Re: One Man Against the World
On Sun, Feb 23, 2003 at 10:46:31PM -0600, Kevin S. Van Horn wrote: 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 And has been rewarded thusly: http://www.mccullagh.org/image/1ds-1/lincoln-memorial-statue-2.html (Off-topic: That's from the first batch of photos I've placed online from the Canon 1Ds camera I reviewed, which is a very nice 11 megapixel SLR. If folks would like to see an excerpt from the full-size image, let me know. Justice Taney, who stood up to Lincoln and was promptly ignored, got a far less impressive statue here: http://www.mccullagh.org/image/12/chief-justice-roger-taney.html It's sad but predictable that journalists tend to lionize Lincoln without realizing that he was hardly a friend of a free press. Of course such a situation could never arise today. -Declan
Re: One Man Against the World
On Sunday, February 23, 2003, at 08:46 PM, Kevin S. Van Horn wrote: 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. JFK's father bought him the election. Look at the voting in Illinois, look at his father, the bootlegger. (I have nothing against bootlegging, but the hypocrisy of the Kennedy Clan railing against perceived moral crimes while making their family fortune off of bootlegging and graft is precious.) --- Soon after assuming power, he manipulated a dramatic incident in order to tighten his grip upon the country Fort Sumter. Bay of Pigs backfired, so Cuban Missile Crisis was the reserve plan. and prepare for attack on smaller nations. Such as the Confederacy and various Amerind nations. Escalating a nonexistent alliance with the Republic of South Vietnam, a cabal of dictators, into a war. I'm old enough to remember the Kennedy years and to remember how many people thought a bullet ought to end his power grab. Of course, he was canonized and sainted after his sacrifice, and so one seldom heard after this death the call I remember from 1961-62: Someone ought to put a bullet in that bastard's head. How soon we forget, and how much we have forgotten in this modern era that calling for the kiling of the Chief Criminal used to be a lot more common than it is today. It used to be we knew when bozos needed killing, and we weren't afraid of opining thusly. Today, however, The Criminal Whose Name May Not Be Uttered is uniquely protected from Someone ought to frag his ass comments. I liked it better when we thought Good riddance! when the Kennedy criminals were killed. --Tim May
Re: One Man Against the World
On Sun, 23 Feb 2003, Tim May wrote: Bay of Pigs backfired, so Cuban Missile Crisis was the reserve plan. Cuban Missile Crisis conveniently happened unplanned. Followup plan to Bay of Pigs was Operation Northwood.
The next time you see someone on TV in a newsroom
Remember this... http://www.mccullagh.org/image/d30-32/new-york-times-dc-bureau.html :) -Declan
Re: Deutsch Jackboots
On Monday, February 24, 2003, at 11:20 AM, Greg Newby wrote: You neglected the possibility that he's from the dreaded Other Side. Better call T.I.P.S. :-) But seriously, he could just be a mercenary: ex-soldier, ex-fed, whatever. There's no reason why the bank couldn't hire their own plain clothes guards. If he had weapons that non-soldiers can't get licenses for, I'd be more suspicious. -- Greg On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 02:01:39PM -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: Perhaps one of you crazies can shed some light on this. While grabbing some lunch I passed by the Deutch Bank tower further down on Wall Street. Standing in front is what is clearly no standard $6/hour security gaurd, though he has no uniform. The guy's wearing jackboots Jackboots are almost certainly _not_ what he was wearing. Presumably TD saw what are sometimes called jump boots or combat boots. jackboota heavy military boot made of glossy black leather extending above the knee and worn especially during the 17th and 18th centuries; a laceless military boot reaching to the calf http://www.apparelsearch.com/glossary_j.htm and a jumpsuit, and I can tell from his build he's some kind of soldier. (He's also armed, but the guns are not visible.) What's the deal here? It seems odd that the guy has no obvious uniform to make us all feel better (he'd certainly save us in the event of another terrorist attack), and scare away the numberless raghead terrorists. Is he there to make the Deutsch Bank execs feel better? Also, what's the deal with him not having any ID or anything? Does a US soldier have to be marked? (As for him being a soldier, take it from me I can tell this guy aint a standard rentacop.) Maybe not a standard rentacop, but TD is sorely mistaken if he thinks uniforms and ID badges need to be worn by various sorts of persons. For reasons too numerous to get into here. Most likely, private security employed by the bank. As for the more buff appearance than the usual retired doughnut eaters employed in the past, these are the times we live in. Where once such a paramilitary appearance would frighten the sheeple, now they are apparently reassured. --Tim May, Corralitos, California Quote of the Month: It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes; perhaps there are no true libertarians in times of terrorist attacks. --Cathy Young, Reason Magazine, both enemies of liberty.
