Preliminary data based on exit polls are showing that Jonathan Quince has collected zero (0) votes this time around.

This may seem curious to many, since I did cast my vote early this afternoon.  How could it be that (barring any surprises I find in my e-mail) I did not even amass a single vote?  Well, the answer is simple:

I voted for Bush.

On the one hand, I say, take that, stupid-stupid-Kerry and frothing-at-the-mouth rabid Bush-haters.  (I can stand an intelligent discussion with a misguided but well-intending Kerry supporter, but the religiously anti-Bush crowd simply disgusts me; if you've been following the news for the past few years, you know those of whom I speak.)  But on the other, I must say that I am far from being President Bush's number-one supporter.  After all, I'm a porn guy (which Bush hates) — I'm a science guy (which Bush hates, vis-à-vis stem cell research and similar issues) — and I'm a national security guy (which even Bush is too weak on for my tastes).  So how could I vote for Bush?

The answer is simple:  While some people seem not to have gotten the message, we happen to be in the middle of a war.

In peacetime, I would never vote for Bush.  In 2000, I wrote-in an independent candidate; much as I loathed Gore, I couldn't bring myself to make my mark for Bush's name.  Yet now, peacetime rules do not apply.  For better or for worse, wartime changes the rules in many ways; and at the ballot box today, the rule of wartime expediency determined my vote.

The war is my single deciding issue in this election; and it just so happens that the war is one of the only things that President Bush has done a half-decent job with.  (And I do give President Bush some serious credit for his handling of the war.  He is facing problems that would daunt all but the strongest of souls, and he has not caved in to the corruption that seems to rule nearly the entire world nowadays.)  I dread the very thought of how Kerry would handle the war.  As I watch this race draw to a close with the numbers growing closer and closer, I fear for the very future existence of America as we know it.

And that is why Jonathan Quince did not get my vote, even though he would make the perfect President. ;-)

Ahh, well.  Being the Oligarch-at-heart that I am, I do believe that I shall simply ignore the polls and carry on with my victory party anyway.

If you haven't seen them, review Part 1 and Part 2.

The polls nationwide will be open soon.  Before you go and waste your vote on a major-party candidate (as I probably will), consider the following Quince Campaign Promises:

• Within my first year in office, I aim to cut the Federal budget by no less than $1 trillion.  That money belongs to you, the American taxpayer; and I intend to see that you keep it instead of giving it to bureaucrats and their pork-barrel projects.  (Note that I may cut the budget by more than $1 trillion in the first year, and will reduce it even more in time; my first-year goal is to cut the size of the Federal government by about 50%.)
• Within my first year in office, I expect to see consumers paying no more than a national average of 99¢ per gallon at the pump for gasoline.  This is part of a general campaign to drastically depress oil prices.  Remember, that corrupt sheikh who does nothing but run a dictatorship is pocketing billions of dollars per year of your money (and then using your money to finance terrorism against you).  Cut out his salary, and oil prices drop.  (Note, again, that I may cut prices more than that in the first year, and I certainly will cut further after that.)
• Within my first month in office, God willing, I expect to see an end to terrorism in Israel and a drastic reduction of the terrorist threat against American interests.  (Well, that's not really my campaign promise except in as much as I will stay off their backs; and a month does seem rather long, as I seem to recall that they work on a six-day timetable.)

Remember, these aren't the duplicitous promises of a professional politician.  These are promises made by none other than Jonathan Quince; and what I say, I do.  My honor is my sword.

Now, go to the polls and write the name of Jonathan Quince in on the ballot!  Think:  Who else will give you national security, an end to the personal income tax, and unlimited porn?  May freedom and justice reign under the auspices of the Quince Administration.

In regards to my election bid, my core constituency has raised an important issue that I did not mention specifically in my mini-platform:  That of a property owner's rights over his land and domicile.

