Locked and Bolted?

Bolt?
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Superfluous

No use locking the stable door after the horse has bolted it shut.

Kinky Friedman Robbed of Election!

Kinky Friedman

The Man Who Would Be President
If This Were A Fair World . . .

Wikipedia

I've long been a Kinky Friedman supporter, ever since I heard his song "They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore" while I was studying at Baylor University in Waco, Texas back in the 1970s.

Anyway, a little known fact ('cause the powers that be want it little known) is that he was running for president this year, and my contention is that he won the election, but for various nefarious reasons, nobody knows this except me even though I have tried to raise awareness of the issue over at the Marmot's Hole, starting when the election results had not yet been 'definitively' announced:

I'm still waiting for the Kinky Friedman write-in votes to be counted, and that we've heard nothing yet about those is a real scandal -- and probably a conspiracy -- but once Obama is proved an alien from Kenya and Romney an alien from Kolob, Friedman will step forth to accept the honor of being proclaimed POTUS, our first real Jewish cowboy president from Texas who's even written a novel and will therefore govern with novel ideas!

Nobody responded to that comment of mine because everyone else was screaming abuse at Obama and Romney, so I followed it up with a plea for attention:

Why is the Kinky Friedman vote scandal being ignored?

Since any voter with good sense either checked Friedman's good name or wrote it in and since my fellow Americans are all voters with good sense, then Friedman must have won by a landslide!

Kinky was the only candidate who'd truly protect free speech!

Remember his campaign slogan:

"I always say, you can pick your nose, and you can pick your friends, but you can't wipe your friends on your saddle, so you're stuck with 'em."

That says everything!

Still no response, so I tried again, this time by promoting my own political party:

I consider myself a radical left-wing conservative reactionary independent solipsist trying to build a political party, except none others like me seem to exist . . .

Where are all the other solipsists?

That got a response from a commentator who called himself "Anonymous Joe":

#257 jefferyhodges: "Where are all the other solipsists?"

We stopped thinking about you.

Relieved to have an interlocutor, I replied:

Jeffery Hodges (#257): "Where are all the other solipsists?"

Anonymous Joe (#262): "We stopped thinking about you."

That explains why I haven't felt like myself lately. Cogito ergo sum must be flawed -- or maybe I just need to think harder!

Be that as it may, all other solipsists are invited to join my Radical Egalitarian And Left-wing Conservative Reactionary Independent Solipsist Party, officially acronymed as REAL CRISP!

We support Kinky Friedman, the true winner of this year's presidential election!

After this comment, I received no further response, either from Anonymous Joe or any other commentator.

The conspiracy of silence is far-reaching . . .

"Leaked Memo" on Iran's Election Revisited

Iran Behind the Mask?

Artist: Brian Stauffer

(Image from New York Times)

On June 18th, I expressed open skepticism about a memo supposedly written by the Iranian Minister of Interior, Sadegh Mahsouli, and sent to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, providing the actual results on votes cast in the recent presidential election in Iran. My suspicions were based partly on a pre-election poll conducted for Terror Free Tomorrow by Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty, who told us in their Washington Post article, "The Iranian People Speak" (Monday, June 15, 2009), that Ahmadinejad was far ahead, and because of that poll, I conceded that the vast majority of Iranians may actually have voted to return this current, hardline president to power.

However, I asked for clarification from experts and received a response from an Iranian, one of my former political science students at Yonsei's Underwood International College, who openly questioned the official election results (though he did not express a decided opinion on the memo's authenticity). Also, a regular reader offered a link that questioned whether or not the opinion poll by Ballen and Doherty offered accurate predictions. Moreover, a recent opinion piece, "A Different Iranian Revolution," published in the New York Times (June 18, 2009) by a certain "Shane M.," a student in Iran who has adopted this very 'Western' pseudonym, argued that even if the opinion poll were accurate when it was taken, the percentages could well have shifted radically by the time of the recent election:

Let's also forget the polls, carried out in May by Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion, that have been making the rounds this past week, with numbers that showed Mr. Ahmadinejad well ahead in the election, even in Mr. Moussavi's hometown, Tabriz. Maybe last month Mr. Ahmadinejad was indeed on his way to victory. But then came the debates.

Starting on June 1, the country was treated to an experience without precedent in the 30 years of the Islamic Republic of Iran: six back-to-back live and unscripted debates among the four presidential candidates. Iranians everywhere were riveted, and the poll numbers began to move.

