Re: The Case for a Marriage Ammendment to the Constitution
From: "Bryon Daly" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> So you would deny adoption to single people as well? What of children that would otherwise go unadopted? Would you rather see them in an orphanage than with a loving single parent of gay couple? ^^ Doh! - that should be "or", not "of". _ MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Case for a Marriage Ammendment to the Constitution
From: Erik Reuter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> On Fri, Jul 25, 2003 at 12:11:59AM -0400, John D. Giorgis wrote: > I disagree. Since every child is produced by a mother and a father, > I think that our ideal goal should be to place every child up for > adoption with a very good mother and father. I disagree. Catholics have a distorted view of the world that isn't healthy to pass on to children. They should not be permitted to legally marry, and their children should be put up for adoption with decent parents. I know you're trying to troll him, but 1) he never stated anything about Catholicism is his remark, did that need to be dragged in?, and 2) it's intolerant and offensive to me and perhaps to any other Catholics who might be on this list. _ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Case for a Marriage Ammendment to the Constitution
From: "John D. Giorgis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> At 11:09 PM 7/24/2003 -0400 David Hobby wrote: >I'll tell you what. Change the amendment so that any two >adults can enter into a civil union, which the federal and >state governments must grant all the privileges of marriage, >and you have my support. I disagree. Since every child is produced by a mother and a father, I think that our ideal goal should be to place every child up for adoption with a very good mother and father. So you would deny adoption to single people as well? What of children that would otherwise go unadopted? Would you rather see them in an orphanage than with a loving single parent of gay couple? _ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Science and knowledge
>From: Deborah Harrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Reply-To: Killer Bs Discussion <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >To: Killer Bs Discussion <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Subject: Re: Science and knowledge >Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 12:29:39 -0700 (PDT) > >--- Jon Gabriel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >From: Deborah Harrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > >--- Jon Gabriel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > There *could* be a joke in there somewhere about > > >how illogical and irrational subjects aren't > > > >inherently understandable, but I certainly won't > > > > go searching for it. ;-) > > > > > > > > Jon > > > > Wearing Flame Retardant Underwear Maru > > > > > >Wise decision... is it decorated with Spiderman, > > >Batman or Pokemon? ;D > > > > LOL! I'm old enough to remember that I owned > > Spiderman, Superman, Star Wars > > and ET Underoos when I was little. :-) > > > > > >Someone must have trai- er, taught you well. ;} > > > > > > > Aye. I also have a strong self-preservation > > instinct. :-D > > > > >Lead Mare Maru > > >Frauliching Through Feilds Of Fowlers Maru :) > > > > Ah, Fraulein! Holstein, Hannoverian or Oldenburg? > > ;) > >Ooh! Bonus points!!! :D Ha! :) I've forgotten a lot! >And you didn't say "Schleswiger Heavy Draft," which >does *not* earn extra points, but does confirm your training... ;) >http://www.ansi.okstate.edu/breeds/horses/scheswigerheavydraft/ Interestingly enough, I've never heard of this breed. They're definitely dense and powerful looking and they remind me of mini-Clydesdales. Thanks very much for the link! :) ...I used to be obsessed with horses when I was a kid and started riding at a very young age >"She Recieved Her Degree" Maru :) LOL! Mike Jasper is crude, rude and very very funny. That column was clean compared to the rest of his work. If you can stand the profanity, try his 'Laramie or Leave It' column, which is archived on the site under 'Greatest Hits'. It's very VERY rude and offensive, but imo, worth the read (primarily because I happen to agree with him.) :) > >P.S. Oldenburg-Arab cross...the ones I've met are neat! Very cool! :) Have you found anything that stands out about their personalities? Just curious. Jon Le Blog: http://zarq.livejournal.com ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Arrgh!
>From: Ronn! Blankenship <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >To: Killer Bs Discussion <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >CC: "Jon Gabriel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Subject: Re: Arrgh! >Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 15:25:32 -0500 > >At 04:11 PM 7/24/03 -0400, Jon Gabriel wrote: >>Is anyone else having their list messages bounced back? Vey >>frustrating! >>I even tried to forward one to Nick and his address was bounced. > > > >This one reached the list (obviously ;-) ) . . . Ironic, eh? > >When My Cats Get Too Predictable I Know I Can Rely On Computers To Do >Something Inexplicable Maru > About the only thing I've ever been able to rely on consistently over the years is that my cats were completely unpredictable. ;-) I caught one of 'em "swimming" in the 50 gallon fish tank in my living room once. Little brat was lucky she didn't electrocute herself when the light fell in (or get nipped by the crayfish for that matter.) Oh, and forget inexplicable, my computer is *psychotic*. :-D Jon Le Blog: http://zarq.livejournal.com _ Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963 ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
RE: Gray Davis Recall Election Set for Sep-Oct
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of John D. Giorgis > Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2003 11:14 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Gray Davis Recall Election Set for Sep-Oct > > This is certainly one of the most amazing stories of the year - the > Governor of mighty California is going to face a recall election in late > Sept. or the first Tues. of Oct.The best opinion on this I have heard > is from a Democratic activist who pointed out how the combination of the > potency of incumbency and fundraising skills had led the Democrats to > nominate a pretty shoddy Governor like Gray Davis whom nobody was > particularly crazy about, and then led California to elect him over a guy > nominated by the Republicans who probably would have been an even more > shoddy Governor and whom people liked even less. > > Of course, California Democrats, instead of doing the wise thing and > trying > to get a solid candidate in there are rallying around the sinking > ship. > > JDG This story is *odd*. I have friends, business contacts and family in California and an informal poll revealed that not one of them is pro-Davis. (They cover a full political and religious spectrum.) Californians may not blame him for their current economic situation, but they sure fault him for not attempting to correct it more aggressively. It certainly looks to me like he's screwed and that the Democrats are (rather stupidly, imo) pinning all their hopes on him. Then again, CA Dems aren't coming across as geniuses in general these days. Did you see the report yesterday about the CA state legislators (Dems again) who were caught on tape suggesting that the state's fiscal crisis be extended over time for political gain? It almost makes you wish a guillotine was available. One can only hope that Davis' Republican replacement won't be taking over a lost cause. Jon Le Blog: http://zarq.livejournal.com ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: I have returned from paradise
From: "Jim Sharkey" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Bryon Daly wrote: >From: "Jim Sharkey" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >>I have to figure out how to shrink the pics we took, though. >There's a whole bunch of waysm depending on the software you have, Thanks, Byron, I figured it out. If anyone wants to see a few of the pics before I wrangle with actually making use of the webspace I apparently have, I posted them at the forum I frequent. You can go here, if you're interested: http://www.pvpforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=21574 Nice pics - I'm jealous! I'd love to visit Hawaii someday. Is Knight of the Dinner Table a title you picked, or a standard one? My brother-in-law lent me a whole batch of KODT comics once - I thought they were great. Also, I tracked down my web site and put up the SC2 music files and mod player: http://home.comcast.net/~bryon.daly/M4win240.zip http://home.comcast.net/~bryon.daly/SC2_MODS.ZIP In the .mods zip, I tossed in non-sc2 .mod called "doit.zip", which is by one of the musicians who created some of the other music. It could easily have fit into SC2. _ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
> >> Like it or not, if your policies make some people > >>angry enough to kill themselves to show their displeasure, > >>you need to rethink your policies. But this is not a very > >>popular thing to say, and the Left does have some political > >>sense. > >> > >> ---David > > > >With comments like these, it's easy to understand why you lost your job as > >a rape and battered women's advocate. You, sir, are an idiot. > > > >Kevin T. - VRWC I don't really see how your comment applies, as most rapists and batterers do not kill themselves. And what is it with the insult at the end? Did you catch that from Gautam? ---David ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
Gautam Mukunda wrote: > > --- David Hobby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Well, it did do a lot to cause the attack. And not > > by harmlessly distributing Britney Spears videos, > > either. > > Some of being targeted was because America was > > "walking point" > > for the West in general. But the US has done a lot > > of > > selfish things to make other countries mad at it > > over the > > years. > > Why do you think that Osama bin Laden objects to the > same things about American foreign policy that you do? That's not a fair tactic in an argument. > In all seriousness, why do you think that his > objection is things that you define as "selfish" - > although others may not, of course. Given what he > supports, and what his supporters support, how does > one follow from the other? Sorry, I can't figure out what you mean here. Clarify? > > > Like it or not, if your policies make some people > > angry enough to kill themselves to show their > > displeasure, > > you need to rethink your policies. ... > Why? This is a moral non sequitur. Suicide bombers > don't act the way we do because _we_ are evil, they > act the way they do because _they_ are evil. Branding them as "evil" doesn't really help to make things clearer. I render your statement as something on the order of "...people who do bad things do them because they are people who do bad things." Which is vacuous. > Failing > to understand that simple fact is why the Left has had > little or nothing to contribute on the issue of > terrorism. It seems like there is this absolute > inability to conceive that someone other than the > United States could be wrong and in the wrong. I did not make any such claim. See below. > What makes you think that the people who attack us > would be in favor of us promoting human rights? Do > _they_ ever promote human rights? Oh, they don't like human rights. They might well attack us just because of this. But if they do, at least we're fighting for a just cause. I'm prepared to defend Britney Spear's right to make money by acting like a harlot, or whatever. I am not prepared to defend the right of various corporations to manipulate things to maximize profits. > David, as far as I understand your argument, it boils > down to, if the US acted the way you wanted to, it > would remove the incentive on the part of terrorists > to attack us. You seem to think that _they_ object to > the same things about the US that _you_ do. As both a > rhetorical approach and a strategic policy I don't see > it. No, I don't. What I want to do is remove the incentive that the US acts selfishly and unjustly. Doing so would earn us more friends, and fewer enemies. > _They_ claim that their problem with the United States > is existential, not political. They object not to > what we _do_, but what we _are_. Al Qaeda published a > list of demands in the Arabic press - the first one > was that the attacks would stop when everyone in the > US converted to Islam. That's their rhetoric, sure. But they do have to find people who REALLY care for their cause to carry out the attacks. If our actions were better, such zealots would be a lot rarer. > Would you have told the Jews of the 1940s that they > needed to understand why they were hated? The victims > of Stalin's purges? Mao's? By now, this is a bad analogy. These groups were oppressed minorities. > We aren't dealing with an opponent > that wants rational things - we are dealing with a > pathology. This isn't about giving them what they > want so that they go away. It's about killing them > before they kill us, because one of those two things > is going to happen just as surely as the tides. But it's not one monolithic group! Some idiots want everyone in the world to adhere to their religion. Others are driven by more reasonable concerns. Let's deal with their concerns. Then all we have to do is fight the former faction. ---David ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
RE: Gray Davis Recall Election Set for Sep-Oct
> -Original Message- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Behalf Of John D. Giorgis > Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2003 8:14 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Gray Davis Recall Election Set for Sep-Oct Not sure if it's so clear to those of you who don't live here, but a lot of the recall momentum came from the deals Davis made during the energy crisis, which are still costing us a fortune. We have Enron to thank, in addition to whatever political foolishness created this situation. Nick ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
RE: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
> -Original Message- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] > I would contend that had Gore won the > post 911 stuff would have gone the same. We would have gone into > Afghanastan with the same outcome. I would argue that Gore would > have been much better at using the good will towards the US that > exists after 911 to accomplish the goal of fighting terrorism. > Think about how the administration has squandered that good will? > The high handed arogance of the Bush team has unnecesarily > alientated much of the world. Uh, didja forget? Gore *did* win -- the vote, anyway. Just not the office that usually goes with it. Nick ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Case for a Marriage Ammendment to the Constitution
JDG poured an a$$load of gasoline on the fire by writing: > I disagree. Since every child is produced by a mother and a father, I > think that our ideal goal should be to place every child up for adoption > with a very good mother and father. With all due respect, I think you're way out of touch with reality. You've taken the classic boob's line, "God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!" and slapped a new coat of pain on it, but it's still bereft of real substance, and just as ridiculous. While a man and a woman are required for the initial act, it does not necessarily follow that both sexes are required for every step after that. I have yet to see compelling evidence that gay adoptive parents, screened to the same degree as a heterosexual couple, are less fit as parents. I think that if someone can demonstrate that they're able to care for a child emotionally, physically and financially, they should be allowed to adopt. If two adults capable of giving informed consent want to make a commitment to care for each other over the long term, they should be allowed to. Heck, if two or more adults capable of giving informed consent want to make that commitment, they should be allowed to. A Marriage Amendment to the Constitution would, in the long run, be a bigger mistake than prohibition (although for different reasons, and with different results). A Marriage Amendment acts to protect a few delicate sensibilities in the face of a change that is moving ever closer, and will be as effective in the long run as Jim Crow and "Separate but equal". Adam C. Lipscomb [EMAIL PROTECTED] Read the blog. Love the blog. http://aclipscomb.blogspot.com ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
