"Probably the complete opposite of what is considered "conservative"."
Uh, so? The New Republican party is the complete opposite of what is considered "conservative" too, with the exception of tax cuts. Even there "conservatives" prefer the tax cuts are accompanied by spending cuts, instead of binge spending and using a credit card to create false prosperity.
"Ashcroft wanted the coporations to own everything, and run the government."
This is more or less the definition of Fascism and Nazism. There were a bunch of giant corporations and industrialists working hand in hand with a repressive, authoritarian government. The government intervenes liberally in the economy and makes winner outs of their friends and party members and losers out of those who are not. The New Republican party does pretty much the same thing.
Needless to say the New Republican's haven't gone to the extremes of Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy or Nazi Germany which is why I call them "compassionate fascists".
Some numbnut can now invoke Godwin's law. Before you do realize its a sign that you lack something necessary to have have original thoughts, so you are just regurgitating moldy Internet cliches.
Isn't it cool how NASA has time and money to do all this cool research that doesn't really have anything to do with a space program other than their overreaching attempts to make it sound like it does.
Please, please, please take all of NASA's manned space program budget and give it to Burt Rutan(the closest modern equivalent we seem to have to the Skunkwork's Kelly Johnson), no strings attached, so he can build a reusable space craft so we all can start flying to space as routinely as we fly cross country now.
Not sure he'd take the money since he despises big government in general, and NASA in particular, but if he had a good pool of money he would make things happen. By the way he seems to despise Boeing and Lockheed about as much as NASA.
"Folks, so many people are involved in elections at so many different levels that there is literally no way that any central entity could rig an election across an entire state."
Its a near certainty the Democrats rigged Illinois in 1960 and it gave Kennedy the Presidency. Case closed:) I win.
You don't need thousands of people, blah, blah blah. You just need a few people in the right place in a close state.
As bitterly divided as the country there are rabid people on both sides, many supervising elections in precincts or counties, who if they see the opportunity would try to throw a few thousand votes to their candidate. I wager the 4000 votes was such a freelance election rigger who did such a hamhanded job of it, it stuck out like a sore thumbs. These aren't the people you need to worry about, you need to worry about the people who are really good at it and I assure you the CIA has, over the years, trained a lot of people to be very good at rigging elections.
I'd agree its a mistake to fixate on electronic voting. There are a million ways to steal an election and you can do it with optical scanners or punch cards. Paperless electronic voting would be easier to do it wholesale, by rigging the software load, and hard to catch without a paper trail but its sure not the only way to steal an election. I wouldn't be surprised if the furor over paperless electronic voting was a sleight of hand. Get all the conspiracy theorists fixated on them, and keep them clean as a whistle so they conspiracy types look like asses blaming them. Meanwhile steal the election in punch card and optical scanner precincts where no one is looking.
"I was able to reasonably come to the conclusion that he had my interests at heart."
Duh.
You work for a "defense contractor". As long as the New Republicans are in power you can have a high confidence you will have all the work you want. They are going to be getting in to one war after another, and building one overpriced weapons system after another(can you say Missile Defense) and pushing up defense and intelligence spending so they should hit a half trillion dollars real soon now. A little chunk of that is going in to your pocket.
So what is it you think you said here that proves anything other than the obvious, you thought Kerry would slash defense spending which might threaten you gravy train. After all the New Republicans told you that he would over and over again, though its quite possible the Democrats in the current climate would waste just as much on defense to prove they aren't weak on defense.
""Well more than 1100 American soldiers died looking for those non existent WMD's...". You obviously have no clue why we went to iraq. Don't say oil, because only 17% of oil comes from that area anyway."
I sure as hell do know why we went in to Iraq. We went in to it because Saddam had WMD's, and was going to use them on American cities, which is the reason I gave in first post, and which is what Bush/Cheney/Fox told us over and over again, and they never lie. It just happens there weren't any. We also went in because Saddam had ties to Al Qaida and was part of the 9/11 conspiracy. Why do I know this because Dick Cheney told me so, on Meet the Press, that it had been proven Iraqi intelligence met with the 9/11 ringleader in Prague. Unfortunately it appears it hasn't been proven and it probably didn't even happen and Saddam probably had nothing to do with 9/11. Reason three way down on the list was to bring freedom and democracy to the ragheads at the point of gun because God told George that this is what he put him on Earth and made him President to do.
Your the only one bringing up the oil angle here. I just have to go with the three reasons my President told me because he would never lie.
You probably haven't noticed but there are way more insane right wing talk show hosts, especially on radio, than there are liberal ones. I don't listen to any of them on either side, excepting Charlie Rose on PBS and I'm pretty sure he isn't insane. If anyone is insane its the right wing talk show hosts that are STILL ranting about the Clintons and seem to hate pretty much everyone and everything excepting their own. Liberal talk show hosts suck because they suck at hate filled, venomous rhetoric like its practiced by the wicked witch of the right, Ann Coulter.
Don't think I did. The only thing I cited was an actual poll done in Iraq that says they view the Americans as occupiers and want them to leave by an overwhelming majority. And I cited basic facts that Iraq is a bloody mess which no one can deny.
I assure you there are Iraqi's overjoyed that Saddam is gone and I imagine they blog it. Problem is they are mostly Kurds and Shia's. Sunnis are pissed which is what you get from a minority in a ethnically fractured country that has gone from being in power to being out of power.
"I guess the difference here is that you believe that nation building should take less than 2 years"
I don't think the U.S. should be "nation building" in the first place. Bush campaigned quite specifically against "nation building" and the Republican's pilloried the Democrats and Clinton everytime they did. Now they are doing it all over the place and at a priced tag in blood and treasure that dwarves the Balkans and Republicans just think its the greatest thing since sliced bread. One word, hypocrites.
"I bet you were one of those people that complained about Afghanistan until...whoops...they had free and safe elections."
The elections in Afghanistan were anything but free. The U.S. flew Karzai to every tribal leader and warlord in the country in a helicopter and he bought the tribe's vote with buckets of U.S. provided "reconstruction" money. There is no media outside the cities so most people have no clue who to vote for and they voted the way their tribal leaders told them to and they were bought.
Meanwhile the other candidates couldn't even campaign in most of the country because the roads are mostly nonexistent and bandits and insurgents make it very dangerous to travel outside Kabul and there is no TV and very little radio.
And of course Afghanistan is a complete mess too. Doctors without borders has pulled out of their too and they rode out the whole Russian occupation and war. There is no security outside of Kabul, the Taliban and Al Qaida are alive and well there and in the tribal regions of Pakistan. Opium production is up like 10X and is causing a surge in cheap heroin around the world which translates directly in to global misery. Despite the Bush propaganda that the Taliban was dealing drugs, the Taliban in fact ruthlessly suppressed the Opium trade because drugs are thoroughly forbidden in the Koran. The U.S. takes over and it explodes.
I'll say what I say everyone time some dick complains about it:
Much truth is said in gest
It was a white tie dinner full of rich fat cats and the fact is they are his base. They give him buckets of money to campaign, he gives them huge tax breaks, interest free loans(from our tax dollars), tax dollar giveaways(a.k.a. "Medicare Reform"), relaxed environmental regulations and on and on.
Its my sig because George just had the poor judgement to say something, in gest, that is taboo to say, the wealthy elite own the government and they own politicians on both sides of the aisle. Its just another case of the poor judgement that is his calling card. It was right up there with his skit with the slides where he is "looking for the WMD's" and can't find any. Well more than 1100 American soldiers died looking for those non existent WMD's, thousands more are maimed for life and there are tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi's who are dead and maimed too, and the tally is going up everyday and will for a really long time. Funny joke.
