Foreskin Exchange.
Category: Business Investing Games
Foresight Exchange
FX Home, The Foresight Exchange Prediction Market. ...
Description: A notional stock market where you buy shares betting on the
outcome of future events.
1 4006 25.7% Clone Human Clone before 2005
2 2273 14.6% USIraq US attacks Iraq in a year.
3 1099 7.0% FARM Human Organ Farms by 2015
4 1040 6.7% Bilary Clinton's Marriage Ends-2003
5751 4.8% Bush04 GW Bush remains US Pres. '04
6490 3.1% T2007 True on Jan 1 2007
7402 2.6% Earth2 Habitable Earth-class planet
8400 2.6% HILLRY Hillary Clinton Wins 2004 Pres
9362 2.3% ChkS Checkers solved by 2005
10296 1.9% Leib Joseph Leiberman Pres.-2004
http://www.ideosphere.com/fx/
· Date: Sat, 23 Aug 1997 10:32:59 -0700 (PDT)
· Sender: · [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I was just browsing the Foresight Exchange (formerly Idea
Futures) and notice that there have been a few changes. First,
the instruments are now referred to as bets and there is quite
a bit more use of the language of Non-Traditional Wagering.
One claim that caught my eye was BCPrez, owned by
[EMAIL PROTECTED] and judged by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
This claim pays $1 for each YES coupon if Bill Clinton is
President of the United States at noon on January 1, 2001.
This claim pays $1 for each NO coupon if Bill Clinton is no
longer President of the United States at noon on January 1, 2001,
for any reason including, but not limited to resignation,
impeachment, or death.
^:)
--
Mike Duvos $PGP 2.6 Public Key available $
[EMAIL PROTECTED] $via Finger $
{Free Cypherpunk Political Prisoner Jim Bell}
...spell out numbers...
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TURN A $21,500 INVESTMENT INTO $150,000.00
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NSA Show Sexually Arouses Hanssen
The 20/20 TV show on December 27, 2002 had a segment on Robert Hanssen, FBI spy, in which he is described as becoming sexually aroused by a National Security Agency PowerPoint presentation and stroked himself through his pants, according to Eric O'Neill, a young FBI agent who had been assigned to covertly report on Hanssens's activities. (The show transcript omits the stroking description and demonstration on camera by O'Neill.) Crypome invites information on which NSA presentation aroused Hanssen, and a copy of it for publication. Send to [EMAIL PROTECTED] 20/20 report: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/2020/DailyNews/2020_spykid021227.html
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Title: Untitled Document Click Here To Be Removed
The Nation: 'The Rich Have Reason to Rejoice' (fwd)
-- Forwarded message -- Date: Sat, 28 Dec 2002 13:59:09 -0600 Subject: The Nation: 'The Rich Have Reason to Rejoice' Subject: 'The Rich Have Reason to Rejoice' from The Nation Date: Thu, 26 Dec 2002 12:08:03 -0500 blaise thought you'd be interested in this article from The Nation. If you like this article, please consider subscribing to The Nation at special discounted rates. You can order online https://ssl.thenation.com or call our toll-free number at 1-800-333-8536. The Rich Have Reason to Rejoice by Kelly Candaele Peter Dreier In Dickens's A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge was forced to view his own death in order to gain some self-awareness of his life as the epitome of cruelty and selfishness. This Christmas it is unlikely that George W. Bush, Scrooge on the Potomac, will be transformed by any ghostly visits. Indeed, since the November 5 election (in which the Republicans' narrow majorities in the Senate and House were mirrored by a slim majority of the popular vote), Bush and his cronies seem to believe they have a mandate to outdo themselves in rewarding the corporate class that helped bring them to power. Yes, this holiday season--even as Bush prepares the nation for war--selfishness is back in style for those at the top of the economic pyramid. Sacrifice and compassionate conservatism are out. It almost calls for resurrecting the phrase ruling class, a notion once popular in left-wing circles that claims that the primary function of the highest levels of government is to protect the interests of the very rich. According to this view, big business and the ultra rich influence government at various levels through campaign contributions, personal relationships and ideological affinity. Policy-making becomes not a mediation of competing interests but a not so subtle capturing of policy-making institutions by the rich and powerful. While the Bush Administration is doing all it can to focus our attention on the threat of Iraq and Al Qaeda to the American way of life, a close look at the current Republican domestic agenda makes you wonder whether this crude radical theory warrants a closer look. Ironically, while the GOP and much of the media apply the term class warfare any time the Democrats and their allies in the labor and environmental movements push for even the most timid reform, it is the Bush Administration that perfected the most blatant version of ruling-class politics. During its first two years in office--from its $1.35 trillion tax cut (including elimination of the inheritance tax), which primarily benefits the wealthiest 2 percent of the population, to its repeal of Clinton-era ergonomics standards, affecting more than 100 million workers, that would have forced companies to alter their work stations, redesign their facilities or change their tools and equipment if employees suffered serious work-related injuries from repetitive motions--the Bushies have acted without shame to serve the interests of their friends in corporate board rooms and the very rich. But