Re: On the orthogonality of anonymity to current market demand
James A. Donald writes: > > Further, genuinely secure systems are now becoming available, notably > > Symbian. Chris Palmer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > What does it mean for Symbian to be genuinely secure? How was this > determined and achieved? There is no official definition of "genuinely secure", and it is my judgment that Symbian is unlikely to suffer the worm, virus and trojan problems to the extent that has plagued other systems.
Re: Return of the death of cypherpunks.
-- James A. Donald: > > Since cryptography these days is routine and > > uncontroversial, there is no longer any strong > > reason for the cypherpunks list to continue to > > exist. John Kelsey > The ratio of political wanking to technical posts and > of talkers to thinkers to coders needs to be right for > the list to be interesting. These days, if one is seriously working on overthrowing the state by advancing to crypto anarchy (meaning both anarchy that is hidden, in that large scale cooperation procedes without the state taxing it, regulating it, supervising it, and licensing it, and anarchy that relies on cryptography to resist the state) it is not necessary or advisable to announce what one is up to. For example, Kerberos needs to be replaced by a more secure protocol. No need to add "And I am concerned about this because I am an anarchist" And so one discusses it on another list. (Kerberos tickets are small meaningful encrypted packets of information, when they should be random numbers. Being small, they can be dictionary attacked.) --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Y068Cy3Zv9GExXRbP24QJP5WmHGLz5VKyqNYFKbx 45fkOIGeiTkFnaM7p/URjB/kgn+0mcg8fMsMLmDy7
Return of the death of cypherpunks.
-- From: Eugen Leitl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > While I don't exactly know why the list died, I > suspect it was the fact that most list nodes offered a > feed full of spam, dropped dead quite frequently, and > also overusing that "needs killing" thing (okay, it > was funny for a while). > > The list needs not to stay dead, with some finite > effort on our part (all of us) we can well resurrect > it. If there's a real content there's even no need > from all those forwards, to just fake a heartbeat. Since cryptography these days is routine and uncontroversial, there is no longer any strong reason for the cypherpunks list to continue to exist. I recently read up on the Kerberos protocol, and thought, "how primitive". Back in the bad old days, we did everything wrong, because we did not know any better. And of course, https sucks mightily because the threat model is both inappropriate to the real threats, and fails to correspond to the users mental model, or to routine practices on a wide variety of sites, hence users glibly click through all warning dialogs, most of which are mere noise anyway. These problems, however, are no explicitly political, and tend to be addressed on lists that are not explicitly political, leaving cypherpunks with little of substance. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG AnKV4N6f9DgtOy+KkQ9QsiXcpQm+moX4U09FjLXP 4zfMeSzzCXNSr737bvqJ6ccbvDSu8fr66LbLEHedb
Re: Any comments on BlueGem's LocalSSL?
--
R.A. Hettinga" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Intel doing their current crypto/DRM stuff, [...] You
> know they're going to do evil, but at least the
> *other* malware goes away.
I am a reluctant convert to DRM. At least with DRM, we
face a smaller number of threats.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
ctySJF5hgF1q9fil61pohBVLfj/aT4jWZ/KUf29x
4GuXiNXRF+nY3+3LFo8YpvV4w1S5dwf+LcuAsZWWe
Re: On the orthogonality of anonymity to current market demand
-- John Kelsey > What's with the heat-death nonsense? Physical bearer > instruments imply stout locks and vaults and alarm > systems and armed guards and all the rest, all the way > down to infrastructure like police forces and armies > (private or public) to avoid having the biggest gang > end up owning all the gold. Electronic bearer > instruments imply the same kinds of things, and the > infrastructure for that isn't in place. It's like > telling people to store their net worth in their > homes, in gold. That can work, but you probably can't > leave the cheapest lock sold at Home Depot on your > front door and stick the gold coins in the same drawer > where you used to keep your checkbook. Some of us get spyware more than others. Further, genuinely secure systems are now becoming available, notably Symbian. While many people are rightly concerned that DRM will ultimately mean that the big corporation, and thus the state, has root access to their computers and the owner does not, it also means that trojans, viruses, and malware does not. DRM enables secure signing of transactions, and secure storage of blinded valuable secrets, since DRM binds the data to the software, and provides a secure channel to the user. So secrets representing ID, and secrets representing value, can only be manipulated by the software that is supposed to be manipulating it. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 3CepcQ59MYKAZTizEycP1vkZBbexwbyiobaC/bXS 44hfxMF4PBKXmc5uavnegOFFCMtNwDmpIMxLBcyI3
Re: [fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems
-- Steve Schear <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Yes, but unfortunately it is not clear at all that > courts would find the opposite, either. If a lawsuit > names the currency issuer as a defendant, which it > almost certainly would, a judge might order the > issuer's finances frozen or impose other measures > which would impair its business survival while trying > to sort out who is at fault. It would take someone > with real cojones to go forward with a business > venture of this type in such uncharted waters. Anyone can sue for anything. Paypal is entirely located in the US, making it easy to sue, has done numerous bad things, but no court orders have been issued to put it out of business. If a business's main assets are gold located in offshore banks, courts are apt to be quite reluctant to attempt to shut it down, as issuing ineffectual or difficult to enforce orders makes a judge look stupid. People fuss too much about what courts might do. Courts are as apt, perhaps more apt, to issue outrageous orders if you are as innocent. as the dawn. Courts are like terrorists in that there is no point in worrying what might offend the terrorists, because they are just as likely to target you no matter what you do. Government regulators are a bigger problem, since they are apt to forbid any business model they do not understand, but they tend to be more predictable than courts. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG CY46prGSdN80nLrJL5G79zdH2Uu2lRjQHD9mlSsf 4JTEpYw1dnco9AMX6Fvv3Uce0bPsG1TJYg+qpwG5n
On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems
Date sent: Tue, 25 Oct 2005 00:38:36 +0200 To: cyphrpunk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Copies to: John Kelsey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Ian G <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED], cryptography@metzdowd.com, [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Daniel A. Nagy) Subject:Re: [fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems > One intresting security measure protecting valuable digital assets (WM > protects private keys this way) is "inflating" them before encryption. > > While it does not protect agains trojan applications, it does a surprisingly > good job at reducing attacks following the key logging + file theft pattern. > > This security measure depends on two facts: storage being much cheaper than > bandwidth and transmission of long files being detectable, allowing for > detecting and thwarting an attack in progress. How does one inflate a key? > > -- > Daniel > > >
Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Wikipedia & Tor]
-- From: "Tyler Durden" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > A very subtle attack, perhaps? If I were so-and-so, I > consider it a real coup to stop the kinds of > legitimate Wikipedia entries that might be made from > Tor users. And if this is the case, you can bet that > there are other "obvious" targets that have been > hammered through Tor. In the long run, reliable pseudonymity will prove more valuable than reliable anonymity. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG wE/La87xersBx39sShMCS6TkdqJr6DSYslVdXZkf 4GY6BRCS/b8OBic0E/U36X+dc1UIs2oNAkWyXXCQB
Re: Fwd: Re: MIT talk: Special-Purpose Hardware for Integer Factoring
-- Steve Furlong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > (Not that I'm particularly fond of the Prez, but I'm > not one of the LLLs who say he's worse than Hitler, > Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and Ronald Regan combined.) (Stalin > doesn't go into that equation because he was, you > know, a good guy whose actions have been > misinterpreted.) No no, Stalin was "a very bad man" - yet, not however, as bad as Ronald Reagan et al. Furthermore the five year plans involved no bloodshed whatsoever, well only a teensy weensy little bit, nothing like what General Motors does in its well known slave labor camps, and the liquidation of the kulaks was self defense against a vicious attempt by the peasants to starve the proletariat. :-) --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG ikKvUYkvyBE7ikT3WsIGcsxLztiI6VjO7F+lbUPi 43u1MspIR5iABmysKM+9wkz7R+H7AgDDsuhTSZJ4A
Re: The ghost of Cypherpunks
--
From: ken <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Assuming that you mean feminism is a variant of
> Marxism, what exactly do you mean by Marxism?
Marxism reinterpreted history as class war, though in
fact workers tended to cooperate with bosses and make
war on competing workers, and similarly for capitalists.
Marxism also reinterpreted the doctrine of inevitable
progress as leading to a "classless" utopia, though
somehow the intellectuals would be more equal than
others in that utopia - note Marx's contemptuous and
snobbish mistreatment of actual workers, and the
striking lack of contact that Marx and Engles had with
actual workers. Engles writings about the condition of
the working class in England are based entirely on what
one can see through the window of a coach and four
horses while being driven from a luncheon party to a
dinner party.
Since we had inevitable progress, the past necessarily
had to be demonized and made alien, and the further back
it went, the greater the demonization and more strange
and alien the past had to be, requiring an ever greater
rewrite of history.
Well time passed, and actual proletarians never showed
much enthusiasm for the war effort, so by and by
Marxists started looking for new wars, pouring the old
wine into new bottles, the old wine being leadership by
enlightened intellectuals, group warfare justifying the
most horrifying misconduct, massive rewrites of history,
and synchronized lying ("I heard this from the three
different people, so it must be true") - and of course,
far from oppressed intellectuals supposedly identifying
themselves with distant groups they don't like very
much. Observe all the diesel dyke feminists supposedly
passionately seeking to protect attractive heterosexual
women from date rape.
These various isms are not marxism, not exactly, but
they bare a striking resemblance to their parent.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
JTnG7EwKWGBKCLMjy9fEelUGWOaNVelhzQKnyKWj
4KYcVP6IOe2k/gw1LLqwMfH5ioyRfGUAvNrJFj/2o
Re: The ghost of Cypherpunks
-- James A. Donald > : So when I buy coffee, that is political? Damian Gerow > Is it organic, fair-trade, shade-grown coffee? > Locally grown? Locally roasted? Purchased through > StarBucks or a local coffee shop? Do the growers use > their profits to help the growth of coca plants? Or > perhaps to fund research into genetically modifying > said coca plants to make them resistant to pesticides? > > You're damn right it's political. like Ben and Jerry's rainforest crunch, where by buying overpriced and extra fattening icecream, you were supposedly saving the rainforest and preserving indigenous cultures . --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 4C+hXHkc3y/UsCUMCx1hWWfk7CYoEIBHyDzVmvQs 4B8YupK7ecImNY+39UMmwbfxBouJu/1U4cVELH+JQ
Re: The ghost of Cypherpunks
--
From: ken <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Do you really think that politics only exists where
> there is a state? I'd have thought the opposite is
> true. Most states actively prevent most people
> participating in politics.
The more authoritarian the state, the more in compells
people to participate in politics, making eveything they
do or think political, for example the endless meetings
in Cuba and Mao's china,
> Where there is no state everyone is a politician, all
> the time, and all public acts are overtly political.
So when I buy coffee, that is political?
Surely the non state area of our lives is the non
political area of our lives.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
OHqLH7EFCEVGI5CkHzpWzDH3Iyd7w5T1TSE3dyUB
4HvAcBSrD8JQfPtYDs3hHfuCbQWprTcJhov+r6b1+
Re: The ghost of Cypherpunks
--
> Did the Cypherpunks have their heyday and that's it?
That is it. This is the ghost of cypherpunks.
Cypherpunks always was a self contradiction - a
political group pushing a fundamentally non political
attack upon the state, and thus upon the very existence
of politics.
This made some sense when the state was attempting to
ban and regulate encryption. It no longer attempts to
do so, thus cypherpunks today has no real function.
Our former evil arch nemesis is now quietly doing
government do gooding to make sure that everyone has
strong cryptography. Now the cypherpunks project is
advanced by more boring stuff: standards, software, and
business. Excessive mention of the ideological
implications of certain standards and software would be
counterproductive.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
SmFa4oMi36RAKGxsYaqtmROD3IFtA0joUvzs+ROw
4XxJQayZH7Q+T8hHbWUkebTqtPmxEnIlz+j/Dt1kG
RE: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: [IP] Internet phone wiretapping ("Psst! The FBI is Having
--
From: Ulex Europae <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Okay, I've been in a hole in the ground for a few
> years. What happened to Tim May?
Gone very quiet. At the expiration party, he failed to
recommend gas chambers.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
52+QQakDucdEgAkVYs0b9Lq9sI84wmnFiKPwbEZK
45j1XEUboV0R/BnpbNqH/42HhEuzdBcP38z9OmshC
Re: Private Homes may be taken for public good
--
> Bush's favorite judges are radical activists when it
> comes to interference with most civil rights
For the most part, it was conservative judges, judes
hated by the democrats with insane extravagance, that
voted for against this decision.
Bush's favorite judge is probably Thomas, who voted
against this decision.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
OATUYUUD6X16QdQnFd2ZgGItmw0TrkkNoR5SYYAZ
4HZTgkPgkgTwPSGrDGUeYo6QjGZU5psCanKPMN479
Re: Lions and tigers and iraqi minutemen
--
James A. Donald:
> > While it doubtless would have been better to behead
> > the Saudi monarchy rather than the Iraqi
> > dictatorship, nonetheless American troops seem to be
> > finding an ample supply of Saudis in Iraq.
Major Variola (ret)
> In what imaginary universe?
In the universe where Saudi arabia is concerned about
the number of Saudis held in Iraq.
http://www.gulf-news.com/Articles/Region2.asp?ArticleID=127086
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
lHwkZ3mj6O+XGR8qR2CrktYKElaLqBN+o8xE7dZJ
4sW5xvskkwfx3HMCFhjQD3j0EuXuLI9X9TOx2bUH7
Re: Len Adleman (of R,S, and A):
--
On 21 May 2005 at 15:55, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
> Please explain what Bush's invasion of a soverign
> nation had to do with the Saudi 9/11 Theatre?