My mistake, should have said precinct, not county. Still 4,000 votes is like 3% of the margin which is statisticly significant coming from one tine precinct.
"In particular, tmoertel published a pretty good statistical smackdown on the theory of electronic irregularities in Ohio (this isn't my analysis - so I don't take credit for it):"
Uh, Ohio didn't use electronic voting in most of the state, the one where the 4000 Bush votes happened being more an exception than a rule. So searching for electronic irregularities is for the most part stupid. Someone challenged paperless electronic voting in Ohio and won so most counties dropped it and used their old system, usually punch cards. A few pressed ahead with half assed paper trails that may or may not have conformed to the judges ruling and were hastily done.
You don't need electronic voting to rig elections. They've been rigged as long as people have been voting. Paperless electronic voting just makes it really easy to do in a big way and really hard to catch.
If anyone rigged Ohio they could have done it the old fashioned way. Send poor quality punch cards to Democratic districts so you get hanging chads, or somewhere along the way punch out a chad for Bush in some cards so if the voter votes for Kerry its thrown out. Punch card "spoilage" is a time proven method for rigging an election.
Just because there wasn't a big statistical swing in Ohio doesn't mean the election wasn't rigged. In fact if you are really good at rigging a state you won last time the perfect rigging is to make it come out the same as last time or actually give your opponent a few more votes. Then someone comes along and does what this guy did and says, "No swing, no rigging" and that is not what it means. Its possible Kerry swung a couple percent to his side, thanks to the fact Ohio's economy has cratered under Bush. If you rig the election and just erase that two percent swing you have done a perfect job of rigging.
Again the exit polls suggest there was a swing to Kerry in most of the swing states that disappeared in the actual results, while the exit polls were pretty accurate in most of the non swing states. All the exit polls were biased to Kerry which is distinctly odd. Either they should have been off in all states in Kerry's favor suggesting a model problem or they should have been randomly off in both Kerry and Bush's favor. Just being off in swing states and only in Kerry's favor is odd to put it mildly.
4000 votes for Bush from a tiny county in Ohio that decided the election and where the margin is just over 100,000 is obviously significant.
The optical scanner anomalies in Florida are potentially hugely significant.
The anomalies in New Mexico could easily flip the state in to the Kerry column so they are statistically significant though they can't change the outcome of the election without Ohio or Florida.
The key point is if there is election rigging or incompetence its ALWAYS significant. If you don't report it, investigate it and punish it your opening the floodgates to everyone to do it in every election and your elections turn in to dodo.
"We can't accept the fact that Kerry lost... by 3.5 million votes."
Kind of amazing that all of a sudden the popular vote is important to Republicans. Well Bush LOST the popular vote last time and it didn't matter for squat to you back then. It doesn't count for anything under our constitution now either. Either consistently ignore it or consistently act like it matters, instead of just saying it matters when you win.
Fact is Bush lost by just over a hundred throusand votes in Ohio and it could very easily be a margin that might disappear if there were anomolies or rigging. Take the 4,000 vote irregularity in 1 county and you find the same in 30 more counties and Bush loses Ohio and the election.
Florida's margin was bigger but so are the anomalies in all the optical scanner district. Just because the President's brother may have rigged it by large enough a margin so it didn't look close isn't any excuse for investigating major anomalies.
"If there was so much hacking going on, why were all these liberal crackers out there working to give Kerry votes?"
We aren't talking about hackers here. We are talking about ruthless politicians. If there are any hackers involved here they are just pawns. We may be talking about CIA or ex CIA people here. They rig elections all over the world and have for decades and its not a secret. They are very good at.
You have to be ruthless and unscrupulous to rig elections. Its helps a LOT if your party controls the election machinery which they do in Ohio and do in a HUGE way in Florida, thanks to the fact the President's brother runs the state. Ruthless and unscrupulous accurately discribes the Bush family and has for numerous generations. It also describes Karl Rove. Today's liberals and Democrats are complete wimps compared to the Machiavellian masters that are todays Republicans and especially the neocons.
The bottomline is it doesn't even matter that much who won. IT DOES MATTER IF ELECTIONS were being rigged any place by anyone even if it doesn't change the outcome. If there are major anomalies they MUST be investigated to the hilt and those involved MUST be prosecuted. If you let election rigging go unreported, uninvestigated and unpunished you will open a flood gate to do it again and again and your elections quickly become meaningless and futile.
Its important to note that many dictators seize and hold power not at the point of a gun but by rigging elections.
Speaking of Canadians it was on CNN Morning this morning that the day after the election the number of hits on the Canadian immigration info site, from Americans looking to bail, spiked like 6X and set a new daily record.
I don't think it registered with Canadian immigration or CNN they were slashdotted since the URL was posted on one of the Slashdot threads about people who were considering leaving America now that it appears its turning in to a right wing police state dominated by intolerant bible thumpers, and may be for a very long time unless there is a major backlash.
I only pray a new third party arises out of the ashes of the Democratic party and moderate Republicans when they realize their party has been usurped by right wing extremists and bible thumpers.
I'd like to see a party that is moderate on social issues, but which strongly favors small government and lower taxes for the middle class, kind of like where McCain, Guilianni and Arnold are but who completely divorce themselves from the New Republican party. Thats the group in America totally abandoned by both parties and I wager its a large one. Maybe it would a little like Libertarians but not so far out on the fringe.
If the Democrats want to win again they need to stop pandering to their special interests, unions, trial lawyers, Hollywood celebs, minorities and gays and target middle Americans for a change. That list of special interests does turn off middle Americans and insures they wont win the South or Midwest. And of course they need to find some candidates that don't suck as bad as Kerry, and I'm not sure there are any in the Democratic party. I assure you the New Republicans are salivating at the prospect of running against Hillary in 2008.
"The computer industry is nearly universially pro-Patent and spreads money to both parties."
What basis do you have for that statement. I think it would more appropriate to say the computer industy's lawyers are pro-Patent. In engineering, R&D and even executive circles I think they have become more of a negative than a positive. The constant defensive patent searching and legal wrangling over them is turning in to a net negative, especially in software patents.
A case study, Adobe sues Macromedia for patent infringement on tabbed UI, Macromedia countersues with some of their patents, they wrangle for a year and then settle out of court. Its hard to say what was in the settlement but chances are the lawyers were the only ones that made a profit, the two companies just wasted a LOT of time and money that would have been better spent developing and marketing products.
Another case study Forgent and its predecessors push JPEG to standards committees at the same time they submarine patents on it, and now they are successfully doing the rounds making everyone who uses JPEG pay for a patent that has never been enforced and expires in 2006. If I recall they may try to extend it to nail MP3 next. Forgent added no economic value to the world, if everyone knew JPEG was patented they would have chosen a different standard. But they rake in buckets of money, money going to execs, lawyers and shareholders most of whom weren't even around when the patent was filed, and the engineers who did add some value way back are probably getting squat.
If you want a healthy economy you need to reward people and companies who add value, not opportunists and gamblers.
I wager its reached the point most companies are trying to rack up patents for defensive purposes and the threat of patents is nothing but a massive draining as they try to develop new products.
I'm sure there are very proprietary software companies who LOVE them, Microsoft being the obvious example. Patents are certain to be their arrow of choice in a few years when all the patents they've been filing the last couple of years are awarded, many of which are probably designed precisely to nail Linux and open source.
"If you think that Boston has a higher average IQ than, say, Midland, Texas, you're assuming that people who live in Boston are just naturally smarter."
