Found this on USA Today: Hot button: Medical marijuana vending machines open in L.A.:

Americans who have traveled to Japan are no doubt familiar with the ubiquitous jidoohanbaiki: standalone vending machines that dispense soft drinks, coffee, food, comic books, paperbacks, clothing (including underwear and stockings), videos, CDs, jewelry, flowers — and booze (beer, whiskey, sake).

California went a big step further today: Vending machines that dispense medical marijuana.

The first two were activated today in Los Angeles at licensed cannabis clubs. State voters approved doctor-prescribed marijuana in 1996 for patients suffering serious pain or nausea who don’t get relief from other drugs.

It goes on from there. The best part is some of the comments at the bottom, which range from “Pot is bad for you and will kill you” to “It’s my body and I’ll do what I want”. For what it’s worth, I agree with both positions - marijuana is bad for you and you should be allowed to use it if you want. It’s certainly no worse than binge drinking alcohol, and, like most vices, if you use it regularly, you’re going to find yourself in a world of pain later in life. However, we leave most vices legal because the alternative is generally much worse than the vice itself - people will still do it, only now it’s the undesirable elements of society that are providing it. Personally, I’d rather starve gangs and criminals of their income, and the best way to do that is to minimize the number of products that they can offer to our citizens.

This is in response to a mildly interesting article over at Pajamas Media: Driven a Ford Lately? Not if You’re Boycotting

Not much attention has been paid to the fact that the American Family Association’s boycott of Ford for taking a pro-gay rights position has contributed to the automaker’s mounting financial woes, contends Tom Blumer of BizzyBlog. With the company on the brink, some shareholders are asking whether political correctness is worth the price.

I’ll tell you why I don’t drive a Ford - it’s because they’re terrible. I had a friend of mine whose entire family, himself included, was a big fan of Fords. They all got Tauruses - not the super-popular first generation ones but the weird looking third generation ones with the strange headlamps. All of them were automatics. Lo and behold, each and every one of them at roughly 70,000 miles needed a new transmission. Now, granted, the plural of anecdotes is not data, but that level of reliability didn’t endear me to the brand. Plus, to be frank, I just don’t like the styling of their cars. They look boring. As for their trucks, I hear they’re great - another friend of mine swears by them - but I just don’t see myself getting one. Meanwhile, another friend of mine got a Ford Focus. She loves it as long as she doesn’t have to go uphill or anything.

Meanwhile, I know a lot of people that have purchased GM products and, though they may not have loved them, at least respected them a little. My significant other has an ‘03 Malibu with over 100,000 miles on it. The engine is still impressively sound. The interior is falling apart, but that’s manageable - it’s a heck of a lot easier and cheaper to repair or ignore an interior than it is to repair or ignore a transmission or engine problem. Her dad has a GMC truck with over 200,000 miles on it that still runs well, which has not been unusual in my experience. My old ‘90 Lumina ran quite well (albeit with a dated and deteriorating interior) until I drove it into a wall. The biggest problem I’ve seen with GM is that their cars frequently eat brake rotors for some reason (happened to my Lumina, happens to my SO’s Malibu) and their interiors disintegrate within 10 years. So, I’d sooner buy a GM product than a Ford product - I can deal with a poor interior a heck of a lot better than I can deal with a poor drivetrain.

Of course, I’m not a GM guy. I’m a Dodge guy. In my experience, they run about as well as most GMs, with a few caveats. First, the interiors seem to hold up a little better with age (not much better, mind you, but better enough for my taste). Second, you have to keep your eyes on the oil level - I don’t know why, but it seems Chrysler’s gaskets run a little thin. Thirdly, the Chrysler products I’ve dealt with are much easier to work on and much more intuitive than comparable Ford or GM products that I’ve seen. I don’t know why - maybe it’s because the first car I seriously worked on was a Dodge Shadow. It might just be a familiarity thing. That said, the number of tools I’ve needed to keep the old Shadow going or my current Dakota in one piece is much, much less than I’ve needed for Ford or GM products I’ve dealt with. Maybe I’ve just been lucky on that front. My fondness for Dodge is certainly not hurt by their pitiful resale value - when you shop used like I do, it’s a godsend.

