If you can make unsubstantiated claims

I've seen this bumper sticker a lot lately:

It's a nice sentiment. I like teachers, we should have more of them. They should be better trained and better paid. I also like soldiers, they help maintain our freedoms when not used in wars of aggression. I still like them even when they're not actually protecting our freedoms because they have more courage than I do and it's not their fault we have ocassionally barbarous leadership. I give them full and unwavering credit for a lot of very important things, like my safety, which I value above all else.

But they're not responsible for everything. It wasn't soldiers who invented the cotton gin [Eli Whitney] or the printing press [Guttenburg] or the computer I'm typing on [Michael Dell]. It wasn't, as much as I'd like to say it, soldiers who picked our language, and, once picked, soldiers haven't once had a hand in keeping English the national language. I'm not slighting their job performance, I'd never criticize Billy Jean King for not winning a Super Bowl. I'm sure they'd do a kickass job keeping English the national language, but so far, the opportunity has never come.

Sure, we've been in a few wars. We've even been in wars on our own soil, wars that threatened to take from us our independence. Both major wars [the Revolution and the Civil War] were fought against English speaking nations, so even though they kept us free, the soldiers didn't keep us speaking English. There was the Mexican-American [non-]war, but Mexico never even made it through the territory in dispute[Thus never really invading American soil], and most Texans were bilingual anyway. Prior to Texan independence, Mexico had asked Steven Austin to ensure that Anglos immigrating would learn Spanish, but made no attempt to force them to unlearn English. History: 3, Dumbass Bumper Sticker: 0

Then came the Spanish-American War, started by greed and a bunch of bullshit newspaper stories that openly and falsely slandered the crumbling Spanish empire and forced Teddy--through public opinion--

World War I wasn't even remotely near us, and we were in no danger of losing our sovereignity to either the Germans or the Austro-Hungarians. There no support for the idea that either nation wanted to invade us/change our language. None. History: 4, Dumbass Bumper Sticker: 0

World War II was a slightly closer shave, Japan bombed the hell out of us and Germany sped through Europe. Manchuria, Japan's puppet state in the 30's was forced to adopt Japanese as the official language, so for the first time we have a potential military threat to American English. But in the end, they couldn't even hang on to Eastern China--a land with almost no army that was fighting a civil war--let alone take the fight to America. The closest they got was occupying the Phillippines, which didn't really want to speak English anyway. Germany too was broken on its own ambition. The Reich really had no chance of making it to the US, even if it was successful in Europe. History: 6, Dumbass Bumper Sticker: 0

Though we could say: If you don't live in like Canada, Madagascar or Burkina Faso and you've babel-fished this blog into French, thank a soldier. But people with the sticker probably hate the French, so: History: 6, Dumbass Bumper Sticker: 0, Sticker Buyers: -1

Korea [History: 7] and Vietnam [History: 8] were wars of aggression, as was the latest Gulf War [History: 9]. The first Gulf War had nothing to do with invasion of the US by a foreign entity [History: 10].

The Cold War, which I grant was very much about the overthrow of America and the end of our democracy, nonetheless posed little threat to our loss of English as a language. Let's assume that things went differently, that there actually was a war against the USSR, and that that war went badly for us and that socialist elements in the US, along with entities from abroad, were able to topple our government, as happened in many nations, the Warsaw Pact countries and Cuba among them. In none of the states referred to as satelites of Moscow did Russian become the national language. And even if, in some unbelievable scenario, the Soviets directly invaded and took over America, English would still probably be alive and well. Even in Ukraine, which was part of the Soviet Union [as opposed to being a satelite] and has a language very similar to Russian, not even state persecution of the language could wipe it from Ukrainian lips. History: 11, Dumbass Bumper Sticker: 0, Sticker Buyers: -1

And the war on terrorism doesn't even count because terrorists want to blow us all to hell, in which case we wouldn't be speaking any language.

