Fats, Vitamins and Minerals

Just saw this article and I can’t believe the amount of idiocy in it. Sorry I can’t help it but this is just unbelievable.

“PCIJ: The case for computerized elections
Ruben D. Canlas, PCIJ, 05/20/2007 | 11:06 AM

WHEN IT comes to new consumer trends and communication technology, we Filipinos are always at the cutting edge. Our fashion mimics the latest from the West. We quickly took to texting, blogging, and Friendster. The children of our wealthy and middle-class families sport iPods and PSPs, while the rest of us use hi-tech mobile phones to vote on Philippine Idol and play SMS contests. Ironically, while we have toppled government leaders by texting, we cannot seem to use technology to vote them in place. Our electoral system scores very low in the evolutionary ladder, second only to the plastic ballot boxes I recently saw being used in Africa, and voting by a show of hands. Our system is in dire need of a makeover, one that is worthy of the Internet age. Even the Commission on Elections (Comelec) thinks so, although it somehow always shoots itself in the foot every time it tries to bring up the subject. The good news is this July, Comelec is finally going to test an Internet voting system with Filipinos working in Singapore. The plan is not exactly flawless, but it’s still a step in the right direction. As expected, too many naysayers complain loudly whenever computerization and elections are mentioned in the same breath. Their main beef: computerization will make cheating easier. If their assertion is accurate, how come no politician has ever tried stealing via Internet banking?”

Some quick notes about the PCIJ article:

1. The US, which is at the top of the abovementioned so-called “evolutionary ladder of electoral systems”, employs computerized elections and is in deep shit. Why on earth are so many Filipino people, after being kicked, lied to, cheated, robbed and raped by the US government, continue to see the US as a progressive land of the free?
2. We didn’t topple a government through texting, it was the desire and mobilization of the people and ESPECIALLY the military support for the public outrage that forced Erap out of power. Besides, if this took place hundred years back, we’d have used smoke signals to gather people for a coup, a rally or an orgy.

3. And here is where all logic curl up and die!!!!: “Their main beef: computerization will make cheating easier. If their assertion is accurate, how come no politician has ever tried stealing via Internet banking?”

NB. I hope to be able to write something more indepth with regards to “computerized elections” and fervently hope that we don’t go down the path of institutionalized fraud as what seem to be taking place in what people like the author of the article above call “progressive countries like the US.” To be very honest, I still cannot understand how even so-called educated Filipinos continue to extol the US, the American lifestyle and the American way. For me, the American Land of Opportunity is so well summed up by HL Mencken in his classic essay “On being American”, where he writes:

Here the business of getting a living … is enormously easier than it is in any other Christian land—so easy, in fact, that an educated and forehanded man who fails at it must actually make deliberate efforts to that end. Here the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive aristocracy. And here, more than anywhere else I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly—the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries and extravagances—is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows. (From the Wikipedia entry)

In the meantime, I include some relevant links below on the US automated elections, and recommend to read Automating the counting of votes can make things worse and Computerizing future elections by Roberto Verzola.

Some relevant info:

How They Could Steal the Election This Time - Ronnie Dugger
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040816/dugger
On November 2 millions of Americans will cast their votes for President in computerized voting systems that can be rigged by corporate or local-election insiders. Some 98 million citizens, five out of every six of the roughly 115 million who will go to the polls, will consign their votes into computers that unidentified computer programmers, working in the main for four private corporations and the officials of 10,500 election jurisdictions, could program to invisibly falsify the outcomes.

Democracy In Danger — Computerized Elections and Institutionalized Vote-Fraud
by Lee Goldberg
http://www.analogzone.com/nete0721.htm

A Brief History of Computerized Election Fraud
http://why-war.com/news/2003/10/25/abriefhi.html
Victoria Collier | Truthout | October 25, 2003
“Squadrons of shiny new Touch Screen Trojan horses are being rolled into precincts across America. Not, as we are told, to make voting easier or more accurate, or to help disabled people vote privately, or to save America from the dangers of hanging chad and butterfly ballots — no. The real reason America is being flooded with billions of dollars worth of paperless computerized voting machines is so that no one will ever again be able to prove vote fraud.”

Vote fraud research
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
The book Black Box Voting by Bevis Harris is available as PDF.

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