In 5 years America has gone from a democratic state in which liberties are treasured and upheld, to a state teetering on the brink of a facist, fundamentalist and terrorist run nightmare nation of despots and villians.
It's been on this path of fascism for far longer than 5 years, it started at a minimum when Senators somehow morphed into being voted upon by the general public, and when the two party system was essentially codified into law, and when we got taught the notion that the US president was our personal president, and not the president of a federation of states. It happened when people liek you were taught we are a democracy, not a constitutional republic. Only now do people like such as yourself"care" about it and somehow think it is all Bush's fault. Bush, or Clinton, or Bush, or Reagan or Carter or Ford were all one man. You want someone to blame? Blame the members of congress. Blame the ones that abdicated their power in the realm of foreign military affairs under the guise of "doing something".
George Bush signed the USAPATRIOT Act, but Congress passed it. Passed it blindly. Congress has been passing laws for decades that increasingly empower the central federal government far beyond what is appropriate and ethical. Indeed the powers in the Patriot Act were sought by Clinton's administration, and Bush before him. Possibly even Reagan's administration. But each time Congress refused. Until 9/11/2001 that is. Then without thought beyond their own appearance, they handed the fedgov and the President in particular a blank check.
In the last week George Bush had both houses... Those congress critters have free-will. They did it of their own volition. You don't get to blame Bush for them passing a law no matter how much he wanted it.
The US has enough laws and regulations to stretch from here to the moon and back several times. The only way for a legitimate government to exercise power over people is for them to be criminals. In a couple years Bush will be gone. And the process will still continue. Only the names of the figureheads will have changed. And no, Europe, you aren't in any better shape.
The US government outright refused to allow the UN to monitor the 2004 election. They won't let any monitoring happen at all, no matter what the citizens want.
And your evidence that the US ciztizenry wants outside monitoring is where?
Can you imagine the government's reaction if Venezuela refused election monitoring?
In the US? General apathy. Is there external third-party monitoring of the French, Italian, UK, German elections? Nope. Do we care? Nope. Should we care? Nope.We have more important issues to concern ourselves with.
they have always been acurate to a very slim margin, yet they were off by hundreds of thousands of votes in 2004
No they haven't been. Exit polls depend on a higher ratio of polled/to voted. The lower the percentage of exiting voters polled, the lower the accuracy of the prediction. if it happens that turnout is much higher than you anticipated in key areas, your numbers will be off dramatically. The difference can be a double or triple variance.
Then again if 20 million people voted, 200,000 is what, 1 percent? That is a fairly tight margin. If 123,000,000 votes are cast, a difference of a couple hundred thousand is less than a percent. Indeed, 250,000 would only be a difference of about two tenths of one percent.
If you want to fight vote corruption, you need to focus efforts first and foremost on specific identifiable actions such as paying peole with drugs, slashing tires, phone calls telling them the wrong day to vote, and so forth. You can also work to lower the power of congress critters. Simple rule among humanity is that the valuable a thing is, the more it will be fought for, and the more that fight will be sneaky, dirty, and underhanded. move the dominant power back to teh states proper and you'll see far less problems on a national basis. Individual states can be handled a lot more efficiently and effectively than can a national congress.
And most imparotantly: stop supporting those who continue to horde power and prevent others from participating in the governance of their state and country.
1. Centralized voting means you only need to corrupt small number of people to corrupt an election. 2. Decentralized voting means you need to corrupt many, many people to substantially change an election result. 3. The US has a history of centralizing its vote counting, using techniques such as moving ballot boxes to central counting locations, and using electronic means to centralize counting.
Given the amount of noise about appearance of fraud in US elections, why isn't vote counting de-centralized? Other democracies seem to manage.
Because the two parties in power have worked long and hard to get it centralized. They don't really care (as a whole) if the system can be corrputed, only that they don't get caught doing it.
The same arguments for decentralization of vote counting apply to decentralizing Congress. There really is no need in today's world for Congress to meet in Washington DC all the time, or even for voting. By leaving the congress critters in their home states you at least have a chance to make them available for *gasp* their consitutents, and you decentralize the lobbying committees. This is also the same reason that so much of today's federal legislation should not exist, and be left to the states.
Oregon passing a bad law has much less impact than the US congress passing a bad law. Florida, for example, mandating the use of Diebold electronic machines has less impact/risk than the US congress doing that, to use a contextual example.
But it won't be changed for the same reason we don't get decentralized vote processing. It benefits those in power (lobyists and congress critters), just like anti-fusion[1] laws, primaries, and the two-party system do.
1: Political fusion is where multiple parties combine to nominate someone to run. For example, the Constitution and Libertarian parties may nominate the same person. Republicans and Democrats both used this to get into power in many states and then make it illegal.
Every bit of publicity helps. Please don't belittle educational programs. Grass-roots education for regular screening arguably helps as much as the latest whiz-bang chemotherapeutic agent. If you catch it early, you markedly improve survival rates.
No, every little bit doesn't help. But here is something that does: encourage women to breastfeed their children. The longer she breastfeeds the lower her risk goes, and by large proportions. A women who breastfeeds for a total of 6 years reduces her risk by two-thirds. Even short-term such as 6 months to two years reduces it by 11-25% For no money, with no drugs. Regular screening will catch it, but it is better to reduce/eliminate the risk. The majority of those women who are not already getting screenings are precisely those who can not afford treatments or screenings (yes some places do it for free).
But if today's women were encouraged and (cue teenage-boy jokes here) aided in breastfeeding, they would not only lower their risk, but save more than enough money to get themselves checked out. Furthermore, if their child is female, they reduce her risk as well. While certainly not conclusive evidence in it's own right, the increase in breast cancer rates in developed contouries, particularly the US, coincides with the decrease in breast feeding. We don't yet understand all of the reasons why breastfeeding plays such a significant role. Realistically we don't have to. We do know it works, and works very well with no deleterious side effects to mother or baby, and a cornucopia of positive effects to both.
You can also help out by fighting laws that disadvantage breastfeeding women. No amount of pink websites will make a difference. But if you put the information about how breastfeeding dramatically reduces the risk of breast cancer, you may actually teach someone something of value, and make a difference. If you follow it up with breastfeeding links such as http://www.breastfeeding.com/ and http://www.lalecheleague.com/ you will be doing an even better service.
Breast cancer strikes one in eight women. Yet if every woman who could breastfeed did so, that number could drop to 1 in 16 in the first generation and 1 in 20 or better in the second.
Your analysis is correct and precisely incorrect as well. Anytime WOMEN get together and organize, it is politically OK, even great.. After all, they are women. However, when MEN do it is is SEXIST. Obviously, I am referring to the US. it may be the case in otehr ocuntries, but my past experience tells me it is likely not the case.
In a society where men are not allowed have men-only places, but women are allowed and even encouraged to have women-only places, it is not suprising that men don't organize a prostate cancer press corps. First, the history of BCA in the US started with a few men, then spread by famous women publically acknowledging their Breast Cancer - mostly actresses who's appearance would have a pivotal role in their livelihood. How many old men have a cause for "coming out" with colon cancer?
