Category: Issues of the Day

Byron, official first son-in-law of NewMexiKen, has written some thoughtful and provocative comments, which I repeat here in full. While I don’t agree with everything he says (and remind him that this site is billed as “Half Wisdom · Half Whimsy · Half Wit” and that no one should take NewMexiKen seriously except me), I do think what he has to say deserves your attention.

Here I go again: I am sure I will get blasted for this, go ahead. Just trying to do the right thing.

So to start off, I voted for Bush. I am probably the only member of Ken’s family (extended or otherwise that did). I could list a ton of reasons why I voted for him (and a ton why I shouldn’t have). But, I can’t think of one reason why I should have voted for Kerry. He never gave me any and neither did any of you. I am not alone.

I understand that I am an outsider and a guest to this forum. But,as I read this website, I am shocked by some of the comments and quite frankly the content that drives them.(Sorry,Ken) Continue reading Another point of view

In case you missed the rest of the story:

But sources in the Secret Service told The Hill that Bush was wearing a bulletproof vest, as he does most of the time when appearing in public. The president’s handlers did not want to admit as much during the campaign, for fear of disclosing information related to his personal security while he was on the campaign trail.

— The Hill

GRANTSBURG, Wisconsin (AP) — School officials have revised the science curriculum to allow the teaching of creationism, prompting an outcry from more than 300 educators who urged that the decision be reversed.

Members of Grantsburg’s school board believed that a state law governing the teaching of evolution was too restrictive. The science curriculum “should not be totally inclusive of just one scientific theory,” said Joni Burgin, superintendent of the district of 1,000 students in northwest Wisconsin.

— CNN

Arafat isn’t even dead yet and according to news reports the Palestinians and Israelis are arguing over where he should be buried.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A computer error with a voting machine cartridge gave President George W. Bush 3,893 extra votes in a Gahanna precinct.

President Bush won Ohio by 136,000 votes so fixing the error wouldn’t change the election’s outcome.

Franklin County’s unofficial results gave Bush 4,258 votes to Democratic challenger John Kerry’s 260 votes in Precinct one-B.

Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. Franklin County elections director Matthew Damschroder says Bush got 365 votes there.

Damschroder says he got calls Thursday from people who saw the error when reading poll results on the election board’s Web site.

Damschroder says after Precinct one-B closed, a cartridge from one of three voting machines at the polling place generated a faulty number at a computerized reading station.

AP via News Channel 5 (Cleveland)

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — It had to happen. Things were just going too smoothly.

Early Thursday, as Broward County elections officials wrapped up after a long day of canvassing votes, something unusual caught their eye. Tallies should go up as more votes are counted. That’s simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone … down.

It turns out the software used in Broward County can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward. Why a voting system would ever be designed to vote backward was a mystery to Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman. It had her on the phone late Wednesday with Omaha-based Elections Systems and Software.

Bad numbers showed up only in running tallies through the day, not the final one. Final tallies were reached by cross-checking machine totals and officials are confident they are accurate.

From the Palm Beach Post

“And anybody who thinks 51 percent is license to end the progressive income tax, chloroform Social Security, create a permanently troglodytic federal judiciary, invade Teheran, and generally take the national polity back to the 1890’s is betting heavy behind a low pair. Don’t fold. Don’t call. Raise.”

— Charles Pierce writing at Altercation

From AP via Wired News:

JACKSONVILLE, North Carolina — More than 4,500 votes have been lost in one North Carolina county because officials believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. Scattered other problems may change results in races around the state.

Local officials said UniLect, the maker of the county’s electronic voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes.

IQ averages in US States — “best estimate available from actual SAT and ACT scores adjusted for the fact that the IQ’s of these test takers are about 10 points above average” —

• 104 IQ New Hampshire
• 103 IQ Oregon, Massachusetts, Wisconsin
• 102 IQ Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Vermont, Washington
• 101 IQ Alaska, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Utah, Wyoming
• 100 IQ Arizona, California, Idaho, Maine, Nevada, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Virginia, West Virginia
• 99 IQ Delaware, Hawaii, Indiana
• 98 IQ Florida, Arkansas
• 97 IQ Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas
• 96 IQ New Mexico
• 95 IQ District of Columbia
• 94 IQ Mississippi, South Carolina

Source: IQ averages in U.S. states

SCHAUMBURG, IL—The Museum of the Middle Class, featuring historical and anthropological exhibits addressing the socioeconomic category that once existed between the upper and lower classes, opened to the public Monday.

