House of the rising Moonglum

Well it looks like we are going to have a run off here in the 49th ward. Moore and Gordon. The results as of 11:54:

42 of 42 Precincts Reporting – 100.00%

Moore only needs to pick up a few more votes to push him over the edge and I’m afraid that there were probably people that were trying to pick between Moore and someone else, so the outlook is pretty grim for Moore opponents. Still, a runoff should send a signal at the very least. Interestingly there were 7414 voters which means that Moore could have just paid us each $50 and been done with it. Alternately, I am 0.013% of the vote and personally made a difference in this race.

So thinking ahead to the runoff… is there any penalty for the blatant disregard for electioneering laws that was going on? I was watching the local news and they were asking about irregularities and said that there were none reported, but I thought that Adams sent in a report, no? And even if he had, would there be any repercussions? That probably got Moore a couple votes at the very least and could have easily ended up making the difference between having a run off and not. The thought that there will be no follow up with that annoys me, assuming that the allegations are true.

You know that creepy feeling you get when you are walking down an alley and someone else walks into the end? That was the feeling I got at the polling place today from Moore supporters. I was walking down the street when from across the street comes, moving very quickly, a Moore supporter yelling at me to remember to vote for Joe waving a brick of fliers that looked like it could hurt somebody if they weren’t careful. Supposedly Joe was inside, but I didn’t see him (there were multiple precincts at my polling place). But I did see his doughnuts. Mmm doughnuts. Well I had to get me some of those. Dunkin had a great banner up: “Get two dozen, make friends the easy way.” Made me laugh.

On the conspiracy side, I tried out the electronic voting machine. I figured it was less likely that Sequoia would try anything at a local election. It also had a very nice voter verifiable paper trail, though I was a little annoyed that that step was optional. To make this stuff really work, precincts need to me selected at random for a manual paper recount to match against the central numbers. And for that to work, there has to be a complete paper trail. Well I hit it, so hopefully if they are messing with the numbers, that flags mine as “needs to be correct”. All in all though the electronic voting experience was pretty pleasant.

Did you know that the IRS is not perfect? They made a data entry error on my quarterlies. They missed a checkbox and decided that they had to get a lot more money from me. This led to calling them up and telling them that no, they actually don’t need any more money. They were quick to agree with me, even though the only evidence for the mistake was in my hand. I have to admit every time I have called the IRS recently they have been really helpful.

Still, the IRS with a data entry error? That is a little disturbing.

Well, AdiumX finally went 1.0. This made a number of my friends happy, but wasn’t a big hit for me, I’ve used Fire ever since I switched to Mac OS X and had to give up Gerry’s ICQ. Apparently I get overly attached to my IM clients. I remember when ICQ was the big thing I was annoyed because it didn’t have icons like I was used to with Broadcast (help me find a link!). But all the kids were doing it so I jumped on. Then everyone at work started using Yahoo! chat, so I had two clients on my machine. Finally when I made the jump, going to a multi client seemed like the good choice. Fire was awesome, it did everything, and was updated on an incredibly regular basis which let it keep ahead of the IM servers trying to knock off outside clients. But reading the message on the front page it sounds like Adium grabbed a couple fire developers and there just isn’t the will to keep it going. So sad. Oh well. We hadn’t had a release for about a year anyway, I guess I will just have to become emotionally attached to Adium. Looks like they will even import most my fire settings…

Well the election is almost upon us, and it will be an exciting one! So, who to vote for, who to vote for? Well there is certainly a lot of info out there at this point, so here you go:

(more…)

Chicagoist has a nice recap of what Stroger has been up to this year.

I had a number of friends get pissed off at me for voting Republican in the county election, however watching services to the poor get cut while expensive patronage positions stay filled, I stand by my decision that in this particular case voting Republican would have been better for the Democratic agenda.

Of course my preference would have been Claypool, but I’m getting used to disappointment. I think that I have voted for the loser in every election for the past five or six. Now which alderman candidate wants me to vote for him again? I have the vote of death in Chicago.

So the big debate for the 49th ward was on WTTW Monday night. Does anyone have a link to the episode? All I can find is the description from WTTW, I would be very interested to see Moore’s reaction to Marshfield being brought up.

Another issue that came up was fundraising. So there are a number of documents that all the people running for office in Illinois need to file. They are available online (search for city: Chicago, state: IL, year: 2007, office: Alderman, district: 49, all others: all) One of the interesting things is that you need to say where all your money comes from. This also means that we all get to see how much money the different candidates have.

As of the end of last year Adams pulled in $13k, Ginderske got $12k, and Gordon is in the lead with $30k. These all seem like reasonable numbers for a ward with 60,000 people. That should cover signs, posters, and with some donations in kind, that should be able to completely plaster the neighborhood with dead trees. But then we get to the incumbent. Apparently the reporting requirements are greater for greater sums of money. I might be reading this wrong, but it looks like Moore pulled in a half a million dollars! Holy crap! With that kind of money who needs TIFs and SSAs, just have the Citizens for Joe Moore pay for it all! I mean that is completely out of control, that is not only more than all the other candidates combined, that is ten times more than all the other candidates combined! If there is a runoff (which I believe there will be) I will need to give a donation to the contender just on principle!

