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I am going to try to make a list of the best stuff I encounter on the internet,  from as many different sources as I can.  I am on many lists, receive many "alerts" and have friends who recommend sites and articles.  (Love those friends!)

I try to always go back to the original source of the article and use that URL.  You are welcome to use any of these article links you wish.  Please do not send around the entire list or anything which appears not to have been a part of the article without crediting me.  I would appreciate it!    This project is really a lot more work than I thought it would be !                 Virginia Metze, vmetze@metze.net

Today's list is below;  to get to older lists, click here

Friday's Reading  List to read with your coffee at your computer :-)

Thoughts Now and Then
(until I get used to doing it every day!)

Today's wisecrack

Just got a great campaign picture from the Dean campaign.  (Yes, I am fervently for Dean.)  It shows him and his wife and Martin Sheen with hands clasped and upraised. 

So, what I want to know is, when do I get to shake the hand of the man who shook the hand of Martin Sheen, our very best President?

Thank a programmer!

When you turn over that last Solitaire card, and it is correct, thank a programmer!

Click here for Other thoughts on other days

Bullies must be confronted!

The failure of Democrats at all levels to recognize that Republicans go beyond being "macho" to being bullies means that we are not going to make an effective response.

Much has been said about Republicans coming across as Father figures, and Democrats coming across as Mother figures.  That is correct only when the Republicans are on their best behavior.

When they are at their worst, as they currently are, they go way beyond being a Father figure to being macho bullies.

Unfortunately common wisdom seems to be that one should not fight bullies and should just stay out of their way.

That of course, makes bullying a winning strategy, whether done in Florida to ensure that votes don't get counted, or done by accusing opponents of treason, or calling in the police on Democrats daring to demand their rights in a committee meeting.

One must NOT let bullies go unchallenged.  The Democrat party must stop thinking that the Republicans will wake up some morning and see that the Democrats have reasonable requests which they will suddenly honor.

It isn't going to happen.

Bullies must be confronted.  The national Democratic party seems to be more inclined to do so.  I hope that they will not fade into the "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" monkey faces.

It is NOT just the man, it is the party!

How did  so many people come to believe it is  possible or even sensible to vote for the "best man for the job" regardless of their party?

The decline in party loyalty is not the good thing that independents make it out to be.

To start at the beginning:  a political party lives and dies by its grassroots, and by the identification it has in the mind of the voters.

Anything that weakens the overall political structure is not beneficial to our democratic process.

It is not possible for someone to be able to govern effectively simply because he is "the best man for the job."  On the tough issues, his party had better be behind him, or nothing will be accomplished.  And if his party is behind him, his party deserves some credit for the achievements as well.

Also, it has helped "politician" undeservedly become a dirty word.  Politics is to the country as diplomacy is to our relations with the world.  It is an honorable service, and we must help build trust in "politicians" again.

Some of the small things that are weakening the party structure in big ways:

1.  The absence of party affiliation on campaign signs.  This gives undue advantage to the incumbent, whose name would be recognized, and would tend to deter needed changes in representation.

It seems very strange to me that candidates have to identify who pays for ads, but do not need to identify what party they belong to until people see the ballot.

2.  The absence of the straight vote on ballots.  In Illinois it used to be possible to cast a vote for the party.  That "X" meant that where you did not have any candidate marked for an office, the candidate from the party was selected.

Why was this beneficial to grassroots government?  Because most people, quite frankly, do NOT know very much about any of the candidates on the ballot.  The candidates at the top get votes, as they will tend to have an opinion about governor or president, and possibly representative.  But when they fail to cast votes down the entire length of the ballot, they are simply putting control into the hands of the most organized party in the area, not necessarily the party of the person they are supporting for president or governor.

3.  Important positions up on "off years."  At first glance this seems like a good thing.  The idea is that the state officials do not get "carried into office" on a sweep by one party or the other.  In practice it is not a good thing, as, absent some really really major scandal, voters do not go to the polls in very great numbers in "off year" elections.  So again, the most organized party gets out the vote and wins the sweepstakes, as only the diehards will go to the polls.  This simply means that the best party and the best man lose out because of lack of interest on the part of that controlling "independent" vote.

Campaign Finance Reform

All of the effort that is wasted trying to achieve campaign finance reform by passing more and more laws governing how much money can be given by whom could be more usefully used to achieve what is really needed:  equal access to all kinds of media.  It is no accident that money has become more and more important since the death of "equal time."

Efforts should be directed to making money less relevant by emphasizing campaign reforms that can be easily tracked.