Once again you are full of shit Twirp. About all thats required is for large numbers of high IQ people to gravitate to Boston, which obviously they do in very high numbers thanks to the presence of MIT, Harvard, and a bunch of other above average schools, and a large number of high tech employers that only higher smart people. Its a city that also draws the best doctors, lawyers, etc. There are plenty of dumb people born in Boston but it has IQ magnets that are certain to skew the numbers in its favor.
If you've ever lived in the sticks you would know that there is also an almost physical force that draws all the intelligent young people out of small towns and to the city, first for their higher education and then for jobs. The people that stay in them all their lives just aren't the best and brightest.
I'll get slammed for it but I wager there is also a close correlation between intelligence and religious faith. Smart, well educated people simply don't buy into organized religion in large numbers. They tend to see through the con game that is big organized religion. If they do have spiritual leanings they tend to be towards less organized and less phony religions. Evangelical Christianity in America is a hollow shell run by conmen. American Christians don't have a clue what Christ's message really was just like they have no clue Bush/Cheney lies to them on a daily basis. They will sit in church on Sunday hearing the teachings of a pacifist who abhored wealth and violence, it goes in one ear and out the other, and the rest of the week they worship war and greed as their real gods.
The New Republican's just need to learn to deal with the reality of their new base. There are some real smart elitists in it, but their voting base is completely dependent on dumb, poorly educated, rural and small town, bible thumpers. It kind of follows since they are the only demographic dumb enough to fall for the gigantic con game the new Republican party is pulling on them. Smart people can tell the Bush administration lies on a daily basis, just like the see through the bullshit the Falwells, Robertsons and Bakers foist on evangelical Christians on a daily basis. To put it another way the Republican's new power base can be summed up with one word, gullible.
Well it is a really innovative advance over the X-15, especially the feather(see below).
Many of the veterans of the X-15 like Scott Crossfield are convinced to this day that if the U.S. had stayed on the X-15 track we might be flying in to space today almost as routinely as a commercial airliner. It might not be the way to go for heavy cargo lifting but it seems a lot better way to fly people and small cargo to a space station and if you can fly small cargos, cheaply, on a weekly basis it adds up.
For a heavy lifter I really wish NASA would take the Space Shuttle stack, throw away the Shuttle, replace it with a simple unmanned cargo container. That would be an awesome heavy lifter if got rid of all the dead weight that is the Shuttle. The SRB's really are A OK for cargo lifting especially if they were filled with the newer cleaner paraffin fuel one of the Universities(Standford?) is working on.
"It cannot be turned into an orbital vehicle for just a few million more, as some seem to believe."
Well thats not me. Thats why I'm wishing he had about $1-2 billion, no strings. He could make a run at it with that much and his small spartan team approach.
"some way to get rid of that speed upon reentry (like a heatshield)"
Not sure it will translate up to the reentry speeds from LEO but Rutan did have a really innovative approach with the feather that allows him to have a lot less heat shielding than the X-15 had. For the obviously less demand flight profile they have now the idea is to create very high drag, by feathering the wing so its flat in to the air, when the atmosphere is very thin and try to burn off as much speed as possible before you hit dense air, then the vehicle switches from falling brick mode to sleek, aerodynamic mode. I think the key is to not be going fast in dense air. I'm wondering if you could stay at high altitudes much longer and burn off the speed there.
Rutan's feather is really a stroke of genius and makes reentry dramatically safer than the X-15 by a long ways. As long as the feather actuators work it appears its very difficult to have a bad reentry. He likens it to a shuttlecock in badmitten, it always comes down in the desired orientation.
Well maybe he wont have to. 60 minutes had a long piece on Rutan tonight. I didn't realize it but he is getting $120 million from Virgin Galactic. If, by some miracle, it turns out profitable maybe they can raise money on their own.
Rutan looks to be a rabid free market type and hater of all things big government, they had footage of him standing next to Reagan praising him for being anti regulation. So I doubt he would take the money if it was offered. He really does completely despise NASA.
"The news people, the other side, and anyone with an ax to grind would be screaming about fiscal irresponsibility."
Thats silly. NASA is the gold standard for fiscal irresponsibility. NASA is spending on the space shuttle pretty much the same amount it would spend if it was flying and it hasn't flown in years now. NASA is pouring money down a rat hole. Rutan spending it couldn't help but be a thousand times better use of the money.
Everyone needs to look at this with Republican rose colored glassed and view this as an investment opportunity. Start buying up costal real estate in Alaska, Northern Canada and Siberia. I wager its really cheap. In a hundred years it will be beach front property in a temprate climate, and all the beach dwellers in Florida will be compelled to move their to escape the 130 degree days in Florida and the Category 6 hurricanes.
I vaguely remember someone, possibly in the Bush administration, suggesting this was a natural cycle and is really the "greening" of the Earth coming out an ice age, so as long as you just spin it right there is no problem here.
Unfortunately its happening rather fast for a natural cycle and to fast for many species to adapt so it may lead to extinctions.
"to identify potential co-sponsor organizations interested in contributing cash toward one or more prize competitions,"
Before I start a rant let me preface it with an interesting URL, Kelly Johnson's rules. If you don't know Kelly Johnson he was the genius behind Lockheed's original skunworks and built two airplanes which are still engineering marvels and he did both in months not decades. His rules are the antithesis of all things that are now NASA's manned space program. In particular:
Rule No. 3
"The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner. Use a small number of good people (10 percent to 25 percent compared to the so-called normal systems)."
Now back to the Centennial prizes. NASA is apparently looking for organizations outside of NASA to give NASA money to help fund part of the prizes. The irony of an agency that wastes billions a year trying to suck cash out of little innovative organizations like the Ansari X prize is just to much.
Seems to me like they are trying to embrace, extend and extinguish the X prize concept much like another monopoly we know.
They make way to many references to "partners" in this program. Forming partnerships is how another monopoly we know destroys competitors.
NASA is obviously nervous about the X prize because its the first thing exciting to happen in manned space flight in a couple decades. Sure it was just a high altitude flight but they did it on a tiny budget and a fast schedule and it was entirely private and NASA was totally cut out of it and they have massive egg on their face.
NASA's effort would be a great program if they would take some of the billions they are now wasting on the Space Shuttle and ISS and put them in to either no string grants or real winner take all prizes.
If you are an organization that either wants to sponsor prizes or win them, partnering with NASA is about the last thing you want to do. In particular I'm guessing any work you do will end up belonging to NASA and not to your organization. If you want to get sucked up in to a money devouring bureaucracy that doesn't do anything innovative in manned space flight anymore, and now needs someone to do it for them but have it still look like NASA needs to be in the loop, then go right ahead. If you want to just feed at the NASA trough then this may also be a good route to go.
I'll reitereate what I've said before here. Giving Burt Rutan a billion or two in no strings grants to go to the next stage and build a vehicle that could fly to the ISS on a weekly basis would be priceless. Maybe he couldn't do it but manned space flight needs a new organization like Kelly Johnsons old skunkworks. You need a talented, seat of the pants, engineer who can put together a small, fast, agile team of the best of the best who are there to succeed and if they do get rewarded for it in a big way. Burt Rutan is the closest match I've seen to Kelly Johnson.
It was on CNN Headline news briefly today. Unfortunately they did what everyone is going to do, they said it was a "glitch" and everyone knows computers have "glitches" so the possibility it was due to foul play didn't even come up. Its a story that wont have any legs unless more of these popup, or someone finds a smoking gun, which is unlikely since no one in government or the media is even looking for a smoking gun and private groups are unlikely to have the access and resources to find or if they due get anyone to listen.
