I didn't make this up, but apparently there's a correlation between Election 2000 and the tracks of Charley, Frances and Ivan. And, who knows, maybe Jeanne. Not that it's any consolation living in a Gore county that just got "brushed" by Frances... and, who knows, maybe Jeanne.
Maybe.
And with that....
The Bush Loses Campaign Experiment.
Posit: That Google can act as a proxy for the mass-mind; that a given number of hits on Google can act as a meter for determining the popularity of any given idea.
Posit: That by increasing the number of links to a particular phrase, or even the presence of a particular phrase on the web, one can alter the Google ranking given a particular idea.
Posit: That the internet (and Google specifically) has a positive feedback relationship with public consciousness; that as ideas rise in their ranking on popular search engines, they will also grow in popularity out in the real world, just as political polls not only measure public opinion but also lead public opinion. Winners tend to win; losers tend to lose.
Posit: The current president of the United States is a loser.
Thus, the project:
Bush loses fight with space-age scooter
Bush loses wargame against Iran.
Bush loses debate against a stem cell.
Bush loses key aide on Latin America
Bush loses his dignity (worth checking out the unlinkable image).
Bush loses the will to see justice done, or possibly Bush just loses the door to Karl Rove's office
Bush Loses by a Landslide in Global Opinion Poll
Bush loses advantage in war on terrorism
Bush loses closest political aide
Bush loses his aura of invincibility
Bush loses poll (and, it appears, a yo-yo)
Bush loses ability to crush democratically elected central American governments
Bush loses advantage in War on Terrorism
This is second-hand information that I'm choosing to trust, because it feels true.
My sister-in-law knows a WPB police lieutenant (who I promised not to name here) who told her the following story about Hurricane Frances.
During the height of the storm, some looters started venturing out to hit pawn shops and steal their guns. After all, who's going to stop them?
So, somehow, the police learned what was going on, and had to figure out what to do about it. There's a hurricane on -- pawn shop owners weren't going to go out to the stores to sit guard, and there are too many pawn shops in West Palm Beach for the cops to patrol all of them... even if there weren't 120 mile-per-hour winds knocking over trees and powerlines.
So the police, they decided to break into the pawn shops themselves and steal all the guns.
It was like a B&E race! With lethal weapons! And lethal weather!
Things like this are why I love South Florida.
Driving through the tail end of the storm and the aftermath, one sees lots of messages directly addressing the storm, spraypainted on shutters and boarded windows. Most are predictable: "Bring it on!" or "Go Away!" But some just go a little further.
The best I saw:
* A local tattoo shop, which had perfectly recreated their ornately lettered window with spraypaint on plywood. I had to look twice to make sure it was actually a board.
* The tobacco store around the corner kept it simple: "No Cigars for Frances!"
* A small house on Federal Highway in Lake Worth didn't put any boards or shutters up. Instead, painted on the glass of the windows: "God. Please don't hit me." The building was untouched.
I took some photos of myself and my immediate surroundings during the storm, and will try to post them later -- once I'm able to log on from home, rather than work, I think.