So let’s see who gives money to Joe (click on itemized to follow along, Web 2 dorks don’t use permalinks, don’t they know the whole purpose of the in-tar-web is to be linked by bloggers?)… Well the first 5k is developers, then we get some local businesses. I’m a local business and I didn’t give my money, is that bad? Some downtown union gave him 5 grand. I’m sure those union members would be happy to know where their hard earned money goes. I wonder who all these people that don’t live in Chicago are.

Oh… wait. I did give him money. Looks like my developers pitched into the kitty. Oh well. They gave what appears to be the smallest amount that developers are allowed to give. I guess that’s why they couldn’t get the zoning variance they wanted. Heh.

Update: The BHoRP points out a newspaper article on this topic. Also the sun times endorses Moore.

I haven’t done any posts on Afghanistan in a while, so here is a positive one. There is an organization that is trying to provide a socially acceptable way for Afghan women to make some money to cover basic needs and send children to school.

The problem is that in the villages in Afghanistan many jobs are forbidden to women. But since many men have died in the continuous wars for the past 30 years that have engulfed Afghanistan the widows have no way to keep themselves alive and their families together. Enter Arzu or Hope in Dari. They are a chicago based organization provide direct marketing for women in Afghanistan to sell their rugs to you and me. In the past there have been many layers of middle-men who take such a large chunk out of the price that the women who actually make the rugs don’t see enough of the money to survive. Arzu actually goes to the villages to seek out families that will most benefit. This is an amazing group, and if you are looking to buy an oriental rug, you should consider these guys. My biggest fear when we invaded Iraq was that we would forget about Afghanistan. For the most part we did, however organizations like this give me hope.

It is worthy of noting that they seem to steer clear of the Pashtu villages, though that could be of political instability in those provinces. I heard about this group (.mp3 full interview) through Chicago NPR.

By now everyone knows that Hot Doug’s picked up the first Foie Gras fine. This is humorous because Doug’s is a hot dog stand that never served Foie Gras before the ban. I actually love Doug’s and Doug is a great guy who thus far has refused to grow past the point where he can work the counter for every customer. His hot dogs are incredible (you haven’t lived til you have had the cognac infused pheasant dog.)

In any case, I think they picked him because he was an obvious case of flouting the law, and he was th least likely to get any increase in business from being the first fine. You see I have been to a number of chicago restaurants that serve foie gras since the ban has gone into effect, and it seems like they have all been vying to get the first fine. My take on it is that the Health Department didn’t want to give anyone who could really take advantage of it that “honor”. So when the opportunity to get someone who was doing it as a lark rather than to make more money came up they took it.

What do you think? (There were other places that did it as a joke, like foie gras pizza and other things, but they mostly only did it once, Doug kept on keeping on.)

p.s. Doug is on vacation til march 6th so you can’t get your game of the week til then.

Two big articles on the Trib today. First the police released more information about the triple murder down the street. Looks like it was a straight-up domestic dispute, so while tragic, a personal matter.

Also, they did a fairly large piece on Dorothy Brown. I have to say that given the track record they present of her current job, I’m not sure that I could really recommend her over the current mayor. Hopefully a similar article is coming up on Walls.

FWIW, here is a sample ballot for the 49th ward.

This year’s polar bear swim in Lake Michigan was called off because even with pick axes, they couldn’t break through the ice. Not swimming was probably a good idea.

Well, it looks like the Trib finally decided to make the location of their election coverage a bit easier to find. There is plenty of info there on the other mayoral candidates, though not much on the City Clerk election. From what I can read Brown doesn’t impress me, but at least she seems to have more energy than Walls. The truth of the matter is though, that race is already spoken for.

On the 49th ward however, the Trib seems to endorse Gordon. The nice thing about local elections though is that you don’t need to rely on other people’s opinions, you can actually meet the candidates and hear what they have to say. If you haven’t taken the opportunity yet, go and have a chat with them and figure out for yourself who you want to vote for yourself.

Chicago city elections are less than two weeks away, and I can’t find a thing in the news about what positions are up and who is running. Of course the major item if you read this or any other Rogers Park blog is the aldermanic election. But according to my sample ballot there is also a clerk and mayoral election. I’m still annoyed with the machine for backing Stroger, (who I am still giving a chance to prove himself, but thus far I am unimpressed) so I’d like a chance to vote for people that didn’t sign the letter telling me to vote for him. The only article I can find on the election doesn’t even mention the names of the people running against Daley!

On the plus side there are plenty of blogs chock full of information (etc…) for the Alderman race.

So if you have a link to info on the challengers in the Mayoral race or the Clerk race please post it here.

Remember what I said about snow being fun to shovel?

