wwdn entries

posted at chatter.monkeylaw.org
Posted: Thu 17 Jun, 2004 6:33 pm Post subject:

from my experience as someone who has worked as a medical test subject and been in jail, the two populations are similar demographically. people who tend to be poor and not well suited to traditional jobs. the other vast pool of subjects is freshman psych students. institutional settings have advantages in terms of being easier to rigidly control for variables. on the other hand, a better way to do research, usually, is quasi-experimentation. with this approach, you don't rigidly control for variables. you give people medical care that seems indicted, collect data about how they do, and use statistics to figure out what if anything you learned. in one study, i was making $100/day until i came down with mono and had to quit (but got very good care for the mono.) hmm! private prisons charge $50/day.. such a project could pay for itself...
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The Divine El TFBShocked MonkeyJoined: 11 Jun 2004Posts: 27Location: California Central Valley
Posted: Thu 17 Jun, 2004 9:39 pm Post subject:

I love this thread! ! Using death row inmates as lab rats, that is brilliant. We would have a chance to rapidly speed up the pace of medical research and get ride of some of society’s dead weight, making the world a better place for law abiding citizens and saving the tax payer's money. And here I thought I was the only that was this heartless. I have advocated this for years and people told me that I was cruel and unfair. It is nice to final be around some practical people. I feel all warm and fuzzy.
_________________It is all fun and games until someone gets hurt and then it is just fun!
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Guest
Posted: Mon 02 Aug, 2004 11:26 am Post subject:

obviously there's potential for abuse. nazi experiments weren't just bad politics, they were bad science. shac, stop huntingdon animal cruelty, is a group with insight and effective tactics in this area. i'm about to go do a month as an experimental animal for eli lilly, i'm waiting to hear if i passed the screening. i'll make about $1000, which i needed to pay ransom to get me out of jail, where i was being tortured. i'm innocent of the underlying charges. as a result of the jail torture, i'm in an acute stage of depression. i was happy to find out i'll be able to stay vegan in this study. next step is i need to rent a laptop and get an online service so i can stay connected while inside. i'll be doing a study on a new aspirin type stuff. because of the depression from the torture, i missed a deadline in a big case i worked on for years, so have lost the case. the underlying cause of my depression is some childhood abuse, which is what motivated me to be a human rights activist. i'm on a downward spiral, but i've picked myself up before. back to topic, there's a lot to be learned from animal and human experimentation, but ethics are essential, both for the morality and for the science. i went into politics where most of my peers went into science, because i saw science perverted into a tool of totalitarianism. it doesn't have to be, and there's a lot a great work being done, for example by the open source movement, where good science is driving out bad politics. there's no reason you couldn't have open source prisoner- done research, where lifers get access to computers to teach them to be researchers, use themselves as test subjects, wholely participate in the process, and genuinely pay a debt to society, instead of being warehoused at taxpayer expense, which adds to the debt to society. it could be done well, it would more likely be done badly, ethics is a key. my undergrduate work was in ethics, which i hoped to make marketable via law school, but it hasn't worked out as planned.
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posted by gt at 1:33 PM

Wwd notes
(these notes areliike listeing to one half of a conversation, if i don't clip the posts they came from.) Nader Reconciliation Dog Water
Nader was on TV the other day. I stopped and listened. He gave a rousing speech hitting all the democratic themes. A bit like Wil in viewpoint. Tall, distinguished, dry humor, quick thinker. If only Gore had grown that beard in time, he might have had a bit of that.
Nader’s probably the most like Harry Browne, the last guy I voted -for-. Except on the issues, where he’s hopelessly pink. Nader could be the guy to get people excited, to get off their asses and go vote – democratic.
I can’t vote for bush, and I’m disappointed the R’s didn’t come up with a respectable candidate this year. I can’t vote for Kerry, and I’m disappointed the D’s didn’t come up with a respectable candidate this year. Probably at some point the Libertarian candidate will shake my hand and ask for my vote –that usually works. Otherwise, I could go with Nadir, as the irony candidate.
Wil quotes Dean on Nixon. Nixon did not win by pandering to racism. Nor did Reagan.
In 68, the Dems offered RFK, a liberal senator from the northeast, and when he didn’t work out went with HH, a liberal senator from the northeast. That doesn’t cut it with your average American. So their choices were Nixon and Wallace, and more chose Nixon. I don’t know much about Gene McCarthy. As far as I know, McGovern and Mondale were liberal senators from the northeast. Dukakis was governor, but of Massachusetts.
Nixon won because there was not a credible alternative.
Bush will win unless there is a credible alternative. So far, there ain’t. (Edwards at least looks electable. I assume his positions would label him non-mainstream, if those were known. I don’t know a lot about him.) Nader might cause more people to view a democrat as an acceptable middle ground. Nader’s not afraid to take on Bush.
The issue isn’t how many votes did Nader get in Florida; the issue is what would have happened if Nader wasn’t in the race? We don’t know.
Letters to congress-critters can be effective if one keeps in mind the maxim: all politics is local. Letter about the pot-hole in front of your house may be very effective. My roommate wrote to Senator Lugar about a problem she was having with the city bus line, and the problem got fixed, a few months later in time for her to move out of state.
Writing on topics of the day gets the letters weighed or counted, but not read – probably not an effective use of your time. My last such letter (to Senator Biden) was in 1972.
Ask yourself, am I using the meme, or is the meme using me?
The exception might be if you focus very narrowly on a topic no one else is writing about. Try to change one line in a budget or a bill, might work. Short story: once upon a time, a senator got 50 letters (one each) supporting guys who wanted to go to the naval academy, and he got 50 letters in support of Robert Heinlein going to the naval academy.
Guess who went?
You can test this theory, by getting fifty of your friends to oppose some small bit of federal spending in your district. Usually, though, the small bit of spending equals paychecks for 50 other guys, who write and call and gets their friends to write, cuz it’s a paycheck issue with them. This is a measurable goal – the money will be in the budget or not. If you can attain measurable goals, you can broaden the focus a little, testing to find the point of ineffectiveness.
Now, having an impact on state and local lawmaking by writing letters, is a whole nother story. One person can be very effective on the local level. My mom was. One person who has done their homework and knows where the bodies are buried can be an irresistible object or immovable force (er, vice versa.) Once you are known to be effective at your local level, your congress-critter will write to you. A few years ago I got one line written into one bill, and years later we’re still in litigation over whether or not it means what it says.
One exception to my “letters are futile” rule is that, if you’ve written it anyway, and the only cost is a stamp, that has a slightly different cost/benefit ratio. E-mailing, while easy, is pointless. At the end of the month they weigh the emails. Exception: emailing the staffer who already knows you, but still follow up with hard-copy.

That’s a tough one for me. I was watching a history channel life of stalin. I’m reading obsessively about LBJ, well aware that my feelings about LBJ are mixed up with my unresolved feelings about my father. There was a book I enjoyed, “the Alienist” which was (among other things) about showing how a serial killer is responding reasonably, as they see it, to social stimuli. Under certain circumstances, trying to take over the world, and killing those who stand in your way, looks pretty reasonable, especially if you know that the end result will be a better world. It’s not too different from what we all do.
I’m a little further along that spectrum than many of you.

posted by gt at 10:26 PM

(responding to a wilful post about k9h20)
I might not be the target market for this stuff. How’s it taste? What are the ingredients – specifically the flavorings. Is it tested on animals? I like the way that by packaging it as a pet food, they probably avoid a lot of red tape in getting the product to market.
I like the way that with a small amount of capital, and using the net, they get to turn an idea into a product, and a product into a company. I like the way almost any of us can do that. A society that is that open to innovation will run rings around a centrally planned economy.
It’s funny, to me, that the same people who get bent out of shape about Georgia not wanting to teach evolution, are often the ones most opposed to evolution in action in the marketplace. This product has a small niche as a novelty item. It might or might not find a bigger niche as an actual product dogs like and people buy.
For that matter, how is it as a mixer? People spend $3 on red bull at the bars.
Hint: excesses of capitalism lead to people generating new ideas, creativity, playfulness,
Learning, interacting, building tools that speed up the process, so in the next round, it’s faster and cheaper to generate new ideas, use creativity and playfulness, learn faster, interact more. This cycles on itself and soon the rate of change goes through the roof, and you hit a point called the singularity. Some say it’s already here, some say 2012,some 2050, but whenever that point is reached, serious weirdness follows. Stalinist command-and-control economies never make the breakthrough to the singularity. They can’t even come up with liver-flavored bottled water.

(i've been writing at wwdn again after a bit of a lapse, but had not been copying them here)
posted by gt at 10:23 PM

Thread: public moderation: a proposal.
http://soapbox.wilwheaton.net/viewtopic.php?p=665198#top
Yo!Philly wrote:
I agree with Lon. It would only serve as a point of humiliation. What would be next? Public flogging of offending posters?

Works for me. With some sort of opt-out system for those not so inclined.
I can see both sides. In my profession we use published decisions,
so people can find out not just what are the laws, but how do they get applied to cases. other disciplines use peer reviewed journals, or
greivance committees, or trial by combat in the alley out back, or
any number of dispute resolution procedures.

What we have here is more than just wil's playground. It's an emerging
virtual community in the hayekian sense, a marketplace of ideas.