By the Wednesday before the election, Mr. Moussavi was backed by about 44 percent of respondents, while Mr. Ahmadinejad was favored by around 38 percent. So let's not cloud the results with numbers that were, like bagels, stale a week later. (And let's ignore the claim that polling by Iranians in Iran is "notoriously untrustworthy." A consortium of pollsters and social scientists working for a diverse range of political and social organizations systematically measured public opinion for months before the election.)

Such a major shift has happened before. A month before the 1997 elections, the establishment candidate, Ali Akbar Nategh-Nouri, was trouncing his opponents in surveys. Then, a week before the vote, the tide changed, bringing to power a reformer, Mohammad Khatami.

The reason for this fluidity in voter preference is simple. Iran has no real political parties that can command a fixed number of predictable votes. With elections driven primarily by personality politics, Iranians are always swing voters. So Mr. Moussavi, hampered by a lack of access to state-run news media and allowed only two months to campaign, began to make inroads into Mr. Ahmadinejad's lead only during the final days leading into the election, his poll numbers rising with his visits to provincial cities and the debate appearances.

These details -- offered by one who sounds as though he knows what he's writing about -- put the memo in a very different light. It may indeed be fake (as the usually politically astute JK insists), but it might also nevertheless offer analytical results calculated by some Iranian willing to put forward projections at to the 'real' details and deciding to publicize them in a way guaranteed to get attention.

Or the memo may really be authentic.

I await more comments -- on the memo, the election, and the direction that events are taking us -- but I note in passing that if voter preference is so fluid and personality-based as "Shane" maintains, then perhaps nobody, not even the Iranians, can tell us where they are going (though this direction would be welcome).

McCain: "a lifelong gambler"?

John McCain

Life's a crapshoot?

(Image from Stephen Crowley, The New York Times)

Yesterday, I characterized John McCain as a gambler, giving as evidence the three Hail Mary passes of his that Charles Krauthammer identified in a recent Washington Post column. But I had other reasons for calling him that, for I had read an article by Jo Becker and Don Van Natta Jr., "McCain wagers on gaming industry," pubished in the International Herald Tribune on September 28, 2008, nearly one week ago, so the issue was already on my mind:

Senator John McCain was on a roll. In a room reserved for high-stakes gamblers at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, he tossed $100 chips around a hot craps table. When the marathon session ended around 2:30 a.m., the Arizona senator and his entourage emerged with thousands of dollars in winnings.

Is this a problem? It used to be one for the evangelicals that the Republican Party has depended upon, but Sarah Palin has shored up that base for him, at least among older evangelicals. His gambling interests had hurt him back in 2000:

A lifelong gambler, McCain takes risks, both on and off the craps table. He was throwing dice that night not long after his failed 2000 presidential bid, in which he was skewered by the Republican Party's evangelical base, opponents of gambling.

But the evangelicals now seem to have accepted this aspect of McCain's character, so it doesn't appear to be an issue that will hurt him with those voters this time. Does his love for gambling pose unacceptable risks for his decision-making? Not so long as he's winning like he was at the Foxwoods Resort Casino that night:

McCain was betting at a casino he oversaw as a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, and he was doing so with the lobbyist who represents that casino, according to three associates of McCain.

The visit had been arranged by the lobbyist, Scott Reed, who works for the Mashantucket Pequot, a tribe that has contributed heavily to McCain's campaigns and built Foxwoods into the world's second-largest casino.

Joining them was Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager. Their night of good fortune epitomized not just McCain's affection for gambling, but also the close relationship he has built with the gambling industry and its lobbyists during his 25-year career in Congress.

I can't help but wonder, given the lobbying connections, if losing at the tables were even a possibility that night, but I make no accusations. McCain was winning, and so long as a man is winning, we don't ask too many questions.

Personally, I dislike gambling, and I tend to agree with George Will and William Safire, among others, that gambling teaches people the wrong lesson on how to go about obtaining wealth, but let that argument be. The bigger issue right now, since McCain is a gambler, is this: Can John McCain walk away from the table at the right moment? Winning or losing, a gambler needs to know when to stop. Does McCain know? We've seen that Krauthammer would probably think not.

A lot of people don't know when the moment to stop has come, as we've perhaps seen in the excessive risks that a lot of distinguished executives in the financial sector have taken over the past several years. The resulting financial crisis has made them look like inveterate gamblers.

Whether or not McCain knows when walk away, even to be known as a risk-taker during this time of financial uncertainty might work to his disadvantage on November 4, when people are likely to pull the lever for the candidate who seems less likely to gamble with their future.

But we'll just have to wait and see what happens about one month from now.

John McCain: character or 'a character'?