Its curious this glitch happened in machines that aren't widely deployed. Maybe the glitch came in someone trying to rig Ohio. They probably focused a lot of attention on a subtle way to rig punch cards which were the most widely used method in Ohio. They almost certainly have lavished attention on using Diebold's machines to rig an election though they weren't used much or at all in Ohio. Maybe here they didn't invest enough time in figuring out how to rig these machines, unwidely tried anyway, so they completely botched it and it stood out like a sore thumb. Elsewhere they just managed to discard a few percent of the Democratic/minority vote (punchcard spoilage being the classic way) or vote flipping from Kerry to Bush which is the preferred way in electronic voting since you can't discard any votes.
God isn't beautiful to have computers in the voting process so anytime something fishy happens everyone, especially the media, can write it off as a "glitch". Everyone knows computers have "glitches" so everyone nods and says it must have been a "glitch". Say no more.
Maybe it was a glitch, though maybe it was a "glitch" in an attempt to rig an election. Someone tried to throw a bunch of votes to Bush and screwed up so badly it stuck out like a sore thumb. So what exactly is stopping the same kind of "glitch" happening elsewhere but it didn't stick out like a sore thumb, went unnoticed, and just produced a few extra percentage points for Bush.
In a few posts here there are people saying they "know" their man one. Well when it comes to elections you never know for sure. If unbiased exit polls and official returns show your candidate won you have some confidence. When raw exit polls show your candidate didn't win and the actual results say he did you should presume there is a chance, though only a chance, the election was rigged. Exit polls, if done fairly and independently, are the only realiable gauge we have of the legitimacy of the election. They are polls and they have margins of error but they are the best of polls since they poll large numbers of actual voters. Its amazing that exit polls have since 2000, when the Republicans started seizing power, either consistently disagreed with election results or as in 2002 mysteriously, completely failed denying us an independent snapshot of the legitimacy of the election, and election very much in dispute in Georgia in particular. This year they consistently showed Kerry winning the swing states in contradiction to the official returns, and then in the middle of the night the exit polls were "adjusted" so they would just match the official returns.
It is important to not fixate on Diebold or even electronic voting in this. Every vote casting method is vulnerable to manipulation. In punch cards its as easy as sending defective cards to Democratic precincts so you get more hanging chads, or "accidentally" knock out an extra chad so they are discarded as double votes. "Spoilage" is a widely recognized tool for manipulating punch card elections.
Before anyone goes in to denial that election rigging might happen in the U.S. just remember it has happened in the U.S., the Nixon Kennedy race being one of the more memorable cases by the Democrats. Rigging happens around the world, all the time, in fact is more the norm than the exception in many places.
It should be remembered most dictators either acquire or hold power under the pretense of fair elections that aren't fair. The CIA has for most of its existence specialized in installing regime's friendly to America's interests using election rigging. If a dictatorship ever does rise in America, though I'm not saying it has, it is far more likely it will come through rigged elections than it will an armed coup.
When there is vast power and wealth hanging in the balance of an election presume those vying for that power WILL entertain rigging the election if they think they can get away with it. The only brake on them is we citizens have to be extremely vigilant and persistent in catching them and denying them the possibilities, and there are thousands of different ways to steal elections.
Actually if you look at some of the links in other threads it appears in Florida the supposedly safe optical scanner districts were where the election seems to be stolen. The returns in the paperless electronic voting show believable increases for Dems and Republicans. All the optical scanner precincts show consistent huge gains for republicans and losses for the Dems. Either they were rigged(presumably the old fashioned way with ballot stuffing or the scanners were miscounting though you would catch that if there were had been a manual recount). Alternately all the scanners just happened to all be in precincts full of bible thumpers who switched to Bush en masse and came out in huge numbers.
In Ohio it appears punch cards were actually more in play than electronic voting. Someone in Ohio challenged paperless voting and won so they were mostly pulled at the last minute. A few counties used them with jury rigged half ass paper trails. If the election was stolen in Ohio it was the old fashioned way with punch cards. The easiest way is to get someone in the minority districts to "accidentally" punch out a second chad in a bunch of cards so they are thrown out as a double vote. It is certainly feasible to "spoil" enough cards to account for 150,000 votes. The other old fashioned way in Ohio is to put white Republicans in the polls in black precincts and challenge minority voters. Just having them there will keep some from voting who fear "the man". Others just walk away when challenged, intimidation does work, and the rest end up getting provisional ballots which may never be counted and sure wont be counted while anyone cares.
There are two sites in there that make there case based on numbers and not rabid liberal rhetoric. I agree the rhetoric in some of them hurt the case.
The most striking conclusions:
The exit polls were consistently wrong only in major swing states and only in Kerry's favor. That is still the most damning indicator the election was stolen. If you are stealing elections exit polls are always the biggest obstacle. Since the Republican's started seizing power the exit polls just started to completely go to hell. They are polls and they have a margin of error but they are far and away the most accurate polls. Exit polls predicted Gore a winner in 2000 which is maybe not that conclusive. But in 2002 the whole system mysteriously cratered and was completely gutted. In 2004 the exit polls showed Kerry winning, then in the evening the system crashes for more than an hour and then when everyone wakes up in the morning and the exit polls magically precisely match the official returns. I have to say the Republicans and Karl Rove almost deserve power because they are maniacal geniuses.
The chart of Florida results tends to suggest whomever stole the election used a feint. Everyone thought the paperless touch screens were where it was going to be stolen and it appears they stole it using optical scan machines instead. The touch screen machines show believable gains for both Democrats and Republicans. The touch screens show massive increases in Republicans and dramatic drops in Democrats. Its a stretch to think that it just happens optical scanners were put in all the precincts where their was explosive Republican gains though its possible if all the rural bible thumper precincts bought optical scanners, but that is a stretch. Same thing in Ohio, everyone though it would be stolen by Diebold and evoting. But they actually switched back to punch cards and no one noticed and people are blaming evoting when it wasn't even extensively used.
So here is the Rove guide to stealing an election:
A. Steal it by so enough that its not close so there is no outrage, there is no hope in the losing camp, there are no recounts, everyone just gives up. Its a balancing act because you have to steal it by just enough, because to much might set off alarm bells. It looks like they tried to steal New Hampshire but didn't do it by enough so Kerry still ones, it appears New Hampshire swung harder than expected to Kerry.
B. You must stick a knife in the back of exit polls because they always point to places where the election was rigged. Again in 2002 the whole system went down and this time the results showed a stolen election and the Republicans just coerced the people doing them to correct them so they matched the rigged election.
C. Only steal the election in the swing states. As long as all the very red states stay red and the blue states stay blue everyone thinks everything is OK. The swing states are close enough everyone expects them to swing so when they do no one cares. It looks like Florida got carried away and was swung by enough to be suspicious but not real suspicious.
D. Use a feint. Push paperless electronic voting and stoke controversy over it. Get everyone to look at it and focus on it. Then steal the election in precincts using optical scanners and hanging chads(the old fashioned way by spoiling cards in minority districts). Punch cards are easy to tamper, you just have to pop out a second chad making it a double vote. Everyone starts screaming evoting stole the election and then when you look there you see it wasn't stolen in the evoting precincts and look like an ass. No one thinks to look at the optical scanners and punch card precincts which a couple of the people in the parent post's links did.
It looks to have been a brilliant work of art. You almost have to stand back and admire it and then you wake up and realize you are for all practical purposes in a dictatorship.
Slashdot Mirror
"Probably the complete opposite of what is considered "conservative"."
Uh, so? The New Republican party is the complete opposite of what is considered "conservative" too, with the exception of tax cuts. Even there "conservatives" prefer the tax cuts are accompanied by spending cuts, instead of binge spending and using a credit card to create false prosperity.