Jon Gabriel wrote: ... > > Like it or not, if your policies make some people > >angry enough to kill themselves to show their displeasure, > >you need to rethink your policies. But this is not a very > >popular thing to say, and the Left does have some political > >sense. > > How about killing innocents? Should we therefore assume from your statement > that you agree with the leftist belief that the mass slaughter of innocent > civilians is an appropriate and justifiable response when someone gets > "angry" for political reasons? To put it another way, do you believe that > on 9/11, civilian New Yorkers deserved to die because they happened to be > Americans? No straw men, please. I would go as far as to say that most COMBATANTS killed in wars did not deserve to die. > I notice that you haven't responded to my post about body counts. I'd > really appreciate an answer to the above questions, even if you're not going > to respond to that one. Sorry. Maybe I missed it. Here is a quote from CNN, from http://us.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/04/17/sprj.irq.casualties/ "The U.S. estimated more than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers died in the 1991 Gulf War, but human rights groups claimed much higher numbers." Given that most were conscripts, this should count as equivalent to a sizeable civilian body count. (Or were there rules for your proposed count-off? What were they?) > Bill Maher's infamous statement "...the terrorists were not cowards..." has > been applauded by the left: In my not-so-humble opinion, they most > certainly were. Honorable, brave men would have attacked military targets > and not civilians who couldn't fight back. Got me. It seems that different people fight by different rules. I don't see any suicide attack as the work of a coward. Yes, killing civilians is not generally seen as honorable. But most militaries accept that some civilian casualties are inevitable in an attack. Al Quaida would probably argue that the World Trade Center was a military target in an economic war. That's a bit of a stretch, but all that's needed is that the terrorists believed it. > > I would like for the US to really be a champion of > >human rights THROUGHOUT the world, not just when and where > >it was politically convenient. > Why should everything be our responsibility? We play 'world policeman' > often enough that it gets tiresome after a while. I notice that you're not > condemning the eastern and western European countries who fail to take on > that role. Why not? Why do we always have to altruistically risk American > lives because, often, much of the rest of the world can't be bothered? What I'm saying is that it looks bad for the US to pick and choose. We are in a good position to champion human rights, resorting to military action if needed. But we have to be clearly impartial about it. I imagine that we could enlist most of NATO and so on in this cause, IF we stopped trying to run the whole show. ---David ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
From: "Robert J. Chassell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "Bryon Daly" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote Seriously, if the admin actually was trying to craft a believable lie that would not blow up in their faces, don't you think they'd do a better job of it, and have all their ducks lined up, i's dotted, t's crossed, etc.? Please tell me why the Administration did not have the US Army search through its then list of feared sites in the latter part of April? I don't know. It seems like a good, valid question that's worth asking. It seems to me that real questions like this have been lost in the flood of "Bush LIED!!!" media coverage. It is this lack of a search that leads many people to think the Administration was not being competent. This is the problem. Maybe or maybe not. It is worth putting the question to the administration. (I'm personally willing to reserve judgement on it until I hear both sides.) It might seem like it at times, but I do not consider myself a Bush partisan; but I am pro-war and think it's critical for us to succeed in rebuilding Iraq as a successful democracy. My main points for getting involved with this thread was that it appeared to me that the Bush Lied accusations and then calls for his impeachment were trumped-up, which had the effect of 1) hurting the US goal of rebuilding Iraq by trying to make the Iraq invasion seem groundless and illegitimate (based just on a single disputable sentence), and 2) distracting focus from the real forward-going issues such as the handling of Iraq's reconstruction. Hopefully the Administration was wrong before the war, or was lying. Hopefully there was nothing dangerous in those sites, or anywhere else. I don't think they were lying. Maybe they were wrong, but I just can't think of a good reason why Saddam would sacrifice/risk so much (in terms of sanctions and later the threat of US invasion) to thwart the WMD inspections for years, if he didn't actually have/want them any more. Also if he had destroyed the WMD the UN *knew* he had prior to kicking the inspectors out, why would he not have kept records/proof/evidence of this? My pet theory I haven't seen anyone else propose yet: When it became apparent that the US was starting to set its sights back on Iraq, Saddam read the writing on the wall, and started destroying all evidence of his WMDs in advance, with the thought that once the US forced inspectors back in, if they actually found anything, Bush would have his smoking gun for implementing regime change. Suppose the Administration were not lying -- Gautam keeps saying this. Suppose the Bush Administration were telling the truth, as best they understood it. If this is true, then we have a different question: perhaps the Administration is not poor at lying -- an inadequacy we would expect of honest men and women -- but is simply incompetent. Suppose the Administration was truthful. That does not take away the problem. We still have the very serious questions of why the Army did not search the sites on its list in the latter half of April, why US took so long to create a new local government after its first attempt failed, why it has taken so long to admit to and get a handle on the guerilla war, and why the cost of the occupation is higher than said before. (The cost is now running at nearly a billion US dollars a week -- an amount that is greater than the humanitarian money the US, according to John, is supplying to Afganistan over the year.) All valid questions. I do think it is a huge, daunting task, though, so I'm somewhat willing to be patient as long as the process is reasonably transparent and accountable. Germany and Japan took years to reconstruct, and I don't think we can expect Iraq to happen any quicker, really. IMHO, we need to be engaged for the long haul, accept that fact and resist those on both political sides that want to bail out before the job is done. (It goes without saying that no one expects perfection. Everyone makes mistakes. That is why you nurture organizations and critics and independent people within them to detect problems and learn quickly. That is why you have Plans B, C, and D. But regardless of that, politically, the point in choosing one set of people over another for an Administration is that the better set is supposed to make fewer big mistakes.) If you and Gautam are right, the question is not whether the Bush Administration were telling the truth as best they could, but whether they are sufficiently competent enough to `build nations' and otherwise defend the US. Yes, and I sincerely hope they are! I think the consequences of failure would be high. Sadly, I also think there are some people who would prefer to see the US fail in Iraq to discredit Bush rather than have the US succeed when that would benefit Bush. -bryon _ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http:
Re: Pregnancy update
> Things are going reasonably OK now. > > This wasn't the case sometime last week. I've been having contractions, > and Wednesday of last week, it just got to where I couldn't lie down > when I needed to, and was horribly exhausted, and having contractions at > a rate that didn't bode entirely well for my not going into labor before > I really ought to. So Dan basically confined me to being horizontal > most of the time, and called my mom. She got here on Sunday. You too? Melissa's been having some pretty bad contractions - the doctor doesn't think she'll make it to the day they scheduled her c-section. Granted, that's only 2-1/2 weeks away... but I'm running around like a maniac trying to get cribs, changing tables and cradles assembled, as well as keep the house and the kids looking reasonably presentable. Glad to hear the inside babies are healthy, and I hope things with your F-i-L go well. I've still got two boxes of clothes for you, but Melissa wants to hang on to them until after the baby's born on the off chance the ultrasound lied and we're not having a boy. Still haven't decided upon a name - we're down to 2 or 3 choices, and I'll be giving them the "shout it out the back door" test this weekend. Sadly, Aethelrede and Cuthbert didn't make the cut again. With my luck, the baby will come right in the middle of the documentary shoot I'm working on next weekend, and there'll be some delightful chaos. Adam C. Lipscomb [EMAIL PROTECTED] Read the blog. Love the blog. http://aclipscomb.blogspot.com ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Case for a Marriage Ammendment to the Constitution
At 02:43 PM 7/24/2003 -0400 Jean-Louis Couturier wrote: >I do agree that the laws permitting or restricting marriage should be >passed by elected officials rather than appointed ones. However, the >courts have there part to play. With such thorny issues, legislators >have the bad habit of looking the other way and ignoring them. Ontario's >courts have made a decision that has prompted the federal governement to >write and pass a bill on the issue. In my mind, this is a foruitious gamble on the Court's part if the federal government had failed to legitimze the Court's decision, however, I think that there would have been some serious unintended negative consequences. Witness our Congress' failure to legitimize the Roe vs. Wade decision. JDG ___ John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED] "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity." - George W. Bush 1/29/03 ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Case for a Marriage Ammendment to the Constitution
On Fri, Jul 25, 2003 at 12:11:59AM -0400, John D. Giorgis wrote: > I disagree. Since every child is produced by a mother and a father, > I think that our ideal goal should be to place every child up for > adoption with a very good mother and father. I disagree. Catholics have a distorted view of the world that isn't healthy to pass on to children. They should not be permitted to legally marry, and their children should be put up for adoption with decent parents. -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: How we were hoodwinked
On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 10:10:51PM -0500, Julia Thompson wrote: > I know. You're more of a tug than a jerk. Do I create tension? What are you going to pull next? -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Case for a Marriage Ammendment to the Constitution
Jean-Louis Couturier wrote: > > At 07:26 2003-07-24 -0400, John D Giorgis posted a text containing the > following: > >Gay marriage would cut the final cord that ties marriage to the well-being > >of children. It is a step we should not take. Our cultural forgetting of > >the meaning of marriage has already had too many sad consequences for > >children and adults (not least for their moral development). > > This is only true if being gay is considered immoral. If gays have the > same moral values as the rest of the population, then they are as apt to > be parents as the rest of the population. Although gays cannot reproduce, Sure they can. Just not completely with their partners. But if a gay couple felt a biological connection was important, they could do things like have one partner have a child with a sibling of the other partner's. The child has half their DNA in common with the first partner, and one quarter in common with the other. (Not quite as strong a connection as a child of a heterosexual couple, who has half in common with both. But still good.) ---David The above would have been easier to state if we had general kinship terms based on degrees of genetic relatedness. Sibling, parent and child are all "halves". Grandparent, grandchild, aunt, uncle, niece, nephew, half-sibling, and so on are "quarters". And you know you're really a redneck if you need fractions which aren't negative powers of two! ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Case for a Marriage Ammendment to the Constitution
At 11:09 PM 7/24/2003 -0400 David Hobby wrote: > I'll tell you what. Change the amendment so that any two >adults can enter into a civil union, which the federal and >state governments must grant all the privileges of marriage, >and you have my support. I disagree. Since every child is produced by a mother and a father, I think that our ideal goal should be to place every child up for adoption with a very good mother and father. John D. ___ John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED] "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity." - George W. Bush 1/29/03 ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Pregnancy update
Things are going reasonably OK now. This wasn't the case sometime last week. I've been having contractions, and Wednesday of last week, it just got to where I couldn't lie down when I needed to, and was horribly exhausted, and having contractions at a rate that didn't bode entirely well for my not going into labor before I really ought to. So Dan basically confined me to being horizontal most of the time, and called my mom. She got here on Sunday. Mom's taking over various tasks gradually. She can put away most of the stuff that goes through the dishwasher (and learning where more and more things go every day), she's offered to do laundry, she's been helping with all the grocery shopping, and she's driving me where I need to go when Dan isn't available to do so himself. Sammy hasn't quite warmed up to her, but he's getting there, and she's helping by not pushing it. (If he doesn't recognize you when you walk in the door for an extended visit, allowing him a week to get used to you is a good thing; I just wish my father-in-law would believe us when we tell him this is the case, but I don't expect him to visit any time soon. I may say something about his diagnosis after he sees the oncologist next week and we have a better idea of just what it was that was removed from him earlier this month.) I think Mom's also enjoying being around a pregnant daughter. I went in for an ultrasound on Tuesday. Both babies are head-down, same as last time. The boy's calculated weight was 1617g, the girl's, 1465g. They're both around 90th %ile for twins of the appropriate gender at the gestation age they're at. The computer that calculates the weights based on ultrasound data also will give a gestational age based on that weight, and the boy's was over a week older than the actual gestational age. They're within a few days of each other on the calculated gestational age, as well, which is very good. All the organs visible on ultrasound were looking good, as well, apparently. So I'm carrying two healthy babies. So I'm walking around with over 3kg of baby inside me (Sammy was roughly 4kg when he was born), plus plenty of placenta, and all sorts of things are being crowded out, my stomach included. I eat to the point where I can't fit any more in my stomach, and then I have to eat again 2-3 hours later. It would be best for everyone involved if I could manage to *not* go into labor until at *least* the 14th of August. The 14th of September would be better. (And I won't be carrying them into October; they don't like for twins to go past 38 weeks, which would be late September.) So, that's what's going on here. And Dan said something about getting a laptop computer set up for me so's I could do e-mail from bed (or from couch, at least until we get that daybed we're borrowing from friends which I'm hoping will be more comfortable than the couch), but that hasn't happened yet. I'm hoping for it within the next 10 days, though. Julia and yes, if you saw anything potentially alarming above and want to ask further questions, go ahead ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Iraq's Nuclear Weapons - Clinton's '98 Statement