Therefore, I must explicitly add the followingto my mini-platform:

• Allodial Title:  I will institute policies to return the majority of privately-owned land in America to the status of allodial title, “free and clear”.  In practical terms, this has many ramifications, including that of landowners being not subject to property taxes.  Most (or all) zoning laws will also be overturned and replaced by nuisance laws that require the demonstration of a material and direct negative effect on someone else's property (or a reasonable certainty that such a negative effect will actually occur).
• Defense of Property:  I will push policies similar to some state laws that allow property owners to shoot intruders and/or trespassers into the curtilage of a home or other private facility on sight (under the presumption that a home invader's very presence shows an ipso facto threat to life and property).  No longer will innocent people need to worry about prosecution for defending their homes.  The bottom line:  Your home is your castle, and you have the right to keep bad guys out by force if necessary (including by deadly force).

Remember that my full platform includes many other points of importance.  I am only listing those matters of most immediate concern which I promise to face head-on in the event that I am elected President (or even if I am not elected, for that matter).

Since the election is tight and I am unlikely to win enough votes to make the news, I have a request for my supporters:  If you do write in my name on the ballot, e-mail me at {my_first_and_last_initials}@oligarch.com and let me know!

Vote for Jonathan Quince for a strong, free, and just America.  [Update 2004-11-02:  And read up on some more of my campaign promises before you go to the polls!]

Here is my mini-platform:

• The Top Line:  A strong national defense; uncompromising prosecution of the War on Terrorism; a military solution to terrorism.  If you are a single-issue voter, this should be your issue.
• Foreign policy:  A strong regard for America's national self-interest and national security; uncompromisingly strong support for Israel; a hard line against that corrupt club of tin-pot dictators known as the “United Nations”, and possible withdrawal from that organization on moral grounds; vigorous enforcement of American policy on rogue states.  (This includes finishing what President Bush started in Iraq and entering into other similar wars if necessary.)
• Economic policy:  Lower taxes, more economic freedom, less governmental involvement in the economy.  Immediate repeal of the capital gains and estate taxes; immediate drastic reduction and rapid phasing-out of the personal income tax; restructuring, simplification, and reduction of corporate taxes, with a focus on taking pressure off small business; reduction of the Federal government to a fraction of its current size and rededication of the Federal government to its Constitutionally mandated functions (e.g., military, foreign policy, currency, function as arbiter between the States, etc.).
• Science and technology:  Uncompromising support for (and non-interference with) cutting-edge research, including stem cell research; a complete reform of the patent system.
• Internet:  Death penalty for spammers.  (Seriously.  Make spamming a “Darwin's Law” offense.  And every spam run crosses state lines, so it is indeed a Federal offense.)  If they've made it onto ROKSO or similar lists, fry 'em.
• Tobacco Policy:  Use powers under the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments to force permanent suspension of anti-tobacco policies nationwide.  This includes drastic lowering or complete elimination of confiscatory taxes currently levied on cigarettes and other tobacco products.  This also includes enforcing the right of private establishments such as restaurants to allow or disallow smoking as the proprietors see fit, rather than as dictated by the Nanny State.
• Education:  Federal intervention in education has failed.  Totally disband the current Federal education regime.  (To all the New Math and Whole Language nitwits and the bureaucrats who support them:  “You're all fired!”  God, I have wanted to say that for years.)  Temporarily replace it to prevent chaos, but see the “Constitution Updating Party” item for an idea as to whether the Federal government will remain involved at all.
• First Amendment:  Uncompromising support for freedom of speech, including freedom of sexual expression.  Removal of obscenity laws nationwide.  Repeal of laws that single out the pornography and sexual entertainment industries for harassment.
• Second Amendment:  Support for the right to keep and bear arms, a right Constitutionally protected for the people.   (Update:  Since it is an issue of great importance, I must explicitly mention that this includes uncompromising support for the personal right to self-defense and use of force in defense of life, limb, and property.)
• Ninth Amendment:  Duh.
• Tenth Amendment and Federalism:  A shrinking of Federal control exercised over the States.   Stop abuse of the Interstate Commerce Clause.  Stop bullshit like the tricks used to raise the drinking age to 21 nationally.
• Federal Enforcement of the Bill of Rights:  Use of both Executive powers and pressure on Congress to vigorously enforce the Bill of Rights (viz., Amendments One through Ten) on the States and lower governments.  This is allowed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
• Constitution Updating Party:  Sure, the Constitution is a bit behind the times.  Changing times have altered the balance on many points of policy; and issues like the Interstate Highway System, NASA, and the Internet just didn't exist when the Framers put it together.  But the Framers did know this would happen, which is why the Constitution has built-in processes for amendment.  In that light, movements should be started towards amending the Constitution to bring it up-to-date; and a strict deadline should be set beyond which all Federal functions not mentioned in the Constitution will immediately cease if new Amendments do not allow their continued existence.
• Prostitution Policy:  Use of Executive privilege to immediately suspend all anti-prostitution laws nationwide (excepting laws against forced prostitution or child prostitution, which violate other laws anyway) and fire all vice squads from police forces.  Payment of compensatory damages to prostitutes who have had assets seized.
• Drug policy:  Three-tiered approach:
  1. Decriminalize possession of drugs for personal use.  Continue to strongly encourage education about the harmful effects of drugs.
  2. Strictly regulate the manufacture and distribution of currently-illicit drugs.  Institute price controls to keep the cost of drugs down, and thus to slice the profit margins of recreational drug manufacturing razor-thin.  Overall, Federal policy should regulate the quality and quantity of output while strictly discouraging profiteering off of newly-licit drugs.
  3. Destroy the organized crime elements who currently profit from drug illegality.  This requires international action, including U.S. military intervention on foreign soil if necessary.  The drug lords (and corrupt governments who support them) rake in billions of dollars each year from the drug racket, and they must be liquidated with extreme prejudice.
• Given the magnitude of the current drug problem, drug policy must be handled by the Federal government as a matter of the general welfare.  However, the end-goal is to roll back Federal involvement over the long term by eventually making drugs into a “non-issue”.  (Nobody cares about the fruit if it isn't forbidden.)
• Death To Lawyers Act:  Complete reform of the criminal and civil justice systems, with a special focus on making the system more accessible to pro-se representation.  Death to lawyers (or at least unemployment).
• John Kerry Policy:  Executive order revoking Kerry's citizenship and deporting him and his family to the Eighth Circle of Hell.
• .…and much more….
• The Bottom Line:  More personal and individual freedom at home; more security, domestically and internationally; and justice above all.

