The BBC has this article Crimea ballot paper: No option to keep things as they are.

James Reynolds shows us round a polling station in Simferopol, takes a closer look at one of the ballot papers, and explains the voting process.

“There’s no option on this ballot paper for people to keep things as they are,” he notes

What follows is my best attempt to quote the understanding of the two questions on the ballot as explained by the reporter in the video.

Do you want crimea to become part of the Russian Federation?

Do you want Crimea to get greater autonomy under the 1992 constitution

Thanks for Cedric Flower’s comment on my Facebook post about  my previous post, Crimea result makes “a mockery” of democracy says Hague.  The actual wording doesn’t seem to be quite as stark as Cedric said.  You can judge for yourself as to what you think of the voting procedure and the ballot wording.

It’s one thing to have an opinion as to whether or not you think this was the fairest way to vote on the subject, but deciding what we ought to do about that judgment is a wholly different matter.  At the very least, before taking any action on our judgment, we ought to know how this type of ballot wording would compare to other ballot wordings that have been used to get the Ukraine to the current political situation it is in. For instance what was the ballot wording for  the acceptance of the 1992 constitution?

There would still be the irony of taking action against a country based on what we thought of someone else’s democratic procedures.  Might we not be best served by letting the people themselves figure out what they want to do about the situation? (I can’t even figure out if the wording of the previous sentence makes any sense even though I invented that wording myself and it sounds kind of literary.)

The BBC has the story Crimea result makes “a mockery” of democracy says Hague.

The government says it rejects the result of Crimea’s referendum, which Foreign Secretary William Hague has denounced as a “mockery of proper democratic practice”.

A total of 95.5% of voters in Crimea supported joining Russia and leaving Ukraine, officials said.

Mr Hague said Russia must now face “economic and political consequences”.

A statement from Number 10 said that the UK did not “recognise” the referendum or its outcome.

There are similar stories coming from “Democracies” around the world including the USA.

To paraphrase Franklin Delano Roosevelt,  “This is a day that will live in irony.”  The gall of the Crimeans to undemocratically vote at over 95% to go with Russia.    They have not even satisfied our foreign definition of how they must implement their own democracy.  How undemocratic can that be?

Who is supposed to decide what is democratic in a democracy, the people involved, or some third party?

Yes, I know the situation may be somewhat more complex than that, but on the face of it, the world “democracies” seem to be somewhat idiotic to claim that the implementing the desires of an overwhelming majority expressed in a transparent ballot is undemocratic.  It was “transparent” in so far as the ballot boxes that I saw on TV were made out of transparently clear material as pointed out by the NBC reporter who showed the ballot box that was at the polling station where he filmed his report.

Remember that our Civil War was fought because the Southern action violated our Constitution, they shot first, and we decided that the rights of our citizens would be violated if we allowed it to go on.  We have no business telling other countries that they must abide by our rules that we use in our own country when their situation is so different from ours.  The boundaries we set up in our country were freely determined by us, as long as you discount the slaves and the native Americans (SARCASM, SARCASM).  There was no such self-determination in attaching the Crimea to the Ukraine.  Of course, I am not so sure that the Russians in Crimea got there by the free will of the people either.  That is reason in itself why we ought not be meddling in a situation so complex, that we do not even understand it the way the people who have to live with it do.

We might think that “we would never live with those conditions”, but it is not up to us to decide what conditions other people are willing to live with if they choose to do so.  We certainly don’t have the right to foment violence that kills those people because we don’t like the decision they made.

Now that I have installed a variant of Linux on my old computer, I could handle the format of the file on this tape.

The label says it is from 1983 and it is in TAR format.  This format is still a mainstay on Linux computers.  In this case, it is not a problem of software, but of hardware.  I wonder if there are still any mag tape readers for this kind of  tape. I also wonder if all the magnetized bits have faded into randomness.

If you are wondering who Elsie was, she was my μVax computer in my office at Digital Equipment Corporation.