Brad DeLong wrote: > > >David said: > > > >> If wombats were credible WMD, he would have included them too. : ) > > > >...thus giving me the chance to point out that I was responsible for: > > > >http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blosxom.cgi/2002/Oct/22#wombat > > > >Rich > >VFP A Colder War Yes, and thank you. Our lives (and our nightmares) are richer for it. ---David ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
At 12:44 AM 7/25/2003 + Robert J. Chassell wrote: >John, rather admirably, says that the lack of search was because the >Administration judged it more important in the latter part of April >and May to protect Iraqis from looters and such than to protect >Americans in Washington, DC, where he lives, or in Kalamazoo, MI. >Perhaps John is right, but I find that argument hard to believe. Alternatively, I also suggest that it is impossible to believe at this point that an immediate search of those sites by all available men would have reduced the number of weapons able to be smuggled by the Baathists by a statisticly significant amount. We now know that the Coalition was pretty much standed by the rapid collapse of the formal Iraqi Resisitance. Given that the formal Iraqi Resistance essentially retreated, after having a year+ to prepare for the war, it somes impossible to believe that rapid "site inspections" would have affected the number of smuggled WMD's in any meaningul way. JDG ___ John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED] "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity." - George W. Bush 1/29/03 ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: I have returned from paradise
Bryon Daly wrote: >From: "Jim Sharkey" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >>I have to figure out how to shrink the pics we took, though. >There's a whole bunch of waysm depending on the software you have, Thanks, Byron, I figured it out. If anyone wants to see a few of the pics before I wrangle with actually making use of the webspace I apparently have, I posted them at the forum I frequent. You can go here, if you're interested: http://www.pvpforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=21574 Jim Can't Wait to Go Back Maru ___ Eliminate pop-ups before they appear! Visit www.PopSwatter.com now - It's FREE. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
At 05:53 PM 7/24/2003 -0500 The Fool wrote: >http://msnbc.com/news/940963.asp?0sl=-44&cp1=1 Didn't they used to duel on the floors of Congress? Sounds like classic ingomious political chicanery to me. JDG ___ John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED] "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity." - George W. Bush 1/29/03 ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
At 08:07 PM 7/24/2003 -0400 Robert J. Chassell wrote: >The phrase "The British have learned" suggests to a listening >public that the US President had US intelligence agencies investigate >the matter. It does not suggest this to me. Indeed the mere fact that British intelligence is being mentioned in the State of the Union suggests exactly the opposite to me. If the US had verified this claim with our intelligence, I would hardly anticipate that the President would credit the British in the SotU. If your criticism is that Bush said "learned" instead of "informed us that they believe", then who is being pedantic and mincing words here? JDG ___ John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED] "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity." - George W. Bush 1/29/03 ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: How we were hoodwinked
On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 10:37:23PM -0500, Julia Thompson wrote: > Personally, I like the story about the little girl who takes a basket > of goodies to her grandmother's house and there's a wolf involved. > What was the name of that? Something with "hood", right? Having read little writing in my 'hood, I can't see how an intelligent person could be hoodwinked by such ridiculous propaganda. -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: How we were hoodwinked
Erik Reuter wrote: > > As far as me being a jerk, I can't see how an intelligent person is > hoodwinked by this ridiculous propaganda. I know. You're more of a tug than a jerk. Julia ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
In a message dated 7/24/2003 5:26:59 PM Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > If John Ashcroft were anyone _but_ an evangelical > Christian (speaking as a non-evangelical > non-Christian) the way he is treated by the Left would > be recognized by everyone for what it is - sheer > religious bigotry of the most unvarnished sort. And your proof for this is exactly what? Ashcroft comes across as yet another member of the administration with narrow and rigid views of the world. A man so convinced of his moral rectitude that a little thing like the constitution can't get in his way. But why is this important? Are you saying that the actions of the Justice Department were ok ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Deborah Harrell wrote: > --- The Fool <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Friday browncoat republicans in the house of > > representatives called the > > police to arrest and remove democratic > > representatives from a library in > > the house of representatives. The future is here > > and now. Never before > > has something so shocking happened in the history of > > the united states. > > This is only the beginning. > > I didn't see anything about this; do you have an > article or two? Thanks. http://www.statesman.com/asection/content/auto/epaper/editions/saturday/news_f381deaac525c174001e.html link will work only through Friday July 25, I think http://www.statesman.com/asection/content/auto/epaper/editions/saturday/news_f381deb1c525f16b0059.html same expiration on link; this may be of more interest to folks in Austin than anywhere else I'm sure someone else has another article somewhere, but no one else has responded yet. Julia ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Case for a Marriage Ammendment to the Constitution
"John D. Giorgis" wrote: > > While I am sure that many of you will not support the first half of the proposed > ammendment, (although I would point out that this first half does not rule out civil > unions - such as the ones currently embraced by the gay community in Vermont.) > Nevertheless, I would hope that everyone would be in favor of the second half. I > think that this issue is so important and controversial that it should be decided by > the State Legislatures and Congress, which are elected by the people, and not > written by unelected judges. > > JDG ... It reads: "Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups." The first sentence of the amendment would ban gay marriage. The second sentence would bar judges from granting legal privileges to same-sex couples (or groups), but allow state legislatures to make their own decisions in the matter. ... (You should have said that the proposed amendment was at the bottom--that was a lot of fluff to wade through. : ) ) I'll tell you what. Change the amendment so that any two adults can enter into a civil union, which the federal and state governments must grant all the privileges of marriage, and you have my support. ---David ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: How we were hoodwinked
Erik Reuter wrote: > > On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 05:49:58PM -0500, Julia Thompson wrote: > > Erik Reuter wrote: > > > > > Since we are being snippy... > > > > > > > > (All this snipping is reminding me of the story about the 3 mythical > women who cut the strings of people's lives when their time is up) I think some modern stories have been based on this, as well. Personally, I like the story about the little girl who takes a basket of goodies to her grandmother's house and there's a wolf involved. What was the name of that? Something with "hood", right? Julia ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Science and knowledge
On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 09:52:26PM -0500, Ronn!Blankenship wrote: > Why not? Exactly. -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
At 11:21 AM 7/24/2003 -0500 The Fool wrote: >It is merely a myth about ostriches. Your claim was that ostriches were >mythical, you did not mention any behavior of ostriches. On the scale of being pedantic from 0 to 10, I rate this as a 7.5 .Your post about "I already posted that article a week ago" (or some such) was significantly more pedantic. I think you're slipping Kneem. JDG ___ John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED] "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity." - George W. Bush 1/29/03 ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
At 11:35 AM 7/24/2003 -0400 Jon Gabriel wrote: >But by your logic, shouldn't we therefore expect that the administration's >next target will be the Saudis? There's plenty of evidence that they have >harbored, supported and trained terrorists whose sole goal is American >genocide. > >Why do you think we ignoring them? Do you think that's a wise choice? 1) I do not think we are ignoring them. I think that there are many pressures being applied to the Saudi regime already. 2) Doing anything about Saudi Arabia was a logistical impossibility so long as Saddam Hussein was in power in Iraq. 3) I think that the United States is a republic, and currently I can hardly imagine the republic supporting an overt attack on Saudi Arabia based on the only circumstantial evidence we currently have publicly available implicating the regime, its past fairly friendly relations with the US, its control of significant portions of the world's oil supply, the very likely backlash in the Muslim and Arab worlds from occupying Mecca and Medina, the likely world outcry against such an attack, and the general reluctantance to go to war without a direct attack and the exhaustion of alternatives. Your argument is the classic moral fallacy that because I donate $1 to feed one poor person in Dominica, I must donate $1 to feed every poor person everywhere. Sorry, but no dice. There were about 10 solid reasons for attacking Iraq directly. There are scant few for attacking Saudi Arabia directly right now. JDG ___ John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED] "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity." - George W. Bush 1/29/03 ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Gray Davis Recall Election Set for Sep-Oct
This is certainly one of the most amazing stories of the year - the Governor of mighty California is going to face a recall election in late Sept. or the first Tues. of Oct.The best opinion on this I have heard is from a Democratic activist who pointed out how the combination of the potency of incumbency and fundraising skills had led the Democrats to nominate a pretty shoddy Governor like Gray Davis whom nobody was particularly crazy about, and then led California to elect him over a guy nominated by the Republicans who probably would have been an even more shoddy Governor and whom people liked even less. Of course, California Democrats, instead of doing the wise thing and trying to get a solid candidate in there are rallying around the sinking ship. JDG http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-recall24jul24,1,145947.story SACRAMENTO The drive to remove Gov. Gray Davis from office qualified for the ballot Wednesday, clearing the way for a campaign unlike any other in California history. ___ John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED] "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity." - George W. Bush 1/29/03 ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: I have returned from paradise
From: "Jim Sharkey" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> I have to figure out how to shrink the pics we took, though. My wife uploaded them at 1.2 meg piece, and I have no idea how to make them smaller at this point. There's a whole bunch of waysm depending on the software you have, but probably the easiest, if you have Windows XP, is just to right-click on any photo (or select a bunch), and select the "Resize Pictures" option. If gives you a dialog with a number of size options, pick the one you want, hit OK, and you're all set. If you selected a bunch of photos, it will resize them all at once. -bryon _ Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Science and knowledge
At 07:11 AM 7/23/03 -0400, Erik Reuter wrote: On Tue, Jul 22, 2003 at 12:16:20PM -0500, Ronn!Blankenship wrote: > Sounds like they would fit Erik's conditions perfectly. Nope. Why not? --Ronn! :) I always knew that I would see the first man on the Moon. I never dreamed that I would see the last. --Dr. Jerry Pournelle ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
In a message dated 7/24/2003 8:34:27 AM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > What's carefully crafted about "The British have > learned" The White House wanted a stronger statement but the CIA experts would not appove it. They tried several iterations before this was chosen (see the NY Times about a week ago). ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
> > I think statements indicating that the > > administration is obviously telling the truth and > > that anyone not agreeing this is either what? > > stupid? venal? totally naive? totally cynical? > > Taken advantage of by people more interested in > political power than the national interest. > Sol in other words I am naive and stupid. I do not believe I am either. I do in fact hate Bush. But that does not make me a leftist. It has to do with the sense of entitlement he exudes. He is the son of wealth. He went to Yale because of his family and their money. He screwed around for many years. He became a successful business man when he was essentially handed a major league baseball franchise. But even that is besides the point. I and many others have serious reservations (I have great fear actually) about what he is doing to the country. I think his domestic policies are horrendous and his economic policies even worse. As to things changing after 911 and the left having no response. Well most americans responded the same way regardless of their political beliefs. I would contend that had Gore won the post 911 stuff would have gone the same. We would have gone into Afghanastan with the same outcome. I would argue that Gore would have been much better at using the good will towards the US that exists after 911 to accomplish the goal of fighting terrorism. Think about how the administration has squandered that good will? The high handed arogance of the Bush team has unnecesarily alientated much of the world. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
> > But of course this statement was carefully crafted.
> > The CIA could not confirm the allegation so the
> > speech writers found language that the CIA could
> > "live with". So this was not simply a statement of
> > fact. The speech writer came up with a phrase that
> > would shield the administration from accusations of
> > lying.
>
> Which is why they weren't lying, and we all know it.
The question is not whether they were technically lying. It was what did they want the
american public to believe. Did they intentionally leave the impression that the
evidence for nuclear program was more active than they knew it was? Our own
intelligence service did not believe there was sufficient evidence to make this claim.
What more can one say. The adminsitration did not lie. It simply deceased us.
> The statement the British tell us is (in some ways)
> weaker than the statement "we know". Of course, given
> the relative records of British and American
> intelligence, it's stronger in some ways too, but
> that's neither here nor there. The point of saying
> the British told us this is to convert a factually
> untrue statement "We know this" to a true one "We
> believe this because someone else we trust claims to
> know it." And, incidentally, as I point out for what
> feels like the hundredth time and you have gracefully
> ignored, the British _still believe it_. They also
> have (much) better intelligence in Africa than we do.
Can you please point out what this evidence is? Of course the British government must
say it still believes this to be true. Are they to say "Gee guys it turns out we were
wrong. Sorry". Must we continue to take the word of a group has a good reason to
continue to hold this opinion without some other proof?
> It really is astonishing. Are we seeing criticisms of
> financial mismanagement?
Not yet
No.
The rebuilding process?
