Spam News Report

(Conspiracy Nation, 01/16/08) – Bill Gates once predicted, “We will solve spam by 2006.” The supposed visionary of the Microsoft Windows monopoly undue fame was wrong. Not only was he wrong, but spam has proliferated into the various mass media so-called news.

It was Monty Python, the great British comedy ensemble, who first did a take-off on spam, actually a decent foodstuff when not eaten to excess. “Spam, spam, spam, spam... Spam, spam, spam, spam,” they sang in one of their skits.

Popularity of Monty Python extended into a free computer programming language, known as “Python.” (Other good, no-cost computer languages are Perl and Tcl.) In an enjoyable introduction to the Python programming language, authors Mark Lutz and David Ascher use Monty Python jokes in their examples. (“Learning Python,” O'Reilly books).

But there is nothing funny about various spam news we keep being over-exposed to. The real news occurs elsewhere, behind closed doors. Matt Taibbi alludes to this in a worthwhile article in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine. (“Merchants Of Trivia,” Jan. 24, 2008, p. 27). “The real stuff happens behind closed doors,” observes Taibbi, “where armies of faceless fund-raising pros are glad-handling equally faceless members of the political donor class, collecting hundreds of millions of dollars that will be paid off in very specific favors over the course of the next four years.”

They, Taibbi's “donor class,” get the real story. We, the People, get spam news.

A real news story involves credible allegations of vote fraud in the recent New Hampshire primary. The mainstream press calls this a “conspiracy theory,” a signal to “respectable persons” to avoid the subject. And it is likely that a recount of the New Hampshire vote, soon to begin, will reveal nothing untoward. But this will be because the recount itself has been compromised. Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (But who will guard the guards?) This was written by the Roman satirist Juvenal two-thousand years ago, and it applies to the New Hampshire recount. (See also, “Vote Recount Is A Loser,” http://www.shout.net/~bigred/RecountLoser.html)

Press spam news on the New Hampshire primary anomaly (Clinton's hand count share of such votes is 47.07% to Obama's 52.93% share and a virtually exact reverse pattern occurs with machine counts where Clinton's share is 52.95% to Obama's 47.05%) include truly wacky explanations: 1) “Closet racism” (are the machines closet racists too?); 2) “Damsel in distress” (machines also sympathetic to damsels in distress?); 3) “Good weather” (affects only the Clinton machine counts?); 4) “Economy was key” (Huh?) (Source: “New Hampshire Primary Votes Were Counted Accurately?” by Kathy Dopp. US Count Votes, DBA National Election Data Archive).

Dopp concludes: “Is the suspicious pattern in New Hampshire's Democratic primary results caused by voting machine counting? We have no clear idea, because we have no confidence in the unaudited machine vote counting process. Knowing how easy it is to corrupt machine-counted election results, it is appalling that New Hampshire and other states do not routinely conduct post-election manual checks of the accuracy of machine vote counts. Human mistakes and worse are inevitable, and without routine post-election measures to detect and correct mistakes, and without public oversight over security and chain of custody of ballots, inaccurate vote counts and incorrect election results are inevitable.”

In the back rooms, where the Tammany gang counts its loot, they know these things. For the rest of us, it is Spam, spam, spam, spam... Spam, spam, spam, spam...

Conspiracy Nation

http://www.shout.net/~bigred/cn.html