"Ashcroft wanted the coporations to own everything, and run the government."
This is more or less the definition of Fascism and Nazism. There were a bunch of giant corporations and industrialists working hand in hand with a repressive, authoritarian government. The government intervenes liberally in the economy and makes winner outs of their friends and party members and losers out of those who are not. The New Republican party does pretty much the same thing.
Needless to say the New Republican's haven't gone to the extremes of Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy or Nazi Germany which is why I call them "compassionate fascists".
Some numbnut can now invoke Godwin's law. Before you do realize its a sign that you lack something necessary to have have original thoughts, so you are just regurgitating moldy Internet cliches.
Isn't it cool how NASA has time and money to do all this cool research that doesn't really have anything to do with a space program other than their overreaching attempts to make it sound like it does.
Please, please, please take all of NASA's manned space program budget and give it to Burt Rutan(the closest modern equivalent we seem to have to the Skunkwork's Kelly Johnson), no strings attached, so he can build a reusable space craft so we all can start flying to space as routinely as we fly cross country now.
Not sure he'd take the money since he despises big government in general, and NASA in particular, but if he had a good pool of money he would make things happen. By the way he seems to despise Boeing and Lockheed about as much as NASA.
Much truth is said in gest.
Speaking of his looks doesn't he remind you of the kid on the cover of Mad Magazine?
Nice Rant.
:) I win.
Unfortunately you shot yourself in the foot here.
"Folks, so many people are involved in elections at so many different levels that there is literally no way that any central entity could rig an election across an entire state."
Its a near certainty the Democrats rigged Illinois in 1960 and it gave Kennedy the Presidency. Case closed
You don't need thousands of people, blah, blah blah. You just need a few people in the right place in a close state.
As bitterly divided as the country there are rabid people on both sides, many supervising elections in precincts or counties, who if they see the opportunity would try to throw a few thousand votes to their candidate. I wager the 4000 votes was such a freelance election rigger who did such a hamhanded job of it, it stuck out like a sore thumbs. These aren't the people you need to worry about, you need to worry about the people who are really good at it and I assure you the CIA has, over the years, trained a lot of people to be very good at rigging elections.
I'd agree its a mistake to fixate on electronic voting. There are a million ways to steal an election and you can do it with optical scanners or punch cards. Paperless electronic voting would be easier to do it wholesale, by rigging the software load, and hard to catch without a paper trail but its sure not the only way to steal an election. I wouldn't be surprised if the furor over paperless electronic voting was a sleight of hand. Get all the conspiracy theorists fixated on them, and keep them clean as a whistle so they conspiracy types look like asses blaming them. Meanwhile steal the election in punch card and optical scanner precincts where no one is looking.
"I was able to reasonably come to the conclusion that he had my interests at heart."
Duh.
You work for a "defense contractor". As long as the New Republicans are in power you can have a high confidence you will have all the work you want. They are going to be getting in to one war after another, and building one overpriced weapons system after another(can you say Missile Defense) and pushing up defense and intelligence spending so they should hit a half trillion dollars real soon now. A little chunk of that is going in to your pocket.
So what is it you think you said here that proves anything other than the obvious, you thought Kerry would slash defense spending which might threaten you gravy train. After all the New Republicans told you that he would over and over again, though its quite possible the Democrats in the current climate would waste just as much on defense to prove they aren't weak on defense.
""Well more than 1100 American soldiers died looking for those non existent WMD's...". You obviously have no clue why we went to iraq. Don't say oil, because only 17% of oil comes from that area anyway."
I sure as hell do know why we went in to Iraq. We went in to it because Saddam had WMD's, and was going to use them on American cities, which is the reason I gave in first post, and which is what Bush/Cheney/Fox told us over and over again, and they never lie. It just happens there weren't any. We also went in because Saddam had ties to Al Qaida and was part of the 9/11 conspiracy. Why do I know this because Dick Cheney told me so, on Meet the Press, that it had been proven Iraqi intelligence met with the 9/11 ringleader in Prague. Unfortunately it appears it hasn't been proven and it probably didn't even happen and Saddam probably had nothing to do with 9/11. Reason three way down on the list was to bring freedom and democracy to the ragheads at the point of gun because God told George that this is what he put him on Earth and made him President to do.
Your the only one bringing up the oil angle here. I just have to go with the three reasons my President told me because he would never lie.
You probably haven't noticed but there are way more insane right wing talk show hosts, especially on radio, than there are liberal ones. I don't listen to any of them on either side, excepting Charlie Rose on PBS and I'm pretty sure he isn't insane. If anyone is insane its the right wing talk show hosts that are STILL ranting about the Clintons and seem to hate pretty much everyone and everything excepting their own. Liberal talk show hosts suck because they suck at hate filled, venomous rhetoric like its practiced by the wicked witch of the right, Ann Coulter.
"And would you stop doing the same?"
Don't think I did. The only thing I cited was an actual poll done in Iraq that says they view the Americans as occupiers and want them to leave by an overwhelming majority. And I cited basic facts that Iraq is a bloody mess which no one can deny.
I assure you there are Iraqi's overjoyed that Saddam is gone and I imagine they blog it. Problem is they are mostly Kurds and Shia's. Sunnis are pissed which is what you get from a minority in a ethnically fractured country that has gone from being in power to being out of power.
"I guess the difference here is that you believe that nation building should take less than 2 years"
I don't think the U.S. should be "nation building" in the first place. Bush campaigned quite specifically against "nation building" and the Republican's pilloried the Democrats and Clinton everytime they did. Now they are doing it all over the place and at a priced tag in blood and treasure that dwarves the Balkans and Republicans just think its the greatest thing since sliced bread. One word, hypocrites.
"I bet you were one of those people that complained about Afghanistan until...whoops...they had free and safe elections."
The elections in Afghanistan were anything but free. The U.S. flew Karzai to every tribal leader and warlord in the country in a helicopter and he bought the tribe's vote with buckets of U.S. provided "reconstruction" money. There is no media outside the cities so most people have no clue who to vote for and they voted the way their tribal leaders told them to and they were bought.
Meanwhile the other candidates couldn't even campaign in most of the country because the roads are mostly nonexistent and bandits and insurgents make it very dangerous to travel outside Kabul and there is no TV and very little radio.
And of course Afghanistan is a complete mess too. Doctors without borders has pulled out of their too and they rode out the whole Russian occupation and war. There is no security outside of Kabul, the Taliban and Al Qaida are alive and well there and in the tribal regions of Pakistan. Opium production is up like 10X and is causing a surge in cheap heroin around the world which translates directly in to global misery. Despite the Bush propaganda that the Taliban was dealing drugs, the Taliban in fact ruthlessly suppressed the Opium trade because drugs are thoroughly forbidden in the Koran. The U.S. takes over and it explodes.
I'll say what I say everyone time some dick complains about it:
Much truth is said in gest
It was a white tie dinner full of rich fat cats and the fact is they are his base. They give him buckets of money to campaign, he gives them huge tax breaks, interest free loans(from our tax dollars), tax dollar giveaways(a.k.a. "Medicare Reform"), relaxed environmental regulations and on and on.
Its my sig because George just had the poor judgement to say something, in gest, that is taboo to say, the wealthy elite own the government and they own politicians on both sides of the aisle. Its just another case of the poor judgement that is his calling card. It was right up there with his skit with the slides where he is "looking for the WMD's" and can't find any. Well more than 1100 American soldiers died looking for those non existent WMD's, thousands more are maimed for life and there are tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi's who are dead and maimed too, and the tally is going up everyday and will for a really long time. Funny joke.