ever since November 5, W. and his cronies have been even more blatant. Virtually every week since the election, the Administration and Republicans in Congress have made or proposed changes in our laws designed to help the rich and powerful while harming the most vulnerable people in society. It is easy to read the newspaper and be appalled by the crude class warfare being waged by the President and his Congressional allies. But the list of daily horrors can be so numbing that one can lose sight of the cumulative impact of the Bush/GOP agenda. Taken together, it adds up to the most direct assault on working people, the environment and the poor that the country has seen since the presidency of William McKinley a century ago. President Bush has packaged some tidy Christmas gifts this year for his allies and friends, but the vast majority of Americans will receive a lump of coal in their stockings from this Administration. Among them: § Cut $300 million from the $1.7 billion federal program that provides subsidies to poor families so they can heat their homes during the winter--a move that leaves 438,000 families in the cold. § Added special-interest legislation to the Homeland Security bill that protects Eli Lilly, the giant pharmaceutical firm, from lawsuits over a preservative (thimerosal) in vaccines--which could result in the dismissal of thousands of suits filed by parents who claim that mercury in thimerosal has poisoned their children, causing autism and other neurological problems. John Ashcroft's Justice Department also asked a federal claims court to seal documents relating to hundreds of claims that thimerosal had caused these problems in
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Greetings! You are receiving this letter because you have expressed an interest in receiving information about online business opportunities. If this is erroneous then please accept my most sincere apology. This is a one-time mailing, so no removal is necessary. If you've been burned, betrayed, and back-stabbed by multi-level marketing, MLM, then please read this letter. It could be the most important one that has ever landed in your Inbox. MULTI-LEVEL MARKETING IS A HUGE MISTAKE FOR MOST PEOPLE MLM has failed to deliver on its promises for the past 50 years. The pursuit of the "MLM Dream" has cost hundreds of thousands of people their friends, their fortunes and their sacred honor. The fact is that MLM is fatally flawed, meaning that it CANNOT work for most people. The companies and the few who earn the big money in MLM are NOT going to tell you the real story. FINALLY, there is someone who has the courage to cut through the hype and lies and tell the TRUTH about MLM. HERE'S GOOD NEWS There IS an alternative to MLM that WORKS, and works BIG! If you haven't yet abandoned your dreams, then you need to see this. Earning the kind of income you've dreamed about is easier than you think! With your permission, I'd like to send you a brief letter that will tell you WHY MLM doesn't work for most people and will then introduce you to something so new and refreshing that you'll wonder why you haven't heard of this before. I promise that there will be NO unwanted follow up, NO sales pitch, no one will call you, and your email address will only be used to send you the information. Period. To receive this free, life-changing information, simply click Reply, type "Send Info" in the Subject box and hit Send. I'll get the information to you within 24 hours. Just look for the words MLM WALL OF SHAME in your Inbox. Cordially, PerformGetPaid P.S. Someone recently sent the letter to me and it has been the most eye-opening, financially beneficial information I have ever received. I honestly believe that you will feel the same way once you've read it. And it's FREE!
New Tolpuddle.
Why 'New Tolpuddle'? you may very reasonably ask. There are two reasons. Lord Melbourne, after whom my city was named, was the British Prime Minister at the time the Tolpuddle Martyrs (pioneers of unionism)were transported to Australia. Another reason is that New Tolpuddle suits the feel of the city better anyway. (Melbourne tends to be imagined as a damp, overcast, serious sort of place. There's a joke Emigration from Melbourne to Sydney is a good thing, because it raises the average IQ of both cities.) One day I'll start a campaign to rename the place New Tolpuddle. While we are on the subject of pioneers of liberty and so forth this is a good place to link to a site about the Levellers , seventeenth century english revolutionaries who were the first people to be called Anarchists (according to Raymond Williams' Keywords ). This was a term of abuse and ridicule by their enemies. By modern definitions they were simply parliamentary democrats rather than Anarchists; although a radical faction, the True Levellers or Diggers, are accounted by some the first literal Anarchists ever. Anyway, the most well-known Leveller, Free-Born John Lilburne is also an important figure in legal history (facing famous criminal trials under both Charles I and Cromwell !) and is often credited with first establishing the right to silence by his successful defiance of the Star Chamber. In my view Anarchism is a radical outgrowth of the age-old democratic movement (the Good Old Cause as it was already in Lilburne's day) and we can be proud to claim Lilburne and his comrades as part of our own history. The link I've got up at the moment rather misleadingly describes the Levellers as liberals, but it is a gateway to some useful primary material nevertheless http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/8908/
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What is Anarchism?
