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By Sylverstone, on October 7th, 2008 was just asked “if this is debunked why is there still a lawsuit pending?”
and “a birth certificate verified in 2001 is not a legitimate birth certificate…” concerning obama’s right to run for office.
people are stupid. *sigh*
one does not need to be “right” to sue.
in an age when dirty politics is the rule, rather than the exception, the 35 bucks to file a lawsuit is cheap bad publicity for the other guy. i assure you that the alphabet agencies have already verified this, as bush wants mccain in office, and those same said agencies answer to him.
personally, i think that people seem to forget that you cannot, and should not, believe anything you read on the internet, and anything can be spun into anything else.
i.e.
“jimmy carter was the secret head of the ku klux klan; bill clinton is the biological son of jimmy carter.”
is 100% true and i can prove it.
(tyler v. carter, 1993 wl 454256 (s.d.n.y.)
obama “was supported by ted kennedy, who is catholic, and the catholic church is led by a pope who was in the hitler youth, so that can mean only one thing: obama loves hitler!”
(pretzel logic for the win)
as mcain was born in panama, are we tossing him out too?
considering the track record of this country concerning voting, and the track record of diebold and their voting machine security, this really isn’t anything like a real issue, and considering the last 8 years, it’s unlikely that who we vote into office will actually end up there anyway.
*however* it’s my duty as an american to vote, and i’m going to.
thing is, i also think it’s a load of crap. this isn’t about obama and mccain to me anyway. they’ll both do a decent job, they both care about what happens to this nation of ours.
mccain is a true hero. the man has guts. (mccain’s campaign manager is up to his eyeballs in the fannie mae and freddie mac mess however, and lying to letterman was really stupid)
obama is *very* intelligent, his wife is as well, and what we need at the helm of this nation is a very very smart man with guts.
someone smarter than me.
someone smarter than joe sixpack.
someone who can speak properly.
i’ll settle for someone who isn’t going to embarrass us to the world.
doing fine so far. both candidates will do.
*however* if something happens to the president, the vice president is at the helm.
read that again.
if something happens to obama, biden can handle it.
something happens to mccain, (mcain is over 70, and has had cancer at least 4 times.) that puts palin in the hot seat.
sets this country up for a scenario i’d rather not think about, with her at the helm.
palin’s interview with katie couric was embarrassing. you should youtube it if you haven’t seen it. it’ll make you realize you would make a better vice president than she would.
facts and such to support my stance:
she actually thought a yahoo e mail account was secure (and broke the law there, as it’s not authorized for government communications)
—
statement: “she took the luxury jet that was acquired by her predecessor and sold it on ebay. and made a profit!” – mccain, at a campaign stop in wisconsin
truth: no one bought the jet online. it was eventually sold through an aircraft broker – at a loss to taxpayers of nearly $600,000.
—
statement: “i told the congress ‘thanks, but no thanks’ on that bridge to nowhere” – palin convention speech
truth: she supported the infamous pork project in her 2006 run for governor, even after congress had killed the bridge; derided its opponents as “spinmeisters.” reversed her stance a year later – but kept the money, doling out the $223 million in federal funds to other pork projects throughout the state.
—
statement: “we…championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by congress.” -palin convention speech
truth: as mayor, employed a lobbyist who also worked for jack abramoff to secure $27 million in pork spending for wasilla – more than $4,000 per resident. in her two years as governor, requested $453 million in earmarks. alaska ranks first in the nation for pork, raking in seven times the national average.
—
statement: “i found…someone who stopped government from wasting taxpayers’ money.” -mccain, introducing palin
truth: signature accomplishment as mayor: building a $15 million hockey arena that plunged the city into debt. broke ground on the project without finalizing the city’s purchase of the land; the resulting fiasco cost wasilla $1.3 million – roughly $200 per resident.
—
statement: “our opponents say, again and again, that drilling will not solve all of america’s energy problems – as if we didn’t know that already.” -palin, convention speech
truth: “i beg to disagree with any candidate who would say we can’t drill our way out of our problem.” – palin, july 2008
—
statement: “we began a nearly $40 billion natural-gas pipeline to help lead america to energy independence.” -palin, convention speech
truth: with federal approval years away, not a single section of the pipeline has been laid. state could end up paying the pipeline’s contractor $500 million – even if it never breaks ground on the project.
—
statement: “she’s from a small town with small-town values.” -fred thompson, convention speech
truth: wasilla and the surrounding valley recently named the meth capital of alaska, with 42 meth labs busted in a single year.
