koan911

We are most amused

Looking for Rowan Atkinson doing a Beethovenian riff on Colonel Bogey, I came across this, "We are not amused...", which of course brought back to me dear memories of a past life (not so long ago):

 
Excuse me: is he wearing the same dress?

I saw Rowan Atkinson perform in Adelaide in the 70s. He played a Beethovenian-variations spoof of the Colonel Bogey march that was hilarious, especially his facial gyrations.

Here’s as close as I can find for your enjoyment:

koan911.wordpress.com

There's an urban legend going around that Vox is gonna shut some time soon.  :(

I'm repeating it just coz it's bad luck not to.  :(

I'd already reserved my name at all the other blog sites and am now importing koan911.vox.com

to wordpress.com.  You'll be able to find me at koan911.wordpress.com in about 24 hours.

Oh yeah, there it is above in RED: "Vox is closing September 30.  Export your blog today."

In Wordpress, go to the Dashboard, then Tools, then Import, then select Vox.

If you move, please let me know where I can find you!?

See you around, folks!

koan911

koan911.wordpress.com

There's an urban legend going around that Vox is gonna shut some time soon.  :(

I'm repeating it just coz it's bad luck not to.  :(

I'd already reserved my name at all the other blog sites and am now importing koan911.vox.com

to wordpress.com.  You'll be able to find me at koan911.wordpress.com in about 24 hours.

Oh yeah, there it is above in RED: "Vox is closing September 30.  Export your blog today."

In Wordpress, go to the Dashboard, then Tools, then Import, then select Vox.

If you move, please let me know where I can find you!?

See you around, folks!

koan911

South Park Kindergarten, Newsletter Week 7, Term 3, 2010

[Yes, I live in an Australian suburb named South Park*.  Go ahead and laugh if it makes you happy...  [* all names changed to protect the reptilian stupid.]]

"Week 7 already it's a little frightening how quickly this term is moving.  We are finding ourselves with lots to do and not enough time to do it!!  The white board has been ordered and should be here in two or three weeks!!

"Congratulations to E.W.  and family on the birth [sic] their new baby, a boy, J.

"IMPORTANT INFORMATION AND REMINDERS:

* bla

* bla 

* Please take the time to read our new nutrition policy we have a child attending who is allergic to fish so we can no longer permit fish at Kindy.  We apologize for the inconvenience to families but this child's health must come first.

* bla, bla, bla, bla bla bla de bla, bla bla blaaa."

---

My wife is new to Australia.  She likes it here, but she finds a thing or two strange.

"Kindy" prohibits kids bringing nuts to lunch.  Some kids are allergic to nuts.  OK, we can live with that.

Kindy prohibits bringing boiled eggs to lunch.  Well, now hold on, our kid *loves* boiled eggs...

Come on, you know.  He's Japanese.  He's been brought up to believe that food is a staple; one of the few basic things that make us happy and glad to be alive.  He eats everything and enjoys it.  He's gotten a little more picky since he hit the Terribles...  (Nothing to do with food, folks.)  But he looves eggs for lunch...

We can understand that a nut drops on the floor and somehow, some kid will mistakenly scoop up that nut, peremptorily chew it, swallow it and die convulsively, tragic as it is to think about such a thing...  but come on!  A whole egg rolling out from some other kid's lunch!?  I mean, forgive the Inquisition, but at lunch time, with so many potentially life-threatening substances on the loose, just what are you, Kinderwardens, doing to allow these kids to wantonly or accidentally SWAP THEIR FOOD?  Huh?!

---

[This is a letter to be attached to a Kindy questionnaire being composed right here on you screens in this blog as it will appear to dear M, N, N and R of South Park* Kindergarten, as they open the morning correspondence next Monday.]

Dear M, N, N and R,

As always thank you so much for your never-ending vigilance over the safety of our precious little ones in your charge at South Park* Kindergarten.  It is so assuring that they mean as much to you as they do to us.

In particular, we want to tell you how reassured we are about the ongoing precautions being implemented at South Park* Kindergarten in order to safeguard the health of all children there and forestall the possibility of any tragic food ingestion accident!

We want to let you know that this is of such pressing concern to us because our only son, so precious to us, was most recently diagnosed as suffering from a particularly severe food allergy.  We cannot adequately describe the agony of the last six months suffered as we have, as a family, worked through this terrible trial.  As a result of being diagnosed as allergic to food, our son must now undergo 8 to 10 serum infusions for nutrition each day, according to as many blood analyses, as well as visit <famous local medical research hospital> three times per week.

