100th POST

I MADE IT TO MY 100th POST

I can't believe my self-idulgence has made it this far.

I am surprised I am still writing. I think the hardest thing about being a writer is the complete hatred I have for my work, while being plagued with the need to write.

I hope someone enjoys it and keeps coming back.



Ok so this is actually the 105th post, but the damn blogger log in lied to me.. but its close enough

Interesting Lessons on Africa

Think Twice about that Wedding Band

How bad do you need that gold or Diamond?
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/weekinreview/21cohe.html?ex=1258779600&en=82730f9d26c0745e&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo
ORKNEY, South Africa — A sign says, "No horseplay in cage." The cage in question is an elevator, but of a particular kind. It plunges down a shaft at ear-popping speed, ferrying miners to a depth of 5,100 feet, just short of a mile.
The older a gold mine gets, the farther the ore is from the shaft. The Great Noligwa mine here has been operating for more than three decades. Where the cage stops, another underground journey begins - by rail, on chairlifts, on foot, downward, another 1,000 feet downward, to the reef. All this may take more than two hours.
A mine is a hostile environment. Explosives, heavy machinery and thousands of human beings must be ferried about with a lot of earth above them. Sometimes that earth rebels. A rock falls and a life is lost. A miner died here less than a month ago. Another sign beside the cage says, "Fingers do not grow on trees."
Tsidiso Mosaola has nine fingers (one was amputated after an infection). He has operated a drill for 20 years now. The richest gold reef ever found does not yield its treasure with ease. Tabular in form, the reef is inclined at 21 degrees. So Mr. Mosaola, 52, is crouched in a low gulley known as "the slope." His body vibrates as the pneumatic drills he wields penetrates the ore....

Gold looks pretty at Tiffany. It looks less pretty on the reef. No trace of its glow lurks in the weary face of Fanie Sithole, 47. He's from Mozambique. He's a winch operator. His eyes try to smile, but they are weary.
Once a year, Mr. Sithole goes home to his wife and five children in Maputo. But in two years, he says, "I'm going home for good."
The next time you buy a ring, think of him. The next time you buy a bracelet, think of Africa.

Another Interesting Article:
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=68&art_id=vn20041121104558991C824191

There are two utterly contradictory styles of western reporting about Africa. In news coverage, like a cartoon, it is bad (war, pillage, famine, corruption); in travel writing, however, it is good (pristine nature, wild animals, great beaches, bargain prices). South Africa is no exception to this crude mental segregation, and sometimes such bizarre schizophrenic contortions are even written by the same correspondent.

The London Daily Mail's star writer, for example, has portrayed South Africa both as plunging into wild, homicidal ruin ("goats have set up home in the marble foyers of derelict banks") and as an idyllic holiday destination ("the roads are better maintained than in Britain"). In 1999, Ross Benson reported over two pages how the "barbarians" were taking over South Africa with unrestrained butchery, making this "the most dangerous place on earth". He concluded that whites would be driven into the sea.

Undeterred by his own prediction, Benson returned this year with his wife, visiting the Western Cape and enthusing about dolphins, scenery, weather, wine and "accommodation as good as anywhere in the world". He had only one complaint. Was it: "Parks and beaches have become killing fields"? No, that was his previous article.

Now, in the Daily Mail, he lamented that one week in South Africa was not enough. "Next time," he promised, "I will try to stretch it out to a fortnight."One explanation for this bizarre dichotomy, apart from an endemic nostalgia for Empire in publications such as the Daily Mail, is an attitude that goes back to some of the earliest European travellers in Africa. Native folk are bearable as long as they stay in their traditional habitat, but it's the end of civilisation when they move to the city.

Such arrogant views found a logical conclusion in apartheid, but prejudices linger on.This is the mirror image of an idea of Africa as a huge game park. In his travel article, Benson seems surprised at the sophistication of his hotel and quality of the wines. "Until now," he confesses, "Africa had, to me, always meant safaris."The fable of an unspoilt wilderness, an Eden of wildlife, say the authors of The Myth of Wild Africa, is a creation of the western imagination: "a refuge from industrial, despoiled Europe".

At the core of the myth, perpetuated every day by TV wildlife documentaries and travel magazines, is first the absence - then the threat - of man. "European explorers wanted to believe in a virgin land, unsullied by human hand," wrote Jonathan S Adams and Thomas O McShane. "Yet this Africa never was. Indeed, nowhere does the vision of Africa depart further from reality. Man has been an integral part of the African landscape for over 2 million years.

