meta-roj

today is the day. don’t let this election last a month.

i’m going to leave you with some homework… courtsey the people trying to make a difference at the united nations: ten stories the world should hear more about.

#1 – Uganda: Child soldiers at centre of mounting humanitarian crisis

#2 – Central African Republic: a silent crisis crying out for help

#3 – AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa: a looming threat to future generations

#4 – The peacekeeping paradox: as peace spreads, surge in demand strains UN resources

#5 – Tajikistan: rising from the ashes of civil war

#6 – Women as peacemakers: from victims to re-builders of society

#7 – Persons with disabilities: a treaty seeks to break new ground in ensuring equality

#8 – Bakassi Peninsula: Recourse to the law to prevent conflict

#9 – Overfishing: a threat to marine biodiversity

#10 – Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation

maybe there will be a quiz….

i never expected to drop a bash link here, but… this just fits.

i’ve been reminded that i should mention the other political messages i’ve generated here as we approach debating season (finally) for the 2004 presidential elections… so, for your review, and without further ado…

no irony left behind

the 2004 florida bingo ballot (with familiar user interface design!)

i wasn’t using my civil rights anyway

wise confuse-us say erection that last whole month keep hurting for years (lessons learned from the 2000 presidential election process)

there you have it. save some for democracy.

i like some of the things the republican party once worked toward. no longer.

the words remain [largely] the same, but the deeds show us a different picture entirely. for the modern american republican party, i apologize to the great republicans of the past. and for eloquence beyond my own, i turn to garrison keillor, with whom i take this stand.

Here’s what happened to the Republican Party [seattle pi, september 12, 2004]

This is a great country, and it wasn’t made so by angry people. We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we’re not getting any younger.

First They Caged the Terrorists

First they caged the Terrorists
and I did speak out
because I was an American.
Then they caged the Iraqis
and I did speak out
because I was an American.
Then they caged the Protesters
and I did speak out
because I was an American.
When they cage me
i hope there is an American left
to speak out for me.

Nous sommes tous Américains

hail the greene dragon, a merry band of patriots.

with shipping time, you’ll need to order your i wasn’t using my civil rights anyway t-shirts (and other stuff) soon to get it in time to be detained in new york during the republican convention.

this, of course, is shameless self-promotion, but it’s important to keep ashcroft in mind while the party faithful are cheering and bush isn’t seeing any opposition.

by now, we’ve all seen the “red vs. blue” state maps, with electoral-vote.com providing what appears to be the most up-to-date state-by-state polling data. so, i thought it’d be interesting to look at the electoral distribution of sales of the “i wasn’t using my civil rights anyway” merchandise, in my personal effort to draw some attention to attorney general ashcroft and his righteous band of lawyers…

so, i thought i’d cook up another bogus election-year map based on my own figures for the popularity of “i wasn’t using my civil rights anyway” merchandise…

this is based on percentage-of-total-sales data (since that was convenient), so ideally, i’d like to see a a population-density distribution, or maybe even a nice, pale green covering all 50 states (that is, about 2% for each). but, we have some surprises here…. georgia with 15 (very red – 52-41% bush on the last poll) electoral votes is sucking up more than 10% of sales. texas with 34 has no interest in this message at all. i’ll forgive wyoming and rhode island and delaware. interestingly, about 2% of sales are “overseas”¹ – canada and the united kingdom.

it might be fun to speculate about this stuff… could it be that there’s an irony deficit in the middle of the country? the south gets it. the west gets it. the northwest gets it. even the industrial midwest gets it, but somehow, with the exception of the hip skiing bunch in colorado and who-knows-what’s-going-on in nebraska, they just don’t get it. or maybe they get it and they don’t like it.

this could be dramatically improved, of course, but i wanted to play around a bit. hope you had fun.

¹ in the president bush sense of the word – “Over 50 percent of our energy comes from overseas. Fortunately, a lot of it comes from Canada.” (ontario, california, 2002.01.05)

update (2004.08.16): asheesh had some useful comments, but apparently had trouble making them stick. basically, he’d like to see this map re-cooked on a sales-per-population basis. i think that is definitely the better approach (see “dramatically improved” above), but it meant looking up state populations and doing math, so i didn’t go that far :)… maybe next time

i was going to write a long and detailed report on the activities in the senate this past week or so, in which we discover the debate on an amendment banning same-sex marriages took 3 days, and the judiciary committee passed 11-7 an amendment banning physical desecration of the american flag.

i was going to direct you to the congressional record, on july 9, 2004, july 12, 2004 and july 13, 2004 where you would find that the “federal marriage amendment” was the main order of business in the senate for three days, while other issues of interest to our democracy, such as the discussion of energy policy, the no-bid halliburton contract, the valerie plame leak investigation, intelligence committee reports, the darfur humanitarian crisis, and such were worked into the schedule.

i was going to remind you that congress is getting ready to go on vacation – the “august recess” from july 26 to september 6. so as they’re wrapping up the legislative session, it’s nice to know that they are dealing with the important issues of policy and integrity in the american government.

and i was going to remind you that the president has repeatedly assured us that “the american people are safer,” so i guess that helps explain why the senate, which is supposed to act as a check on the executive branch, would take president bush’s word for it and move on to less pressing matters, such as making america safe for heterosexual marriages.

i was going to say something about how the senate, having achieved nothing with regard to legislating the terms upon which americans are permitted to establish relationships, that the portion of the senate known as the judiciary committee would move on today to recommend a anti-flag-burning amendment for consideration by the senate as a whole.

then i was going to say something about how i am comforted, as an american, knowing that my elected legislators are busying themselves with measures to restrict the rights of the american people in the fields of sex and protest, so that we may continue the recent tradition of american hypocracy as we insist that the rest of the world adopt the policies we profess rather than the policies we practice.

i was going to make this an elaborate and empassioned plea for change, but nobody is listening.

is anyone listening?

if you are a woman
if you are a person of color
if you are gay
lesbian
bisexual
transgender
if you are a person of size
if you are a person of intelligence
if you are a person of integrity
then you are considered a minority in this world

– margaret cho