Beyond Opinion

I saw the Presidential Debates tonight. They were more well-behaved than 2000's debates, when candidates ran roughshod over time limits all over the place. This year they used Toastmaster lights, and when the red came on, the speaker stopped right there. So how did they do? I say Kerry did slightly better, but not enough to have much effect on the election. Kerry has to come out with a definite plan and he has to speak from his heart. This means there must be stumbles and errors in Kerry's talk. A perfect Kerry speech performance means that speechwriters wrote his words. Stumbling would say that Kerry himself is speaking from his heart.

It was Bush that was stumbling all over the place. Yes, from the heart at times, but to me Bush gave me the impression as fumbling all over the place. He had trouble grasping for words. He did get in a few points, though. But he overdid some words, such as "mixed messages", and at one time he almost committed a Bushism, namely "Mexages". Reminds me of a Mix-Mex Mexican restaurant.

Bush did make one glaring Bushism: Moolah instead of mullahs. Moolah is money. Is that what he is thinking of with regard to Iraq?

Kerry made some good points, such as asserting that Bush's attack on Iraq was a serious mistake. Of course he did not come up with any definite plans for getting us out of that mistake. He said that attacking Iraq because of 9/11 was like FDR attacking Mexico because of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Actually it is more complicated than that. Bush did invade Afghanistan first. So it is more like FDR attacking Japan because of the Pearl Harbor attack, then attacking Mexico. But it was still a good point made.

One thing that Kerry brought out was that the situation in Iraq is apparently getting worse. Every month that passes by brings about more and more US casualties there. But it still is not enough to topple Lichtman Key 11, Foreign and Military Success. Still only five keys have fallen; Allan Lichtman says only four have fallen; he thinks that Short Term Economy still stands. I think it has fallen because this employment thing is dragging on, and that is how people feel the economy. But Short Term Economy fall or no, that still leaves not enough keys down to defeat Bush. So it still looks like a Bush victory, unless something startling happens.

An unusual incident happened today, which highlights failures on the part of several interests. I visited my wife today at the hospital after she had surgery earlier this week. I left at about 2130 and got into my 1996 Toyota Corolla to drive home. However, I could not drive home. I started the car OK, but then I could not move the floor gear shifter out of Park. I called AAA to get help. They told me that they would have to tow it back home for me, and that it would take 60-90 minutes. Further, she kept asking me for area codes. Huhh?? The area code for Richmond is 804. They should know that. But then she said she was from Elkton, Maryland. That I don't appreciate. I expect to hear from someone in my local area. Further, the waiting time seemed really long to me late at night.

I tried to get back into the hospital to see Anne to talk with her about the incident. However, the doors were closed; it was past visiting hours. It was before 2200. They told me visiting hours were until 2200. They did not tell the truth. So I called the place with my cell phone and asked to speak to her but they would not put me thorugh. I told thiem of my situation and they said that they would send security over. I told them, OK, send them over. Maybe they can do what AAA couldn't or wouldn't do. They were over in 5 minutes. The security agent started my car readily. I asked him how he did it. He said you have to put the key in. Huhh?? I did that. But now the car is started. I drove it straight home without turning it off. I stopped briefly to cancel the AAA call.

When I got home, I turned off the car and tried to start it again. It started, but again I could not get it out of Park. This must be some intermittent problem, then. So I went in my house and got on the computer and Googled expressions such as "can't get * out of park". There were not too many hits, but I was able to find that most of these mention turning the steering wheel to unlock it, or of depressing the brake before starting it, and some mention that in cases like this the brake lights don't work either - a fuse is to blame.

So I went outside and tried all of these things. The brake lights worked normally. That wasn't it. I turned the steering wheel and that didn't do it. So I tried hitting the brake first, and then starting it. Bingo. That worked. Apparently the Corolla is set up so that you can't shift it out of Park unless you are depressing the brake. Absolutely no one and absolutely no manual told me this, and apparently I am in the habit of hitting the brake first, and this time, for some reason, I didn't.

There were quite a few problems all along this thing. When I bought the car from Carmax, they provided no manual. The manual may have said something about it. I tried to price one and found that it costs $27. Huhh? For something that originally came free with the car? Further, there is apparently no manual on the Internet. The hospital was not being very helpful but they did get me in touch with someone who temporarily solved my problem. The biggest blame is on the AAA and I am not sure I am renewing with them any more. The last few times I tried to get help with them it took over 60 minutes; the time previous to this they never came. Further, I don't want to do business with anyone who gives me people in faraway places when I have a local emergency.