“The splendid and intriguing middle class may be gone, but it will never be forgotten,” said Harold Greeley, curator of the exhibit titled “Where The Streets Had Trees’ Names.” “From their weekend barbecues at homes with backyards to their outdated belief in social mobility, the middle class will forever be remembered as an important part of American history.”

The Onion

The most serious barrier to renouncing your citizenship is that the State Department, which oversees expatriation, is reluctant to allow citizens to go “stateless.” Before allowing expatriation, the department will want you to have obtained citizenship or legal asylum in another country—usually a complicated and expensive process, if it can be done at all. Would-be renunciants must also prove that they do not intend to live in the United States afterward. Furthermore, you cannot renounce inside U.S. borders; the declaration must be made at a consul’s office abroad.

From Harper’s, which has much more, including this:

A more pleasant solution might be found in the Caribbean. Take, for example, the twin-island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis, which Frommer’s guide praises for its “average year-round temperature of 79°F (26°C), low humidity, white-sand beaches, and unspoiled natural beauty.” Citizenship in this paradise can be purchased outright. Prices start at around $125,000, which includes a $25,000 application fee and a minimum purchase of $100,000 in bonds. Processing time, which includes checks for criminal records and HIV, can take up to three months, but with luck you could be renouncing by Inauguration Day.

NewMexiKen is intrigued that there has been a boom today in the search item “average IQ by state.” Wonder what provoked that?

Here’s the post from six months ago that’s bringing them to NewMexiKen. (A post that, as I remember it, helped educate me to the fact that irony is lost on many most blog readers.)

“[M]any more Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin’s theory of evolution.”

Garry Wills in The New York Times.

Thanks to commenter Jennifer for the pointer.

What’s going to happen when all the polls going into the election show the Democrat leading, and all the exit polls show the Democrat winning, and then the voting computers whirr, the software does its magic, and out comes Bush?

NewMexiKen, February 25, 2004

Half the country is not stupid. We’re all stupid. We’re convinced several times a day to do things that aren’t in our best interests. We work too hard. We’re drinking, eating, medicating, and smoking ourselves into early graves. We overextend ourselves on credit. We knowingly stay in emotionally or physically abusive relationships. We let television raise our children. We’re deliberately mean and nasty to people we don’t like or agree with. We learn science from the Bible. We stay silent when speaking out would help someone. We fear the future. We fear death. And we’re lazy about our beliefs and convictions and we let the Democratic and Republican Parties dictate the political agenda in America by pushing our emotional buttons. Red, blue, black, white, brown, yellow, purple, and retina-burning yellow-green…we all share the blame.

Jason Kottke

NewMexiKen, having decided and voted, had also decided to lay off – as one blogger called it – “the liberal political crap” and stick to birthdays and history, [YAWN] etc.

Except Wonkette deserves recognition:

Ooops: He’s alive. And he’s condemning Bush. Which of course means that he wants Kerry to win. Unless he really wants Bush to win and is just by default endorsing Kerry in order to get people to vote for Bush out of spite. But then again, if we’re smart enough to figure that out, then maybe Osama knows that, too and he really wants Kerry to win, and is endorsing Kerry so that people will at first learn toward voting for Bush but then think that’s what Osama wants. . . So confusing. Clearly, we’ve fallen for one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is: “Never get involved in a land war in Asia”; but only slightly less well known is this: “Do not read about goats when death is on the line.”