For the most part it works fine as a benevolent dictatorship, like scandinavian monarchies. Eric Raymond discusses the attributes of leadership in online communities, and wil has those qualities,
ably assisted by a council of tribal elders, the mods.
It's anarchy in action like in somalialand, here no government is needed because people have built communities of respect and kinship networks.
But the benevolent dictatorship model has limits, and when king richard goes off to kill jews he leaves evil king john in charge, disputes happen,
a big charter gets signed, and we have this new concept called due process.
Currently the rule is "don't be a jerk" - if a user decides wil is being a jerk,
they ban him by no longer coming here. Too many users leave, the community dissolves, and the only ones left would be the fanboys.
Pericles has this vision of athens as a community, and implemented that, and for over a hundred years there was a marketplace of ideas in which socrates and aristotle invented much of modern philosophy.
I've been networking online since 1980, and seen various attempts at virtual community rise and fall.
Will this one last, if wil gets bored one day and hits the delete button?
Is virtual community possible, is it desirable,and is this the right place to look for it?
If this is an attempt at virtual community, it's not something wil can accomplish alone. The owner, the mods, the users, each have to participate in certain ways for the system as a whole to work.
Now maybe users are fungible and can be replaced. Wil could alter and abolish this set of 10,000 users and start fresh.
But i suspect that wouldn't work.

Basic questions of political theory arise, in this undiscovered country.
Some of you guys, wilful or billy, know more about sociology than i do, how customs develop, what their social functions are.
That set of theory hasn't been fully integrated into the newer approaches,
memetics, praxeology, socioeconomics in the mack reynolds sense.
How can we all just get along?
Let's not be afraid to examine this rigorously, to apply the different things we've learned in different majors at different schools or life experiences.
Whether wwdn flourishes or dies, each of us is going to have to confront these issues of how we choose to interact with the emerging virtual communities, so i think it's worth thinking about.
posted by gt at 7:25 PM

re: what have you gomne to jail for
(one of those annoying online qizzes)
This computer just won't scroll, so it's too frustrating to try to find, cut paste, posts, so i will give up for now or look for soemthing worth the trouble.
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I'm on this old p1 as a work around til i get a real computer (an old p2)
So just as i was writing "prostitution" i got this "illegal operation" box and had to reboot.
Stuff i have gone to jail for:
unlicensed driving.
unlicensed pharmacy
illegal concealment
outstanding warrants
protesting cia recruitment
warm place to sleep during blizzard
visit client.

so, prostitution: i'm open to your offers. reasonable rates, plus travel expenses. email rather than pm please. entertainment purposes only,
void where prohibited.

posted by gt at 5:09 PM

Wil writes:

Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2003 10:45 am Post subject: Project Censored: Top 25 underreported of 2002-2003

I look forward to reading Project Censored each year. They research and release a list of the major stories that are ignored or marginalized by mainstream media in the US.

I believe that the press has lost virtually all credibility, and when I read things like this, it just confirms my distrust.
_________________
ThIs IS WiL DoT SIg, so Kep YOu Hand OF IT O ElsE!

I respond:
I think the project is a good one, but misnamed.
I would expect wil, as an author and publisher, to understand the
distinction between stories that didn't sell, and stories that were
banned by force, censored.

specific comments:
problem: 174 million killed by big government.
solution: more big government of course!
maybe that meme doesn't sell well because it's been oversold before and is tired.

story number 13 is interesting. it urges that non-human persons, e.g.
"arbitrary aardvark, inc." be denied legal rights such as speech.
it supports the censorship of the ceo of nike for writing in the new york times. it doesnt take the position that the nike case hasn't gotten press.
it complains because the press has tended to side with the anti-censorship
arguments.
thus, the censorship project defines censorship as "speech that doesn't agree with ours," even when that disagreement is based on opposition to censorship.
I'm not clear if wil is saying "these are interesting stories that could use more attention" or if he is saying he agrees with that particular bit of
pro-censorship doublespeaking hypocrisy.

Perhaps this would be a time to mention that -this- board is valuable
precisely because we can express such disagreements and kick ideas around, and raise issues and points of view that are rarely seen in the mass media,
as part of a community of mutual respect and mojo,
and it's because of that value that some of us nitpick to extreme
new policies that might threaten that openness.
posted by gt at 5:00 PM

Ok, i haven't posted here in 6 months. I still post over at wwdn, i just haven't been copying to here.
I was away for a couple months with hardware issues, and the r+p board over there was shut down for a couple months in some kind of censorship ploy, i still don't know what that was about, but i'm back to posting over there alot. meanwhile, most of my blogging efforts have gone into
http://ballots.blogspot.com
where i blog about election law.

posted by gt at 4:53 PM

s an aardvark with rights, it's hard for me to stay away from threads like this.
monkeys wrote:
PETA is one of those groups that comes closest to being a homegrown terrorist organization. However, the way to fight for this is boycott...not breaking and entering.
No, it's a gut reaction because they are radical extremists.
And, I did try the vegetarian lifestyle.
And why is it that the animals they are defending can kill the slower weaker of other animals for food but the Humans can't? ...But to say that animals have a right to live and we shouldn't kill them, when every other animal in the world does the exact same thing, is just illogical.

do you eat people? if not, why not? I think we agree that eating people is wrong (usually). we just disagree about what a people is. you would deny my peopleness just because i'm not shaped like you.
[Quote:

It’s like the NAACP having a position on the welfare of my middle class white butt.

Actually, the NAACP, and their general counsel Thurgood Marshall, did a heck of a lot for the welfare of middle class white butts. The right to privacy set forth in NAACP v Alabama ex rel Patterson is something that I cite to in just about all my briefs on the right to political speech on the net.
The right to privacy is something god gave me as part of my heritage as an animal. Can I prove that to you? no. Humans are animals. If no animals have rights, no humans have rights.
You can try to deny my rights if you must, but at your own peril.
Treat others as you would be treated is a good survival strategy.
As Libertarian singer-songwriter melanie says, I don't eat animals and they don't eat me.
(Actually technically i'm a mammals rights advocate; insects and virii don't feel pain and terror and fear in the way that is relevant to respecting the rights of others.)

paige: perhaps you are confusing peta with someone else. it's like the distinction between sinn fein and the ira. if y'all think peta are extremists, you are in for .. some enlightement. cows got guns.
http://www.tvshows.de/alf/
Within our lifetimes computer-to-brain interfaces should improve dramaticly. This will be applied to "chattel", "livestock" etc, at first just for economic reasons, or as part of the research. Through rapid evolution of technology, nonhuman animals will have more tools at their disposal, more ability to manipulate their environment. no reason that can't include wmd. remember the tnuctipin?
Quote:
I dont give a damn about my bad reputation
and I’m not trying to improve my station.
posted by gt at 12:22 AM

(first entry in a month. i've been staying away, spending time offline. issue: confederate flag.)
see this is what r + p is supposed to be about. good thread, varied opinions, people sharing different perspectives based on geography and personal history.
I'm from east of the mason-dixon, so I can see a bit of both sides of this.

various paralells are available. schoolkids are slaves, forced into concentration campuses by compulsory education laws, denied basic civil rights, treated as second class citizens, because that is the natural order of things, according to aristotle and the bible. Slaves of the local government, whioch in turn is largely but not totally under federal control.
In any such situation you could expect the captive population to develop a culture of resistance in which symbols which appear to mean one thing have other deeper meanings.
You could also expect high rates of drug abuse, suicide, depression. look at an Indian reservation - same pattern.
So the tshirt with the stars and bars may be an anti-slavery statement,
a slightly cryptic one.

The state i'm from has seen various flags at various times, sweden, dutch,
english, pennsylvania maybe?, usa, and our state flag, blue with a gold diamond.
I think the reason some people wear or display the confederate flag is related to why at times i wear the ancient stewart tartan.

After the battle of Culloden in 1746, traditional Highland Dress was banned along with tartan from 1746-82.
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0328-06.htm
For one thing it's about history, about understanding how we got here and about showing due respect for our ancestors.
It's also about today - scotland finally got its parliment (legislature?) back just recently.

1610 - dixie settled by europeans. 1620 - my family immigrates from holland to new england.
1610-1776 - a period of nationbuilding. the new nations band together in a defensive alliance to throw off the oppressive central government.
1776-1781 - the defensive alliance is organized under the articles of confederation.
was it 1782? bloodless coup overthows confederacy, replaces articles with
constitution. overall a good document, but has a few weasel-words like
"commerce", "necessary and proper" that over time allow the central government to become oppressive.
1783-1860 constitutional period.
1860 - republicans seize power in highly questionable election. terrorists
attack fort sumpter's twin towers. president decides to go to war over oil, i mean slavery.
1861-1865 - war of northern agression.
1866-2003 federal occuption of dixie.
1916 - easter rebellion
1945 - british occupation of india ends.
1946-1960ish - decolonial period in which empires tend to allow local self-rule, mostly leading to squalor and despotism, as the new regimes make the same mistakes the empires did.
1974 - vietnamese kid displays flag of south vietnam. he and his family are executed.
1900-2000 - 100 million people killed by their own governments.

Question for canadians: during the war of northern agression (where our north is your south) lincoln's secretary of state suggested that if the british kept sending supplies to the south that canada should be invaded. if this had happened, would you today feel comfortable as part of the united states, or might you keep a canadian flag around somewhere, and have a sense that there was something wrong with having dc run your lives?
If so, would that canadian flag be a symbol of racism?

Question for americans: if bush is hung for war crimes and the UN takes over, probably very gradually, the way you cook a frog, will your grandchildren be flying american flags? If so, are they doing so out of racism?