—
statement: palin has “taken on the political establishment in the largest state of the union.” -fred thompson, convention speech
truth: served until 2005 as director of fund raising group associated with indicted senator ted stevens.
—
statement: “she fought oil companies.” -mccain, introducing palin
truth: collected $13,000 in campaign contributions from oil and gas lobbyists, including exxon, bp, shell and chevron. bp was a sponsor of her inaugural bill.
—
statement: “she’s been to kuwait. she’s been over there. she has been with her troops. the national guard that she commands, who have been over there and had the experience.” -mccain, highlighting palin’s national security credentials
truth: never had a passport before 2007, when she made a brief photo-op trip to visit troops in germany and kuwait. has never been to iraq, and until yesterday, had never met a single foreign head of state.
—
statement: “i have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending.” -palin, convention speech
truth: as governor, sought travel reimbursement for 312 nights she spent in her own home.
—
now, to me, all of that stuff is important. much more important than her underaged, unwed daughter being pregnant. but her stance on choice was made very very clear as well.
in november 2006, then gubernatorial candidate sarah palin declared that she would not support an abortion for her own daughter even if she had been raped.
granting exceptions only if the mother’s life was in danger, palin said that when it came to her daughter, “i would choose life.”
at the time, her daughter was 14 years old. moreover, alaska’s rape rate was an abysmal 2.2 times above the national average and 25 percent of all rapes resulted in unwanted pregnancies.
just not feelin she’s a good choice.
in fact, i think that the choice of her as the first female vice president of the united states is an insult to intelligent women everywhere.
do your own research. then vote. your life, and the quality of it, does depend on it.
-stone
By Sylverstone, on April 1st, 2006 Before anyone in government is allowed to promote a technological ‘solution’ to a problem they should be forced to share their knowledge of modern technology.
They should publicly perform the following tasks:
1. Set the time on a video and make a successful recording – using only the provided manual for reference. Focus groups suggest that, (like liberal Home Secretaries), swearing in front of the electorate cannot be associated with New Labour;
2: A timed round. In no more than 30 seconds, find an entry in the address book of a Motorola mobile phone – using only one hand, no manual and no swearing;
3. Configure a secure wireless network under Windows XP from a standing start before the machine has been hacked into oblivion. No calls to Microsoft, no techies on speed-dial (if you could find them on the Motorola that is) and absolutely no swearing;
and;
4. Transfer a piece of music from the iTunes music store on to their shiny new Windows Media Player simultaneously stating government policy on how DRM is a good thing for customers. (Obviously, despite the extreme provocation, no swearing will be permitted).
Then, AND ONLY THEN, should they be allowed to be in a position to judge whether their shiny new heap of wires and silicon comes with a side order of snake oil.
By Sylverstone, on January 10th, 2006 you have got to be kidding me…
http://news.com.com/Create+an+e-annoyance,+go+to+jail/2010-1028_3-6022491.html
Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.
It’s no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.
In other words, it’s OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess.
This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.
“The use of the word ‘annoy’ is particularly problematic,” says Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “What’s annoying to one person may not be annoying to someone else.”
It’s illegal to annoy
A new federal law states that when you annoy someone on the Internet, you must disclose your identity. Here’s the relevant language.
“Whoever…utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet… without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person…who receives the communications…shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”
Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously titled bit called “Preventing Cyberstalking.” It rewrites existing telephone harassment law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet “without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy.”
To grease the rails for this idea, Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, and the section’s other sponsors slipped it into an unrelated, must-pass bill to fund the Department of Justice. The plan: to make it politically infeasible for politicians to oppose the measure.
The tactic worked. The bill cleared the House of Representatives by voice vote, and the Senate unanimously approved it Dec. 16.
There’s an interesting side note. An earlier version that the House approved in September had radically different wording. It was reasonable by comparison, and criminalized only using an “interactive computer service” to cause someone “substantial emotional harm.”
That kind of prohibition might make sense. But why should merely annoying someone be illegal?
There are perfectly legitimate reasons to set up a Web site or write something incendiary without telling everyone exactly who you are.
Think about it: A woman fired by a manager who demanded sexual favors wants to blog about it without divulging her full name. An aspiring pundit hopes to set up the next Suck.com. A frustrated citizen wants to send e-mail describing corruption in local government without worrying about reprisals.
In each of those three cases, someone’s probably going to be annoyed. That’s enough to make the action a crime. (The Justice Department won’t file charges in every case, of course, but trusting prosecutorial discretion is hardly reassuring.)
Clinton Fein, a San Francisco resident who runs the Annoy.com site, says a feature permitting visitors to send obnoxious and profane postcards through e-mail could be imperiled.
