The Null Device

2004/12/25

A handful of "liberals" in America have been claiming since November that the Presidential election was stolen. Now, the big news is that Presidential candidate John Kerry may be among them; Kerry is allegedly planning to retract his concession and launch a legal challenge against the election results on the ground that the election was fraudulent. As opposed to the Democrats having lost for having run the most inoffensively uncharismatic candidate, and/or because 51% of Americans really believe in their heart of hearts that gays have it too easy.

For all I know, this could be wishful thinking. Then again, if it does happen, I wonder how far it'll get, especially given that most of the Democrat-voters seem to have acknowledged that Bush won it fair and square. Perhaps we'll see a replay of the recent events in the Ukraine, with liberals, secularists, progressives, gays, lesbians, atheists, humanists, polyamorous pagans, Burning Man attendees and the kinds of Americans who own passports and read books other than the Bible and Ann Coulter camping out in the streets of Washington DC under blue banners, soon to be joined by red-banner-waving counter-demonstrations of Pentecostals, ultra-patriots and Nascar fans.

Then again, it may not get to that; given the state of free speech in the Bush Era, the blue rally are likely to be herded into "free-speech zones" miles away from anywhere, ignored by CNN/FoxNews and their efforts unknown to anybody but a handful of liberal bloggers, with those who resist facing the full brunt of "Miami-model" anti-protest ultraviolence.

election john kerry politics usa 0

The Independent has a piece about the cost of Christmas:

£20m: Amount made by Mark Tilden, British robot expert who invented Robosapien, this year's hit toy
£20m: Amount nations of sub-Saharan Africa are paying in debt to developed world every 16 hours
30,525: Number of miles your Christmas dinner will have travelled to reach your table - vegetables alone are likely to have come 15,800 miles
4.2%: Rise in murder rate over Christmas

(via 1.0)

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The bizarre story, with album covers and low-bitrate MP3s, of Yu-Mex, one of the most unlikely musical genres in the history of thrift-shop records. Yu-Mex is what happened when Tito's Yugoslavia broke off relations with the USSR, turned against Russian culture and looked for other ideologically-sound exotic influences, finding them, of all places, in Mexico. And so, sombrero-clad, mustachioed hombres from Slovenia to Serbia put out record after record on the state-run record label Jugoton, with songs with titles like "I Am A True Mexican". (via bOING bOING)

communism exotica kitsch mexico music retro yu-mex yugoslavia 0