h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You've pretty much told me everything I knew about him, plus the "champion of the consumer" bit, which I didn't know, and that 3% was the best he did, which I also didn't know. (didn't know much, did I? On the other hand, hands up how many US residents know anything about Charles Kennedy... rhetorical, of course, I doubt many UK residents know that much about Charles Kennedy...)

That "maybe 3 per cent in his best states" does go a little way to making my point, I think.

H.

I'm UK, and I've stated before what NBY sees as the UK view. My caveat would be that I only ask for some evidence, not necessarilly *conclusive* evidence. A telephone call would help. An email from a work email system (hence with traceable email headers) would help. A letter on company notepaper would help.

Ralph Nader - the Democrats tried to negotiate with him, but the fool refused. He claims that going through a term of hell with the Republicans will really make people appreciate why they should vote Green. The Democrats would have one if he hadn't stood, *and* the libertarian candidate *had* stood. In a pure two-way contest, the Democrats would have one the popular vote, but lost the election, as now.

I knew more around the time, but have forgetten it. That's mainly 'cause I'm interested in electoral reform, though.

Nader wrote a magazine article called something like 'The Safe Car You Can't Buy' in the 60s (?) which basically revealed that the US car companies willfully ignored safety issues when designing their cars (because safety didn't sell, probably).

And didn't Philip K Dick used him as the basis for a religion (Naderites) in at least one of his short stories? Or was it another writer?

In this particular case, I think evidence of one kind might be available.
If someone claims to be a specific person IRL, who married a long time ago, then given the date & location in many cases an online check of a register of births, marriages & deaths could at least show if such a marriage took place. If no marriage, then a lie has been told.
If there *was* a marriage, it doesn't necessarily indicate the truth has been told, but may add some weight to the researcher's claims.

"Unsafe At Any Speed", R. Nader 1965. Check out 'Nader's Raiders" sometime when you've got a strong stomach for failed idealism.

Speaking of failed idealism: Nader didn't really get that Son-of-a-Bush "elected" ... Gore was jerked around horribly by press (there was an excellent article about it in Rolling Stone a couple of months ago - I can get you specifics if you'd like), and he asked for the wrong counties to be re-counted in Florida, which didn't matter since the re-count wasn't "allowed". (?) A recent 'conclusion' to studies on the Forida vote chaos 'showed' that - had the counties Gore asked to be re-counted had been, Bush would have 'won'. This was the story trumpted by the NY Times, The Washington Post, and other heavy-hitters of the Press. However, had the entire state been re-counted, Gore would have won with a significant majority. This part of the story was ignored or buried, as per my own letter-to-the-editor locally that was never published...

So we can't go around blaming ol' Raphie boy. Hell, I wasn't even allowed to write him in on the ballot here in North Carolina: he declared "too late" and the Greens couldn't get enough signatures together in time to get him on the ballot. And 'write-ins', we were told here, were tossed out.

It all sucked/sucks.

Hoovooloo, do you mean:

"Charles Kennedy is the Leader of the Liberal Democrats and the MP for Ross, Skye and Inverness West in the Scottish Highlands." This just in:

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/reports/interview/interviewoftheweektranskenn_elec.shtml
 
or

"Charles Kennedy, Honorary Professor of Economic Theory at the University of Kent at Canterbury, died... at his home on 4th November 1997, aged 74." ?

-7_love_those_search_engines_7

[Whoops - I included a link to a BBC interview with Charles Kennedy in that last post. Now I can't remember if that's ok. If the posting is gone, that's why...]

I always think it is a somewhat fruitless debate in the UK about identity cards - we do already have many forms of cross-referenced IDs.
To start with, we too have a "National Insurance" number, used to index all our employment, tax, and possibly indirectly health and education records. Admittedly, they have their own as well, but they are all related.
Some other bits of data you may or may not know are stored about our identity, ripe for stealing and abuse:
- there is a web-site where it is possible to search the UK Electoral Roll for a given person. This allows you to find the address of anyone registered to vote, since this has to be publicly available. From there, you could find out phone numbers, and already you're building up quite a profile. I'm sure you could quite easily work out a series of steps (although I don't recommend trying it out!) that would let you build up some ID, and eventually have enough to prove you *were* that person.
- I would go on to point out some of the riskier loopholes I've spotted in applying for ID, but I think that would be rather like giving the enemy information, so I'll stop here.

It's kind of scary, really, isn't it?