This Man Is Laughing At You

At a recent Washington dinner, our president made light of the fact that our forces in Iraq haven't yet found any weapons of mass destruction.

George W. Bush put together a "coalition of the willing" consisting of forces from nations around the world, coordinated an invasion force under false pretenses and blamed the result on faulty intelligence. Moreover, given all of this, he refuses to admit that the war was unjustified. Now he's making jokes about it.

Take a look at the results of this unscientific Fox News poll. Seems the majority thinks the jokes Bush has made about not finding weapons of mass destruction is perfectly acceptable. But how acceptable is it to families of soldiers who have died or who are still over in Iraq, away from their families?

What show of arrogance and indifference to human suffering will it take for people to realize that this is all a sham and that the "War on Terrorism" is just propaganda that the Bush administration is using to warp public opinion?

Personally, I'm appalled by Bush's callous show of indifference to human suffering.

Rock the Vote Through Online Voting

I can't help but wonder if the folks who put together efforts to encourage younger people to vote might be better served by lobbying for online voting. I know a lot's been written about the security of online voting, but if we could get security issues taken care of, online voting could revolutionize our political system.

Low voter turnout has become such an issue over the years that politicians often write off entire demographic groups within their own constituencies, opting to concentrate on groups of people that actually turn out at the polls. Senior citizens are an important group, while the 18-24 age group is not.

Just for giggles a few weeks back, Jimmy, Eric and I were looking at some MRI runs that crosstabbed people who voted in any election against political persuasion, age and a few other breakouts. Folks who don't vote tend to be younger and most of them have access to the Internet. They also tend to lean to the left from a political standpoint. Just based on the raw numbers, it's easy to see that implementation of online voting would give liberal candidates a distinct boost.

Especially on the local level, I'd like to see online voting become a reality. Where I'm from, senior citizens enjoy political influence that far outweighs their numbers. There are several retirement communities not far from my place on Long Island and it's very difficult to make investments in education because any significant increase in the schools budget tends to get voted down due to the high percentage of senior citizens who don't want to see an increase in their taxes. Local politicians spend a disproportionate amount of time catering to these senior citizen groups and little if any time on issues of importance to younger people, quite simply because they know the retirement communities will bus senior citizens to the polls on election day, and the younger people seem to want to spend Election Day playing Madden Football on their PlayStations.

I'll probably get some comments about how people who don't vote forfeit their rights to complain if their politicians don't adequately represent them. But I can't help but think that making voting easier would help level the playing field a bit. We'd certainly get more participation.

So maybe efforts should concentrate more on lobbying for online voting rather than trying to get more youngsters to turn out.

Comment Spam Honks

Step 1: Get comment spam from the penis pill people
Step 2: Delete comment and ban IP address
Step 3: Get comment spam from the penis pill people again, with an IP address one number off from the address banned the last go-round
Step 4: Repeat Step 2, yank hair out
Step 5: Repeat steps 3 and 4 ad nauseum

Is there an easy plug and play tech solution for this? I'm starting to get tired of these bastards.

Mobile Number Portability Not All It's Cracked Up to Be

I've just emerged victorious from a battle with my former mobile provider, Verizon Wireless. Last Wednesday night, I lost my mobile phone on a trip to visit my cousin in New Jersey. I immediately called Verizon to suspend service on the phone, so that if anyone picked it up, they couldn't ring up charges on my bill. The next day, I visited a Verizon Wireless store and was kept waiting for over a half hour for a sales rep. While perusing Verizon's sad selection of phones, I decided that since it had been 30 minutes and no one had yet stepped up to help me, that perhaps I had better take my business elsewhere. I was already unimpressed with Verizon's service. My phone would often ring to tell me I had voice mail and upon dialing in, I would find out that it was a message left two days prior. Since this might result in a bad situation, I figured it was time for a new provider.

One of the phones that really impressed me was the Handspring Treo 600. Among the providers supporting this phone are T-Mobile (with which I had a nasty experience a few years ago when they were VoiceStream) and Sprint. I elected to go with Sprint and transfer my number.

What I quickly learned is that one can't transfer a number that is attached to an account that has been suspended for any reason. Sprint kept trying to port the number over and Verizon wouldn't release it. I called Verizon several times to try to get them to release the number. After several unsuccessful attempts, a nice customer service rep from Sprint set up a conference call with myself and Verizon to try to ascertain what the problem was.

It turns out the problem was that Verizon had zeroed out the ESN attached to my old phone, in order to keep anyone from using it. The number wouldn't port without an ESN, so Verizon had to put my old ESN in, at great personal risk to me because anyone who had the phone at the time could have racked up charges in my name.

The next day, I called Sprint again because my new phone still didn't work and they informed me the problem still wasn't taken care of. Another call to Verizon indicated that "everything seemed okay" on their end and that there was nothing they could do. I decided to wait it out and sure enough, the next day, the phone started working shortly after noon.

While all of this could have been a legit computer glitch, I'm hearing horror stories from a lot of people about number portability and I can't help but think that providers are deliberately making this process difficult in an effort to hang on to existing customers who want to change their service. If I hadn't been upgrading my phone to something more full-featured, I might have given up during the hour-long conference call between Sprint and Verizon and gone back to Verizon. In retrospect, however, I'm glad I was persistent.