How to find neighbors who think they are registered but probably aren’t - Boing Boing
“Project Vote has now posted online lists of people (with their addresses) who filed registration applications in various counties but who were not put on the voter rolls by election authorities because of alleged or actual deficiencies in their applications.”
In keeping with the theme from last week’s post, today I’d like to say a little about voter registration. I personally think voluntary voter registration borders on moronic. By requiring voluntary voter registration voter turnout is lower, and it seems to me to be one more piece of information that can be used to track you. As for the latter, I would know because I have spent some time assisting in repossession and tracking people. For instance, if I were to use a few publicly available resources I could obtain the following information from your voter registration: Full name, Date of Birth, Gender, Maiden Name, County, Precinct, Physical Address, Mailing Address, Voting History - Election Date, Election Type, Election Party, Election Voting Method
Continue reading ‘So what about “registering” to vote? What’s up with that?’
Watch this short clip with Bill Maher, he makes a great comparison about terrorism and our rights.
I just watched a video by Penn Jillette in his “Penn says…” series, entitled Cynicism. It reminded me that I haven’t made any posts explaining my stance on voting and elections. Well, here goes.
Let’s start with the basic mechanics of the presidential election in the United States. I think the WikiPedia article explains it best in the following snips:
The Electoral College consists of 538 popularly elected representatives who formally select the President and Vice President of the United States.[1] The Electoral College is an example of an indirect election.
Rather than directly voting for the President and Vice President, United States citizens cast votes for electors. Electors are technically free to vote for anyone eligible to be President, but in practice pledge to vote for specific candidates[2] and voters cast ballots for favored Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates by voting for correspondingly pledged electors.[3] Most states allow voters to choose between statewide slates of electors pledged to vote for the Presidential and Vice Presidential tickets of various parties; the ticket that receives the most votes statewide ‘wins’ all of the votes cast by electors from that state. U.S. Presidential campaigns concentrate on winning the popular vote in a combination of states that choose a majority of the electors, rather than campaigning to win the most votes nationally.
More after the break!
Continue reading ‘Voting, elections, and BS’
I know it’s not a hot topic, but here’s a personal opinion. I was on youtube watching political mashups, like George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People. I thought I would throw a definition out there. Looting: stealing products. Survival: stealing food that people should be giving you in the first place. See the difference? Looting = stealing stuff you don’t need. Survival = keeping yourself and your loved ones ALIVE by any means necessary. I’m sorry, but if something happened where I am and I ran a grocery store or anything like that I’d have left the doors unlocked and a sign that said TAKE WHAT YOU NEED AND NO MORE. If a guy breaks into your house to steal a sandwich, give him the sandwich he obviously needs it more than you!
PBS show P.O.V. episode titled 9 Star Hotel
[Edit: If you can properly divide this post into logical paragraphs with proper grammar whilst keeping the original text, I will edit the post to match! Yeah, ha ha.]
We’re going to end up just like this. The police patrol the area in and outside what appears to me to be something crossed between a landfill and a construction site. As far as I can tell, that’s what it is. The town/city is called Modi’in. (The core town has a population of just 65,000.) One officer whispers too the cameraman “we’re looking for illegal workers”. The illegal workers they talk about? Mostly young men, I would guess in their 30s. They work illegally in the construction trade for Israelis during the day, and return to their camps (makeshift homes that appear to be made from tents and demolition scraps such as tin and fiberglass) at night. They possess very few things, one shows the group a toy car he is saving for his kid brother or a child he may someday have. I don’t know if they all are, but at least some of them are from Yata, Hebron. I don’t know enough about the workings of Palestine or Israel (or the Palestinian Israeli areas that seem to have been on the news since my birth), but whether it’s available or not these guys aren’t getting any government assistance. That’s right, they aren’t on some form of welfare or food stamps. They work hard during the day for what they get and sleep on whatever they have at night. Obviously I don’t know enough about any of this to really present something meaningful about their situation, but I can apply it to ours. They live in a shanty town while they build massive apartment buildings and houses for others. It sounds to me like Texas. I don’t know the laws of Israel or Palestine. I know the laws of Texas and the U.S. What is the crime? Being illegals, they don’t pay taxes. (Oooh like they make enough money for that to matter. Look at how our income taxes work, they wouldn’t have had to pay in anyway. Why don’t our rich people pay more anyway? Oh, and don’t forget it’s not just illegals who get paid under the table, plenty of citizens do it too.) Being illegals, they’re mistreated and paid poorly. (The government must use this as a further excuse? They do what they can. If you want to help them, help them. Don’t pretend you’re helping them and then kick them in the dirt.)
I say, let a man work an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. I don’t care what race he is, what country his citizenship is from. I say, why tax income when you already tax purchases, sales, property, and everything else. Why must everything be us and them, when really it is simply us. We persecute ourselves. We are all human beings, act accordingly.
To view the PBS show this entry was about, visit http://www.pbs.org/pov/blog/2008/05/2008_pov_preview_9_star_hotel.html
U.S. President (for awhile longer) George W. Bush made it clear today that he disagrees with the Supreme Court ruling that will open the way got Gitmo detainees to have actually civilian court trials to determine if they may continue to be held in custody. See AP article here. Bush basically wants to write new laws to circumvent this opening so that he may continue to allow U.S. forces to hold any and all persons indefinitely without trial. The Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that the U.S. government is violating the rights of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. How would you like someone to grab you up, accuse you of terrorism (for whatever reason, let’s say you said you “disagree with the current administration”), and lock you in a facility infamous for torture and poor treatment - indefinitely. That is what is happening here. People need to get off their false patriotic high-horses, quit being so blood thirsty over things they know little about, and consider the lives of other human beings. This whole idea of a free society was founded on the basis of innocence until proven guilt (something we lost by the wayside well before 9/11), fair trial, and justice. Now we live in a country full of these “just nuke em” idiots. Do any of you personally know this Al-Ghizzawi guy? Me neither. That means we don’t have the right to condemn him until it’s proven he has done something.
Remember the article I wrote here awhile ago about the Army using video games and the like to recruit kids? Well now we’ve got a full scale report from the ACLU accusing the US government of recruitment practices that target children. I’m not going to go into it much, so just read the article here: http://dallaspeacecenter.org/node/3355 I’ve been watching this go on for years wondering when someone else would notice. Of course we have this whole “if you don’t support murder you’re not a patriot” kind of mentality in this country, so of course most people don’t even object. Hey, this isn’t your granpappy’s army, believe me.
I didn’t coin the term ’sphere of awareness’ although I sure wish I did. I originally thought this up as bubble theory. The nomenclature is obviously because the idea was visually based. So what is it? It’s the idea that every person has a bubble of awareness, and it affects their knowledge. Imagine yourself in a bubble. Everything that you sense is within that bubble. Everything you are aware of. Now take time out of the equation, imagine everything you are aware of EVER. Do you watch the Today Show? CNN? Local News? Do you read the newspaper? Do you read blogs? Do you use wikipedia? These are part of your bubble. Continue reading ‘Wyn’s Bubble Theory - Spheres of Awareness’
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