What rebuilding process? When there electricity and water we can talk about rebuilding.
>
Not in any meaningful sense. It's just accusations
> of lying about 16 words that are factually true but are meant to deceive. To deceive
> not about a sexual escapade but about taking the country into war. It is about the
> administration not trusting the american people enough to make the real reasons the
> reasons they talked about.
That even if the Administration were
> lying (it is not) its record of truthfulness compares
> quite favorably to FDR's in 1940. Or Wilson's ("He
> Kept Us Out of War!") in 1917, for that matter.
>
But we have a new moral bar. Thanks to the republicans we are now told that lying is
an impeachable offense. The republicans tried to get rid of Clinton using this new
rule. Why should not the democrats use the same rule. At least Clinton just lied about
his sex life not our military life.
> Is the Democratic Party _trying_ to give Bush all 50
> states in 2004? That would explain this fairly well,
> I guess.
We will see what happens in 2004. If the economy does not recover we might see Bush
losing some of his aura. Now I don't think this will happen because the dems do not
have a real candidate. But who knows what will happen.
___
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
I have returned from paradise
And if you are interested in hearing about it, you can check out the story here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/templar569/ I have to figure out how to shrink the pics we took, though. My wife uploaded them at 1.2 meg piece, and I have no idea how to make them smaller at this point. Jim ___ Express Yourself - Share Your Mood in Emails! Visit www.SmileyCentral.com - the happiest place on the Web. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Religion based ethics
- Original Message - From: "Doug Pensinger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2003 2:32 AM Subject: Re: Religion based ethics > Dan Minette wrote: > > - Original Message - > > From: "Doug Pensinger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > >>I see our morals evolving before our very eyes, don't you? > > > > > > Not really. Remember there is no purpose to evolution, it just is. > > Isn't there at least one, however vaguely defined purpose to evolution: > success? In the same sense that the purpose of gravity is falling, but that's streatches the meaning of purpose. > The > > survival of the fittest is not the survival of the best. In particular, > > fittest may be a function of the sequence of environments; so the nature of > > the fittest can be somewhat random. > > But doesn't the randomness of evolution begin to recede once you are > actually aware of the evolutionary process and actively abet it? Then, its not really evolution. > An animal with a successful adaptation is unaware of what that > adaptation is, but a human with a successful innovation can immediately > recognize what and why it is successful and continue to build upon it. > > An animal is not aware of the social "laws" that guide its behavior, but > a human is not only able to see short term benefits of social behaviors, > but he is able to 1) compare those behaviors with those of other groups > and 2) compare those behaviors with past behaviors. Aberrant behaviors > may have short term success, but as in your Native American example, > eventually end in failure. Every behavior by the Native Americans ended in failure. The Euroepeans simply took the land as they willed. The result was a vast and powerful European country in the Americas. It became the super power of the world. As I pointed out, the aberrant behavior of the Iriquois allowed them the greatest power for the greatest time with respect to the Europeans of any native group. The 6 nations were afforded some respect by the Europeans because of their power. >In turn, behaviors that eventually prove to > be more successful may have appeared and failed one or more times before > they succeeded. Evolution. That only works if you are taking a snapshot of about 50 years of history and calling it the culmination of history. The US is somewhat unique in that morality is actually the third priority of foreign policy (after national security and economic self interest). The US winning the Cold War was not a certainty. What you appear to be saying is that the system that ends up the dominant system is, by definition, moral. If totalitarian systems had won, or eventually win, will that make individual freedom immoral? If your worst nightmares come true, and a US theocracy is formed, will that make you immoral if you are not Christian. Does might make right? The argument given above indicates that this is true. My argument is, that some things are immoral, even if they prove successful. It was wrong to treat the Native Americans as we did, even though the power of our country is at least partially founded on that immoral behavior. Would you argue, by definition, it was right? Dan M. Dan M. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Morality is just self interest?
I'm going to focus on one answer that relates to a post of Doug for now. - Original Message - From: "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, July 19, 2003 6:25 PM Subject: Re: Morality is just self interest? > On Sat, Jul 19, 2003 at 04:49:49PM -0500, Dan Minette wrote: > > This was clearly in the best interest of the Iroquois, but not the > > slaughtered tribes, nor humanity in general. Yet, it was a perfectly > > rational act, if you assume the Iroquois acted in the self interest of > > their own tribe. > Until they got slaughtered in turn by a stronger "tribe". Not so > rational, after all. Perhaps if they had cooperated with the other > tribes, they (collectively) would have been much stronger when the > Europeans arrived, and could have negotiated a peace from a position of > strength. Well that's an interesting hypothesis. I realize that history cannot be tested experimentally, but I do not consider it meaningless. So, it is important to me to realize that they were strong when the Europeans arrived. Indeed, amazingly they were able to maintain their strength, as the first nation of the six nations, for over 100 years (from before 1650 to the Revolutionary War). This was in spite of the ravaging of their nation by disease imported by the Europeans. Part of this is attributed, to the "adoption" of some of their slaves, to keep their numbers up in the face of disease. Some slaves became junior members of the tribe. It was found that slaves with no home tribe were especially ameanable to such identity changes...which reiforced the massacre of tribes from which they had slaves. They were well known and received a measure of respect from the Europeans. Indeed, one of the documents studied before the writing of the US constitution was the Iriquois constitution. They were fairly unique in how they were treated as "players" by the Europeans. I can think of no other example of Native Americans in North America retaining a reasonable amount of power with respect to the Europeans for so long. If you wish to remark that this is just a function of my poor memory, then I'd invite you to show a counter example. Dan M. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
"Bryon Daly" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote Seriously, if the admin actually was trying to craft a believable lie that would not blow up in their faces, don't you think they'd do a better job of it, and have all their ducks lined up, i's dotted, t's crossed, etc.? Please tell me why the Administration did not have the US Army search through its then list of feared sites in the latter part of April? It is this lack of a search that leads many people to think the Administration was not being competent. This is the problem. John, rather admirably, says that the lack of search was because the Administration judged it more important in the latter part of April and May to protect Iraqis from looters and such than to protect Americans in Washington, DC, where he lives, or in Kalamazoo, MI. Perhaps John is right, but I find that argument hard to believe. The lack of search meant the sites were open to enemy guerilla soldiers. According to the Pentagon, as of 30 May, the US still had not searched 700 sites on its then list. At the moment, we don't know whether the Administration's judgement was right or wrong. Suppose that long after the current situation quiets down some Iraqi Shiites die of anthrax? One possibility is that they handled wool and caught natually occuring anthrax. But what if a guerilla group claims that the deaths are retaliation for the Shiites support of invaders? Hopefully the Administration was wrong before the war, or was lying. Hopefully there was nothing dangerous in those sites, or anywhere else. Suppose the Administration were not lying -- Gautam keeps saying this. Suppose the Bush Administration were telling the truth, as best they understood it. If this is true, then we have a different question: perhaps the Administration is not poor at lying -- an inadequacy we would expect of honest men and women -- but is simply incompetent. Suppose the Administration was truthful. That does not take away the problem. We still have the very serious questions of why the Army did not search the sites on its list in the latter half of April, why US took so long to create a new local government after its first attempt failed, why it has taken so long to admit to and get a handle on the guerilla war, and why the cost of the occupation is higher than said before. (The cost is now running at nearly a billion US dollars a week -- an amount that is greater than the humanitarian money the US, according to John, is supplying to Afganistan over the year.) (It goes without saying that no one expects perfection. Everyone makes mistakes. That is why you nurture organizations and critics and independent people within them to detect problems and learn quickly. That is why you have Plans B, C, and D. But regardless of that, politically, the point in choosing one set of people over another for an Administration is that the better set is supposed to make fewer big mistakes.) If you and Gautam are right, the question is not whether the Bush Administration were telling the truth as best they could, but whether they are sufficiently competent enough to `build nations' and otherwise defend the US. -- Robert J. Chassell Rattlesnake Enterprises http://www.rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.teak.cc [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
> Like it or not, if your policies make some people angry enough >to kill themselves to show their displeasure, you need to rethink >your policies. I totally disagree. If your policies make evil men angry enough to kill themselves, you are very likely doing the right thing. I don't get this. Soldiers do not go on suicide missions because they think they are evil. They go on such missions because they think they are virtuous and that their actions will help their compatriots. It is their enemies who think they are evil. Their enemies would much prefer they surrender rather than go on a suicide mission that may kill many of the enemy. Please look at the terrorists of 2001 Sep 11: they did not consider themselves evil; on the contrary. Some of their enemies do think of them as evil. However, the term is not useful if you are trying to figure out the most effective way of stopping any of their compatriots from repeating the mission. It is more useful to be like a successful general, and `think like the enemy' so you can understand and thus counter him. Think of the terrorists as being fellows devoted to honesty, fair play, and devotion to God, rather than robbery, humiliation, and shame (with some backsliding, of course). Then you can see why the US might invade Iraq in order to intimidate other dictatorships, for short term safety. And also you can see why, over a longer term, it is important to the US that Iraq become prosperous and free -- that the US engage in successful nation building so that enough Iraqis change their belief systems. And you can see why it is so important to the anti-US guerillas to attack infrastructure and to exacerbate clan and religious differences. -- Robert J. Chassell Rattlesnake Enterprises http://www.rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.teak.cc [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
What's carefully crafted about "The British have learned" Suppose I say that `James has learned to drive'. If I then say, `he drove into the ditch' you understand that I was being ironic about the phrase `learned to drive'. This is because learning, in everyday use, is not supposed to mean `learned to fail'. The phrase `learned to drive' is supposed to mean `learned to drive successfully'. A person who has learned to drive is not expected to drive into a ditch, except rarely. The phrase "The British have learned" suggests to a listening public that the US President had US intelligence agencies investigate the matter. Put another way, if I tell you that `James has learned to drive', you can be pretty sure that I had reason to say that -- perhaps his mother told me that James got his driver's license. Clearly, espionage questions are more difficult, but the interpretation of what someone says about them is the same. Moreover, the statement suggests that the US intelligence agencies reported to the President positively. Consquently, the listening public interpret the President's words to mean that the "The British have learned correctly, as best our intelligence agencies can discover", not, as was the case, that "The British have learned incorrectly" -- Robert J. Chassell Rattlesnake Enterprises http://www.rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.teak.cc [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: How we were hoodwinked
On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 05:34:18PM -0500, Robert Seeberger wrote: > Here is one for Outlook Express that is free, and works quite well. > I have been using it for a few months and it has actually helped me spell > better in the first place. And here is a useful website (but of course for email use it would be faster and easier to just obtain one of the numerous computer dictionary programs available, many of which DO offer phonetic lookup) http://www.ultralingua.net/dictionary/ -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: link: Atlas of the Universe
On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 04:53:48PM -0300, Alberto Monteiro wrote: > It shows the position of the Sun relative to the near > stars and then zooms out to the whole observable > Universe: > > http://www.anzwers.org/free/universe/ Cool link! Thanks Alberto. I like the fully zoomed out view. Since it looks spherical, it started me thinking of the Earth. There are about 6 billion people on earth, and the website says there are 10 billion large galaxies in the visible universe. If only we could travel billions of light years in a lifetime, we could give each person on earth their own LARGE GALAXY and still have some left over. Of course, the current inhabitants, if there are any, might object... -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: How we were hoodwinked
As far as me being a jerk, I can't see how an intelligent person is hoodwinked by this ridiculous propaganda. -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Case for a Marriage Ammendment to the Constitution
- Original Message - From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2003 5:19 PM Subject: Re: The Case for a Marriage Ammendment to the Constitution >The family is not in any danger. I differ with this statement. I think that the family is facing a number of threats. IMHO, gay marriages would strengthen the concept of family. Dan M. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: How we were hoodwinked
