Category — USA

Instapundit felt it. And so did I!

My webhost, HostingMatters (or HostMatters, if you will) experienced a downtime earlier today as the US Presidential elections brought about a huge surge in traffic on the Net. And I’m sure this would’ve affected a great lot of hosts out there.

Hopefully… by the time I wake up, the traffic would’ve subsided to some extent. It pained me to see my blog take so long to load.

By the way, at this time, Bush has taken 4 states to Kerry’s 1 Kerry has overtaken Bush as he has taken 9 states to Bush’s 7, even as the Democrats are running with a loss of 3 electoral votes. And pollsters are still chickening out of predicting who’ll take Ohio

So, today is the day when the biggest circus in the world will perform its final act - the Grand Finalé!!

For this final act, we have just the two clowns in the ring. Georgie, the gun-slingin’ idiot and Johnny, the basset-hound-faced pretender. Who will make the crowds applaud at the end of the act?! Which clown will rule the world America?!

I say the competition will be tough. The race will be close. But Georgie will win it by the nose. After all… he has quite a long nose, doesn’t he? … having lied so much in the last four years!! ;-)

C’mon folks… make a prediction!

Updated!
On a serious note, I completely agree with Shanti’s views about voting. So all you Americans… go out and vote!! Or else… learn to live with whoever your countrymen choose!!

While George W. Bush continues to ridicule John Kerry’s flip flopping attitudes on national and international issues, here’s a brilliant photo-essay that takes a tongue-in-cheek look at Bush’s own flip flops over the years, in the form of a shoe catalog.

It’s funny and tastefuly done! And there’s even a download link if you want to send it out to friends as a pdf file.

However, the author of the photo-essay lets us down in the end by putting up a 1778 quote attributed to Alexander Tyler.

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

From Bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to selfishness;
From selfishness to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back to bondage.

First of all, the author must be referring to Alexander Fraser Tytler, a Scottish history professor who is supposed to have written the above passage in a book titled, ‘The Fall of the Athenian Republic‘. Now, there is no record of such a book even in the US Library of Congress, which houses over 128 million items. So this quote is, in all probability, an urban legend.

However… it is an interesting quote nonetheless! Can this cycle of democracy be applied to an Indian context? Have we ever gone from abundance to selfishness and ultimately from dependence to bondage? Oh but we have, haven’t we?! Loosely put, the regional kings let British and other traders gain political control of their states in exchange for trade and protection… and in the longer run, India ended up as a British colony.

And then from bondage we went on to spiritual faith (rise of people like Gandhi or Swami Vivekanand or countless others)… and from faith we went to great courage as seen in the freedom struggle… and then ultimately we gained liberty!

As for the transition from liberty to abundance… we haven’t seen that yet in India, have we?! Well… I can put it down to the the libertarian argument of not having enough liberty!

Convenient, eh?! ;-)

With the US presidential elections drawing closer by the day, here’s a look at the various forms of electronic/computerized voting systems in use across the world.

It looks at the Smartmatic machines used in Venezuela, which uses fingerprint tracking and paper receipts to keep fraud down. Then it checks out the EVMs used in India, which are nothing but electronic counters that simply store a count of the votes polled. The article also evaluates the first steps taken by Australia by introducing eVACS, built with open-source software with a hope of inspiring trust in its voting system.

While foreign voting systems are certainly far from perfect, both supporters and detractors of e-voting agree that the United States can learn some important lessons from parts of the world that have not been historically associated with sophisticated voting technologies.

I agree with that view. Instead of trying to hope for a perfect system, I feel the US should’ve gone ahead with some proven ideas from either the Indian or the Venezuelan polls. With all the cribbing about the security, only 31% of US voters would actually vote electronically (using the controversial Diebold machines, I presume) in the elections later this year.

Bruce Springsteen’s ‘No Surrender‘ is John Kerry’s campaign song, it being Kerry’s favourite song.

So Springsteen apparently returned the favour by declaring his support [NYTimes registration required] for the Kerry-Edwards campaign.