That people lived in Africa, however, was irrelevant to the West: what mattered was the wilderness."Western fiction about Africa has also largely stalked these twin paths: either local people are written into the background, so that white heroes can strut (or shoot) their way across the continent, or the natives lurch into the action as an unpredictable, unfathomable horde. Doris Lessing once wrote that white African writers used the continent as a peg on which to hang their egos (she included herself).

More obvious examples range from Wilbur Smith to Ernest Hemingway. Indeed Hemingway appeared to view Africa as a sort of gladiatorial arena for white men to test their character and courage. In his short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Hemingway described Africa as somewhere to go "to work the fat off (one's) soul". A current popular genre is the rollicking memoirs of Africa correspondents, centred more on the rock 'n' roll buzz of their escapades than the tragedies they are ostensibly reporting.

As a style this harks back to those colonial "adventure yarns" by Rider Haggard and John Buchan, where intrepid white men brave the Dark Continent.Even a good one, such as The Zanzibar Chest by Aiden Hartley, about his years in African war zones, can impart an echo of Haggard's Sir Henry in King Solomon's Mines: "I like your looks, Mr Umbopa, and I will take you as my servant."With Laurens van der Post, fact and fiction actually blend.

His best-selling books on the Bushmen were based as much on his own daydreams as on fact. In his novels, on the other hand, Van der Post was in a direct line from Buchan and Haggard: the simple, rural African is a decent fellow, but once tainted by the modern world - education and the city - he becomes corrupt (and probably communist).

A cartoon-like, imperial residue - rural Africans, good urban Africans, bad - also explains, I suspect, the modern divergence between news and travel coverage of Africa. A long line of British novelists, suggested Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o in his classic work Decolonising the Mind, prepared the way for later blinkered mass media attitudes, with depictions of only two types of African: "the one who co-operated with the European coloniser' (good); and "the one who offered resistance to the foreign conquest and occupation of his country" (bad). "The imaginative literature had created the necessary racist vocabulary long before TV and the popular media had come to dominate the scene," he concluded.

It is a short journey from John Buchan's white panic in Prester John (1910) to Benson's post-apartheid hysteria in the Daily Mail (1999). Buchan describes good Africans, loyal to their white masters, and bad - the evil Reverend Laputa, a "nigger priest" plotting to drive out whites (in Benson's modern fable, into the sea). Laputa ("the Umkulunkulu") has a veneer of education which swiftly gives way to barbarity.

But, thanks to the selfless heroics of emigrant Scotsman David Crawfurd, civilisation is saved and finally the wised-up young hero reflects:"I knew then the meaning of the white man's duty. He has to take all risks, recking nothing of his life or his fortunes, and well content to find his reward in the fulfilment of his task.

This is the difference between white and black, the gift of responsibility, the power of being in a little way a king; and, so long as we know this and practise it, we will rule not in Africa alone but wherever there are dark men who live only for the day and their own bellies."Compare this with the description of Johannesburg by Benson 89 years later: "This is the first city I have ever seen abandoned to the barbarians in time of peace." The distance between Buchan and Benson is that we are no longer waiting for the barbarians: they have arrived and taken over.

Buchan's Prester John ends, after an epic clash of white against black, good over evil, with a lyrical account of how the white man is now assisting the subdued "Kaffirs" to transform the veld into a flowering garden: that elusive Eden of colonial dreams, replete with a quote from the Bible: "The wilderness and the solitary place are glad for us." Only five years after his nightmare in Johannesburg, where the "bad" natives live, Benson can also rhapsodise about "a sweeping tour of lush scenery and serrated ridges": for this, in the colonial imagination, is the "real" Africa, where the "good" natives live - and where above all (as in Prester John, apartheid and this year's Daily Mail travel article) their most sterling quality is that they are invisible.Novelist Chinua Achebe sees more in such caricatures than either ignorance or prejudice.

In an essay on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, he writes: "Quite simply it is the desire - one might almost say the need - in western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest."In King Solomon's Mines, faithful Umbopa (now revealed as a king) sums up the dutiful gratitude of "good" Africans by informing Sir Henry gravely: "Had ye not been Englishmen I would not have believed it; but English 'gentlemen' tell no lies."

Epilogue III

NOVEMBER 3rd THESES

ON NOVEMBER 3rd, this organization posted these on the door of the DNC and around the country at local Democratic Headquarters... Let me say he is right on target... In short it basically says we need to stop thinking American's are rationale economic actors we need to create and articulate our moral foundation that is the basis for liberlism. And through articulation of values that are the defining characteristics of America we can reclaim this country:

http://www.3nov.com/

Epilogue II

I DON'T CONDONE THE VIEWS OF THIS SITE:

http://www.fuckthesouth.com/

But it is funny, and I like his point about the North paying for the limited government of the South...

