It is a time of freedom and fear, of Gaia and of borders, of many paths and the widening of a universal toll road, emptying country and swelling cities, of the public bought into privacy and the privacy of the public sold into invisible data banks and knowing algorithms. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.

These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread.

Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.


 
In a new Gallup Poll, George W. Bush has hit his lowest approval rating ever since entering office.

Meanwhile, our irregular statistics show evidence that Wesley Clark is not just a flash in the Clinton conspiracy or moony media pan. There's something real going on here. Six times as many Clark stickers as Dean stickers have sold off our shelves in the past week. Clark meetups added 1,248 new members yesterday, while Dean meetups added 474. All of a sudden, Clark has the second-largest meetup mass of all the candidates.

This shouldn't be read as a Clark surge at Dean's expense, but as an independent phenomenon. The sticker shock happened not just because all the Dean people already have stickers: the rate of Dean sticker purchases haven't gone down, the Clark sticker purchases have just soared. Similarly, the rate of about 400 new members a day is a long-term average for the Dean campaign, meaning that the Dean engine is still chugging along at an impressive clip (Kerry and Kucinich add roughly 30 new members a day, and the Bush, Gephardt, Lieberman and Edwards campaigns add 1 or 2 new members daily -- if they're fortunate enough not to actually lose membership).

Our statheads conclude that in these two measures of popular support outside the view of the media circus, Clark and Dean are the dynamos of the moment.

Posted by James Cook at 7:03 AM. # (permalink)




Return to the Irregular Times Main Page

Read our Blog Archives