The Firemonger Project

The Firemonger Project: Help spread Firefox. Download this CD, burn it and give it to your friends and family.

The Firemonger project is dedicated to providing an easy to use CD which contains the latest versions of Firefox™ and Thunderbird™, the web browser and email client created by the Mozilla Foundation. In addition to these amazing products, we've added a selection of plugins, extensions and themes. In other words, this CD contains everything you need to get started with Firefox and Thunderbird. Welcome to the revolution!

So get downloading already!!!

Tourist's Guide To Driving Around Washington D.C.

This is great, a tourist's guide to driving around our fair capital, from kuro5hin.org. Definitely worth the read if you live or commute in the area like myself.

"The DC road grid was laid out by a Frenchman, which explains why locals hate the French, and also explains much about US Foriegn Policy. Within DC proper, the roads are laid out in a grid, with other streets crossing the grid at weird angles, usually through a traffic circle. No one in DC knows how to drive in a traffic circle, and people from the surburbs are worse. Many streets are one way, and making a left turn can require travelling three or four blocks out of your way. Right turns are worse. Right turn on red is allowed, except at intersections that are posted otherwise.

Most intersections are posted otherwise.

Also, within DC we take security seriously! Primarily by shutting down major roads and intersections for no discernable reason.

If your road map of Montgomery County MD is more than a few weeks old, throw it out and buy a new one, it's obsolete. If in Loudon or Fairfax County in Va, and your map is one day old, it's already obsolete."

New Speed Test

Just ran a new speed test from BroadbandReports. Right up there with my rated 768/128 speed for a change.

2004-11-09 21:17:52 EST: 691 / 131
Your download speed : 707700 bps, or 691 kbps.
A 86.3 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 135125 bps, or 131 kbps.

Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked

Is it conspiracy theory or is there really something going on here?

When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.

What makes this so intriguing is the whole discrepancy between the votes cast and the exit polls, which should be a far better indicator of actual results...

The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 9,676 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

...

Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. "The correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted, "but one would normally expect that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - to be far smaller than it was."

I'm still mulling this over, but the discrepancy between the exit polls and the actual tabulated votes, particularly in the counties using the Diebold systems, looks rather incriminating... even more is the fact that the mainstream media seems to be glossing this over so far...

17 Reasons Not to Slit Your Wrists...by Michael Moore

Ok, it sucks. Really sucks. But before you go and cash it all in, let's, in the words of Monty Python, 'always look on the bright side of life!' There IS some good news from Tuesday's election.
Here are 17 reasons not to slit your wrists:

1. It is against the law for George W. Bush to run for president again.
2. Bush's victory was the NARROWEST win for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916.
3. The only age group in which the majority voted for Kerry was young adults (Kerry: 54%, Bush: 44%), proving once again that your parents are always wrong and you should never listen to them.
4. In spite of Bush's win, the majority of Americans still think the country is headed in the wrong direction (56%), think the war wasn't worth fighting (51%), and don't approve of the job George W. Bush is doing (52%). (Note to foreigners: Don't try to figure this one out. It's an American thing, like Pop Tarts.)
5. The Republicans will not have a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate. If the Democrats do their job, Bush won't be able to pack the Supreme Court with right-wing ideologues. Did I say "if the Democrats do their job?" Um, maybe better to scratch this one.
6. Michigan voted for Kerry! So did the entire Northeast, the birthplace of our democracy. So did 6 of the 8 Great Lakes States. And the whole West Coast! Plus Hawaii. Ok, that's a start. We've got most of the fresh water, all of Broadway, and Mt. St. Helens. We can dehydrate them or bury them in lava. And no more show tunes!
7. Once again we are reminded that the buckeye is a nut, and not just any old nut -- a poisonous nut. A great nation was felled by a poisonous nut. May Ohio State pay dearly this Saturday when it faces Michigan.
8. 88% of Bush's support came from white voters. In 50 years, America will no longer have a white majority. Hey, 50 years isn't such a long time! If you're ten years old and reading this, your golden years will be truly golden and you will be well cared for in your old age.
9. Gays, thanks to the ballot measures passed on Tuesday, cannot get married in 11 new states. Thank God. Just think of all those wedding gifts we won't have to buy now.
10. Five more African Americans were elected as members of Congress, including the return of Cynthia McKinney of Georgia. It's always good to have more blacks in there fighting for us and doing the job our candidates can't.
11. The CEO of Coors was defeated for Senate in Colorado. Drink up!
12. Admit it: We like the Bush twins and we don't want them to go away.
13. At the state legislative level, Democrats picked up a net of at least 3 chambers in Tuesday's elections. Of the 98 partisan-controlled state legislative chambers (house/assembly and senate), Democrats went into the 2004 elections in control of 44 chambers, Republicans controlled 53 chambers, and 1 chamber was tied. After Tuesday, Democrats now control 47 chambers, Republicans control 49 chambers, 1 chamber is tied and 1 chamber (Montana House) is still undecided.
14. Bush is now a lame duck president. He will have no greater moment than the one he's having this week. It's all downhill for him from here on out -- and, more significantly, he's just not going to want to do all the hard work that will be expected of him. It'll be like everyone's last month in 12th grade -- you've already made it, so it's party time! Perhaps he'll treat the next four years like a permanent Friday, spending even more time at the ranch or in Kennebunkport. And why shouldn't he? He's already proved his point, avenged his father and kicked our ass.
15. Should Bush decide to show up to work and take this country down a very dark road, it is also just as likely that either of the following two scenarios will happen: a) Now that he doesn't ever need to pander to the Christian conservatives again to get elected, someone may whisper in his ear that he should spend these last four years building "a legacy" so that history will render a kinder verdict on him and thus he will not push for too aggressive a right-wing agenda; or b) He will become so cocky and arrogant -- and thus, reckless -- that he will commit a blunder of such major proportions that even his own party will have to remove him from office.
16. There are nearly 300 million Americans -- 200 million of them of voting age. We only lost by three and a half million! That's not a landslide -- it means we're almost there. Imagine losing by 20 million. If you had 58 yards to go before you reached the goal line and then you barreled down 55 of those yards, would you stop on the three yard line, pick up the ball and go home crying -- especially when you get to start the next down on the three yard line? Of course not! Buck up! Have hope! More sports analogies are coming!!!
17. Finally and most importantly, over 55 million Americans voted for the candidate dubbed "The #1 Liberal in the Senate." That's more than the total number of voters who voted for either Reagan, Bush I, Clinton or Gore. Again, more people voted for Kerry than Reagan. If the media are looking for a trend it should be this -- that so many Americans were, for the first time since Kennedy, willing to vote for an out-and-out liberal. The country has always been filled with evangelicals -- that is not news. What IS news is that so many people have shifted toward a Massachusetts liberal. In fact, that's BIG news. Which means, don't expect the mainstream media, the ones who brought you the Iraq War, to ever report the real truth about November 2, 2004. In fact, it's better that they don't. We'll need the element of surprise in 2008.

Feeling better? I hope so. As my friend Mort wrote me yesterday, "My Romanian grandfather used to say to me, 'Remember, Morton, this is such a wonderful country -- it doesn't even need a president!'"

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
www.michaelmoore.com

George Walker Bush, Jr., Re-elected President of the United States

OK, so for those of inclined to be bitter, this has got to be the best article lead-in for yesterdays' results (kuro5hin.org):

Former alcoholic and functional illiterate George W. Bush has won re-election and will retain his office as 43th President of the United States of America, despite a proven inability to pronounce the word "nuclear".

The editorial as a whole is a good and entertaining read. Oh hell, it's not that long I'll just reprint the best parts.

George Bush ran with Dick Cheney, soulless oil-fired robot and current Vice President of the United States. Mr. Cheney's main qualifications include playing thermonuclear chicken with the USSR and inadvertently fathering a very confused lesbian.

The pair beat out Sen. John F. Kerry and his runningmate Sen. John Edwards through fear-mongering and the time-honored tradition of banking on American stupidity.

They presented a plan throughout three Presidential Debates and one Vice-Presidential Debate to build an America that is dominated by fear, owned by corporations, and loathed worldwide.

They believe the U.S. can have a stronger economy through the technique of giving the idle rich all the money, a health care plan based on the idea of not caring for anyone's health, an energy plan co-authored by the House of Saud, and a strong presence as the world's resented playground bully.

The comments, though, are interesting in themselves, especially this gem right at the top typifying (IMHO) the worldwide reaction to the election results [edited for spelling]:

I used to have sympathy for the American people, even whilst disagreeing with the policies of their government.

Now I have to face up to the sad reality that over fifty percent of Americans are superstitious, uneducated simpletons who have bought into a fantasy of fear fostered upon them by a government which realized that the only way to hold an electorate who believes in nothing, is by selling them the idea of a new boogey man.

You'd have thought the Cold War, with its over-hyped vision of the Russian Imperialist Threat (in reality a collapsing, ineffective political and economic system) would have rung some bells. But no... I guess people somehow enjoy being scared shitless.

I hope the other democracies in the world grow a spine and show the US that this globe is not theirs alone. If Bush wants 40bn more for the Iraq effort, he should be told to get it from its own people. You made your bed, now lie in it - filthy though it may be.

Just the thing I needed to uplift my day. I don't feel so alone anymore. LOL