It is tempting to want to divest, but when I have a more rationale thought I realize this is what the Republicans want, for ust to infight believe there is a difference between us, when really we are more alike then not

"The rich have always stayed on top by dividing white people from black people, but poor white people have more in common with poor black people then they do rich white people." - Bullworth

Epilogue I

Who heads the DNC

GO DEAN GO

According to Daily Kos:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/15/231259/43

"[A]bout 3 months ago, I was told by someone close to Dean that Nancy Pelosi was backing Howard Dean for the DNC chair. I found it rather odd, but apparently, Pelosi reached out to Dean, perhaps thinking he would be the best alternative if Kerry were defeated. That would seem clear thinking to me. Remember the standing ovation that Dean received during the Convention in Boston from the Democratic congregation? Apparently, those in DC have forgotten.

Last week John Kerry met with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Kerry convinced the two Democratic leaders to go with backing Tom Vilsack for the DNC. Now, that's some pretty strong sway up in the Hill, de facto? Not quite.

Dean's got some backing too. Both Jesse Jackson Sr. and Jr. are backing Dean, as is Gov Bill Richardson of NM, Donna Brazille as well."

Fuck that shit, we need real reform, I am sick of rural white voters in Iowa and New Hampshire picking our Democratic Nominee, let DC, California and NY pick who we send, let the minorities, women, and labor unions that are the life blood of this party, pick its nominee...

More Proof

I did some research on the counties in Florida and how they have vote... Some people have said that these Dixie Crats have been "Trending" republican

well:

COUNTY 2000 vs. 2004
Gilchrist: Bush: Gore: Bush 04: Kerry: NET CHANGE
33% 67% 71% 29% -38%

DeSoto: 47% 53% 59% 41% -12%

Franklin: 48% 52% 59% 41% -12%

Highlands: 48% 52% 63% 37% -14%

Lafayette: 45% 55% 74% 26% -30%

Levy: 39% 61% 63% 37% -24%

Manatee: 50% 50% 57% 43% -7%

Osceola: 48% 52% 53% 47% -5%

Pasco: 50% 50% 55% 45% -5%

Pinellas: 48% 52% 50% 50% -2%

Sarasota: 46% 54% 54% 46% -9%

These are just counties where it there is obviously no trending... But we didn't even get to counties with very suspicious Finals... SIMPLY PUT THIS IS JUST FISHY

More Proof

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm

This is not just conspiracy theory... As I have always said, do you really believe he would go into an election he hadn't fixed?

Kerry Won the Election

Since the end of the election I have been screaming from every place I can, telling everyone I know, KERRY WON THE ELECTION. I know the skepticism on your face, I see it all the time when I say it. But this is not left over sour grapes of 2000, to be honest, since the 2000 election I have become disenchanted with our political system. But here is the truth

THE ELECTION WAS FIXED.

And better than the last one, but if you are waiting on NBC, owned by GE which gave over $8.6 million to Republicans this cycle AOL-Time-Warner, Disney, Viacom, News I Corp., Bertelsmann, Vivendi Universal, Sony, AT&T, The Washington Post Co. to report it you will be waiting a long time. These “news” organizations’ corporate takeovers no longer allow for real criticism, discussions of policy or the business welfare supporting Bush administration’s stealing of an election.

So where is the proof?

Like most things it is right in front of our eyes. EXIT POLLS. Exit polls are simple, people standing outside polling stations in key swing states in key counties asking voters who they just voted for.

As Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times reported in “Report Says Problems Led to Skewed Surveying Data,” “The last wave of national exit polls we received, along with many other subscribers, showed Kerry winning the popular vote by 51 percent to 48 percent, if true, surely enough to carry the Electoral College,” Steve Coll, managing editor of The Washington Post, wrote in an online chat with readers Wednesday.

It gets better, according to Greg Palast of www.tompaine.com, “most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. At 1:05 a.m. Wednesday morning, CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. The exit polls were later combined with—and therefore contaminated by—the tabulated results, ultimately becoming a mirror of the apparent actual vote. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.” (I checked with CNN about this and they admit to doing all these things as well as making a mistake)

In 2000, exit polls showed Gore winning Florida by a slim margin, which we now know that if ALL ballots had been counted, Gore would have won Florida.