On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 05:49:58PM -0500, Julia Thompson wrote: > Erik Reuter wrote: > > > Since we are being snippy... > > (All this snipping is reminding me of the story about the 3 mythical women who cut the strings of people's lives when their time is up) -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: How we were hoodwinked
--- Erik Reuter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > As far as it taking an inordinate amount of time to run an email through > a spellchecker, I can't see how an intelligent person is hoodwinked by > this ridiculous propaganda. Now your just being a jerk. On the off chance, let me explain: Running a spellchecker is not a solution. Such algorithms work by finding words that are close in spelling not close in pronunciation. Believe it or not, these are not the same thing. Since there are so many ways to phoneticaly represent a word, most of them are no where near the actual spelling. Therefore in cases where the phonetic representation I select at any particular time is not a close match to any spelling, I have to try alternat phonetic representations till I find one that the spell checker accepts as a hit. This can take minutes for each word, often 10 minutes in some cases. In other cases I simply can never find the word, and I have to resort to changing the sentence to use a differnt word. This can take several additional minutes. Once the spell checker does make a sugestion which looks phoneticaly correct there is an aditional delima. Often more than one suggestion is made, or for some reason it doesn't seem like the right word. I then have to look every sugjestion up in a dictionary. This takes several minutes until I find that I have the right spelling for the right word. Sometimes I find that none of the spellings represent the right word and I must then either start over with phonetic representations, or rewrite the sentence. You see, your brain has a component which automaticaly matches phonetic streams, to words, to spellings, to meanings, to the appearence of a written word (which is actualy differnt than spelling.) It does this on automatic, just as your hand recoils from a hot surface without you haveing to think about it. What is more when you have a thought, it is highly likely that the thought you have is in language. My brain does not do this. I think in pictures, in consepts, in abstractions without language. I have to conciously translate my thoughts into language. I have many more standard meanings than their are words to repersent. My thoughts are often more granular, but also often less granular than words allow. To translate a very small thought into words I must select from an abundence of possibilities. Usualy each one of these is equaly insuficient for what I wish to say. I then construct the sentence linearly, all the while processing the next sentence and thinking ahead. Aranging and rearanging consepts so that the structure of my conversation can be more easily processed linerly. If I am writing then as I do this the words which I chose must be sounded out and the english phonetic system employed to represent the sounds. All of this is up-front, first order conciousnes. Nothing happens on automatic. Everything must be thought about and considered. The spelling of a word to me is transparent. When I read I only read phenomes, not words. If I tried to concern myself with spelling, not only would I not be successfull in spelling properly, but I would never be able to get a sentence out. I would get stuck on a sentence and have to divert resources to spelling thus shutting down the processes which are buisy translating my thoughts into words. And again, I still would not spell correctly. In the past 10 years or so, I have been able to spell much better, becouse I have shiften my word memory from the abstract to the physical. By typing I am amble to store more words which can be recalled somewhat on auto. But "muscle memory" is not so exact. Sometimes I get the right phonetic grouping (FREX "tion" instead of "shun"), but voul sounds are still quite problemeatic. Forign words, especialy french words, are nearly imposible. My muscle memory knows that there is a C in muscle and a G in forgin, but I can not tell you whether or not I have spelled either corectly my looking at them. FORIGN FORIN FOUREN FORIGHN FOWRIN FUERIGN FORAN FORIEAN FAURGHIN all stimulate me to subvocalize "forign", and that subvocalization can then be translated to meaning (once again -conciously-). My ..."fingers" tell me that "forgin" is the right pattern, but I have no way of knowing if this is corect or not. And give me a few hours or seconds and I might select an alternate spelling. Even now "forighn" also --feels-- right. I really have no way of knowing. I do get something in return though. I do visiual, abstract, pattern recognition, etc. on automatic. When I think of an object which is 3 demensional, I do not think of that object ~from and perspective~. I am able to hold more an process more in my head at one time, and much faster. I have to to be able to even speak and comunicate. You could suggest that everyone has hurdles and everyone has differnt things to deal with, and that is just life, and, after all, a few extra minutes spellchecking is something I will just have to deal with. And when you con
Re: Fw: Congratuations for winning our lottery
On Fri, Jul 25, 2003 at 08:47:27AM +1000, Russell Chapman wrote: > We don't have routing numbers, though - what are they used for? That's what we call the BSB number, although I don't know if they are as nicely hierarchical as yours are, they suffice to identify the bank. -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Religion based ethics
Doug Pensinger wrote: But doesn't the randomness of evolution begin to recede once you are actually aware of the evolutionary process and actively abet it? An animal with a successful adaptation is unaware of what that adaptation is, but a human with a successful innovation can immediately recognize what and why it is successful and continue to build upon it. Not really, because we also hinder it at the same time - handicapped people who would never have had the chance to pass on the damaged genes in past millenia are now at no disadvantage in terms of conceiving and raising a child. If anything, we are increasing the randomness by allowing disadvantages to continue and promoting genetic advantages, so there's a broader range of genetic variance. Hell, in this century, even _I_ can have children and raise them to child bearing age... :-) Cheers Russell C. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
--- Gautam Mukunda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > --- Deborah Harrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I do think that without serious citizen oversight, > > the Ashcroft Justice Dept. would (or will) make a > > mockery > > of the Constitution. If people don't make noise > > about it, we will lose some of our civil rights and > > freedom > > (some will say that we already have... [no cite as > > these have been discussed on-list alrady]). > > > > Debbi > > If John Ashcroft were anyone _but_ an evangelical > Christian (speaking as a non-evangelical > non-Christian) the way he is treated by the Left > would > be recognized by everyone for what it is - sheer > religious bigotry of the most unvarnished sort. First, *I* am not "Left" - I've discussed my views on the death penalty and gun ownership here before, not to mention what would happen to proven child molesters if I were in control. My views on personal responsibility frex in health matters have also been spelled out. If you want to call me a liberal with significant libertarian leanings but with conflicting militarism - well, that would be closer to reality, but still missing a lot. Second, he could worship Pan or Bacchus for all I care, but if he started to insist that we must drink to inebriation every Saturday night, I'd find that offensive, not to mention dangerous. What has been eroded under his watch includes the right to know what one is accused of, to have a lawyer, and not to be held indefinitely 'in limbo.' (See prior multiple list postings with articles re: these and other justice issues.) Not sure how that relates to his religion, unless you're referring to the previously-raised concerns about the erosion of the separation of church and state...which I have commented upon unfavorably. I consider myself extremely religiously tolerant, having good friends of various beliefs, from devout Catholic to Lutheran to Southern Baptist to Jewish to Hindu to Wiccan to atheist. But I will not tolerate anyone trying to *impose* their beliefs on me, or infringe upon my right to believe as I choose. Debbi __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Fw: Congratuations for winning our lottery
Sonja van Baardwijk wrote: http://www.european-lotteries.org/pdf/dayzers_warning.pdf Interesting that the warning was posted in English first and Dutch second - one assumes that the scam is aimed at those ignorant Americans...;-) Nice to see your virtual smile again Sonja! Cheers Russell C. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
> From: Gautam Mukunda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > --- Deborah Harrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I do think that without serious citizen oversight, > > the > > Ashcroft Justice Dept. would (or will) make a > > mockery > > of the Constitution. If people don't make noise > > about > > it, we will lose some of our civil rights and > > freedom > > (some will say that we already have... [no cite as > > these have been discussed on-list alrady]). > > > > Debbi > > If John Ashcroft were anyone _but_ an evangelical > Christian (speaking as a non-evangelical > non-Christian) the way he is treated by the Left would > be recognized by everyone for what it is - sheer > religious bigotry of the most unvarnished sort. It's because himmlercroft is an extremist religious nutbag that wants to turn the U.S. into the united police states of amerika. He's turned the justice department into the injustice department. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
> From: Deborah Harrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > --- The Fool <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Friday browncoat republicans in the house of > > representatives called the > > police to arrest and remove democratic > > representatives from a library in > > the house of representatives. The future is here > > and now. Never before > > has something so shocking happened in the history of > > the united states. > > This is only the beginning. > > I didn't see anything about this; do you have an > article or two? Thanks. > > I do think that without serious citizen oversight, the > Ashcroft Justice Dept. would (or will) make a mockery > of the Constitution. If people don't make noise about > it, we will lose some of our civil rights and freedom > (some will say that we already have... [no cite as > these have been discussed on-list alrady]). Shows how when the right wing ideologues harp on how 'liberal the media' is, just how much of a propaganda farce that really is. It was shown on C-Span. http://msnbc.com/news/940963.asp?0sl=-44&cp1=1 http://www.thehill.com/news/072303/energize.aspx http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/national/24THOM.html?ex=1059710400&en=d1 09d54bb050f353&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: How we were hoodwinked
Erik Reuter wrote: > Since we are being snippy... ;) Julia who *could* start getting snippy in the other sense, but it's just not worth the energy today ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Iraq's Nuclear Weapons - Clinton's '98 Statement
Ray Ludenia wrote: > > David Hobby > > > No, it doesn't. I read all three quotes as "We will attack all of the > > nasty weapons that Iraq has." If > > wombats were credible WMD, he would have included them too. : ) > > They certainly are! You should see the holes they dig. :-) > They also love to leave their turds on the tee-markers at golf to mark their > territory. Not to mention the effect they have on cars when they are hit. > > Regards, Ray. How big are they? Sounds like large armadillos. :) Julia ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Fw: Congratuations for winning our lottery
Erik Reuter wrote: When you say you give away your "bank account info", what exactly are you talking about? (I don't mean post the numbers, I mean the descriptive terms for what you give, like routing number, account number, bank name, etc.) All Australian banks have a code called the BSB code, which stands for Bank/State/Branch. So my account with ANZ has a BSB of 014-592 (0=nationwide bank, 1=ANZ, 4=Queensland and 592 is the Townsville branch where my account is). At that branch I have a standard cheque account, with a 9 digit account number. So if I give you my BSB and account number, you can pay into my account. You can pay it at any Australian bank or Post Office, but there will be fees and a day's delay compared to paying it into a branch of my bank. You can also add the eBay auction number as the transaction reference, and that will show on my statement. But it won't help you withdraw any. There are plenty of ways of drawing money out of my account without a cheque, online, in person, or even by phone, but this information isn't anywhere near sufficient. This information I've given out to eBay buyers is written on the bottom of every cheque I write as well, so it's hardly secret ... We don't have routing numbers, though - what are they used for? Cheers Russell C. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Fw: Congratuations for winning our lottery
- Original Message - From: "Sonja van Baardwijk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2003 9:06 AM Subject: Re: Fw: Congratuations for winning our lottery > Robert Seeberger wrote: > > http://www.european-lotteries.org/pdf/dayzers_warning.pdf > > >The scams are getting deep these days Thanks Sonja xponent Winning Smile Maru rob ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: How we were hoodwinked
- Original Message - From: "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2003 7:41 AM Subject: Re: How we were hoodwinked > On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 03:17:37AM -0700, Jan Coffey wrote: > > > But still your missing the point. I just can't see how an intelegant > > person is hoodwinked by this rediculous propoganda. > > Since we are being snippy...I just can't see how an intelligent person > could post writing like this. It would seem to me that if someone knows > that their spelling is poor, they would take care to either not post > when they are upset or to run their writing through a spell-checker > before posting. > Here is one for Outlook Express that is free, and works quite well. I have been using it for a few months and it has actually helped me spell better in the first place. http://mywebpages.comcast.net/joeyr76/pc/oespell.html xponent HTH Maru rob ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
--- Deborah Harrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I do think that without serious citizen oversight, > the > Ashcroft Justice Dept. would (or will) make a > mockery > of the Constitution. If people don't make noise > about > it, we will lose some of our civil rights and > freedom > (some will say that we already have... [no cite as > these have been discussed on-list alrady]). > > Debbi If John Ashcroft were anyone _but_ an evangelical Christian (speaking as a non-evangelical non-Christian) the way he is treated by the Left would be recognized by everyone for what it is - sheer religious bigotry of the most unvarnished sort. = Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
RE: Arrgh!
