Category: General

Thinkin Bout Fallujah

Cause MC Frontalot’s Special Delivery just came up on the iTunes.

“Uh, yeah, I got a delivery for Iraq here; can Iraq sign for it? It’s a large box of freedom. Thanks. Sorry, I meant explosions. The freedom is backordered.”

And I wish that I could afford the ear of Bush the Second.
I’d ask is it your favorite philosopher who recommended
Invading and exterminating all who defy us,
Crying out “Justice!” but seeking out triumphs.
Was it your Christ, unbeloved of empires?
One nailed his ass to a post, he expired!
A terrorist, as Roman evidence showed,
Put down like a retard on the Death Row
In Texas, I guess, tough luck, right George?
Aint’ that how every war gets scored?
Big gun wins, winner gets a free turn?
Enemy after enemy burns?

A lot of killing going on there now, our men and women dying and killing.

A lot of killing.

No Press Anthology

I just got a copy of the No Press Anthology, and boy, it is one cool book of short roleplaying games.

Just from skimming the games, it looks like Snowball would be a cool off the cuff narrativist RPG engine, WTF a much more silly one, Pretender, Pagoda, and The Agency would be good high adventure high coolness short narrativist games, Cell Gamma and Discernment, would be good conceptual weird-out games.

Oh, and Over the Bar is kind of a joke, though I guess you could play it. Don’t worry, it doesn’t take up much of the page count. :)

Highly recommended. Hope to play some of these sometime.

This is What Happens To Saints

Philadelphia Inquirer | 11/08/2004 | Priest who led Druids resigns

“He’s a saint,” said Jessica Kenworthey, who belongs to another church but attends services at St. James’ with her husband, Mark, who is a member. “This is what happens to saints.”

This little witch hunt might seem to be of interest only to Episcopalians, but PJ points out that it’s a small part of a big picture that others might find disturbing.

This whole thing was instigated by a particularly sinister political organization called the “Insitute for Religion and Democracy,” which is dedicated to subverting mainline churches in favor of fundamentalism. The whole sequence of events is pretty creeptacular.

Getting the GAO Involved

Cool!

In their letter, representatives John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida asked the GAO to “immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to difficulties they encountered and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems and administration.”

John Doty, spokesman for Nadler, said the congressmen emphasized that they were not seeking a nationwide recount and were not anticipating that an investigation would change the outcome of the election.

“But we do want to make sure that where there are problems they’re fixed so that it won’t affect other elections in the future,” Doty said. “We want to make sure that people can be confident in the system.”

See, that’s me too. I don’t want the election changed to make Kerry win, now. I just want to have a justified confidence that I still live in an actual democracy.

Slashdot Sort Of Covers Election Weirdness

CmdrTaco of Slashdot spews a lot of good links on 2004 election freakiness while managing to mistake Michigan City, Indiana (near LaPorte, IN) for the nonexistent “LaPorte, Michigan,” misspell “anomaly,” and most egregiously of all, he opposes the “Diebold counties” to the “optically scanned paper ballot counties” — when the point of the article he links to is that the optically scanned paper ballots in those counties are counted by a piece of Diebold software which has been demonstrated repeatedly to be easily manipulated (Bev Harris demonstrated how to completely change the results of an election in less than two minutes at the machine, using no specialized computer skill beyond the ability to find, open, and edit a spreadsheet.)

Good old Slashdot.

In the interests of fairness and balance, I should link to the Kuro5hin story where one of the Kuro5hinites claims to have some statistical evidence of Ohioan weirdness in a particular county and another poster slaps him down and says it’s not statistically significant. I don’t know how to evaluate this either way, but it’s not relevant to the Florida situation where the results are WAY off. Typically, a Slashdot poster linked to this discussion despite the fact that the alleged anomalies it was addressing were not even linked to in the main slashdot post, and as far as I know are the theory of one sole Kuro5hin poster, and not getting any play anywhere else.

Good old Kuro5hin. Good old slashdot.