My old friend SicPreFix linked to this site, I was amazed at how one-sided the world vote was. Anyone in the world could cast a vote for McCain or Obama. While not scientific or random it’s still very interesting.

I’m glad that Obama has apparently won the electoral college but sad that he seems to have barely squeeked by in the popular vote, I wanted him to get at least 55% there.

More importantly (and more upsetting to me) is that Proposition 8 in California is ahead right now by a decent margin (although the polls only closed a little over an hour ago). If that damn thing passes it will add an amendment to the state constitution that bans gay marriage. I figured surely Californians are enlightened enough to vote it down and by a decent margin but I’m quite pissed that it’s ahead at all.

Another disturbing result is that proposition in Colorado that has about 75% of the vote to create a law that says life begins at conception. That means that all laws for living people apply from the moment of conception including the right to not be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process. Short version: it effectively bans all abortions. From what I read on CNN that would mean even a fetus conceived as part of a rape would have to be carried to full term by the mother and that sucks.

I love this cartoon that my brother sent me because I’m so sick of the allegations against Obama that he’s advocating Socialist policies (i.e. redistribution of wealth). What the hell is Medicare? I pay money into it every paycheck but all that money goes to other people; that’s but one example of redistribution of wealth in this country that you don’t hear Republicans complaining about.

I found this neat little image while looking for an at&t logo for the previous article:

The way I figure there’s really only at&t, Qwest and Verizon left as the larger local phone carriers (ILECs for you telco geeks). Sure, there are little mom & pop LECs out there but I swear we’re on the way back to Ma Bell (who knows how much longer Qwest can hang in there).

From this article on the Wired Blog Network.

No I’m not a closet Mickey Mouse Club fan, I decided to vote for Steve Kubby in the Libertarian primary election next week. (Actually I’m a lazy bastard and registered a few years ago for permanent absentee balloting so that I can just mail in my votes every election.)

Here’s are the firsts paragraphs of his Wikipedia entry (linked to above):

Steven “Steve” Wynn Kubby (born December 28, 1946) is a Libertarian Party activist who played a key role in the drafting and passage of California Proposition 215. The proposition was a ballot initiative to legalize medical marijuana which was approved by voters in 1996. Kubby himself is well-known as a cancer patient who relies on medical cannabis. He has authored two books on drug policy reform: The Politics of Consciousness,[3] and Why Marijuana Should Be Legal.[4] He was the Libertarian Party candidate for Governor of California in 1998 and has declared his candidacy for the Libertarian Party’s 2008 presidential nomination.

In 1968, at the age of 23, he began experiencing symptoms of hypertension and palpitations. He was diagnosed with malignant pheochromocytoma, a rare, fatal form of adrenal cancer. Kubby underwent surgery to remove a tumor in 1968, 1975 and 1976. This last time, his medical records show that the cancer had metastasized to his liver and beyond. All other patients with this diagnosis have had a 100% mortality rate within five years. His physician, Dr. Vincent DeQuattro, a specialist from the USC School of Medicine, monitored his condition and treated him with conventional therapies, including chemotherapy, until referring him to the Mayo Clinic in 1981 for yet another surgery and radiation.

For the next 25 years, Kubby claimed to control the symptoms of his disease solely by smoking medical marijuana and by maintaining a healthy diet. His original doctor, an expert on this condition shocked to learn he was still alive, said, “In some amazing fashion, this medication has not only controlled the symptoms of the pheochromocytoma, but in my view, has arrested its growth.”

I have been subscribed to Reason magazine for many months now and I find it a great read every month. It’s a libertarian magazine that deals with all the ways that our freedoms are being taken away (civil liberties, privacy, economic freedoms etc.) I’m probably going to start quoting articles since there have been some great quotes in recent interviews & articles. Here’s their About Us statement:

Reason is the monthly print magazine of “free minds and free markets.” It covers politics, culture, and ideas through a provocative mix of news, analysis, commentary, and reviews. Reason provides a refreshing alternative to right-wing and left-wing opinion magazines by making a principled case for liberty and individual choice in all areas of human activity.

Reason Online is updated daily with articles and columns on current developments in politics and culture. It also contains the full text of past issues of the print edition of Reason. Reason Online is entirely free.

Reason and Reason Online are editorially independent publications of the Reason Foundation, a national, non-profit research and educational organization.

I’m tired of seeing all the Intelligent Design (ID) crap that people are trying to pass off as science so here’s a page of links that I found on the Scientific American web site that can be used to defened evolution and the scientific method against ID and Creationism.

Resources for Defending Evolution: Scientific American

Yes, it’s true (at least according to the BBC): monkeys killed the deputy mayor of Delhi, India. Any death is tragic but there’s something about monkeys being involved that adds a bit of humor. Unless this is step one in the “Monkeys take over the Earth” plan…

Of course part of me also says “that’s what you get for taking over so much monkey habitat and building strip malls and shit there” too.

BBC story about killer Rhesus macacques

Why do people insist on getting worked up over stupid things? These four buildings at the Coronado naval base are really just for L-shaped buildings put into a circle but some folks are all up in arms about how it looks like a swastika from the air. I’ve flown out of the San Diego airport many times and never noticed it from the air. The complex was built 40 years ago but apparently now that people can see the aerial view with help from our Google Overlords it’s very upsetting to people.

Now I can understand that once ground was broken the Navy didn’t want to spend extra money to change it but why didn’t someone notice when viewing the blueprints? 

News story on Fox

Not Their Finest Hour is an interesting read on the state of education in England, albeit with a conservative American bias. I stumbled across the article while doing a search for the etymology of the phrase “can’t win for losing” (don’t ask, Google sometimes takes you on weird tangents). I guess the bias is expected when the site is named The American Spectator.

Basically dropping Winston Churchill from the list of required historical figures to study in middle school is but one of many radical changes made recently. The source article is from the Daily Mail in the UK and is a more informative read I think. Below is the opening paragraph which hints at how far-reaching the changes are.

Secondary schools will strip back the traditional curriculum in favour of lessons on debt management, the environment and healthy eating, ministers revealed.

The original site where I found a link to the AS story was at LisaFab. The two articles that I happened to click on (the other was here about the new Pope’s writings about Jesus) are just links to American Spectator stories. In the spirit of researching before making a statement I clicked on several other links and all five were pointed at AS articles. I figured that this was either a shill site run by AS to direct more traffic to their site or Lisa is a hard-core right-wing conservative. A quick read of her bio page shows that must be the latter:

Lisa Fabrizio is a freelance writer who lives in the People’s Republic of Connecticut. She is a proud conservative whose aim is to recapture the public from the all-consuming fog of liberalism which seizes them early in school and pervades almost all aspects of their lives.

Now I know I link to lots of stories from here but they are from all over the place, not just a single site. I also try to provide at least a modicum of my own thoughts into my posts (although this one has more than other recent posts have).