The political stuff will trickle off for a bit. I have a vacation coming up and it might be time to wipe clean. I’ll sign off with a piece of email kos received:

I work at a domestic violence shelter in a
rural conservative district in Mich. that is has had its economy gutted
by NAFTA and where Christianity dominates the culture.

Yesterday while reflecting about 4 more years of Bush I was talking
with a woman staying in the shelter. I will give her a fake name, lets
call her Laura B. Laura is 28, pregnant, (never considered an
abortion). She finished highschool and did a year of college before
dropping out to have a couple of kids with her military husband. Living
in Virginia on base with her autocratic mate (he doesn’t allow the boys
3 and 4 to say “yeap” they have to answer “yes sir”) drove her crazy
and she was hospitalized for suicidal thoughts. Military dude divorced
her and has custody.

She came home to Mom in Mich and ended up at our shelter to try and
sort out her life. (Mom has no money either and her own problems.) We,
like all secular agencies, have seen a steady erosion of funds.

Laura B. has found a job working in the kitchen at a local faith based
Christian College. She makes $6/hour. She drives a dying Ford Escort
wagon pays $2.15/gallon for gas. Her latest crisis is her insurance
expired on Oct. 9 (her ex-partner cancelled policy). She needs to come
up with $211 to get insurance for one month or face a $1,000 fine if
she gets caught driving with no insurance. We have some public
transportation, Dial-a Ride, minibus runs between 7 am and 6 p.m., M-F
$1.50 one-way. She has to be at work at 6am.

She has been walking to work lately but it is about 2 miles she is 5
months pregnant, it is dark at 5 am, and winter is coming. Solution? Go
begging at the churches who seem to have money for these things. They
will give her the money if she attends bible school. So last night she
was at bible school until 9 p.m.

She has never attended our domestic violence support groups as she is
too tired at night and goes to bed early but the bible study was not
optional.

She was excited about “God’s message” when she came back.

This week she moves into low income subsidized housing. Her newest
crisis is she has found out when the college is closed for the
Christmas holiday (one month) she has no employment. She is hoping to
find temporary employment as a seasonal retail worker if the Christmas
sales are brisk to tide her over. She doesn’t know what she will do
when the baby is born, hopes she can work up till the last week (she is
on her feet all day with this job). She will be eligible for subsidized
daycare.

She voted for Bush because of his “family values.”

I’ve been holding back on posting to give a little perspective on it, think about what I want to say. There’s not really a question of what needs to be done, but I will be moping a bit.

By the slimmest of margins, and it looks like, because of a completely irrelevant bigotry, we have validated the administration’s actions abroad, and committed ourselves to a set of foreign, economic, civil rights and environmental policies that will probably take a lifetime to undo.

It’s almost enough to make you throw your hands up. The triumph of newspeak, of fantasy over objective reality. But on the other hand, to realize that if an aging populous of bigots with an agenda of hate and fear is the best that they can come up with, perhaps there’s hope in opposition. And that even if there isn’t any hope, against such an agenda, opposition is a moral obligation.

Anyway, instead, here’s some links:

• Kerry concedes. – Xeni
  

  “Get over it,” he said, “The way you feel now is exactly how I felt when Nixon won a second term — crushed. I just couldn’t believe America was that stupid. But remember what happened to Nixon that term.”

  “Change comes from discontent,” he said. “And right now, there’s a lot of discontent.”

• Rafe comments
  

  I’m sure there will be tons of recrimination and analysis that explain exactly why Bush has won, but one number stands out to me as I think about Bush’s win, and that’s the number of people who voted. The Democrats were predicting upwards of 118 million voters. The Republicans were predicting 104 to 108 million. It’s closer to the number that the Republicans projected. In other words, the Democrats were undone by the same thing that everybody hoping for significant change is undone by, the false hope that people who don’t normally vote would rise up and make their voices heard. It never seems to work that way, does it?

• Clusterfuck Nation: Election Results – Jim Kunstler
  

  We couldn’t form a plausible opposition to the those who act as if the future doesn’t exist.

• Greg Knauss on the Political Divide
  

  Our culture has been swept along in a tide of emotionally-resonant, steadfastly anti-rational entertainment, and politics is at the head of the wave. The course of our country, the future of our people, is being determined by lizard-brain responses to images designed to trigger sub-rational responses.