While it doubtless would have been better to behead the
Saudi monarchy rather than the Iraqi dictatorship,
nonetheless American troops seem to be finding an ample
supply of Saudis in Iraq.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
UB064U/DafELO1g1L+J1elpcp4Rm0O4oDPOO5uH+
4rzwuJwOGk4RYWsWPOFN78tEmJamA31vLTloe7Rnv
Re: WebMoney
-- On 22 Apr 2005 at 16:20, Bill Stewart wrote: > Last time I wanted to use an online gold system, I > used pecunix as the currency and goldage.net as the > payment handler. That was partly because of the fees > for the size of transactions I was doing (for small > transactions, the minimum fee is more important than > the percentage), but partly for convenience - one way > to pay Goldage in the US is to go to a bank where they > have an account and make a deposit - Wells Fargo is > one of their more widespread banks. A procedure that was, of course, anonymous. You probably made a deposit in cash. In the cypherpunk vision, internet transactions should be blinded, so that the adversary cannot do connection analysis. If Ann pays Bob, the adversary can detect this, and perhaps suspect that Ann actually is Bob. We do however have anonymous deposits and withdrawals from internet transaction services, and weakly nymous providers of accounts. Many foreign banks go through the motions of verifying foreign account holders true names, but not all them try all that hard. E-gold goes through the motions, and sporadically enforces its acceptable use policy, which requires you to submit true name information, but really does not try at all for the most part, unless the shit hits the fan. Pecunix does not require true name information - merely an email account at which you are capable of receiving mail - preferably PGP mail. WebMoney does not even require an email account. If you use their classic security system, their client just generates what I assume is a private key on your computer, and that is your identifier. Though these systems permit governments to do connection analysis, most governments are not terribly interested in doing connection analysis on foreigners, and governments do not work well with other governments. Not that I suggest that any of this is an adequate substitute for true Chaumian blinded transactions, but it is a substitute, and also foreshadows demand for such transactions, and a profitable business model based on such transactions. The real obstacle is that 99% of customers cannot understand WebMoney's security, or use Pecunix's PGP based interface. If you try to sell them Chaumian blinded transactions, the average mobster is going to be seriously boggled. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG /rjlkisXJqOtx4zr4jGWmDeW6blJQ6vawOmxFssX 4BiPlDhZsJ7G0P6TTWXEwYNbNs1ylu/oofbIhlUrv
Re: WebMoney
On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 01:20:46PM +0300, Marcel Popescu wrote: > > Second, has anyone seen http://www.wmtransfer.com/ ? Ok, it's > > Russian, so not a lot of trust in there... on the other hand, it > > DOES mean it's unlikely to bow to US pressure. On 20 Apr 2005 at 19:23, Pawe Krawczyk wrote: > Haven't used it personally yet but in Russia it seems to be equally > popular as PayPal in the West. This implies that people trust it. The > only problem is that when you would like to use it from the West you'd > need to find an exchange and most of them are located in Russia and > Ukraine. You can do transfers between webmoney and Pecunix, using http://exchange.net.ua, but it costs you about 3% each way. http://www.wmtransfer.com/ has you create a secret key, (at least in the classic version) which it signs. This enables you to do money transfers and send and receive secret messages concerning those money transfers. Pecunix has a PGP version, which relies on your PGP secret key. Paypal has notoriously terrible security, which they solve by rather arbitrarily confiscating money from accounts that they dim wittedly suspect of engaging in fraudulent transactions. Because webmoney takes security rather seriously, they do not accept credit card transactions, which is a major pain. Nor can you convert paypal to or from other internet moneys. The fact that webmoney takes security so seriously suggests to me that they are honest - but, of course, the fact that they are russian suggests .
Re: how email encryption should work
--
James A. Donald:
> > In my blog http://blog.jim.com/ I post "how email
> > encryption should work"
On 8 Apr 2005 at 22:17, Bill Stewart wrote:
> I see a couple of problems with your proposal. I'm not
> sure I like your external trusted mail-server
> assumptions
Trusting the mail server is merely the default. The
user can use a different password for the certificate
server, and if that password is strong enough to resist
offline attack, he does not have to trust the
certificate server - but all that is "advanced
cryptographic options", which regular people are not
expected to touch.
> Your plan is really designed for a small number of
> addresses per sender, as opposed to a quasi-infinite
> set of tagged addresses. It's becoming pretty common
> for anti-spam reasons to give different recipients
> different mail addresses like
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] (or
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]) or
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> so you can track and whitelist/blacklist people you
> communicate with,
This does not seem to me to be a problem. When one uses
a large number of addresses one does not want external
people to know, or be readily able to prove, that these
multiple addresses map to a single address - therefore
one wants separate keys for each address.
These multiple addresses are akin to inverse petnames.
People of categoy X know you as JoeX, people of
categoryY know you as JoeY, and people of the category
client know you as Joe's Consulting Services
Incorporated
In the proposed scheme, the default case is that JoeX,
JoeY, and Joe's Consulting services each get globally
unique public and private key, without Joe doing
anything or thinking about it. That seems correct
behavior to me.
> - Is (sender+recipient+timestamp+message) the right
> thing to sign? The Subject: line is in the mail
> headers, but it's probably something that should be
> part of the message. I'm not sure about some various
> X-headers.
Subject should of course be signed - and in encrypted
messages, subject and timestamp should be encrypted.
> And of course the From: line includes both the email
> address and the sender's name, and the sender's name
> may be different for different recipients (in some
> sense, it may be the recipient's petname for the
> sender.)
As in the petname prescription, petnames should be
translated to global names immediately after leaving the
user interface.
Zooko's triangle:
email addresses are global and securely unique
identifiers, but not necessarily memorable. In
the proposed system, the email address may also
identify a key, or several keys. In the default
case A key maps to one, and only one, email
address, but an email address may map to none,
one, or many keys. Most commonly one key.
Nicknames are global and memorable, but not
necessarily unique.
Petnames not global, but are memorable and
unique per user The user will commonly adopt
the nickname or an abbreviation of it as a
petname, but he does not have to. The client
software, however defaults to the first seen
nickname as petname, if there is no collision or
near collision.
Thus in the email address, James A. Donald
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" is the
globally unique identifier, "James A. Donald" is the
nickname, which the recipient might ignore, substituting
the petname "jim"
Assume the recipient has substituted "jim"
Then when the recipient reads mail from
[EMAIL PROTECTED], he should see "jim" on the from
line, even though what was sent and signed was "Hound of
the Baskervilles <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>" (Due to the fact
that I recently changed the nickname after the recipient
gave me a petname - alas a user assigned petname takes
precedence over a sender nicknam)
Then when the recipient replies, he should see "Jim" on
the "To" line, but this gets translated to Hound of the
Baskervilles <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> before the message is
signed, encrypted, and sent. (The nickname does not get
frozen in, but may change at any time, potentially
causing confusion. Still, if someone changes his
nickname, he cannot complain about confusion.)
> - Also, if you're attaching a key strictly to the
> email address, what happens to old signatures if you
> move email addresses?
Unavoidably, digital signatures are going to be more
transient than ink signatures. It is the nature of the
technology. Fighting it will only lead to complexity
and difficulty of use. If someone values a signature,
perhaps because it is a business name associated with a
good reputation,
Re: FEC requesting comments on Internet use
-- On 4 Apr 2005 at 12:47, Shawn Duffy wrote: > http://www.regulations.gov/freddocs/05-06521.htm > > Public comments due June 3rd. > > >From the Summary: > "The Federal Election Commission requests comments on > proposed changes to its rules that would include paid > advertisements on the Internet in the definition of > ``public communication.'' These changes to the > Commission's rules would implement the recent decision > of the U.S. District Court for the District of > Columbia in Shays v. Federal Election Commission, > which held that the current definition of ``public > communication'' impermissibly excludes all Internet > communications. Comment is also sought on the related > definition of ``generic campaign activity'' and on > proposed changes to the disclaimer regulations. > Additionally, comment is sought on proposed new > exceptions to the definitions of ``contribution'' and > ``expenditure'' for certain Internet activities and > communications that would qualify as individual > volunteer activity or that would qualify for the > ``press exemption.'' These proposals are intended to > ensure that political committees properly finance and > disclose their Internet communications, without > impeding individual citizens from using the Internet > to speak freely regarding candidates and elections. "Properly finance" means that speech will be defined as paid for, even if no actual money changes hands. The proposed rule brings what was formerly speech into the definition of expenditure, even if assigning a money value is arbitrary. There is no real distinction between individual speech and campaign expenditure so broadly defined. Any distinction between the campaign and individual citizens is merely some arbitary cutoff. Perhaps comments in "A" list blogs might be defined as campaign expenditure, and comments in other blogs might be defined as individual. The obvious rule is "If the campaign does not pay money for it, it is not a campaign expenditure", but this rule is declared to be a loophole, a loophole that must be corrected - and of course it is a loophole. But it is a loophole that cannot be fixed without massive violation of free speech. Fixing this "loophole" is what is meant by "properly finance". To fix this "loophole", speech must be deemed to be campaign speech, at least if it is sufficiently prominent, and if it is not in fact paid for directed and planned by the campaign, this will be an offense, a form of fraud, cheating the campaign laws. This rule (speech is money, and unpaid for, unsupervised electoral speech is fraud) already applies in the offline world - thus the NRA is forbidden to inform voters about the way a particular politician votes on guns - at least forbidden to do so shortly before election time, because that would supposedly be a campaign expenditure. To get around this rule, the NRA has purchased some radio stations, thus availing itself of the press exemption, which allows the press, but not ordinary mortals, to comment on political races. The question then, is how will this prohibition against political speech on specific politicians and campaigns be applied to the internet. "A" list blogs claim to be the press, so the argument is that "A" list blogs should be exempt from this rule because they are the press, "B" list blogs exempt because they are individuals, so no regulation of internet speech. Evidently some people reject this argument. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG m5dzJ3SI7awps9BM2r6oU3sTR7bm6M+PgfNxX2Ki 4oWzYp9hbWL2AKzCa8cowYZ4jXXJftNhUSH9LQHsL
Re: How email encryption should work
-- On 29 Mar 2005 at 11:54, Lars Eilebrecht wrote: > Are you saying that the keyserver creates the > public-private key pair for the user? That doesn't > sound like a good idea. Not what I said, though that is one possible way of implementing the proposal. Another possible way is that the client program hashes the password in one fashion, known to everyone, and in a different way, known to everyone, gives the second hash to the server, which then hashes that in a secret way, and the client program then constructs the secret key from both numbers. Of course, if the user clicks on the menacing "Advanced custom cryptographic key management" he can construct the key in some other fashion. > How do you prevent that a user creates a > key/certificate for an email address the user doesn't > own. Re-read: "That server then ... emails a certificate asserting that holder of that key can be reached at that email address." --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG xvP3RO30rRc2fw0ArT3XUSEsygxK3zrL1Wu7jC7N 4tJfMev2Cd5X96wjDddtEB7mMPVaXk1ImGBnvo3fC
How email encryption should work
--
In my blog http://blog.jim.com/ I post "how email
encryption should work"
I would appreciate some analysis of this proposal, which
I think summarizes a great deal of discussion that I
have read.
Here is how email encryption should work:
* The user should automagically get his key and
certificate when he sets up the email account,
without having to do anything extra. We should allow
him the option of doing extra stuff, but the default
should be do nothing, and the option to do something
should be labeled with something intimidating like
Advanced custom cryptographic key management so
that 99% of users never touch it.
* In the default case, the mail client, if there are
no keys present, logs in to a keyserver using a
protocol analogous to SPEKE, using by default the
same password as is used to download mail. That
server then sends the key for that password and
email address, and emails a certificate asserting
that holder of that key can be reached at that email
address. Each email address, not each user, has a
unique key, which changes only when and if the user
changes the password or email address. Unless the
user wants to deal with advanced custom options,
his from address must be the address that the
client downloads mail from as it normally is.
* The email client learns the correspondent's public
key by receiving signed email. It assigns petnames
on a per-key basis. A petname is also shorthand for
entering a destination address (Well it is shorthand
if the user modified it. The default petname is the
actual address optionally followed by a count.)
* The email client presents two checkboxes, sign and
encrypt, both of which default to whatever was last
used for this email address. If several addresses
are used, it defaults to the strongest that was used
for any one of them. If the destination address has
never been used before, then encrypt is checked if
the keys are known, greyed out if they are unknown.
Sign is checked by default.
* The signature is in the mail headers, not the
body, and signs the body, the time sent, the
sender's address, and the recipient's address. If
the email is encrypted, the signature can only be
checked by someone who possesses the decryption key.
* If user is completely oblivious to encryption and
completely ignores those aspects of the program, and
those he communicates with do likewise, he sends his
public key all over the place in the headers, signs
everything he sends, and encrypts any messages that
are a reply to someone using software that follows
the same protocol, and neither he nor those he
corresponds with notice anything different or have
to do anything extra other than that when he gets
unsigned messages, a warning comes up an
unobtrusive and easily ignored warning if he has
never received a signed message from that source, a
considerably stronger warning if he has previously
received signed mail from that source.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
VvdTZKUxpdfcDRAGwBSupIYVIUGAAE5orXRkJl8q
4y7qVNj7u/H3nJLgyAs5pGM2tDFOcyCyC9L+vbbpa
Re: Golden Triangle Drug Traffic Arbitrage?
-- On 23 Mar 2005 at 20:19, Anonymous wrote: > If the yuan is actually cheaper than it should be > because of being pegged to the dollar, there's a much > easier way to take advantage of the arbitrage > opportunity: simply buy goods in China and sell them > in America. And guess what, thousands of Chinese > export companies do just that, making money off the > economic downhill slide that China has erected > spanning the Pacific. This effectively forces Chinese > workers to be paid less than they are worth, > decreasing their savings and acting as an economic > stimulus for China as a whole. Your economics is entirely sound, but I disagree with you on one minor question of fact. I doubt the yuan is cheaper than it should be. Seems to me that the fundamental reason why chinese are working cheap and providing us with their excellent goods in exchange for our rather dubious and shaky dollars so abundantly printed by the Bush administration, is that the chinese banking system is even more dubious and shaky. Chinese prefer to stash their wealth in America, rather than in China. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG yC4wWPvE9H0XZCRKPMW6PqvlRX3vgMVfysKz8u6u 44OJ9qSkTtN7rlOcXnJVAQ7CsuzdGN9MlipEX1/yY
Re: Golden Triangle Drug Traffic Arbitrage?