As you can easily understand, we are so appreciative of your enlightened appreciation of the dangers of food -- it is hardly necessary to explain to you that our child will not be bringing any lunch at all to Kindy, as he has been diagnosed as allergic to food, and we are confident you can understand our concern that no food, under any circumstances, from any other kid, should in any way fall, even accidentally, into the hands of our precious, darling, little K.  For this, we rely with the greatest confidence upon your own good understanding, and look forward, as always, to your next newsletter with news and information about South Park* Kindergarten.

Yours truly,

bla bla bla

South Park Kindergarten, Newsletter Week 7, Term 3, 2010

[Yes, I live in an Australian suburb named South Park*.  Go ahead and laugh if it makes you happy...  [* all names changed to protect the reptilian stupid.]]

"Week 7 already it's a little frightening how quickly this term is moving.  We are finding ourselves with lots to do and not enough time to do it!!  The white board has been ordered and should be here in two or three weeks!!

"Congratulations to E.W.  and family on the birth [sic] their new baby, a boy, J.

"IMPORTANT INFORMATION AND REMINDERS:

* bla

* bla 

* Please take the time to read our new nutrition policy we have a child attending who is allergic to fish so we can no longer permit fish at Kindy.  We apologize for the inconvenience to families but this child's health must come first.

* bla, bla, bla, bla bla bla de bla, bla bla blaaa."

---

My wife is new to Australia.  She likes it here, but she finds a thing or two strange.

"Kindy" prohibits kids bringing nuts to lunch.  Some kids are allergic to nuts.  OK, we can live with that.

Kindy prohibits bringing boiled eggs to lunch.  Well, now hold on, our kid *loves* boiled eggs...

Come on, you know.  He's Japanese.  He's been brought up to believe that food is a staple; one of the few basic things that make us happy and glad to be alive.  He eats everything and enjoys it.  He's gotten a little more picky since he hit the Terribles...  (Nothing to do with food, folks.)  But he looves eggs for lunch...

We can understand that a nut drops on the floor and somehow, some kid will mistakenly scoop up that nut, peremptorily chew it, swallow it and die convulsively, tragic as it is to think about such a thing...  but come on!  A whole egg rolling out from some other kid's lunch!?  I mean, forgive the Inquisition, but at lunch time, with so many potentially life-threatening substances on the loose, just what are you, Kinderwardens, doing to allow these kids to wantonly or accidentally SWAP THEIR FOOD?  Huh?!

---

[This is a letter to be attached to a Kindy questionnaire being composed right here on you screens in this blog as it will appear to dear M, N, N and R of South Park* Kindergarten, as they open the morning correspondence next Monday.]

Dear M, N, N and R,

As always thank you so much for your never-ending vigilance over the safety of our precious little ones in your charge at South Park* Kindergarten.  It is so assuring that they mean as much to you as they do to us.

In particular, we want to tell you how reassured we are about the ongoing precautions being implemented at South Park* Kindergarten in order to safeguard the health of all children there and forestall the possibility of any tragic food ingestion accident!

We want to let you know that this is of such pressing concern to us because our only son, so precious to us, was most recently diagnosed as suffering from a particularly severe food allergy.  We cannot adequately describe the agony of the last six months suffered as we have, as a family, worked through this terrible trial.  As a result of being diagnosed as allergic to food, our son must now undergo 8 to 10 serum infusions for nutrition each day, according to as many blood analyses, as well as visit <famous local medical research hospital> three times per week.

As you can easily understand, we are so appreciative of your enlightened appreciation of the dangers of food -- it is hardly necessary to explain to you that our child will not be bringing any lunch at all to Kindy, as he has been diagnosed as allergic to food, and we are confident you can understand our concern that no food, under any circumstances, from any other kid, should in any way fall, even accidentally, into the hands of our precious, darling, little K.  For this, we rely with the greatest confidence upon your own good understanding, and look forward, as always, to your next newsletter with news and information about South Park* Kindergarten.

Yours truly,

bla bla bla

The Philosophy of Liberty

The Philosophy of Liberty

War Games: US versus Iran

No Way Can US Win A Non-Nuclear War With Iran

[The original source for this article, (Pakalert Press), seems to be offline, (or blocked in Australia?), so I take the liberty to reprint in full]

Iran Shahab-3 range

When Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the highest-ranking American officer, was asked recently on NBC's Meet The Press whether the United States has a military plan for an attack on Iran, he replied simply: "We do." 