Re: Ethnomathematics
On Monday, February 24, 2003, at 04:43 PM, Kevin S. Van Horn wrote: 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. Math be for whitey, Excel be for Microsoft whiteys and Chinks. Seriously, this flap is old news. I remember about a dozen years ago when some feminista professor was teaching female-oriented physics. Actually, she was _advocating_ the teaching of female-oriented physics. Her shtick was that classical physics is a male rape fantasy, complete with forces and the planets being pushed around in their orbits. (Showing, amongst other things, that she didn't know about geodesics and least action principles.) She advocating reframing physics in terms of envelopment (planets move as the Mother envelopes them) and nurturing (objects fall in order to be closer to the Mother) and vagino-centric principles. It was just this kind of postmodern, deconstructionist crap which made the Sokal hoax so timely (the one about the implications of Marxist ideology, blah blah, for string theory!). Frankly, if the inner city welfare mutants wish to study ebonomathematics, I'm all for it. The negro leaders in America are doing a very good job of putting the nigger back in the negro. Here's an image the censors are already trying to get removed: http://images.ogrish.com/2003/2212003/decap3.jpg --Tim The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals... It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of. -- Albert Gallatin of the New York Historical Society, October 7, 1789
Re: The next time you see someone on TV in a newsroom
This kind of stuff is standard practice. Ever seen a reporter interview a subject? The reporter usually only has one cameraman so they usually film the interview and at the end session they move the camera to where the interviewee was sitting and film the reporter nodding his/her head or something. Then they edit the video to insert the reporter into the middle so it looks more realistic. -- Neil Johnson, N0SFH
Re: The next time you see someone on TV in a newsroom
On Monday, February 24, 2003, at 12:20 PM, Declan McCullagh wrote: Remember this... http://www.mccullagh.org/image/d30-32/new-york-times-dc-bureau.html And I notice that hanging on the wall to the right in the photo is the New York Times -- Baghdad Bureau photo. All the news that's fit to simulate. And to think some people still think we actually _did_ go to the moon at one time. (P.S. I wonder how long it will be before publishing a photo debunking someone's Potemkin Village is a violation of the DMCA?) --Tim May You don't expect governments to obey the law because of some higher moral development. You expect them to obey the law because they know that if they don't, those who aren't shot will be hanged. - -Michael Shirley
Re: The next time you see someone on TV in a newsroom
On Monday, February 24, 2003, at 04:00 PM, Declan McCullagh wrote: On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 02:43:37PM -0800, Tim May wrote: And I notice that hanging on the wall to the right in the photo is the New York Times -- Baghdad Bureau photo. All the news that's fit to simulate. Heh. I went on CNN Headline News last week around 7:20 am ET. They put me in a studio I hadn't been in before, with a remote-controlled camera and a photo of the monuments in the background. After my brief segment was over, a camera operator came in and rolled down the background a few inches -- apparently it hadn't been adjusted correctly and all you could see was the sky. They have another background (a continuous loop, on rollers) for daytime, night, etc. Will try to remember to take a photo the next time I'm there. Those kinds of backgrounds are, I think, quite reasonable. They're very obviously just backdrops, as the lights don't change, lights at night don't flicker, clouds don't move, etc. CNBC uses them for San Francisco backdrops...usually the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Transamerica Pyramid, or the Bay Bridge. And they're even clever enough to usually have an overcast shot when the day is overcast, a clear and sunny shot as appropriate, and (less often for programming reasons) night shots. I think 