Yes, prostate cancer is high among men, it's the second leading cancer for men. For every 3 men who die of prostate cancer, 4 women die of breast cancer, so it's almost, but not quite, equal.
Actually, the numbers you are looking for are:
According to the CDC:
Breast cancer:
* The incidence rate for the United States is 124.9; state incidence rates range from 109.0 to 147.8; approximately 53% of states have incidence rates at or above the national rate.
* The death rate for the United States is 25.5; state death rates range from 16.2 to 34.3; approximately 47% of states have death rates at or above the national rate.
Prostate cancer:
* The incidence rate for the United States is 161.2; state incidence rates range from 106.1 to 217.1; approximately 58% of states have incidence rates at or above the national rate.
* The death rate for the United States is 28.1; state death rates range from 17.6 to 51.8; approximately 59% of states have death rates at or above the national rate.
Don't be upset because a group of people got organized. Organize yourself and get out there.
The problem with this theory is that women did not organize themselves. A handful of celebrities essentially did it. There never has been a grass roots breast cancer thing. What grassroots-ness (?) there is, is stupid little do-nothing things like pink ribbons and turning your website pink for a day, week, or even month/year. Things that make people feel good but don't really do anything. That is what our society is trending towards. We learned it from the people we put in office.
Furthermore, another crucial difference between prostate and breast cancers is that the jury is still out on whether early detection leads to a better result in prostate cancer. It is a proven technique for lowering the suffering and mortality of breast cancer, but the evidence does not support such a conclusion for prostate cancer. I suspect this is a key aspect in the lack of a national prostate awareness campaign. What are you going to do, tell men to get a finger shoved up their hole for something that we don't know yet if it matters that you know about it? particularly since the act of going looking may cause damage? Honestly, do you expect men to put out a brochure telling them how to stick their finger up their arse and feel around? Compare that with the instructions for women for self-examination.
Another factor is that it is deemed "OK" to talk about breasts/boobs on TV, but not your butthole. And face it, that is the interface to the prostate. Men are subject to many jokes about getting your prostate exam. There are few jokes about women getting their breasts examined. What jokes there are consist of men wanting to do them.
Ultimately, a lot of it is about money. And sadly, political money comes at a price. In this case that price is less effective research into solutions and understanding. The money for BC tends toward "awareness". So everyone becomes "aware" of breast cancer, but those who need to know about i
The ironic thing is that only the US has hundreds of thousands of Marines that can be deployed and a strong worldwide military deployment capability
More BS. From wikipedia:
The Marine Corps, with 180,000 active and 40,000 reserve Marines as of 2005, is the second-smallest of the U.S. armed forces. Only the U.S. Coast Guard is a smaller military service than the Marine Corps.
the US Pentagon's publicly stated goal of complete, worldwide military superior Duh!
The nuclear non-proliferation treaty requires that nuclear powers work towards nuclear disarmament. The US rejects all proposals calling for nuclear disarmament.
Actually, not quite The relevant text is:
Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.
The US does reject all "proposals" for the US to unilaterally disarm, and rightfully so. One side disarming is not an effective measure to cessation of the nuclear arms race and disarmament. Despite that there have been several cases where the US did unilaterally make significant reductions in nuclear weapon strength.
In 1981 US President Reagan announced a plan for a negotiated withdrawal of all intermediate range missiles from Europe. The Soviets balked and refused, eventually leading to the end of the concept. Why did the Soviets not want it? They already had some 1100+ missiles in place versus the US' zero. Indeed, Margaret Thatcher (that would be Britain, not the US) openly admitted later that she "had always disliked the original INF 'zero option'" and that she "had gone along with it in the hope that the Soviets would never accept.". West German leaders also were very opposed to it.
Further, in 1986 Gorbachev called for the total elimination of nukes. Reagan agreed, and talks were underway. But as always the devil is in the details. The sticking point was SDI. The Soviets did not want the US to be able to stop missiles, the US did. There is a lot of depth around SDI the public has always been ignorant of, but not through deceit.
A missile defense system (vs. ICBMs) will have a given percentage of success. Let us for sake of discussion say we could eliminate 55% of the existing Soviet warheads. If you are the Soviets that means in order to have the same strike capability you will need to more than double your ICBM count. This was unacceptable for them. Further, if the quantity of threats decreases, most systems will actually increase their effectiveness. So the combination of warhead reduction and a US defense system was entirely unacceptable because it made their nuclear arsenal nearly worthless as a weapons system. If the US system was capable of destroying say 30K of the Soviet 60K of warheads, and you reduce warhead count to less than 30K, the chances are you won't get many warheads through. If the number drops to 15K, chances are you won't get more than one through if you even get one through. Thus, you are not a nuclear threat to the US, and sabre-rattlig (somethign the SU did a *lot* of) is not effective.
Now, if the goal is the elimination of all nuclear weapons, this isn't a problem, is it? By this time, the Soviet Union had already broken nuclear treaties such as SALT-I. The particular bit of near-irony here is that they broke the anti-ballistic missile defense portions of it.
Further, the US, through Reagan, advocated heavily the elimination of short range nuclear weapons. There was much support from Japan, and eventually Eruopean leaders. But not the Soviets. Why? the Soviets had thousands of them (SS-20 missiles, IIRC).
It's probably just a few years before we have at least one private company putting stuff into orbit so the pollution will happen anyway.
We've had private companies putting stuff in orbit for many years. It is a multi-billion dollar industry. You might even recognize some of them. How about we start with "Boeing"? Sea Launch (which is managed by Boeing), Lockheed-Martin, Arianspace; any of these sound familiar? In point of fact, the vast majority of launches are by private companies.
We aren't even 100 orders of magnitude close to having a tether material that work, yet people are spending their time on robot designs that are a trivial problem. Why don't these contests focus on high alitutde tethers?
Actually we have workable tether material right now, and have had for a long time. You are mixing "general tether" with "space elevator for Earth". We have the *material technology* right now to put a space elevator on mars, the Moon, and in orbit to move between orbit levels.
There is also the use of tethers in high altitude balloon experiments and uses. Ballons have been used for suborbital use for some time and and are quite effective, and relatively cheap compared to rocketry. If the balloon technology is used to create "floating platforms" to be used as waystations on the path to orbit, tethers will be required. Robots that continuously inspect and maintain the tethers to the balloons will be critical.
Further, a staged approached to orbit via bouyant platforms and tethers is also a possible route. The tether would not need to reach from Earth's surface to geosynchronous orbit. We could theoretically have bouyant platforms and tethers forming a sort of "rail link" to LEO. If you saw the season finale of Stargate-SG1 think about their stargate chain, only in terms of tethers and bouyant stations.
And finally, if you think that robots being able to navigate small tethers is a trivial problem, why don't you make them and go win all these contests to prove it?
Hm... do you think that if your tether is beginning to BUCKLE AND DEFORM, you might have a slightly more fundamental problem than just needing to redesign the robot?