General staffs are supposed to plan for even the most unlikely future contingencies. Right down to the 1930s, for example, the United States maintained and annually updated plans for the invasion of Canada - and the Canadian military made plans to preempt the invasion. But what the planning process will have revealed, in this case, is that there is no way for the United States to win a non-nuclear war with Iran. 

The U.S. could "win" by dropping hundreds of nuclear weapons on Iran's military bases, nuclear facilities and industrial centres (i.e. cities) and killing five to 10 million people, but short of that, nothing works. On this we have the word of Richard Clarke, counter-terrorism adviser in the White House under three administrations. 

In the early 1990s, Clarke revealed in an interview with the New York Times four years ago, the Clinton administration had seriously considered a bombing campaign against Iran, but the military professionals told them not to do it.

"After a long debate, the highest levels of the military could not forecast a way in which things would end favourably for the United States," he said. The Pentagon's planners have war-gamed an attack on Iran several times in the past 15 years, and they just can't make it come out as a U.S. victory. 

It's not the fear of Iranian nuclear weapons that makes the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff so reluctant to get involved in a war with Iran. Those weapons don't exist, and the whole justification for the war would be to make sure that they never do. 

The problem is that there's nothing the U.S. can do to Iran, short of nuking the place, that would really force Tehran to kneel and beg for mercy. It can bomb Iran's nuclear sites and military installations to its heart's content, but everything it destroys can be rebuilt in a few years. And there is no way that the United States could actually invade Iran. 

There are some 80 million people in Iran, and although many of them don't like the present regime they are almost all fervent patriots who would resist a foreign invasion. Iran is a mountainous country, and very big: four times the size of Iraq. The Iranian army currently numbers about 450,000 men, slightly smaller than the U.S. Army - but unlike the U.S. Army, it does not have its troops scattered across literally dozens of countries. 

If the White House were to propose anything larger than minor military incursions along Iran's south coast, senior American generals would resign in protest. Without the option of a land war, the only lever the United States would have on Iranian policy is the threat of yet more bombs - but if they aren't nuclear, then they aren't very persuasive. Whereas Iran would have lots of options for bringing pressure on the United States. 

Just stopping Iran's own oil exports would drive the oil price sky-high in a tight market: Iran accounts for around seven percent of internationally traded oil. But it could also block another 40 percent of global oil exports just by sinking tankers coming from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the other Arab Gulf states with its lethal Noor anti-ship missiles. 

The Noor anti-ship missile is a locally built version of the Chinese YJ-82. It has a 200-km range, enough to cover all the major choke points in the Gulf. It flies at twice the speed of sound just metres above the sea's surface, and it has a tiny radar profile. Its single-shot kill probability has been put as high as 98 percent. 

Iran's mountainous coastline extends along the whole northern side of the Gulf, and these missiles have easily concealed mobile launchers. They would sink tankers with ease, and in a few days insurance rates for tankers planning to enter the Gulf would become prohibitive, effectively shutting down the region's oil exports completely. 

Meanwhile Iran would start supplying modern surface-to-air missiles to the Taliban in Afghanistan, and that would soon shut down the U.S. military effort there. (It was the arrival of U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles in Afghanistan in the late 1980s that drove Russian helicopters from the sky and ultimately doomed the whole Soviet intervention there.) 

Iranian ballistic missiles would strike U.S. bases on the southern (Arab) side of the Gulf, and Iran's Hezbollah allies in Beirut would start dropping missiles on Israel. The United States would have no options for escalation other than the nuclear one, and pressure on it to stop the war would mount by the day as the world's industries and transport ground to a halt. 

The end would be an embarrassing retreat by the United States, and the definitive establishment of Iran as the dominant power of the Gulf region. That was the outcome of every wargame the Pentagon played, and Mike Mullen knows it. So there is a plan for an attack on Iran, but he would probably rather resign than put it into action. It is all bluff. It always was. 

The second edition of Gwynne Dyer's latest book, Climate Wars, was published recently in Canada by Random House.