Alternet has the story 7 Crazy (And Not So Crazy) Theories on What Happened to Flight 370.

As part of the terrorist hijack theory, some reports have suggested that terrorists hijacked the 100-ton plane and have hidden it somewhere intact with all radio devices turned off to avoid detection. The fact that the cell phones of passengers have rung, according to relatives, has only added fuel to that rumor.

They came close to the most worrisome theory possible, but then veered away from it, perhaps because of lack of imagination.

The worst case sceharion that I can imagine seems to even have escaped the thinking of the CIA, at least from what the CIA has said publicly.

Here it is, and I am sure I can’t be the only one to think of this. The plane has been hijacked by terrorist.  They are now setting it up for a mission even more shocking than the World Trade Center crashes.

The people who flew the planes into the World Trade Center had to depend on the fuel that was loaded in the plane to cause the collapse of the buildings.  Think of what people could load onto a plane if they had unlimited time and complete control of the plane.

Can they be loading the plane with tons of high explosives or even a nuclear bomb?  What about germ warfare?

What are they doing with the hundreds of passengers?  Are they going to use them as hostages by putting them back on the plane when it takes off for its mission?

What action will be taken when the plane is found to be in the air again?  We could shoot it down  to prevent it from completing its mission.  After that, we might find that it was not on a deadly mission at all.

Has a movie like this already come out, or will it be in theaters in a month or two?

To the certainty of death and taxes, we must add Murphy’s Law.

For those of you unfamiliar with that law it states, “If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.”

Yesterday, I posted the article The Solution To The Windows-XP Conundrum. In that post, I noted  that Microsoft gives you two solutions to the problem of Windows-XP becoming unsupported in April. Both of Microsoft’s solutions wipe out your ability to run programs that you had on the old Windows-XP machine.  In that post, I also noted that there is another option that allows you to use another operating system, Linux, on your old machine while preserving the ability to run Windows-XP if you have to.

Being an extremely firm believer in Murphy’s Law, I chose the option that preserves Windows-XP.  I implemented that option yesterday instead of one of those Microsoft options.

Today, I received a letter from my sister asking me to find some old documents from 1993 and 1994.  I have some documents on file that are in Adobe FrameMaker format.  The only machine that I have that still has Adobe FrameMaker on it is the Windows-XP machine.  If I had wiped out the ability to run Windows-XP yesterday, I would not have been able to look at those files today.

You never need 20 year old documents until exactly the day after you eliminate the capability to read them.  Since I knew of that problem, I preserved my ability to read them.

I have two computers. The old one is running Windows-XP. Microsoft is discontinuing support for Windows-XP which accounts for about 30% of their installed base. Microsoft has two options for you. One is to just upgrade the operating system by buying either Windows 8 or Windows 7. You have to first check to see if those operating systems are compatible with your old hardware. After the upgrade, many of your old programs won’t run, but if you used the optional installation aid, at least your settings can be restored.

The other choice Microsoft offers you is to buy a new computer with the new software already on it, and just dispose of your old computer. You lose almost everything from your old computer unless you find some way to at least transfer the data from your old machine to the new one.

There is another alternative that Microsoft probably disparages. You can install a variant of Linux such as Ubuntu on your old machine.

You might ask if you will lose everything on your old machine if you install Ubuntu. Fortunately the answer is that you won’t lose anything. You won’t even lose what you would under Microsoft’s two options. The reason is that the default Ubuntu installation option is to turn your machine into a dual boot machine. This means you will be able to run Ubuntu or Windows-XP at any time on the old computer.

You won’t want to run Windows-XP if you can possibly avoid it because of the future vulnerability of that operating system after Microsoft stops fixing security problems in Windows-XP. However, if you find that there is something you absolutely need from the Windows-XP side, you can disconnect your machine from the internet for safety reasons, and then boot-up Windows-XP.