Not necessarily. As long as the buckling and deformities are within workable tolerances, this is not a problem. Having a robot that can account for larger variances increases this limit and thus makes the whole concept more feasible. Look at it this way. The roads cars drive on buckle and deform with the weather (frost heaves) as well as ordinary wear (potholes). If cars had solid metal "tires" instead of rubber they would be less tolerant of non-pristine roads. The use of soft materials such as rubber, combined with such things as springs to limit the impact of the deformities increases the tolerance and thus makes the concept of a car on a road much more usable and viable.
But the potential for your tether to break off eventually is probably going to be a slight drawback.
Not really. Any semi-decent design of a tether system includes maintenance. Only a fool would think there would be no maintenance robots. Particularly since most of the designs include running tether construction robots along thinner ribbons to create thicker ones. Combine maintenance robots with the ability to reinforce the ribbon(s) and the problem of deformity shrinks greatly, provided the robots can handle the deformity well enough to get there and repair it.
Come on Nature does NOT abhor vacuum. 99.999% of nature IS vacuum.
And the other.001% is rabidly fighting it.
The PP should have been modded as funny, but not insightful as it would demonstrate an abysmal ignorance of reality if it were intended as serious.
Indeed the "colonization" of the cable and ballons by nature demonstrates that nature does indeed abhor a vacuum. The materials represented a vaccum of life, and nature sought to rectify that (again with the personification of natural processes) by adding life to it. Stars are continually exporting material into space, you know the vaccum the poster referred to, as if trying to change it from a vacuum.
I'm not an astronomy buff, so this might be a stupid question. But why are there so many craters on Mars? Doesn't the atmosphere protect the planet like here on Earth? It appears that there are almost as many craters as on the Moon. I guess the atmosphere is very thin on Mars.
About ten seconds on google or wikipedia would give you an answer.
If the goal is to teach them how to program, write HTML, write basic documents, and so forth then yes, Linux can be used. With a single machine of today's standards you can build a base binary install of a Gentoo w/o all the newer heavy libs. Vim, emacs, Python, perl, nxclient, fluxbox/blackbox/iceWM for window management, By running NXServer on the modern machine and NXclient on the older machines you can provide access to more modern (larger) programs such as Abiword and Gnumeric to introduce these types of tools.
A 386 was considered a "minimum system requirement" the "standard" machine of the time was a 486 or a Pentium-133. I ran Abiword and IceWM on a 133 w/o problems. I even ran two X sessions with only a slight hiccup with a 2MB video card. If you can get a relatively recent PCI graphics card for the machines they'll do video better than they used to.
Once you get into C coding you can use vim/emacs and use distcc for compiling across the systems including the master system. For introductory C these machines would do fine.
It isn't "today's Linux", it is "today's common distributions".
Yes, I agree that it is not as simple as I suggested. Still, I would argue that the simplest case is one we can probably all agree on. That is to say that when there is widespread doubt about the results that at least one recount would be in order.
If the pre-election polls showed a clear and dominant victory by one side, and that one side won a clear and dominant victory by a margin of say 20 points, but the losing side has "widespread doubt" about the results, should there be an automatic recount, or would opposing the recount be a "bad thing"? The problem is what qualifies as "widespread doubt"?
One thing most pundits do not know is that most areas in the US have automatic recount requirements. Indeed, even Florida had an automatic recount mechanism that would have been used were it not for the Gore team's antics. A sensible automatic recount for elections that fall under a small percentage point difference is a good thing.
yes but it's soooo much easier to just bitch and moan...;)
Too true.;)
Now, in this case I have an easy-out: I'm not a US citizen so I can't really intervene directly...All I can do is bitch and moan to americans.
Actually that isn't true. It is true that you can not directly intervene. But then again, neither can I and I do live here, have even run for office, and have seen firsthand how elections are run. Something very few here can say. Sadly, most of the world has lost the concept of "Lead by Example".
The problem we are speaking of is not limited to the US, despite politicians insisting it is so and media talking heads agreeing. This provides you with an opportunity: work on solutions. You don't have to be an American to do that.
Or, one ballot-"book" where each page is a stand-alone simple ballot for one election... That is very close to what we have here in Idaho. In fact we may be talking about the same thing.
We have a booklet that is affixed to the booth. We have a card that we slip into the machine. We then have one race per page (usually) and you use a small punch to punch out the appropriate hole. It is dead simple, and doesn't even need an "X".;)
Here's a thought: I've been told that these US election ballots are very complicated and thus cannot be effectively counted by hand as we do here in canada.
It is incorrect to view the US election system as unified. I do know that here in Idaho our ballots are abut as simple as is humanly possible. The big problem is that not even paper ballots are foolproof and mistakeproof. And politicians (usually the losers) will always say it is the fault of the ballot and not the voter. I've made a mistake and got myself a new ballot, no problem.
Politicians believe the only time the voter is infallible is when they voted for them. The rest of the time we need protecting from even ourselves.
Ultimately the problem isn't the booth and the ballot. It is the system that leads to it (primaries and partisan politics) and the supporting infrastructure (sound byte "issues" and outright deceit in campaigning). Government by anything short of unanimous consent is by definition a compromise.
Actually I'm trying to cancel out this goofy definition of MPG when there's electricity involved. Does a pure electric car get Infinity Miles per gallon?
The electricity does not just pop into the car from nowhere. The Prius uses electricity but still has an MPG rating. Because it uses gasoline.
...this development, along with the Bill and Melinda foundation, means we now have extremely large, extremely rich companies doing what our governments should be doing.
No it means we've finally got back around to big businesses doing what governments CAN NOT do successfully. The government is good at very few things: primarily killing other governments' armies. Clearly they are not that good at observing our rights, though they are good at polluting (single largest contributor to pollution is the government). some government even spend time and money putting speakers on big briotehr cameras to stop crime by telling people "I'm watching you" and so forth instead of doing what it really takes to stop the crime.
This isn't new, big business has done these things in the past. But now since it's Google or Gates we hear about it like it's the next big thing. http://philanthropy.com/free/articles/v18/i17/1700 1003.htm is about some o the recent reports. Direct corporate philanthropy last year topped 20 billion dollars.
If they're promoting cleaner vehicles or saving kittens it's all fine and dandy. But what about accountability? What if Google, with its billions, starts doing things that some of us strongly disagree with? Would Christian conservatives be happy if Google started a campaign to push condoms in schools and third world countries to help stop AIDS? Would progressives be happy if Google started a campaign to restore family values through aggressively marketing church youth groups?
Boycotts, media exposure, voting with your dollars. All of which are more effective than when the government does such things. What do you do when the government does these things? Whine a bit, and a few weeks or months later the government continues doing it as normal. The next election the same bozos are re-elected.
It isn't like you can go out and set up a new government as easily as starting a company to compete with Google.
Put it this way - if Google's board turned rabid tomorrow, how much damage could it do?