-- On 23 Mar 2005 at 10:27, Tyler Durden wrote: > China pegs it's currency to US currency. With the > dropping dollar, this means that there's going to be a > larger and larger gap between 'reality' (as measured > in the true cost of goods in a free market) and the > pegged rate. > > On Cypherpunks do I need to explain the idea that this > difference will inevitably give rise to a big black > market to exploit that difference? There will be no black market as long as the chinese government is prepared to buy US dollars from all comers at the official rate. The black market can only happen if they start saying "well, you are just a regular person, not a proper registered business, so we will not buy your dollars, unless you give us a good explanation of how you came to have them." In my opinion the official chinese rates are pretty much in line with reality, are reasonable and realistic. The chinese government is prepared to buy and sell unlimited dollars at the official rate, because it thinks that dollars are reasonably cheap at the official rate, and they are reasonably cheap, because they can be used to buy stuff that chinese want, and stuff that the chinese government wants. And if the official rates are not reasonable and realistic, there will be no black market until the chinese government is simultaneously unwilling or unable to buy unlimited dollars at the official price, and also unwilling to change the official price. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG HsbCTO3R0hDvTi4O2HOi/0Y0UtIUZ/LWAkI3C0Wg 4aRr/HrQ9ZtcE0cqgSbp57xoZ1X3xpgldD4zNHi5M
Re: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)
--
On 9 Mar 2005 at 12:14, Eric Cordian wrote:
> Now, I think we can all agree that it would be lovely to have
> a distributed filesystem, with a global namespace, that
> anyone can put stuff in, and take stuff out of, which
> guarantees anonymity for both producers and consumers of
> content, swarms downloads, has an redundant distributed
> encrypted backing store that lasts forever, is easily and
> quickly searched, can be instantly set up by anyone who
> wishes to use it, never breaks, and starves users who
> unreasonably leech large amounts of resources without
> reciprocating.
Bittorrent, alone, starves users who leach without
reciprocating, but only in certain very limited ways.
As a result of that and swarming Bittorrent has far more
bandwidth available than any other file sharing network. You
can download big files faster. If you want to download big
files, use Bittorrent, or hell will freeze over before your
files complete. But it does not have more files available,
indeed it has fewer, because there is no reward to users for
making a wide range of files available.
The enormous success of bittorrent, and its limitations, should
tell us that the principle of rewarding uploaders and storers,
and starving leachers, is pretty much central to the success of
a protocol and its software.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
MHH97gJAm7xaefDsVkckpP3M1T3kFYcHHE4T6q6e
4sy0PVrzWWflVPEeAHnZN9+Cf4YNPT7P4feuRNy00
Re: I'll show you mine if you show me, er, mine
-- > > However, techniques that establish that the parties share a > > weak secret without leaking that secret have been around > > for years -- Bellovin and Merritt's DH-EKE, David Jablon's > > SPEKE. And they don't require either party to send the > > password itself at the end. > They are heavily patent laden, although untested last time I > looked. This has been discouraging to implementers. There seem to be a shitload of protocols, in addition to SPEKE and DH-EKE A password protocol should have the following properties: 1. It should identify both parties to each other, that is to say, be secure against replay and man in the middle attacks, in particular, strong against phishing.. It should be secure against replay and dictionary attacks by an evesdropper or man-in-the-middle. Such an attacker should be able to no better than someone who just tries repeatedly to log on to the server with a guessed password 2. It should be as strong as practical against offline attacks by the server itself. The server operators, or someone who has stolen information from them, should not know the users password, and dictionary attacks should be sufficiently expensive that a strong password (not your ordinary password) is secure. Can anyone suggest a well reviewed, unpatented, protocol that has the desired properties? --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG A8bCmCXDTAX2Syg907T7uRpajs77l9CqLEii+ezP 42zQDcP3xJXtcLPSgCVa55kew+ALkrQ/I50PFm9lC
SpookAir, redux: No Secrets -- Eyes on the CIA
-- On 27 Feb 2005 at 18:53, R.A. Hettinga wrote: > March 7 issue - Aviation obsessives with cameras and Internet > connections have become a threat to cover stories established > by the CIA to mask its undercover operations and personnel > overseas. U.S. intel sources complain that "plane > spotters"-hobbyists who photograph airplanes landing or > departing local airports and post the pix on the > Internet-made it possible for CIA critics recently to > assemble details of a clandestine transport system the agency > set up to secretly move cargo and people-including terrorist > suspects-around the world. Brinworld: They may be watching us, but we are also watching them. The large number of surveillance cameras popping up in American cities has turned out to be no threat to liberty. Most of them are privately owned, and their private owners have no inclination to review their records, unless a real crime has been committed, and no inclination to hand over to authorities records that would primarily reveal their own activities. In recent incidents where private surviellance camera records were given to authorities, the authorities received only selected excerpts, only what the owner of the records chose to reveal. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG PS5fDA87MKS6uCbiF0gJ/R+39ekRuwLazrAsTyAa 4MxSlekoFzNrLXER1RoAItoikUPxKn3udKQokRxkB
Re: I'll show you mine if you show me, er, mine
-- On 24 Feb 2005 at 2:29, Peter Gutmann wrote: > Isn't this a Crypto 101 mutual authentication mechanism (or > at least a somewhat broken reinvention of such)? If the > exchange to prove knowledge of the PW has already been > performed, why does A need to send the PW to B in the last > step? You either use timestamps to prove freshness or add an > extra message to exchange a nonce and then there's no need to > send the PW. Also in the above B is acting as an oracle for > password-guessing attacks, so you don't send back the > decrypted text but a recognisable-by-A encrypted response, or > garbage if you can't decrypt it, taking care to take the same > time whether you get a valid or invalid message to avoid > timing attacks. Blah blah Kerberos blah blah done twenty > years ago blah blah a'om bomb blah blah. > > (Either this is a really bad idea or the details have been > mangled by the Register). It is a badly bungled implementation of a really old idea. An idea, which however, was never implemented on a large scale, resulting in the mass use of phishing attacks. Mutual authentication and password management should have been designed into SSH/PKI from the beginning, but instead they designed it to rely wholly on everyone registering themselves with a centralized authority, which of course failed. SSH/PKI is dead in the water, and causing a major crisis on internet transactions. Needs fixing - needs to be fixed by implementing cryptographic procedures that are so old that they are in danger of being forgetten. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Dn3N69hcbr+mL/HUTw8OhGtKmD9rHYOMN4NTBkIY 47AOCXrb7e35xm5QBsHbFVr/jfm+XwTUvzdiytKpG
Re: What is a cypherpunk?
--
On 16 Feb 2005 at 0:30, Justin wrote:
> Judging from social dynamics and civil advancement in the
> animal kingdom, monarchies developed first and property
> rights were an afterthought.
Recently existent neolithic agricultural peoples, for example
the New Guineans, seldom had kings, and frequently had no form
of government at all other than that some people were
considerably wealthier and more influential than others, but
they always had private property.
This corresponds to the cattle herding people we read depicted
in the earliest books of the old testament. They had private
property, wage labor, and all that from the beginning, but they
do not develop kings until the book of Samuel, long after they
had settled down and developed vineyards and other forms of
sedentary agriculture: Judges 17:6 "In those days there was no
king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes"
Thus both our recent observation of primitive peoples, and our
written historical record, shows that private property rights
long preceded government.
Our observations of governments being formed show that
governments are formed primarily for the purpose of attacking
private property rights. You want to steal something like
land or women, you need a really big gang.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
of/pZSLkKATIjG0fWzPvEZnxIsBE/Q0Se80Gx178
4LGYWiIfc2+Us4l38hwPX8mK0CR7hBpVkJ952v8/D
Re: What is a cypherpunk?
-- James A. Donald > > > As governments were created to smash property rights, > > > they are always everywhere necessarily the enemy of those > > > with property, and the greatest enemy of those with the > > > most property. Steve Thompson > > Uh-huh. Perhaps you are using the term 'government' in a > > way that is not common to most writers of modern American > > English? Justin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > I think it's fair to say that governments initially formed to > protect property rights Where we have historical record, this is not the case. Romulus was made King in order that the Romans could abduct and rape women. William the bastard became William the conqueror by stealing land and enserfing people. After George Washington defeated the British, his next operation was to crush the Whisky rebellion. You could say that he defeated the British in order to protect property rights, but his next military operation was to violate property rights, not uphold them. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG h5r7X0d4z7lq2vVpAOdecOCy2txrOnv9O/ymDY+3 4VE2saGBeSH+48fFJ9nuHVOypb45jH6pBBteu3f+Z
Re: SHA1 broken?
--
> There is however a huge problem replace SHA-1 by something
> else from now to tomorrow: Other algorithms are not as well
> anaylyzed and compared against SHA-1 as for example AES to
> DES are; so there is no immediate successor of SHA-1 of whom
> we can be sure to withstand the possible new techniques.
> Second, SHA-1 is tightly integrated in many protocols without
> a fallback algorithms (OpenPGP: fingerprints, MDC, default
> signature algorithm and more).
They reduced the break time of SHA1 from 2^80 to 2^69.
Presumably they will succeed in reducing the break time of
SHA256 from 2^128 to a mere 2^109 or so.
So SHA256 should be OK.
2^69 is damn near unbreakable. 2^80 is really unbreakable.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
IQqit8pqSokARYxy1xVLrTaVRSKMAGvz2MXbQqXi
4DAQZgw0sbP3OcD3kgO+x7f+VfsPD4E8EBsB96d/D
Re: What is a cypherpunk?
-- James A. Donald wrote: > > The state was created to attack private property rights - > > to steal stuff. Some rich people are beneficiaries, but > > from the beginning, always at the expense of other rich > > people. On 14 Feb 2005 at 13:18, ken wrote: > More commonly states defend the rich against the poor. They > are what underpins property rights, in the sense of "great > property" Observe that rich people around the world are hiding their money in America, despite the fact that progressive taxes, speculative lawsuits and money laundering laws show the American government is no friend of the rich. Still less is any other government a friend of the rich, or even the moderately well off, any more than a wolf is the friend of the deer. As governments were created to smash property rights, they are always everywhere necessarily the enemy of those with property, and the greatest enemy of those with the most property. > - until the industrial revolution that was mostly rights to > land other people farm or live on. Every society we know > about has had laws and customs defending personal property > (more or less successfully) but it takes political/military > power to defend the right to exact rent from a large estate, > and state power to defend that right for thousands or > millions of landowners. For thousands indeed - but not for millions - which is why only massive state confiscation of property can create a society where landowners number in the mere thousands. The old west, and australian squatters, show that fairly large estates, texan size, can exist even in the face of active hostility from a state that refuses to recognize those property rights, and actively seeks to destroy them. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG NSa2rHCplLHx15v3Gnuif4Ikp13vGHgGAD4FsQ/L 4sfxn6VBdoXUsN8RPTiWcftpni6ER6qYlKqWLq0Ys
Re: What is a cypherpunk?
-- James A. Donald wrote: > > If, however, you decline to pay taxes, men with guns will > > attack you. > > > > That is the difference between private power and government > > power. ken wrote: > But in most places at most times the state is run at least > partly by and for the rich and the owners of property and > supports and privileges their continuing private power. The state was created to attack private property rights - to steal stuff. Some rich people are beneficiaries, but from the beginning, always at the expense of other rich people. > And there are circumstances where private individuals send > men with guns to attack you if you cross them. Compare mafia "extortion" with government "taxation". The mafia charges are small in proportion as their power is small. The Gangsta disciples charged drug dealers thirty dollars a month for protection, and, unlike the state, actually provided protection. The mafia cannot afford to seriously piss off its customers, because there is no large difference between customer firepower and mafia firepower. The government, on the other hand, can afford to seriously piss of its subjects. The federal government established its monopoly of force by burning Atlanta and Shenendoah. Al Capone did the Saint Valentine's day massacre. Big difference. > Quite a lot of them, from the feudal barons, to drug-dealers > in modern cities, to just about anywhere out of easy reach of > the state's police. Again, compare the burning of Shenendoah with the Saint Valentine's day massacre. There is just no comparison. Governmental crimes are stupendously larger, and much more difficult to defend against. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG sE92+Z9bMSzulF42TGzG/hIjoDv+qod3IBzFehdT 4O/i5gQElpUPn6EYOMIETP8gkc9EP5DSN2QYuq83i
Re: What is a cypherpunk?
-- James A. Donald: > > Corporate lawyers did not descend on Linux until there were > > enough wealthy linux users to see them in court, and send > > in their own high priced lawyers to give them the drubbing > > they deserved. Eugen Leitl > You're misinterpreting the events. Industry has so far been > fighting with propagada only. Outside of FOSS IP wars are the > rule. What has happened so far is that "corporate lawyers" have lost, and linux has won - that is to say, corporations using linux have successfully defended their right to do so. Compare with what happens to tax evaders. The state is your enemy. The corporation is your friend. It was corporations that defended linux in court, and created substantial parts of linux - for example a lot of linux was written by IBM employees on IBM salary - presumably as an anti microsoft measure. Corporations deal with competition by creating stuff, governments deal with competition by shooting it. The corporation is free and voluntary association. The alternative is state imposed association. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG mCPvNIMCElEgaF3RT8krDyySbf6TRivdp5TOTL3/ 45fmEJA1E7SZ6GhiXjBjgr5i6tT7dfRXf3teVziId
Re: What is a cypherpunk?