• George Bush’s America
  

  Reading the various commentary and chatting with a few people I’ve come
  to a couple of realizations which I think we all need to come to terms
  with. First, as Eric Alterman puts it, there are more of “them” than “us” right now.
  The people who voted George Bush and the Republicans into office this
  year didn’t do so because they were conned by a right wing asshole
  posing as a compassionate centrist. They did so precisely because he is
  a right wing asshole

• Election Countdown 2004 . Election’s Over. Go Home
  

  The early spin declares that the secret to Bush’s success was moral issues. A whopping 22 percent of voters called “Moral Values” their single most important issue, beating the economy, terrorism and Iraq; and of those, 80 percent voted for Bush. Yes, Evangelical Christians seemed to be the driving force yesterday, and they were driven, some say, by Bush’s stance on gay marriage and abortion.

  See also this thread: 21. “Moral Values”?

• Anyone Know How to Make a Noose? James Wolcott
  

  The election was a victory for George Bush and Rovianism, a victory for Grover Norquist. It was also a victory for Osama Bin Laden. I don’t believe for a moment Bin Laden was trying to sway voters to Kerry with his taped address. This was the outcome he wanted, a gift from us to him: an unapologetic Christian Crusader in the White House whose reelection giving lie to the notion that Abu Ghraib was an aberration and that the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians weigh upon America’s conscience. This morning America could not look more like a grinning aggressor to the Arab world, an aggressor with fresh marching orders.

  Also, yesterday morning:

  I am preparing myself for either outcome today. Should Kerry
  win, I will post an important statement called “A Time for Healing,” or
  something equally noble-sounding. Should Bush win, I shall post a
  statement of philosophical resignation tentatively titled “Good, Go
  Ahead, America, Choke on Your Own Vomit, You Deserve to Die.” The
  latter will probably require a little more tweaking.

• MORE ON THE GOP BASE – Noam Scheiber
  

  Per my piece from this morning and my previous post, here’s an extremely telling piece of exit polling data from yesterday: Not only did Kerry win by an 86-13 margin among self-described liberals, he also won by a 55-45 margin among self-described moderates. So how’d Bush pull it off? He won 84-15 among self-described conservatives, and, more importantly, he made sure conservatives comprised a much bigger chunk of the electorate than they did in 2000. (Conservatives comprised about 34 percent of the electorate yesterday, versus 29 percent in 2000–a huge shift, raw numbers-wise.) Anyone anticipating a conciliatory second Bush term should stop and consider how much Bush owes his base.

• A MANDATE FOR CULTURE WAR – Andrew Sullivan
  

  That’s Bill Bennett’s conclusion. He won’t be the only one. What we’re seeing, I think, is a huge fundamentalist Christian revival in this country, a religious movement that is now explicitly political as well. It is unsurprising, of course, given the uncertainty of today’s world, the devastating attacks on our country, and the emergence of so many more liberal cultures in urban America. And it is completely legitimate in this country for such views to be represented in public policy, however much I disagree with them. But the intensity of the passion, and the inherently totalist nature of religiously motivated politics means deep social conflict if we are not careful.

  SLOW DOWN THERE…. – Amy Sullivan thinks this is hooey

• Stand and Fight
  

  In the end, this election is about what kind of people we are, what kind of country we’ll be. Half of the electorate dissents from Bushism. The election still represents an expression of the strength of opposition to the radical and reckless course Bush has followed, despite the ugly campaign.

• Well, what to say?
  

  I’ve referred to this in the past, and hopefully will have a chance to return to it, but here’s the essence of the matter, as I see it. Before today, the course that America had charted in the world over the last three years could be seen as the result of a traumatic event (9/11) and the choice of a president who was actually put in office by a minority of the electorate. This was a referendum on what’s happened in the last three years. And it’s been validated.

• BEFORE THE BLOODLETTING….
  

  I sure hope all the liberal energy that came together this year doesn’t dissipate. After all, the real problem has never been George Bush, the problem has been that a bare majority of Americans agree with George Bush. That’s not an academic distinction, either: just as movement conservatives built up their machine in the ashes of Barry Goldwater’s loss in 1964, liberals need to continue building a long-term machine dedicated to changing popular opinion. And it’s hardly a herculean task: a switch of only 3 or 4 points in public opinion is a virtual landslide, and if we can pull it off it means that guys like George Bush can’t get elected anymore, even if they are the kind of people you’d like to have a beer with. It can be done.

• Bush Unbound – Matt Welch
  

  Worse, I predicted 17 months ago that pushing for a constitutional amendment against gay marriage would specifically backfire on the Republicans, and cost them the White House. On the contrary, Bush bumped his popular vote percentage to a Clinton-topping 51 percent, Republicans increased their lead in both the House and Senate, and all 11 gay marriage-banning initiatives were headed for passage as the votes got counted in the wee hours this morning. Unsurprisingly, and certainly not for the last time, my finger is nowhere near the national pulse.