Prior to the discontinuance of Microsoft support for Windows-XP, you won’t have to disconnect your computer from the internet to retrieve something from the Windows-XP side of your machine.

Since Sharon is the one now using the old computer for browsing the internet, all I need to do is to get Firefox running under Ubuntu on the old machine.  Firefox even provides a facility to keep all of your Firefox installations in sync.  I am already using that to sync my Windows-7 machine, the Windows-XP machine, and my Samsung tablet.

If there is anything you get from reading this blog, it should be who is William Black and what has he said and done.  All you have to do is search in the search box, at the right below the menu and above recent posts of the blog, for William Black. The preceding link will do it for you.

Politico has the story Senate jobless benefits deal reached.

The bill would be paid for by an extension of U.S. Customs fees established by the recent budget deal through 2024 and by making changes to federal pension programs over the next 10 years.

Who needs their stinkin’ Social Security or Medicare anyway? Let’s pit the unemployed against the old folk and see who wins. Either way, the rich win.

What is this baloney about paid for? Do these Senators have the foggiest idea that their government is sovereign in its own currency? As long as there is slack in the economy, there is no worry about how to pay for Social Security and Medicare (if we get a handle on big Pharma and private health insurance companies).

Why do we have to pit the unemployed against the elders, when the top 1% is holding 40% of the wealth of the country. We elders earned our benefits. What have the great bank robbers done to earn their wealth? Are they supposed to be rewarded for tanking the world economy. Are we that afraid of them?

Oh, and how do the Republican Senators think the FED payed for the $13 trillion in bank bailout money? They were shocked when Ben Bernanke told them he just typed it into the computer.  What are these clowns doing making economic decisions for our country?

By clowns, I mean the Senators, Democrats and Republicans who are foolish enough to think that new spending has to be “paid for” by cuts in other programs.  As for Ben Bernanke, his only clownishness was his failure to put an end to the big bankers accounting control fraud when he had the chance in the Bush Administration.

See my previous post Bill Black at TED Explains How Insiders Rob Banks and Cause Crises.

Thanks to MardyS for posting this on his Facebook page so I could get a head start in trying to beat this idea into the ground.

Alternet has the article WATCH: Daily Show’s Samantha Bee Nails Hypocrisy of Government Funding for Penis-Pumps—But Questioning Contraception Dollars.

ObamaCare is that insurance companies have to cover women’s health care needs including contraception.  This has caused serious congressional debate with Republicans adamant that women ought to pay for their own individual sexual health choices.

Yet, on last night’s The Daily Show, Samantha Bee revealed that unlike the serious congressional debate targeting female contraception and reproductive healthcare in general, Medicare has spent $172 million on penis pumps in the last five years, which the mostly white, older, male members (sic) of Congress don’t seem to have a problem.

Now the dirty little secret is out. This must be why I am such a strong proponent of women’s equality in health care funding by the government. I don’t want to be a hypocrite.

Maybe the rallying cry ought to be “No penis pumps and no viagra unless female contraceptives are funded.”

Naked Capitalism has the article Bill Black at TED Explains How Insiders Rob Banks and Cause Crises.

This is a great piece to share with friends and who still aren’t sure why we had a crisis or are predisposed to blame it on greedy borrowers, as opposed to greedy and reckless financial services industry players.

If you don’t know who Bill Black is and if you haven’t read his book and if you have been ignoring my blog for the past 7 or 8 years, here is the bio that was posted along with the YouTube video below.

William Black is an associate professor of economics and law at UMKC. He has held many prestigious positions, including executive director for Fraud Prevention. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae’s former senior management. He is a criminologist and former financial regulator.

Warning: If you would prefer to cling to your own idea of what caused the crisis because you are so sure you know what you know, then do not watch the video below. If, on the other hand, you entertain the possibility that the Tea Party funded by the Koch Brothers might have an ulterior motive in getting you to believe the government’s promotion of home ownership is the cause, then this video is for you.

Why aren’t we outraged enough to demand action from Obama and Holder?