John McCain

Republican Nominee

(Image from Wikipedia)

I can't say that I know a lot about candidate John McCain, but I suppose that now is the time to begin paying attention, so I've read a couple of articles on the man to try to get a sense of his character.

The first article, from U.S. News and World Report, presents McCain's first-person report on his five-and-one-half years in captivity as a POW in North Vietnam: "John McCain, Prisoner of War: A First-Person Account" (May 14, 1973; posted online January 28, 2008).

In this account, McCain describes what happened to him from the moment that he ejected his Skyhawk dive bomber on October 26, 1967 until the moment that he boarded a U.S. Air Force plane on March 15, 1973, and a little bit more, so it's a long online article of 17 pages.

McCain doesn't boast about his experience, but his story is impressive, given that he survived beatings, torture, war injuries, poor nutrition, and bad health care for five and one-half years of imprisonment.

At the time of this article's publication, he had only been back to the US for two months, and he expressed gratitude for the support that his wife had given him through her faithful wait:

I'm proud of the part . . . my wife, Carol, played here at home. The temptation for the wives, as the years went by, was to say, "God, I want them home under any circumstances." When Carol was pressed to take this line, her answer was, "Just to get him home is not enough for me, and it's not enough for John -- I want him to come home standing up."

I received very few letters from Carol. I got three in the first four months after I was shot down. The [North Vietnamese] . . . let me have only one during the last four years I was there. I received my first package in May of 1969. After that, they let me have approximately one a year.

The reason I got so little mail was that Carol insisted on using the channels provided by the Geneva Convention for treatment of prisoners of war. She refused to send things through the Committee for Liaison with Families run by the antiwar groups.

And he tells us of what he learned about life:

I had a lot of time to think over there, and came to the conclusion that one of the most important things in life -- along with a man's family -- is to make some contribution to his country.

Pretty impressive, it seems to me.

I was thus rather disappointed in the McCain that I read of in the other article, published by Sharon Churcher in Britain's Daily Mail: "The wife U.S. Republican John McCain callously left behind" (June 8, 2008). Despite being a conservative paper, which might be expected to portray the Republican nominee more positively, the depiction of McCain as a family man is not very impressive. His then-wife, Carol, had suffered a horrendous accident at Christmastime of 1969 that had left her nearly crippled and a full 5 inches shorter that when he had married her:

When McCain -- his hair turned prematurely white and his body reduced to little more than a skeleton -- was released in March 1973, he told reporters he was overjoyed to see Carol again.

But friends say privately he was 'appalled' by the change in her appearance. At first, though, he was kind, assuring her: 'I don't look so good myself. It's fine.'

Reportedly, however, McCain soon grew unfaithful to his wife, met Cindy Lou Hensley in 1979, pressed for a divorce with Carol, and quickly married Cindy. This didn't set very well with some observers:

Ted Sampley, who fought with US Special Forces in Vietnam and is now a leading campaigner for veterans' rights, said: 'I have been following John McCain's career for nearly 20 years. I know him personally. There is something wrong with this guy and let me tell you what it is -- deceit.

'When he came home and saw that Carol was not the beauty he left behind, he started running around on her almost right away. Everybody around him knew it.

'Eventually he met Cindy and she was young and beautiful and very wealthy. At that point McCain just dumped Carol for something he thought was better.

'This is a guy who makes such a big deal about his character. He has no character. He is a fake. If there was any character in that first marriage, it all belonged to Carol.'

I can't entirely agree with Mr. Sampley, for I think that any man who could survive five and one-half years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam under the conditions that McCain endured surely has character . . . as a soldier. He simply lacked the character required of a husband. He was thus more right than he knew when he said, "I don't look so good myself."

I won't say that McCain is unfit for the presidency. Nobody's perfect, and many men have been unfaithful to their wives yet have managed to serve their country with distinction -- even as president -- and some men have managed to grow better in their maturity, having learned from reflecting on the things that they've done. Perhaps McCain has. I don't know, for my view is partial.

Yet, I do have a fuller picture of the man who McCain is, an impressive but flawed man, and I'll have to pay close attention, as election day draws near, to this increasingly fascinating campaign.

President-Elect Lee Myung-bak: Policy Suggestions from Gypsy Scholar

President-Elect Lee Myung-Bak

"Squinting to the future..."

(Image from JoongAng Ilbo)

In a record voter turnout, Lee Myung-bak has won the presidential election by a landslide -- almost most of all those Korean voters who voted actually cast their votes for him!

Okay, so we've factored down the concept of landslide to mean 50 percent of the vote, or thereabouts, and the record is a record low, but still, the guy won, and that's pretty darn good for a slippery politician who's been caught on video lying about his involvement in the obscure BBK scandal.