-- James A. Donald wrote: > > There is nothing stopping you from writing your own > > operating system, so Linus did. Eugen Leitl wrote > Yes. Corporate lawyers descending upon your ass, because you > -- allegedly -- are in violation of some IP somewhere. See > you in court. Corporate lawyers did not descend on Linux until there were enough wealthy linux users to see them in court, and send in their own high priced lawyers to give them the drubbing they deserved. > > If, however, you decline to pay taxes, men with guns will > > attack you. > If you ignore a kkkorporate cease & desist, men with guns > will get you, too. You live in a world of your own. In civil court, the guy with no assets has a huge advantage over the guy with huge assets -because the guy with huge assets *cannot* send men with guns to beat him up and put him in jail - he can only seize the (nonexistent) assets of the guy with no assets. So what we instead see is frivolous and fraudulent lawsuits by people with no assets against big corporations, for example the silicone scam. It is in criminal court where the guy with no assets goes unjustly to jail, and that is the doing of the state, not the corporation. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG LHaZt4XXRKhPMhtKPS5CggL+KGd7QTAqTuygm1P1 45bORHg+DoDEtRSoju+baDDEgsaWOIrgPHd/pMAuj
Re: What is a cypherpunk?
--
On 6 Feb 2005 at 19:18, D. Popkin wrote:
> Yes, but Big Brother governments are not the only way such
> "wisdom" gets imposed. Bill Gates came close to imposing it
> upon all of us, and if it hadn't been for Richard Stallman
> and Linus Torvalds, we might all be suffering under that yoke
> today.
There is nothing stopping you from writing your own operating
system, so Linus did.
If, however, you decline to pay taxes, men with guns will
attack you.
That is the difference between private power and government
power.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
IQOesrdAqVhLdsZtGiFJzVPm4eKemvE0rvMznIRG
4e37sO5HcxzRajhvHvVBldBgvI0YdW75A0FNQwWi9
Re: Dell to Add Security Chip to PCs
-- On 3 Feb 2005 at 22:25, Anonymous wrote: > Now, my personal perspective on this is that this is no real > threat. It allows people who choose to use the capability to > issue reasonably credible and convincing statements about > their software configuration. Basically it allows people to > tell the truth about their software in a convincing way. > Anyone who is threatened by the ability of other people to > tell the truth should take a hard look at his own ethical > standards. Honesty is no threat to the world! > > The only people endangered by this capability are those who > want to be able to lie. They want to agree to contracts and > user agreements that, for example, require them to observe > DRM restrictions and copyright laws, but then they want the > power to go back on their word, to dishonor their commitment, > and to lie about their promises. An honest man is not > affected by Trusted Computing; it would not change his > behavior in any way, because he would be as bound by his word > as by the TC software restrictions. The ability to convincingly tell the truth is a very handy one between people who are roughly equal. It is a potentially disastrous one if one party can do violence with impunity to the one with the ability to convincingly tell the truth. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 6B7i0tiB4vUHqQnAP6nXT2z+B+zLB8624+K6+ENU 47fFHg6cY0KInzxMe/l+L2c7LqmPZyrwOSZepYIR3
RE: Ronald McDonald's SS
-- James A. Donald: > > Note that the main enemy it is aimed against is the CIA, > > and it's existence was successfully kept secret from the > > CIA for this time. (For had the CIA detected it, they > > would have instantly leaked the information, the same way > > they have leaked so much other stuff.) On 24 Jan 2005 at 19:43, Steve Thompson wrote: > I rather doubt that anyone outside of the CIA could really > say what they would or would not do in such a situation. They would do what they always done in recent decades - suck up to the Democrat party. (Which is a major improvement on the state department which sucks up to America's enemies.) --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG xXYVRz8r4ISHikxse8xuVwxMzucHB3T/3oeeirPa 4RMOddYiQx7wKxSQrA36cczivHFYNiqG4Zrxha+SM
RE: Ronald McDonald's SS
-- On 24 Jan 2005 at 10:34, Tyler Durden wrote: > "Military and civilian participants said in interviews that > the new unit has been operating in secret for two years -- in > Iraq (news - web sites)," > > Well hell, it's doing such a good job already it should > definitely be expanded! Note that the main enemy it is aimed against is the CIA, and it's existence was successfully kept secret from the CIA for this time. (For had the CIA detected it, they would have instantly leaked the information, the same way they have leaked so much other stuff.) --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG KsFrtFSMHXcDohroqAdPG4sz0/zlWutoJnTTVx33 4RrZF0Pj1rWQ7L2OUmPyd0vZu4myhO+ICGi7PHb+j
Re: Spotting Trouble Identifying Faltering and Failing States (1997)
-- James A. Donald wrote: > > Oh wow, let us expand our current highly popular and > > successful Iraqi operation to embrace a quarter of the > > world. Wouldn't it be nice? No, come to think of it, it > > would not be nice. "J.A. Terranson" > Since Mein Fuhrer Bush is preparing to escalate to Iran in a > few months, you'd better get used to it. After the unpleasant experience of nation bulding in Iraq, I hope that for the next round, he will stick to nation destruction. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG wgw43gq8A2g53kCdBjoluX54Qwjxi4g0gYergxL2 4ZpJWmU7pyS7BAOC50oFHVaTl4jAtT7gJJlwH4E14
Re: Feral Cities
-- James A. Donald: > > Terrorists, as we discovered in Afghanistan, tend to piss > > people off. They need a government that is strong enough to > > intimidate the locals to refrain from killing them. "Major Variola (ret)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Since when did a few remote Al Q boot camps piss people off? Al Quaeda's job in Afghanistan was to perform the massacres that the Taliban could not trust Afghan troops to do. As reward, they got to do lots of rape. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG XS+RbeI9x56+eGEJSL0XpRb/V4lhlvJ+9hIFdozX 4U+LELZqarYEsN76W5PxOcuYS8LCrTCW7z5upagAP
Re: Spotting Trouble Identifying Faltering and Failing States (1997)
-- > For these reasons it seems to us that military planners and > decision makers should be interested in considering new > approaches toward aiding failing and faltering states. 4 > > [...]The cure they propose is "conservatorship," under which > the United Nations would directly supervise or actually take > over the government of a failed state until it became fully > capable of administering its own affairs. 7 U.S. military and > political leaders should immediately understand, these > authors warn, that such a conservatorship would inevitably > involve American military participation in some form or > another. Oh wow, let us expand our current highly popular and successful Iraqi operation to embrace a quarter of the world. Wouldn't it be nice? No, come to think of it, it would not be nice. The problem is not failed states. The problem is states like North Korea, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, which are not failing, but damn well should. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG KZbrHZ/MYP584OnYd7NsjZjmUpn8Srn0ydIoe269 4ATqczLXXya6Ei6jVdqfx7nHh1/Fdp6s6+VCLrdwO
Re: Feral Cities
--
> Feral cities would exert an almost magnetic influence on
> terrorist organizations. Such megalopolises will provide
> exceptionally safe havens for armed resistance groups,
> especially those having cultural affinity with at least one
> sizable segment of the city's population.
Yet Mogadishu did *not* provide an exceptionally safe haven for
terrorists
On the contrary, terrorists hang out where there are strong
governments to protect them, extremely strong governments,
govenments that attempt to exercise totalitarian control over
every aspect of every person's life, speech, and thought. They
hung out in Taliban Afghanistan, and today they hang out in
Syria.
Terrorists, as we discovered in Afghanistan, tend to piss
people off. They need a government that is strong enough to
intimidate the locals to refrain from killing them.
This hand wringing about failed states is nonsense. We would
be a lot better off if more regimes failed - starting with
Saudi Arabia, which is at present walking both sides of the
road on terror, and speaking out of both sides of its mouth.
We should send arms to those that hate the current Saudi regime
- and worry which of those who received our arms are good guys
and which are bad guys after the regime falls.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
lYYew1mXLqlqClNWre3iWNTQSdUjC3dM+wojwWKP
4ZzkUnYtfu/tX/c5VsLePUrbbJ15Ww5uBlRvLj+Ut
Re: Talking Back to Power: China's 'Haves' Stir the 'Have Nots' to Violence
The title of this post is misleading: The protest is anti government, and pro property rights. For example: > [...] "People can see how corrupt the government is while they > barely have enough to eat," said Mr. Yu, reflecting on the > uprising that made him an instant proletarian hero If he was a "proletarian" hero, he would say "the capitalists". Instead he said "the government". > [...] > > Last month, as many as 100,000 farmers in Sichuan Province, > frustrated by months of fruitless appeals against a dam > project that claimed their land, took matters into their own > hands. [...] Gee. They took the defense of their own property rights into their own hands. > "I work like this so that my daughter and son can dress > better than I do, so don't look down on me," They are rioting for economic mobility, not for a classless society, but for a society where classes are not hereditary. > "I heard him say those exact words," said Wen Jiabao, > another porter who says he witnessed the confrontation. "It > proves that it's better to be rich than poor, but that being > an official is even better than being rich." The bad guys are not the rich, but those who obtain wealth through poliical power. > Cai Shizhong, a taxi driver, was angered when the > authorities created a company to control taxi licenses, > which he says cost him thousands of dollars but brought no > benefits. The bad deeds of the bad guys are economic regulation > Peng Daosheng's home was flooded by the rising reservoir of > the Three Gorges Dam. He was supposed to receive $4,000 in > compensation as well as a new home. But his new apartment is > smaller and less well located, and the cash never arrived. The bad deeds of the bad guys are violation of property rights without fair compensation. > Li Jian, 22, took part in the plunder. A young peasant, he > had found a city job as a short-order cook. But he longed to > study computers, said his father, Li Wanfa. The family > bought an old computer keyboard so the young man could learn > typing. > > "He wanted to go to high school but the school said his > cultural level was not high enough," Mr. Li said. "They said > a country boy like him should be a cook." Again, the call for social mobility, equality of opportunity, not equality. > They did not attack any of the restaurants or department > stores along the government square, focusing their wrath on > symbols of official power. A riot against the state, not against the rich.
Re: Finally, the Killer PKI Application
-- > <http://sys-con.com/story/print.cfm?storyid=47592> > > (SYS-CON)(Printview) > > Finally, the Killer PKI Application Web Services as an > application - and a challenge December 22, 2004 Summary > Enterprise PKI has a bad name. Complex, costly, difficult to > deploy and maintain - all these criticisms have dogged this > technology since it first appeared. Because PKI sucks. > To the dismay of so many CIOs, few applications have stepped > up to make effective use of PKI. Because PKI sucks. > A Role for PKI WSS goes to great lengths to remain flexible > and not to specify a particular encryption/signing > technology. Or in other words, due to the fact that PKI sucks, they have left the door open for a replacement. > now the investment may finally be realized. I don't think so. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG wBk2DrWHeXk89xcxEqBeSgid7cCLVSNvu1z47YJW 4VzhTnreELC1p4yrs3eDjP2/svE8kzr6HxxP9ToWm
Re: Flaw with lava lamp entropy source
-- On 17 Dec 2004 at 22:51, Major Variola (ret) wrote: > I've been running a 1970s-era lava lamp for some time, and > found that it can enter a stable attractor where you get a > non-circulating blob o' wax at the bottom. While Walker et > al.'s (?) LL video entropy source is cute/clever, the general > lesson we can take from this is to be careful that physical > sources do not fail. These days the video entropy source is not a lava lamp, but a lens cap - in the dark, the ccds generate significant thermal noise, which (unlike chaotic noise) cannot fail, unless someone immerses the camera in liquid helium. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG YIh62RYRs2hLkj/bbMuhph73iWN9Kmjo6IJ27mBf 4RyyRBC0ayoxtSug4pB9k+d7sjGlnt3gsa6yVYFy5
Re: Mixmaster is dead, long live wardriving
--
On 11 Dec 2004 at 8:29, J.A. Terranson wrote:
> Looking out of my fifth floor window I can connect to ~20
> 802.x nets *without* directional antennas or high powered
> cards. With extra gear, I can hit almost 50, and in both
> cases, roughly a third are completely open, another third are
> trivially "protected", and the remaining third have done the
> best they can under the circumstances
This may explain the lack of wardriving. Why bother to drive?
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
GZxQHl5Ys94JIEGFGqHzFIw0CwTw+cJrG2kcpVuC
4om0VpAEKeFBIkSSAJXTDq0ocurOXkmRwScqZa3fV
Re: Mixmaster is dead, long live wardriving
--
On 10 Dec 2004 at 21:47, Joseph Ashwood wrote:
> Wardriving is also basically dead. Sure there are a handful
> of people that do it, but the number is so small as to be
> irrelevant.
I regularly use the internet through other people's unprotected
wireless networks, simply for convenience while travelling, not
for any stego or anonymity purpose. So do lots of other
people. I only target places convenient to tourists and likely
to be rich in unprotected networks. Maybe your network is
located someplace where it is not worth the trouble to find it.
Sometimes I go down the street and steal some bandwidth just
because I find it a change to work in the open air.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
hOnTAnMFC4mbjwvyxYfLSmvpUXtw2xutPOvdyU0k
4Jx3r8szirxwjD/2L68Q0/BDk3jSlebytG9a9+2IQ
RE: Blinky Rides Again: RCMP suspect al-Qaida messages
--
On 9 Dec 2004 at 16:15, J.A. Terranson wrote:
> (3) The other camp believes that stego is a lab-only toy,
> unsuitable for much of anything besides scaring the shit out
> of the people in the Satan camp.
I have used stego for practical purposes. The great advantage
of stego is that it conceals your threat model.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
aV25L9tGoz00uU3bzcY+rbFDV5nX9BCkK67CRwcd
4mBXnVakFBPiPRCdugeDolUdtnd8iueWgYFwR3Pch
Re: punkly current events
--
On 9 Dec 2004 at 19:47, Joseph Ashwood wrote:
> In short, except for those few people who have some use for
> MixMaster, MixMaster was stillborn.
As one of those few people who have had some use for Mixmaster,
it does not seem stillborn to me.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
Ro+kP9M7vm+5D5reA+LsRnc0ZS0gmtCx5gMXfF1C
4b44ZbduosEwPf20ABp+i55nWmvT0qNthPt1OryTC
Re: punkly current events
-- James A. Donald: > > The reason that taliban caught in Afghanistan, and people > > with the wrong accent caught in Afghanistan, tend to wind > > up in Guantanamo Bay is not because Afghan warlords are > > taking orders from US overlords, it is because Afghan > > warlords are fighting a holy war against the same people > > who are our enemies. Bill Stewart: > But the Taliban were the US warlords' *friends* Learn some history. The current holy war was going at a slow burn even during the war against the Soviet Union. Once the Soviet Union fell back, any pretense of alliance was dropped, and the flames were in plain sight. These terrorists have been bugging various muslims they deem insufficiently muslim long before they were bugging the west. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG wUajaZLtoiBjJKFNy8BqbXfYOsgcNOgbhUPRDpeN 4bqrDBnbVHsw8K/4rUF8UkC0k60jpoqzZoKNYpz03
Re: punkly current events
--
On 10 Dec 2004 at 6:53, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
> Name a place which is not subject to US juridiction? Ok,
> Iran, N Kr, until we pull a regime change (tm) on them. Yeah,
> they have a lot of 'net bandwidth, right.