What about the imports, you ask? I’ll tell you - I’m poor, and buy most of my vehicles used. Buying a used Honda for $10,000 with 180,000 miles on it is not my idea of a “bargain”. Buying a similarly aged Dodge in the same class for half that with half the number of miles, on the other hand… well, now we’re getting somewhere. I don’t care who makes the car, unless the engine says “diesel” on it somewhere, I’m not trusting it past 200,000 miles. I can’t - I have a 300 mile drive in each direction to visit my son, so I need an engine that still has a little life in it. I understand why the imports have better resale values - they’re better cars. I’m okay with that. I just don’t have the money to go there and, frankly, though the domestics may not be quite as flashy, they do get the job done as long as you stay on top of your maintenance. To each their own, I guess.

Anyways, if Ford wants my business, here’s what I need to see from them:

1. Build an interesting car. I understand your customers are generally conservative, but you’re not going to get me by selling cars that look like cheap knockoffs of last decade’s Toyotas and Hondas.
2. This really goes out to all of Detroit, actually - stop treating your subcompacts as second-class citizens. Does it look like Toyota takes the day off when they design or build the Corolla? The Focus was actually a decent car… over six years ago. To Ford’s credit, they’re the one of the Big Three to actually produce a halfway decent small car in the past five years - the Aveo is an econobox at its econo-ist, and don’t even get me started on the Caliber.
3. Please go a few years without a major recall or without your customers complaining because ${RANDOM_EXPENSIVE_PART} keeps going out prematurely.

That’s all. That’s really all I’m looking for at this point.

I apologize for the past week’s inactivity. However, it has given me some time to come up with some very interesting topics, of which this is hopefully one of them.

First, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the original Axis & Allies board game, the premise is that it’s World War 2 and you have to pick at least one of the major powers of the time (US, Britain, Russia, Germany, or Japan) and, working with your allies (fellow players, usually), attempt to defeat the opposing alliance to either achieve or prevent world domination, depending on whose team you’re on. It’s a dice-driven strategy game that I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve spent far too much of my life playing. In fact, I even found an open source version of the game that I still play on my laptop when I’m bored called TripleA. There are different units, each with varying levels of mobility, strength, defense, and cost. Resource management is handled through the acquisition of IPCs (Industrial Production Certificates). The more IPCs you get, the more units you can build. You get IPCs each turn, but the number of IPCs you get each turn is determined by which territories are under your control.

There are one of two positions you start off with in Axis & Allies - either you have more units in more strategically useful places but less IPC production capabilities (Axis), or you have fewer units but far greater IPC generation capabilities (Allies). If you’re in the former position, your goal is to reduce Allied IPC generation capabilities as fast as possible by taking as much territory as possible with the lowest possible cost. A quick victory is probably the only victory you’re going to get. If you’re in the latter position, your goal is to wait things out, adopt an initially defensive posture, taking offensive opportunities when and where they present themselves but generally not forcing anything. Suffice it to say, if you have more units in better strategic areas than your opponent and you’re generating more IPCs than your opponent, your opponent is probably toast. Conversely, if you don’t have enough units and you don’t generate as many IPCs as your opponent, your goose is probably cooked. There are some ways to work around that condition, however, especially against less skilled opponents. The key is you have to find one strategic quality that you have more of than your opponent and do your damndest to exploit it.

In Axis & Allies, there are three basic strategic qualities that you can achieve superiority of. The first is, of course, IPC generation - this is the big one. If you have it and can maintain it, you will eventually win. Failing this, the next option is unit quantity and position. If you have more units in the right places than your opponent, you might be able to leverage it to reduce your opponent’s IPC generation and maximize yours sufficiently such that you gain IPC superiority. Finally, if you have neither of these, there’s still mobility - if you’re able to move your units easier and quicker than your opponent, you may be able to position them such that you can achieve superior quantity and position at a given point, which, in turn, may eventually leverage into IPC superiority. The last option is a bit of a long shot, though, and can be fairly easy to lose against a decent opponent.

