Question on Mixmaster
I've known about Mixmaster for years, but only just now finally downloaded and installed it (Mixmaster 2.9.0). Does anyone know where I can find documentation on how to actually use it? The distribution (from Sourceforge) contains no documentation whatsoever beyond a *very* terse man page that has no information at all on the interactive interface, and only has one-line summaries of each command-line option.
Re: Petro's catch-22 incorrect (Re: citizens can be named as enemy combatants)
John Kelsey wrote: No policy toward anyone isn't possible once there's any kind of contact. There are terrorists who'd want to do nasty things to us for simply allowing global trade, or for allowing trade with repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia or Nigeria, or for selling weapons to countries with bad human rights records. Osama Bin Laden might not hate us, but *someone* would. Baloney. The terrorists have made it pretty clear what their gripe with the U.S. Government is, and it has nothing to do with trade, the American lifestyle, or the elusive freedoms that Americans supposedly enjoy. It has everything to do with US troops stationed in nearly every country in the world (specifically, Saudi Arabia), meddling in Middle Eastern conflicts (the never-ending Israeli-Arab feud), and the steady stream of Arab corpses that Clinton and the Bushes have produced over the last ten years or so (thousands of Afghani civilians killed by US bombs in the last year or so; the bombing of Iraq that has stretch uninterrupted from the beginning of the Persian Gulf War to the present day). Neutrality and noninterventionism work spectacularly well as a foreign policy. Just take a look at Switzerland: seven centuries of peace and freedom, with the exception of a few years during the Napoleanic era, and never a problem with terrorists. Even if we were just an economic giant with little foreign policy, we'd still have an impact by which countries we chose to trade with How about "Friendship and free trade with all, entangling alliances with none," to quote Thomas Jefferson? A trade policy that doesn't choose favorites avoids any problem of others wishing to influence U.S. trade policy.
Re: Fresh Hell
Morlock Elloi wrote: Funny, but I can't seem to find the passage in the Bible where it talks about cloning. In fact, I can't find any passage that even remotely impinges on the subject [...] wasn't there something about exclusivity of conceiving without fucking ? As a former believer and student of the Bible, I can assure you that there is no passage in the Bible that says that Jesus was, will be, our should be the *only* person conceived without the benefit of sexual intercourse. And what do you think in vitro fertilization is, anyway? Many / most American Christians stress that they rely on the Bible as their one and only source of religious truth. If so, they have absolutely no *religious* basis for objecting to cloning.
Re: DoD badly protected web form lets "users" administer .mil domain names.
Care to register a .mil Web site of your own for free? The DoD has gone out of its way to make it a snap. [...] That's great. How about "kill-iraqis-regardless.mil" or "want-to-buy-some-oil-in-iraq.mil" or "we-lust-for-another-war.mil" I think your aim is off here. It's the politicians and political appointees who are agitating for this war, not the career military. A lot of the top military leadership is against the idea of attacking Iraq, I suppose because they have a keener appreciation of just how dangerous, messy, and unpredictable war can be.
Re: Gullible Journalists
Tyler Durden wrote: "For some reason I've never been able to fathom, many journalists seem to be remarkably gullable, when they're told something from the right kind of source, especially a government agency or other official source." Chomsky (dig around on http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm) and others have commented on this quite a bit. If you want to hear it from the horse's mouth, I suggest you read some of Vin Suprynowicz's columns, or his book, _Send In The Waco Killers_. He's been a working journalist for decades, and so can describe first-hand how this process of co-opting journalists works.
Re: The practical reason the U.S. is starting a war
Tim May wrote: The negro is transforming himself into a gutter race. Which ones? I see a very different pattern of behavior in some other parts of the world.
Re: Trials for those undermining the war effort
Harmon Seaver wrote: Encouraging the imperial persecution of a religious minority? Well, it looks at this point that it would have been a reasonable trade-off, given the millions who have been tortured and murdered in Europe and the Americas since the Council of Nicea in 425 by the offspring of those surviving christers. And what makes you think things would have been any better in the absence of Christianity?
Re: U.S. Drops 'E-Bomb' On Iraqi TV
John Kelsey wrote: but it sure seems like it would be unhealthy to be one of the people shooting at the helicopters in that situation--like a bunch of people shooting at a lion with .22 pistols or something. Even if you eventually drive the helicopter off, it's going to leave a big pile of bodies behind! You mean like the way the Somalis drove Clinton's soldiers out of Somalia? (18 dead on one side, hundreds to possibly over a thousand dead on the other, but the side contributing the most corpses won.)
Re: U.S. Drops 'E-Bomb' On Iraqi TV
John Kelsey wrote: I think there was some complicated argument about the Taliban not being a legitimate government, What's a legitimate government? One with enough firepower to make its rule stick?