[k9: please do see my article Connecting The Dots... for further background]

War Games: US versus Iran

No Way Can US Win A Non-Nuclear War With Iran

[The original source for this article, (Pakalert Press), seems to be offline, (or blocked in Australia?), so I take the liberty to reprint in full]

Iran Shahab-3 range

When Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the highest-ranking American officer, was asked recently on NBC's Meet The Press whether the United States has a military plan for an attack on Iran, he replied simply: "We do." 

General staffs are supposed to plan for even the most unlikely future contingencies. Right down to the 1930s, for example, the United States maintained and annually updated plans for the invasion of Canada - and the Canadian military made plans to preempt the invasion. But what the planning process will have revealed, in this case, is that there is no way for the United States to win a non-nuclear war with Iran. 

The U.S. could "win" by dropping hundreds of nuclear weapons on Iran's military bases, nuclear facilities and industrial centres (i.e. cities) and killing five to 10 million people, but short of that, nothing works. On this we have the word of Richard Clarke, counter-terrorism adviser in the White House under three administrations. 

In the early 1990s, Clarke revealed in an interview with the New York Times four years ago, the Clinton administration had seriously considered a bombing campaign against Iran, but the military professionals told them not to do it.

"After a long debate, the highest levels of the military could not forecast a way in which things would end favourably for the United States," he said. The Pentagon's planners have war-gamed an attack on Iran several times in the past 15 years, and they just can't make it come out as a U.S. victory. 

It's not the fear of Iranian nuclear weapons that makes the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff so reluctant to get involved in a war with Iran. Those weapons don't exist, and the whole justification for the war would be to make sure that they never do. 

The problem is that there's nothing the U.S. can do to Iran, short of nuking the place, that would really force Tehran to kneel and beg for mercy. It can bomb Iran's nuclear sites and military installations to its heart's content, but everything it destroys can be rebuilt in a few years. And there is no way that the United States could actually invade Iran. 

There are some 80 million people in Iran, and although many of them don't like the present regime they are almost all fervent patriots who would resist a foreign invasion. Iran is a mountainous country, and very big: four times the size of Iraq. The Iranian army currently numbers about 450,000 men, slightly smaller than the U.S. Army - but unlike the U.S. Army, it does not have its troops scattered across literally dozens of countries. 

If the White House were to propose anything larger than minor military incursions along Iran's south coast, senior American generals would resign in protest. Without the option of a land war, the only lever the United States would have on Iranian policy is the threat of yet more bombs - but if they aren't nuclear, then they aren't very persuasive. Whereas Iran would have lots of options for bringing pressure on the United States. 

Just stopping Iran's own oil exports would drive the oil price sky-high in a tight market: Iran accounts for around seven percent of internationally traded oil. But it could also block another 40 percent of global oil exports just by sinking tankers coming from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the other Arab Gulf states with its lethal Noor anti-ship missiles. 

The Noor anti-ship missile is a locally built version of the Chinese YJ-82. It has a 200-km range, enough to cover all the major choke points in the Gulf. It flies at twice the speed of sound just metres above the sea's surface, and it has a tiny radar profile. Its single-shot kill probability has been put as high as 98 percent. 

Iran's mountainous coastline extends along the whole northern side of the Gulf, and these missiles have easily concealed mobile launchers. They would sink tankers with ease, and in a few days insurance rates for tankers planning to enter the Gulf would become prohibitive, effectively shutting down the region's oil exports completely. 

Meanwhile Iran would start supplying modern surface-to-air missiles to the Taliban in Afghanistan, and that would soon shut down the U.S. military effort there. (It was the arrival of U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles in Afghanistan in the late 1980s that drove Russian helicopters from the sky and ultimately doomed the whole Soviet intervention there.) 

Iranian ballistic missiles would strike U.S. bases on the southern (Arab) side of the Gulf, and Iran's Hezbollah allies in Beirut would start dropping missiles on Israel. The United States would have no options for escalation other than the nuclear one, and pressure on it to stop the war would mount by the day as the world's industries and transport ground to a halt. 

The end would be an embarrassing retreat by the United States, and the definitive establishment of Iran as the dominant power of the Gulf region. That was the outcome of every wargame the Pentagon played, and Mike Mullen knows it. So there is a plan for an attack on Iran, but he would probably rather resign than put it into action. It is all bluff. It always was. 

The second edition of Gwynne Dyer's latest book, Climate Wars, was published recently in Canada by Random House.