We have almost 20 machines, so looks like more won’t be necessary, but here’s some extra stats for completion’s sake.

Paul, your contribution will be well spent on a big bottle of cheap vodka.

Probably worth updating on election day right?

We’ve been busy little bees over the past week. That and trying to juggle work work, outside work, etc can be a bit demanding.

• Wesley Clark was on campus last night, and he’s very sharp, and the Q&A was great. Both great questions, and by and large, well thought out and insightful answers. There definitely are two very starkly different strategic visions for America, and it’s too bad that hasn’t been delineated or discussed more during the campaign. Clark would be a great Secretary of Defense. His depth of knowledge and facility with the facts was impressive.
• Voted this morning of course. LA Weekly helped with the propositions.
• We’re tapping into a big need for big file hosting for policiatl/social events like this. “indy akamai” as a friend put it. Definitely will be more followup on this. We’ll have a full post mortem when we get a breather
• We got a Wired News writeup this morning, which was great: Download Movies Before You Vote
• We hit #1 on Popdex and Daypop over the weekend before ceding the top spot to more worthwhile related stories

MSNBC exit poll indicates that the youth did not vote. The 18-29 bracket voted the same this year as in 2000, while 30-44 group was down.

That being said, lets count all the votes and see how it falls.

NetNewWire now has 5061 unread items and counting. And it’s randomly dropping read items despite my protestations (preferences set to not delete). non-suck RSS reader is definitely moving up the priority list.

• Matt Webb comments on ‘Normalization is for sisses’ – unnormalized data is typially for masochists, but that’s b/c data management tools (read: rdbms) are too brittle. Now if we had some efficient way to make those structures more late-binding/morphable…
• Firefox is on the move – must run stats on campus soon. My Mozilla stats have been going down on my blog, but recently lots more ‘normal’ people have been dropping by
• The Descent of the American Empire
  

  The American military is without equal. That sounds good, until you realize that a massive military without an equal means you have an irrelevant army. America is building a missile defense system after being attacked with domestic civilian aircraft. America sees the world in need of policing, while the world sees America as something from which you should protect yourself.

  Insightful, although (and this makes his statements more telling before), as a nit, bush has been pushing his Faith-Based Missile Defense program since he came into office, before 9/11

By popular request (big number so it won’t run out):

permalink

Subject:  The Rumors On the Internets Are True!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
"I hear there are rumors, uh, on the internets."
        -President George Walker Bush
The INTERNETS VETERANS FOR TRUTH have launched a new pre-election campaign,
"Never Forget," at http://www.internetvetsfortruth.org/ in an effort to educate
the voting public prior to the November 2nd election.
The website features documentary content highlighting the records of both
George W. Bush and John Kerry. 
The INTERNETS VETERANS FOR TRUTH invite you to view this documentary evidence
as well as to enjoy the social and political commentary of Jon Stewart, Eminem,
and others.
We know the rumors on the Internets are true.  We invite you to visit and
decide for yourself:
  http://www.internetvetsfortruth.org/
And to please, pass this on to our fellow Americans.
Let's blogroll.
*****************************************************************************
*              THE INTERNETS VETERANS FOR TRUTH: NEVER FORGET               *  
*****************************************************************************
Need to vent?  Want to help? Long to engage in some geopolitical discourse?     
Email: letsblogroll@gmail.com

Update: not much sleep, but on track for today or tomorrow

Linkdump:

• BXE 0.9.6 released – new version of the Bitflux Editor (amazing editor if all you need to support is Moz)
• MT vs. WP vs. TxP: Entry Page Design – Scrivs says MT is best of the bunch, but really, the bar isn’t set that high
• Download Fahrenheit 9/11 Here – Marc Perkel has the idea
• W3C: Inaccessibility of Visually-Oriented Anti-Robot Tests
• 35th Anniversary of the Internet – Party Oct 29 @ UCLA
• TestXSLT 3.0 – great quick XSLT previewer
• Web-log Continuum Sparklines – visualizing posting times

All my new machines are now in. Here’s what I got, from 3 ISPs:

• 3.0TB @ 100Mbps
• 1.2TB @ 100Mbps
• 1.8TB @ 100Mbps
• 1.0TB @ 100Mbps

Another 5-6 machines from volunteers, and then if need be, I can get more machines (possibly a full 100Mbps, and or new machines provisioned almost instantaneously @ EV1)

BTW, while we’re talking about massive bandwidth, Marc Percel has the idea. He’s distributing Fahrenheit 9/11 far and wide. ($2K for an unmetered 100Mbps? Not as cost effective when you do the math I think. 5x20Mbps from Servermatrix for $1K or you could get 15-20 1-2TB boxes for the month)