If, however, you must make the bifurcated choice for a major-party candidate, consider which candidate is less far away from the above.  (Hint:  Kerry it ain't.)

This is a joint message of the Committee to Elect Jonathan Quince, the Alliance Against the Abomination Known as John Kerry, and the Social Order for the Physical Enjoyment of Females.  Political donations amounting to $0.00 were provided by our corporate overlords at Oligarch Corporation.

Update 2004-11-01:  My core constituency has spoken!  With only one day left until the election, I update my platform with important points regarding rights of land ownership.

Update 2004-11-02:  Read up on some more of my campaign promises before you go to the polls.

• Spam.  It would be bad enough if spam only cost millions of dollars in bandwidth and server resource usage (a cost that, as always, is passed on to the consumer).  But even worse, spam fundamentally alters the nature of communications on the Internet.  By forcing users to munge e-mail addresses on the Web and Usenet, spam makes Internet communications more difficult to use (particularly for the blind or disabled) and destroys the possibility of legitimate automated applications.  By burying people's inboxes in offensive, badly-spelled dreck so that important personal and business communications are lost in the noise, spam makes e-mail unpleasant and impractical to use for important correspondence.

  The bottom line:  Spam is bad, and spammers should be shot on sight.

• Spyware, browser hijackers, and malicious adware.  When you can't trust your computer, how can you do business online?  When the majority of users' computers are untrustworthy, how can trustworthy applications be built?  When Bill Gates Himself has been hit by spyware, how can Aunt Millie hope to keep her computer clean?

• Phishing and Fraud.  Annoying as hell to the Net-savvy.  Detrimental to newbies.  A recent study pegged the annual cost of phishing at $500 million in the U.S. alone.  Also, this is largely a subset of spam (above).