My mistake, should have said precinct, not county. Still 4,000 votes is like 3% of the margin which is statisticly significant coming from one tine precinct.
"In particular, tmoertel published a pretty good statistical smackdown on the theory of electronic irregularities in Ohio (this isn't my analysis - so I don't take credit for it):"
Uh, Ohio didn't use electronic voting in most of the state, the one where the 4000 Bush votes happened being more an exception than a rule. So searching for electronic irregularities is for the most part stupid. Someone challenged paperless electronic voting in Ohio and won so most counties dropped it and used their old system, usually punch cards. A few pressed ahead with half assed paper trails that may or may not have conformed to the judges ruling and were hastily done.
You don't need electronic voting to rig elections. They've been rigged as long as people have been voting. Paperless electronic voting just makes it really easy to do in a big way and really hard to catch.
If anyone rigged Ohio they could have done it the old fashioned way. Send poor quality punch cards to Democratic districts so you get hanging chads, or somewhere along the way punch out a chad for Bush in some cards so if the voter votes for Kerry its thrown out. Punch card "spoilage" is a time proven method for rigging an election.
Just because there wasn't a big statistical swing in Ohio doesn't mean the election wasn't rigged. In fact if you are really good at rigging a state you won last time the perfect rigging is to make it come out the same as last time or actually give your opponent a few more votes. Then someone comes along and does what this guy did and says, "No swing, no rigging" and that is not what it means. Its possible Kerry swung a couple percent to his side, thanks to the fact Ohio's economy has cratered under Bush. If you rig the election and just erase that two percent swing you have done a perfect job of rigging.
Again the exit polls suggest there was a swing to Kerry in most of the swing states that disappeared in the actual results, while the exit polls were pretty accurate in most of the non swing states. All the exit polls were biased to Kerry which is distinctly odd. Either they should have been off in all states in Kerry's favor suggesting a model problem or they should have been randomly off in both Kerry and Bush's favor. Just being off in swing states and only in Kerry's favor is odd to put it mildly.
4000 votes for Bush from a tiny county in Ohio that decided the election and where the margin is just over 100,000 is obviously significant.
The optical scanner anomalies in Florida are potentially hugely significant.
The anomalies in New Mexico could easily flip the state in to the Kerry column so they are statistically significant though they can't change the outcome of the election without Ohio or Florida.
The key point is if there is election rigging or incompetence its ALWAYS significant. If you don't report it, investigate it and punish it your opening the floodgates to everyone to do it in every election and your elections turn in to dodo.
Hagel's name is circulating as a possible candidate for President in 2008. Don't be surprised if he wins :)
This is NOT insightful.
"We can't accept the fact that Kerry lost... by 3.5 million votes."
Kind of amazing that all of a sudden the popular vote is important to Republicans. Well Bush LOST the popular vote last time and it didn't matter for squat to you back then. It doesn't count for anything under our constitution now either. Either consistently ignore it or consistently act like it matters, instead of just saying it matters when you win.
Fact is Bush lost by just over a hundred throusand votes in Ohio and it could very easily be a margin that might disappear if there were anomolies or rigging. Take the 4,000 vote irregularity in 1 county and you find the same in 30 more counties and Bush loses Ohio and the election.
Florida's margin was bigger but so are the anomalies in all the optical scanner district. Just because the President's brother may have rigged it by large enough a margin so it didn't look close isn't any excuse for investigating major anomalies.
"If there was so much hacking going on, why were all these liberal crackers out there working to give Kerry votes?"
We aren't talking about hackers here. We are talking about ruthless politicians. If there are any hackers involved here they are just pawns. We may be talking about CIA or ex CIA people here. They rig elections all over the world and have for decades and its not a secret. They are very good at.
You have to be ruthless and unscrupulous to rig elections. Its helps a LOT if your party controls the election machinery which they do in Ohio and do in a HUGE way in Florida, thanks to the fact the President's brother runs the state. Ruthless and unscrupulous accurately discribes the Bush family and has for numerous generations. It also describes Karl Rove. Today's liberals and Democrats are complete wimps compared to the Machiavellian masters that are todays Republicans and especially the neocons.
The bottomline is it doesn't even matter that much who won. IT DOES MATTER IF ELECTIONS were being rigged any place by anyone even if it doesn't change the outcome. If there are major anomalies they MUST be investigated to the hilt and those involved MUST be prosecuted. If you let election rigging go unreported, uninvestigated and unpunished you will open a flood gate to do it again and again and your elections quickly become meaningless and futile.
Its important to note that many dictators seize and hold power not at the point of a gun but by rigging elections.
"If I was American (not Canadian)"
Speaking of Canadians it was on CNN Morning this morning that the day after the election the number of hits on the Canadian immigration info site, from Americans looking to bail, spiked like 6X and set a new daily record.
I don't think it registered with Canadian immigration or CNN they were slashdotted since the URL was posted on one of the Slashdot threads about people who were considering leaving America now that it appears its turning in to a right wing police state dominated by intolerant bible thumpers, and may be for a very long time unless there is a major backlash.
I only pray a new third party arises out of the ashes of the Democratic party and moderate Republicans when they realize their party has been usurped by right wing extremists and bible thumpers.
I'd like to see a party that is moderate on social issues, but which strongly favors small government and lower taxes for the middle class, kind of like where McCain, Guilianni and Arnold are but who completely divorce themselves from the New Republican party. Thats the group in America totally abandoned by both parties and I wager its a large one. Maybe it would a little like Libertarians but not so far out on the fringe.
If the Democrats want to win again they need to stop pandering to their special interests, unions, trial lawyers, Hollywood celebs, minorities and gays and target middle Americans for a change. That list of special interests does turn off middle Americans and insures they wont win the South or Midwest. And of course they need to find some candidates that don't suck as bad as Kerry, and I'm not sure there are any in the Democratic party. I assure you the New Republicans are salivating at the prospect of running against Hillary in 2008.
"The computer industry is nearly universially pro-Patent and spreads money to both parties."
What basis do you have for that statement. I think it would more appropriate to say the computer industy's lawyers are pro-Patent. In engineering, R&D and even executive circles I think they have become more of a negative than a positive. The constant defensive patent searching and legal wrangling over them is turning in to a net negative, especially in software patents.
A case study, Adobe sues Macromedia for patent infringement on tabbed UI, Macromedia countersues with some of their patents, they wrangle for a year and then settle out of court. Its hard to say what was in the settlement but chances are the lawyers were the only ones that made a profit, the two companies just wasted a LOT of time and money that would have been better spent developing and marketing products.
Another case study Forgent and its predecessors push JPEG to standards committees at the same time they submarine patents on it, and now they are successfully doing the rounds making everyone who uses JPEG pay for a patent that has never been enforced and expires in 2006. If I recall they may try to extend it to nail MP3 next. Forgent added no economic value to the world, if everyone knew JPEG was patented they would have chosen a different standard. But they rake in buckets of money, money going to execs, lawyers and shareholders most of whom weren't even around when the patent was filed, and the engineers who did add some value way back are probably getting squat.
If you want a healthy economy you need to reward people and companies who add value, not opportunists and gamblers.
I wager its reached the point most companies are trying to rack up patents for defensive purposes and the threat of patents is nothing but a massive draining as they try to develop new products.
I'm sure there are very proprietary software companies who LOVE them, Microsoft being the obvious example. Patents are certain to be their arrow of choice in a few years when all the patents they've been filing the last couple of years are awarded, many of which are probably designed precisely to nail Linux and open source.
"If you think that Boston has a higher average IQ than, say, Midland, Texas, you're assuming that people who live in Boston are just naturally smarter."