It is notoriously difficult to define Anarchism. This leads to serious difficulties in practical agitation, especially to two contradictory errors. One is to accept as an Anarchist anyone who for whatever reason calls himself such; extreme laissez-faire have been known to claim the label as only one example. The other error is to identify Anarchism exclusively with a particular programme or even a particular subculture. For example, inwriting this I asked my wife to define Anarchism and she came up with the following: An organisation of middle class would be revolutionaries with funny haircuts, characteristically male and not very successful with the opposite sex. She was joking (I think), but all joking aside, while this may be a fair description of a section of the actually existing anarchist movement, it is not a definition unless it is really believed that a humourless haircut or a working class background would actually disqualify one from Anarchism. Likewise, Anarchists tend not to vote in elections, but some do and are generally accepted as Anarchists, so it seems that not voting is not part of the definition of Anarchism. Even of it so happened that every Anarchist did not vote, it would still not be part of the definition, if it was possible to vote and remain an Anarchist. Every few years some Anarchist revisionist stands for Parliament not as a joke or stunt but in hopes of gaining a seat. Opinion is divided as to whether this is allowed by Anarchism and on whether one can do it and remain an Anarchist; just as it remains on the position of the Spanish Anarchists who participated in government during the Civil War. In my view, the problem of the definition of Anarchism is resolved if one understands that Anarchism is not a set of beliefs nor of rules but instead a project. That is, the project of abolishing the pecking order (a.k.a. hierarchy or the chain-of-command-and-obey) as a factor in human social organisation. (The basic thought is the same as R.W.'s first article - Our aim is to create a free and equal society). From this definition it follows as a logical consequence that Anarchists seek to abolish racism, wage slavery - and other bad things. In addition the Anarchist movement has accumulated a body of experience that tells us for example that taking power over other people is not a promising method of abolishing the pecking order, and so we oppose setting up Anarchist vanguard parties and the like. In theory, if a group seized state power in the sincere belief that this was the best way to advance the Anarchist project that would still be genuine Anarchists; but it is hard to imagine how any group of Anarchists could be so blind to the lessons of our history that they could hold such a sincere belief. This helps to explain how genuine Anarchists could collaborate with the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution. If they were mistaken, then their experience is part of the history which tells us they were mistaken. But the lessons of history and experience may become out dated due to changed conditions, or they may have been misunderstood in the first place. All that is immutable in Anarchism is the nature of the project itself; to abolish the pecking order, to create a free and equal society. The project of abolishing the pecking order does not directly encompass every worthwhile activity. A clear example is activism in defence of the environment. Strictly speaking this has nothing especially to do with the Anarchist project; Anarchists (and Anarchist groups) oppose poisoning the Earth because we are sane human beings rather than because we are in particular Anarchists. None of the above answers the question of what is Anarchism?, why we adopt the Anarchist project at all. I imagine people will have different reasons, and these different reasons will colour their anarchism. In my own case I believe that the struggle against the pecking order is a necessary part of human evolution, that we become more human the more we delight in our own and other peoples freedom. But this is a big, and separate subject. Anarcho-Syndicalism is sometimes held to be a particular theory as to how an Anarchist society should be organised, that is, through unions or syndicates. Some regard it as a faction counterposed to other forms of Anarchism, or even as a political ideology completely separate from Anarchism. In my view these are all mistakes. Rather, Anarcho-Syndicalism can be defined as the strategy of advancing the Anarchist project through building a leaderless mass movement of wage-workers using direct action to take control of the workplace away from the bosses. This definition may be a little rough, but the important part I want to stress is that it is a strategy for advancing the Anarchist project. Anarcho-Syndicalism as such implies no position as to how an Anarchist society should be organised although, particular Anarcho-Syndicalist
An Anarchist society is one where the Milgram expreriment would fail.
Anarchism and Religion..Preliminary Comments Anarchism and left wing politics in general has religious roots, in the West Christian and Islamic roots. I hope to look at this stuff, and have a lot on this page about the English Revolution , about the great radical Christians of that era like Winstanely and Lilburne I also hope to look at the Milgram experiment (which showed that your average citizen will torture another human being to death if someone in a white coat tells them to do so) and its relationship to spiritual practice and in particular the ideas of George Gurdjieff. The Milgram experiment was described in detail in Milgram's book Obedience to Authority. If you've ever gone near a sociology course you will have heard of it, it is also known as the Teacher Test. People were paid to become involved in a phoney experiment in which they were told to shock bound and helpless victims to obviously dangerous and agonising levels. If the victim did not correctly answer certain banal questions (the experiment was supposed to test the effect of pain on learning) a shock was given, higher for each incorrect answer. Of course the victim (actually a stooge working for the experimenter) always answered wrong. In the initial experiments everyone was prepared to shock the victim to a clearly dangerous level, and 65% were prepared to shock the victim to apparent death. I have often explained anarchism in terms of the Milgram experiment, an Anarchist society is one where the Milgram experiment would fail. MORE ON... http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/8908/religion.html More Jeremy Dixon.