So why the mistake this is the rationale… this is great:

According to the Rutenberg piece in the NY Times a report written by Joe Lenski and Warren Mitofsky (co-directors of the exit polling service) “details systemic glitches that skewed the data in ways of which several news organizations.” What are those glitches? “In some cases, the report said, survey takers could not get close enough to the polls to collect adequate samples of voters opinion. The report also theorized that the poll results more frequently overstated support for Mr. Kerry than for President Bush because the Democratic nominee's supporters were more open to pollsters.”

Or

As Warren Mitofsky, said on the Jim Lehrer News Hour, “Kerry voters were more anxious to participate in our exit polls than the Bush voters.”

THAT’S RIGHT THE EXPLANATION KERRY SUPPORTERS WERE MORE ANXIOUS THEN BUSH SUPPORTERS…

As my old boss the Mystery Pollster points out, “What Mitofsky is suggesting is extraordinary: If true, it is the first time in his exit polls and one of the first times I can remember for any political survey, that those who refused to participate in the survey were different enough (more supportive of George Bush) than those who were interviewed to make a material difference in the overall results.”

OR MAYBE THE EXIT POLLS WERE RIGHT AND THEY NOW HAVE TO EXPLAIN WHY THEY DID NOT MATCH THE RESULT
SIMPLE THE ELECTION WAS FIXED

John McCarthy an AP Writer reported that an election system in Ohio gave extra votes to Bush. According to “Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes,”

“An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said. Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry’s 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. Bush's total should have been recorded as 365.

“Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch that on one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred when its cartridge was plugged into a reader and generated a faulty number. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred.”

THIS ONE WAS REPORTED, HOW MANY WERE MISSED…
IT GETS EVEN BETTER

According to CNN.com’s Daniel Sieberg as Posted on Nov. 5.

“In Florida, and a handful of other states, several voters said the touch-screen machines incorrectly recorded their choices. ‘I filled out my ballot and was shocked when I went to the final screen, and the ballot had voted for the opposite of what I had chosen on every candidate,’ one woman in Florida said. (SHE VOTED FOR KERRY IT CAME OUT BUSH)”

I have many friends who reported the same thing. Voting for one having another come out. On Election day CNN reported a delay in voting in a county in Florida because the voting machines had a “glitche” in which machines came calibrated with votes on them. These are the ones caught what about the ones not caught?

This is a few hours of research on the Internet, imagine what we could find if someone actually did some reporting on it.

Not all the fraud is with voting machines, I have not even begun to talk about the votes thrown out.

“Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes,” again Greg Palast, “In the United States, about 3% of votes cast are voided—known as “spoilage” in election jargon—because the ballots cast are inconclusive.” Meaning anything from not voting for a congressional candidate to the now infamous hanging chads. “Today, [Nov. 4th] the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio.”

And of course according to statisticians investigating this phenomenon country wide have found that 54% of those votes discarded were black voters, even though we only make up about 13% of the voting population. What is the point, well out of the 2 million votes discarded in Tuesdays election, the overwhelming majority are Black or other minority voters’ ballots.

More proof, in New Mexico, CNN.com reported a Bush victory by 11,620 votes, yet according to New Mexico offcials, approximately 18,000 ballots were tossed out almost entirely in Latino, Native American, and poor precincts. So Latino voters in New Mexico who voted 2 to 1 for Kerry were 5 times as likely to have their vote tossed as White voters.

Here is the best quote, “in heavily Hispanic areas controlled by Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in the ‘Little Texas’ area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush ‘won’ there 68 percent to 31 percent.”

“I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election, and he told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply indicated that such people simply can't make up their minds on the choice of candidate for president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the desert to register their indecision in a voting booth.”

What more proof do we need? At the very least we know there is something severely wrong, and it is not simply that Kerry supporters were more vocal in their support then Bush supporters… does anyone really believe that to be true? The election was fixed, the Diebold head who said he would deliver the election for Bush was not bluffing. It was fixed, and more efficiently then the last time. Please do not rest, spread the word, tell the story, never let anyone believe Bush won by having more votes cast for him.

Epilogue to a Vote

REALLY SUMS UP THE ELECTION PERFECTLY

(REAL HEADLINE)

YOU MIGHT THINK THAT WAS HARSH, BUT HERE IS THE PROOF:
THIS WEBSITE HAS THE AVERAGE IQ's of States that Went for Bush:

http://chrisevans3d.com/files/iq.htm







For People Who Need to Leave the Country:
http://www.marryanamerican.ca/