Once again you are full of shit Twirp. About all thats required is for large numbers of high IQ people to gravitate to Boston, which obviously they do in very high numbers thanks to the presence of MIT, Harvard, and a bunch of other above average schools, and a large number of high tech employers that only higher smart people. Its a city that also draws the best doctors, lawyers, etc. There are plenty of dumb people born in Boston but it has IQ magnets that are certain to skew the numbers in its favor.
If you've ever lived in the sticks you would know that there is also an almost physical force that draws all the intelligent young people out of small towns and to the city, first for their higher education and then for jobs. The people that stay in them all their lives just aren't the best and brightest.
I'll get slammed for it but I wager there is also a close correlation between intelligence and religious faith. Smart, well educated people simply don't buy into organized religion in large numbers. They tend to see through the con game that is big organized religion. If they do have spiritual leanings they tend to be towards less organized and less phony religions. Evangelical Christianity in America is a hollow shell run by conmen. American Christians don't have a clue what Christ's message really was just like they have no clue Bush/Cheney lies to them on a daily basis. They will sit in church on Sunday hearing the teachings of a pacifist who abhored wealth and violence, it goes in one ear and out the other, and the rest of the week they worship war and greed as their real gods.
The New Republican's just need to learn to deal with the reality of their new base. There are some real smart elitists in it, but their voting base is completely dependent on dumb, poorly educated, rural and small town, bible thumpers. It kind of follows since they are the only demographic dumb enough to fall for the gigantic con game the new Republican party is pulling on them. Smart people can tell the Bush administration lies on a daily basis, just like the see through the bullshit the Falwells, Robertsons and Bakers foist on evangelical Christians on a daily basis. To put it another way the Republican's new power base can be summed up with one word, gullible.
" (it is more like a redesign of the X15 plane)"
Well it is a really innovative advance over the X-15, especially the feather(see below).
Many of the veterans of the X-15 like Scott Crossfield are convinced to this day that if the U.S. had stayed on the X-15 track we might be flying in to space today almost as routinely as a commercial airliner. It might not be the way to go for heavy cargo lifting but it seems a lot better way to fly people and small cargo to a space station and if you can fly small cargos, cheaply, on a weekly basis it adds up.
For a heavy lifter I really wish NASA would take the Space Shuttle stack, throw away the Shuttle, replace it with a simple unmanned cargo container. That would be an awesome heavy lifter if got rid of all the dead weight that is the Shuttle. The SRB's really are A OK for cargo lifting especially if they were filled with the newer cleaner paraffin fuel one of the Universities(Standford?) is working on.
"It cannot be turned into an orbital vehicle for just a few million more, as some seem to believe."
Well thats not me. Thats why I'm wishing he had about $1-2 billion, no strings. He could make a run at it with that much and his small spartan team approach.
"some way to get rid of that speed upon reentry (like a heatshield)"
Not sure it will translate up to the reentry speeds from LEO but Rutan did have a really innovative approach with the feather that allows him to have a lot less heat shielding than the X-15 had. For the obviously less demand flight profile they have now the idea is to create very high drag, by feathering the wing so its flat in to the air, when the atmosphere is very thin and try to burn off as much speed as possible before you hit dense air, then the vehicle switches from falling brick mode to sleek, aerodynamic mode. I think the key is to not be going fast in dense air. I'm wondering if you could stay at high altitudes much longer and burn off the speed there.
Rutan's feather is really a stroke of genius and makes reentry dramatically safer than the X-15 by a long ways. As long as the feather actuators work it appears its very difficult to have a bad reentry. He likens it to a shuttlecock in badmitten, it always comes down in the desired orientation.
Well maybe he wont have to. 60 minutes had a long piece on Rutan tonight. I didn't realize it but he is getting $120 million from Virgin Galactic. If, by some miracle, it turns out profitable maybe they can raise money on their own.
Rutan looks to be a rabid free market type and hater of all things big government, they had footage of him standing next to Reagan praising him for being anti regulation. So I doubt he would take the money if it was offered. He really does completely despise NASA.
"The news people, the other side, and anyone with an ax to grind would be screaming about fiscal irresponsibility."
Thats silly. NASA is the gold standard for fiscal irresponsibility. NASA is spending on the space shuttle pretty much the same amount it would spend if it was flying and it hasn't flown in years now. NASA is pouring money down a rat hole. Rutan spending it couldn't help but be a thousand times better use of the money.
Everyone needs to look at this with Republican rose colored glassed and view this as an investment opportunity. Start buying up costal real estate in Alaska, Northern Canada and Siberia. I wager its really cheap. In a hundred years it will be beach front property in a temprate climate, and all the beach dwellers in Florida will be compelled to move their to escape the 130 degree days in Florida and the Category 6 hurricanes.
I vaguely remember someone, possibly in the Bush administration, suggesting this was a natural cycle and is really the "greening" of the Earth coming out an ice age, so as long as you just spin it right there is no problem here.
Unfortunately its happening rather fast for a natural cycle and to fast for many species to adapt so it may lead to extinctions.
Its somewhat worse than that:
"to identify potential co-sponsor organizations interested in contributing cash toward one or more prize competitions,"
Before I start a rant let me preface it with an interesting URL, Kelly Johnson's rules. If you don't know Kelly Johnson he was the genius behind Lockheed's original skunworks and built two airplanes which are still engineering marvels and he did both in months not decades. His rules are the antithesis of all things that are now NASA's manned space program. In particular:
Rule No. 3
"The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner. Use a small number of good people (10 percent to 25 percent compared to the so-called normal systems)."
Now back to the Centennial prizes. NASA is apparently looking for organizations outside of NASA to give NASA money to help fund part of the prizes. The irony of an agency that wastes billions a year trying to suck cash out of little innovative organizations like the Ansari X prize is just to much.
Seems to me like they are trying to embrace, extend and extinguish the X prize concept much like another monopoly we know.
They make way to many references to "partners" in this program. Forming partnerships is how another monopoly we know destroys competitors.
NASA is obviously nervous about the X prize because its the first thing exciting to happen in manned space flight in a couple decades. Sure it was just a high altitude flight but they did it on a tiny budget and a fast schedule and it was entirely private and NASA was totally cut out of it and they have massive egg on their face.
NASA's effort would be a great program if they would take some of the billions they are now wasting on the Space Shuttle and ISS and put them in to either no string grants or real winner take all prizes.
If you are an organization that either wants to sponsor prizes or win them, partnering with NASA is about the last thing you want to do. In particular I'm guessing any work you do will end up belonging to NASA and not to your organization. If you want to get sucked up in to a money devouring bureaucracy that doesn't do anything innovative in manned space flight anymore, and now needs someone to do it for them but have it still look like NASA needs to be in the loop, then go right ahead. If you want to just feed at the NASA trough then this may also be a good route to go.
I'll reitereate what I've said before here. Giving Burt Rutan a billion or two in no strings grants to go to the next stage and build a vehicle that could fly to the ISS on a weekly basis would be priceless. Maybe he couldn't do it but manned space flight needs a new organization like Kelly Johnsons old skunkworks. You need a talented, seat of the pants, engineer who can put together a small, fast, agile team of the best of the best who are there to succeed and if they do get rewarded for it in a big way. Burt Rutan is the closest match I've seen to Kelly Johnson.
It was on CNN Headline news briefly today. Unfortunately they did what everyone is going to do, they said it was a "glitch" and everyone knows computers have "glitches" so the possibility it was due to foul play didn't even come up. Its a story that wont have any legs unless more of these popup, or someone finds a smoking gun, which is unlikely since no one in government or the media is even looking for a smoking gun and private groups are unlikely to have the access and resources to find or if they due get anyone to listen.