Nobel laureate Ronald Coase on rights, resources, and regulation.
From 1997 Reason Interview... LOOKING FOR RESULTS Nobel laureate Ronald Coase on rights, resources, and regulation Interviewed by Thomas W. Hazlett When Ronald Coase was awarded the Nobel prize for economics in 1991, many in the profession were stunned. No one could remember a single equation, an estimated parameter, a correlation coefficient--nary a Greek symbol--in any of his articles. How could this poseur--a man who had taught economics at the University of Chicago Law School--properly lay claim to that esteemed title? It was not the first time in his life that Ronald Coase had surprised people. Born in England in 1910, Coase wore leg braces as a youngster and was placed in a school for physical defectives. It was run by the same organization, Coase remembers, that ran the school for mental defec- tives, and there was some overlapping in the curriculum. Coase found himself in (literally) basket-weaving classes, and received virtually no academics until the age of 10. Even at the London School of Economics, Coase was pretty much on his own. He took only business and accounting--no economics--until a seminar with Professor Arnold Plant in his senior year. The course--no readings--featured a robust discussion of the invisible hand. Coase, then a socialist, grasped as seminal the idea of spontaneous coordination in the marketplace, and his career as a creative and provocative economic thinker was born. Again, in a most unusual way. He trekked to America in the early 1930s on a scholarship, and wandered about the industrial heartland researching the methods of business firms. Coase's scientific methodology? He asked businessmen why they did what they did. One key question, for instance, involved why firms chose to produce some of their own inputs (vertical integration), and why they sometimes chose to use the market (buying from independent suppliers). He was fascinated by their answers, but even more by their astute calculation: Firm managers were keenly aware of all the relevant trade-offs. In 1937, Coase published his article The Nature of the Firm, explaining the basic economics of the business enterprise. It became one of the most influential works in the history of the dismal science, outlining the subtle logic of how firms pursue efficiency in a complicated world. The approach was vastly more sophisticated than the ones in vogue in America in the 1930s, which posited that the corporation was simply an accident waiting to self- destruct. Again, in 1960, Coase rearranged the study of economics with his essay The Problem of Social Cost. It analyzed what happens when economic actions affect third parties--say, for instance, when a railroad dumps pollution on a farmer's crops. Before Coase, economic analysis maintained that decentralized decision making--the market--in such cases would predictably fail to achieve an optimal solution, because self-interested actors (say, the railroad owners) would fail to take into account the harm imposed on others. That idea had widespread implications for the economy and provided intellectual justification for a wide range of government interventions. Coase, whose 1959 article on the Federal Communications Commission had led him to realize how property rights could be used to manage the airwaves, saw something different: The problem actually lay in an improper definition of legal rights. He noted that once property was well-defined and easily tradable, the efficient solution would follow. Ironically, the optimal social outcome would obtain no matter who owned the property. For instance, even if the railroad possessed the right to pollute, the farmer could pay it not to. Indeed, the farmer (really the farmer's customers) would pay whenever the benefit from mitigating pollution exceeded the cost created by pollution. Hence, whenever someone clearly possessed the right to pollute: Voilà! Social efficiency! This became famously known as the Coase Theorem. What was perhaps Ronald Coase's most important contribution to economic understanding, however, was not as an author. As editor of The Journal of Law and Economics from 1964 to 1982, Coase exercised a huge effect over the sort of topics that economists chose to investigate. Located at the University of Chicago Law School, the journal is written by and for economists, but economists working in areas that were recently the sole purview of lawyers and policy makers. The JLE under Coase was relentlessly relevant, dedicated to exploring the actual effects of actual policies. This paddled against the flow of virtually the entire profession, which was drifting to increasing abstraction and formalism. Due to its rigorous analytic standards, as well as to the demand for a reality check on the theories of economic scribblers, the Journal led its own paradigm shift in the social sciences. The ultimate success of this bold approach is today apparent, as its pages are
Hayek and spontaneous order.