And anyone who speaks out against that point, is speaking out against Democracy itself, and needs to take a good long look in the mirror to think about what kind of world they want to live in.
(The "corrected" data by the way, is by definition "corrected" so that the discrepancy goes away. So what good is it? Why do people call it "corrected" and not, oh, say, "fudged"?)
I'll speak out against Democracy. Always have, always will. Democracy is nothing more than the tyranny of the majority: an appeal to popularity. People call data "corrected" for more accurate reasons that people call the US a "democracy".
Evidence of Democratic fraud does not invalidate evidence of Republican fraud.
True.
It is not "OK" if both sides cheated. Evidence that both sides cheated re-inforces the conclusion that the election was invalid.
True. But what does this mean? Does it mean we re-do the election, barring each of the candidates? Clearly, merely re-runing would likely not stop them from doing it again. Only barring the benefitted would lead to the opposing side cheating "for" the other side then exposing it to get them out of the election. So the most prudent route would be to eliminate all of them from the second election.
I also don't understand why there is any opposition to counting ballots.
The question is not whether to reocunt, but how many times do you do it? Under what conditions? If there is a 12% difference, do you recount? If the difference is within the margin of error do you not recount? If the results are within the margin of error do you declare a tie? That one seems reasonable. To me anyway.
I have a hard time believing that americans are willing to forgo double-checking their election results because it would cost too much.
I don't. After all many places have a tie-breaker system of flipping a coin or having of all things an arm wrestling contest between the tied candidates, as opposed to a new election.
Am I the only one here who thinks that fighting to stop a ballot recount should be a criminal offence?
Probably. And that is a good thing.
Getting rid of primaries would be the best thing we could do. At worst it weakens the effect of tampering by splitting focus.
It's easy to whine, bitch, main, and beat the keyboard on slashdot, or to write articles slamming one side. It is another thing entirely to actually work to reduce the problems with the system. There is far too much of the latter and not enough of the former.
Both bush's were wackjob hard-right, reagan was between right and wackjob hard-right, clinton was centerist, and kerry was at best center-right.
So you are saying that the last election was between a center-right and a hard-right. This would mean that what 95% of the voting populace voted for the "right wing". This would be the same voting populace that voted fifty-fity for a then hard-righter (your assertion) and a hard-lefter Gore (my assertion). What does this say about the ideology of the "left half"?
At best that would make the non-hard-right devoid of something to vote for. It would make them a group that votes against rather than for. If this is true then they have lost. They will be stuck in a "make the other guy eeevil" type of war. To which the right-wingers can easily respond by pointing this out. They then lose any high ground as the other side posits eideas and the "left-wingers" propose none of their own.
Now, to a certain extent that is currently going on. But it is IMO part of a larger shift. The two parties have been merging for years: it is inevitable that they do so. As each side tries to get the "gooey middle" they incresinlgy find themselves alike. At some point the currently losing side will realize it and try to strike back out "to it's roots". Dependign on their success or apparent success, the other side will as well. But it won't change things. Eventually a third party will rise and capture those who are sick of the polarization.
What happens next is a toss up. Usually the two warring parties will try to co-opt the ideas of the younger third party. Historically prior to the implementation of the primary system and enacting of laws to solidify the two part system, they fail and the third party becomes a dominant part. At which point natural counterbalancing occurs and a new party formed of the remnants of the original two will rise to counter.
The single best change to the electoral process would be to remove partisan elections. You can still have parties, but no more primaries. Everyone who wants to run does so. This places significant barriers to a single group keeping a small subset as available to the public for voting. Everyone runs without utilizing party affiliation. Not perfect, but definitely better.
While true, There has never been wholesale, systemic manipulation of the electoral process on this scale. Previous acts of fraud tended to be minor and localised, mainly due to an overzaealous member of one or the other parties. The irregularities referrenced in the 200 and 2004 elections, however, appear to be a well planned and concerted effort by the extreme right wing to ensure thier agenda is enacted at all costs.
See, its that "appear to have" thing. The human mind sees connections where they may not exist. Many, many items that are isolated but viewed as a collective "appear" to be connected. Consider the ant colony. For decades it was assumed it was a fully controlled system; it was even describes as the model of communism. This is becuase of the high level at which we viewed the events in an ant colony. Yet with specific research over long terms we've since learned that the ant colony is diamterically oppsed to central command and control. Indeed each ant is a full "individual" in that it makes decisions entirely on it's own and the resulting ant colony is an emergent phenomena.
Just because it happened at multiple places does not mean it was a coordinated effort. For sake of discussion, let us assume that one in a thousand precints will have some level of corruption/irregularities at voting time. How many, on average, will occur in a presidential election?
Further, how many prior elections have had access to the deta at the level we have had? Can you say with certainy and proof that we haven't had this level of irregularities over the last several decades? How many presidential elections over the last two hundred years have been so close? The closeness of the matter dictates the closeness of the scrutiny - right or wrong. When the difference is small we worry more about small changes. When the difference is double digits, the media doesn't care because the likelihood of a different outcome is small and thus won't make good ratings.
The change of news reporting to being judged as an entertainment show (i.e. ratings and advert sales) also has repercussions on investigative analysis of elections. As mentioned above, it it sells it will be analyzed. If not, we won't hear about it.
It is an error to conclude that the last two elections were rugged or attempted to be rigged through a concerted effort (conspiracy) by the Republicans simply because we seem to see more instances of irregularities, or outright corruption. It is the same situation in corporate world. The higher ups have always been greedy and complicit. Only we are now privvy to it when it gets exposed. By seeing it happen now, we think it is increasing when in reality it is merely an increase in information availability that gives an appearance of increase.
So what specifically do you think the cameras will solve?
1) The cameras will do absolutely nothing about the industrial pollution. 2) By your own admission the cameras were stolen by those who were the alleged targets of the cameras. By what reasoning do you conclude that one of these "subhumans" as you call them will suddenly humanize and do the right thing because a voice from the camera told them they were being naughty?
The privacy and freedom aspects are important, but should not supplant the simple fact that the camera system does nothing to deter the behaviour you speak of. Like the aformentioned Robin Williams quote "Stop, or I'll yell stop again" this system will not solve the real problems: violent crime, or in your case pollution. But hey they might be able to start berating you over not even trying to keep your house clean.
I can see it now. You arrive home after dodging the PT system with your groceries. As you approach your house a voice calls from the cameras "Citizen 128902 you have made no attempts to wipe the sludge from your house in 15 days. This is unacceptable anti-social behaviour. Clean your house now or I will be forced to send out an agent from the enforcement division. Thank you and have a good day. Oh, by the way your mum stopped by and didn't look too happy either. You might give 'er a call."
The UK can not stand for this anymore - we need to find a voice, and a way to complain, that does not make us look like criminals.
Arrange protests in front of the cameras. Heckle them when they tell you to disperse. Arrange it so you have simultaneous protests at as many cameras as you can. As long as you can get protests at number_of_police_available+1 you'll make a point. The higher the number the better the point. Do this repeatedly. It is a start.