• Viruses, worms, and other malware.  This overlaps with Spyware, et al. above for obvious reasons; and since a plurality (if not the majority) of major network worms today are organized crime tools for building botnets for spamming, this also overlaps with Spam.  Needless to say, malicious programs are Very Bad.

• Wrongful litigation, legislation, and other governmental or government-backed actions.  Can I safely criticize a major corporation online?  Can DeCSS be distributed as a song?  Will peer-to-peer distribution methods be killed for legitimate uses as well as illicit ones?  Why are some people hell-bent on destroying lives and livelihoods by attacking the porn industry?  Is technical innovation going to be totally strangled by patents run amok — or will that require an act of Congress?  Why can a corrupt and powerful organization such as the Church of Scientology wield the power of government to destroy critics' lives and prevent information about Scientology's crimes from being made public?

  What freedom of speech and technical innovation do we really have?

  So many questions.  So few encouraging answers.

On this, the holiest day of the Hebrew calendar, I shall be fasting from sundown to sundown as a symbol of my solidarity with the Jews and my support for Israel.  It is just a gesture, a token that seems powerless in the practical face of world events; yet particularly now, it is fitting for me to place my spiritual signature on the side of what is good and right.

Work, food, water, sex, and leather shoes.

I am familiar with the Halakhic prohibitions meant not for sacrificial suffering, but rather to bring the faithful away from their bodies and closer to God for a day.  Suspend all connection to the physical world, as far as you can without injuring yourself, and spend a day immersed in the purely spiritual.  I don't know that I shall be observing all of rules — I choose ad hoc from year to year; and since I am a Gentile, I doubt that anybody will argue with me — but I always keep the fast.

Yet today, my mind is preoccupied with more important issues than those of ancient ritual.

I live my life in a fairly easy and well-to-do world.  I want not for food or for a roof over my head or for warmth in the chill of winter.  Peace and quiet surround me; I fear not for my safety when engaged in such simple activities as a walk down the street or a trip to the store.

Yes, I do have my own private sufferings.  Yet as a child of educated middle-class America, ensconced in a cocoon of safety and security from the day I was born, there are certain dangers of which I am simply unaccustomed to worrying.

Say, to pick a very recent example, the danger of having a mortar shell suddenly crash through the roof of my home, causing the structure to collapse on my head.

There are lots of things I don't worry about.  Whether going to the mall, boarding a bus, or simply strolling near my house, I don't worry that the person next to me is a walking human bomb who is about to self-detonate.  When my family members go to a pizzeria or a discotheque, I don't worry that they are going to come home in burnt and mangled pieces.  The school buses I see on the roads near my home aren't armor-plated — because nobody is worried that they will be suddenly driving into a hail of gunfire.

When I go to the top of a famous skyscraper, I don't worry that somebody is about to crash into it using a 767 fully loaded with premium-grade jet fuel as a missile.

Ah, the lovely sheltered life we here in America do did lead.  It is was such a luxury.

I read Israeli newspapers.  One of the most dreaded parts of my morning is the prospect of facing yet another list of names.  Sometimes, for weeks on end, it is a daily ritual:  Innocent victims of terrorism popping up in droves on my computers screen.  I read each name carefully, giving it a little salute, before I continue with my day.

Names are important; but it is also useful to remember that each name has a real human being attached.  So every now and then, I go to look at their faces.  (When I first found that memorial site in 2001, there were eleven pages of faces; at present, there are 45.)  Page after page, face after face… on, and on, and on.  Each of those was a real person, living and breathing and warm, with a life and hopes and dreams.  Each of them was cut short; and all are now resting beneath the soil before their time for no good reason at all.  (Unless you want to call them “sacrifices for peace” — ugh, just like the “sacrifices” of 9/11, right?)

Yet the violence is worse than senseless:  It is cold and calculating, hotly acclaimed, a sickening mixture of religious zeal and pure, undiluted hate.

(To be continued at a later date.)

I was born in this life to a land built by settlers.  That land, of course, is the United States of America.  Now, for those who do not know me, I should disclaim that I am not born a Jew; but for a number of reasons, I feel a great kinship to the peoples of a different land, another land that was also built by settlers and freed through warfare from the shackles of British colonialism.  That land, of course, is the modern State of Israel; and I would like to focus for a moment on the brave souls who built that state in the most impossible of circumstances.