Final Score:
History: 11
Dumbass Bumper Sticker: 0
Sticker Buyers: -1

So there it is, 11 and 12 point victories respectively, which doesn't even cover the spread for such a moronic sentiment.

I should also say that I'm terrible at History. I've always gotten fantastically bad grades, so it takes a human of phenomenal [a factor of (Luke+n)] ignorance and stupidity to see this as anything but feeble-minded polemics.But by all means, thank a soldier for anything and everything they actually do, which is a hell of a lot.

Read the full thing here.

A crisis of democracy, or something

With the impending inauguration of Democrat Christine Gregoire to the boring and cynical position of Governor of Washington State, after a much more exiting election than that office deserves, Republicans want a re-vote. They want it so bad they've made a website for it. To further show that their blood is boiling, the main page for the state party has been ransacked and festooned with angry reds and emphatic exclamation points.

RE-VOTE!, it says.

But why? For what purpose, and, most importantly, to what end?

Is it a 'crisis of democracy' that an election should be so close? Not really. The problem is not with the closeness itself, but with the electoral problems the small margin of victory has exposed.

All votes were not counted. A critical number of ballots were not counted correctly. A majority of us doubt the outcome.

These startling revelations and they have the support by Washington's next-to-most-recent Republican Governor, a man who left office when I was negative 4 years old.

Yet, with trepidation, I admit that what they say is true. Not merely true, but foundationally so. So true that the critique is not limited to one race in one state. It's true of all elections. There has never been an election in history in which all votes have been counted, and all counted correctly. Such a thing has never happened, and never will.

The election process isn't uniform, the sheer plurality of voting devices is staggering, not to mention that there is a separate counting and reporting protocol for each county, if not each precinct. The whole thing is overflowing with an impossible amount of interference by those moronic but lovable primates, H. Sapiens. As long as people are somehow involved in the counting process--from physically judging ballots to just feeding them into a machine--there are going to be problems that will never allow for a perfectly accurate gauging of public opinion. As long as there are human hands behind the scenes, regardless of how well-meaning, there will be errors and hence, a margin of error. With margins of error come the possibility of differing count totals--ah, but we only count twice when it's close, so we only notice what are systemic inadequacies at times like this. That is, when the margin of victory is under the margin of error.

But even if we made the system perfectly automated, wondrously human-free [which we won't in 50 years, let alone in time for this democracy-righting re-vote], even if we took our grubby little meathooks off the whole thing, there would still be humans on the front end--voting--to screw things up. To once more borrow from LeAnn Rimes: you can't fight the moonlight.

Even this seemingly large shift, from two-hundred-something pro-Rossi to one-hundred-something pro-Gregoire, a shift of three-hundred-something votes, represents just over a hundredth of a percent [.00012 or so] of all votes cast.

Now, with the revote, the Republicans promise, "One simple ballot style; One clear set of counting rules; with Everyone watching very closely. But how do they plan to do that, and why didn't they do it the first time? Also, everyone was already watching very closely the first time, and the second, and the third. What's the fourth going to change? There will still be errors, there will still be omissions, there will still be disgruntled voters and a losing side, the best they can hope for is that one side or the other would manage to re-get-out-the-vote enough to push the margin of victory outside the margin of error.

But if they don't, what's it going to be, another revote? This could easily go off into perpetuity, when it needs to die a nice, inauspicious death now. If Rossi ended that third count ahead, or if the tables were turned, and successive recounts showed him the victor after Gregoire had won the first two counts, I'd still want to see this end. I'd be typing through more tightly gritted teeth, but who won is irrelevant to the argument.

This is not a crisis of democracy, it's an inherent and unfixable systemic shortcoming.

We should focus money not on a revote, but on homogenizing and streamlining the process for next time, all the while realizing that no amount of effort is going to yield a perfect election. Ever.

Another week between updates, but this time I had a [computer] virus, I swear.

Read the full thing here.