Like I said, I'm from east of the mason-dixon, I don't have a dog in this hunt. Or maybe i do - in 1776 my state succeeded not only from britain but from pennsylvania, and we regard our soverienty and independence as precious. So we can relate to those who who have fought that battle and lost. For now. "In zimbabwe we fought for 100 years." - gil scott heron.

Unquestionably racism is part of the equation. Mostly it's about classism.
Poor white trash, scots-irish and german, wanting to be left alone, and the ruling elites, wanting the white trash to be their serfs, servants, employees taxpayers and cannon fodder.
But it's also about racism. Elites know how to divide and conquer. In usa prisons (crime colleges,in which many of the inmates are political prisoners of the still smoldering civil war) it's not inmates versus wardens, it's black gangs against white gangs against mexican gangs. With 2 million in prison, the racist subculture of the prisons spreads throughout the rest of society. Who are the real racists, the aryan brotherhood in the prison, or the liberal democratic assistant district attorney who has the job of locking up young balck male entrepreneurs? The racist system does not require overtly racist beliefs by its worker ants. The ones exhibiting overt
racism, e.g. flying the stars and bars in that context, are usually indicating their own powerlessness and frustration.

Ah, that was fun. been awhile since i've had a good rant.

Now i need to get back to work. The case I am working on started out in federal court, but judge posner agreed with me that certain of the issues properly belong in state court, so I'm now working on my brief to the Indiana Supreme Court, where I will be arguing that free speech -
including wearing ambiguous political tshirts to school - is protected by the state constitution. So issues of federalism are vital and alive today; this stuff matters.
_________________
nolan chart: 100/100 www.lp.org/quiz kinsey# pi earth first mars next

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posted by gt at 3:15 PM

:
Please remember that this is clearly not how the majority of low-income families live in our country. I would be interested to know how many other cities are trying such a tactic.

It really bugs me that many government officials talk about this digital divide, which, yes, may be important in being a well-read, informed person. But aren't things like clothing, basic education, shelter, food and health care more important than have access to the *&#(@ing internet???

In my state the majority of low income families live within bicycling distance of a public library with net access. I'm one of them; I spent much of yesterday online at a library i'd ridden my bike to.
(There's also a substantial minority of rural poor with a different set of issues.) This kind of thing indicates the way our society is transforming into a post-scarcity model.
Cheap solarpowered net access is going to transform the 4th world.
Jyoti's idea of a social mimium can be addressed with free internet,
a monthly bag of soylent purple (It's purple!), a coupon for a packet of seeds and directions to the communty garden plot. Maintain an online lifestyle checklist and earn a coupon for an up to once a month visit to a health care clinic.
Get a job or start a business if you feel like it, participate in the open source gift economy if you feel like it.
Violate someone's rights and expect to pay restitution, which might involve being rented out in a labor contract or even having your organs auctioned off if no one will front you the restitution.
Choose to have kids, expect to be held acountable for providing for them.
If that doesn't suit you, don't take the antidote to the birth control drugs in the soylent purple.
If you don't have a place to stay, and have made yourself unwelcome at every housing coop in the city, you can check out a tent at the library for up to 30 days while you build a yurt from the kit. The government will gaurantee your financing for a yurt kit through two-finger jimmy's loan and grill, and will make sure jimmy's capital is protected, but the interest is between you and him.
Fail to wear a seatbelt at your own risk - the few cops we have left spend all their time on rights violations, but most of that is handled by private security, insurance comapnies, and the open source crime watch teams like disaster action kids. "I woulda got away with it too, if it weren't for those darn kids"

posted by gt at 3:28 PM

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A lot of people dismiss twain as a children's author, and miss the point.
His plain language was a reaction to the flowery purple prose of his day.
Compare him with dickens, and dickens is good, most of the authors of that era are just unreadable now. I'll admit i'm not much a hemingway fan, some of it's fairly dull, although he also was part of that movement about writing with short words and short sentences and not letting fancy language get in the way of telling a story.

Twain 's main contribution is as a satirist; he used humor as a weapon in the struggle for human rights. He was a humanist in a fundy culture.
here's a story about a guy who read a fotnote about twain's work to document belgian actrocities in the congo, and then wrote a best seller
about the situation.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=1059
here's twain's book, king leopold's soliloquy, sorry about the .pdf format.
http://diglib1.amnh.org/articles/kls/
"No American publisher dared print it."
Here is "the war prayer" and other anti-imperialist writings of twain.
This stuff is fresh, fully applicable to today. And it's public domain.
http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/twain/
I once visited Hanibal Missouri, the setting for Tom Sawyer, and stayed a year. It was like stepping into a time machine and going back 50 years from the way things were in Boulder Co. It's a depressing place, where twain tourism is the main industry, that and a pesticide plant and place where they make deviled ham. Some of the attitudes twain wrote about are still around.
If you've never read twain, he's worth checking out.
If you think you've already read twain, there's probably stuff you've missed. Also of course "mark twain" is probably the best known pen name, and it's mentioned in McIntyre v Ohio, the case that establishes the right to anonymous political speech, which is the area of human rights activism that i currently specialize in.
Bought my first house, then found there were no jobs.

posted by gt at 1:40 PM

:

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gt_bear wrote:
Recently somebody posted a site where you can make your own webcomix from character templates and text boxes,
and I promptly lost the url, anyone have it handy?

www.stripcreator.com

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gt_bear
Uakari

Joined: 31 Jul 2002
Posts: 1288
Location: arbi the arbitrary aardvark
Posted: Mon Jan 27, 2003 7:50 am Post subject:

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Thanks non.

http://dexlives.keenspace.com/d/20010706.html

And dex is absolutely delightful.
It's -6 F out there, and my pipes did not freeze. Luckily I'm unemployed, so I don't have to go out in it. Not only that my tv mysteriously healed itself. Or at least it's getting fox.
So the day's off to a great start.
http://dexlives.keenspace.com/d/20010810.html
Ok, i gotta ask. They're cute and all but what the heck are they?
It'll be a d'oh moment when you tell me; i should know, but can't place it.
Seahorses? Gazelles? Giraffes? Aliens? Mermen?

Later edit: RTFM.
A: They’re dragons. Horned, fire-breathing dragons. Horned, fire-breathing dragons who otherwise happen to look fairly human. I have been reliably informed that they could be considered a species of faerie dragons, which are smaller and more intelligent than their traditional gold-hoarding traditional counterparts, and are sometimes mammilian as

posted by gt at 9:35 PM

Posts: 23
Location: arbi the arbitrary aardvark
Posted: Sun Feb 23, 2003 7:51 pm Post subject: moksha? no thanks, i just ate.

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http://www.essaybank.co.uk/free_coursework/1309.html
This ^ rambling essay has a word, [i]theodicy[/i], for what you might be looking for.

I don't have the answer to your question. The above essay might point
in the direction of where to look for some smart people who've given this issue serious consideration. I don't know if they've come up ith good answers. The same sets of people have attempted "proof of the existence of god" and come up with lame flawed arguments which we recently discussed in another thread. Still, I have vague recollections from a course i took once that there have been some good arguments on this issue.
Your claim that nothing can justify the suffering of one person is a strong one. The autonomy of the one outweighs the needs of the many, and failure to grasp this basic concept is a key flaw in many attempts to
contruct moral systems.
Arguing that a deity should be worshiped isn't very high on my personal agenda, so you should look elsewhere for such arguments.
I will note that an underlying cause of depression is often loneliness,
and that if you accept Great Monkey, or Bob, or Mithras, or whoever, as your personal savior you won't be lonely anymore, delusional maybe.
The hare khrisna, a fundy offshoot of hinduism, say that chanting the
transcendental name of god will resolve these difficulties.
Hare Khrishna Hare Khrisna Khrisna Khrishna Hare Hare Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare, repeat ad naseum.
But they also say you shouldn't do it if you aren't sincere, and I wasn't, so I stopped that experiment and kept going back for the yummy food.

But the reason for my post is a different approach entirely. If suffering is caused by depression, fix the depression. A specific instance of the general proposition if suffering is caused by x, fix x. "Doctor it hurts when i do this." "Don't do that." A friend of mine was troubled by depression, and wrote some books that are helpful, and gave them to me, so that I could give them to you. Here they are. www.mcwilliams.com/books
And then those bastards killed him. While I was deeply depressed over the past several years, I had one of his books that I was using as a doorstop.
It was the right size and weight and made a great doorstop. I wasn't in the right frame of mind to read it then; I'm reading it now and it's great.
That's the trouble with depression; when one is depressed, one isn't open to hearing about solutions. My lover used to get severely depressed,
with good cause, but it was incredibly frustrating to stand outside that watching it happen and knowing that nothing I said would reach her or help. So to anybody who is struggling with depression, peter mcwiliams'
books have some great answers, but only if you are ready for them.

posted by gt at 8:55 PM

signs of the apocalypse?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://street.safeshopper.com/328/cat328.htm?937
We can make you one in a jiffy. Ask about our free american flag decals.

http://www.well.com/user/davidu/extinction.html
If we lose 1/3 of known species in 30 years, how many do we lose in 90 years?

If you were writing about the coming singularity 100, 1000, or 2000 years ago, can you see it might be hard to get the point across clearly and concisely? These aren't the end times, for those willing to see them through, but there are weird times ahead. The rate of change has been accelerating, gradually but measurably, and we are coming to the point of the curve where changes that took centuries will happen in weeks.
Be prepared. Don't let school get in the way of getting an education.
The most bizarre science fiction is going to be tame compared to how weird things are getting soon. Still, a good grounding in sf can be very helpful. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

posted by gt at 3:11 AM

:
MsRetro wrote:
What makes conservatives unpopular in liberal communities is their assumption that what they think is right is right for everyone.

