E. J. Dionne runs down the Republicans' desperate, slimy, seedy, ugly campaigning this season.

...this year's campaign will mark the moment when Republican leaders who govern in the name of conservatism turned definitively away from hope and waged one of the most trivial and ugly campaigns in our country's history.

...

But this year Republican campaigners and their advocates in the conservative media have crossed line after line in sheer meanness, triviality and tastelessness. Conservative optimism and its promise of morning in America have curdled into the gloom of a Halloween midnight horror show.

The Motley Fool reports on a stock-pumping fraud scheme involving a clever use of compromised on-line brokerage accounts:

The new breed of brokerage account hacker isn't looking to milk your account dry. There are safeguards against that, since account redemptions would be delivered in your name to your home. No, a broker hacker is simply after the ability to pump up a thinly traded stock's price by selling your stocks and then using the proceeds to snap up shares of a targeted speculative stock in your account.

In another fine piece in Rolling Stone, RFK Jr. shows the state of security and reliability for computerized voting machines:

Georgia law mandates that any change made in voting machines be certified by the state. But thanks to Cox's agreement with Diebold, the company was essentially allowed to certify itself. "It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state," Hood told me. "We were told not to talk to county personnel about it..."

According to Hood, Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties - the state's largest Democratic strongholds. To avoid detection, Hood and others on his team entered warehouses early in the morning. "We went in at 7:30 a.m. and were out by 11," Hood says. "There was a universal key to unlock the machines, and it's easy to get access. The machines in the warehouses were unlocked. We had control of everything. The state gave us the keys to the castle, so to speak, and they stayed out of our way."...

This week's Zelda's Inferno exercise was the "poetry obstacle course":

an empty bottle holds space, like the empty arms of one whose lover is gone
fire pulls in air from all sides and then pushes it upward
the river shapes its bed;
the riverbed shapes the river
books press the life out of words;
the reader breathes them back in
the waitress brought me coffee like a valkyrie taking me to Valhalla
seconds move by in a way that could be called "ticking" except that they were silent

oil and water still didn't mix
so he added an emulsifier

he pulled the planet toward him

CNN reports on a study showing that sleeping children awoke to recordings of their mothers' voices more quickly and more often than to a beeping smoke alarm.

The study of 24 children ages 6 to 12 found that 23 awoke to the recorded voice of their mother saying "(Child's first name)! (Child's first name)! Wake up! Get out of bed! Leave the room!" Fourteen of the children also awoke to the traditional tone alarm. One child didn't wake up to either.

The children who woke up to the voice did so at a median time of 20 seconds, compared with three minutes for those who woke up to the tone, according to the study by Columbus Children's Hospital researchers being released Monday in Pediatrics.

Another set of Zelda's Inferno exercises:

1) given three phrases (selected from random texts):

I remember when it was so clean
maintaining close family ties
in order to live well

connect them in a poem:

to live well, I am starting to think, is less
about the outside than about the inside -
(hardly a stunning revelation but one that in this world must be repeated over and over
antihypnotic counter-charm against advertising etcetera)

Mother Jones features an interview with an innocent man swept up in the "War on Terror", who spent two years in various prisons in three countries, including Gitmo:

Another Zelda's Inferno exercise. This one was a little more complicated:

1) Everyone in the group got a sheet of paper. They wrote a single line or phrase at the top, then passed the paper to the person next to them. That person wrote the "opposite", in the sense of "The Opposites Game" seen here, phrase on the next line, then folded the paper over so only their line was visibile, and passed it to the next person, who wrote an "opposite" line (which, this not being mathematics, was quite different than the first line). Each page was passed around until it had traversed the whole group. We all then looked at all the pages and each copied all the lines that we had written (one on each sheet). Those lines then provided source material for a poem.

As those who know me know, I have nothing against the appropriate use of "psychedelic" or "entheogenic" substances. Far from it. But I have to shake my head when someone starts taking their own feedback-saturated perceptions too seriously, as seen in this Rolling Stone profile of Daniel Pinchbeck:

This was all before Pinchbeck himself started making some very unusual claims. After separating from the heiress in 2003, he made a trip to Hawaii and the Amazon with an incredibly hot abstract painter and Santo Daime priestess, sunbathing nude with her by the Hawaiian cliffs. In the Amazon, he received a transmission from God, in the form of Quetzalcoatl, a mystical bird-serpent in Mayan myths. Quetzalcoatl told Pinchbeck that he is a prophet -- all those times in his life when he thought he was a loser, because his birthdate happens to be in June 1966 (666), and his surname happens to be a fancy word for "false gold," were signs that one day he'd be chosen to transmit some very special, intradimensional knowledge to the planet. Here it is: The world as we know it is about to end -- on December 21st, 2012, the last day of time in the Mayan calendar.