P.S. I think it's a salient point that the example used in the article is a man being shouted at to not ride his bicycle - not a mugging, not a rape, not a murder - a bicycle.
Exactly. This isn't about stopping crime, but the government controlling behaviour.
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In 5 years America has gone from a democratic state in which liberties are treasured and upheld, to a state teetering on the brink of a facist, fundamentalist and terrorist run nightmare nation of despots and villians.
...
It's been on this path of fascism for far longer than 5 years, it started at a minimum when Senators somehow morphed into being voted upon by the general public, and when the two party system was essentially codified into law, and when we got taught the notion that the US president was our personal president, and not the president of a federation of states. It happened when people liek you were taught we are a democracy, not a constitutional republic. Only now do people like such as yourself"care" about it and somehow think it is all Bush's fault. Bush, or Clinton, or Bush, or Reagan or Carter or Ford were all one man. You want someone to blame? Blame the members of congress. Blame the ones that abdicated their power in the realm of foreign military affairs under the guise of "doing something".
George Bush signed the USAPATRIOT Act, but Congress passed it. Passed it blindly. Congress has been passing laws for decades that increasingly empower the central federal government far beyond what is appropriate and ethical. Indeed the powers in the Patriot Act were sought by Clinton's administration, and Bush before him. Possibly even Reagan's administration. But each time Congress refused. Until 9/11/2001 that is. Then without thought beyond their own appearance, they handed the fedgov and the President in particular a blank check.
In the last week George Bush had both houses
Those congress critters have free-will. They did it of their own volition. You don't get to blame Bush for them passing a law no matter how much he wanted it.
The US has enough laws and regulations to stretch from here to the moon and back several times. The only way for a legitimate government to exercise power over people is for them to be criminals. In a couple years Bush will be gone. And the process will still continue. Only the names of the figureheads will have changed. And no, Europe, you aren't in any better shape.
The US government outright refused to allow the UN to monitor the 2004 election. They won't let any monitoring happen at all, no matter what the citizens want.
And your evidence that the US ciztizenry wants outside monitoring is where?
Can you imagine the government's reaction if Venezuela refused election monitoring?
In the US? General apathy. Is there external third-party monitoring of the French, Italian, UK, German elections? Nope. Do we care? Nope. Should we care? Nope.We have more important issues to concern ourselves with.
they have always been acurate to a very slim margin, yet they were off by hundreds of thousands of votes in 2004
No they haven't been. Exit polls depend on a higher ratio of polled/to voted. The lower the percentage of exiting voters polled, the lower the accuracy of the prediction. if it happens that turnout is much higher than you anticipated in key areas, your numbers will be off dramatically. The difference can be a double or triple variance.
Then again if 20 million people voted, 200,000 is what, 1 percent? That is a fairly tight margin. If 123,000,000 votes are cast, a difference of a couple hundred thousand is less than a percent. Indeed, 250,000 would only be a difference of about two tenths of one percent.
If you want to fight vote corruption, you need to focus efforts first and foremost on specific identifiable actions such as paying peole with drugs, slashing tires, phone calls telling them the wrong day to vote, and so forth. You can also work to lower the power of congress critters. Simple rule among humanity is that the valuable a thing is, the more it will be fought for, and the more that fight will be sneaky, dirty, and underhanded. move the dominant power back to teh states proper and you'll see far less problems on a national basis. Individual states can be handled a lot more efficiently and effectively than can a national congress.
And most imparotantly: stop supporting those who continue to horde power and prevent others from participating in the governance of their state and country.
1. Centralized voting means you only need to corrupt small number of people to corrupt an election.
2. Decentralized voting means you need to corrupt many, many people to substantially change an election result.
3. The US has a history of centralizing its vote counting, using techniques such as moving ballot boxes to central counting locations, and using electronic means to centralize counting.
Given the amount of noise about appearance of fraud in US elections, why isn't vote counting de-centralized? Other democracies seem to manage.
Because the two parties in power have worked long and hard to get it centralized. They don't really care (as a whole) if the system can be corrputed, only that they don't get caught doing it.
The same arguments for decentralization of vote counting apply to decentralizing Congress. There really is no need in today's world for Congress to meet in Washington DC all the time, or even for voting. By leaving the congress critters in their home states you at least have a chance to make them available for *gasp* their consitutents, and you decentralize the lobbying committees. This is also the same reason that so much of today's federal legislation should not exist, and be left to the states.
Oregon passing a bad law has much less impact than the US congress passing a bad law. Florida, for example, mandating the use of Diebold electronic machines has less impact/risk than the US congress doing that, to use a contextual example.
But it won't be changed for the same reason we don't get decentralized vote processing. It benefits those in power (lobyists and congress critters), just like anti-fusion[1] laws, primaries, and the two-party system do.
1: Political fusion is where multiple parties combine to nominate someone to run. For example, the Constitution and Libertarian parties may nominate the same person. Republicans and Democrats both used this to get into power in many states and then make it illegal.
Every bit of publicity helps. Please don't belittle educational programs. Grass-roots education for regular screening arguably helps as much as the latest whiz-bang chemotherapeutic agent. If you catch it early, you markedly improve survival rates.
No, every little bit doesn't help. But here is something that does: encourage women to breastfeed their children. The longer she breastfeeds the lower her risk goes, and by large proportions. A women who breastfeeds for a total of 6 years reduces her risk by two-thirds. Even short-term such as 6 months to two years reduces it by 11-25% For no money, with no drugs. Regular screening will catch it, but it is better to reduce/eliminate the risk. The majority of those women who are not already getting screenings are precisely those who can not afford treatments or screenings (yes some places do it for free).
But if today's women were encouraged and (cue teenage-boy jokes here) aided in breastfeeding, they would not only lower their risk, but save more than enough money to get themselves checked out. Furthermore, if their child is female, they reduce her risk as well. While certainly not conclusive evidence in it's own right, the increase in breast cancer rates in developed contouries, particularly the US, coincides with the decrease in breast feeding. We don't yet understand all of the reasons why breastfeeding plays such a significant role. Realistically we don't have to. We do know it works, and works very well with no deleterious side effects to mother or baby, and a cornucopia of positive effects to both.
You can also help out by fighting laws that disadvantage breastfeeding women. No amount of pink websites will make a difference. But if you put the information about how breastfeeding dramatically reduces the risk of breast cancer, you may actually teach someone something of value, and make a difference. If you follow it up with breastfeeding links such as http://www.breastfeeding.com/ and http://www.lalecheleague.com/ you will be doing an even better service.
Breast cancer strikes one in eight women. Yet if every woman who could breastfeed did so, that number could drop to 1 in 16 in the first generation and 1 in 20 or better in the second.
In a society where men are not allowed have men-only places, but women are allowed and even encouraged to have women-only places, it is not suprising that men don't organize a prostate cancer press corps. First, the history of BCA in the US started with a few men, then spread by famous women publically acknowledging their Breast Cancer - mostly actresses who's appearance would have a pivotal role in their livelihood. How many old men have a cause for "coming out" with colon cancer?