They left the lands of their births and moved to a worthless strip of land, a land that nobody wanted.  They populated a territory previously inhabited only by nomadic tribes and impoverished vagabonds.  They sowed the desert with their sweat and their blood; and from the desert, they made green things grow.

Living as we do in the comfort of Western nations, we must see these Zionists as simply being crazy and masochistic.  Many of them were educated.  All were hard-working, able-bodied, and courageous.  Had they so chosen, they could have had comfortable lives in other countries.  Instead, they chose to spill their toil on the harsh sands of the desert in order to build a country of their own.

They did it for love.  They did it for loyalty.  They did it for a concept called Zionism:  The idea that after millennia of wandering and persecution, the Jews should resurrect their ancient nation and take command of their own destiny.  They came as “settlers” to a barren wasteland; they drained the swamp and irrigated the desert; and in the space of a few generations, with little help but violent interference from others, they transformed it into a modern paradise.

Barely a half-century later, the world has its eye on another group of Jewish “settlers”.  Time has passed, and they are not the same people as the “settlers” of yore; but they share one fundamental commitment:  The belief that historically and politically Jewish land should be inhabited by Jews.  And like the original Zionists, the “settlers” of Yesha put their lives on the line to back up that commitment.  In contrast to people who sit in Europe or America and talk about a Jewish homeland, they are out there yielding forth the ultimate sacrifices to make it a reality.

Like the Zionists of the twentieth century, these “settlers” have come home only to be met opprobrium and murderous rage.  They have suffered the insults of the world at large and the attacks of their barbarous neighbors.  Great are their losses, and few are their rewards.  Yet for them, the ultimate reward is not one of wealth or of glory before a world that would rather see them dead.  Rather, they take solace and strength in the principles that drive their existence.

The premises are simple.  Every square inch of Eretz Yisrael belongs to the Jews, whether by historical connection or modern right or both.  Whether a Jew builds a home in Tel Aviv or he builds it a few miles outside the 1949 ceasefire lines, he has a right to exist there; indeed, many parts of Yesha were inhabited by the settlers of just a few decades ago before they were forced out in the heat of the War of Independence.  Even the simplest understanding of history should suffice to prove that the “settlers” of Yesha have a moral and spiritual sameness to the settlers of Mandate Palestine.  And thus, if the “settlers” of Yesha are damned, so damned is the State of Israel itself.

Condemnation of the “settlers” of Yesha is condemnation of the Zionist enterprise.

Condemnation of the “settlers” of Yesha is condemnation of the modern State of Israel, of its history, its founding, and its very right to exist.

Condemnation of the “settlers” of Yesha is condemnation of the covenant of Abraham, of the legacy of King David, of the war for survival fought by the likes of Menachem Begin and David Ben-Gurion.

Expulsion of Jews from their homes is the job of a German Nazi like me — not the job of Ariel Sharon, a Jew, a General, and a lifelong Zionist.  What has happened, Arik?  What corruption hath been wrought on your watch?  Pray ye tell; the world of the watchful wants to know.

No other nation in the respective histories of Earth or mankind would give “back” land won under such circumstances.  No other nation would use its military to expel its own people from their homes to give their land over to a people with whom the nation is actively at war.  The history of right and wrong in this matter is far too intricate for the scope of a simple bit of rhetoric such as this; but one fact remains clear to any but the most ignorant:  The modern State of Israel was born in blood and fire, not in a frenzy of pitiful ass-kissing and apologies.  And the State of Israel cannot be sustained by this policy of ultimate appeasement, a policy that makes Neville Chamberlain appear the proud bearer of Justice's sword by comparison.

Now, nobody is going to listen to a cranky old Gentile like me.  I'm just a naïf with too much idealism and far too much knowledge of history for his own good.  So I'll just slip back into my comfy American home and go back to deciding which eye I want to gouge out at the polls this November.

Update:  It just keeps getting better.

(Long story.  Don't ask.)