Re: Trials for those undermining the war effort
Harmon Seaver wrote: And what makes you think things would have been any better in the absence of Christianity? You've heard of the Inquistion perhaps? The Catholic Church (which carried out the Inquisition, in cooperation with various governments) is not the whole of Christianity. There are also the Orthodox churches, the Protestant denominations, and various other branches. Furthermore, you haven't given any evidence that what happened in Europe was any worse than what has happened under countless tyrants the world over. Nor do you account for the crucial role the Christian religion played in abolishing slavery. Or the War On Some Drugs, the modern inquisition? You won't find a prohibition against using drugs, nor a requirement to persecute those who use them, anywhere in the Christian scriptures. Any monotheistic religion is by definition exclusive Exclusive as to what they consider proper object of worship, yes. persecutorial of others. "By definition persecutorial" is bullshit. I am no longer a religious person of any sort myself, but I know from personal experience what real-life Christians are like, as opposed to the cartoon caricature you seem to carry in your head. I've experienced both the good and the bad. Do you have any real experience with Christians, as opposed to the stereotypes promulgated on TV and in the movies by bigoted screenwriters and producers? One good thing that Christianity and other religions do is instill a sense of right and wrong in people and thereby promote adherence to basic standards of conduct. As Christianity (and religion in general) has waned in America, no adequate replacement for this function has emerged. Perhaps as a result, American culture no longer values honor and honesty. The protagonists in popular movies, TV series, and books have not the slightest moral scruples about lying, nor, in many cases, about stealing. There is no longer any shame attached to failing to keep your word. There is no longer any shame attached to sponging off of others instead of pulling your own weight. I'd like to think that we don't have to resort to superstitions to promote these moral standards, but the experience to date in America is not encouraging.
Re: Trials for those undermining the war effort?
Harmon Seaver wrote: But of course, the problems really pre-date all that, going back to when the christer Romans came and killed off the Druids and Wiccans who wouldn't bend the knee to conversion, as they did in the rest of Europe. You are completely and utterly wrong here. The Romans never conquered Ireland; furthermore, the conversion to Christianity was entirely voluntary and peaceful in Ireland. For quite some time there was an independent Irish Christian church that was independent of Rome. Don't assume that what held true in other parts of Europe necessarily held true in Ireland.
Re: U.S. Drops 'E-Bomb' On Iraqi TV
Damian Gerow wrote: I can only see two reasons for bombing with nuclear weapons: hate and stupidity. That being said, you'd have to *really* hate someone (or an entire country) to actually /use/ a nuclear weapon. That's nonsense. I can think of several entirely ethical uses of nuclear weapons, with the usage not motivated by hate but simple utility: 1. You have a large invading fleet approaching your nation. A few nukes out in the middle of the ocean could handily take out the fleet without getting any innocent bystanders. (This scenario occurs in one of Poul Anderson's novels.) 2. You have a large invading army crossing an uninhabited wasteland. Again, tactical nukes would be useful and ethical here. Use airbursts, though, to avoid producing a lot of fallout. 3. Power generation. One scheme I once read about for a fusion reactor involved digging a deep cavern, exploding a nuke within it every once in a while, and having the resulting heat drive your electrical generators. 4. Interplanetary transportation of a massive payload. Project Orion, anyone?
Re: Senators from Utah being Southern
Tim May wrote: Sorry, wrong again. Hatch is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, LDS, aka Mormon. Not an actual Christian church. Details available with Google. Basically, Jesus is no more a divine figure in LDS than in Islam. In fact, LDS and Islam share a number of things in common with regard to the role of the various prophets and seers. Sorry, but you've got your facts completely wrong here. Mormons very much consider themselves a Christian church; in fact, they consider their church to be the restoration of the church Christ originally established. Jesus is a divine figure in the LDS church. He's considered the literal son of God the Father; he's also considered the creator of the Earth, the Jehovah of the Old Testament, and a god in his own right.
Re: The burn-off of twenty million useless eaters and "minorities"
Tim May wrote: Swahili was the language they took to meet the minimal foreign language requirements. This sounds like the one worthwhile course in the bunch. One may learn a foreign language in order to be able to read important literary, historical, philosophical, or scientific works in other languages, in which case Latin, Greek, German, and French are good languages; in order to be able to communicate well with a wider group of people, in which case Spanish is a good language for Americans to learn; or just to broaden one's horizons, in which case I am told that Swahili is a good choice, as it is structurally so different from Indo-European languages.
Re: The burn-off of twenty million useless eaters and "minorities"
Tim May wrote: It goes beyond just the "black leaders" thing--it's also about "black pride." My eye-opening experience was my arrival in college (as Brits would say, "at university") in 1970. Well, this post explains a lot about Tim's attitude. Myself, I never ran into this kind of crap in college. I attended college 10 years later, in a conservative state (Utah). The few blacks I've encountered personally have mostly seemed to be decent people.
Re: Police state, plainclothes pigs need to die
Major Variola (ret) wrote: Girl driving in car is attacked by men in car and tries to escape the attack. The men are pigs (DEA, of course) out of uniform in unmarked car. She is shot in head. Pigs will get away with this, of course. She was Mexican, lower class, in Texas, so expendable. Donald Scott was lily-white, upper-class (millionaire), and lived in Malibu. He was expendable, too. Nowadays, the uniformed thugs can get away with killing *anybody* who doesn't have good political connections. The motto of the DOJ ought to be "State-sanctioned murder: it's not just for minorities anymore."