[k9: please do see my article Connecting The Dots... for further background]

Vote Club

Notes on an election

[Or: Voting Strategies for Dummies]

Today, Saturday, August 21st, is election day here in Australia.

koan911

Voting is compulsory in Australia.  (Nevertheless, koan911 has not voted since March, 1983. He made some poor decisions earlier in life and has been on the lam these last 25+ years. He has felt that appearing at a polling booth, (even heavily-disguised), might bring too much unwanted attention, (i.e. Hellfire), down on his coordinates.)

I used to enjoy telling Americans that if they ever made voting compulsory in the States, the Republican Party would be out of business overnight. (In the 70s, I worked as a polling clerk: in electoral parlance, while a blank or otherwise invalid vote is an "informal vote", a valid, 1-2-3-straight-down-the-ballot vote is known as a "donkey vote". ;) Hee haw. Get it?)

In my electorate today, there were 5 candidates for a seat in the House of Representatives and 42 candidates for 6 seats in the Senate.

Australia uses preferential voting for the House and proportional representation in the Senate.

Preferential voting means that you mark candidates in order of preference, 1..N, and if the candidate of your first preference is eliminated, your next preference(s) may actually still have an influence in selecting the eventual winner.

This provides a) an avenue to register a protest vote without "throwing your vote away", and b) promotes the existence of numerous, confusing, special-interest candidates, (e.g. of the Australian Sex Party, (I kid you not)).

Needless to say, the major parties hate preferential voting.  This is because they are scumbags.

With 42 candidates to choose from, the diligent voter faces some considerable homework.  It used to be that you could number just the first few candidates that you liked and that would be considered a valid vote.  In 1984, the Senate ballot was repackaged with a horizontal line across the middle.  You could "vote above the line", simply by putting a 1 for the party you chose and nothing else.  Your preferences would then be automatically distributed by the party according to its own deals with other parties.  Or you could continue to "vote below the line", numbering the host of candidates in order of preference.

Somewhere along the line, they changed the rules and now demand that you number (nearly) ALL the candidates, if you vote below the line.  (I.e. they made it really easy to do it their way and fiendishly difficult to do it any other way.) This is because, "they" -- the major parties -- hate preferential voting.  This is because they are scumbags and hate democracy.

The two major political parties here in Australia are the Liberal Party, which is conservative, and the Labour Party which represents big business, such as the mining companies and Rupert Murdoch, (who made a guest appearance in Tomorrow Never Dies as the media-mogul arch-villain, or provided the inspiration for that character, anyway).  (Unfortunately, James Bond is a fictional character and Rupert Murdoch is not.)

An advantage of voting "below the line" is that you can pick and choose for the Senate.  Each state is represented by 12 senators, 6 of whom face re-election each alternate election.  So if you live in Victoria, want to favor the Labour Party, but can't stand Stephen Conroy because he is evil and has sponsored legislation to filter the internet to the extent that Australia has now been rated as having the same freedom of expression as China... Voting below the line, you can give preference to the five other Labour candidates -- but mark Stephen last, (e.g. "666th").

---

Now let's turn to voting strategies under Western democracy.

There is just one major strategy.  Choose the major political party that you dislike the least, suck in your breath and vote for it.

You will generally be given a choice of just two.  The differences between those two may seem major, but so also will be the difference between what a party says before the election and what it does after the election.  The end result after the election will be predictably similar to the status quo before the election -- no matter which party gets elected!

The two-party political system is a triumph of Political Science and the faith people place in it is a source of constant pride to all politicians and academics.  The system itself is very similar in principle to World Wide Wrestling, (and no coincidence either!); only, the interest in it is inexplicably, considerably more wide-spread.

Imagine for a moment, a wrestling match with only one wrestler in the ring and no referee!  The Soviet Union tried this (one-party) system and, although the results were pretty much the same, (one party wins), it did not hold up -- it wasn't much of a spectacle, nobody believed its premise and you could neither bet on it nor talk about it in the media.

All right.  "Surely," you are saying, "there has to be more!?  What else can we do??"

Well, yes.  But are you really ready for it...?

---

First Rule of Vote Club:

1. Vote against the incumbent!

"Just who do you think you are, making a career out of being a single-point of failure in the execution of the will of the people.  In these times, one term and then you're out!  Not so enticing to sell out your country for 30 pieces of silver when you only get three or four years and no re-election, is it?"