If Afghanistan was subject to US jurisdiction, it would not
have a bumper opium crop. If Saudi Arabia was subject to US
jurisdiction, they would not be funding terrorism. If Israel
was subject to US jurisdiction, they would be less cavalier
about murdering American trouble makers.
The reason that taliban caught in Afghanistan, and people with
the wrong accent caught in Afghanistan, tend to wind up in
Guantanamo Bay is not because Afghan warlords are taking orders
from US overlords, it is because Afghan warlords are fighting a
holy war against the same people who are our enemies.
Similarly Sistani is busily subverting the US favored parties
in Iraq, at the same time he is busily subverting US enemies in
Iran. He has his own agenda, which on some matters agrees
with the US agenda, and others contradicts the US agenda.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
2c9x3EgsLT44LpYQQUlGud/yFuYB783XVxKtOPRY
4FmUuq0u9cIG0iHSOk5xjllcON90ZXsAI+IcJG7X8
Re: geographically removed?
-- Major Variola: > > > Internal resistance mediated by cypherpunkly tech can > > > always be defeated by cranking up the police state a > > > notch. > > > > > > This is eg why e-cash systems have anonymity problems. James A. Donald: > > The problem is that any genuinely irrevocable payment > > system gets swarmed by conmen and fraudsters. We have a > > long way to go before police states are the problem. Steve Furlong > Heh. When the stasi come a-callin' tell them they'll have to > wait because you've got bigger problems. Wonder how well that > would work? The stasi are not a callin yet on ecash, and have not been particularly effective against people publishing bittorrents. > I see that an irrevocable payment system, used by itself, is > ripe for fraud, more so if it's anonymous. But why wouldn't a > mature system make use of trusted intermediaries? People issuing e-cash systems want to be irrevocable and anonymous, in part because the market niche for revocable payments is occupied by paypal and credit card companies, but they are running into trouble from fraudsters. They also have trouble from states, but as yet the trouble from states is merely the usual mindless bureaucratic regulatory harassment that disrupts all businesses, not any specific hostility to difficult-to-trace extranational payments. > The vendors register with the intermedi- ary *, who takes > some pains to verify their identity, trustworthiness, and so > on, and to keep the vendors' identities a secret, if > appropriate. The sellers pay the intermediary, who takes a > piece of the action to act basically as an insurer of the > vendor's good faith. If there's a problem with the service or > merchandise and the vendor won't make good, the intermediary > is responsible for making the buyer whole. Is there some > reason this wouldn't work? If not, why hasn't anyone tried it > yet? Not enough cash flow to make it worth their while? Lots of people have tried it, with varying degrees of success. Not much demand for it yet. A big problem is that whenever any such a website achieves some degree of acceptance, a storm of fake websites appear imitating its name, its look and feel, with urls that looks very similar. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Y34+Yhj/+imvS+mJMNI1gisrEu1m1KVnVZ1XWcQC 4IiGQ9ui1sYZ89OBlTxmM6HA8I+qJa2Q8CwcRJu3c
Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report
-- James A. Donald: > > Permanent holy war in Iraq would keep them busy and out of > > mischief WITHOUT permanent large involvement from American > > military. Steve Thompson > True, but there's a question of the waste of resources and > man-years that would come from such a circumstance. All the oil money has been wasted, most of the humans in the middle east have suffered poverty, ignorance, lack of freedom and the unproductive absence of useful labor. All my life, people have been proposing to solve this problem. Nearly every American president since 1950 announced some big and expensive initiative that would supposedly solve this problem, or make some substantial progress towards a solution. What is your solution? > And then there's the ethical[1] side of the coin: do the > (largely financial benefits) that might come from a civil war > in Iraq really justify the consequent standard-of-living for > the residents of Iraq? And your remedy for improving the standard of living in the arab world is? James A. Donald: > > Plus, of course, they would be pumping oil like mad in > > order to fund it. Steve Thompson > Aren't we all about to run out of oil soon anyways? Forty years or so, according to estimates by the more sane and conventional authorities. James A. Donald: > > the people who organize large scale terror can be > > identified, particularly by locals and coreligionists, > > which is why they have been dying in large numbers in > > Afghanistan. Steve Thompson > Um, what planet are you on? The planet where the Afghans held an election, in which nearly everybody voted, some of them several times, and the Taliban were unable to carry out any of the threats they made against the voters, which indicates that the Afghans have been pretty efficient in killing Taliban. > The people who, as you say, organize large scale terror tend > to be protected by virtue of large bureaucratic firewalls, > legislated secrecy, misdirection (smoke and mirrors), and > even taboos. The average Afghan warlord is untroubled by any of this crap. He sees someone who looks suspicious, says "Hey, you don't look like you are from around here. What are you doing?" If he does not like the answers, he brings out his skinning knife, and asks a few more questions. If the answers make him even more unhappy, he hands his skinning knife to the womenfolk, and tells them to take their time. > But perhaps you are not referring to Western terrorists, but > are expecting your reader to assume that terrorists always > wear turbans, and who generally will live and operate in the > Middle-Eastern theatre. Perhaps you have forgotten about the > people who planned and executed the operations that helped > South-American tyrants form up and train their death- and > terror-squads? The parties that sponsored death squads of Latin America, when victorious, held free and fair elections, which they won, and those they had been fighting lost. The death squads were an response to Soviet sponsored attempts to subjugate, enslave and terrorize Latin America, and when the Soviet Union passed, so did the death squads. It seems most unlikely that Al Quaeda, the Taliban, and the rest, if victorious would hold free and fair elections, or be capable of winning them. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG ZM2pY5cDUC+zxrjD6RPpjIIAXWXup9Ea+odfnDAf 4eH4bUjZbBj3uFRzBBaJlvBPdeLJxSaUyk6w48C2Z
Re: Patriot Insurance
-- On 25 Nov 2004 at 21:42, Tyler Durden wrote: > Well, I guess I agree. However, there is some issues of > Cypherpunkly importance here, particularly concerning > nation-states fighting other nation-states. Though I can't > consider myself a true-believing anarchist, my own personal > reason for continuing to post on the subject was to > illustrate that, as long as Group-of-Bandits X continues to > utilize our tax dollars to fuck over geographically removed > Group of Bandits Y (and their citizenry), then some form of > local resistance a la Blacknet (and arguably more drastic > measures) might be called for, irregardless of how much > Group-of-Bandits X (and their hypnotized citzenry) believe > they're marching on God's orders. I would like to clarify my own position, which is in some important ways different from your own: I am not in favor of myself, or any one else in America, being sacrificed for the greater good of Iraqi democracy, and since Iraqi democracy is likely to consist of 51% voting to bugger the other 49%, I can understand the position of those Iraqis who are fighting to resist the imposition of democracy. But if they fight by taking hostages and mutilating them on television, then by all means let us have them sodomized. I don't want Americans sent to fight by their stupid government, but if they are sent to fight, I am in favor of them winning and the guys they are fighting dying, and if it means destroying the village to save it, serves the goat fuckers right. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG QILwOoAZoZRoKhP5l5fyQXQ021Gs0UkjXIXPRZ3A 4zkLA6Uyu1rxD5xgNBbsjEbA+HajLJfiHBPRZEEK3
Re: geographically removed?
--
On 27 Nov 2004 at 6:43, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
> Internal resistance mediated by cypherpunkly tech can always
> be defeated by cranking up the police state a notch.
You assume the police state is competent, technically skilled,
determined, disciplined, and united. Observed police states
are incompetent, indecisive, and quarrelsome.
> This is eg why e-cash systems have anonymity problems.
The problem is that any genuinely irrevocable payment system
gets swarmed by conmen and fraudsters. We have a long way to
go before police states are the problem.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
j/Q7ovPCBpocpAweY6EuWipd1SYuu09GuF0FDGs4
4F1phVigtAvUzPhC0QjPDP/3SKkY4KUtZc5hRUL9a
Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report
--
On 25 Nov 2004 at 10:10, Tyler Durden wrote:
> More to the point is that a long term period of chaos and
> turbulence causes the locals to be willing to open the door
> to the like of the Taliban,
Those who used to mindlessly chant commie propaganda now
mindlessly chant islamist propaganda.
Just as it was supposedly capitalist oppression and injustice
that makes the oppressed masses supposedly warmly embrace their
communist liberators, in the same way we infidels supposedly
endlessly fight among ourselves. Supposedly that part of the
world not under Islamic overlords is Dar Al-Harb (Abode of
War), thus leading us to gladly submit to the peace provided
by becoming second class citizens under islamic overlords. Dar
Al-Islam (Abode of Islam)
The violence of which you speak was not warlords fighting
warlords, but the Taliban and its predecessor attacking men
women and children, for example the shelling of Kabul.
The relief that people expected to obtain by submitting to
Taliban rule was not relief from fighting each other, but
relief from indiscriminate Taliban attacks.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
Telq5NhpCgCZDEO1lcOKsyieFYCXtJtqz9XFpas
4FPfkxCbsSj5U8v+827Yg0Rx1b1I/8QU/qUAvToxa
Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report
-- James A Donald wrote... > > What made [Afghanistan] a breeding ground for terrorism was > > not civil war, but diminuition of civil war. The problem > > was that the Taliban was damn near victorious. If the US > > government had maintained the relationship with our former > > anti communist allies, and kept on sending them arms, we > > never would have had 9/11 Tyler Durden > Well, that's not particularly convincing. First of all, even > during the Taliban's reign there were plenty of warlords that > ran some regions of Afghanistan. I seem to recall you lot claiming that the Taliban had successfully restored order - (you see the Taliban being able to massacre civilians unoppose as order) There was some truth in that claim. They controlled 95%. Had their been less truth, the Taliban would have had less ability to make trouble. > More to the point is that a long term period of chaos and > turbulence causes the locals to be willing to open the door > to the like of the Taliban, as long as they offer some kind > of peace. So we should therefore make sure they cannot offer some kind of peace. In Iraq, the Pentagon cannot supply peace. Why then should we allow those who wish to destroy us provide peace? If we cannot have peace, no one should. > The period between Soviet withdrawal > and the Taliban was uglier than practically anything > imaginable...one batch of warlords would take over, killing > the men loyal to the previous batch and raping the women, Nonsense. The ugly thing about the period before Taliban rule was that the Taliban, or people of much the same ideology, would persistently destroy murder and rape in order to get people to submit to their rule. When opposition largely collapsed, their massacres did not cease, though their rapes became more discrete. Instead, they decided to expand their terror onto a wider stage. The war was not warlord vs warlord, it was radical Islamists vs the rest, the rest being warlords and conservative Islamists. The radical Islamists won, but victory did not appease their appetite for terror. > and then another batch would take over and do the same thing. All the big crimes were committed by the Taliban or their ally Hekmatyar. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG iMxmau6gQqD0z0pAMUXMXDaFhYeKeIIMk+RxXM7G 4oThdqbZEnQ5o4UXBwjhmlFI92anV7zx78zQop+f4
Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report
-- James A. Donald: > > Seems to me that permanent civil war in Iraq provides > > Americans with the same benefits as democracy in Iraq, > > though considerably more reliably. Steve Thompson > You might be more accurate to say that a permanent [civil] > war in Iraq benefits miltiary leaders and civilian > contractors with a variety of benefits. Permanent holy war in Iraq would keep them busy and out of mischief WITHOUT permanent large involvement from American military. Plus, of course, they would be pumping oil like mad in order to fund it. Finding Al Quaeda is hard. Nation building is even harder. Military training covers nation smashing, not nation building. But arranging matters so that Al Quaeda is busily killing those muslims it deems insufficiently Muslim, and muslims are killing Al Quaeda right back, seems astonishingly easy. It is like throwing a match into a big petrol spill. Why are American soldiers getting shot putting out the fire? Why are Americans dying to stop arabs from killing arabs? We *want* arabs to kill arabs. When arabs kill arabs, we fear that the wrong side might win - but whichever side wins, it usually turns out to be the wrong side. If no one wins, no problem. > > Nothing like a long holy war with no clear winner to teach > > people the virtues of religious tolerance. That is, after > > all, how Europeans learnt that lesson. > You're dreaming. People simply do not learn from history. But we learnt from history. Europe, and Europeans, did learn from the European holy wars. > Many things would be nice if [group A] were busy killing > [enemy B] instead of [group C]. Sadly, this is not a perfect > world and the people who need the most killing do not, > generally speaking, get it. > > Perhaps it is a bit of a shame that the kind of broken person > who ends up becoming a suicide bomber, a Ted Kaczynski, a > Timothy McVeigh, or even a Jim Sikorski, First: Three cheers for Timothy McViegh. Secondly, the people who organize large scale terror can be identified, particularly by locals and coreligionists, which is why they have been dying in large numbers in Afghanistan. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG G5IWMfReu/by3/JCAyrz14Fcz3P/3Cx5EC8D4Nds 4uM10QNnx/FK6otz8rAXMHEfD++OcHoiD5mO/tqBW
Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report
-- James A. Donald: > > > And the problem with a civil war in Iraq is? On 24 Nov 2004 at 2:42, Bill Stewart wrote: > Well, once you get past the invalid and dishonest parts of > Bush's 57 reasons We Need to Invade Iraq Right Now (WMDs, > Al-Qaeda, Tried to kill Bush's Daddy, etc.) you're pretty > much left with "Saddam tried to kill Bush's Daddy" and > "Replacing the EEEVil dictator Saddam with a Democracy to > protect the Iraqi people". Seems to me that permanent civil war in Iraq provides Americans with the same benefits as democracy in Iraq, though considerably more reliably. Chances are that after fair and free election, the majority will vote to screw the minority - literally screw them, as in rape being unofficially OK when members of the majority do it to members of the minority. Nothing like a long holy war with no clear winner to teach people the virtues of religious tolerance. That is, after all, how Europeans learnt that lesson. And the worst comes to the worst - well today the Taliban are busy kiling Afghans instead of Americans. Wouldn't it be nice if Al Quaeda was killing Iraqis instead of Americans - well actually they are killing Iraqis instead of americans, but wouldn't it be nice if they were killing *more* Iraqis? --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG PwjZ4PipCdWr8EC4cLgzxV3SAw0bWUhhvejdGR8/ 4XrnLDT2Ed8fBlZ0wGPU0dQOOH2GeZ5kbh7h8N4QF
Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report
-- James A. Donald > > And the problem with a civil war in Iraq is? John Kelsey > At least three: > > a. The pottery barn theory of foreign affairs--we'd be > blamed for making things worse. And if we do nothing, we are also blamed for making things worse: Observe, for example 1. the French assist the Hutus to commit genocide against the Tutsis. Capitalism and America get blamed. 2. The Indonesians massacre infidels. Capitalism, Americans and America get blamed. 3. Saddam massacres his people. The CIA, Americans and America get blamed. 4. Syria invades Lebanon. America and Israel get blamed. 5. Africans massacre each other in the Congo. America gets blamed. (Oddly, for once, the CIA, capitalism, and Jews, are not involved.) > (I don't know how much this matters long term, but it would > certainly have made life pretty hard on Tony Blair and the > rest of the world leaders who actually supported us.) The dogs bark and the caravan moves on. > b. We would one day like their oil back on the market. They would like that also. Fortunately all the oil is Kurds, or Shiites - the first areas to be secured once the civil war burns down a bit. > c. We would like to make sure that the next regime to come > to power there isn't someone we also feel obligated to get > rid of, as even invasions done on the cheap cost a lot of > money. But it is easy and cheap to remove people. It is installing people that is hard, bloody, and expensive. If the dice turn out badly, just roll them again. Nobody teaches soldiers nation building in basic training. They do however, teach them nation smashing. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG cE8rYUZGiDSDZk4yFeEBDqa3go99WSWJnoTURH4R 4L1KruhmMXw4gVFrzipYHod+HL0bAKAEvFpvwCdUV
Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report
--
James A Donald wrote...