To understand how the last option works, it’s helpful to understand how you move units in Axis & Allies. There are two land units worth mentioning since they’re the ones that can actually take territory - they are infantry and armor. Infantry move one space per turn. Armor, meanwhile, can move up to two spaces per turn. If you have armor and your opponent has infantry, you may be able to mass it quickly at one point and flank an opponent’s infantry position. This opportunity rarely presents itself, however - few land areas are large enough to be more than two or three spaces abreast, so infantry can move into position nearly as quickly as armor. Real mobility lies in the sea - if you have enough transports, you can get just about anywhere faster than your opponent. Transports, like armor, also move two spaces at a time. The difference, however, is that transports move on the ocean, which is much less dense and much more open. Hypothetically, you can load up transports in Japan, approach East Asia, notice that your enemy is massing against your attack there, and promptly redeploy to a more advantageous position in, say, Africa. It will be at least two or three turns before your opponent can get his or her troops into position to counter yours, during which you may be able to do enough damage to balance out IPC production, or at least focus your opponent’s energies on coming up with ways to defeat your army while you develop another attack force. The reason this works is because it’s nearly impossible for someone to defend all points at once.

There are a number of problems with this approach, however:

1. It’s a very brittle advantage - without sufficient transports, you won’t have it. Since transports are weak, defensively, this advantage can be easily countered by an opponent that’s smart enough to do something about them.
2. Even if your opponent is too dense to actually get rid of your transports, they’re still going to be able to defeat any invasion you launch sooner or later. Presumably, if you’re using a set of hit-and-run transport-based invasions, it’s because you have insufficient resources to face your opponent head-on. However, in order to face them in this capacity, you not only have to generate units to attack with (something which your opponent can generate more of already) but you also have to build sufficient transports to send them, thus further handicapping your efforts. Consequently, sooner or later, your force will be defeated once they land.
3. Though your opponent may not be able to defend all places simultaneously, if given enough time, they will be able to defend enough places to reduce your forces’ effectiveness to near-nil. This will then lead to your opponent being able to competently deal with the vector of your attacks (the transports), thus eliminating your last strategic advantage.

How does this tie into Iraq?

It all began last Wednesday when what’s left of Al-Qaeda forces launched an offensive in Mosul, taking advantage of the fact that the Iraqi Army and the US military cannot defend all of Iraq equally. This is similar to using the strategy I just mentioned - Al-Qaeda is using the one strategic strength it has (mobility) to try to counter the strategic advantages contained by the Iraqi and US units (quality and strength of units, ability to produce more units). However, the end game is rapidly coming to pass - unlike the past, Iraqi military units are increasingly competent and can respond to Al-Qaeda offensives in record time. In this case, they’re already getting ready for an offensive, as reported by the LA Times, and it’s less than a week later. Eventually, it won’t matter where Al-Qaeda hits; Iraqi or Iraqi-allied forces will either already be there, ready to deal out much more damage than it receives, or they’ll be there within a day or two, again ready to deal out more damage than Al-Qaeda can hope to muster. Once that happens, it’ll only be a matter of time before Al-Qaeda’s mobility is reduced such that they won’t be able to muster a successful offensive anywhere in Iraq, no matter where they wish to deploy it.

Who says board games aren’t educational?

In all seriousness, I’m all for the Iraq War and what we’re accomplishing there, but, upon reading the latest about the White House’s ongoing efforts at showing the world that the most technologically advanced country in the world doesn’t know how to back up data, well, I had to get cute with the headline. It just needed to be done. A quick summary, courtesy of the Washington Post:

The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat.

The 2005 study — whose credibility the White House attacked this week — identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

This isn’t the first time that somebody connected to the administration has been involved in some data losing shenanigans, though, in the case of Scott Bloch, he was investigating Karl Rove, which makes one wonder… well, okay, it makes ME wonder:

Did the White House lose the e-mail in retaliation?

Of course, as an IT consultant, I have to wonder where the e-mails went in the first place. Clearly, there were no backup procedures, which I find curious - I would think the White House hosts its own e-mail, or, at the very least, that it’s hosted by a federal agency somewhere. A quick MX record search of whitehouse.gov reveals that their mail does, in fact, go to a server somewhere. More importantly, it’s a server that’s in the White House’s subnet. What this means is that the e-mail system for the White House (at least, the externally facing one) uses a server that is using federal infrastructure - this would imply that it’s not just your mom and dad’s POP e-mail that gets deleted from the server every 7 days or something without getting backed up somewhere at some time. Most importantly of all, however, is that we have a name for a technical contact for the White House:

William Reynolds

Sadly, a quick Google search reveals nothing. Worse yet, the chances that the tech contact on that IP’s WHOIS being an actual, legitimate tech contact are relatively slim, though better than they would be in the commercial world - heaven knows that the White House wouldn’t be the first organization to falsify or forget to update their WHOIS information.