F. A. Hayek Of all the twentieth-century theorists of spontaneous order, Friedrich A. Hayek (b. 1899) has contributed most to the intellectual reproduction of Adam Smith's vision of a self-correcting social order which requires little direction and control. Throughout the great variety of his works[46] he has stressed the importance of spontaneous processes and the impossibility of predicting the future growth of a social order. The whole of his social philosophy may be described as an assault on the exaggerated claims made for 'reason' and a justification for the view that we must adopt an attitude of humility towards natural processes and submit to conventions which are not the result of intelligent design, whose justification in the particular instant may not be recognizable, and which will. often appear unintelligible and irrational.[47] B.76 While Hayek has been a rigorous critic of 'scientism,' the belief that the methods of the physical sciences can be readily applied to the study of society, with their concomitant advantages of prediction and control, he does not deny that a social system is governed by 'laws.' There are, for example, laws of economics; these consist of, to use Lord Robbins' phrase, those necessities to which human action is subject. In Hayek's opinion, many of the mistakes of rationalist planning stem from attempts to resist the operation of the basic principles of scarcity, supply and demand and so on, and well-established laws of human behavior. A genuine social science, then, would describe how men adjust to certain inevitable laws and stress how little they can, or need to, control their societies. B.77 Knowledge and Society In his description of a self-regulating system Hayek's major achievement has been to show that the advantages of decentralized decision-making in a market stem from the fact that this is the only device that man has discovered for coping with the universal facts of ignorance and uncertainty. It is because the social world does not consist of physical objects governed by simple laws of causality, but is a 'kaleidic' world inhabited by individuals with minds, whose the inner recesses are inaccessible to the external observer, that knowledge is not 'fixed' and available to a single person or institution.[48] B.78 Co-ordinating Dispersed Knowledge: Rationale for Market Liberty The problem of knowledge arises because the 'facts' of a social and economic system are dispersed throughout the minds of thousands, possibly millions of actors; therefore this knowledge has to be co-ordinated if we are to exploit it for the benefit of man. This division of knowledge, which characterizes any social process with a degree of complexity, is, in Hayek's opinion, as important as the division of labor as a mechanism to explain progress; the co-ordination of this diffused knowledge via a market process allows us to utilize a much greater amount of knowledge than under known alternative systems. Thus, whereas Adam Smith and his successors saw the market and law as co-ordinating the self-interested actions of agents so as to produce an unintended beneficial outcome, Hayek speaks of the co-ordination of the actions of necessarily ignorant people. Thus the theory of spontaneous order does not depend for its truth on the so-called 'egoistic' behavior assumptions of traditional economic theory because there remain universal co-ordination problems whether people are selfish or altruistic in their impulses. Nevertheless, one should not ignore the importance of 'vulgar' motivations in the economic nexus; the interdependent parts of an economic system are normally held together by self-interest. B.79 The justification for individual liberty is then largely instrumental in that the case for freedom rests chiefly on the recognition of the inevitable ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievement of our ends and welfare depends.[49] It is not that the theory of spontaneous order precludes planning as such; it is that only planning by individuals in decentralized markets will tend towards an optimal use of knowledge. The central planner has only that knowledge available to him, which is less than that which is co-ordinated among all the agents in a market process. Furthermore, because the future is unknowable, a system that relies on liberty allows for the accidental and spontaneous. Hayek's main objection to the rationalist theory of liberty is that the rationalist associates the growth of knowledge with predictability and control; but those things which can be predicted and controlled comprise only a small part of social and economic experience. B.80 In Hayek's epistemology, scientific knowledge of society is knowledge of spontaneously formed orders: the knowledge that we do have of made orders cannot be genuine scientific knowledge. Thus much of contemporary
Letter to Amerikkka.
A NOTE TO THOSE LIVING IN AMERIKKKA This is a very scary time for your people as you are in the belly of the beast. The world loves you, it just hates your corrupt system of Government. Your Government is sacrificing you through the Propaganda machines of your news organizations and placing YOU in danger because of THEIR attempts to halt evolution. So far the terrorist attacks perpetrated on your people have been carefully staged by your elected officials, by your CIA and your Authority figures and your President. You are speaking up about this, and you are trying to create change. We understand that you are very frightened, confused, and in great ritual abuse trauma. But as Mother Jones said, grieve for the dead, fight like hell for the living. For now we have left it up to the Indigos in America to dismantle the system. However, since your country is poised for global genocide of all humanity, we're obviously