Its curious this glitch happened in machines that aren't widely deployed. Maybe the glitch came in someone trying to rig Ohio. They probably focused a lot of attention on a subtle way to rig punch cards which were the most widely used method in Ohio. They almost certainly have lavished attention on using Diebold's machines to rig an election though they weren't used much or at all in Ohio. Maybe here they didn't invest enough time in figuring out how to rig these machines, unwidely tried anyway, so they completely botched it and it stood out like a sore thumb. Elsewhere they just managed to discard a few percent of the Democratic/minority vote (punchcard spoilage being the classic way) or vote flipping from Kerry to Bush which is the preferred way in electronic voting since you can't discard any votes.
"It is simply a glitch"
God isn't beautiful to have computers in the voting process so anytime something fishy happens everyone, especially the media, can write it off as a "glitch". Everyone knows computers have "glitches" so everyone nods and says it must have been a "glitch". Say no more.
Maybe it was a glitch, though maybe it was a "glitch" in an attempt to rig an election. Someone tried to throw a bunch of votes to Bush and screwed up so badly it stuck out like a sore thumb. So what exactly is stopping the same kind of "glitch" happening elsewhere but it didn't stick out like a sore thumb, went unnoticed, and just produced a few extra percentage points for Bush.
In a few posts here there are people saying they "know" their man one. Well when it comes to elections you never know for sure. If unbiased exit polls and official returns show your candidate won you have some confidence. When raw exit polls show your candidate didn't win and the actual results say he did you should presume there is a chance, though only a chance, the election was rigged. Exit polls, if done fairly and independently, are the only realiable gauge we have of the legitimacy of the election. They are polls and they have margins of error but they are the best of polls since they poll large numbers of actual voters. Its amazing that exit polls have since 2000, when the Republicans started seizing power, either consistently disagreed with election results or as in 2002 mysteriously, completely failed denying us an independent snapshot of the legitimacy of the election, and election very much in dispute in Georgia in particular. This year they consistently showed Kerry winning the swing states in contradiction to the official returns, and then in the middle of the night the exit polls were "adjusted" so they would just match the official returns.
It is important to not fixate on Diebold or even electronic voting in this. Every vote casting method is vulnerable to manipulation. In punch cards its as easy as sending defective cards to Democratic precincts so you get more hanging chads, or "accidentally" knock out an extra chad so they are discarded as double votes. "Spoilage" is a widely recognized tool for manipulating punch card elections.
Before anyone goes in to denial that election rigging might happen in the U.S. just remember it has happened in the U.S., the Nixon Kennedy race being one of the more memorable cases by the Democrats. Rigging happens around the world, all the time, in fact is more the norm than the exception in many places.
It should be remembered most dictators either acquire or hold power under the pretense of fair elections that aren't fair. The CIA has for most of its existence specialized in installing regime's friendly to America's interests using election rigging. If a dictatorship ever does rise in America, though I'm not saying it has, it is far more likely it will come through rigged elections than it will an armed coup.
When there is vast power and wealth hanging in the balance of an election presume those vying for that power WILL entertain rigging the election if they think they can get away with it. The only brake on them is we citizens have to be extremely vigilant and persistent in catching them and denying them the possibilities, and there are thousands of different ways to steal elections.
Actually if you look at some of the links in other threads it appears in Florida the supposedly safe optical scanner districts were where the election seems to be stolen. The returns in the paperless electronic voting show believable increases for Dems and Republicans. All the optical scanner precincts show consistent huge gains for republicans and losses for the Dems. Either they were rigged(presumably the old fashioned way with ballot stuffing or the scanners were miscounting though you would catch that if there were had been a manual recount). Alternately all the scanners just happened to all be in precincts full of bible thumpers who switched to Bush en masse and came out in huge numbers.
In Ohio it appears punch cards were actually more in play than electronic voting. Someone in Ohio challenged paperless voting and won so they were mostly pulled at the last minute. A few counties used them with jury rigged half ass paper trails. If the election was stolen in Ohio it was the old fashioned way with punch cards. The easiest way is to get someone in the minority districts to "accidentally" punch out a second chad in a bunch of cards so they are thrown out as a double vote. It is certainly feasible to "spoil" enough cards to account for 150,000 votes. The other old fashioned way in Ohio is to put white Republicans in the polls in black precincts and challenge minority voters. Just having them there will keep some from voting who fear "the man". Others just walk away when challenged, intimidation does work, and the rest end up getting provisional ballots which may never be counted and sure wont be counted while anyone cares.
There are two sites in there that make there case based on numbers and not rabid liberal rhetoric. I agree the rhetoric in some of them hurt the case.
The most striking conclusions:
The exit polls were consistently wrong only in major swing states and only in Kerry's favor. That is still the most damning indicator the election was stolen. If you are stealing elections exit polls are always the biggest obstacle. Since the Republican's started seizing power the exit polls just started to completely go to hell. They are polls and they have a margin of error but they are far and away the most accurate polls. Exit polls predicted Gore a winner in 2000 which is maybe not that conclusive. But in 2002 the whole system mysteriously cratered and was completely gutted. In 2004 the exit polls showed Kerry winning, then in the evening the system crashes for more than an hour and then when everyone wakes up in the morning and the exit polls magically precisely match the official returns. I have to say the Republicans and Karl Rove almost deserve power because they are maniacal geniuses.
The chart of Florida results tends to suggest whomever stole the election used a feint. Everyone thought the paperless touch screens were where it was going to be stolen and it appears they stole it using optical scan machines instead. The touch screen machines show believable gains for both Democrats and Republicans. The touch screens show massive increases in Republicans and dramatic drops in Democrats. Its a stretch to think that it just happens optical scanners were put in all the precincts where their was explosive Republican gains though its possible if all the rural bible thumper precincts bought optical scanners, but that is a stretch. Same thing in Ohio, everyone though it would be stolen by Diebold and evoting. But they actually switched back to punch cards and no one noticed and people are blaming evoting when it wasn't even extensively used.
So here is the Rove guide to stealing an election:
A. Steal it by so enough that its not close so there is no outrage, there is no hope in the losing camp, there are no recounts, everyone just gives up. Its a balancing act because you have to steal it by just enough, because to much might set off alarm bells. It looks like they tried to steal New Hampshire but didn't do it by enough so Kerry still ones, it appears New Hampshire swung harder than expected to Kerry.
B. You must stick a knife in the back of exit polls because they always point to places where the election was rigged. Again in 2002 the whole system went down and this time the results showed a stolen election and the Republicans just coerced the people doing them to correct them so they matched the rigged election.
C. Only steal the election in the swing states. As long as all the very red states stay red and the blue states stay blue everyone thinks everything is OK. The swing states are close enough everyone expects them to swing so when they do no one cares. It looks like Florida got carried away and was swung by enough to be suspicious but not real suspicious.
D. Use a feint. Push paperless electronic voting and stoke controversy over it. Get everyone to look at it and focus on it. Then steal the election in precincts using optical scanners and hanging chads(the old fashioned way by spoiling cards in minority districts). Punch cards are easy to tamper, you just have to pop out a second chad making it a double vote. Everyone starts screaming evoting stole the election and then when you look there you see it wasn't stolen in the evoting precincts and look like an ass. No one thinks to look at the optical scanners and punch card precincts which a couple of the people in the parent post's links did.
It looks to have been a brilliant work of art. You almost have to stand back and admire it and then you wake up and realize you are for all practical purposes in a dictatorship.