Yes, prostate cancer is high among men, it's the second leading cancer for men. For every 3 men who die of prostate cancer, 4 women die of breast cancer, so it's almost, but not quite, equal.
Actually, the numbers you are looking for are:
According to the CDC:
Don't be upset because a group of people got organized. Organize yourself and get out there.
The problem with this theory is that women did not organize themselves. A handful of celebrities essentially did it. There never has been a grass roots breast cancer thing. What grassroots-ness (?) there is, is stupid little do-nothing things like pink ribbons and turning your website pink for a day, week, or even month/year. Things that make people feel good but don't really do anything. That is what our society is trending towards. We learned it from the people we put in office.
Furthermore, another crucial difference between prostate and breast cancers is that the jury is still out on whether early detection leads to a better result in prostate cancer. It is a proven technique for lowering the suffering and mortality of breast cancer, but the evidence does not support such a conclusion for prostate cancer. I suspect this is a key aspect in the lack of a national prostate awareness campaign. What are you going to do, tell men to get a finger shoved up their hole for something that we don't know yet if it matters that you know about it? particularly since the act of going looking may cause damage? Honestly, do you expect men to put out a brochure telling them how to stick their finger up their arse and feel around? Compare that with the instructions for women for self-examination.
Another factor is that it is deemed "OK" to talk about breasts/boobs on TV, but not your butthole. And face it, that is the interface to the prostate. Men are subject to many jokes about getting your prostate exam. There are few jokes about women getting their breasts examined. What jokes there are consist of men wanting to do them.
Ultimately, a lot of it is about money. And sadly, political money comes at a price. In this case that price is less effective research into solutions and understanding. The money for BC tends toward "awareness". So everyone becomes "aware" of breast cancer, but those who need to know about i
You have a typo there. That should read the UN
The ironic thing is that only the US has hundreds of thousands of Marines that can be deployed and a strong worldwide military deployment capability
More BS. From wikipedia:
the US Pentagon's publicly stated goal of complete, worldwide military superior
Duh!
The nuclear non-proliferation treaty requires that nuclear powers work towards nuclear disarmament. The US rejects all proposals calling for nuclear disarmament.
Actually, not quite The relevant text is:
The US does reject all "proposals" for the US to unilaterally disarm, and rightfully so. One side disarming is not an effective measure to cessation of the nuclear arms race and disarmament. Despite that there have been several cases where the US did unilaterally make significant reductions in nuclear weapon strength.
In 1981 US President Reagan announced a plan for a negotiated withdrawal of all intermediate range missiles from Europe. The Soviets balked and refused, eventually leading to the end of the concept. Why did the Soviets not want it? They already had some 1100+ missiles in place versus the US' zero. Indeed, Margaret Thatcher (that would be Britain, not the US) openly admitted later that she "had always disliked the original INF 'zero option'" and that she "had gone along with it in the hope that the Soviets would never accept.". West German leaders also were very opposed to it.
Further, in 1986 Gorbachev called for the total elimination of nukes. Reagan agreed, and talks were underway. But as always the devil is in the details. The sticking point was SDI. The Soviets did not want the US to be able to stop missiles, the US did. There is a lot of depth around SDI the public has always been ignorant of, but not through deceit.
A missile defense system (vs. ICBMs) will have a given percentage of success. Let us for sake of discussion say we could eliminate 55% of the existing Soviet warheads. If you are the Soviets that means in order to have the same strike capability you will need to more than double your ICBM count. This was unacceptable for them. Further, if the quantity of threats decreases, most systems will actually increase their effectiveness. So the combination of warhead reduction and a US defense system was entirely unacceptable because it made their nuclear arsenal nearly worthless as a weapons system. If the US system was capable of destroying say 30K of the Soviet 60K of warheads, and you reduce warhead count to less than 30K, the chances are you won't get many warheads through. If the number drops to 15K, chances are you won't get more than one through if you even get one through. Thus, you are not a nuclear threat to the US, and sabre-rattlig (somethign the SU did a *lot* of) is not effective.
Now, if the goal is the elimination of all nuclear weapons, this isn't a problem, is it? By this time, the Soviet Union had already broken nuclear treaties such as SALT-I. The particular bit of near-irony here is that they broke the anti-ballistic missile defense portions of it.
Further, the US, through Reagan, advocated heavily the elimination of short range nuclear weapons. There was much support from Japan, and eventually Eruopean leaders. But not the Soviets. Why? the Soviets had thousands of them (SS-20 missiles, IIRC).
At the peak of the "nuc
It's probably just a few years before we have at least one private company putting stuff into orbit so the pollution will happen anyway.
We've had private companies putting stuff in orbit for many years. It is a multi-billion dollar industry. You might even recognize some of them. How about we start with "Boeing"? Sea Launch (which is managed by Boeing), Lockheed-Martin, Arianspace; any of these sound familiar? In point of fact, the vast majority of launches are by private companies.
We aren't even 100 orders of magnitude close to having a tether material that work, yet people are spending their time on robot designs that are a trivial problem. Why don't these contests focus on high alitutde tethers?
Actually we have workable tether material right now, and have had for a long time. You are mixing "general tether" with "space elevator for Earth". We have the *material technology* right now to put a space elevator on mars, the Moon, and in orbit to move between orbit levels.
There is also the use of tethers in high altitude balloon experiments and uses. Ballons have been used for suborbital use for some time and and are quite effective, and relatively cheap compared to rocketry. If the balloon technology is used to create "floating platforms" to be used as waystations on the path to orbit, tethers will be required. Robots that continuously inspect and maintain the tethers to the balloons will be critical.
Further, a staged approached to orbit via bouyant platforms and tethers is also a possible route. The tether would not need to reach from Earth's surface to geosynchronous orbit. We could theoretically have bouyant platforms and tethers forming a sort of "rail link" to LEO. If you saw the season finale of Stargate-SG1 think about their stargate chain, only in terms of tethers and bouyant stations.
And finally, if you think that robots being able to navigate small tethers is a trivial problem, why don't you make them and go win all these contests to prove it?
Hm... do you think that if your tether is beginning to BUCKLE AND DEFORM, you might have a slightly more fundamental problem than just needing to redesign the robot?
Not necessarily. As long as the buckling and deformities are within workable tolerances, this is not a problem. Having a robot that can account for larger variances increases this limit and thus makes the whole concept more feasible. Look at it this way. The roads cars drive on buckle and deform with the weather (frost heaves) as well as ordinary wear (potholes). If cars had solid metal "tires" instead of rubber they would be less tolerant of non-pristine roads. The use of soft materials such as rubber, combined with such things as springs to limit the impact of the deformities increases the tolerance and thus makes the concept of a car on a road much more usable and viable.
But the potential for your tether to break off eventually is probably going to be a slight drawback.