I am not suggesting that there be no rules about how money can be spent.  However, to think that we can ever really control how people with money spend it is to ignore the ease with which money can be transferred about.  Somehow, those with money will find a way to spend it for the candidates they like.

One way that we can make money less relevant is through returning the equal time laws, requiring media to give equal access to all political parties.

Another way is to force campaign finance funding to be revealed continuously as the campaign proceeds.  Instead of waiting until after the election to get those records up to date, this kind of information should be made public weekly or monthly.  A web site would be good. 

Gifts of large amounts, revealed early, would cause companies to be less generous, I believe.  Would MBNA be the largest donor to the Republican party if, in the months prior to the campaign, every one who was incensed about their errors or charges complained that they were all the more upset because the horrendous charges were evidently generating enough income that they could be donating so much money.

If one took this approach, one would also have to do something about waiting until after the election to get funds to pay off large accumulations of bills so as to avoid reporting.  This would have to be counted as seriously as election fraud.

And what about making corporations giving large amounts to political parties have to reveal this in regular size type on statements and advertisements?

Enforceable limits should be enforced!  That sounds silly, but the fact is, if they started really enforcing the laws we currently have, I wonder if we would need any new ones...

23 July 2003

When people or political parties engage in bullying tactics, the choice is fight or flight.  If you are a political party, you are doing everyone a disservice if you take the "flight" line of non-resistance.  Bullying works because people shy away from conflict and scurry away, letting the bully have his way.  Democrats must recognize the bullying nature of Republican behavior and must not let them get by with it!

22 July 2003

Ann Coulter, the only apparent female deserving of the title FemNazi, is planning a new book to honor Hitler!  Click here for a description.  To assure us she is a woman, she has a lot of pictures of herself on her web site...

Ever wonder what Illinois and the country would look like if the Republicans believed in BIG government and the government getting INTO our lives?

8 May 2003

Depending on the audience that could be a very good approach...[in response to a post in a thread about answering a very poorly worded posting]

If I belittle something, I also do it with the audience in mind. Will it encourage /empower them to believe their instincts that the stuff is crap?

It works especially well against bullies, who intimidate people and keep them from understanding and responding.

But this guy seemed to have the kind of mind that goes from the simple to the complex rather than the complex to the simple...

How to respond to such people, who are ALMOST thinking something, is frustrating.

I like to get people to drop the big words ... it is amazing how often they don't know what the heck they are talking about but are just throwing random phrases around.

I think the first time I really understood the difference between concepts and the expression of concepts was when I taught third and fourth grade (in one classroom).

I always had the feeling that they could have learned anything had I been able to teach them. But I had to be able to truly understand the fundamentals in order to put them into words that they could grasp. And I discovered that one does not understand the fundamentals nearly as well as one thinks one does.

Another thing that was illuminating was  interviewing students to work for me at the computer center I ran before I retired.

I used to think that it was sufficient to ask someone whether they had had the real time programming course. Then I learned that one had to then ask them about some of the concepts.

Then I figured out they didn't have the remotest understanding of what real time was all about...

30 Apr 2003

We should all be fighting voting machines with everything we have.

The companies are owned by Republicans, but it would be just as bad if they were owned by Democrats; no one should be controlling our votes.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO VERIFY THAT THEY ARE BEHAVING CORRECTLY. Source code is proprietary, and the difficulty of figuring out whether they are working from source code is not easy anyway.

It is the case that virtually no program of any size is free of bugs.

Well, you can't afford bugs in voting machines.

This helped steal elections around the entire country last time. You all read the horror stories, I suspect -- in some places, many races had the exact same winning totals, for example. Now that is VERY UNLIKELY.

And it could be caused by a very simple programming error.

There are many program errors that are not that easy to analyze, and hard to figure out by looking at the code, and hard to devise extensive enough tests.

For example, what if a loop is simply executed one too many times under certain conditions?

What if the comments in the code (if one could see it) did not match what the code actually does?

What if the code does not match what is actually loaded into the computer?

What if microcode is changed by the code?

There are so many things that can go wrong -- please believe me, as a person who has been a computer professional for 41 years -- there is no way to trust voting machines and the programs that run them, or the people that write the programs, either in their competence, or their desire to do wrong.

My favorite web sites

My favorite quotes from "sig files"

Some more of my web pages

Some of my favorite yahoo newsgroups

Democrats-only
Bush_lied_people_died
Progressive
USDemocrat newsgroups
Democrats.com newsgroups
LiberalsLikeChrist
and 60 others!
 

Other groups:
DorothyL@listserv.kent.edu (mystery list)
WISEnet@listserv.uic.edu (women in science and engineering)
 

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