99% of the viewers understand that it's just a visual cue to remind those not hearing or reading the intro about where the interviewee is located. Putting up fake newsrooms is quite another matter, though. I don't recall seeing this static shot of the New York Times-Washington Bureau newsroom. It seems like a silly thing to do, to have a photo of a newsroom with nobody in it. On the backdrops themselves, I'm surprised they're not using blue screen technology. The weather reporters have it, though with a sometimes visible edge (which is distracting). Since the War on (Some) Terrorists is the Wag the Dog War, we may soon be seeing actual faked war footage. (The best news has been that 100 or so American reporters have signed on to wear actual uniforms, to be assigned to combat units, and to participate in battles if need be. This I count as good news because it may mean that captured reporters are not held-and-released the way Bob Simon, for example, was in Iraq. This time they may face the same fate other captured enemy face. And it erases any misconceptions that the unquestioning press is actually independent of the military-industrial-media complex. Fox News -- Fair AND Balanced!) --Tim May Ben Franklin warned us that those who would trade liberty for a little bit of temporary security deserve neither. This is the path we are now racing down, with American flags fluttering.-- Tim May, on events following 9/11/2001
Re: The next time you see someone on TV in a newsroom
On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 02:43:37PM -0800, Tim May wrote: And I notice that hanging on the wall to the right in the photo is the New York Times -- Baghdad Bureau photo. All the news that's fit to simulate. Heh. I went on CNN Headline News last week around 7:20 am ET. They put me in a studio I hadn't been in before, with a remote-controlled camera and a photo of the monuments in the background. After my brief segment was over, a camera operator came in and rolled down the background a few inches -- apparently it hadn't been adjusted correctly and all you could see was the sky. They have another background (a continuous loop, on rollers) for daytime, night, etc. Will try to remember to take a photo the next time I'm there. -Declan PS: The newsroom itself: http://www.mccullagh.org/image/d30-32/new-york-times-washington-bureau.html
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: Deutsch Jackboots
On Monday, February 24, 2003, at 04:27 PM, Steve Furlong wrote: On Monday 24 February 2003 14:20, Greg Newby wrote: If he had weapons that non-soldiers can't get licenses for, I'd be more suspicious. Weapons that non-soldiers can't get licenses for includes pepper spray in NYC. And the notion that a guard having a weapon a non-soldier can't get a license for is flawed. Even in the most statist hotbeds of weapon control, in places like NYC and Washington, security guards can usually be issued a gun upon completion of a short training class (consisting of cartoons showing how guns are aimed...only a slight exaggeration). There is no weapon a security guard might have which would make me think he's non-civilian, except maybe for a Stinger. Even MP-5s are readily licensed to some security guards. At nuke plants, for example. And, no, they are NOT military. (Maybe former military, but not current, except in Protection of the Reich Alerts.) --Tim May How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? --Alexander Solzhenitzyn, Gulag Archipelago
Re: The next time you see someone on TV in a newsroom
You wrote: Waitisn't this a Philip K Dick book? The president's actually a simulacra made to convince workers to stay below ground because of the terrible war. But the truth is there is no war, and the underground folks are really just slave labor cranking out goods for the elite few up on the surface, thinking they are serving the war effort. Even better is the one by Anthony Burgess called The Wanting Seed IIRC, where the draftees, both men and women, are given basic training to firm them up, then held onboard ship for weeks fattening them up, then sent to the trenches where they are machinegunned, then butchered for Spam.