Not really. Any semi-decent design of a tether system includes maintenance. Only a fool would think there would be no maintenance robots. Particularly since most of the designs include running tether construction robots along thinner ribbons to create thicker ones. Combine maintenance robots with the ability to reinforce the ribbon(s) and the problem of deformity shrinks greatly, provided the robots can handle the deformity well enough to get there and repair it.
Come on Nature does NOT abhor vacuum. 99.999% of nature IS vacuum.
.001% is rabidly fighting it.
And the other
The PP should have been modded as funny, but not insightful as it would demonstrate an abysmal ignorance of reality if it were intended as serious.
Indeed the "colonization" of the cable and ballons by nature demonstrates that nature does indeed abhor a vacuum. The materials represented a vaccum of life, and nature sought to rectify that (again with the personification of natural processes) by adding life to it. Stars are continually exporting material into space, you know the vaccum the poster referred to, as if trying to change it from a vacuum.
I'm not an astronomy buff, so this might be a stupid question. But why are there so many craters on Mars? Doesn't the atmosphere protect the planet like here on Earth? It appears that there are almost as many craters as on the Moon. I guess the atmosphere is very thin on Mars.
About ten seconds on google or wikipedia would give you an answer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars#Atmosphere
Now honestly, show of hands: who has their console (not PC!) connected to a display device capable of 1080p?
I do.
Who plans on buying a device capable of 1080p?
A second one? Yup.
If the goal is to teach them how to program, write HTML, write basic documents, and so forth then yes, Linux can be used. With a single machine of today's standards you can build a base binary install of a Gentoo w/o all the newer heavy libs. Vim, emacs, Python, perl, nxclient, fluxbox/blackbox/iceWM for window management, By running NXServer on the modern machine and NXclient on the older machines you can provide access to more modern (larger) programs such as Abiword and Gnumeric to introduce these types of tools.
A 386 was considered a "minimum system requirement" the "standard" machine of the time was a 486 or a Pentium-133. I ran Abiword and IceWM on a 133 w/o problems. I even ran two X sessions with only a slight hiccup with a 2MB video card. If you can get a relatively recent PCI graphics card for the machines they'll do video better than they used to.
Once you get into C coding you can use vim/emacs and use distcc for compiling across the systems including the master system. For introductory C these machines would do fine.
It isn't "today's Linux", it is "today's common distributions".
Yes, I agree that it is not as simple as I suggested.
;)
;)
;)
Still, I would argue that the simplest case is one we can probably all agree on. That is to say that when there is widespread doubt about the results that at least one recount would be in order.
If the pre-election polls showed a clear and dominant victory by one side, and that one side won a clear and dominant victory by a margin of say 20 points, but the losing side has "widespread doubt" about the results, should there be an automatic recount, or would opposing the recount be a "bad thing"? The problem is what qualifies as "widespread doubt"?
One thing most pundits do not know is that most areas in the US have automatic recount requirements. Indeed, even Florida had an automatic recount mechanism that would have been used were it not for the Gore team's antics. A sensible automatic recount for elections that fall under a small percentage point difference is a good thing.
yes but it's soooo much easier to just bitch and moan...
Too true.
Now, in this case I have an easy-out: I'm not a US citizen so I can't really intervene directly...All I can do is bitch and moan to americans.
Actually that isn't true. It is true that you can not directly intervene. But then again, neither can I and I do live here, have even run for office, and have seen firsthand how elections are run. Something very few here can say. Sadly, most of the world has lost the concept of "Lead by Example".
The problem we are speaking of is not limited to the US, despite politicians insisting it is so and media talking heads agreeing. This provides you with an opportunity: work on solutions. You don't have to be an American to do that.
Or, one ballot-"book" where each page is a stand-alone simple ballot for one election...
That is very close to what we have here in Idaho. In fact we may be talking about the same thing.
We have a booklet that is affixed to the booth. We have a card that we slip into the machine. We then have one race per page (usually) and you use a small punch to punch out the appropriate hole. It is dead simple, and doesn't even need an "X".
Here's a thought: I've been told that these US election ballots are very complicated and thus cannot be effectively counted by hand as we do here in canada.
It is incorrect to view the US election system as unified. I do know that here in Idaho our ballots are abut as simple as is humanly possible. The big problem is that not even paper ballots are foolproof and mistakeproof. And politicians (usually the losers) will always say it is the fault of the ballot and not the voter. I've made a mistake and got myself a new ballot, no problem.
Politicians believe the only time the voter is infallible is when they voted for them. The rest of the time we need protecting from even ourselves.
Ultimately the problem isn't the booth and the ballot. It is the system that leads to it (primaries and partisan politics) and the supporting infrastructure (sound byte "issues" and outright deceit in campaigning). Government by anything short of unanimous consent is by definition a compromise.
Actually I'm trying to cancel out this goofy definition of MPG when there's electricity involved. Does a pure electric car get Infinity Miles per gallon?
The electricity does not just pop into the car from nowhere. The Prius uses electricity but still has an MPG rating. Because it uses gasoline.
...this development, along with the Bill and Melinda foundation, means we now have extremely large, extremely rich companies doing what our governments should be doing.
0 1003.htm is about some o the recent reports. Direct corporate philanthropy last year topped 20 billion dollars.
No it means we've finally got back around to big businesses doing what governments CAN NOT do successfully. The government is good at very few things: primarily killing other governments' armies. Clearly they are not that good at observing our rights, though they are good at polluting (single largest contributor to pollution is the government). some government even spend time and money putting speakers on big briotehr cameras to stop crime by telling people "I'm watching you" and so forth instead of doing what it really takes to stop the crime.
This isn't new, big business has done these things in the past. But now since it's Google or Gates we hear about it like it's the next big thing.
http://philanthropy.com/free/articles/v18/i17/170
If they're promoting cleaner vehicles or saving kittens it's all fine and dandy. But what about accountability? What if Google, with its billions, starts doing things that some of us strongly disagree with? Would Christian conservatives be happy if Google started a campaign to push condoms in schools and third world countries to help stop AIDS? Would progressives be happy if Google started a campaign to restore family values through aggressively marketing church youth groups?
Boycotts, media exposure, voting with your dollars. All of which are more effective than when the government does such things. What do you do when the government does these things? Whine a bit, and a few weeks or months later the government continues doing it as normal. The next election the same bozos are re-elected.
It isn't like you can go out and set up a new government as easily as starting a company to compete with Google.
Put it this way - if Google's board turned rabid tomorrow, how much damage could it do?
Not as much as you'd think.
And anyone who speaks out against that point, is speaking out against Democracy itself, and needs to take a good long look in the mirror to think about what kind of world they want to live in.
(The "corrected" data by the way, is by definition "corrected" so that the discrepancy goes away. So what good is it? Why do people call it "corrected" and not, oh, say, "fudged"?)
I'll speak out against Democracy. Always have, always will. Democracy is nothing more than the tyranny of the majority: an appeal to popularity.
People call data "corrected" for more accurate reasons that people call the US a "democracy".
Evidence of Democratic fraud does not invalidate evidence of Republican fraud.
True.