> > And the problem with a civil war in Iraq is?
Tyler Durden
> And the answer is: 9/11 sucked.
>
> Oh wait, I guess I have to explain that. After the Soviets
> were pushed out of Afghanistan the place became a veritable
> breeding ground for all sorts of virulent strains of Islam,
> warlords, and so on.
Nothing wrong with warlords - right now they are doing a fine
job of keeping the Taliban down.
What made it a breeding ground for terrorism was not civil war,
but diminuition of civil war. The problem was that the Taliban
was damn near victorious. If the US government had maintained
the relationship with our former anti communist allies, and
kept on sending them arms, we never would have had 9/11
The trouble was that the government abandoned our allies. We
should have sent them enough aid to sustain permanent major
civil war against the Taliban.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
PKHY56Lv+tILn2Qq0fJACuoHr5UrnHsCHuFRofC7
4B3ZCczFe/KNkguYoDENJrgFm5KZ6pJTV/sIRh7wY
Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report
-- R.A. Hettinga > > I think if we had decapitated Iraq, went after our military > > objectives, like securing what was a threat to us, > > including Iraq's senior military and political leadership > > and their weapons stockpiles, and left political order to > > emerge there on its own, like we did in Afghanistan, we > > could have done it with Rumsfeld's original 50,000 troop > > estimate. On 23 Nov 2004 at 7:47, John Kelsey wrote: > It seems like there would have to have been someone to take > over in a fairly clean way, or we'd have wound up setting off > a civil war. And the problem with a civil war in Iraq is? --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG x5H8AGNAFwoPy8fyvCAHj64dIL55pbnwnQFgENLL 4PH/mFu1yrhhrF9zduNJT5lUkHHJFlT99/IhXMPeT
Re: Gettin' Our Scots-Irish Up
-- On 16 Nov 2004 at 10:17, Bill Stewart wrote: > The music that I associate with National Review is distinctly > not country-western - it's Bach's Second Brandenburg > Concerto, used as the theme music for Bill Buckley's program > Firing Line. > > They may be putting on country-boy airs, but they're still > elitists... Perhaps, but it is characteristic of american conservatives to claim to be rednecks or hillbillies - and characteristic of american leftists to condemn their opponents as trailer park trash, rednecks, hillbillies, and sister fuckers. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG KvBpkRgMY1EaRdittHLTuKxpXHzlpZNo6UE55J9v 4c1dfn1oWWGKl5Zmmwoij539ww8jvi8JqwMuasWVW
Re: Iraq II, Come to think of it (was...China's wealthy)
--
On 14 Nov 2004 at 12:33, Tyler Durden wrote:
> When it comes to China, even some of the Han-dominated areas
> are incredibly difficult to get to, and when you start
> talking about Southern parts of Yunnan, most parts of Tibet,
> and places like Qinhai and Xinjiang, the idea of a
> lightening-fast and efficient despotism starts to sound
> dubious.
I have never suggested that any despotism was lightning fast or
efficient, and totalitarianism, such as that of Mao and Qin, is
even slower and less efficient.
It is not travel distance that makes for slow reactions, but
the fact that everything has to be cleared with the top, the
fact that low level people are forbidden to think.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
56D0bYHQzFhVoqs5hSQzS0qvgik5OwJHVAMVGSfz
4FvsMZXY2Yed7To20MoGIPJ3rszxf79ZaE6XvYlpG
Re: Iraq II, Come to think of it (was...China's wealthy)
-- James A. Donald: > > Qin had a cult of personality, in which every single person > > subject to his control had to participate. A subject of > > Qin, like a subject of Mao, was more aware of Qin, than he > > was of his mother and father. Tyler Durden: > You are apparently simply unaware of the real size and > terrain of China. There were villages in remote parts of > China that were unaware of Mao's death into the early 1980s. Bullshit. Everyone knew that which the regime decided they must know. And if true, which I very much doubt, you are not only arguing that Qin's legalism was a different thing than communism/nazism, you are also arguing that Mao's communism was a different thing than Stalin's communism. It was a lot harder to get to Afghanistan from Moscow than to get to any place in China from Peking, yet every Afghan child knew in painfully excessive detail what Moscow commanded them to know, and the regime was partially successful in preventing them from knowing what it wished them to not know. When, during the great leap forward, Peking commanded unreasonable grain requisitions from the provinces, *all* provinces contributed, and *all* provinces suffered starvation. It is often said that Mao's famine was an unfortunate accident, while Stalin's famines were intentional, but any differences are merely a matter of greater self deception. Both did the same things for the same reasons, but Stalin justified his actions by anti peasant rhetoric - "liquidation of the kulaks", whereas Mao justified his action by pro peasant rhetoric, but this is a mere difference in the emphasis in the rationalizations and propaganda, not any difference in means and ends. Both used ruthless terror to establish extraordinary control over a far flung empire that had formerly been ruled by relatively light hand, and then used that extraordinary control to extort extraordinary resources from the peasantry. The difference between Stalin's frequent references to the poor peasants (who were supposedly carrying out the liquidation of the kulaks in revolutionary zeal) and Mao's similar references is merely that Mao was more thorough in creating the simulation of a mass movement. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG xGYJrVMJ5Hx9Dgyly/Lt7Vk6TKJAugVqAcp3+7mq 4rvMXJ51mdk2UqHkU40M50T9s5aAMzX99JW0hQGT/
Re: Iraq II, Come to think of it (was...China's wealthy)
-- James A. Donald: > > Pol Pot's Cambodia was, like Ch'in dynasty china, > > decentralized in that they had twenty thousand separate > > killing fields, but was, like Ch'in dynasty china, highly > > centralized in that the man digging a ditch dug it along a > > line drawn by a man far away who had never seen the ground > > that was being dug. Tyler Durden > Well, this was difficult given that there were probably a > good number of Qin Shr Huang's 'subjects' that didn't even > know they were subjects until well after Qin Shr Huang died. That seems improbable: Qin had a cult of personality, in which every single person subject to his control had to participate. A subject of Qin, like a subject of Mao, was more aware of Qin, than he was of his mother and father. The proposition that the chinese emperors ruled with a light hand is historical revisionism. Some of them ruled with a moderately heavy hand, some of them with an extremely heavy hand, and Qin was as heavy as it gets. > However, the nature, reasons, and byproducts of any > particular instance of despotism very hugely...trying to pack > them all into one simplistic grid is a formula for. I did not pack them in to one simplistic grid - I said that legalism was much the same thing as communism/nazism, whereas Confucianism is a mixture of that, and also of rule by social conservatives. The rule of Qin was very similar to commie nazi rule. The rule of Qianlong was substantially different. Both were despots, but Qianlong was no totalitarian. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG k6s+2bFmGHKlU9v6wCbmGCo+6m4eAEfjtEfJ3b3W 4EcgDCvx/77or2uD2Vhx/20HURcJ8XVeRylOk8puI
Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks
--
Tyler Durden
> To say that China was "despotic" would, on average, be
> accurate. But then again, one must remember that a form of
> despotism where the despots are months away is very different
> from modern forms of despotism.
But the despots are still months away. The joke used to be
that it took a Russian six months to organize a date with a
girl because he had to clear it with the Kremlin.
When Vietnam attacked Cambodia in 1978, it took the left a year
to suddenly come up with a venemous denunciation of Khmer Rouge
Cambodia - they could not react until the Soviet Union reacted,
and it took the Soviet Union near a year to react.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
/wF4zwpFvF9ac/DnBvXxdZOBgq+OgBH5WtuPImjY
4mzi4xYS1k3UR5wq20+FtKNGU4wV3pYRcCYMs0tjT
Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks
-- On 12 Nov 2004 at 14:29, Tyler Durden wrote: > OK, Mr Donald. You clearly imagine the China of 2,500 years > ago to operate like a modern 20th century nation-state. You > need to rethink this, given a few simple facts: My delusion is evidently widely shared: I did a google search for legalism. http://tinyurl.com/56n2m The first link, and many of the subsequent links, equated legalism with totalitarianism, or concluded that legalism resulted in totalitarianism. > 1. There were no telephones during Confucious' time. Pol Pot's goons mostly murdered people by killing them with a hoe, and mostly tortured people with burning sticks. Does this make Pol Pot's Cambodia not a modern nation state? What made the Ch'in empire a modern despotism was total centralized control of everything, and a multitude of regulations with drastic penalties for non compliance. Telephones are irrelevant. It was the liberal use of the death penalty for non compliance, not the telephone, that made it centralized. > 2. Several provinces of China are larger than all of Western > Europe. Even a very high-priority message could take months > to propagate. 3. "Control' of China 2500 years ago was almost > nonexistent. When a provincial commander marched fresh conscripts from place A to place B, he would do it in the time alloted, and be there on the date specified, or the Ch'in emperor would cut his head off. It is the cut-his-head off bit, and the minute and overly detailed instructions concocted by a far away bureaucracy, that made it a modern totalitarianism. Analogously, in the recent war, Iraqi troops failed to blow several bridges because they had to wait for orders from Saddam. Wireless and telephone did not help. > It was a geographically, ethnically, and linguistically > diverse set of quasi-nation-states. So was the Soviet empire. > "Law" in early China was NOTHING like what you imagine it to > be, and was a higly decentralized affair. So was Stalin's Soviet Empire, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, in the highly unusual sense of "decentralized" that commie/nazis use. Pol Pot's Cambodia was, like Ch'in dynasty china, decentralized in that they had twenty thousand separate killing fields, but was, like Ch'in dynasty china, highly centralized in that the man digging a ditch dug it along a line drawn by a man far away who had never seen the ground that was being dug. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG kIKFSkaq39tHojTf6+FAu2WFT3X6iHJMyTUNi7kx 4kLyg7PvSEfnbAOwjYFVGCmxNpP52VH6X9inrj6cM
Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks
-- On 12 Nov 2004 at 15:08, Tyler Durden wrote: > The Qing were 1) Manchus (ie, not Han Chinese)...they were > basically a foreign occupation that stuck around for a while; > and 2) (Nominally Tibetan) Buddhists. Although they of course > adhered to the larger Confucian notions, they in many ways > deviated from mainstream Confucian beliefs. The mainstream Confucian belief, like the mainstream legalist belief, was that the emperor should have absolute power. The Qing dynasty was successful in giving effect to this belief, and justified that effect on confucian grounds. This makes them more confucian, not less confucian, than the Sung dynasty, for the Sung were confucian merely in intent, much as the current chinese regime is communist merely in intent. > Also, you need to get more specific about WHEN during the > Qing dynasty you believed this occurred. During the 19th > century this is most certainly NOT true, and there are many > famous naval battles that occurred between the British and > the Chinese navies (in fact, the famous Stone Boat in the > Summer palace was built using funds that were supposed to pay > for real ships). The Qing dynasty prohibited anyone other than themselves from owning seagoing boats - that is why I called it the equivalent of the iron curtain. > But this has nothing to do with Confucianism per se, but is > more directly related to good old traditional Chinese > xenophobia. The prohibition was not against foreigners sailing, but chinese sailing, so the intent was not fear of foreigners, but as with the iron curtain, fear of chinese wandering outside government control and being contaminated with unauthorized foreign thoughts. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG QpsnWCawMTxeL36my3kdz4SvKVqTYqmGh2nPCY2E 4vCwJru3POMcSWlMD2yDlvSJWTIOuNvDNItpg37fe
Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks
--
ken wrote:
> > And when was this stagnation?