Lara

WHAT!!! Are you.....edit.....I.....edit......and......edit...AAAAHHHHHH.

Now that I got that out of my system without being thrown out of here by Dan , you TOTALLY just defined a liberal. My God, Liberals want to take care of you in every aspect of your life from cradle to grave because they think they can run your life better for you than you can run it yourself! edit......edit.....edit....edit I don't even smoke and I need a cigarette. ARG, I'll finish later, after I stop the smoke from comming out of my ears!

Well, jer, if this helps any, what she posted can be read either way.
Does their and they modify conservatives, or liberals? True statement either way, just very different meaning.
Familiar with the Kantian imperitive?
If I have it right, it says, I should choose rules for myself that, if followed by everyone, would maximize overall utility.
Not claiming to have it quite right.
Some choices are about tastes, and aren't universalizable. I like the taste of chocolate ice cream, but that doesn't mean you must.
That's why the golden rule is a bad standard for decision making; the person who likes chocolate ends up giving it to the person who would rather have vanilla. Rand had that stuff figured out better than some others.
Now here's where my Kant gets fuzzy.
I believe that the world would be a better place if we didn't kill each other for trivial reasons, and to kill a calf just to take its mother's milk to make chocolate ice cream is a trivial reeason, so I don't buy ice cream.
But can I universalize that and insist that you not buy ice cream either, or is Kantianism only about an individual's choice of morality?
Btw you might disagree with my calf example; I disagree with alot of Kant's attempts to provide examples of his theory in action;
you might not tend to include "calf" in "each other"; one of the problems with applying a kantian imperitive is in asking the right questions, framing the issue with the right level of specificity.
As usual, i've overintelectualized and thereby lost much of my small audience...

posted by gt at 1:23 AM

Monkey Angst wrote:
Outworld wrote:
Plus, registering is a big show of support for your forums, and I'm all for supporting a webcomic that is funny, yet political, somewhat controversial maybe, but in the end downright fun to read!

I think in order to be controversial, there has to be controversy, and for that I think a lot more people need to read it.

What are your syndication policies? That is, let's say I know some guys who send a monthly packet of stuff to small town newspapers in indiana,
most of which probably aren't really receptive to your editorial stance, but are hard up for copy. Do I have your permission to include monkeylaw toons? I probably won't ever get around to doing this, but getting permissions would be a good start. Ghastly's not quite what i'm looking for. Dex Lives is probly my fave right now. Someday I'll put links here to my blog, which has no readers. No, i got that backwards, i'll put links to here on my blog, which has no readers.
arbitraryaardvark @ themail.com

posted by gt at 1:22 AM

:
skc wrote:

(p.s. In the interest of fairness, I'll point out this interesting rebuttal to the claims of a Bush-Nazi connection.)

Quote:
"The silver spoon in George W. Bush's mouth was bought and paid for by Nazi butchers, who yanked the fillings from dead Jew's mouths."

.

My new word for the day conspiranoia. There's a book and a yahoogroup even..
Quote:

In early 2001 Edwin Black published a widely publicized study of "IBM and the Holocaust" detailing how IBM's German division was instrumental in developing the Hollerith tabulators Nazis used to process concentration camp prisoners.
http://www.thethresher.com/indiscreet.html
from another list i'm on.
mike godwin wrote:

Subject: Re: cfp2003?
At 7:13 PM -0500 2/19/03, Eric C. Grimm wrote:
>He also demonstrated how the Holocaust
>would not have been possible without Hollerith machines from IBM to handle
>the data-processing tasks.

They were called "Hollerith Catalogues."

--Mike

45833 From: Mike Godwin
Date: Wed Feb 19, 2003 10:49pm
Subject: Re: cfp2003?

This of course was my little joke on Stewart Brand.

--Mike

>]> They were called "Hollerith Catalogues."
>]>
>]>
>]> --Mike
>

So here we have the author of godwin's law discussing connections between US industry and the nazis. Dunno quite what to do with that.
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/legends/godwin/

posted by gt at 12:05 AM

edited into next post

posted by gt at 11:14 PM

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Once upon a time, there were japanese folk tales of monsters.
Then, the first of the godzilla movies. (I don't know if there was a manga version first)
Then there was a hollywood remake, with cgi and other special effects that wouldn't have been available to the original directors.
2010, tokyo, a young wannabe filmmaker, let's call him ron, is having some sake with fellow students, whining about how his screenplay for a remake of godzilla will never get made. He rejects animation, models,
guys in godzilla suits, cgi, as each not being realistic enough. Animatronics?
Maybe, but look at the budget we'd need. We'd have to rob a bank.
"Or have godzilla rob the bank for us?"
"Hmm," spoke up hiro "I'm a bioengineering student, you know? And I have to turn in a senior project proposal next month. I've been planning to design a new species of nematode, but that's so been done before.
What if we were to design the godzilla you want, and grow it in the laboratory? Give me all your design specs, and I can throw something together and turn it in as my project proposal"
"You should not joke about your senior project. You are drunk again. You will get us all expelled."
"Always the optimist aren't you? I tell you what. I'll finish my nematode proposal, and submit this one as extra credit. That way the plagarism rules for the senior project proposal won't apply, and you can all help."
"With ron's screenplay and hiro's bioengineering proposal, we can put together a business plan and get an economic development loan from
mitsui zaibatsu. We rent an island, stock up on sake and pr0n, send periodic progress reports, and 6 months later a mysterious fire destroys the studio and we report that the projections are unfavorable and that the project should be scrubbed.
And that, friends, is how godzilla is going to help us rob a bank."

That was how it started, how my grandfather unleashed the demons that are all that is alive now on nippon, and why we live here on neotoyko,
hoping that the godzilloids don't discover space travel. -30-

posted by gt at 7:09 PM

pm Post subject: Evolution VS Godzilla...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

JK...but its a real scarey foreign movie with english voiceovers...JK again.
I was wondering what the balance of evolution vs religion would be if I put the topic in here too. I go to a website that discusses a certain religion's faults(contradictions) and the regulars post scientific stuff about winged dinos and evolution topics, then the religion's spokepeople come in and defend said religion and try to find links that would disprove what science has found so far. Real interesting reading and alot of name calling.

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gt_bear
Uakari

Joined: 31 Jul 2002
Posts: 990
Location: arbi the arbitrary aardvark
Posted: Sat Feb 22, 2003 5:32 pm Post subject:

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I just been reading steven hawking's illustrated short history of time, in the bath because the soapbox was down for awhile. So my biases tend to run toward science, if not the modern infrastructure of science.
Hawking talks about gallileo as inventing scientific method, replacing
aristotle's deductive approach. If you have a theory, test it against reality, see if it works. Kuhn's the structure of scientific revolutions is also on topic. At one time, the genesis model was good science, and the lifestyle advice in the torah was practical, good sound advice recording the oral history of healers; kosher means health.
Newton's model of gravity works pretty well for most things most of the time, but sometimes you need to work with a more exact model based on relativity.
Hawking points out that gps's use relativity; a newtonian gps would be off by a mile or two and you wouldn't find your geocache.
It would be irrational to continue to adhere to a failed early model which had been disproved, and shown not to work.
The pope certainly thinks so; the big bang model of the origin of this set of galaxies has the papal seal of approval.
So what kind of "religion" is it that denies understanding about the way the world works? If god created the universe, and the conditions by which we became intellegent, what sort of an insult is it to deny the reality of how the universe works? Is this irrational, or am i missing something? If irrational, what other irrational beliefs of behaviors do I need to worry about from these people?
Now, I don't have a gps, and newtonian physics works pretty well for me most of the time. Does evolution matter, or is it one of those things that only comes up in rare circumstances?
For the old testament hebrews, life was pretty much the same day to day.
Sure, the hittites had bronze weapons, and then the assysrians came up with iron, so there was already an arms race going on, but change was slow.
The way evolution works is towards a more self-aware universe.
Simple stars give way to more complex stars with planets and 100 or so elements. Life forms, either on the planets or in space and winds up on the planets. Life learns how to taste, and then smell, and then see. Eagles, or vultures, have good vision and in that sense have awareness; a planet with eagles is more evolved, more self-aware, than one without.
Then comes language, culminating in english. Writing. Printing press.
Tesla invents fm and farnsworth invents the tv. Computers, internet, the soapbox. Stellar evolution, biological evolution, cultural evolution, memetics, technological evolution, steps to a more self-aware universe.
My grandmother was born on a farm in the 1800's and saw automobiles,
radio tv computers space travel, prevention for smallpox and polio,
doubling of the average american's lifespan. Our life is not like hers; the rate of change has increased dramaticly; our future is going to be very different than the past.
An understanding of evolution is absolutely key to coping with the coming singularity.
Without it, you'll have no idea what's going on.
Sure, there's still room for humility. The tower of babel problem. "Now that we have the steam engine, we no longer need god." steam engine,
light bulb, atomic power, the internet, a golden calf...
The old testament sets out rules for living, that are well adapted to the climate and technology of the old testament, but those have changed.
New rules for living are needed that fit today's climate and today's technology. Those might be loosely based on the earlier rules, but
updated and refitted. And the rules can no longer be based on generations of trial and error, gradually seeing what works - there isn't time.
Each generation needs to construct an ethics for now.
Trying to get by on yesterday's ethics, now moldy fermented expired and yucky, won't work, nor will forgetting the lessons of prehistory and trying to start totally from scratch.
Last time i wrote one of these "life the universe and everything" posts the board went down when i hit enter, but we'll see...

posted by gt at 6:35 PM

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Going to Mars is vital. It does not follow that NASA should be the entity to get us there. I'm guessing China, India, or a private consortium could get there faster and cheaper; what Japan's role would be is less clear.
For Kennedy, the space program was about getting americans excited about developing the high tech that would give a winning edge in the cold war.
For Johnson, it was a way to bring jobs to texas and funnel billions to his cronies brown and root, who had financed his journey from congressional aide to president.
Nixon was probably in it for the PR.
But since then the space program has been a questionable investment for the US government. I don't mean the nation or the people, I mean the government. That money could have spent invading canada or mexico, or buying votes in the inner city, or building new prisons for poltical prisoners, or whatever it is government likes to do with your money.
What is the payoff, to the government, of going to mars?