It is not "OK" if both sides cheated. Evidence that both sides cheated re-inforces the conclusion that the election was invalid.
True. But what does this mean? Does it mean we re-do the election, barring each of the candidates? Clearly, merely re-runing would likely not stop them from doing it again. Only barring the benefitted would lead to the opposing side cheating "for" the other side then exposing it to get them out of the election. So the most prudent route would be to eliminate all of them from the second election.
I also don't understand why there is any opposition to counting ballots.
The question is not whether to reocunt, but how many times do you do it? Under what conditions? If there is a 12% difference, do you recount? If the difference is within the margin of error do you not recount? If the results are within the margin of error do you declare a tie? That one seems reasonable. To me anyway.
I have a hard time believing that americans are willing to forgo double-checking their election results because it would cost too much.
I don't. After all many places have a tie-breaker system of flipping a coin or having of all things an arm wrestling contest between the tied candidates, as opposed to a new election.
Am I the only one here who thinks that fighting to stop a ballot recount should be a criminal offence?
Probably. And that is a good thing.
Getting rid of primaries would be the best thing we could do. At worst it weakens the effect of tampering by splitting focus.
It's easy to whine, bitch, main, and beat the keyboard on slashdot, or to write articles slamming one side. It is another thing entirely to actually work to reduce the problems with the system. There is far too much of the latter and not enough of the former.
Too bad you missed the rebuttal supporting Kennedy and showing that the naysayers are the ones who are full of it.
I say both sides are full of it.
Both bush's were wackjob hard-right, reagan was between right and wackjob hard-right, clinton was centerist, and kerry was at best center-right.
So you are saying that the last election was between a center-right and a hard-right. This would mean that what 95% of the voting populace voted for the "right wing". This would be the same voting populace that voted fifty-fity for a then hard-righter (your assertion) and a hard-lefter Gore (my assertion). What does this say about the ideology of the "left half"?
At best that would make the non-hard-right devoid of something to vote for. It would make them a group that votes against rather than for. If this is true then they have lost. They will be stuck in a "make the other guy eeevil" type of war. To which the right-wingers can easily respond by pointing this out. They then lose any high ground as the other side posits eideas and the "left-wingers" propose none of their own.
Now, to a certain extent that is currently going on. But it is IMO part of a larger shift. The two parties have been merging for years: it is inevitable that they do so. As each side tries to get the "gooey middle" they incresinlgy find themselves alike. At some point the currently losing side will realize it and try to strike back out "to it's roots". Dependign on their success or apparent success, the other side will as well. But it won't change things. Eventually a third party will rise and capture those who are sick of the polarization.
What happens next is a toss up. Usually the two warring parties will try to co-opt the ideas of the younger third party. Historically prior to the implementation of the primary system and enacting of laws to solidify the two part system, they fail and the third party becomes a dominant part. At which point natural counterbalancing occurs and a new party formed of the remnants of the original two will rise to counter.
The single best change to the electoral process would be to remove partisan elections. You can still have parties, but no more primaries. Everyone who wants to run does so. This places significant barriers to a single group keeping a small subset as available to the public for voting. Everyone runs without utilizing party affiliation. Not perfect, but definitely better.
While true, There has never been wholesale, systemic manipulation of the electoral process on this scale. Previous acts of fraud tended to be minor and localised, mainly due to an overzaealous member of one or the other parties. The irregularities referrenced in the 200 and 2004 elections, however, appear to be a well planned and concerted effort by the extreme right wing to ensure thier agenda is enacted at all costs.
See, its that "appear to have" thing. The human mind sees connections where they may not exist. Many, many items that are isolated but viewed as a collective "appear" to be connected. Consider the ant colony. For decades it was assumed it was a fully controlled system; it was even describes as the model of communism. This is becuase of the high level at which we viewed the events in an ant colony. Yet with specific research over long terms we've since learned that the ant colony is diamterically oppsed to central command and control. Indeed each ant is a full "individual" in that it makes decisions entirely on it's own and the resulting ant colony is an emergent phenomena.
Just because it happened at multiple places does not mean it was a coordinated effort. For sake of discussion, let us assume that one in a thousand precints will have some level of corruption/irregularities at voting time. How many, on average, will occur in a presidential election?
Further, how many prior elections have had access to the deta at the level we have had? Can you say with certainy and proof that we haven't had this level of irregularities over the last several decades? How many presidential elections over the last two hundred years have been so close? The closeness of the matter dictates the closeness of the scrutiny - right or wrong. When the difference is small we worry more about small changes. When the difference is double digits, the media doesn't care because the likelihood of a different outcome is small and thus won't make good ratings.
The change of news reporting to being judged as an entertainment show (i.e. ratings and advert sales) also has repercussions on investigative analysis of elections. As mentioned above, it it sells it will be analyzed. If not, we won't hear about it.
It is an error to conclude that the last two elections were rugged or attempted to be rigged through a concerted effort (conspiracy) by the Republicans simply because we seem to see more instances of irregularities, or outright corruption. It is the same situation in corporate world. The higher ups have always been greedy and complicit. Only we are now privvy to it when it gets exposed. By seeing it happen now, we think it is increasing when in reality it is merely an increase in information availability that gives an appearance of increase.
Heh heh, the F-22 Puppy, that'd be funny.
If you're going to name an aircraft after a dog, make sure it's one that drops bombs.
B-2b Puppy
B-52H Rottwieler
So what specifically do you think the cameras will solve?
1) The cameras will do absolutely nothing about the industrial pollution.
2) By your own admission the cameras were stolen by those who were the alleged targets of the cameras. By what reasoning do you conclude that one of these "subhumans" as you call them will suddenly humanize and do the right thing because a voice from the camera told them they were being naughty?
The privacy and freedom aspects are important, but should not supplant the simple fact that the camera system does nothing to deter the behaviour you speak of. Like the aformentioned Robin Williams quote "Stop, or I'll yell stop again" this system will not solve the real problems: violent crime, or in your case pollution. But hey they might be able to start berating you over not even trying to keep your house clean.
I can see it now. You arrive home after dodging the PT system with your groceries. As you approach your house a voice calls from the cameras "Citizen 128902 you have made no attempts to wipe the sludge from your house in 15 days. This is unacceptable anti-social behaviour. Clean your house now or I will be forced to send out an agent from the enforcement division. Thank you and have a good day. Oh, by the way your mum stopped by and didn't look too happy either. You might give 'er a call."
The UK can not stand for this anymore - we need to find a voice, and a way to complain, that does not make us look like criminals.
Arrange protests in front of the cameras. Heckle them when they tell you to disperse. Arrange it so you have simultaneous protests at as many cameras as you can. As long as you can get protests at number_of_police_available+1 you'll make a point. The higher the number the better the point. Do this repeatedly. It is a start.
P.S. I think it's a salient point that the example used in the article is a man being shouted at to not ride his bicycle - not a mugging, not a rape, not a murder - a bicycle.
Exactly. This isn't about stopping crime, but the government controlling behaviour.