Further, this incident brings about the power of the Internet. True, there was absolutely nothing about this problem on the Toyota site, and trouble-shooting sites are few and far between. But there were enough discussion forums around that discussed the problem to give me the solution I needed. This shows just how powerful the Internet is. It prevented a major annual-leave-eating time-consuming and costly trip to the car repair place. The Internet is worth many times more than all the car repair places in the world.

Another Google alert came out today that I thought was interesting. This time it was a reference to Allan Lichtman in an article by Counterpunch. By clicking on "Counterpunch", you can find the article which caused the alert. It was by Karyn Strickler, who I now find out is Allan Lichtman's wife. She says that the 2000 election was the Curse versus the Keys. It seems there is this fumbum of a campaign worker named Bob Shrum, and that this Democratic worker has worked on many Democratic presidential campaigns, with the property that any campaign that he works for loses. He did not work for Clinton either time, and he got in only a little in the Jimmy Carter campaign. So guess who Bob Shrum is working for? Who else, but Kerry. Further, he worked for Gore in 2000, so that should have meant that Gore would lose in 2000.

However, the 13 Key System of Karyn's husband, based on a methodology used to predict earthquakes, said that Gore would win. He was the incumbent party, and he had lost only five keys - incumbency (3), policy (7), scandal (9), foreign/military success (11) and charisma (12). Six keys down are needed to defeat the incumbent party, so Gore should have won. So Karyn's point was that this was an irresistible force of Shrum versus the immovable Lichtman keys. So what happened?

Both. Gore won the popular vote, which is what the keys were meant to predict. But Bush got into the White House, continuing the Shrum curse. So what now? Evidently, Kerry has to get rid of Shrum. In fact, he has to get rid of all those donkeys that are working for him and try something new, novel, and so decidedly different that it upsets the key theory. Right now the keys also predict Bush. Bush is five keys down; here I differ with Lichtman in that I believe that the short-term economy key (5) has fallen, although that claim is somewhat shaky. This is because people feel like the economy is bad. But still, one more key is needed. Unless the whole roof caves in, like Hurricane Ivan blowing it in, Bush will be reelected and the curse will continue. Maybe Shrum is good for Halloween.

An interesting site for Presidential elections is David Leip's Presidential Atlas, containing maps and detailed county by county results for all elections from 1788 through the present, where the data is available. One of the more interesting items on that site is a Mock Election, wherein members can vote. Oh, they have voted all right. And Kerry has a huge lead, with 266 electoral votes, or 4 short of victory.

The interesting thing is who is second. None other than Mike Badnarik, the Libertarian candidate. He is leading across most of the South and in the Rocky Mountain states, and even is taking Texas, slightly edging out Kerry for that honor. Alabama and Mississippi are going to Michael Peroutka, the Constitution Party candidate. Peroutka has several other states. Badnarik has about 165 electoral votes, and Peroutka about 50. Bush is trailing badly in fourth with 5 states and 18 electoral votes, including Vermont and Nevada. Nader has Wyoming. Don't ask me how Nader has Wyoming. He does. So what's going on here? Is this site being trashed?

The parties are out of balance. About 600 Democrats and about 500 Republicans have voted, but 888 Libertarians have voted! And they are almost all for Badnarik. So that skews the results. To put this election on a firmer basis, one must multiply or use weights corresponding to the percentages of the electorate that actually are these parties. Even so, that gives Kerry a huge lead. But does this mean that Badnarik will suddenly erupt on the national scene and garner 5% of the vote? I sure hope so. That would hand the election to Kerry, as it would cost Bush a sixth Lichtman key.

Today I got a Google alert today telling me about Operation Snowbird. This is a service which allows people living in states other than Florida to vote in Florida. This is an interesting concept. It is a direct assault on the Electoral College, that bastard of an institution which, so far in the history of the United States, has determined the winner of a Presidential election.

The 2000 Election caused this to come about. Gore won New York by 6 million votes, and Bush won Texas by a similar amount (although wait a minute… maybe he should have lost Texas! See below). Bush "won" Florida by a mere 537 votes out of about 4.6 million votes cast. Now what if we could have transferred 538 votes from New York State to Florida? That is a mere 0.009% of the vote in New York. But yet it would have won the election for Gore.