Hey, don't think that I'm dissing President-Elect Lee. I happen to kinda like the guy . . . even if he does always squint at me from those supposedly flattering campaign posters.

Anyway, since readers depend on my blog for political insight regarding peninsular matters, then I'm sure that everyone will be interested in my opinion as to what the future holds for Korea's President-Elect Lee.

Doubtless, there are two questions on everyone's mind:

Question 1: Will President Lee Myung-bak be the first Korean president to serve his time serving time?

Answer 1: No. As president, Lee can pardon himself.

Question 2: Will President Lee Myung-bak make a concerted, public effort to alert the whole world to the dangers of electrical fans, namely, the very real risk of fan death?

Answer 2: Definitely yes maybe. This is a very delicate issue upon which every Korean politican has had to tread very lightly. Now, each Korean knows -- and knows to the core of his or her Dokdo soul -- that fan death is real. Absolutely real. No doubts. And I agree with Koreans on this issue, as regular readers will recall. Many a time, I have promoted the truth of fan death on this blog, hoping to alert foreign readers mired in ignorance of the risk that they face on those hot, sultry summer nights in bed when they have to strip down to . . .

But let's not get so specific about that detail.

My point is that fans left running at night can kill you in your sleep, a truth that I've defended ad nauseum on this blog:

Fan Death is Real!

Fan Death Redux

Another fan-death disbeliever!

Doc Rock's diagnosis: "You've been smokin' way too many fans"

Nevertheless, fan death is real!

Okay, five posts in three years of blogging might not constitute an ad nauseum defense, but take a look at the comments, where much of my fan-death defense has been carried on. There, I've faced constant ridicule from non-Koreans who are aggressively ignorant about the scientific truth of fan death and who stoop to the lowest of personal attacks to ridicule me for my views.

I've been called crazy, stupid, drug-addled, ignorant, and even had my scientific knowledge questioned -- yes, questioned, despite my master's degree . . . in history of SCIENCE. Most recently, a commenter calling himself 'Christian' quoted one of my facts and denied it:

"[Hodges stated:] It's a little-known fact that the whirling blades [of a fan] cause disturbance in the ether that pervades the universe, and the ripple effect impairs organisms up to 500 feet distant."

[Christian blathered:] Yeah, that's true, it is so little known that I didnt knew about that. Oh,and btw, aether does not exist, and there was a famous experiment about that in the 19th century (and many other later): Michelson-Morley Experiment.

In my reply to this screed, I ignored Christian's difficulty with orthography and courteously focused upon his appalling scientific ignorance:

Christian, thanks for visiting and posting.

As for the Michelson-Morley experiment, it was obviously flawed. How else explain that those two so-called 'scientists' missed the obvious existence of the ether, the very fifth element known to natural philosophers since antiquity?

Yes, there are only five elements. Forget all that stuff you learned in chemistry. It's utterly wrong.

Only fan death is real.

How can anyone rationally argue with my view? Obviously, I know far more about the ether than 'Christian', who thinks that the ether doesn't even exist! I mean, how ignorant can one get?! Ether has existed since the days of the ancient Greeks!

So, you see what I'm up against in my struggle to publicize the very real risk of fan death. Those people whom I'm trying to save from mortal danger are the very ones who ridicule me.

So . . . I wouldn't blame President-Elect Lee Myung-bak if he opted to ignore the issue of fan death, for he has to deal with foreign policy and can't afford to jeopardize his credibility on international affairs by announcing to a hyperskeptical, disbelieving world that his administration has a position on fan death.

But this Lee administration definitely must take a position, even if an unannounced one, for no device so dangerous as an electrical fan can be ignored, especially since at least one other country does accept the scientific evidence for its deadly effects and is rumored to be pursuing a secretive fan-death program.

I refer, of course, to North Korea.

The danger is clear. A line of towering, gigantic electrical fans can be erected by the Communist North along the DMZ, and the threat of their being turned on at night when all of the South should be sleeping soundly after a hardworking, capitalist day will cause many an anxious, sleepless night and thereby significantly impair the South's economic performance.

To paraphrase the inspiring Churchill's famous words on spine-stiffened resistance to an oppressive regime's infamous, threatening rule:

That is something up with which we shall not put!

Let us echo those Churchillian words! The South must act now to protect itself, for under the progressives' Sunshine Policy of the past eight years, the North has already been left free to forge ahead with a fan-death program, and the South is in danger of falling behind. I therefore appeal to President-Elect Lee Myung-bak to act quickly:

"Mr. President, we cannot allow a fan-death gap!"