Meanwhile there is this whole other space race going on, of sattelite tv
and telecom, companies going into space because that's where the money is. It's a gamble, see Iridium, but gambling on longshots is something the market is good at.
Microsoft could be spending a billion a year on a (wo)manned mission to mars just for the pr value.
Hollywood could chip in 100 M to make a movie about it.
naming rights to the spacecraft could go for a bundle.
I don't know exactly how it will play out, but I think we need to look beyond the welfare model of the space program.
Tax credits for the rich for mars investments maybe.
Those M&M guys, they're from Mars aren't they?
Make space travel an olympic event.

posted by gt at 6:34 AM

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RolleisRule wrote:
Strict Construtionism?
Open to interpretation?

Please post views and opinions on why you think one way or the other, or both. Or niether.

Let's try (yeah-right) and keep this non-partisan. I'm looking for individual opinions, not party lines. Why do you think the way you do?

Edit: Would someone move this into R&P please? Ooopsie.

The constitution isn't perfect, but it's better that what we've got. (JBay?)
More strictly construed, and the constitution might be an obstacle, and could be gotten rid of, by several methods.
So it's kept open to interpretation, and the only sections occasionally enforced are those with a strong public constituency.
And so the document survives.
Parts of it are very specific ["shall not be infringed"] while other parts are deliberately vague [due process equal protection privileges and immunities.]
When the hearts and minds of the people support the constitution, the politicians follow. When people no longer care about their liberties, they erode.
I believe that the rights set out in the constitution include fundamental rights given by god, and that in fighting for the preservation of those rights I'm doing god's work. pretty good clue i'm insane, eh?
Or perhaps the "god-given" is just a convenient con, and what i mean by rights are just strongly held personal preferences.
When my rights were violated at age 14, i knew enough to be offended, but not enough to be able to respond effectively. I began close study of the constitution and case law at 17, just past the peak of the brennan-marshall period when courts were expanding rights due to popular support.
When my rights were violated at 19, I understood pretty clearly what had just happened, but kept pretty quiet about it.
By the time i was in my 30's i was a little more confident, or foolish,
and began suing and winning.
This can be a fun hobby if kept in perspective. I can't recommend it as a career choice. Nearly all of you will be confronted at some point in time with having your rights violated, once you learn to recognize when that happens. At that point you can waive your rights, or sue.
later edit: i forgot to add that your state constitution is the main source of your rights, but you have to read it, learn it, and apply it.
I agree with the article wyatt cites right below this.

posted by gt at 6:28 AM

Jyoti Mishra wrote:

Ultimately, I'd like to see an economic system in which the bare minimum is provided, so no-one goes hungry or homeless or dies of ill-health because they're too poor to afford payment.

You did say ultimately. But this seems like you have described only the benefits without addressing the costs. Food and maybe homes and health care are scarce resources. Where will they come from? Santa claus?
The united way? Like on pitcairn, by investing the national surplus?
Slavery, either of some of the people all of the time or all of the people some of the time? Bonus checks from the single tax fund?
Quote:

BUT...
I'm not against the idea of people working harder to earn themselves luxuries on top of the bare minimum. And if everyone was guaranteed food and shelter, they couldn't do this by exploiting people who have little other choice.

I agree a social minimum would remove some of the problematic aspects of the volantarism philosophy i've been advocating. I've never claimed my method is perfect or is all butterfies and flowers - only that it is preferable,
at a practical and moral level, to every other system i've encountered.

Quote:

Diverging a little, it's like the porn industry. If a man or woman is a genuine exhibitionist who loves to have sex in public, then this might be the industry for them. But how many people get into the seedier side through a sad chain of poor initial circumstances and being dealt a bad hand before they were born? Yes, I know they're still exercising a choice but it's not like they've got a whole palette there.

Well put! I'll take porn analogies over sports analogies any day.
Sam Stern has written about these themes in the ol' porn journal at
www.jewishcheerleaders.com (hope it's clear that that's not safe for work)
As an aspiring pornographer myself, you make an important point.

Quote:

Which is all a rambling way to say I'm in favour of freedom but I don't believe you can have true freedom where there's extreme poverty, only where everyone is rich (in the sense of being well-fed and housed),
love and kisses,
Jyoti

I would turn this around; you only find extreme poverty where there is a lack of true freedom. When there is freedom, almost everyone will choose to do at least the minimal work necessary to be rich (in the sense of being fed and housed.) In the case of children who are not yet able to be self-sufficent, i believe they have a claim on their fathers, and if the father is dead and had no insurance then their mothers, and if both are somehow dead and left no insurance, perhaps their extended kinship networks.
(bein interupted by chat, might come back and edit to discuss bowling
posted by gt at 6:17 AM

:
Citizen Corps Councils will also promote and strengthen the Citizen Corps programs at the community level, such as Volunteers in Police Service programs, CERT teams, Medical Reserve Corps units, and Neighborhood Watch groups; provide opportunities for special skills and interests; develop targeted outreach for special needs groups; organize special projects and community events; encourage cooperation and collaboration among community leaders; and capture smart practices and report accomplishments.

If there is not a Citizen Corps Council in your area, please contact your State Citizen Corps representative and work with your local officials to get one started. Citizen Corps Councils provide the local level support to help create the groundwork for the long-term security of our neighborhoods, our communities, and our nation.

Got 2 or 3 friends who have a sense a humor and like to drink?
Organize a citizen corps council for your dorm/cell block/cubicle.
The ideal CCC has a softball team, a bagpiper, and the phone # of the red cross. Then you have an annual picnic, issue some press releases now and then, and quietly join and subvert the dominant paradigm.
Within three years no one will remember a time when there wasn't a ccc in your town, and you can start quietly picking judges, school board members, strawberry festival queens. If this sounds vaguely scary,
well it can be but it doesn't have to be. Pretty much every town
is full of interlocking clickes like this.

posted by gt at 6:13 AM

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

lucychi wrote:
In my experience, mostly in high school and college, I have received more crap for being a conservative than most of my liberal friends (and I do have quite a large number of those friends) have gotten for being liberal in their ENTIRE LIVES.

I have been taught, my whole life, that liberal values are the ones that get censored, knocked around, covered up, and generally abused. However, I believe things have changed.

Can we distinguish between orthodox and unorthodox opinion, as well as
liberal and conservative?
I think you are referring to the issue of having, and expressing, unorthodox opinion. Whether the orthodox opinion at any given place and time is liberal or conservative or something else depends on many factors.

Quote:

These days, if you believe in old-fashioned values and traditions, you get reamed for being "intolerant."

I'm somewhat sceptical here; is it any old fasioned value and tradition (saturnalia, imbolc, lupercalia, beltane ... your basic old fashioned traditions) or specific ones like "women who swim in the sea should be stoned" or "we must sacrifice 40% of our crops to the war leader or he will smite us." Is the nature of the objection antiquity, or fashion, or, maybe, something to do with tolerance?

Quote:

I sustain constant verbal abuse for not believing in stuff like homosexual behavior or abortion (PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don't turn this thread into a discussion of issues; that's not what I want this to be about). I'm told that I want people to go against who they really are, or that I won't let people make personal choices.

verbal abuse? as opposed to expression of disagreement? perhaps your expression of unorthodox beliefs has you labeled as a deviant. Welcome to the club. You can test the disagreements for looking for unorthodox applications of the orthodox beliefs. for example "won't let people make personal choices" see how they feel about the choice to use heroin, not wear seat belts, and work for less than minimum wage. Is the person you are speaking with for choice, or for a currently fashionable set of choices?

Quote:

In my high school, I was in the minority in every debate we had any issue, and was treated nastily by my peers because of it. We were taught the liberal views in school, so everyone was a liberal except me (I was homeschooled by conservative parents, which is why I wasn't).

One reason people homeschool is they don't want the government's socialist agenda crammed down their throats, and that's commendable, if deviant. Another can be that the parents are paranoid fruitcakes, and want to raise junior up to share their belief the moon is made of green cheese.
It's a matter of degree. We can hope that exposure to two different belief systems has given you the chance to think critically and sort out how you feel.

Quote:

Recently, in one of my classes, we had a discussion about the homosexual issue, and not one person who was participating was on my side. It was Everyone against Lucy, and I was most certainly on the defensive, as I was being attacked from all sides. At one point, my teacher was literally yelling what she thought at me.

