let's play "who's the traitor?"
it's an enchanting parlour game in which partisans on separate teams use character assassination to attempt the personal destruction of members of the opposing team. here's the basic move:   if your team can bait an opponent to react angrily rather than civilly, then you get to label your opponent a traitor (and for good measure, a fool and a poor sport). the real fun begins once each side accuses the other of being a traitor. at that point civil discourse breaks down and increased distrust between partisan sides accomplishes the functional equivalent of a successful terrorist attack. who needs terrorists when we can accomplish just as much social chaos with outrageously self-indulgent personal attacks masqueading as debate?

questioning the patriotism of americans is this decade's equivalent of red baiting from the mccarthy era. with bush's narrow victory at the hands of an ill-informed electorate, look for the divisiveness and mean spirited attacks to get worse. and who profits from rude american discord? can you do the math on this one in your head?
posted by Will Ross at 06:37

fringe opinions get a free ride
the columbia journalism review features blinded by science, written by chris mooney.

A climate scientist faced with a reporter locked into the "get both sides" mindset risks getting his or her views stuffed into one of two boxed storylines: "we're worried" or "it will all be okay." And sometimes, these two "boxes" are misrepresentative; a mainstream, well-established consensus may be "balanced" against the opposing views of a few extremists, and to the uninformed, each position seems equally credible.

as if it was needed, this is more evidence that our poorly informed culture continues to ignore critical thinking skills. the funny part about all of this recurring foolishness in the faux delivery of "fair and balanced" consumables for the public discourse is that careful readers with critical thinking skills can correctly parse the doublespeak that passes for mass marketed amercan journalism without batting an eye. the old grey lady can win pulitzers for pushing lies and bury the retraction months later, but careful readers with correctly functioning mental sieves do not miss these nuggets. sadly, critical thinkers are obviously in the voting minority or else we would not be so busy inflicting pax bush-americana on the rest of the planet.
posted by Will Ross at 19:07

princeton's purple voting map
red + blue = purple. here's a 2004 election map where the winner does not take all, courtesy of princeton math professor robert vanderbei.
posted by Will Ross at 04:53

herbicide resistant coca?
a suggestive but inconclusive article by joshua davis in wired magazine describes boliviana negra, a new strain of coca plant selected by local farmers to resist american anti-drug aerial herbicide spraying.

Three hours after leaving the coca fields, I attend a meeting of two dozen heads of local farmer cooperatives - they represent more than 5,000 farmers in Putumayo - and they nod knowingly when asked about the new breed. "Nobody listens to us because they think we are dumb farmers," says one man. "The Americans are arrogant. They don't talk to the people who live here. We are the ones who are sprayed. We are the ones who live with the plants."

does the u.s. government's misguided coca eradication policy now provide free weed control for columbian coca fields?
posted by Will Ross at 20:04

hope deferred
kerry came close, but not close enough. this result just goes to show how much more work there is to do, though the heavy lifting will really fall on the shoulders of my children's generation. for what it's worth, this is my first apology to the next generation for the mess we are leaving them. my generation behaves like a bad guest. my country is drunk on some very strange brew. as i have done in nine previous presidential elections, when the ballots were counted i woke up wednesday morning to find the ballot i cast on the losing side of the race for the white house. this is the story of my life long dissent from the tyranny of the majority. i remain unapologetic for my belief in the possibility of an america that really does deliver on the dream of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all its citizens, not just for a privileged few.
posted by Will Ross at 10:58

hope is on the way
today is the 55th presidential election day in america. peggy and i voted early this morning. we were both on the phone last night with our kids going over the ballot propositions in detail. we agreed on 13 of the 16 propositions, and we agreed to disagree on the remaining three. on the national election we're clearly both kerry partisans. i have a kerry bumper sticker on my truck. kerry is not my first choice, but bush has been a complete disaster for this country and for the world. this is the day we've been waiting for: 11/2/04: the end of an error.

our rural polling place is the dining room at the anderson valley grange. until the march 2004 primary election we used punchcard ballots. in march mendocino county switched to optically scanned paper ballots, an excellent interim voting technology choice which provides a verifiable, manually recountable paper trail, and a big improvement over the discredited punch cards. the optical ballot is a paper card with ovals beside each office or proposition. filling in the oval with a black felt tip pen indicates the vote. after filling it out, the voter inserts the ballot into the optical scanner, perched like a small office machine beside the table where the poll workers sit. like similar devices, the scanner grabs the ballot and briskly sucks it inside. it is a fairly routine and understandable mechanical device.

today the grange was more crowded with voters than usual. while my ballot was being issued, a man was being taught how to insert his completed ballot into the optical scanner. "hmmmm," i thought as i walked to a polling booth, "he must not have voted in the primary." or he could have voted absentee (giving him the benefit of the doubt). i marked my ballot and walked towards the scanner. another man was being taught how to insert his ballot into the scanner. when it grabbed the ballot from him he jumped and blurted out, "whoa!" i didn't need any instruction to insert the ballot, because i had used the same system in the march election. what's interesting to me in this very small sample from my polling place is the presence of people voting in this election who did not vote in the last election. or at least did not vote in person.

i'm looking forward to the results tonight. my hope is that the obsessively publicised national polls showing a close race in an evenly divided country will be far wrong, that senator kerry will post a convincing and clean win in spite of the many republican dirty tricks, and that tomorrow the hand wringing can begin over the wretchedly wrong tracking polls used by the media to sell their dead heat horse race circus stories. dead heat? dead wrong. or so i hope.
posted by Will Ross at 09:31