Friday follies

1,240,000 citations for fraud

Yep. That’s how many citations that Google pulled up when I keyed in “2004 US presidential fraud.” Yikes. Now, it is true that a lot of the cites were from blogs, but there were many, many from mainstream media: CNN, New York Times, the UK’s Independent, etc., etc. I’m not linking them here, because you can just scoot over to Google and pull up the citations yourself.

Now I have said before that I am no conspiracy fan, but it just stands to reason that with as many people screaming (and they are screaming) that the fix was in, well, like the man said, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” Know what I mean?

 

Red Rover
Those little tin guys on Mars are still chugging along, and this week sent back pix of clouds; more proof, if it were really needed, that there’s free water on the Red Planet.Now, if Bush were to do one Good Thing, he could follow through on his promise to send men to the place, we could establish a colony, and maybe Mankind would have a refuge, a seed store as it were, for after the Shrub starts the next nuclear war and irradiates the whole damn Earth.

If you’re interested in reading some speculative stuff about exploring the Red Plant, , the sf trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars), might give you an appreciation how the colonization of the 4th planet might play out. Stanley is a damn good writer and has some nifty insights into the political process as well.
 
History as fiction

Speaking of writers and political fiction, don’t forget to check out The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth, an alternative history of a fascist United States, and also Philip K. Dick's The Man In The High Castle, another fascist fantasy. This stuff hits close to home, as it were.

While we're on the subject, while checking the Google for the above citations, I noticed that there are over 14,900,000 entries for "alternative history." Seems to be a popular subject on the Web. I wonder if any of those alternative worlds postulate a Dem winning the last election. Gee, I wonder what it would be like ...