Send me the headers for something that bounced. Obviously, this message of yours didn't. -- Nick Arnett Phone/fax: (408) 904-7198 [EMAIL PROTECTED] > -Original Message- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Behalf Of Jon Gabriel > Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2003 1:12 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Arrgh! > > > Is anyone else having their list messages bounced back? Vey > frustrating! > I even tried to forward one to Nick and his address was bounced. > > Jon > > > Le Blog: http://zarq.livejournal.com > > _ > Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. > http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail > > ___ > http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Case for a Marriage Ammendment to the Constitution
> Nevertheless, I would hope that everyone would be in favor of the second > half. I think that this issue is so important and controversial that it should > be decided by the State Legislatures and Congress, which are elected by the > people, and not written by unelected judges. > As will hardly surprise anyone, I could not possibly disagree more. By this logic, the Supreme Court should not have decided as it did in Brown vs Board of Education. If it were left up to states, there would still be legal discrimination in the deep South, almost 50 years after Brown. Rights are rights; they should not be at the mercy of transitory or even entrenched prejudiced majorities. It has been the province of the Supreme Court for 200 years to rule on the constitutionality of laws. A conservative, of all people, should respect that kind of established tradition. The article cited is also factually wrong, as well as philosophically wrongheaded. Marriage has not historically been about procreation; or, at least, not only about procreation. If that were so, sterile people would not be allowed to marry. Marriage has been about many things: property, honor, dynastic unions, balance of power, etc. The kind of nuclear family beloved of the Christian Right has not existed in this form for most of human history. To fetishize it - and to use this fiction as a means to beat up gay people (figuratively, although they certainly get beat up literally too by those enflamed by the prejudice encompassed in such articles) - is to violate historical truth in the service of an unworthy attempt to capitalize on some people's bias. Prejudices should be fought, not pandered to. Permitting gay people to marry legally does not do the slightest thing to infringe upon the rights of anyone else, despite the Christian Right's hysterical delusion that "the family" is somehow threatened by the idea. The family is not in any danger. The Constitution, however, might be. An amendment barring gay marriage is unnecessary and unworthy of even being considered. It purports to solve a nonexistent problem. It is shameful. Tom Beck www.prydonians.org www.mercerjewishsingles.org "I always knew I'd see the first man on the Moon. I never dreamed I'd see the last." - Dr Jerry Pournelle ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
[Listref] Near-death experiences (NDE)
I don't remember the original thread, but Ritu had mentioned a study in which near-death experiences were surveyed; here is one article about that: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/DrJohnson/GMA020108Near_death_experiences.html "...The study reported in Lancet looked at 344 patients in the Netherlands who were successfully resuscitated after suffering cardiac arrest in 10 Dutch hospitals. "Rather than using data from people reporting past near-death experiences, researchers talked to patients within a week after they had suffered clinical deaths and been resuscitated. (Clincical death was defined as a period of unconsciousness caused by insufficient blood supply to the brain.) "About 18 percent of the patients in the study reported being able to recall some portion of what happened when they were clinically dead; and 8 to 12 percent reported going through "near-death" experiences, such as seeing lights at the end of tunnels, or being able to speak to dead relatives or friends. Most had excellent recall of the events, which undermines the theory that the memories are false, the study said..." The euphoria some experience probably is related to endorphin/enkephalin release, but the recall of events when there isn't any blood flow to the brain *is* puzzling. "...Blackmore says science can also explain those tunnels: Electrical brain scans show that in our last moments, as the brain is deprived of oxygen, cells fire frantically and at random in the part of the brain which govern vision. "Now, imagine that you've got lots and lots of cells firing in the middle, towards fewer at the outside, what's it going to look like? Bright light in the middle fading off towards dark at the outside," Blackmore said. "I think that's where the tunnel comes from. And as the oxygen level drops, so the bright light becomes bigger and more immediate, and you get this sensation of rushing forward into the light." ..." Of course, that means you must imagine that instead of the documented *random* neuron firing, you are positing *coordinated* neuron firing...In my own near-drowning, I saw sparkly lights against a dark-grey background, which is consistant with a random-fire pattern Here is the paper abstract: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11755611&dopt=Abstract "...We do not know why so few cardiac patients report NDE after CPR, although age plays a part. With a purely physiological explanation such as cerebral anoxia for the experience, most patients who have been clinically dead should report one." Debbi Vehhh-rrrhy Interesting - But Not-Proof Maru __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Iraq's Nuclear Weapons - Clinton's '98 Statement
From: Richard Baker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: Killer Bs Discussion <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Killer Bs Discussion <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Iraq's Nuclear Weapons - Clinton's '98 Statement Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 19:14:07 +0100David said:> If wombats were credible WMD, he would have included them too. : )...thus giving me the chance to point out that I was responsible for: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blosxom.cgi/2002/Oct/22#wombat *waves to Rich* That's hilarious. :) Wasn't there either a USAF or RAF jet nicknamed the Wombat? Jon Le Blog: http://zarq.livejournal.com _ STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
--- The Fool <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Friday browncoat republicans in the house of > representatives called the > police to arrest and remove democratic > representatives from a library in > the house of representatives. The future is here > and now. Never before > has something so shocking happened in the history of > the united states. > This is only the beginning. I didn't see anything about this; do you have an article or two? Thanks. I do think that without serious citizen oversight, the Ashcroft Justice Dept. would (or will) make a mockery of the Constitution. If people don't make noise about it, we will lose some of our civil rights and freedom (some will say that we already have... [no cite as these have been discussed on-list alrady]). Debbi __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: How we were hoodwinked
As far as it taking an inordinate amount of time to run an email through a spellchecker, I can't see how an intelligent person is hoodwinked by this ridiculous propaganda. -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: AOL has problems
At 02:50 PM 7/24/03 -0500, Julia Thompson wrote: "Ronn!Blankenship" wrote: > > My initial reaction to the subject line: > > "No ***, Sherlock . . . " Then there's the paraphrase, "Sure no, S***lock." Or, "No shirt, Shylock." None Of Which Makes AOL Any Better Maru --Ronn! :) I always knew that I would see the first man on the Moon. I never dreamed that I would see the last. --Dr. Jerry Pournelle ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Arrgh!
At 04:11 PM 7/24/03 -0400, Jon Gabriel wrote: Is anyone else having their list messages bounced back? Vey frustrating! I even tried to forward one to Nick and his address was bounced. This one reached the list (obviously ;-) ) . . . (I thought of offering to forward a message to Nick telling him of your difficulties, but then realized that if this message reached the list, I didn't need to . . . ) When My Cats Get Too Predictable I Know I Can Rely On Computers To Do Something Inexplicable Maru --Ronn! :) I always knew that I would see the first man on the Moon. I never dreamed that I would see the last. --Dr. Jerry Pournelle ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: How we were hoodwinked
--- Erik Reuter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Who said anything about restrictions? As far as spellcheckers, I > can't see how an intelligent person is hoodwinked by this ridiculous > propaganda. I do not hav ethe time, or fel that I should be expected to run everything through a spell checker. If as a fellow list member you choose to treat me as a friend, then I am certain you would not want to force me to spend so much extra time that my participation would be infeasable. I will give you the benifit of the doubt and suppose that you do not understand that some of the processes your brain does automaticaly mine does not. And that that you do not understand the reprecussions of such differences. I guarantee you that I am often quite frustraited with non-dyslexics becouse the things my brain does on automatic they must strugle with. However, I show them patience and acceptance. If you wish to be a friendly list-member then I am sure you would want to do the same. If you wish to further this discussion then please do so off-list as I am certain no one here really cares to continue reading such personal attacks. = _ Jan William Coffey _ __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Science and knowledge
- Original Message - From: "Doug Pensinger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2003 12:31 AM Subject: Re: Science and knowledge > Dan Minette wrote: > > > I think the key to reconciling this with the general description of > > physicists as mostly realists is the "shut up and calculate" statement of > > Feynman. It is an acknowledgement that there is no good realistic > > explanation for how QM works. It deliberately tables the question; tacitly > > acknowledging Feynman's inability to solve it. > > > Because today's physicists can't explain it it can't be explained? Its really significantly stronger than that, but it requires a bit of explanation to show how. Physicists have not been able to unify gravity and E&M for over 100 years, but there is still a general feeling that it is doable. Further, with two different systems to reconcile, the problem is not underdetermined. That is to say there are not a wealth of free parameters to play with: the first person or group of people to come up with a system that has both GR and QM as special cases will have made a tremendous step forward. Historically, unification of previously distinct theories has been a great source for increased understanding. Reconciling QM with realism was never the same type of thing. First of all, the mechanism for doing this has always been hidden variables. These hidden variables behave classically, they just happen to result in observables that do not. What does this mean? Classically, particles go through one slit or another; waves do not interact at a single point; objects have their properties independent of observation. This is not seen in QM. What was proposed by Einstein and others was that the lack of these properties was just temporary; when the next level was explored, it would be found to contain objects that behaved in a more classical manner. Only, many many levels have been explored since then, and nothing has been discovered. Roughly 10^15 orders of magnitude have been explored below the first quantum levels seen, and no hidden variables have been observed. This is in contrast with the neutrino, which was observed after only about 25 years after it was first postulated as the reason for the apparent non-conservation of mass in weak decays. But, that's not the only problem with hidden variables. The biggest blow came with Bell's and Wigner's work, showing that a local hidden variable theory was impossible. That is to say, that the hidden variables would have to transmit spacelike signals. At the time, it simply showed the inconsistency of local hidden variable theories with the theory of QM. Since then, there has been extensive experimental work, inconsistent with local hidden variable theories. So, the only available realistic theories are either non-local in a hidden manner, like TI, or invokes other features that really have a hard time matching common sense realism. Why? Because finding out that there really are hidden variables and observable backwards in time signals would falsify special relativity (SR) in a profound fashion: indeed in a fashion that classical mechanics has not been falsified. It would be akin to discovering that there really is a preferred reference frame and an aether, after all. Indeed, I'd state that this is one of the less revolutionary ways for scientific discovery to reconcile QM and realism. The others involve things like real backwards in time signals, allowing the possibility of a transmitter destroying itself via a signal sent after the destruction. This is the fundamental difference between our present inability to reconcile gravity with QM and our present inability to reconcile local realism with QM. With the former, we need to take a step forward. In that case, both GR and QM will be special cases of the new theory. With the later, we need to take a step backwards, since the last 100 years of physics would be proven to be a dead end. Well, that might be overstating it a bit, but it would certainly be akin to finding that there really is an aether. Dan M. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Dreaming (was: Science and Knowledge)
> -Original Message- > > I waited to allow someone else to come up with this one. We have no > scientific means to allow people to tell if they are > dreaming, even though > dreams have been studied for thousands of years. We have > means to see if > other people are dreaming, but we have no means of someone > telling if (s)he is dreaming. Do you mean for a person who is dreaming to know that they are dreaming or for another person to know that the first person is dreaming? If you mean the first, what about lucid dreaming? Way back in college, I took a class on sleep and dreaming. As part of that class I did a term paper on lucid dreaming. It was very interesting and made me wish that I could have lucid dreams. If you mean the second, there are the rapid eye movements. If you are having REM, you are dreaming. Also, for that same paper, I came across some research that tried to have lucid dreamers communicate that they were dreaming *while* they were dreaming. The dreamer would, once they realized they were dreaming, "look" left and right in a certain pattern. The researchers would record the eye movements and try to find the pattern. I believe there were some successes. - jmh ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
RE: When does it end? (RE: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words)
> From: Nick Arnett [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > How does this end? Can anyone offer a definition of the conditions > necessary for us to return to peacetime, or whatever one > might properly call 'normal' conditions? It ends when the US has dominated all the other countries in the world, I guess... I don't know. It is a scary proposition. We cannot defeat every terrorist in the world. We cannot stop every rogue state that wants to build a nuke or a biological bomb. > Am I going to wake up 20 years from now to more reminders > that we are living in a state of emergency because the > evil-doers have not yet been wiped off > the face of the earth? Tell me why not, please. I know that this is not a world I want to live in either. Unless I missed it, I don't believe it has been responded to. And I'd love to see the answer, too! > If this is not the future we want to create, then shouldn't > we return to > normal political discourse, in which one is not branded a traitor for > questioning the leadership. If we can't question and > criticize our leaders > today, what is going to change to allow us to question them > tomorrow, or in > 20 years? Why is this any different than during World War III (as some are calling the Cold War)? The leadership was certainly criticized. Except during the Vietnam Conflict, I don't recall anyone being branded a traitor just for questioning the leadership of the country or the direction it is going? The consequences for the United States during the Cold War were certainly greater than those now. - jmh ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Arrgh!