One of the things i'm hearing is that you either aren't able to hide your deviant opinions, or that you choose not to. I'm sure someone else in the class had other opinions, but by 3rd grade they learned to keep real quiet about that. Especially the girls. I'm pretty sure I disagree with you on the issues, but your willingness to discuss instead of just hate quietly is
refreshing. You are getting the education you paid for, by having your ideas sharpened and tested. They are learning to be sheep, mouthing the right buzzwords.
College, and in a different way high school, is about gaining access to
middle class power and privilege. This involves dealing with a lot of irony.
A dictatorship only needs to control the bodies of the subjects.
In a democracy, the ruling elite has to control minds as well.
If you can safely parrot the buzzwords of the day, you are less of a threat
to the establishment, and can be safely offered the key to the executive washroom. Homeschooled kids are less skilled at being a faceless fish in the school of fish; they are more likely to drop out or be valedictorian that is the average public school graduate.
Quote:

Why, in this day and age, must conservative be constantly forced to defend themselves and their opinions? Why are we persecuted for our beliefs? I realize in the past liberals have gotten their fair share of abuse, but I have never believed that "Turnabout is fair play."

I don't understand why I'm a bad person for not believing that love means letting everyone do whatever they want in whatever fashion they want.
Has anyone else experienced this?

One technique dr peter breggan taught me many years ago, is "verbal cross-dressing." A given proposition can be pitched to either conservatives
or liberals, it's just a matter of using the correct set of buzzwords.
If liberals don't like vouchers, offer them a "menu of tools to empower the underprivileged." etc. Look for shared values underlying the apparent principled differences; is the disagreement about tactics or underlying
fundamentals? No full discussion of the ransberger pivot in this post.
_________________

posted by gt at 6:10 AM

:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm coming late to this party, just as well things seems calmer now.
I noticed the byrd link in the blog and thought, is that Harry Byrd, the
Independent, or Robert C. Byrd, the fiddle player from west virginia?
so I googled.
But I was unable to find any mp3's from his album online, and I can't find my notes in either of the blogs i thought i'd saved it to.
In short, he's a mixed bag. King of Pork, he gave up leadership in the senate to sit back and collect pork for west virginia, even if it bankrupts the country. A dirt poor kid who put himself through law school, he's been a defender of civil liberties. In the 1920's joining the klan was like if I joined the junior chamber of commerce or citizen's council; it was a pro-america boosterism club, anti-red, with an agressive marketing program. in this county just about everybody who could come up with $10 was a member, and if two buddies joined you got your $10 back. He's been in the senate longer than anybody but thurman.
When I travel east sometimes instead of the PA turnpike I'll cut down 81 into west virginia. In morgantown* there's an 8 lane superhighway, rt 83,
that runs from byrd's front door to the capitol in dc. * Last time I was in Morgantown there was a fancy new monorail, but I didn't see the possible connection till just now. [cue simpsons' music man monorail theme]
Now I'm all for good ad hominem criticism of foriegn policy speeches now and then, but in this case (and i think we have consensus on this by now) it's best to let the words speak for themselves, and identifying them as
Senator Byrd's is for attribution rather than an argument from authority.
"Turkey in the straw" might lighten things up a little, or "will the circle be unbroken" a nice peace-unity gesture. Byrd doesn't play the fiddle anymore, but he's conservative in the sense of being interested in preserving our heritage and folkways (especially if the new Heritage & Folkways Center will be in West Virginia.)
_________________

posted by gt at 6:08 AM

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Winkrometer wrote:
1. If God exists, he/she/it created the universe intentionally.
2. If the universe has a creator (or creators), he/she/it/they created all things within it.
3. Earth is a thing within the universe.
4. All things existing on Earth are within anything the Earth is within.
5. Suffering exists on the Earth.
6. No moral being intentionally creates suffering.

Therefore, if God exists, he/she is immoral.
Proof of theorem complete.

I don't usually deal with the issue in premise 1 - did god create the universe unintentionally? might explain a few things. still we'll grant that for the sake of argument and throw in premises 3,4,5.
2 and 6 are disprovable, depending on how you define your terms.
I created this post. If you are claiming god gets the credit for what i write,
ok, but it sort of waters down creating.
Moral beings like myself routinely create suffering. When I had 5 gin and tonics monday, i was creating suffering on tuesday which led to suffering today, friday, but it was for the greater good.
The claim "no moral being creates other moral beings which create suffering to serve some higher purpose" is a little less obvious.

To some your use of anthropomorphic terms, he/she, immoral, is blasphemous to allah, who is neither male nor female or other limited human concepts, but is transcendantal. Amoral might be a better sense of the alternatives to moral.

Still, you argument has some rigor; you attempt to break down the premises on which your conclusion would rely, in an aristotelean sylogism.
If all discussions of morality were that logically constructed, progress might be possible.

The jesuits are said to be good at this sort of thing.

Why do you ask? If it is true, that god is immoral, what wil you do differently tomorrow?
What is this morality of which you speak? If a man is alone on an island, does he have morality, or is morality a set of rules for how we act one with another on down through the generations? Does god have a peer group? Does it need to set a good example for its godlings? What are we, chopped liver? Oy.

posted by gt at 6:05 AM

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Here in indiana the law has been rewritten so that the intent of the donor
governs; family approval is no longer as essential.
Re execution, i agree with reservations, suggested reading includes Niven,
who discusses organlegging and state harvesting of organs in his known space series.
To any shortage there is a simple elegant solution. Legalize it. I wrote in 1979 in an unpublished paper, "Rights and the Market in Blood" that the best way to end the blood shortage is to legalize sale of blood. That paper has bothered me at times. I can't find a copy, it could be in one of these boxes here (looks despairingly at jumble of boxes.) I was 19, I got an A on the paper, went on to other things, wasn't secure enough to think anybody would care what I thought. It was my first sense that I could do that kinda stuff; wonk policy with the best of them. But at least once a year I read about the blood shortages, and I know that I have an insight that could be saving people's lives.
It's the same with organs. 3000-4000 people a year die just in the united states because of the organ shortage, needlessly.
It makes liberals happy to kill people by preventing them from buying organs from willing donors, because doing so reinforces their deeply held belief that commerce is bad. Our conservative newspaper took the same position for what seemed to be fundy reasons; I guess all that right to life stuff isn't so important after all.
Are there short term and long term problems with buying organs and blood? You betcha. It is worth killing 3000 people a year in order not to have to face up to and deal with those problems? I don't think so.
Some idiot will carve up his spouse or children and try to sell their parts on ebay or equivalent, and that will get coverage, somebody dying because they didn't get a liver isn't as newsworthy, especially if there are 10 a day.
It's thalidomide all over again; its easier to see the deformed babies from england that were prevented by thalidomide not having been approved yet in the usa.
Not because they thought there was anythng wrong with it, it's just that the paperwork takes years. Than it is to see the 100,000/yr who having been dying because the fda wouldn't allow their medicine. (I'm not referring to any one medicine here, it's a general pattern of the usa to withhold new drugs from the market until enough monkeys have been tortured and killed to meet the quota)
However, these policy choices (to legalize markets in organs and blood)
are somewhat testable. There should be other countries where there were
either formal or informal markets for such things, and we could look at
how that has worked out in practice. HIV transmission is one of the big concerns and I expect there's been alot of research done, anybody know where i start looking?

There are times when on this forum i get excitable and passionate and upset with well-meaning people who repeat lies like "market failure".
I hope with this example I've shown one of the reasons for the intensity of my typing. I genuinely believe lives are stake; that the liberal intellegensia is willing to sacrifice thousands of lives a year to reinforce their pretense at market failure arguments. And now it's the consevative anti-intellegensia who want to ban cloning. That puts my life at risk. Not this week, not next month, but my shot at living past 100 fades quickly if medical research is banned or slowed to a crawl.
later edit:

1 (anti-market) Richard M, Titmuss, The Gift Relationship (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970), pp. 224-25.U.S.,
2) (promarket) Congress, House, Filing before the Food and Drug Administration on blood labelling, Whole Blood and Red Blood Cells, Docket No. 75N-0316; comments of the Council on Wage and Price Stability, January 13, 1976.[/later edit]

And I'm willimg to admit I could be wrong, and i'd be interested in looking at the studies, but sceptical of deathist interpretations of the data.
I've got the theory worked out why markets should be better able to allocate scarce medical resources, and in theory theory and practice are the same, but in practice they aren't always.

posted by gt at 6:04 AM

timbo asks what have you done for your inner child lately

My inner child went out to play last night and slept past noon,
and then learned some stuff about who invented tv and lightbulbs.
My teddy bear sometimes goes with me to the plasma center, but we are skipping that today because my blood has too much alcohol in it right now. There's a stuffed monkey here at my computer. He doesn't talk yet, but makes cool facial expressions.
New word for the day: chomporado
http://www.novica.com/ww/index.cfm?action=Mexico
Quote:

Tonight Rosa, Evelia, and Cristina prepared a hearty dinner sans animal products. I assured them they didn't have to abstain from meat on my behalf, but they insisted that they commonly ate exactly what they had prepared for me - a salad of fresh local greens, chomporado (a hot, thick drink made of corn masa, hot water, and locally-grown bitter chocolate), and caldo de chapil, a delicious soup made of chapil greens (a delicate, mild weed that looks like young, tender alfalfa but tastes delicious), sliced zucchini-type squash, and fresh cut corn kernels.

