980s onwards. For more information, see http://www.climateaudit.org/?page_id=354

That, however, is nothing compared to how the "hockey stick" got into the 2007 IPCC report. That verged on fraud: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html

The IPCC report itself was based on faulty mathematics. Christopher Monckton, a physicist, decided to examine the climate model used for the 2007 IPCC report, and found that the math was wrong, and that the impact of CO2 on climate had been overstated by anywhere from 500-2000%: http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/monckton.cfm

Looking away from the science for a moment, why is it that Al Gore got a Nobel peace prize for a documentary that either misled or got a large part of its science wrong ( http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/goreerrors.html )? Why is it that the skeptics who point at the problems with climate science suffer from ad hominem attacks, while the skeptics themselves are just looking at the science? Shouldn't the argument be in regards to the data - and for that matter, isn't the ad hominem attack usually used by the person whose argument is weakest?

The climate is changing - it always has been. In fact, the last eight years have been very abnormal due to the fact that the overall surface temperature of the Earth hasn't actually changed during them (the only measurement station noting an increase in temperature is from NASA, which relies on ground based thermometers which have been overrun by urban centers, which raises the local temperature anyway - sorry, but I don't have the link for this data on hand and I'm running out of time, so you'll have to google for this information yourself). And while CO2 is a greenhouse gas, it is a very minor one. Climate-wise, we have been on an upswing for some time. But how much of that is our fault?

I don't know. But so long as the "science" that is being spouted on this is based on discredited graphs, cherry-picked data, and faulty mathematics, I don't think I'm going to find out any time soon. This "scientific consensus" is propaganda double-speak, and what's needed is honest science where theory is based on data, and not the other way around.

I'm afraid you're relying on the Hockey Stick graph, which has been pretty much demolished by mathematicians by now:

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html

Have something displaying one of these or others you find.

From the /. article just before this one.
http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~ogawa/codeswarm/

Xaos does autozoom and continually refreshes.
http://wmi.math.u-szeged.hu/xaos/doku.php

I like electric sheep
http://www.electricsheep.org/

Galaxy simulator
http://kornelix.squarespace.com/galaxy/

I don't like WordPress like some others here do. I think there's to much of an unjustified hype about it. I consider both b2evolution and Pivot superiour in terms of quality, features and usability. Pivot is database free which can be a big performance plus if you're only powering a single blog. I'd actually suggest you check out Pivot. It's backend is approachable and extremly easy to use and the available templates are a wonderfull groundwork to get rolling with your own style.

Of course all these are GPLd blogtools. If you insist on spending money for a commercial blogtool licence I'd strongly recommend Expression Engine over Movable Type or others.

A third alternative are payed blog services. You might want to check out Squarespace which looks like solid functionality crossed with a designers wet dream.

Have you ever tried to write to Amazon?

I did when I started researching which online music vendors were telling their customers which CD's they sold contained DRM that might make the products unusable. Most online vendors -- and initally Amazon --- responded that they were not supplied this information by their suppliers.

Overstock was the only company I surveyed that stated they would advertise DRM presence on their online catalogs. Interestingly, BMG's BMG Music Service also said they were unable to provide such information.

Another interesting finding was that, even as Amazon's customer rep was emailing me to say they didn't have DRM info, Amazon actually WAS providing copy protetection information on individual titles.

I finally gave up on following up on the survey after I decided to stop buying CD's altogethe. It's a dead format and is being hastened to the grave by industry efforts such as Sony's DRM rootkit.

Results of my survey are referenced here:
http://ddmcd.squarespace.com/managing-technology/a mazon-does-publish-copy-protection-information-aft er-all.html

clicky

Here are a few excerpts:

Philadelphia's 2003 mayoral election did not set especially high standards for civic discourse ...

... According to Sherry Swirsky, a local antitrust attorney who is active in Democratic politics and who worked as an election monitor that day, the men carried clipboards and drove around in unmarked black vans.

"Some of them were just driving around neighborhoods, looking menacing," Swirsky recalls. "But others were going up to voters and giving them misinformation about the kind of I.D. they needed in order to vote. The truth is, you don't need any I.D. to vote. But they were telling them they needed a major credit card, a passport or driver's license. They were telling them it was risky to vote if they had any outstanding child support bills. Imagine the menacing presence of a bunch of big white guys in black cars who look like they're law-enforcement people telling you all these things."

... It was not a sick prank by one or two racists but instead a systematic effort that required planning and not-insignificant outlays of money (the uniforms, the vehicles and the men, some of whom were reportedly recruited from out of state). ...

Swirsky met dozens of voters who were intimidated by strange men in uniforms; in a survey of black voters taken after the election, 7 percent reported being accosted by voter-intimidation efforts. ...

. . .

[Ralph] Neas [president of the nonpartisan People for the American Way Foundation] is referring not just to the Philadelphia mayor's race but also to a widely publicized absentee ballot-fraud investigation conducted by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in Orlando this summer. In that investigation, elderly African-American voters were visited at their homes by police officers curious about their voting behavior. While Florida officials deny any attempt to intimidate voters, critics say the investigation is emblematic of the kind of under-the-radar, state-sponsored intimidation program that Republican officials have conducted in the past. On Friday, the Justice Department disclosed that it has initiated a civil rights investigation into what occurred in Orlando.

. . .

In July, John Pappageorge, a Republican state representative in Troy, Mich., attended a local party meeting to discuss with colleagues the Republicans' chances of winning the state for Bush in November. In the course of the discussion, according to an account published in the Detroit Free Press, Pappageorge declared, "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election." Detroit, of course, has a huge minority population; about 83 percent of its residents are African-American. Pappageorge's statement was roundly condemned and he quickly apologized for it, insisting that he wasn't suggesting anything racist or illegal in calling for a suppression of the Detroit vote. As a matter of politic strategy, Pappageorge was probably right.

. . .

In 1986 the party hired an outside company to conduct another ballot-security initiative, this one aimed at challenging the voting eligibility of 31,000 voters in Louisiana, the vast majority of whom were black. According to a 2002 study of voter-intimidation practices that Swirsky wrote for the Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review, when Democrats again sued over the ballot-security initiative, they unearthed a Republican planning document t

Certainly disfranchisement is a serious concern. Voting in the US of A is regulated by the states (http://www.righttovote.org/state.asp), so that is something to consider before getting into a situation where a felony conviction is a possibility.

There are currently 6 states where all people convicted of felonies are permanently disfranchised: Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, and Virginia.

Most actions usually considered civil disobedience do not result in felony convictions. At that level, either what you're doing isn't civil anymore, or you're on the right track and making the right enemies.

Of course many convicted criminals go onto to be very successful despite a checkered past. The stigma of a criminal record just ain't what it used to be. Even the Republicans will hire a convicted murderer.

I think you mean "Google ate his baby."

This man is cooking up enough crazy theories for me to think Google at his baby.