Is anyone else having their list messages bounced back? Vey frustrating! I even tried to forward one to Nick and his address was bounced. Jon Le Blog: http://zarq.livejournal.com _ Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
link: Atlas of the Universe
It shows the position of the Sun relative to the near stars and then zooms out to the whole observable Universe: http://www.anzwers.org/free/universe/ Alberto Monteiro ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: AOL has problems
"Ronn!Blankenship" wrote: > > My initial reaction to the subject line: > > "No ***, Sherlock . . . " Then there's the paraphrase, "Sure no, S***lock." That acted almost like a little temporary emotional reset button on someone who was in desperate need of one. I don't know how many times I defused her with that one (the first instance was, of course, a fluke, and I wasn't the one uttering it), but it was pretty handy at times. (The times when I wasn't so sick of it that I'd say something hurtful instead, knowing it would hurt -- my bad, but my patience isn't up to saint-level, never has been. Really.) Julia ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say
> > Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say By JOHN SCHWARTZ > No, it isn't. See the recent brazilian elections. Unfortunately, it's not idiot-proof, and we keep electing jerks :-/ Alberto Monteiro ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Science and knowledge
--- Jon Gabriel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >From: Deborah Harrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >--- Jon Gabriel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > There *could* be a joke in there somewhere about > >how illogical and irrational subjects aren't > > >inherently understandable, but I certainly won't > > > go searching for it. ;-) > > > > > > Jon > > > Wearing Flame Retardant Underwear Maru > > > >Wise decision... is it decorated with Spiderman, > >Batman or Pokemon? ;D > > LOL! I'm old enough to remember that I owned > Spiderman, Superman, Star Wars > and ET Underoos when I was little. :-) > > > >Someone must have trai- er, taught you well. ;} > > > > Aye. I also have a strong self-preservation > instinct. :-D > > >Lead Mare Maru > >Frauliching Through Feilds Of Fowlers Maru :) > > Ah, Fraulein! Holstein, Hannoverian or Oldenburg? > ;) Ooh! Bonus points!!! :D And you didn't say "Schleswiger Heavy Draft," which does *not* earn extra points, but does confirm your training... ;) http://www.ansi.okstate.edu/breeds/horses/scheswigerheavydraft/ "She Recieved Her Degree" Maru :) P.S. Oldenburg-Arab cross...the ones I've met are neat! __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Iraq's Nuclear Weapons - Clinton's '98 Statement
Brad said: > I don't suppose4 you got a free copy of _Singularity Sky_ out o fit, > did you? No, alas not. Rich GCU One Line Reply ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Iraq's Nuclear Weapons - Clinton's '98 Statement
David said: If wombats were credible WMD, he would have included them too. : ) ...thus giving me the chance to point out that I was responsible for: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blosxom.cgi/2002/Oct/22#wombat Rich VFP A Colder War I don't suppose4 you got a free copy of _Singularity Sky_ out o fit, did you? ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: How we were hoodwinked
Who said anything about restrictions? As far as spellcheckers, I can't see how an intelligent person is hoodwinked by this ridiculous propaganda. -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.net/ ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
RE: How we were hoodwinked
Doug posted:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/international/worldspecial/2
> 0WEAP.html?pagewanted=1&th
>
> "To my mind, the most telling and eye-catching point in the
> judgment of five of the six intelligence agencies was that if
> left unchecked, Iraq would most likely have a nuclear weapon in
> this decade. The president of the United States could not afford
> to trust Saddam's motives or give him the benefit of the doubt,"
> she said.
("she" being C. Rice.)
John Horn replied:
This is the one argument that got me and convinced me to support the war
against Iraq. I figured, if everything else wasn't true, at least this
was.
And now it appears that everything else probably wasn't true!
Seriously, why couldn't this have been the main argument, not the
handwaving
about existing WMD that don't exist??
As far as I'm concerned, the war was justified for Saddam's crimes against
humanity, no mention of WMD needed. There was the ethnic cleansing of the
so-called Marsh Arabs (not to mention the destruction of 95% of the marsh
ecosystem in southern Iraq), gassing of Kurd towns, women being raped while
their husbands are forced to watch, men being killed in plastic shredders...
Most of this is covered in this article by British Labour MP Ann Clwyd,
which I think Guatam originally posted to the list.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3284-614607,00.html
Excerpt:
All these crimes have been recorded in detail by the UN, the US,
Kuwaiti, British,
Iranian and other Governments and groups such as Human Rights Watch,
Amnesty
and Indict. Yet the Security Council has failed to set up a war crimes
tribunal on
Iraq because of opposition from France, China and Russia. As a result,
no Iraqi official
has ever been indicted for some of the worst crimes of the 20th
century.
I'm not a fan of Bush, and I generally don't trust either him or his
motives, and I *especially* don't trust his Attorney General (I'm from the
state that voted for a dead person for Senate rather than vote for
Ashcroft). But removal of SH's regime from power was absolutely necessary
and justified. If you want to attack the Bush administration, there are
plenty of reasons that don't involve this war.
Reggie Bautista
_
Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
___
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Case for a Marriage Ammendment to the Constitution
At 07:26 2003-07-24 -0400, John D Giorgis posted a text containing the following: Gay marriage would cut the final cord that ties marriage to the well-being of children. It is a step we should not take. Our cultural forgetting of the meaning of marriage has already had too many sad consequences for children and adults (not least for their moral development). This is only true if being gay is considered immoral. If gays have the same moral values as the rest of the population, then they are as apt to be parents as the rest of the population. Although gays cannot reproduce, they can adopt, if they live in a region where they are not considered immoral. This means that gays couples can be the foundation for a family and meet most opponents' requirement for marriage. I do agree that the laws permitting or restricting marriage should be passed by elected officials rather than appointed ones. However, the courts have there part to play. With such thorny issues, legislators have the bad habit of looking the other way and ignoring them. Ontario's courts have made a decision that has prompted the federal governement to write and pass a bill on the issue. Jean-Louis ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say
From: "The Fool" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: Killer Bs Discussion <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Brin-L" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 13:23:52 -0500 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/technology/24VOTE.html?ex=1059710400&en= d989a69c518293a6&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say By JOHN SCHWARTZ The software that runs many high-tech voting machines contains serious flaws that would allow voters to cast extra votes and permit poll workers to alter ballots without being detected, computer security researchers said yesterday. "We found some stunning, stunning flaws," said Aviel D. Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, who led a team that examined the software from Diebold Election Systems, which has about 33,000 voting machines operating in the United States. The systems, in which voters are given computer-chip-bearing smart cards to operate the machines, could be tricked by anyone with $100 worth of computer equipment, said Adam Stubblefield, a co-author of the paper. "With what we found, practically anyone in the country from a teenager on up could produce these smart cards that could allow someone to vote as many times as they like," Mr. Stubblefield said. *Yawn* We would have figured it out eventually... probably right after Pamela Anderson and Cartman from South Park won with 184 million votes in 2004. :-D Jon GSV Back To The Old Drawing Board Le Blog: http://zarq.livejournal.com _ MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/technology/24VOTE.html?ex=1059710400&en= d989a69c518293a6&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say By JOHN SCHWARTZ The software that runs many high-tech voting machines contains serious flaws that would allow voters to cast extra votes and permit poll workers to alter ballots without being detected, computer security researchers said yesterday. "We found some stunning, stunning flaws," said Aviel D. Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, who led a team that examined the software from Diebold Election Systems, which has about 33,000 voting machines operating in the United States. The systems, in which voters are given computer-chip-bearing smart cards to operate the machines, could be tricked by anyone with $100 worth of computer equipment, said Adam Stubblefield, a co-author of the paper. "With what we found, practically anyone in the country from a teenager on up could produce these smart cards that could allow someone to vote as many times as they like," Mr. Stubblefield said. The software was initially obtained by critics of electronic voting, who discovered it on a Diebold Internet site in January. This is the first review of the software by recognized computer security experts. A spokesman for Diebold, Joe Richardson, said the company could not comment in detail until it had seen the full report. He said that the software on the site was "about a year old" and that "if there were problems with it, the code could have been rectified or changed" since then. The company, he said, puts its software through rigorous testing. "We're constantly improving it so the technology we have 10 years from now will be better than what we have today," Mr. Richardson said. "We're always open to anything that can improve our systems." Another co-author of the paper, Tadayoshi Kohno, said it was unlikely that the company had plugged all of the holes they discovered. "There is no easy fix," Mr. Kohno said. The move to electronic voting which intensified after the troubled Florida presidential balloting in 2000 has been a source of controversy among security researchers. They argue that the companies should open their software to public review to be sure it operates properly. Mr. Richardson of Diebold said the company's voting-machine source code, the basis of its computer program, had been certified by an independent testing group. Outsiders might want more access, he said, but "we don't feel it's necessary to turn it over to everyone who asks to see it, because it is proprietary." Diebold is one of the most successful companies in this field. Georgia and Maryland are among its clients, as are many counties around the country. The Maryland contract, announced this month, is worth $56 million. Diebold, based in North Canton, Ohio, is best known as a maker of automated teller machines. The company acquired Global Election Systems last year and renamed it Diebold Election Systems. Last year the election unit contributed more than $110 million in sales to the company's $2 billion in revenue. As an industry leader, Diebold has been the focus of much of the controversy over high-tech voting. Some people, in comments widely circulated on the Internet, contend that the company's software has been designed to allow voter fraud. Mr. Rubin called such assertions "ludicrous" and said the software's flaws showed the hallmarks of poor design, not subterfuge. The list of flaws in the Diebold software is long, according to the paper, which is online at avirubin .com/vote.pdf. Among other things, the researchers said, ballots could be altered by anyone with access to a machine, so that a voter might think he is casting a ballot for one candidate while the vote is recorded for an opponent. The kind of scrutiny that the researchers applied to the Diebold software would turn up flaws in all but the most rigorously produced software, Mr. Stubblefield said. But the standards must be as high as the stakes, he said. "This isn't the code for a vending machine," he said. "This is the code that protects our democracy." Still, things that seem troubling in coding may not be as big a problem in the real world, Mr. Richardson said. For example, counties restrict access to the voting machines before and after elections, he said. While the researchers "are all experts at writing code, they may not have a full understanding of how elections are run," he said. But Douglas W. Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa, said he was shocked to discover flaws cited in Mr. Rubin's paper that he had mentioned to the system's developers about five years ago as a state elections official. "To find that such flaws have not been corrected in half a decade is awful," Professor Jones said. Peter G. Neumann, an expert in computer security at SRI International, said the Diebold code w
Re: Iraq's Nuclear Weapons - Clinton's '98 Statement
David said: > If wombats were credible WMD, he would have included them too. : ) ...thus giving me the chance to point out that I was responsible for: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blosxom.cgi/2002/Oct/22#wombat Rich VFP A Colder War ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: How we were hoodwinked
--- Erik Reuter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 03:17:37AM -0700, Jan Coffey wrote: > > > But still your missing the point. I just can't see how an intelegant > > person is hoodwinked by this rediculous propoganda. > > Since we are being snippy...I just can't see how an intelligent person > could post writing like this. It would seem to me that if someone knows > that their spelling is poor, they would take care to either not post > when they are upset or to run their writing through a spell-checker > before posting. > I can't see how an intelegent person would redicule someone for something they have no control over rather than addressing the information. Spell-checkers do VERY VERY LITTLE to actualy correct spelling. Most of the time they do not even provide a spelling which is phoneticly simmilar to the desired word. Even when they do, they provide too many posibilities, all of which must be looked up in a dictionary to figure out which is actualy the correct one. This is increadably time consuming and if I were required to do this it would limit my participation in any discussion to the point that it would not be fesable. I was not upset then (but I am now). There is absolutly no reason I should be required to spend an hour constructing a 2 minut post. Your bigotry realy angers me. I am certain that the list moderators do not whish to limmit equal participation in this list by excluding participants by race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, or disability. I am also certain that they do not which to place restrictions on such individuals as to make their participation infesable. = _ Jan William Coffey _ __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
W, corporate shill
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/opinion/24SAFI.html?ex=1059624000&en=5fa ea66331fcf207&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE Bush's Four Horsemen By WILLIAM SAFIRE WASHINGTON On the domestic front, President Bush is backing into a buzz saw. The sleeper issue is media giantism. People are beginning to grasp and resent the attempt by the Federal Communications Commission to allow the Four Horsemen of Big Media Viacom (CBS, UPN), Disney (ABC), Murdoch's News Corporation (Fox) and G.E. (NBC) to gobble up every independent station in sight. Couch potatoes throughout the land see plenty wrong in concentrating the power to produce the content we see and hear in the same hands that transmit those broadcasts. This is especially true when the same Four Horsemen own many satellite and cable providers and already influence key sites on the Internet. Reflecting that widespread worry, the Senate Commerce Committee voted last month to send to the floor Ted Stevens's bill rolling back the F.C.C.'s anything-goes ruling. It would reinstate current limits and also deny newspaper chains the domination of local TV and radio. The Four Horsemen were confident they could get Bush to suppress a similar revolt in the House, where G.O.P. discipline is stricter. When liberals and conservatives of both parties in the House surprised them by passing a rollback amendment to an Appropriations Committee bill, the Bush administration issued what bureaucrats call a SAP a written Statement of Administration Policy. It was the sappiest SAP of the Bush era. "If this amendment were contained in the final legislation presented to the President," warned the administration letter, "his senior advisers would recommend that he veto the bill." The SAP was signed by the brand-new director of the Office of Management and Budget, Joshua Bolten, but the hand was the hand of Stephen Friedman, the former investment banker now heading the president's National Economic Council. Reached late yesterday, Friedman forthrightly made his case that the F.C.C. was an independent agency that had followed the rules laid down by the courts. He told me that Bush's senior advisers had focused on the question "Can you eliminate excessive regulation and have diversity and competition?" and found the answer to be yes. He added with candor: "The politics I'm still getting an education on." The Bush veto threat would deny funding to the Commerce, State and Justice Departments, not to mention the federal judiciary. It would discombobulate Congress and disserve the public for months. And to what end? To turn what we used to call "public airwaves" into private fiefs, to undermine diversity of opinion and in its anti-federalist homogenization of our varied culture to sweep aside local interests and community standards of taste. This would be Bush's first veto. Is this the misbegotten principle on which he wants to take a stand? At one of the White House meetings that decided on the SAP approach, someone delicately suggested that such a veto of the giants' power grab might pose "a communications issue" for the president (no play on words intended). Friedman blew that objection away. The SAP threat was delivered. In the House this week, allies of the Four Horsemen distributed a point sheet drawn from Viacom and Murdoch arguments and asked colleagues to sign a cover letter reading, "The undersigned members . . . will vote to sustain a Presidential veto of legislation overturning or delaying . . . the decision of the FCC . . . regarding media ownership." But they couldn't obtain the signatures of anywhere near one-third of the House members the portion needed to stop an override. Yesterday afternoon, the comprehensive bill including an F.C.C. rollback passed by a vote of 400 to 21. If Bush wishes to carry out the veto threat, he'll pick up a bunch of diehards (now called "dead-enders"), but he will risk suffering an unnecessary humiliation. What next? Much depends on who is chosen to go into the Senate-House conference. If the White House can't stop the rollback there, will Bush carry out the ill-considered threat? Sometimes you put the veto gun back in the holster. The way out: a president can always decide to turn down the recommendation of his senior advisers. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
RE: How we were hoodwinked
> From: Doug Pensinger [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/international/worldspecial/2
> 0WEAP.html?pagewanted=1&th
>
> "To my mind, the most telling and eye-catching point in the
> judgment of five of the six intelligence agencies was that if
> left unchecked, Iraq would most likely have a nuclear weapon in
> this decade. The president of the United States could not afford
> to trust Saddam's motives or give him the benefit of the doubt,"
> she said.