R.A. Hettinga wrote:
> Two words: Ming Navy
For those who need more words, the Qing Dynasty forbade
ownership or building of ocean going vessels, on pain of death
- the early equivalent of the iron curtain.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
Iw7Wkew4KTQWmS2lvvIMd7+fR3rWAWagnqJ4cF0k
4Ee4DcVaw474VQFVRrwVAXR4XZSXiaNtRuKXYpsBo
Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks
-- On 12 Nov 2004 at 11:12, Tyler Durden wrote: > However, blaming the Chinese response to the Meiji > restoration on officially unsanctioned thought illustrates a > complete cluelessness about China. During that time Chinese > intellectuals (which at the time meant practically anyone who > had any kind of an education) regularly debating notions of > "Ti Yung", or the tension between what is esentially Chinese > vs what's useful from the Western World (and by the 1860s it > was starting to become clear that the west had some advanced > ideas). This is far more than a top-down dictatorship in the > Stalinist sense, That is the revisionist version - that china was a free and capitalist society, therefore freedom is not enough to ensure modernity and industrialization - a proposition as ludicrous as similar accounts of more recently existent despotic states. China during that period was the classic exemplar of "oriental despotism", the place on which the idea is based. > just as the Cultural Revolution was far more than a bunch of > teenagers "obeying orders". But the Cultural Revolution was merely a bunch of teenagers obeying orders, merely the simulation of a mass movement, with mass compliance instead of mass initiative. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG A3r+IPhnwM5iwqn01H7AuV9g1K9PgqLsYSmZVb6P 4ewsr2ejzouasJCmgOSl3a3j3FucBkMACrPcAsosX
Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks
-- James A. Donald. > > China stagnated because no thought other than official > > thought occurred. On 12 Nov 2004 at 15:40, ken wrote: > And when was this stagnation? Started soon after the Qing dynasty > And what were the reasons China did not "stagnate" for the > previous thousand years? When the Song dynasty attempted to appoint important people, they did not necessarily become important people, and when it attempted to dismiss important people, they did not stay dismissed - The Song dynasty was unable or unwilling to give full effect to Confucianism. The local potentates conspicuously failed to behave in a properly confucian manner towards the emperor. The Song emperor could not reliably make local authorities obey him, which mean that his confucian mandarins could not reliably stop anyone other than themselves from thinking - much as today the communists are unable to stop anyone other than themselves from banking - in part because they are reluctant to apply the rather drastic measures that they have frequently threatened to apply. China prospered under Song Confucianism for pretty much the same reasons as it is today prospering under "communism". --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Yv20dIxJj7Vr+GPh5ImGfq9c3N7OLh5qda5/qc+9 49HxvL6pJJ1duyj3afDTLVoAjtWFWKz322go1DD9I
Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks
-- On 12 Nov 2004 at 9:51, Tyler Durden wrote: > As far as I'm concerned, what Kung Tze does ca 5 BCE is > really consdolidate and codify a large and diverse body of > practices and beliefs under a fairly unified set of ethical > ideas. In that sense, the Legalists were merely a refocusing > of the same general body of mores, etc...into a somewhat > different direction. One might call it a competing school to > Kung Tze de Jiao Xun, but I would argue only because, at that > time, Kung Tze "authority" as it's known today was by no > means completely established. But in a sense, the early > legalists weren't a HECK of a lot different from Confucious. Which is a commie nazi way of saying that the the Confucians were not a heck of a lot different from the legalists - and the legalists set up an early version of the standard highly centralized totalitarian terror state, which doubtless appears quite enlightened to the likes of Tyler Durden. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG k9Dumf7XMAhNCRDuxNd2aKQtrN2PqD2p2l3TDcjw 4SMVqw0LGnr3oZKU5v0WQpooJ4tKHdZvNiokzj2e9
Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks
-- James Donald: > > However Confucianism vs Daoism/Taoism is rather different > > from what you would get in the west. Confucianism is > > somewhat similar to what you would get if western cultural > > conservatives allied themselves with nazi/commies, in the > > way that the commies are prone to imagine conservatives > > have supposedly allied themselves with nazis. Taoism > > somewhat similar to what you would get if anarcho > > capitalists allied themselves with pagans and wiccans... "Enzo Michelangeli" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Actually, that doesn't apply to any century. The ancient > philosophical school that inspired Mao Zedong was actually > Legalism, which provided the theoretic foundations to the > absolutist rule of Qin Shi Huangdi In my original post, I said that legalism was pretty much the same thing as communism/nazism, so you are not disagreeing with me, merely re - raising a point I had already raised. However, whereas legalism is much the same thing communism/nazism, confucianism is legalism moderated by conservatism > (to whom Mao liked to compare himself). Mao, as many other > Chinese reformers and writers of the early XX Century, hated > Confucianism as symbol of China's "ancien regime" and decay. And the commies hated the nazis, as well as other commies slightly different from themselves, and the nazis hated other nazis slightly different from themselves. The conflict between confucianism and legalism does not imply the difference betweent the two is very large, though it is a good deal larger than the miniscule difference between communism and nazism. > By comparison, Confucianism was remarkably enlightened, "by comparison". Well most things are pretty enlightened by comparison with communism/legalism/nazism. I am less impressed by this fact than you are. Confucianism is despotic and oppressive. Even if confucians do not bury scholars alives, they suppress their opponents by means less spectacular, but in the long run comparably effective. China stagnated because no thought other than official thought occurred. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG HNIR6uGQUMyllJLev2ryOe5xvv1qtUyvgvnFXy4J 4HfiAds3UvnSj3hJTTbW4uTzwvqIlszbh7H0gilkM
Re: The Full Chomsky
--
On 11 Nov 2004 at 14:21, John Young wrote:
> Chomsky, [...] He makes no apology for his attacks on
> apologists for the powerful, he is merely better at it than
> they are.
Wherever the master's boot smashes into the face of a child, we
can rely on Chomsky to deny the master's crimes, while
simultaneously justifying those crimes, and demonizing the
child as a CIA agent.
Always Chomsky is on the side of evil, of hatred, of the
torturer, and against the torturer's victim, as he was on the
issue of Pol Pot's Cambodia, when he spread and endorsed the
lies of issued by Pol Pot's regime.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
w8wf5p0VKgycj9Ld3q9wBJikPRDq7/6mG2fem3Oi
481l46Enne+sD9gu1SutixMgpaZcYscUEn7FHAJPG
Re: The Full Chomsky
-- Tyler Durden wrote: > What a fucking idiot. The 3000 were already dead, the 'famine' was > about-to-be. A Chomsky nut could say Chomsky helped avert complete > catastrophe [...] > > But this misses the point. Mr Donald will no doubt chime in > yammering on about Chomsky's "lies", but that also misses the point. > Chomsky makes very strong arguments supporting a very different view > of world events, and he often quotes primary and secondary sources. No he does not quote primary and secondary sources. He purports to paraphrase primary and secondary sources, When he actually quotes, as he rarely does, he quotes only very small fragments in elaborate and contrived false context, often using made up quotes which resemble, but differ from the original in vital ways. The "famine" in Afghanistan is a case in point, which has already been discussed in the newsgroups. The sources in original context did not make the claims he attributed to them. I have provided a paragraph by paragraph comparison of source materials with Chomsky's claims about source materials for the issue of the Khmer Rouge - see http://www.jim.com/chomsdis.htm, but the same story could be written, and indeed has been written, of everything he writes. If you complain that his lies in support of the Khmer Rouge are old news, I will do a similar number on his more recent lies about the Afghan famine. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 7d/sRxIb8lHa8J3zbt56pbk45oa+nV8y90GgLfGL 496eTnLDCz/ALgUZmdM3tMRnhmRw8AcO00m0wSerI
Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks
--
Tyler Durden wrote:
> Fascinating. And typical of the unusual Chinese seesaw that has
> occurred throuout the aeons between hyper-strict centralized control
> and something approaching a lite version of anarchy. There's no good
> mapping of this into Western ideas of fascism, marxism, and
> economics.
Maps near enough. The Chinese concept of "legalism" is barely
distinguishable from German concepts of communism and nazism.
However Confucianism vs Daoism/Taoism is rather different from what
you would get in the west. Confucianism is somewhat similar to what
you would get if western cultural conservatives allied themselves with
nazi/commies, in the way that the commies are prone to imagine
conservatives have supposedly allied themselves with nazis. Taoism
somewhat similar to what you would get if anarcho capitalists allied
themselves with pagans and wiccans, in the way that conservatives are
prone to imagine that they have, though in reality the pagans and
wiccans line up with the greenies and nazis, for the most part.
This is the result of a Chinese heritage of politicide and mass
murder, whereas the west has a heritage of compromise and negotiation.
So in the west, we have ordinary people forbidden from doing banking
stuff, but a pile of loopholes in that law, and we do not have the
death penalty for unauthorized banking, whereas in China, they do have
the death penalty, and despite the death penalty, massive defiance of
the law.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
NWin7CjdJuYCUBbj9jwfYAiCHobTuUO1Bw3DLogP
4Unpss2ukPbY+HeKKDTu441IpswCXzfXLuU2FCphs
Re: In a Sky Dark With Arrows, Death Rained Down
-- Peter Gutmann wrote: > Nobles expected to surrender to other nobles and be ransomed. > Commoners didn't respect this, and almost never took prisoners. > Henry's orders didn't make that much difference, at best they were a > "we'll turn a blind eye" notification to his troops. The english army was well disciplined, and in battle did what it what it was told. About half way through the battle of Agincourt, King Henry decided he could not afford so many troops guarding so many prisoners, and told them kill-em-all. Nobility had nothing to do with it. It did not matter who took you prisoner. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG QwzmnNSSaHhQhQItWATHwnWB7cLchcXDK+wV1pDP 4p0FRureqYrveRbFxz5h7VDonlv9au7JlTFdp/2BL
Re: The Values-Vote Myth
--
J.A. Terranson wrote:
> The fact is that those who did not vote effectively voted for Shrub.
> You are either part of the solution or you are part of the problem.
> Inaction is not good enough.
Voting is not a solution.
Voting only encourages them. If you vote for a candidate, and he
wins, he will then proceed to commit various crimes, and you, by
voting, have given him a "mandate" for those crimes.
Further, suppose you think, as I think, that candidate A is a lesser
evil than candidate B, but the difference is not much. If you vote for
the lesser evil, you will start to rationalize and excuse all the
crimes he commits, identifying with him, and his actions.
Nor is Kerry a solution.
I cannot understand why you Bush haters are so excited about this
election when on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Kerry promised to
continue all Bush's policies only more effectually.
You vote for Kerry because you think he is a liar?
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
EDbRclDc5acD10EGJi0ScHZfE2IslIbsawTQvj54
4jjneZ53XniQe2NYlNlFO5PGLTN5vTyDLI5okTjKv
Re: Why Americans Hate Democrats-A Dialogue
--
James Donald:
> > I routinely call people like you nazi-commies.
Eugen Leitl wrote:
> How novel and interesting.
>
> Cut the rhetoric, get on with the program. Cypherpunks write code.
I also write code, unlike people like you.
See for example www.echeque.com/Kong
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
iRF6jCg0M9tIDOFv9wmxaZxcMi0N2C6vQn8oF4IO
42OhxMux7d4g+wGUgQBqxmiP8H6QXmmOGpbq5bqCd
Re: In a Sky Dark With Arrows, Death Rained Down
--
Peter Gutmann wrote:
> That's the traditional Agincourt interpretation. More modern ones
> (backed up by actual tests with arrows of the time against armour,
> in which the relatively soft metal of the arrows was rather
> ineffective against the armour)
You have this garbled.
According to
http://www.royalarmouries.org/extsite/view.jsp?sectionId=1025
by the fifteen hundreds, the very finest armor could deflect almost
all bodkin arrows - but very few could afford a complete set of the
very finest armor - and the battle of Agincourt occurred well before
the fifteen hundreds.
Presumably the armor improved (and became heavier and more expensive)
in response to the battle of Agincourt.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
wY4Gt1+GdEkqgNLQxKrMduPJSg/k6DEUpWEGeADc
48Orz+xAb/+RsojnqG7H/GLzb+Ll5QWvCCvF9MkuG
Re: In a Sky Dark With Arrows, Death Rained Down
-- Peter Gutmann wrote: > That's the traditional Agincourt interpretation. More modern ones > (backed up by actual tests with arrows of the time against armour, > in which the relatively soft metal of the arrows was rather > ineffective against the armour) I find this very hard to believe. Post links, or give citations. > (There were other problems as well, e.g. the unusually high death > toll and > removal of "ancient aristocratic lineages" was caused by English > commoners who weren't aware of the tradition of capturing opposing > nobles and having them ransomed back, rather than hacking them to > pieces on the spot. Wrong French nobles were taken prisoner in the usual fashion, but executed because the English King commanded them executed. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG R2tc27UGwjykTsUjBSVNU/VakHCZzthZfJpceSzP 49ifULPODBC+M+WzhF3jxg1W5+UV7ABaMjvVW7R8b
Re: This Memorable Day
-- Nomen Nescio wrote: > To label any argument that points out the obvious circumstance that > injustice feeds hatred as communist propaganda, is really only > ridiculous, even if it's also dangerously incompetent and as such no > real laughing matter. > > Why do you mention Bin Laden anyway? There are thousands of bigger > and smaller groups around the world (they exists in every country > more or less) that we'd label as terrorists in the western part of > the world. And all of them are instruments of the affluent and well connected. For example Shining Path was not poor peasants, but academics and students. For the most part using terror are not those suffering injustice, and all of them are those inflicting injustice. This is particularly the case with Islamic terror. For the most part it is not those suffering Dhimmi status that engage in terrorism, but those who in their native countries are successful in inflicting Dhimmi status on those of the incorrect religion, and who apply terror in the hope of expanding this success. Al Quaeda attacked westerners because of their considerable success in murdering and raping Afghans. Jemaah Islamiyah because of their considerable success in murdering and raping Timorese and Ambionese. Today's Islamic terrorism, like yesterday's communist terrorism, is the actions of evil men whose considerably privilege and comfort arises from the injustice and oppression that they have successfully inflicted, and that they intend to inflict a great deal more of. Back before the fall of communism, wherever the master's boot smashed into the face of a child, you lot would loudly praise the master, and demonize the child as a CIA agent. Now, after the fall of communism, you are still at it, even though the masters no longer even pretend to be acting to defend the poor and oppressed. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG QeJ5sNOExxqx0Vq7NTG0bDDnwEip8vKbsX9+9d8i 4IDiep3tuDmwKA77n4H3u9nHRV2g6oqOWQkRYfFcW
Re: This Memorable Day
--
> This post gave me a big laugh. So naive. There are a few basic
> forces feeding extremism and terrorism around the world and those
> are inequalities and injustice anywhere.