RE: The burn-off of twenty million useless eaters and minoritie s
At 10:31 AM 2/24/03 +, Vincent Penquerc'h wrote: ... Now, I may have left my clue home, so feel free to explain *why* 100% capitalism (eg no state left, no other power) could never end up with power aggregation. I don't think you can *ever* prove a claim like that, since you're dealing with humans, who can be only very imperfectly modeled. There's no system that couldn't possibly fall into some horrible state, whether that's tyranny or chaos or lemming-like rush to an unwinnable war or ostrich-like refusal to prepare for clearly oncoming war. Systems of human decision makers are driven by the decisions made by those humans, and sometimes, they're a bunch of idiots. More centralized decision-making has the ugly property that a smaller set of decision-makers have to be idiots to run the whole society into a ditch. On the other hand, more centralized decision-making makes larger projects possible sometimes, especially ones involving big, long wars. -- Vincent Penquerc'h --John Kelsey, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: 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. This was kind of the thrust of my recent posts on the black issue. There's almost the built-in assumption that they can't excel in math, so let's get them something that will at least keep them in the classroom. Fuck that. Black folks can do just fine in math, and believe me I know. But as long as you keep watering down the cirriculum, all you'll get is more lumpen prolitariat cranked out. Don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE to see the occasional history course in math and science pop up, and aware of Chinese and Arabic contributions to science and technology in particular. But let's not have another math-version of ebonics. -TD _ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
Re: Deutsch Jackboots
Steve Furlong wrote.. Weapons that non-soldiers can't get licenses for includes pepper spray in NYC. And nunchucks. I remember back in Washington Heights where I grew up, kids were knocking themselves out imitating Bruce Lee with home-made 'chucks (they'd cut a broom handle into sections and then attach them with the door chain). So the city outlawed 'em. (A couple of years later our dojo fell out of favor with the then chief-of-police, so one of the brothers was actually prosecuted for nunchuck posession!) -TD Interesting, by 6:00PM when I was going home I happened to notice 2 such soldiers. Was there a terrorist threat against Deutsch Bank, or just a meeting of the BOD? From: Steve Furlong [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Deutsch Jackboots Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2003 19:27:51 -0500 On Monday 24 February 2003 14:20, Greg Newby wrote: If he had weapons that non-soldiers can't get licenses for, I'd be more suspicious. Weapons that non-soldiers can't get licenses for includes pepper spray in NYC. -- Steve FurlongComputer Condottiere Have GNU, Will Travel Guns will get you through times of no duct tape better than duct tape will get you through times of no guns. -- Ron Kuby _ Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
Re: The burn-off of Tom Veil
-- On 23 Feb 2003 at 15:55, Tyler Durden wrote: With respect to the Cambodia issue, Chomsky is pointing out how US agit-prop and media take advantage of our lack of certainty with respect to the real numbers. Originally Chomsky lied about Cambodia, to deny the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. He changed his tune after the Soviet Union changed their tune. Chomsky estimates that only 800,000 are verifiable via publically accessible documentation. Chomsky originally claimed thousands, not tens of thousands, a statement he attributed to highly qualified specialists although the people he cited were too cautious to make the claim he attributed to them. As for the Cambodia issue, I think the US government's complicity in 'inadvertently' bringing the KR into power is a good precedent for what we're doing in the Middle East. Originally, Chomsky claimed that the Khmer Rouge were rebuilding Cambodia, that they were comparable to the french resistance, that the stories of massacres had been repeatedly discovered to be false, and so on and so forth. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG TF+XPgep9hB6HF8pL+yRUVdu6a9ckBKBghjWDY6S 4fZOVskt09IN81+t/M242V4VkWHdcJA35Af5Em3ET
RE: The burn-off of twenty million useless eaters and minoritie s