Hmm, this monkey doesn't have a name yet, maybe "chomporado!"
Chimporado?
The crazy guy next door seems in touch with his inner child, he's riding his bike in circles in the snow, i guess his unicorn, no i meant unicycle, doesn't work well in snow. What's a build-a-bear turtle? hi phillip.
_________________
posted by gt at 3:02 PM

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http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/farnsworth03.html
http://www.digitalcentury.com/encyclo/update/baird.html

Two fascinating stories. Make a hell of a script.
Philo was 14 in 1921, plowing his potato field, when he got the idea for electronic television, what we think of as television today. He was 21
when he finished a working model, by which time Baird had come up
with a mechnical television thingy.
Thanks 'maniac, I did not know that. Welcome to the box.
I don't agree with much of what you've been saying, but I like the way you ground your discussion in your own experience and are passionate about your positions. If you stick around there's some fine people and plenty to talk about. It can be habit-forming so be careful about budgeting how much time and energy you spend here.
_________________

posted by gt at 1:27 PM

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My friend is taking an astronomy class.
he has to write a thesis and is totally stumped, does anyone have any ideas?
_________________
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gt_bear
Uakari

Joined: 31 Jul 2002
Posts: 846
Location: arbi the arbitrary aardvark
Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2003 10:39 pm Post subject:

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Well, he could summarize what is known about the closest stars, say the ones within 15 light years, or the 50 closest ones, or whatever, and
compare what we know about those stars with what we know about stars with planets (most of which are further away), and then see if he can
make any predictions about how and when we will know more about these nearby stars.
This is important because these are the stars we'd tend to want to go to first, especially if they have planets.
If he needs filler, he could go into detail about how to build a probe to
travel to the star to gather more data, and why it makes sense to wait for a better probe that can get there faster, and how you predict when you reach the point where it makes more sense to send it now than wait for a better one. I want credit in a footnote. If anybody wants to read my thesis, it's here someplace.
-----
Here's another topic. I just had coffee, and could crank these out all night.
Pick an asteroid. I was thinking about the 800-mile-wide planetoidal object recently found way out past jupiter, but an asteroid might be better. Let's say vesta. Some monkey does research where you zap stuff with lasers and study the pretty colors that come off it spectrographicly to analyse the contents of the object.
So the thesis topic is a thought experiment: Assume you can borrow the hubble, and the resources of the space station, and some form of transportation to haul the biggest laser you can find (or be able to power;
power supply might be your limiting factor) with the plan that you will zap the asteroid with the laser and study the results.
Would you expect to learn anything we don't already know?
Come up with scientific reasons why this would be a waste of time and not feasible, regardless of cost. Then critique those reasons.
Then estimate the cost, and come up with reasons about why, regardless of its scientific merit, the project isn't economicly feasible at this time.
Find a sponsor willing to do some feasibility studies.
[hint - the military industrial complex]
Examine scale; what is the smallest project that could be expected to get any results? What is the largest project that can be done with off-the-shelf technology? How you could plan to incorporate advances in technology
over a 5 to 10 year period? For example, can the power supply be increased by adding more photovoltics to the station, or is there some other approach?
I think this as a thesis could attract the attention of say a McDonald Douglass. Because it provides a scientific cover story for putting big honking lasers into space, and those turn out to have some interesting applications. This message was brought to you by the Vesta Mining Company.
If i wanted to do some more of these, i could see a thesis about the project to raise chicken eggs on the space station, darn I had another one right here...
And here's a question. I noticed a use of "phasers" in a 1953 sf novel, although the gadget being described wasn't a star trek type phaser.
What is the first known use of the term, and when did it get its modern meaning. Are there other terms that trek introduced to the language?

posted by gt at 5:27 AM

science

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JSc wrote:
In some cases, you're dead right--there's a decent fraction of government funding which never results in any advances (a lot of that is a result of the large amount skimmed off by universities when a researcher receives a grant, incidentally). In others, the results have little practical application besides war and slaughter (tends to be engineering projects for the DOD, more often than not).

I think you are misunderstanding the nature of my objections.
My argument isn't that government funding makes for bad science; it is that it is wrong to steal from the poor to fund scientists. This argument admits that science is what is driving the rise in the standard of living of the poor, but says it is still wrong.
For that matter, it isn't morally defensible to steal from the rich either.

For the same reasons, it would be wrong to enslave a subset of the population, oh let's say aftrican-maricans, to become scientists, or to have all of their earnings confiscated to fund science.
If it is wrong to take 100% from 10% of the people, it is also wrong
to take 10% from 100% of the people.

It's a moral statement about personal autonomy; what is it about science that should override the general principle of leaving people alone to live their own lives in their own way and be scientists or not as they choose?

The military uses of science was an argument for government funding, not against. If the survival of the population due to threat of invasion is at risk, this would tend to justify some level of taxation or enslavement. of course this argument doesn't hold up as well for the invaders.

There is also an argument that government funding is bad for science; that the best thing the government can do is get out of the way and let markets drive technological innovation.
I remember a time when the internet was offlimits to commericial use, and we didn't have spam and pop-ups and we could enjoy being elite and superior and having these cool toys that the other kids didn't have. But i prefer the commercialized internet. And I think it's that way in general; that market-driven mechanisms will outperform a centrally-planned economy any time.

Quote:

In a lot more cases, though, there's a lot of work that results in major improvements to the world around us. If you dig through science history a bit, you'll find that pretty much every major (and most of the minor) discovery and development at least in part owes something to government funding.

Perhaps that would be because government is ubiqutous. I think government funding was involved in the development of the wheel, but that does not mean that the wheel depended on government funding

posted by gt at 5:26 AM

www.insurgentcountry.com/michey_hart_gd.txt
posted by gt at 5:06 AM

some more notes on byrd.
provided a gushing tribute to Democratic Senator Robert Byrd which didn’t manage to mention what he’s known best for -- pork-barrel spending for his home state -- or, in praising his "unflinching devotion to principle," did she recall his opposition to the Civil Rights Act or membership in the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1988, he retired from the Majority Leader’s job to chair the Appropriations Committee
His only known indulgence, his fiddle, which he gave up in sorrow after his grandson died.

posted by gt at 4:59 AM

stream of broccoli - annotating wil.
i crawled home thru the snow (ok, on my bike)
new post by wil called stream
as usual it rocks.
i read the coments.
i go back and read the post again with an agenda.
i read futher down, wher he says thank you senator byrd
so i google.
the senator has a kick ass web page, but it doesn't have whqat i want,
an audio clip of him playing the fiddle.
Robert (Senator)
Appearance as principal performer

Come Sundown She'll Be Gone, Mountain Fiddler, County 769 (1978), cut # 13
Cripple Creek, Mountain Fiddler, County 769 (1978), cut # 4
Cumberland Gap, Mountain Fiddler, County 769 (1978), cut # 7
Don't Let Your Sweet Love Die, Mountain Fiddler, County 769 (1978), cut # 6
Durang's Hornpipe, Mountain Fiddler, County 769 (1978), cut # 9
Forked/Forky Deer, Mountain Fiddler, County 769 (1978), cut # 5
Old Joe Clark/Clarke, Mountain Fiddler, County 769 (1978), cut # 11
Red Bird, Mountain Fiddler, County 769 (1978), cut # 1
Roving Gambler, Mountain Fiddler, County 769 (1978), cut # 10
Rye Waltz, Mountain Fiddler, County 769 (1978), cut # 8
There's More Pretty Girls Than One, Mountain Fiddler, County 769 (1978), cut # 3
Turkey in the Straw, Mountain Fiddler, County 769 (1978), cut # 2
Wagon Yard, Mountain Fiddler, County 769 (1978), cut # 12
Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Mountain Fiddler, County 769 (1978), cut # 14

posted by gt at 4:42 AM

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This quote I found in a book written by Peter McWilliams.
The quote is by Henry Miller.

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heros.Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly.Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind.Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
HENRY MILLER

Maybe we need some soul stirring quotes:-

Brian

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I was thinging about coming tot he forum to write about this same book and i see that brian has already startd a thread. I'm in chat with him right now.
My sister sent me this book a few years ago. I used it for a doorstop. It as the right size and weight and made a perfect doorstop, and i'd see it every day and know someday i'd be ready to read it.
Started reading it recently.
I'm not sure why she sent it to me, except that she is a connes.. she appreciates self-help books.
I don't think she knows that peter, the coauthor, was a friend of mine before he was killed.
his books are free online at www.mcwilliams.org
the book brian is quoting from is "do it: lets get off our buts"
he is a master of the epigram, an oscar wilde. so you can read the booka quote at a time.
but i also encourage reading the whole book cover to cover someday.
i'm reading a chapter at a time in the bath.
today's chapter was about harnessing fear, guilt, anger, and using them
as positive sources of energy in your life.
I set down the book and went wrote the first draft of the thing i had been putting off all week.
I think some of you might also find it empowering.
Or just funny.
Like I said, it's free online, along with the sequel Life 101, and all his other books. http://www.mcwilliams.com/books/books
_________________

posted by gt at 7:41 PM

(at the other forum, housey asked about digital cameras)
I have a feeling that if i clean the northwest corner of this room i might find my digital camera, for which i had misplaced the software package it was supposed to run off of. It had some nice pix of a friend of my nephews on it too. Cleaning the house is going more slowly than I had planned so I did not get to that corner this week, although I made some progress in another room today. Found my tie-die "national security agency" tshirt and a sweater my exwife knitted for me that i'd been looking for. Gary's been a big help in getting me to plan chores and break them into managable pieces. In the same corner is a scanner I haven't gotten the software working for yet; I have some photos I'd like to scan,
very g-rated but sentimental value. And I haven't been able to find the disney photos camera yet. Because I've been doing better at checking my email, I have a good lead on a cushy patronage job i can call about tomorrow, one I am well-overqualified for so might have a shot at.
I am not making progress every day, which was the plan, but I am making progress more days than not, I'd say.
_________________
http://gtsoapbox.blogspot.com

posted by gt at 7:39 PM

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I need to be careful about logging onto the soapbox before I have gotten up and done useful chores. This stuff is just too tempting.
Once, a long time ago, I made a choice to study epistemology instead of auto repair. So now I know a lot about my "knowing" that my car doesn't run, knowing that I haven't paid the insurance lately, knowing that my license will be suspended if I don't do something about this seat belt ticket by next week, knowing that I am going to ride my bike through the snow to the plasma center. But I don't know how to fix my car. So I am going to pay someone else to do it, when I get around to it.
I remember the look of distain on my fathers face when I explained that I was taking epistemology, what that was. Probably the same look I would have gotten if i'd taken auto repair.