You are quite right, it is unjust that people like Bin Laden are so
immensely rich with oil wealth. To remedy this problem, Bush should
confiscate the Middle Eastern oil reserves.
You are using stale old communist rhetoric - but today's terrorists no
longer not even pretend to fight on behalf of the poor and oppressed.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
hB70Rn/r/Izz2zUYn/rVfOyEDZVqu1UUzdNLVJJe
4inRuB429RCVLG1VVfP9Z5CBGfL+mE/dNmP+GZvcb
Re: This Memorable Day
--
Peter Gutmann wrote:
> Fighting an unwinnable war always seems to produce the same type of
> rhetoric,
It is a little premature to call this war unwinnable. The kill ratio
so far is comparable with Britain's zulu war.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
9YCccdHmWgBxj3a1UFFKM7Xyl1qKvkQYJoNuuZEw
4pOgjIzTXDiWQ1xXvdwBxCk93EgSXiZfQ29ag+5sW
Re: This Memorable Day
--
Peter Gutmann wrote:
Well it wasn't the point I was trying to make, which was comparing
it to predictions made by (the propaganda division of) another
super-power in the mid 1940s about winning an unwinnable war because
God/righteousness/whatever was on their side, and all they had to do
was hold out a bit longer. Compare the general tone of the WSJ
article to the one in e.g. the first half of
http://www.humanitas-international.org/showcase/chronography/documen
ts/htestmnt.htm.
But it is hardly a matter of "holding out". So far the Pentagon has
shattered the enemy while suffering casualties of about a thousand,
which is roughly the same number of casualties as the British empire
suffered doing regime change on the Zulu empire - an empire of a
quarter of a million semi naked savages mostly armed with spears.
As quagmires go, this one has not yet got shoelaces muddy. The
enemies are the one's that have heroic fantasies of holding out
against hopeless odds, as for example Fallujah. The question is not
whether the terrorists keep Falljah, but merely whether Pentagon gets
a city or a pile of rubble.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
9M6CeBC9wwBisQe3JNJvnnu758kvx8Rq2e2KM9b2
41XkwhnPAbRy29/XaMnNedLxI40PWmNEk4y2tUdn7
Re: This Memorable Day
able to do the equivalent of sending special forces to assist the Northern Alliance. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Jyneib4EqTRVeeBY0/BjpjdEidDWCmp8YSQkckag 47p0ym1TCnknVRDL2q1wHz9ykyIr4wMdZjZBin9s/
Re: Winning still matters, etc...
--
John Young wrote:
> There is a decreasing chance the US can apply its military might to
> defeat an unconventional enemy. That kind of enemy is not what
> long-standing military strategy and most tactics are aimed at.
> Rumsfeld was hoping to revise that when yet one more mighty military
> war appeared to head off changing military policy.
The US never intended to use its military might to defeat an
unconventional enemy.
It intended to use its military might in the entirely conventional way
to destroy or deter governments that foster terrorism, as was
accomplished very successfully in Afghanistan.
Regime change in Iraq was supposed to deter Syria and Iran, but they
have not in fact been deterred. Saudi Arabia and Libya have been
deterred. Indonesia has changed its policy on terror, but it is
unclear whether this was the result of the spectacle of Saddam and his
bullet ridden sons or honest soul searching.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
nVs3V7urdcH8GOjfhlNYzb0/JWqCDKupA3RE8WE3
4YdwLgC/LWPMsXcHeSFlqJW/NrcK/eDjuprNNcJok
Re: Winning still matters, etc...
--
At 05:09 PM 10/30/04 -0400, R.A. Hettinga wrote:
> > The terrorists cannot win either a conventional or an
> > asymmetrical war against the United States, should it bring
> > its full array of assets to the struggle.
Major Variola
> The large pit of smoldering radioactive glass is probably not
> an option..
Why not?
You keep assuming that Muslims unite, escalate, etc, but if
they do, US will escalate also.
In fact, there is not much the Islamicists can do to escalate
beyond their current extremes. There is a great deal the US
could do to escalate beyone its current measures.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
odq504QOMD1tmYFgnLderv0nS117FbcIG83t4MIX
4GzccezZIfj7BfeEbPLrXimv+SU42yCuvTxkLS+Rn
Re: Geodesic neoconservative empire
--
Major Variola (ret):
> > Is this geodesic neo-conservativism? Where can I start
> > bearer-document goose-stepping?
R.A. Hettinga wrote:
> Impedance mismatch. You're using a (now) cryptocommie
> codeword for Jewery ("neo-conservative") with Nazi imagery.
> Everybody knows that Jews are communists, right? ;-). Except,
> of course, to a cryptocommie, *everyone*'s a fascist. Must be
> like eskimos and 19 different names for snow, or something.
The underlying theory is that Zionism/Neo Conservatism is
pretty much the same thing as national socialism, only with
"Jewish" substituted for Aryan. There is some truth in the
theory, but those so sensitive to the mote in Israel's eye,
fail to notice the beam in their own eye - fail to notice that
Communism etc is pretty much the same thing as national
socialism, only with various oppressed masses substituted for
Aryan.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
wCJhHoX6NaUOg9bzELh3wQAX0TvI/0xSpIOmC1vM
4LSyiD05pLm9WYrKDI9oyxCi8ABMK6tMoAkxIOGhU
RE: Geodesic neoconservative empire
--
On 29 Oct 2004 at 10:20, Tyler Durden wrote:
> We're not reducing the quantity of government, just
> consolidating under a single growing Borg-like government,
> namely the US.
This presupposes the US intends to rule Afghanistan and Iraq,
which is manifestly false.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
TCB2vWoGyhVihGigpgZNddyxcR+FX8/hDPZankmv
4jNqo70KLA5nfPvXptDt0z6bJGMJ0LDIX5iVsCD/p
Re: US Retardation of Free Markets (was Airport insanity)
-- James A. Donald: > > The remaining communists have made some psychological > > recovery - see for example Tyler Durden's peculiar version > > of recent history, where in his universe the communists > > actually won and are still winning," Tyler Durden > Again, you live in a world that's evenly divided between > black and white. Since I'm not white you figure I must be > black. Whatever you are, you have told us a story of the world where the Koreans bravely repelled the evil capitalist American attack, and enjoyed prosperity and progress thereby. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG EqHk0rek72pGIAIvZCiBmJDtn1yvQHDXnJ/0n/ks 4jknM3llghisRUJE2X+8tiw6yn8yqEdesC8+Fy4HC
Re: US Retardation of Free Markets (was Airport insanity)
-- On 27 Oct 2004 at 9:55, Tyler Durden wrote: > There are plenty of counter-examples to the "benefits" of US > interventionism, particularly throughout central America. We saw that when the Soviet Union fell, the US lost interest in central America, and peace and democracy broke out in central America with the victory of those forces that had formerly received US backing, and the defeat of those forces that had formerly received Soviet backing, showing that US meddling in central America, was, as it was claimed to be, a defensive response to Soviet meddling, a defensive response that had the support of the people of central America, and that the suffering of central America was in substantial part caused by Soviet meddling. > But apparently, the locals are not particularly happy about > the unilateral decisions we've been making in their benefit. > Of course, you might chalk this up to fanaticism/Islam or > whatever, but I suspect they just don't trust us (Abu > Ghraib), Sure they don't trust us, but observe that in the Afghan election, Karzai got 56% of the vote, and the soft-on-the-taliban guys got much the same vote as the supposed representatives of the oppressed masses in Central America - down in the asterixes. I predict a very similar election outcome in Iraq. Sadr may get a dangerously large vote, possibly as large as the Nazis got in the Weimar republic, but anyone who looks aligned with the car bombers will be down in the asterixes. > and remember the fact that it was the US that propped up > Saddam as long as he stuck to the script. Another tale from your odd parallel universe where the US attacked Korea. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG zEWlCJhdBBReeJ2Tnl5midyyezqcb0uz+y18EzpX 4OAEBY/Hw5iw7juSxIfTFKJsXQRt7junqQKOiLZ07
Re: US Retardation of Free Markets (was Airport insanity)
-- "R.A. Hettinga" > > This is actually the running fantasy in Marxism since the > > 1950's, when it turned out that that, instead of the > > "workers" eating the "bourgeoisie" by the firelight or some > > Glorious Revolution or another, would instead be come > > "bourgeoisie" themselves. John Kelsey > I think this bit gets at the heart of why the Islamic > fundamentalists are hard to deal with. For most people I > know, some notion of peace and prosperity is the thing we > want from our governments. [...] > > The Islamic fundamentalists can't offer that. [...] No > peace, not much prosperity, but a lot of capital-P Purpose. > A place in history, a part of the Jihad. In this sense, it's > a lot like Marxism was, back when it had serious adherents; > it's a mass movement, like Eric Hoffer talks about. Mass movements of this kind require the promise of inevitable victory. When communism suffered one decisive, uncomplicated, unambiguous defeat, the dominos fell one after another all the way to Moscow. The remaining communists have made some psychological recovery - see for example Tyler Durden's peculiar version of recent history, where in his universe the communists actually won and are still winning, and similarly the Islamists have made a considerable psychological recovery from Afghanistan, but the ideal of date with destiny tends to lose its appeal when you keep picking yourself off the dirt with a bloody nose. In Iraq we face a guerrila movement, and discover, yet again, that guerrilas can only be defeated by local forces - and the boys from Baghdad are not all that local. This gives the Islamicists renewed hope. So what do you do, if, like Israel, you face terrorists embedded in a local population that supports thems sufficiently they can melt into the people? Withdrawal did not work, for the terrorists keep sending car bombs and the like from their stronghold, as in Fallujah. What worked in Afghanistan was to find some local warlord we could live with, someone in no hurry to get his six pack of virgins, someone who might want to put sacks over the heads of the women of his town, but had no grandiose ambitions to stuff all the women of the world into bags, and then we cut a deal with him - we help him his slay his enemies, he helps us slay our enemies. Unfortunately the US plan to bring democracy to the middle east, and to preserve Iraq as a unitary state, keeps getting in the way of this sort of deal. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG o32eoG4KhmccNjDBkOW9upEtn8Lka3zsooGJn8lY 4dMgCNOmt5z/S3km7vma/L6RECrRaVEmnhEZ4E2hb
Re: US Retardation of Free Markets (was Airport insanity)
-- James A. Donald: > > Moral equivalence, the rationale of those who defend > > tyranny and slavery. Roy M. Silvernail > Moral superiority, the rationale of both sides of any given > violent conflict. The winner gets to use the victory to > proclaim the correctness of their interpretation. A claim that presupposes that the west is just as totalitarian as its enemies, that well known reality is not to be trusted, that newsmen and historians are servants of the vast capitalist conspiracy, so in place of obvious truths, we can substitute any ridiculous fantasy that we find politically conforting, for example Tyler Durden's fantasy that the US attacked Korea, and attacked to impose poverty on Koreans so that the US can be rich, or the widely popular fantasy that the CIA trained Osama Bin Laden. Seeing as Bin Laden's contribution to the revolutionary war against the Soviets was merely roadbuilding, did they train him in roadbuilding? --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG AErjoTRu9URKg4L+F5xjlOq35GQBD2reuyMhDJ5b 46ur5/+9ZCqnZu8EDgtmmeUH93ImKPyfT6+Pj/QUE
Re: US Retardation of Free Markets (was Airport insanity)
--
On 25 Oct 2004 at 21:03, Tyler Durden wrote:
> The point is this: Almost and "side" in this world that has
> committed or commits atrocities can find a true-believing
> apolegist.
Moral equivalence, the rationale of those who defend tyranny
and slavery.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
9UPtpcIvFgtu2JFnBNLIA/QPpXk7MkK68mtvmQya
45I4CX0wox3d7YrExie7R1Q+2YFGk2ao4amh5DlM6
Re: US Retardation of Free Markets (was Airport insanity)
-- J.A. Terranson: > > > So if I was to go out tomorrow and spread 2000 curies of > > > Ci into the local subway system "As payback for Ruby > > > Ridge", this would not be an act of terrorism? James A. Donald: > > That would be terrorism, because regardless of what you > > *said* your intent was, you would not be targeting those > > responsible for Ruby Ridge. J.A. Terranson: > And if the station I chose just happened to be the one > servicing ATF? If your intent was to nail passing BATF employees, surely hitting closer to their office would be more effectual. Spray some radioactives in the entrance lobby. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG KWVunJBmZ52AZSOdaQb2Q5Zoz2Crn5g0U31NRSlo 4iLTYoVpo0AgmiEow46ObxjN4dPkqPP6I0kKDTG+9
Re: US Retardation of Free Markets (was Airport insanity)
-- James A. Donald: > > Bin Laden's intent was to make anyone in America afraid - > > thus the use of airliners, rather than truck bombs. > > McViegh's intent was to make BATF afraid. J.A. Terranson: > This is idiotic. You're claiming that the definition of > "terrorist" is dependent not on the act, but on why the act > was committed. Analogously, the definition of "murderer" depends on why the act was committed. > So if I was to go out tomorrow and spread 2000 curies of Ci > into the local subway system "As payback for Ruby Ridge", > this would not be an act of terrorism? That would be terrorism, because regardless of what you *said* your intent was, you would not be targeting those responsible for Ruby Ridge. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG VD3OmstfdjDi423472WFnOcF4OoAi0gOL2FZR45Y 4G2LCL/l1ZIVyRLfDcdladNssQtPhB0PR3mZs2VbO