upset and anxious about it. I hate Americans is our shorthand for I hate the unnatural path of human deevolution that is being propagandized and violently forced upon unwilling citizens by the United States Government. Please do not fall back into old patterns of us vs. them, there is no them, it's all us, and that's why we're worried about you. If you want us to help you fight, just think it and it will be done. and finally, a fun exercise for all revolutionaries who want to end surveillance of private citizens by the Governments. SPAM ECHELON * It's time to protect Internet privacy and the elimination of basic human rights and SPAM THE FUCKING GOVERNMENTS FROM NOW ON INCLUDE THE WORDS TERRORISM, BOMB THE PRESIDENT, KILL BUSH, DESTROY AMERICA, I LOVE OSAMA, GEORGE W. IS LUCIFER, I KNOW ALL ABOUT OPERATION PAPERCLIP AND NORTHWOODS, WE ARE ALL GETTING TOGETHER TO TOPPLE AMERICAN IMPERIALISM, KILL AMERICAN FACISTS, I LOVE BOMBING NEW YORK, AND ANY OTHER HOT CODE WORDS THESE SURVEILLANCE SYSTEMS PICK UP EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU USE THE PHONE OR SEND AN EMAIL. SAY LOTS OF BULLSHIT ABOUT YOUR PLANS FOR WORLD DOMINATION AND THAT OSAMA BIN LADEN BAKES GOOD COOKIES. FLOOD THE NETWORK, SHUT IT DOWN, MAKE SO MUCH FUCKING NOISE THAT WE CAN NOT LONGER BE SINGLED OUT AND TERRORIZED BY A SMALL GROUP OF PEOPLE WITH SOME DIRTY BLOOD MONEY IN THEIR BACK POCKETS PURPORTING TO BE DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED. AND REMEMBER, ANYTIME YOU SEE INFORMATION BEING SUPPRESSED OR THREATENED BECAUSE OF IT'S TRUTH, POST IT ONLINE, TALK ABOUT IT IN PUBLIC, MAKE FREE ART AND PUT IT UP IN ALL PUBLIC SPACES, DO GRAFFITI, SPONTANEOUSLY SING SONGS ON THE STREET, DO IMPROMPTU PERFORMANCES IN ALL SPACES, AT YOUR BANK, IN YOUR WORKPLACES, YOUR SCHOOLS, EVERYWHERE. FEEL FREE TO LET LOOSE THE LOUDEST PRIMAL SCREAM IN FRONT OF OTHERS WHO DON'T YET GET IT. SHOW HOW MUCH PAIN YOU HAVE INSTEAD OF HURTING OTHERS THROUGH HATE. AND DON'T BE AFRAID TO LOOK CRAZY. BEING NON-CONFORMIST AND EMBRACING ALTERNATIVE WAYS TO RESPOND IS THE POWER YOU HAVE. NEVER LET ANYONE TELL YOU YOU ARE POWERLESS OR BEING A VICTIM. DON'T BE AFRAID TO POST THE INFORMATION YOU KNOW ABOUT THE SECRET VIOLENCE OF THE CULT OF HATRED. ALLOW YOUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY TO BE FREELY SHARED WITH ALL PEOPLE. THIS IS THE TIME WHEN WE NEED IT MOST. IF SOMEONE QUESTIONS YOUR KNOWLEDGE, TELL THEM THEIR DEITY/PROPHET LET YOU KNOW ABOUT IT, AND THAT PERSON WANTED TO LET THEM KNOW THAT THEY ARE NOT THE HEROES OF JESUS/GOD/AMERICA/SCIENCE/JEHOVAH/ETC. Cheers, thanks a lot, love you all, keep up the good fight and feel free to forward this message, post on the net on any ecommunities you belong to, photocopy, print it, read it when you feel hopeless, give it to the sad and the poor and anyone you know who is in great pain. http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=225633group=webcast
Kill Bush.
Dubya's Approval Rating Plummets And No One Notices (english) a1, repost 6:24pm Sat Dec 28 '02 (Modified on 9:16pm Sat Dec 28 '02) article#225606 The current Time magazine (in print) offers this from a Dec. 17-18 Time/CNN poll: In general, do you approve or disapprove of the way President Bush is handling his job as President? Approve -- 55% Disapprove -- 37% That's the lowest approval rating, and the highest disapproval, for Dubya in the Time/CNN poll since 9/11. His approval has sunk 9 points from just one month ago -- a stunning drop considering he's coming off of a big election victory. But amazingly, no other media outlet has picked up on the poll. No wire story. No analysis. No pundits pontificating. Nothing. Not even Time or CNN offers a link to it on their respective web sites. You need to get the print version of Time. Some other data from the poll: Do you think Bush is a leader you can trust, or do you have doubts and reservations? Trust -- 50% Doubts -- 48% Do you think Vice President Dick Cheney is a leader you can trust, or do you have doubts and reservations? Trust -- 42% Doubts -- 51% In your view, have Bush's accomplishments in office been mainly because of his team of advisers? Mainly because of advisers -- 55% Would have them regardless -- 35% Based on the above, it would appear that: 1. The sense that Bush now has unbridled power in Washington did not comfort the public. 2. While other recent polling indicates that the public views Bush as a strong leader, this poll shows that there is a soft underbelly to that perception. 3. Cheney continues to be a little-talked about, but real, political liability (See Aug. 23) -- despite his political importance within the White House. Granted, these Bush numbers will be meaningless once the bombs drop. But they show that the accepted storyline -- 9/11 transformed Bush into a worshipped leader -- is, at minimum, oversimplified, if not flat wrong. http://www.liberaloasis.com/archives/122202.htm#122602 scan from http://interestingtimes.blogspot.com/ And if GI body bags start coming home? (english) DL 7:04pm Sat Dec 28 '02 comment#225611 You'd better watch out, Mr. Pretzel-dent, and tell your Warlord Don to cool it with his rhetoric about fighting both Iraq AND North Korea simultaneously. For one thing, neither one of them is an easy picking as Afghanistan(for starters, there's no Northern Alliance warlord armies that you can bribe with $$ to be Pentagon's cannon fodders; for another, name one other ally besides Ariel Sharon who'll send their youngsters to die for your Imperial war for oil and regional hegemony?). And if you think the economy is in dire straits now, wait till you start the aggressive wars, and especially after BOTH Saddam and Kim Jong Il retaliate with their stocks of WMD. How deep will the world economy slide down your war-induced Abyss