e voting (receipts, votebuying, brinworld)

[Harmon Seaver]

On Tue, Dec 02, 2003 at 04:06:43PM +0000, ken wrote:
> Thomas Shaddack wrote:
> 
> >On Wed, 26 Nov 2003, Neil Johnson wrote:
> >
> >
> >>>""Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
> >>>Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"
> >>>-- Ben Franklin
> >>
> >>And if they are all armed ? They all starve.
> >
> >
> >Lambs can eat grass, which is usually unarmed.
> 
> It is not. Grass is stuffed full of all sorts of complicated 
> chemicals that can cause confusion to creatures that chomp it. Not 
> to mention nassty little silica crystals.
> 
> Lambs can eat grass because they are toughened and honed 
> grass-killers, fitted by millions of years of evolution to survive 
> everything the grass can throw at them.  And even then they only 
> cope with some kinds of grass. When a cat eats grass it gets sick.
> 

   Right, in fact if sheep (and sometimes cattle) eat Phalaris sp., for
instance, they get the "staggers", depending on the time of year and other
environmental conditions, and also upon the alkaloid makeup of the particular
cultivar. Phalaris, of course, contains fairly large amounts of tryptamines,
like dimethyltriptamine (DMT), as do many other plants. And thank the Goddess
for that -- but sheep don't like it. Or maybe they do, and just aren't saying.