Of course, all of this technical digging could be for naught - there’s no way to know for sure whether or not the White House uses the same e-mail infrastructure for intra-office communications as they do to contact the outside world. That said, I do find it interesting that the same administration that signed Sarbanes-Oxley is also the same one that inadvertantly “lost e-mail” that might be useful in the course of an investigation, flying directly in the face of Section 802.

Ah well. Wouldn’t be the first time the federal government flew by a different set of rules than the rest of us, now would it?

Driving that point home, Liberia is cancelling municipal elections because it can’t afford to operate them.

If only there was some way to donate to the cause of Liberian municipal elections… not finding much on Google. If anybody comes up with anything, let me know. In the meantime, there is STAR Radio - maybe they won’t have local elections, but if we can help them report on what elections they do have, that might be a step in the right direction.

I’d love to say something witty and creative about Canada and their human rights commissions, but I think Ezra Levant nailed it. Instapundit, as always, is doing an excellent job of keeping people abreast, including links to the video of the interrogation, Ezra’s opening statement, and more.

To quickly summarize: Ezra Levant was the publisher for the Western Standard when they published the Danish Mohammed cartoons a couple of years ago. Naturally, somebody got offended (a “Muslim” imam, as it turns out) and complained to the Alberta Human Rights Commission. Now the Commission is attempting to determine why Ezra published the cartoons and whether or not he meant to incite hatred against Muslims. Ezra’s argument, naturally enough, is that it doesn’t matter why he said it, he has the right to say what he wants.

I know I’m not stepping on any controversial ground here (not controversial, anyways, to those that actually subscribe to some of the values of the Enlightenment), but I, for one, wish Ezra luck, thank him for his strong stand against those bureaucrats, and hope he continues to give such stirring speeches. Maybe we should import him and let him run for President - heck, I’d vote for him.

I’m probably going to stop writing about the flood in Fernley here pretty soon - there’s not a whole lot more to write about at this point. That said, all stories need a conclusion, and it looks like we’re just about there.

First, some good news for those in Fernley - Bush approved federal aid. Meanwhile, Fernley and her neighbors continue to do a stand up job in the rebuilding effort. The best part of this story is that, in the end, the federal government is providing the dessert in the rebuilding process, not the meat. That said, it’s not all positive - renters are hurting due to a lack of flood coverage and FEMA funds being primarily earmarked for homeowners. As a renter myself, I’m definitely sympathetic. If my apartment were to get flooded, I’d lose a lot. I can also understand not buying renter’s insurance, much less adding flood coverage on top of it; most people don’t rent because they’re financially secure, after all.

Meanwhile, courtesy of the RGJ and a little help from Google Maps, here’s a map of the flood damage:

View Larger Map

Sex & The City is on right now, and I can’t change the channel. Why? Because the remote is on the other side of the couch from me, and my sleeping girlfriend is blocking it.

Yes, I know - I could get up and turn it off. That isn’t the point. What I’m getting at is that, no matter which way I go here, it’s going to be inconvenient - either I’m stuck watching absolutely asinine, brain-dead cougar fantasy tripe, or I get off the couch for once and turn the TV off. Either way, it’s just not right. This isn’t the 1950’s, damn it!

(Rant over.)

I can’t argue with my hit count - the Fernley Flood is a popular search, so the least I can do is keep the information flow going. In that vein…

How is it that, every time the federal government gets involved in something, it finds a new and creative way to screw it up? Take the aftermath of the flood, for example. FEMA isn’t sure if they’ll provide aid or not. Meanwhile, somebody owned that levee, and that somebody was the Bureau of Land Management. Of course, in a classic case of bureaucratic chicanery, it’s not the BLM that manages the levee - it’s the Truckee Carson Irrigation District. This, of course, raises the fascinating question of how one maintains a mound of dirt in the first place.