("she" being C. Rice.)
This is the one argument that got me and convinced me to support the war
against Iraq. I figured, if everything else wasn't true, at least this was.
And now it appears that everything else probably wasn't true!
Seriously, why couldn't this have been the main argument, not the handwaving
about existing WMD that don't exist??
- jmh
___
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
RE: Fw: Congratuations for winning our lottery
>-Original Message- >From: Erik Reuter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2003 5:44 AM >To: Killer Bs Discussion >Subject: Re: Fw: Congratuations for winning our lottery > > >On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 11:27:44AM +1000, Russell Chapman wrote: > >> I don't understand this - every time I sell something on eBay I give >> away my bank account info for them to put the funds into. >How does the >> bank account info help them? > >When you say you give away your "bank account info", what exactly >are you talking about? (I don't mean post the numbers, I mean the >descriptive terms for what you give, like routing number, account >number, bank name, etc.) I apologize. The Nigerian scam uses this method, but it appears that the lottery scam is usually asking for money to open foreign bank accounts (Dutch Lottery scam), or to pay taxes or fees to cover the transfer from overseas. They usually ask for a money order. Some of the lottery scams do attempt to get bank account info, though, by having the mark fill out an online form. I suspect that some marks feel if they are entering info into an online form, that it is somehow guaranteed or secure. Nerd From Hell > > >-- >"Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.net/ >___ >http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l > ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
From: "Jon Gabriel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> But by your logic, shouldn't we therefore expect that the administration's next target will be the Saudis? There's plenty of evidence that they have harbored, supported and trained terrorists whose sole goal is American genocide. Why do you think we ignoring them? Do you think that's a wise choice? I'm hoping the administration takes a much harder stance against the Saudis, myself. Steven Den Beste propsed a theory about why we've largely been ignoring the Saudis, and why that's about to stop: http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/07/Nextstepinthewar.shtml The overall war is continuing more or less as envisioned. Now that we're beginning to get established in Iraq, and now that Iraq's oilfields are coming back online and exports are beginning again, we've reached the point where we can begin to seriously confront the Saudis. The grand strategy of a war requires pacing and preparation; you pick your fights when you're ready, and choose the sequence so as to maximize the chance of success and minimize the chance of self-immolation. In the case of the current war, one of the things which was important was to make sure that the economy of the world didn't collapse or go into serious spasms while the war was being fought. There have been a lot of people who, for a long time now, have demanded that we cease treating the Saudis as staunch allies and friends. Saudis have been the financiers of much of international terrorism and the rise of extremist Islam around the world, and before the overall war can end that also has to end. That's true, but if you pick a fight too soon, you can lose it. If, for instance, on September 12 Bush had identified Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Iran all as nations which he considered enemies, then they'd all have instantly allied with one another overtly. He didn't, and they didn't, and though Saudi Arabia and Syria tried to impede our war against Iraq as much as they could, they didn't succeed in saving Saddam. And now we no longer need the Saudis. We've withdrawn our forces, and we no longer need the command center which is there. With Iraq's oilfields back online, a disruption in Saudi crude shipments (no matter why) will no longer threaten to make the world economy go into spasms. And that means we no longer have to treat them with kid gloves. Which is why there's increasing evidence that the US is about to take (http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/07/13/terrorism.report/index.html) a much harder line with the Saudis: A congressional report will soon reveal close ties between residents of Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, two senior lawmakers said Sunday. "It would be embarrassing, I think, to a lot of people there," Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, the Republican former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer." The classified report is the result of an investigation into the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The report, or portions if it, is expected to be declassified soon. "There are a lot of high people in Saudi Arabia, over the years, that have aided and abetted Osama bin Laden and his group. And they've done it through charities, they've done it directly and everything else," Shelby said. "What we've got to do is find the truth." I think this was always on the overall plan for the war's campaign. Once Afghanistan was take care of and after Iraq had been taken, I think that it was always expected that the next step would be to apply political pressure to Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria to get them to stop supporting terror groups. Fighting terrorism is like fighting ants; there are too many of them, they're too small and too spread out. To fight ants, you don't fight the ants. You fight the queen. If you kill the queen, all the rest of the ants will die. Terrorists are small and spread out, but without money they're only a small threat at best. Terrorism is low-resource warfare but it isn't no-resource, and even organizations like al Qaeda need millions of dollars per year in order to operate. Most of that money has been coming from Saudi Arabia. If the support stops, al Qaeda will be even further impeded and its threat will be reduced even further. (And the same goes for other similar groups e.g. Hizbollah.) The Saudis have been giving that money to those groups as a form of danegeld. "We'll give you money if you leave us alone, and go kill Jews and Americans instead, OK?" They're trying to placate both the terrorists and us, by continuing their support while making a few gestures, highly publicized but token and insignificant, to prove their support for the "War on Terrorism". Now we're in the position of being able to apply far greater pressure on them, to let them know that we no longer need them and won't settle for token gestures on their part. Saudi Arabia has been
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
> From: Gautam Mukunda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > --- The Fool <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > like the mythical ostrich, I guess. As long as > > the > > > > Ignorance is strength huh? Ostriches are __NOT__ > > mythical. > > True, but they don't stick their head in the sands. > It is the "mythical ostrich" that does that. Not the > real one. It is merely a myth about ostriches. Your claim was that ostriches were mythical, you did not mention any behavior of ostriches. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
--- The Fool <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > like the mythical ostrich, I guess. As long as > the > > Ignorance is strength huh? Ostriches are __NOT__ > mythical. True, but they don't stick their head in the sands. It is the "mythical ostrich" that does that. Not the real one. = Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
RE: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
> -Original Message- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Behalf Of Gautam Mukunda ... > The Joint Chiefs could probably do a pretty good job > of it. They could do no worse than the people running > them now, certainly. But, Nick, the war against > terrorism is more important than every other political > issue in America today. If - by definition - the Left > isn't even able to propose a strategy, then you are > supporting my argument, because the Left is > irrelevant. This reasoning would only be logical if you postulate that the war against terrorism is the *only* important political issue in America today. Is that what you're saying? Would you agree that it's not logical the way that you stated it? > No, it's because that's what we've got. Only in > paranoid fantasies do we have a war that suspends > normal checks and balances for civil rights. If it > did, you and The Fool would have been arrested > already. You've made the same error in logic again. For this to be true, *all* civil rights would have had to be suspended. That's certainly not what I believe, nor what I wrote. > The Left's preferred options > - doing nothing, or giving our enemies what they want > - are not policies, they are suicide pacts. Oh, please... Can you name one Democrat in Congress who has ever called for "doing nothing" in response to terrorism? Or on this list? Or are you saying that such a position is implied somehow? If so, how? I imagine that you're seeing political suicide -- which is what such a statement or implication would be -- because you want to, not because it's there. But make your case, I'm listening. > The "war > on terrorism" didn't happen because it made people > happy, any more than the Cold War happened because > conservatives needed an enemy (another one of those > fantasies of the Left, come to think of it) or the > Second World War happened because FDR needed someone > to distract from the failure of his New Deal policies > to end the Great Depression. The war happened because > it was forced on us by our enemies. What most of the > right wants to do is win it. Has anyone, right, center or left, even defined, in a practical sense, what it would mean to "win it?" I sure haven't heard such a definition, which leaves me rather cynical, I'm sorry to say. Without it, what I see are politicians using the phrase to further their own agendas, not our national or human interests. > What most of the Left > seems to want to do is pretend that there is no war - > like the mythical ostrich, I guess. As long as the > American public is faced with those two choices, then > I know how this will end. Polarizing it that way is naive, at best, Machiavellian and culturally suicidal, at worst, in my opinion. Nick ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
> From: Gautam Mukunda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > --- Nick Arnett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > The left is defunct only if we remain forever in a > > state of total war. And > > that's precisely why a vaguely defined, open-ended > > "war on terrorism" that > > suspends normal checks and balances for civil rights > > is as partisan as any > > policy ever has been. > > No, it's because that's what we've got. Only in > paranoid fantasies do we have a war that suspends > normal checks and balances for civil rights. If it > did, you and The Fool would have been arrested > already. When Ashcroft's jack-booted thugs come for > you, give me a call - I'll be happy to protect you. Friday browncoat republicans in the house of representatives called the police to arrest and remove democratic representatives from a library in the house of representatives. The future is here and now. Never before has something so shocking happened in the history of the united states. This is only the beginning. > like the mythical ostrich, I guess. As long as the Ignorance is strength huh? Ostriches are __NOT__ mythical. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
RE: Seth Finkelstein on 16 words
From: "Nick Arnett" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of > Gautam Mukunda > What's it's really about, though, is hate. Well, hate > and envy. A large portion of the world's left just > goes batshit crazy at the idea of George Bush. So > much so that no one, nothing, is more important than > beating him. Defending a sociopathic dictator? No > problem, as long as it hurts George Bush. Big government motivated by hatred? Social programs based on hate? Unions based on hate? Bleeding-heart hatred? I'm all confused -- I can't seem to wedge a psychology of hatred into the usual stereotypes. Gimme a good old-fashioned Hitler and I can see plenty of hatred, but he wasn't a leftie, unless he went so far that he circled back around. Believe it or not, hatred is present on both political sides. Here's a small tidbit: http://makeashorterlink.com/?A50A62065 -- Doesn't a part of you wish that Queasy and Duh-day were alive? I'll admit they're scum and rightfully so, but anything that lands as even more humiliation on W's grotesque shrivelled face is that much the better. It's sad, really, that as despicable as they are, Saddam's family seems to be the lesser of two evils when you compare them to the wretched little bastard* occupying the White House and destroying America in the process... -- > I spent the year > after the attacks in Cambridge - a place where the > left would generate something coherent if it was > capable of it _anywhere_ - and it didn't, and isn't. Setting aside sarcasm now... I think that you may be mistake in *expecting* the left to come up with a coherent war plan against terrorism. That's like turning to the Dali Lama to head your SWAT team... or asking the Joint Chiefs to run social programs. Do you really think that the left is necessarily incapable of defending this country from threats like terrorism? Must the Democrats now be the Peacenik Party? I certainly hope not! What happened to the Democratic party of FDR, Truman, and JFK? I fear that the democrats have begun largely catering to their vocal far-left element, which ends up pushing the moderate left (of which I somewhat consider myself) into the republican camp if they're concerned about terrorism and WMD. The left is defunct only if we remain forever in a state of total war. And that's precisely why a vaguely defined, open-ended "war on terrorism" that suspends normal checks and balances for civil rights is as partisan as any policy ever has been. If the left was to ease up on all the "The evils of the US are the root cause of 9/11, we only have ourselves to blame" rhetoric and start proposing (alternate) solutions rather than just attacking Bush's plans, the left wouldn't be defunct at all, and we'd actually have national dialog about how best to procede from here, rather than political sour grapes. Wouldn't that be better for everyone? _ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
