Democracy's Future

The BBC have recently run a 'democracy day' series of posts ....

Democracy ~ The Best Of Some Bad Options.

 

I don't know whether this is coincidental to the recent events in Paris, where decidedly non-democratic voices have been heard, post the jihadist attacks, or just coincidence, but the latest of these posts highlighted that Europe faces a "crisis of democracy".

Jeb Bush - President 2016

So a nation has spoken and President Obama will serve a second term in office.

Possibly he will be able to push through some meaningful policies, but with only the congress as Democrat controlled, and the Senate in the hands of the Republican, its more likely that the US voters have simply just opted to 'kick the can of worms, further down the street'.

Thankfully, the result of the popular vote (50.4% to 48% with Florida shamefully still to declare) was also reflected the electoral college in outcome - although not is spirit, where the college has given Obama a lead of about 100 votes, which shows how disproportional it can be.

As usual there are some interesting snippets thrown up, perhaps the oddest of which is the fact that:

Republicans Need A Bush Or Nixon On  The Presidential Ticket

The Republican ticket of 1928, is the last one to capture the White House without a Bush or a Nixon on it - that's both weird and worrying in equal measure ....

Herbert Hoover 1928 Presidential Ticket

Nixon Eisenhower - Inauguration of an era

........... So Jeb Bush for President 2016 anyone?.

Reform US Electoral System

Predicting anything is tricky, as anyone gambling on sports events such as .... oh I don't know, golfs 'Ryder Cup', will have found out last week.  But usually there is some sort of form when it comes to politics. Opinion polls are often very good indicators of what the people of a country are thinking (well, in true democracies .... not the Russian kind), and so we can take a punt on predicting the results.

US Presidential Race Prediction 2012

This map for example is my entirely spurious prediction for the US Presidential 2012 election next month (Obama must be favourite this time, incumbant always has the edge in a tight contest, if they are up for the fight).

Lunar Larceny

Once upon a time in America, there was an organisation called NASA, and the US of A was very proud of its achievements.  In fact so proud of its achievements were they, especially as it had eclipsed the bad boys of the CCCP, that when it reached its peak and sent men to the Moon, they wanted to show the world of its prowess.

Apollo landings - the peak of US space achievements.

The question was how? Then some eager beaver in the US State Department  noted the words of the crew of the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972, when Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt (still incidentally the last men to have set foot on the Moon), picked up a rock and turning towards the cameras Cernan announced: "We'd like to share a piece of this rock with so many of the countries throughout the world."

What better way they thought, to trumpet American technological and military superiority, than by handing out to various national leaders, little pieces of the very brick-sized rock that Mr Cernan had been holding in his hands? And so throughout the early 1970's, under the orders of President Richard Nixon, fragments of the rock were sent to 135 foreign heads of state, and the 50 US states. Each of these "goodwill Moon rocks" was encased in a lucite ball and mounted on a wooden plaque with the recipient nations' flag attached.

Truth be known they were rather tatty gifts .... but then this was the 1970's, when taste reached an all time low ...

The Goodwill Moon Rock given to Britain.

Two hundred and seventy were given to nations of the world, and one hundred to the fifty US states. Not much thought was given to what happened to these rocks .... it was assumed that they had all gone to national and local museums, until one day in 1998 one of these rocks, the Honduras goodwill Moon rock, was offered up for sale to a NASA investigator.  He had been hunting for fake 'moon rocks' which were being sold in various scams. The rock he was offered weighed 1.142g and the seller wanted $5m (£3m) for it, and the FBI recovered it in a sting operation.

The investigator then made it a personal mission to find out where all the bits of rock were .... he found attempts to sell both Spain's and Cyprus's moon rocks, and that the two Moon rocks Gaddafi's government was given are both missing. Romania is also missing its Apollo 17 goodwill Moon rock, as is the rock given to Malta. The Irish rock is under tons of waste on a landfill following a fire at its housing site.

In all the US gathered and distributed a large number of rocks to various national states, scientific institutions and domestic states ..... and a total of 160 of all the moon rocks gathered by the Apollo 11 and 17 missions are currently unaccounted for or missing (including 24 in the US alone). It has to be assumed that many of these were sold on the black market ..... the hunt is now on to find them all.