It’s not all bad, though. Where the federal government is doing yet another bang-up job of finding new and creative ways to fail, local and volunteer agencies continue to do an outstanding job of picking up the pieces of people’s lives and helping the victims carry on. If you want to help, feel free to do so - some instructions can be found here. Alternatively, if you’re one of those walking back into your flooded home, you can find some tips here.

As for flood insurance in Nevada, and how that might seem somewhat oxymoronic, be sure to consider the geography of the land you live in. For those of you that haven’t looked at a topo map of the area, Nevada is made up of numerous small valleys. Most of them don’t have any drainage outside of the valleys, which means that, when appreciable precipitation does arrive (and it does, just not yearly), there’s only one place for it to go - the low point of that valley. Even in the parts of Nevada that do have drainage, such as those within the Truckee, Carson, or Humboldt River watersheds, Nevada’s drainage is limited by the nature of the Great Basin, which covers most of the state. Meanwhile, as if being in a giant bowl wasn’t enough, since Nevada’s a desert, the soil is very, very hard, and doesn’t absorb water well. So, let’s recap:

1. No drainage.
2. Even when there is drainage, it drains into an area that has no drainage.
3. Water isn’t absorbed by anything.

When you combine those ingredients with a non-trivial amount of water, the result is going to be… well… this:

And this:

And yes, even this:

Thing is, Nevada isn’t unique. Arizona floods, too. California, meanwhile, is borderline compulsive about getting everything worse than Nevada - floods, fires, earthquakes, you name it. I think it’s just a sad cry for attention, personally.

Checked my SiteMeter today - it turns out that a lot of people are visiting here to find out information on the flood in Fernley and on Reno’s weather in general. So, let’s get to it:

Firstly, parts of Fernley are still a mess. With that in mind, for obvious reasons, Fernley would prefer it if people didn’t turn the flood zone into a tourist trap. They still need to clean up the damage, and having people aimlessly stumble around there isn’t going to help things. The damage looks pretty bad - preliminary estimates figure 290 homes were damaged, and up to 1,500 people were displaced from the flood. For whatever it’s worth, it appears that similar flooding could happen in Reno and Sparks due to our “levee system” being somewhat improvised. When you live in a desert environment, proper runoff handling is frequently one of the last things you think about until it’s too late. Heck, sometimes it takes a couple of tries.

On a slightly more local note, you can get the listing of school closures and delays here:

School Closures and Delays for Monday

Posted: Jan 6, 2008 03:13 PM
Kellene Stockwell
Channel 2 News

The following schools will be closed for Monday, January 7:

* Lake Tahoe Unified School District
* Tahoe-Trucke Unified School District
* All Five Fernley Schools

The following schools will have a two hour delayed start for Monday, January 7:

* All Washoe County Schools except for Gerlach and Incline Schools (Regular Schedule)
* Bishop Manogue Catholic High School
* St. John’s Childrens Center
* Childrens Center at High Desert
* Summit Ridge Christian School
* All Virginia City Schools except for Hillside Elementary (Regular Schedule)
* Our Lady of the Snows
* Long Valley Charter School
* Pyramid Lake High School
* Excel Christian School
* Lion and Lamb Christian School
* Little Flower School
* Milan Institute of Sparks
* Pebbles Preschool in Sparks

On another note, if you wish to support the cause of the Fernley flood victims, you can do it by supporting the Northern Nevada Red Cross. You can find more information here, including who to contact if you require support.

It’s amazing the kinds of things you find when you stumble around aimlessly on line… like this gem:

The ReDistricting Game

Haven’t tried it yet, but it looks very interesting. Plus, it mentions the State of Jefferson, though I have no idea yet if it has to do with the “real” State of Jefferson.

That, I’m sure, is the question that crossed a lot of people’s minds when they turned on their morning news and saw this (ABC News):

Levee Breaks As Storms Pummel West Coast
Nev. Levee Breaks As Storms Pummel West Coast; Hundreds of Thousands Without Power

A ruptured levee sent a frigid “wall of water” from a rain-swollen canal into this high desert town early Saturday, flooding hundreds of homes and forcing the rescue of more than a dozen people by helicopter and boat.