The incumbent in my electorate is a young, bright, diligent, no doubt idealistic, junior member of the House of Representatives.  It was really hard to rank her dead last(*) on my ballot, but I closed my eyes, swallowed hard and punched her in the face.  Why?  She works for the party which works for who-knows-who and certainly not me; yes, she's idealistic now, but she'll become an expert dissembler soon enough if given the chance; and because it is the First Rule of Vote Club.

Second Rule of Vote Club:

2. Never vote for a member of a major party!

Political parties are oligopolies, subsidiaries to one vast, hidden monopoly of political power: they are anti-trust and anti-democratic.

So I ranked my incumbent's only real opponent second last.  No choice, anyway: it is the Second Rule of Vote Club.

Third Rule of Vote Club:

3. Vote according to your principles and vote for the candidates that represent you on issues dear to your heart and mind.

If you live in the Soviet Union, you can't do this because it's gone; therefore you must be dead and in Commie heaven; and because there was only one party, anyway: so you had no real choice.

If you live in the United States, you can't do this either because there's only two parties -- the Left Ventricle Party and the Right Ventricle Party: either way, it's winner rules all...

But if you live in Australia...

Well, for the Senate, I cast my top preferences:

    #1: Senator Online party, (direct democracy!!!)

    #2: Climate Sceptics, (down with ETS, cap-and-trade and neo-feudalism),

    #3: an independent, (thanks, Mark, and I wish you well)

    #4: the Australian Sex Party, (dedicated to the destruction of Stephen Conroy 666, as are we all)

    #5: the Secular Party, (admit I did no research on it and it was only the name which closed the deal)

In reality, only the vote for the SOL will show up on the radar and only as a disturbing protest.

This is the intent of the Third Rule of Vote Club.

Fourth Rule of Vote Club:

4. In Vote Club, we live by first principles and lateral thinking.  We detest giving in to pragmatism, compromise or fuzziness such as emotional intelligence.  But like The Third Rule of Fight Club...  I mean Vote Club...  the Fourth Rule of Vote Club promotes freedom of spirit, flexibility.  I could not quite bring myself to vote my incumbent last, according to The First Rule of Vote Club.

* I pulled my punch.  A bit.

And why?

Because there were a bunch of reptilian dregs I could not possibly bring myself to elevate from the bottom of the ballot.

(And Australian Electoral Commission rules nowadays demands one pencil in at least a mark of disrespect against all.

Damn you, Australian Electoral Commission!  Damn you...  One day, I swear, you will be replaced by Vote Club and it will be we who administer the Rules of Voting...)

:)

The Christian Democrats got a punch in the face; at least from me.  My own personal belief is that religious zealots should never be allowed a say in politics, just as serial killers on death row are denied.  It's just my personal belief, separation of church and state and all that -- I can't justify it -- and, although it may effect you indirectly, I hope you will respect my personal beliefs...  ;)

(And now let me spaketh directly unto you, Christian Democrats, in your own tongueth, as a personal aside: God may yet be on verily your side and therefore the untiring exercise of your kneecaps every morning, noon and night shall be sufficient unto ye.  Polling places are indeed a den of iniquity, wrought by sATAN hIMSELF.  Go ye there therefore in peril that ye demonstrate yer lack of faith in the Almighty: woe be unto you!)

And finally, in last place: Family First.  This one is a front for wowserism and, in my book: deception on top of religion -- DOUBLE FAULT!!  Family First: dead LAST, on my ballot.

This concludes the Fourth Rule of Vote Club.

Fifth Rule of Vote Club:

5. Go placidly amid the noise and the haste.  :)

There were a bunch of candidates I couldn't recognize.  Not bad, not good.  Just distracting.  Ignore the noise, I thought.

(Example: the Shooters and Fishers Party.)

Noisy, miscellaneous people.  I put them all, collectively, second on my ballot -- where they can do little or no harm.  In accordance with the Fifth Rule of Vote Club.

In summary, the final ranking:

1. the good guys

2. the miscellaneous, nondescript, vainly hopeful

3. the big party apparatchniks, seeking power

4. the incumbent, (evil or not)  (* OK, so not quite last)

5. the vituperous zealot trash

---

Monday morning analysis of Saturday's election results:

(i.e. so what did I, (k9's personal autobiographer), actually achieve?)

No net difference.  Que sera, sera.

Others vote simply to prevent a worse outcome.

I voted so that I could simply hold my head up afterward!

Like the "sour grapes" bumper sticker that says, "Don't blame me!  I voted for the other guy...":

mine says: "hasta la revoluciòn!"