So this lawyer has come up with this idea. He has posted the Operation Snowbird site, which explains how non-residents of Florida can vote in Florida. You can't just up and sign up at the Florida Election website. You have to have something to do with Florida. Maybe you stay a good part of the time at a relative's house in Florida. Maybe you rent a property in Florida. Maybe you attend SWIM south of Miami every year. (But can you claim Camp Owaissa Bauer as a residence?) Whatever. If you have any connection at all with Florida, you can vote in Florida. If only 0.1% of voters in New York vote in Florida instead, and all are Kerry voters, that would provide an extra 60,000 votes for Kerry in Florida, and maybe that would squeak out a Kerry electoral victory.

Of course there are limitations. If you vote in Florida, you can't vote in New York. If you vote in two different places, you have cast two votes, and there are stiff penalties for doing that. In fact, maybe Gore took Texas in 2000. The Constitution forbids both the Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates for the electoral votes of a state to come from that state. Cheney lived in Texas for a number of years in the 1990s while he ran Halliburton. At the last moment he said, well he has a residence of some sort in his birth state of Wyoming, so he registered to vote there, and he voted there. If Cheney can do it, so can everyone, says Operation Snowbird. If we can't do it, then Cheney can't either, and Gore won Texas in 2000. So do it. Kerry can afford a vote or two in New York, which he is going to take anyway by a landslide. Same for voters in Texas. Kerry's not going to win that state anyway. So why not? Vote in Florida and help Kerry win.

Of course don't just consider this for Florida. If it makes sense for non-Floridians to vote in Florida, then it makes just as much sense for non-Missourians to vote in Missouri, non-Ohioans to vote in Ohio, non-Pennsylvanians to vote in Pennsylvania and so forth. For these are all swing states. If enough New York and Texas voters pile up votes in any one of these, it could tip that state, and maybe the entire election, to Kerry.

This is not the only time this sort of thing has happened. In 2000, someone tried to set up a "vote swap" site, which supposedly would have allowed a Nader supporter in Florida to swap votes with a Gore supporter in New York, so the New Yorker would vote for Nader and the Floridian would vote for Gore. But agreements of this sort are not binding, and you are going on trust alone. The fact that swap or switch schemes like this comes up attests to the serious flaws in the Electoral College system. If everyone were allowed to vote in any state, then people would pile up votes first in swing states, then in any big state, and the voting pattern would approach popular vote, which is what I think this country should have anyway.

Tonight, on the eve of Peak Oil and a monster hurricane, I got gasoline at the Wawa that now has the cheapest gasoline in the nation. As of 2004 September 15 2015, gasoline at the Wawa and the Liberty near Chesterfield, Virginia, still was selling for $1.499 a gallon, and the BP was selling it for $1.519 and has to settle for third place. I bought about ten gallons for about fifteen dollars, and strangely enough, there was an opening! I did not have to wait. After I got my gasoline, I drove off and parked at a parking place near the Wawa, allowing the next customer to get his gasoline. This is a good idea when places are crowded and/or prices are low.

I could not enter this Wawa's price in Gas Price Watch, because there was nowhere to enter it - it did not list the gas station. I had to enter it in, but as of late today, the Wawa was still not at the site. However, it did say the cheapest gasoline was at Chester, Virginia for $1.499. It was the Liberty's gasoline, but I did not enter that. Someone else must have. Why can't these people get the Wawa listed? Wawa is a major chain in this part of the country (it means "Canada goose" in a Native American language).

And in any case, a gas war occurring on the eve of Peak Oil has got to be one of the craziest things going on right now. It seems words mean more than goods. The words of the US Government today saying that the oil fields of Louisiana are safe from Hurricane Ivan the Terrible were enough to cause crude oil prices to drop late today. So words will do the job, that is, until the last drips come from the gas pump and leave the pump dry.

There is a price war in Chesterfield, Virginia. I think it was caused by a Liberty station opening up shop right next to a Wawa and a Mobil or Sunoco across the street. The ongoing price around here for unleaded gasoline is $1.639 a gallon. But this Liberty, along with the Wawa and the other station, were selling for $1.609 a gallon, and then $1.579 a gallon, much lower than anything else in this area; just down the road it is $1.759 a gallon. Then I found the unbelievable today. The price had fallen to $1.489 a gallon at the Wawa (by tonight it had gone back up to $1.499), and the price at the Liberty was $1.499. Man, this is a real price war, like we had in the 1950s. First one station would cut prices, then another would cut prices and the first one would cut again, each station trying to get all the business by being the cheapest on the block. I could understand how that could happen then, but now, when we are nearing peak oil and when crude is rising because of a hurricane threat to oil facilities? It's like Alice in Wonderland.