To answer that question: Yes, Nevada has levees. In fact, there’s a fair amount of agriculture that goes on here, supported by some irrigation that, yes, is handled through the use of levees. This was a result of the Newlands Reclamation Act, which Fernley and neighboring Fallon are both heavy beneficiaries of.

Back to the story - a levee breaks. Homes get flooded. This sounds vaguely familiar, right? Surely the rescue work was botched, people started dying, and Bush looked like a tool, right?

Nope.

As the aforementioned ABC story notes,

No injuries were reported in the flood in Fernley, about 30 miles east of Reno, after a section of the Truckee Canal up to 150 feet long broke soon after 4 a.m. As many as 3,500 people were temporarily stranded and more than 100 had gathered Saturday afternoon at a shelter set up at a high school.

That’s right - nobody died. In fact, nobody was injured. So, naturally, the people of Fernley and Northern Nevada waited for FEMA to show up and rescue them, right?

Nope (KTVN). In fact, within a few hours, the neighborhoods were evacuated, the neighboring air station sent a helicopter, the National Weather Service issued a warning, the water was diverted, the levee was quickly rebuilt… the list goes on. Reno and Sparks both sent assistance to Fernley in the form of supplies and manpower. Best of all, this was all done and put into motion long before the politicos began issuing their statements.

Speaking of which, some statements from “notable” political types:

Sen. Hillary Clinton:

“I am deeply concerned and saddened about the reports of severe flooding in Fernley, Nevada this morning as a result of a levee breaking along the Truckee Canal. I am especially concerned given the freezing temperatures and severe snow storm conditions prevailing in the area.

As emergency crews begin their work to evacuate the 3,500 residents who have been displaced from their homes, my thoughts and prayers are with the entire community.”

Sen. Obama:

Today, Senator Barack Obama released the following statement on the Fernley levee break.

“Early this Saturday morning, a 30-foot section of the Truckee Canal levee broke, sending waves of water into the town of Fernley and trapping nearly 4,000 people in their homes. Michelle and I send our thoughts and prayers to the victims of this sudden disaster, and we honor the swift and heroic response from rescue organizations, including the Fallon Naval Air Station. I have asked my staff and supporters in the area to take time out from campaigning this weekend to assist in the relief efforts.”

Donation of blankets and clothing can be dropped off at the Reno Obama for America Headquarters at 141 East Pueblo Street, Suite B.

Sen. Reid, Sen. Ensign, and Congressman Heller:

U.S. Senators Harry Reid and John Ensign, and Representative Dean Heller of Nevada issued the following statements regarding the broken levee in Fernley.

“I spoke with Mayor Cutler today and promised him we would do everything possible to ensure the people of Fernley get the federal resources they need to help the community recover as quickly as possible,” said Reid. “We recognize that long after the flood waters recede there will still be a lot of work to do and my office will work with federal, state and local agencies to ensure that the community returns to pre-flood conditions and that this never happens again. I also extend my deepest gratitude toward all the first responders who are doing a great job getting people out of harm’s way.”

“My thoughts and prayers are with all of the families and communities impacted by this serious emergency. It is my hope that we can continue to move people out of harm’s way and into safety as quickly as possible. The Nevada Congressional Delegation is ready to assist the Governor and the people of Fernley to ensure that we have all the necessary resources to help those in need,” said Senator John Ensign.

“My heartfelt condolences go out to the residents of Fernley who have been affected by this flood. The Nevada delegation stands by the City of Fernley and we’ll do everything we can to help those affected by this disaster and fix the levees,” said Heller.

Meanwhile, the Reno Gazzette-Journal is maintaining a timeline for the Fernley flood. On a slightly more regional note, the RGJ is also maintaining a map of road closures, sandbag locations, and more. Since it’s also hosted on Google Maps, you can also see it here:

View Larger Map

All snarkiness aside, I do realize there’s a big difference in scale between what happened in New Orleans and Fernley. I just find the differences in reactions very interesting.

I don’t know which is worse - the show, or the commercials. The International Women Garment Workers Union commercial was particularly disturbing.

Without further ado… I present to you… the Star Wars Holiday Special.