Title: RE: The burn-off of twenty million useless eaters and minoritie s Too much capitalism is as bad as too much communism. That's semantically equivalent to saying that too much economics is as bad as too much totalitarianism... Too much liberty is as bad as too much repression? Right. If you think capitalism is liberty, you have a problem. Capitalism would work as freedom catalyst only if it would not lead to the aggregation of power in some places. Once you have power, you use it. Pretending, like some did, that people with power would not use force once they reach the stage where they *can*, is disingenuous. And saying that this has then ceased to be capitalism misses the point: you end up in a society with centralized power, and which only differs from a state by the name. Which is why some capitalism is good, but too much is bad. I do concede that I'd prefer capitalism much better than communism though. My association of both on the same grounds was way overboard and triggered by this evil commie pinko nonsense. Now, I may have left my clue home, so feel free to explain *why* 100% capitalism (eg no state left, no other power) could never end up with power aggregation. -- Vincent Penquerc'h
Re: The burn-off of Tom Veil
On Sat, Feb 22, 2003 at 01:56:48PM -0800, James A. Donald wrote: Secondly in high welfare state countries, by definition, wealth is politally distributed, leading to correspondingly high levels of organized group violence, as frequently illustrated in France. Yes. And because wealth is politically distributed in such nations, you already have the mechanisms in place (lobbyists, demonstration organizers, pressure groups) who seek to keep it that way. Otherwise they'd lose their jobs and political influence (getting called over to the White House for tea). Amply explained by Buchanan's public choice theory, but with no end in sight. -Declan
Re: The burn-off of twenty million useless eaters and minorities
Harmon Seaver wrote on February 21, 2003 at 20:40:51 -0600: On Fri, Feb 21, 2003 at 11:10:11PM -, Tom Veil wrote: If you would trade Castro for Bush, you're either a totalitarian monster, or simply insane. Bush is obviously both. He's neither. I tend to think he's a well-meaning statist idiot. This of course, doesn't excuse his crimes. If you truly see no difference between the two, I wonder if, upon getting the opportunity to do so, you would vote with a raft and be the first person ever to emigrate from the US to Castro's Cuba. In any case, I've added you to my blacklist. Interesting that you have to speak from behind a remailer. I use remailers so I can state my opinions with complete and total impunity, without fear that my words will be used against me at some point in the future. Not that I'm even remotely opposed to remailers, I love them and use them all the time, but I also know that when someone uses one for converstations such as this, it's because of pure cowardice. That's your opinion. I'm sure many on this list see it as prudence. Why don't you come out in the open so we can killfile you? If you can't killfile me, you're incompetent. I always use the same nym. You're sounding more and more like a LEO troll. If I was a LEO, would I have called for the killing of gun-grabbing LEOs in a recent Usenet post?
Deutsch Jackboots
Perhaps one of you crazies can shed some light on this. While grabbing some lunch I passed by the Deutch Bank tower further down on Wall Street. Standing in front is what is clearly no standard $6/hour security gaurd, though he has no uniform. The guy's wearing jackboots and a jumpsuit, and I can tell from his build he's some kind of soldier. (He's also armed, but the guns are not visible.) What's the deal here? It seems odd that the guy has no obvious uniform to make us all feel better (he'd certainly save us in the event of another terrorist attack), and scare away the numberless raghead terrorists. Is he there to make the Deutsch Bank execs feel better? Also, what's the deal with him not having any ID or anything? Does a US soldier have to be marked? (As for him being a soldier, take it from me I can tell this guy aint a standard rentacop.) I'd take a photo but I have the distinct impression he'd try to nix it. (Also, I'm not too into attracting such attention around here.) -TD _ Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963
Re: Deutsch Jackboots
On Monday 24 February 2003 14:20, Greg Newby wrote: If he had weapons that non-soldiers can't get licenses for, I'd be more suspicious. Weapons that non-soldiers can't get licenses for includes pepper spray in NYC. -- Steve FurlongComputer Condottiere Have GNU, Will Travel Guns will get you through times of no duct tape better than duct tape will get you through times of no guns. -- Ron Kuby
