The US Election, Australian politics etc.

There has been a number of interesting correlations between state-by-state voting in the US elections. cptjohnc notes the votes on a
county-by-county basis. From rumplstimskin I've picked up a correlation between IQ and the states and the
states and university degrees, although some have questioned the IQ range (all within one standard deviation). I'm currently working on a distribution based on votes and high school graduation - at least the figures seem more precise for that one.

But in general, it is fair to say that one of Kerry's main points - that America is divided - is actually an
advantage to the Republicans. The Republican states are poor, ill-educated, Christian conservative, and rural. Whilst I wish to avoid the denigrating tone of John Stuart Mill, his comment on conservatives ("Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives") does seem to be an apt electoral strategy. As democracy can only survive through informed decisions, it seems that the ancient Greek idea that despotism follows a failed democracy may indeed be apt.

Meanwhile in Australia, the fundamentalist Catholic Tony Abbot had put fuel to the fire on the abortion "debate", and John Anderson says it's out of control. Of course, these self-righteous wealthy individuals would never consider getting an abortion themselves if they found themselves pregnant and without the means to support a child. Of course not. In my opinion, these are the immoral people. These are the people who think that they have the right to determine what you do with your body.

Mark Latham, having already promoted fellow incompetent losers (Wayne Swan and Stephen Smith) is now taking an "axe to dud poll promises", including the troops home by Xmas pledge. Asylum-seeker supporters will get no joy from the recent appointment of Laurie Ferguson, and his unbelievable ignorant and divisive comments. In other words, the conservatives in the ALP, having delivered us a Howard government, want to dump the few good reasons that people voted for Labor in the first place.

On a related note, Labor for Refugees had it's first post-election meeting on Saturday. As expected there was a great deal of anger of how the Victorian branch distributed Senate preferences and how the party failed by pandering to the "aspirational voter". Sadly the meeting witnessed the departure of Kevin Peoples, the hard-working Secretary of the organization.

Outside of all this political analysis, I continue, strangely enough to have a life - although a great deal of it at the moment seems to be caught up with problems relating to land tax, the distribution of wealth in Australia and NZ political parties. I'm having a weird experience at work trying solve an otherwise simple problem; connecting a Mac to a Windows network printer (some applications work, others don't). The ICT newsletter Red Friday is now into its third issue and the Ten Thousand Islands play-by-email roleplaying campaign has reached its
second major scene.

Last Sunday was the annual Unitarian Church fete (rather uninteresting) and the chosen speaker, a natural health/alternative medicine advocate, was a bit of a conspiracy theorist. His best points were the need to regulate natural therapy and integrate it into the university system and the systematic reasons on why pharmaceutical companies - and many doctors - are so much against to the practise. Still, one practical upshot was getting some plants for verylisa's housewarming in Altona Meadows. So far away! Deepest darkest suburbia, yet still in zone one for public transport. Spent a bit of time chatting with cvisors, fizit and, of course, caseopaya. The evening concluding with a few pints with severina_242 and friends at a dodgy faux-Irish pub (for the love of God, how many more must we have?) in Port Melbourne.

The arrival of that writing madness, NaNoWriMo reminds me that my rewritten and much reduced version of my thesis is due in by the end of the month. Better get on with it.