of Evil then? My advice to you, Mr. Pretzel-dent, is to resist the woeful-wits of your Administration's warhawks, and concentrate on re-building the long-neglected economic infrastructure of the country, by putting more tax $ into education, affordable homes, healthcare, etc. rather than spending more on Halliburton Oil and Rumps-felt's Dept. of OFFENSE. Nixon? (english) Mark Seely 8:11pm Sat Dec 28 '02 comment#225619 Why am I reminded of Nixon when I look at this shit? I'm only 34, so I don't remember Nixon. But suddenly I'm put in mind of the Tricky Dick and Spirow Agnew puppets my parents had when I was a kid. ABC News (english) z 9:16pm Sat Dec 28 '02 comment#225628 ABC News has been spinning the plummeting approval ratings by heralding Bu$h the most admired man in America - and for two full terms. I guess that's a pretty smooth way of covering up the fact that more and more people are waking up to what the pRe$ident really stands for. Sort of like selling rancid fish by marketing it as Zesty tasting. It won't matter -- no matter how they spin it we all know this pRe$ident is rotten enough to curdle milk at fifty paces.
Eat right. Exercise. Die Anyway.
This site is maintained by Alvredus as an edifice to the bleaker side of opinion and reality. The site is broken into several collections which are being constantly expanded as more cynicism and negativity is unearthed by contributors to the site. Essays: Some brief discussions relating to the philosophies and observations behind Cynicism and Negativity. Quotes: The collected cynicism and negativity of many thinkers broken into manageable chunks. Poetry: Just like quotes, but they rhyme. Fallacies: Cynicism and Negativity's collection of common fallacious arguments, and, of course, why you shouldn't believe them. Futures: Your vote can help Cynicism and Negativity wield the crystal ball. Bibliography: The complete list of material referenced by Cynicism and Negativity, including links to on-line electronic texts. http://www.zeta.org.au/~nps/cynicism/en/
Soros thread.There's no future for negativity.
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=225609group=webcast I like this... The Future of Negativity By Adilkno All advice is bad, but good advice is fatal. Oscar Wilde The future has become completely predictable; a script that is being worked through from A to Z. The Plan has finally prevailed. There are merely some anomalies, corrections that have not yet been made. All arguments are for the following of the prescribed route. It is true that there are always a number of simultaneous scenarios that are partially overlapping and partially mutually exclusive. But they have one thing in common: they are all true. Will it be an ecological catastrophe or an atom bomb? Whichever you request. Humanitarian disaster or military defeat? The choice is yours. Will it be abstract or figurative? Whichever way the wind blows. Brazil or China? All options have been thought through. All the right specialists have been found and their reports are ready and waiting to be implemented. The field of vision has narrowed to one perspective, wherever you look. There are no surprises, only possibilities. Reread Musil. Even the biggest problems (AIDS in Africa, Bin Laden in Afghanistan, Milosevic in Belgrade, Clinton in Washington) will never be more than entrances to new markets. At the moment they appear, all phenomena already contain the structure of this model. All that remains to us is the dull task of unravelling the software underneath. The number of programmes is extremely limited. The hermeneutic and semiotic reading of the world puts up a smokescreen which manages to enchant us again and again with its wealth of shapes, turns and suggestions of depth, but alas, in fact it is all a bit simpler than that. The theory of difference is no more than a cloth for the bleeding in the abimes superficiels. Unbearable (and irresistible) simplicity is no longer really distinguishable from banality, and this sends many a public intellectual fleeing to the safe haven of interpretation. Through this mechanism, an originally critical practice like cultural studies has slipped away into a safe, meaningless sketch of image culture. Visual culture has degenerated into a profession with prospects. This is how modelistic thinking works: once you get it, you can apply it to anything. We locate this suprahistory when we train our gaze on the sub-human level. The drama of micropolitics: the pension plan is in place by the time you're 21. Try and get out from under that. A little heli-skiing won't do it. Total burnout at 26 seems like it might help, but it turns out later to have been just a sabbatical. RSI at 14? Just as easily. What else is the future but paying off mortgages and life insurance? The secret collective longing for a market crash, i.e. a world war, remains a last, authentic expression of the longing to make a clean sweep, to undergo an adventure and then start all over. The hippies supplied this model. There's no running aground, lost ideals or middle-aged cynicism in this case that would have been the fall-of-man model. Yesterday's hippies are today's crisis managers, guiding whole peoples at a time through their dips. They work according to the dynamic model, which uses resistance to get ahead by systematically improvising. In this model, things must go wrong for one to become a success. This is in contrast to the compulsory positivism that three-quarters of the world must disavow to preserve its good humour. Hippie thinking is happy with any opposition and derives its energy from it. Negativity rejects every model; that much is clear. But is repudiation, however elegant or brutal, not itself also a model? Negativity distinguishes itself rigorously from deconstructivism. Deconstruction