Pinging stuff I care about.
Gateway to Sindarin: A Grammar of an Elvish Language from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings
I’m proud to say I’ve met David Salo and corresponded with him on the net. He’s a brilliant scholar on many levels, and the finest linguist I know, barring perhaps a professor from my grad school days. His years of labor on this work are reminiscent of Tolkien’s own years of work on Middle-Earth before he published anything. This is so amazing. Rock on, David.
Via MetaFilter, which has links to a lot of other similar material.
A bizzare pattern of impossible anomalies This has long been known : the welter of financial ties of Diebold and ES&S to the radical religious right (with stakeholders currently, it seems, on the secretive CNP) and Bob Fitrakis notes : “Wherever Diebold and ES&S go, irregularities and historic Republican upsets follow.” Howard Ahmanson was the original funder for Bob and Todd Urosevich’s Data Mark,which became ES&S, Bob later left to head Diebold ,maker of HAVA Act mandated touch screen voting machines used in Ohio and Florida and elsewhere….Ahmanson is a Christian Reconstructionist (a form of Dominionism ) who has talked of imposing Biblical law on the US – including the death penalty for gays and drunkards – and is also a main funder of the Chalcedon Foundation. However, the most bizzare patterns of anomalies in Florida came not from touch-screen but optical scan machines. Florida’s central vote tabulator also is Diebold made, raising questions on the a bizzare pattern of anomalies in which a large number of counties in Florida had increases in Republicans votes over expected levels – by an overall average of 50% to 100% and – in one county, as high as 700%. Meanhwhile, here are graphs of variance between exit poll results for battleground states.
(go to the MeFi article for the heavily hyperlinked version of the above paragraph)
Eek.
The Institute on Religion and Democracy : A Letter of Repentance from The Rev. William Melnyk
I guess I’m glad that they’ve worked it all out, but this text sure has a creepy “witch trial confession” feel to it, doesn’t it?
Via PJ.
So they say but I’ll believe it when I drive on it.
Propaganda Matrix says that across the nation Republicans defeated Democrats by exactly the same amounts (18,181 votes) in races which were run on electronic voting machines. I’m not clear on how exactly that would work; why wouldn’t the fraudsters vary the amounts?
Conspiracy Planet quotes Democratic Underground (which I can’t reach at the moment) as saying that in precincts with electronic voting machines and no paper trail, Bush consistently got a 5% boost over exit poll numbers, whereas in precincts with a paper trail, his numbers actually matched exit poll numbers.
That is what fraud would actually look like if it occurred. It’s a credible picture of what we should look for to figure otu if vote fraud is occurring (actually we should prevent it from occurring by requiring voter-verifiable secure paper ballots…) But I’m not gonna go crying foul until I hear it from a source that doesn’t have a crudely photoshopped picture of Bush as Satan on the front page, you know what I mean?
If it has occurred it needs to be investigated and revealed, but again, the fact remains that if liberals can really get America on their side this kind of skullduggery won’t have a chance anyway.
Both of those links are courtesy of Fortean Times.