I take it back. There is so much snow blowing around that it is easier to just shovel up a scoop and toss it straight up. It won’t come back down. After shoveling the front walk, after about 20 minutes there are dune like formations near the sharp cutoff of the edge of the walk. I think I’ll wait for it to stop before making another stab at it.

I’m just glad I’m not south of the 80 corridor, looks like actual feet down there.

I don’t know if ohio has destroyed the ballot trail from the 2004 election yet, but the first convictions of election officials has been handed down.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

(Again a little out of date… still getting caught up on old news to blog.)

An event happened recently that I should have blogged about, but I seem to have taken a month off, so you get it a little bit late.

Space debris is a real problem. There are about 10,000 objects in earth orbit that the US Space Command has catalogued and tracked. These objects are over 10 cm in size and given that they are staying in orbit, are mostly moving very quickly. In 1998 there were 8,000 catalogued objects. Upper stages of rockets sometimes explode, as the upper stage of a Pegasus did in 1996 creating 700 catalogue-able objects, and hundreds of thousands of others. Orbital debris is moving so fast, relative to other orbital objects, that if two meet catastrophic results may be obtained. The international space station is continuously pelted with debris. So is hubble.

The largest problem however is the fact that as more debris is created, the chain reaction of one piece running into another creates ever more debris. There may come a critical point where we effectively deny ourselves the use of space. There has already been one case of mission failure due to space debris.

Recently the US and China have been working on an agreement to try to minimize the amount of space debris. So I have to ask myself, what on earth were they thinking when the purposely created the worst orbital space debris event ever? Didn’t want to be left behind the US?

When the Pegasus upper stage exploded, the impact probability for the Hubble Space Telescope doubled immediately. Fortunately the stage was in a relatively low orbit so much of the danger passed as objects fell back to earth. However this most recent ASAT weapon test by China was in a low-mid range orbit so the middle of the debris cloud is at about 530 miles giving the debris a much longer lifetime. Fortunately the danger to the ISS was short lived to to the orbital dynamics involved.

It will be interesting to see what China has to say for itself on April 23, when they are hosting the international conference on space debris. One things for sure, all that nice nice we were making about joint space ventures, to the moon and all that, well that ain’t happening anymore.

I just hope we get space debris under control and soon, otherwise we may wall ourselves into our planet for a hundred years.

For some reason the issue of Marijuana prohibition in this country has come up in conversation a number of times in the past few days. One thing in particular shocked me, and that is that everyone who is talking to me about it seemed to think that it has always been illegal. This is completely not true, in fact on the federal level it was only prohibited in 1937, after the alcohol Prohibition! Charles Whitebread (USC Law Prof.) gave an interesting speech in 1995 where he outlines everything that he was able to uncover about the history of the drug use in the United States. It is a very interesting read, particularly in some of the letters and minutes that he had access to. A brief summary:

Basically all drugs were legal until the early 1900s. This meant that more people were addicted to drugs in 1900 than now, (3-5% of the adult population) though that was probably through accidental addiction via medical use of morphine. The problem was solved by creating the FDA to stop accidental addiction via “snake oil salesmen”. Note that they didn’t make drugs illegal, they just made them warn people of possible side effects and only certify safe drugs. The first national criminalization was via the harrison act of 1914 but didn’t cover many drugs including Marijuana. A few states prohibited Marijuana, but it wasn’t until 1937 that the federal government passed a ban. And it wasn’t with much fanfare or debate, just kind of slipped under the table. Since then there has been a continuous escalation of penalties with no accompanying drop in actual usage.

The article gives a lot more detail and interesting facts, but those are the main points. What I find particularly interesting is Whitebread’s stance on prohibitions in general. His claim is that they always come down to an “us versus them” mentality. Human nature will always prohibit what the other is doing, not what we are doing. We whip ourselves into a frenzy over something and jump to criminalization as a solution rather than actual treatment of the problem. Look at meth-amphetamines. The press jumps all over it to show how widespread it is, when in fact it is much less widespread than amphetamines were in the 80s. Then we go ahead and increase the penalties. Because you know a meth addict is sitting there thinking, “oh man, I am going to just kick this since I might be in jail longer now.”

The initial success of the FDA has a lot to teach us I think. Educate and Regulate. No need to criminalize, heck tax it once you regulate it (should still be cheaper than black market) and use the proceeds to cover the medical costs of addiction clinics. Then you might actually make some inroads.

But maybe I’m just a liberal freak….

… or fun with Shoveling.

As the temperature drops, moisture is sucked out of the air (PV=nRT) either via snow, or closer to the ground, deposition. So the atmosphere would need to be drastically humidified to make it snow. Well as a “warm” front comes in, it brings with it the higher humidity, and a higher water saturation point potentially dropping all sorts of huge dendrites and plates on us. But, since it is still about 0 degrees Fahrenheit, there is no excess moisture to congeal the plates and we are left with snow that is so dry and fluffy that you can scoop up massive piles and toss it casually over your shoulder. Makes me remember that playing in the snow can be fun.