Re: Ethnomathematics
Anonymous wrote: Ethnomathematics Good lord, this sounds like it was practically designed to sabotage the prospects for minorities to excel in mathematics, by encouraging them to waste their efforts on nonsense and useless trivia.
Re: One Man Against the World
I've been reading DiLorenzo's book, _The Real Lincoln_, and this description is a pretty close fit to Abraham Lincoln, too. Eric Cordian wrote: --- A great, civilized nation democratically elected a fanatic demagogue, who preached war. Actually, he did not really receive the majority of votes, but, somehow, his ascent to power was arranged nevertheless. Lincoln only got 40% of the popular vote. At the time he was elected, it was generally assumed, and had been since the founding, that secession was a fundamental right of the states. The idea that the Federal Government could go to war to prevent states from leaving the union was unheard of. --- Soon after assuming power, he manipulated a dramatic incident in order to tighten his grip upon the country Fort Sumter. and prepare for attack on smaller nations. Such as the Confederacy and various Amerind nations. An immense propaganda machine turned "enemies" into devils, the incarnation of evil. An important part of Lincoln's propaganda machine was simply to imprison anyone who criticized him. He imprisoned any newspaper editor who had the gall to criticize him. Other newspapers he put out of business by instructing the Post Office not to deliver their publications (mail was the most common means of receiving the paper at the time). He had a Congressman arrested and deported for criticizing the war. He arrested a large portion of the Maryland legislature to prevent a debate on whether or not Maryland should support the war. --- The call for war enabled him to unite the whole people behind him, to silence all opposition, gradually abridge human rights, See above. Also, Lincoln illegally suspended the right of habeas corpus. (The Constitution allows its suspension in times of insurrection, but universal legal opinion of the day was that this required an act of Congress.) overcome the economic crisis and embark upon a voyage towards world dominion. The departure of the Southern states, which paid something like 80% of the expenses of the Federal Government, was indeed a great economic crisis for the Federal Government. DiLorenzo also argues that Lincoln's conquest of the south was the beginning of U.S. imperialism. --- He loved being photographed in uniform, walking along lines of soldiers, pretending to be a great military leader --- It's well-known that Lincoln micromanaged the war. I mean, of course, Adolf Hitler.
Re: Someone explain...Give cheese to france?
Tyler Durden wrote: Let's take one of my famous extreme examples. Let's say a section of the New Jersey Turnpike gets turned over to a private company, which now owns and operates this section. So...now let's say I'm black. NO! Let's say I'm blond-haired and blue eyed, and the asshole in the squad car doesn't like that, because his wife's been bangin' a surfer. So...he should be able to toss me off the freeway just because of the way I look? (Or the way I'm dressed or the car I drive or whatever.) Not if he wants to keep his job. This is supposed to be a profit-making operation, remember? Pissing off or outright throwing out paying customers is a good way to make the company lose money, which is bound to get the owners quite upset. Let's suppose, however, that the owners are such extreme bigots that they prefer nursing their prejudices over making money. Should the owners be able to arbitrarily deny certain people access to their property? In the absence of a valid contract to the contrary, OF COURSE. Anybody for whom this is not blindingly obvious still hasn't grasped the fundamental concept that most children acquire by the age of three or four: the difference between MINE and YOURS. The way I see it is there's private property, there's public property, and then there's reality with lots of stuff in between. No, there's private property, there are unowned (unclaimed) resources, and that's it. I don't consider the State to have any valid property rights at all, as everything which it claims as its property was obtained by theft, violence, or both. Your "stuff in between" is just a bunch of hooey invented in order to justify violations of property rights. Sort of like this "compelling state interest" test invented by the frauds in the Supreme Court to weasel their way past the clear and unambiguous wording of the First Amendment; no trace of the concept exists in the Constitution.
Re: Give cheese to france?
Harmon Seaver wrote: The better way to frame the question: May a private property owner legally exclude people from it? Seems to me the answer should be, as a general rule, yes Absolutely yes, except for the fact that malls have invited the public in, Are you saying that if I invite people to a party, I cannot then throw them off my property when and if they become abusive or offensive? so once you've done that, it's pretty hard to exclude some portion of it. No, it's not hard at all. "Sir, I'll have to ask you to leave the premises." That's all it takes. Plus the whole other issue of whether the malls aren't partially owned by the public. There is no "public," only individuals who sometimes, temporarily and in limited ways, work together. If they've used eminent domain then they are accomplices to armed robbery, and the property seized should be returned to its rightful owners, who may then exclude anyone they damn well please. It would probably be best for society as a whole Forget about "society"; only actual, individual people live, think, suffer, enjoy, have rights, etc. There's also the issue of corporations not having any civil rights in the first place Their owners certainly have property rights. These rights stem from their nature as human beings (or from God, if you are so inclined); they are not granted by nor subject to the approval of any government.
Re: Fw: Drunk driver detector that radios police
david wrote: But you wouldn't mind if insurance companies required the device in order for you to get a policy (whether or not it called the police or just the insurance company) ? Right ? If I did mind, I'd just find a different insurance company. It's a little bit harder for me to say, "I don't like government X; I choose to be governed by Y instead" while continuing to live in the same spot.