And he was partly right; I sometimes regret not having chosen a more useful line of study. And sometimes I don't.

So let's look at consequences. How would a belief, as opposed to just a good guess, that there is no god, change your life?
As humans, mammals, great apes, we have deductive reasoning
(2.0 + 2.0 = 4), inductive reasoning (the sun is shining, therefor it might be warmer than before, and might be daytime, and the problem of mystical experience. We dream, we alter our consciousness with drugs or
fatigue, and have visions of god or transcendental experiences, and then have to decide how to integrate that into our mundane lives, perhaps by avoiding the brownies next time.
Once upon a time people believed in neptune. These weren't stupid people; there must have been some reason, some utility, for this belief.
And later there must have been some utility for getting rid of this belief.
"4" is an idea which subsists. I have 4 cookies here, they exist.
"god" is an idea which subsists, but may not have any real world instantiations/incarnations/realness.
What is the social function of the meme "god"?
How will a conviction that there is no god change how you interact with the other monkeys?
Are we as a society moving past the point where a belief in god makes any more sense than a belief in neptune? Do you want to be an early adopter of the society-works-better-without-the-god-meme viewpoint?
What are the costs and benefits of that strategy?
Whn Johnny was little he believed in santa claus. When he got to be 6, he left behind this childish viewpoint, and was an asantaist. Then he had johnny jr., and discovered that santa was real after all.
Allah is a much more sophisticated idea of what a god would be than jehova is. But the part about facing east 5 times a day has costs and benefits, and the part about killing a sheep during the hajj is just plain evil.
Some idiot has his bass cranked up outside the window, so I'm going to have to go shoot him, but actually I welcome the distraction.
I'm going to have to be carefull about logging onto the soapbox before I've really gotten up and gotten some chores done.
_________________

posted by gt at 3:39 PM

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Jyoti has mentioned, that like a lot of my rants, this one has drifted away from being about monopolization of memetic distribution, and is now more about totalitarianism and its alternatives, yer basic political philosophy 101, the old hobbes v locke debate. (jefferson v stalin if you prefer.)

jyoti raises an excellent point about alienation from work vs meaningful work. somebody illustrated it with the story about the mexican fisherman, who had meaningful work.

Here is a prescription for alienation from work:
"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!"
- Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, 1874

Let's say jimmy really wants to be a heart surgeon, and he'd be a good one, but what he's better at is being a headbanging rock musician,
which he hates. The marxist regime would compel him to be the rock musician, leaving him as an alienated worker.

Nozick, the harvard libertarian political philosopher, expressed it like this:
"from each as she chooses, to each as she is chosen"
In that set up, each individual gets to make choices to optimize the mix of work that is fun versus work that is socially desired; that is to say lucrative. The key here is that decision making is decentralized instead of centralized.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs kicks in. If you don't have food, you choose a job that will provide food, and then you can decide which of those jobs you like better or which provides more extra food.
But once your most basic needs are being met, you can focus on other priorities. When I was a kid, I knew I wanted to be a freedom fighter when i grew up; that's what's meaningful work for me. I thought maybe i'd do it as a writer since i enjoy working with words and ideas. In order to be able to meet my basic needs, I learned how to be a hunter-gatherer, able to live off the land whether in the prairie or the big city.
I got an education as a political philosopher-king, like my mom, but they weren't hiring. They look at you funny when your resume lists position sought as "philospher-king." So I looked into law school, but it took 10 years of working wage slave jobs to get there.
I took a week's pay and bought the means of production, a $400 486, and I was in business. Haven't made it pay yet, but I've had a blast.
And meanwhile I get by as a hunter-gatherer, and augment that with plasma sales.
The motivation to slack off is strong when you are your only employee, doing what you love. I mean, fark, or ghastly, are only a few clicks away.
You get 100% of the benefits of slacking off. Add more equal partners to split the reduction in earnings caused by slacking off, and the payoff for slacking off increases.
This is not as concise and coherent as I had planned.
Where I was headed was, that in a voluntarist society the standard of living is much higher, so people have a much easier time moving up the hierarchy from "I work to eat to live" to "I work to fund my 9 kids college fund" to "I work for self-actualization and to meet babes."
In the coercive society "I work so the commisar doesn't shoot me" or "I work to meet the needs of others according to my abilities" or "I'm pretty good at looking busy when the boss comes around, but mostly i'm playing warhammer."
In the long run, the technological advances in a voluntarist society raise the standard of living for the poorest above the average in the coercive economy, so that the disadvantages of social inequality and unequal distribution of wealth are more than offset.
The socialist coercive economy has an initial advantage if it is producing relative equality of wealth, so that you don't have the disutility of some people going hungry while others eat veal and big macs.
But this gets lost fast when resources are distributed to maximize political
efficiency rather than economic efficiency.
In the voluntarist economy, the system of "from each as she chooses, to each as she is chosen" results in optimum economic efficiency, and that drives technological progress, resulting in the singularity, post-scarcity economics, life extension, robots, and all that star trek stuff.
Take away the voluntary aspect, and you kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Of course I have no objection to volantarist socialism, only the coerciv flavor.
And that's why government funding of science is evil.
I ended up not getting to all of the interesting points about light bulbs.
_________________
nolan chart: 100/100 www.lp.org/quiz kinsey# pi earth first mars next

posted by gt at 5:35 AM

:
Conspiracy theories are interesting. I do not doubt that there are, in fact 'secret societies' and conspiracies associated with at least a few of them. I do think that a great deal of what is written about them and passes for evidence is bogus pseudo-journalism, and poorly researched.

What I do doubt is the notion of a grand "super conspracy" that is directing world events. My doubt is based on an number of factors
2) "I'll start my own!" - granting for a moment, the existence of a singular conspiracy, I can't see how it wouldnt eventually become multiple, competing conspiracies. As soon as somone became disengfeanchised with the group, I imagine some would stomp off and use the power and resources they did secure to start their own group. While some might be stopped, I suspect not all would be. And, the existence of multiple conspiracy groups would compete for power - meaning that power is not in anyone's hands, no one is 'directing things' per se. They may have some influence, but not absolute power.
. But, this isn't tin foil hat stuff.. it's the meat and potatoes of politics.

I agree that there is no one all-powerful conspiracy; there are various interlocking conspiracies that conspre with and against one another, and provide a rough system of checks and balances.

from dictionary.com:

cy ( P ) Pronunciation Key (kn-spîr-s)
n. pl. con·spir·a·cies
An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.
A group of conspirators.
Law. An agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action.
A joining or acting together, as if by sinister design: a conspiracy of wind and tide that devastated coastal areas.

also from dictionary com:

eric conspiracy

A shadowy group of moustachioed hackers named
Eric first pinpointed as a sinister conspiracy by an infamous
talk.bizarre posting ca. 1986. This was doubtless influenced
by the numerous "Eric" jokes in the Monty Python oeuvre.
There do indeed seem to be considerably more moustachioed
Erics in hackerdom than the frequency of these three traits
can account for unless they are correlated in some arcane way.
Well-known examples include Eric Allman (of the "Allman
style" described under indent style), Erik Fair (co-author
of NNTP), Eric S. Raymond and about fifteen others. The
organisation line "Eric Conspiracy Secret Laboratories" now
emanates regularly from more than one site.

(this was apparently a joke slipped by dictionary com by some hackers
- everyone knows there is no eric conspiracy.)
http://volokh.blogspot.com is the volokh conspiracy.
"The soong dynasty" by sterling seagrave is a nice look at the
swirl of conspiracies that competed for power when the manchu empire fell in china.
[later edit: yamato dynasty review:
http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:xRYamijW_dYC:www.danford.net/yamato.htm+japanese+imperial+conspiracy&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 ]
i found bergamini's "the japanese imperial conspiracy" a good read. http://www.asiaweek.com/asiaweek/foc/2000/11/30/
google on "garibaldi" for a sense of how pervasive conspiracies have been in italy over the last 2000 years.
in order to understand george bush, you have to study averil harriman (sp?).
in order to understand al gore, you have to study armand hammer.
if you see connections between harriman and hammer, then you can worry. personally i have belonged to phi alpha delta, the order of the arrow, the monkeyboxer rebellion, maybe a few others.
The influence of conspiracies is one valid approach to historical analysis,as log as you don't lose sight of other influences. conspiracies work to activate a certain set of memes. whether the social environment is ripe for that set of memes means getting into memetics, socioeconomics, praxeology, all that fun stuff.
I'm from delaware; there are two good conspiracy books about delaware, dupont dynasty by gerard colby, and the company state by ralph nader.
The second book is significant not just for what it says about delaware,
but as a blueprint for nader's interlocking directorates of "pirgs."
Robert Caro documents LBJ's conspiracy with brown and root, government contractors in the pendergast machine tradition. [/tin foil hat]
posted by gt at 8:56 PM