Don't Fear the Ether

What is that? Blue Oyster Cult? What a crappy, weird song...I much prefer the Cavaliers' creepy song about "being good" so the left-behind boyfriend/bad driver can meet his dead girlfriend in the afterlife. Perverse and somehow still fittingly Protestant.

Anyway, old people won't use the internet to pay bills, because they don't "trust" the netherworld of magical instant data transfer to correctly move ions/money from their checking account to a creditor's account.

But old people--and everybody else, apparently--will use electronic voting machines to pick a Senator, Congressman, or President.

And as you may have heard me say before, the motherfucking machines don't work. It's a fact. It's documented and well-known at this point.

The double-digit lead "Democrats" have in all the pre-election polls is completely imaginary (sometimes termed as "Democrats Lead Over Bush," bizarrely, since as far as we know there is no "Democrats" vs. "Bush" check-box on any ballot this November). The Democrats don't count the votes--Diebold does, and it has already stated on numerous occasions that a GOP victory is what it wants.

The city of Chicago is hiring smart guys like me to be poll site workers this year, and they're going to train us smart guys to set up and download the electronic voting machines, but I am almost certain they aren't going to know what we should do if touching the "Democrat" button returns a vote for a Republican. That would just be unthinkable.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out. By the way, if you know any students in the Chicago area, have them contact People for the American Way, the group fielding applications for the city. Applicants must be residents of Cook County and must attend 4 short training sessions and be prepared to work all day at the assigned polling place. And the upshot is, you get paid $500.