I went to http://www.gaspricewatch.com to find out what the most expensive and cheapest gasoline in the country was. It said the cheapest was $1.569 in Norman, Oklahoma. Hey, the Wawa and its neighbors have this price easily beat. The cheapest gasoline in the nation is now in Chesterfield, Virginia, at the Wawa and Liberty on Ironbridge Road. I was so interested in this fact, that I signed up as a spotter for Gas Price Watch, and tried to enter the price. But when I got there, the Wawa was not listed! I could not find anywhere on the site where I could enter the gasoline station. They force you to select one of their stations, then enter the price.

So take that site with a grain of salt. The cheapest gasoline in the nation is not in Norman, Oklahoma, but in Chesterfield, Virginia, unless someone can come up with another station that is $1.489 or cheaper elsewhere in the nation. What do I think of these low prices? I think that they don't reflect reality. Peak oil is coming soon so I expect prices to rise. They will eventually. I think the stations are waiting for the elections to be over. Just watch then. Prices will really go up.

Today I wanted to register to go to the Toastmasters District 66 conference in Roanoke, Virginia, so I went to www.district66.org to see if there was information there. There was enough to at least make a hotel reservation, but the registration forms were not out yet. But I found the theme of the convention, and I am not too sure I am keen on it: "Toastmasters Superheroes!". I.e., each Toastmaster get a skin-tight blue and red uniform with an emblem containing an S, or rather, a T on it, and a cape, and fly off to Roanoke to give superspeeches. Of course we know that we can't be superheroes; we are only human. We only want to get up in front of an audience and give a speech well. So I would have liked to have seen a different theme.

I went to the theory of Spiral Dynamics to see what themes might be available. There are eight levels to this system, including those that we can roughly call Traditional (Blue), Modern (Orange), and Postmodern (Green). The "Superheroes" theme is definitely Red, which is the third level. This is because superheroes in history are normally associated with Red civilizations, such as the ancient Greeks and Romans with Hercules, Perseus, and other superheroes. In this "meme", Toastmasters are encouraged to do everything impulsively and to grab for all the Toastmaster gusto they can get, and save poor weak Toastmasters in distress. But if we changed the "meme", how would the title change? Here are the possibilities:

Beige - Toastmasters Survival
Purple - Toastmasters Magic
Red - Toastmasters Superheroes!
Blue - Toastmasters Rules
Orange - Toastmasters Opportunities
Green - Toastmasters Community
Yellow - Toastmasters Networks
Turquoise - Toastmasters World

Certainly I would prefer Toastmasters Opportunities to Toastmasters Superheroes. I don't know if I would like Toastmasters Rules. One advances in life most by defying the rules. Toastmasters Community sounds really appealing to me. That is, we achieve something good, rather than have it just be limited self-action. The one I prefer the most is "Toastmasters Networks". This implies that it is the networking or web of Toastmasters life that unites all Toastmasters, and that the right actions in Toastmasters can be done by analyzing the big picture and see what is best. "Toastmasters World" might even sound better, but some more explaining would have to be done, as to what a "Toastmasters World" would actually look like.

Let's hope that the next conference consider either "Toastmasters Community" or "Toastmasters Networks" for its theme.

I have observed now two polls (Time and Newsweek) saying now that Bush has an 11 point lead over Kerry. Apparently he got a post-convention bounce whereas Kerry did not. I had been predicting all along according to the Lichtman Keys that Bush would win the election, even when Kerry had a substantial lead. It looks like Bush has pulled out, and he may stay in the lead until election day. He is five keys down, and nothing at the Republican Convention suggests that the Social Unrest key has fallen.

Kerry's main hope now is if some key falls before Election Day. But which one? Scandal? Abu Ghraib seems to have fizzled. Foreign and Military Success? No major setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. Things are not going well there, especially in Iraq, but nothing has turned up to actually negate Bush on this key. There seems to be no credible third-party challenge; Nader will not work, as he is taking votes away from the Democrat. I am hoping that Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik will get 5%; that would cause the third-party key to fall, but first Badnarak needs to break forth on the national scene.The best chance might be the third-party key, so those who want Kerry to be elected might consider contributing to Badnarik's campaign instead, hoping that these funds somehow would convince conservative Republicans to vote for Badnarik instead of Bush. Otherwise, it looks like Bush in November.