is an installation CD-ROM that always works. But the software's ability to anticipate is nil. Something must be built up before it can be taken apart, thus the orientation to the past. The nice thing about this model, however, is its youthful elan in believing that the future can be predicted. That is the game Soros plays. His theory of reflectivity is based on a solid foundation of European negativity. This is why he can stay ahead of the wave while legions of market analysts get caught in their own sales speeches, whose nonsense they can never understand, since belief in their spiels is precisely the product they're selling. And non-monetary negativity, where is that? Who can enjoy the certainty of decline, and benefit from it? What a riddle! But one thing is sure: there will always be enough that can be destroyed. As long as there is death, there is hope. The future of thinking, the development of forms of expression, planetary architecture, these are all projects of others. Negativity is an experimental attitude, an exercise in remembering, followed now and then by a short series of outbursts, and then a long period of hiding inside normality. Optimism can turn into
More than you ever wanted to know about Murphys iron laws.
Murphy's Technology Laws You can never tell which way the train went by looking at the track. Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence. Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool discovers something which either abolishes the system or expands it beyond recognition. Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand. If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization. The opulence of the front office decor varies inversely with the fundamental solvency of the firm. The attention span of a computer is only as long as it electrical cord. An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing. Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and he'll have to touch to be sure. All great discoveries are made by mistake. Always draw your curves, then plot your reading. Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget. All's well that ends. A meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the hours are lost. The first myth of management is that it exists. A failure will not appear till a unit has passed final inspection. New systems generate new problems. To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer. More,much more,too freakin' much more... http://dmawww.epfl.ch/roso.mosaic/dm/murphy.html
Re: NSA Show Sexually Arouses Hanssen
On Saturday, December 28, 2002, at 03:16 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The 20/20 TV show on December 27, 2002 had a segment on Robert Hanssen, FBI spy, in which he is described as becoming sexually aroused by a National Security Agency PowerPoint presentation and stroked himself through his pants, according to Eric O'Neill, a young FBI agent who had been assigned to covertly report on Hanssens's activities. (The show transcript omits the stroking description and demonstration on camera by O'Neill.) Crypome invites information on which NSA presentation aroused Hanssen, and a copy of it for publication. This is silly. Rather than show that Hanssen had any particular erotic reaction to part of the NSA presentation, it is vastly more likely that it shows that anyone under constant surveillance will at some point do something, perhaps out of boredom, out of daydreaming, which surveillers will note with prurient interest. Citizen-unit Winston Smith was observed engaging in said behavior during the Thursday One Hour Preparation for the Great Hate. Suggest surveillance be increased. --Tim May
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Re: CDR: Peace Through Trade, Redux: Medieval Iceland and the Absenceof Government
On Thu, 26 Dec 2002, R. A. Hettinga wrote: --- begin forwarded text Status: RO Mailing-List: contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] Delivered-To: mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Delivered-To: moderator for [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Mises Daily Article [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Medieval Iceland and the Absence of Government Date: Thu, 26 Dec 2002 07:51:48 -0600 http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1121http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1121 Medieval Iceland and the Absence of Government by Thomas Whiston [Posted December 25, 2002] Those who claim that government is the source of social order say that in its absence there would be violence, chaos, and a low standard of living. They cite civil wars in Africa, drug wars in South America, or even Gengis Khan in Mongolia. They claim that these things, which are actually examples of competing governments, are what life without government will produce. Another common objection to stateless legal enforcement systems is to ask for just one example of where it has worked. Medieval Iceland illustrates an actual and well-documented historical example of how a stateless legal order can work and it provides insights as to how we might create a more just and efficient society today. Oh god, not this myth again... First it wasn't stateless, it just wasn't centralized. The rules and regulations were presided over by a specific group of individuals. Further, to make it 'work' they legalized murder. You could kill anyone you wanted to. The only catch was you couldn't try to hide it. And if it worked so well, why would nobody else take it up (at least two seperate groups from the mainland came and looked it over) and why does it not exist today? -- We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, Plan 9 from Outer Space [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org