After her first contact with a Department of Homeland Security agent, an Oregon toy store owner thought she might be the victim of a prank caller. But a second cryptic call left Stephanie Cox shaky. When the feds descended on Pufferbelly Toys, they showed their badges and made their mission clear: They were investigating a report that she was selling a toy called the Magic Cube, which they said was an illegal knockoff of Rubik’s Cube. Cox removed the offending item from the shelf, then contacted the manufacturer, who assured her there was no patent violation. Now, with the Magic Cube back on the shelf, Cox still puzzles over her Homeland Security experience. “Aren’t there any terrorists out there?” she asked.

Wired News Furthermore

The top civilian contracting official for the Army Corps of Engineers, charging that the Army granted the Halliburton Company large contracts for work in Iraq and the Balkans without following rules designed to ensure competition and fair prices to the government, has called for a high-level investigation of what she described as threats to the “integrity of the federal contracting program.”

From The New York Times

Or as the General puts it, “We didn’t have enough troops to guard both the oil ministry and the explosives bunker. One of them had to remain unguarded.”

To review the essential facts, prior to the war, Iraq’s Al Qa Qaa bunker and weapons complex had roughly 350 tons of high explosives under IAEA seal. After the war, for whatever reason, the complex was either not guarded at all or inadequately guarded. And all those explosives (primarily RDX and HMX) were carted away.

What we’re talking about here isn’t just a bunch of dynamite. This encyclopedia entry says RDX “is considered the most powerful and brisant of the military high explosives.” And not 350 pounds, 350 tons.

It is apparently widely believed within the US government that those looted explosives are what in many, perhaps most, cases is being used in car bombs and suicide attacks against US troops. That is, according to TPM sources and sources quoted in this evening’s Nelson Report, where the story first broke.

One administration official told Nelson, “This is the stuff the bad guys have been using to kill our troops, so you can’t ignore the political implications of this, and you would be correct to suspect that politics, or the fear of politics, played a major role in delaying the release of this information.”

— As reported by Josh Marshall

How could any thinking person vote for these people?

From the The Albuquerque Journal:

Kim Griffith voted on Thursday — over and over and over.

She’s among the people in Bernalillo and Sandoval counties who say they have had trouble with early voting equipment. When they have tried to vote for a particular candidate, the touch-screen system has said they voted for somebody else.

It’s a problem that can be fixed by the voters themselves — people can alter the selections on their ballots, up to the point when they indicate they are finished and officially cast the ballot.

For Griffith, it took a lot of altering.

She went to Valle Del Norte Community Center in Albuquerque, planning to vote for John Kerry. “I pushed his name, but a green check mark appeared before President Bush’s name,” she said.

Griffith erased the vote by touching the check mark at Bush’s name. That’s how a voter can alter a touch-screen ballot.

She again tried to vote for Kerry, but the screen again said she had voted for Bush. The third time, the screen agreed that her vote should go to Kerry.

She faced the same problem repeatedly as she filled out the rest of the ballot. On one item, “I had to vote five or six times,” she said.
…

Bernalillo County Clerk Mary Herrera said she doesn’t believe the touch-screen system has been making mistakes. It’s the fault of voters, she said Thursday.

NewMexiKen expects to have trouble voting for County Clerk Herrera next time around.

Malcolm Gladwell writes about the cost of prescription drugs in The New Yorker.

The perception that the drug industry is profiteering at the expense of the American consumer has given pharmaceutical firms a reputation on a par with that of cigarette manufacturers.

In fact, the complaint is only half true. The “intolerable” prices that Angell writes about are confined to the brand-name sector of the American drug marketplace. As the economists Patricia Danzon and Michael Furukawa recently pointed out in the journal Health Affairs, drugs still under patent protection are anywhere from twenty-five to forty per cent more expensive in the United States than in places like England, France, and Canada. Generic drugs are another story. Because there are so many companies in the United States that step in to make drugs once their patents expire, and because the price competition among those firms is so fierce, generic drugs here are among the cheapest in the world. And, according to Danzon and Furukawa’s analysis, when prescription drugs are converted to over-the-counter status no other country even comes close to having prices as low as the United States.
…

In fact, drug expenditures are rising rapidly in the United States not so much because we’re being charged more for prescription drugs but because more people are taking more medications in more expensive combinations. It’s not price that matters; it’s volume.

An important and informative article.

The Monster Slash (video).