Yes, the gimmick here is that I’m running for President in, oh, eight years or so. Consequently, I should be discussing politics like crazy, using it as a platform to draw out my political views and, if I’m really lucky, provide some biting commentary into current politics. Right now, I could cover the primaries - Iowa’s caucus is coming up, Nevada is an early caucus state… it would seem natural. There’s just one problem:

I think the primaries are inherently flawed.

Let’s think about our election process here. It follows some basic steps:

1. A candidate decides that he/she wants to run for public office.
2. Said candidate has to appeal to those that would participate in primaries; those are usually more hard-line elements in their respective parties.
3. After wooing the more extreme elements of their parties, they then complete a primary, during which the hard-line elements select their candidates.
4. Two viable candidates emerge from the primaries and then spend the rest of the campaign doing their best to pretend they didn’t say everything they said during the primaries. This causes more moderate voters to view them as phonies and more extreme voters to become disgruntled that their favorite candidate is revoking many of the positions they find near and dear.
5. Those voters who aren’t too disgusted with the politicians speaking out of both corners of their mouth show up, hold their nose, and elect somebody.

And we wonder why turnout is so low.

In short, the primary-based system we currently employ does an absolutely amazing job of reducing voter turnout by creating candidates that a vast majority of the country can’t stand and causing the candidates that are selected to become almost toxic to their original backers.

The question, of course, is what do we replace it with… and, I hate to say it, but I think France is on to something here.

In France, they have two waves - in the first wave, all of the candidates run together. Then, the top two candidates after the first election run off and go to the next round. Following our political structure, if Republicans were en vogue one year, that would mean we’d have two Republican candidates to choose between - this would come in handy whenever people like Mondale decide to run against people like Reagan. Similarly, if two Democrats were enormously popular, we could choose between those two candidates instead of wasting our time on other undesirable candidates.

Ultimately, our current system isn’t designed to pit the top two most popular candidates against each other, though. It’s similar to the college BCS - it’s less about pitting #1 vs #2 and more about keeping tradition alive, allowing some people to make plenty of money, and giving plenty of voice to extreme elements of both political parties that are loud, active, yet represent a small minority of American voters’ interests.

(Can you tell I wrote this on three hours sleep? I can.)

It’s a new year. The air is crisp (24 degrees, according to the Weather Channel). Hawaii just soundly trounced in the Sugar Bowl. I have to work tomorrow, thus finishing two straight weeks of four day weekends. I’ll miss them.

It’s customary to make lists of resolutions around this time of year, but I’m going to pass. It’s always been my personal opinion that, if you need to do something, you shouldn’t wait ’til New Years Day to decide to do it. Besides, most of the things I would resolve to do are either too personal or too pedestrian for a blog, anyways. I mean, who cares whether I pay my credit card debt down?

Instapundit had an interesting article today about whether or not Fred Thompson was too sane to be President, and that got me thinking: Am I crazy enough to run the strongest country in the free world? To answer that question, consider the following:

- I was baptized Mormon so I could have sex with a girl. We eventually married, then divorced.
- I received two free old Macs last week, and was genuinely excited because it meant I could finally give away the eight year old Mac I already had.
- I bought a ‘76 Plymouth Fury for $200, paid about $800 in repairs, then gave it back to the organization I bought it from a month and a half later. I still miss that car.
- I was stung by a bee a few years ago. This wouldn’t be that spectacular, except it was indoors, at night, and in November in Reno. In short, that bee never should’ve been alive enough to sting me.
- I drove to Nebraska to watch a football game (a 1500 mile journey in each direction) and, in the process, stayed up for 40 hours straight. I would’ve let the other person in the truck drive but he hadn’t slept either, so I decided it’d be safer to just hop myself up on enough Rockstar to kill a horse and complete the journey myself.
- I’ve only had two girlfriends. I married one of them. Even so, since I turned 16, I’ve only been out of a serious relationship for a grand total of nine months, a total that I don’t plan to add to anytime soon.
- I’m annoyed because I can’t find anyone to play Axis & Allies with me. Yes, I know about TripleA, but I want to play with the actual board.

Okay… well, with that list, I think I can safely conclude that I’m boring enough for the job. I need to sex that list up somehow. There has to be something completely insane and reckless that I can do that’ll prove to the world that I, David Colborne, am completely and totally insane enough to run this great country.

Any thoughts?