“Who decides what’s annoying? That’s the ultimate question,” Fein said. He added: “If you send an annoying message via the United States Post Office, do you have to reveal your identity?”
Fein once sued to overturn part of the Communications Decency Act that outlawed transmitting indecent material “with intent to annoy.” But the courts ruled the law applied only to obscene material, so Annoy.com didn’t have to worry.
“I’m certainly not going to close the site down,” Fein said on Friday. “I would fight it on First Amendment grounds.”
He’s right. Our esteemed politicians can’t seem to grasp this simple point, but the First Amendment protects our right to write something that annoys someone else.
It even shields our right to do it anonymously. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas defended this principle magnificently in a 1995 case involving an Ohio woman who was punished for distributing anonymous political pamphlets.
If President Bush truly believed in the principle of limited government (it is in his official bio), he’d realize that the law he signed cannot be squared with the Constitution he swore to uphold.
And then he’d repeat what President Clinton did a decade ago when he felt compelled to sign a massive telecommunications law. Clinton realized that the section of the law punishing abortion-related material on the Internet was unconstitutional, and he directed the Justice Department not to enforce it.
Bush has the chance to show his respect for what he calls Americans’ personal freedoms. Now we’ll see if the president rises to the occasion.
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By Sylverstone, on June 13th, 2005 So Newsweek prints an uncorroborated allegation about American interrogators flushing Qurans down the toilet in order to get fanatical Muslim prisoners to talk, and there’s rioting and death all over the Muslim world.
There are several lessons to be learned from this incident, some trivial,
some quite important.
1. The courts have given the news media carte blanche, in the name of the First Amendment — but the media are no better than government at exercising unchecked power. When it’s known that no one can punish you, a certain kind of person stops caring whether he hurts anybody. And such people tend to rise within any organization that doesn’t work hard to have a conscience.
Personally, I think there should be legal consequences for editors and publishers and reporters so abysmally selfish and stupid that they would run with a story that they knew would provoke outrage in Muslim lands, without first making sure it was true.
I’m not talking about prior restraint, which would be unconstitutional. I’m talking about consequences after the fact.
In this case, formal libel and slander laws wouldn’t have much effect, because who has standing to sue? (Though we need to restore a reasonable standard of libel and slander, even for public figures; being famous shouldn’t mean that other people have no obligation to tell the truth about you.)
I’m talking about informal consequence, like Newsweek‘s correspondents being frozen out of news stories. Being banned from the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department for at least a year. But if any administration did such a thing, all of the media would unite to crucify them.
So all that’s left would be a clean personnel sweep of everyone involved in publishing a false story that leads to needless deaths. But it’ll never happen. Maybe some token person, after a lengthy “internal investigation” (i.e., coverup; after all, we know just how thorough em>Newsweek’s
investigations are), will be … fired? Naw. Reassigned.
So all that’s left is for the public to punish the offenders by ceasing to buy their publication.
But that won’t work because fifteen minutes after the story, the American people have forgotten it.
So Newsweek kills people with a false story that is actually a lie (unlike anything President Bush ever said about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction), and nothing happens to the perpetrators.
2. Too many people in the “American” media have lost any concept of loyalty to their country — if they even consider it their country, rather than just their residence.
Yeah, that’s right, I’m playing the “patriotism” card. But not the way you think.
Our country is at war. And it’s a war in which victory absolutely depends on the Muslim world perceiving it as a war between the U.S and its allies on one side, and fanatical murderous terrorists on the other.
If it is ever perceived as a war against Islam, then we have lost. The world has lost.
So during such a difficult time, even people who think the Iraq War or even the whole war on terror is a horrible mistake still have an obligation of loyalty to the nation that offers them protection, prosperity, and freedom.
I mean, what kind of idiot breaks a hole in the hull of his boat during a storm, just because he doesn’t like the guy at the tiller and thinks the storm could have been avoided?
Even if the allegations about Quran desecration were completely and absolutely verified, why in the world would you publish the information during wartime? It’s not that the Media themselves regard the Quran as sacred. It’s just paper to them. And surely they would have to agree that if such actions might somehow gain the cooperation of a potential source of useful information (though that seems extremely unlikely to me), it would be infinitely preferable to physical torture.
But they dwell so blindly within the cocoon of their sheltered world, where it’s just awful for somebody to offend “multicultural” people (though just fine to be openly vicious to American Christians or Israeli Jews), that it doesn’t occur to them that they could just keep their mouths shut and avoid damaging America and putting Americans all over the world in danger.
They might even realize that by not reporting this story, true or not, they would save Muslim lives. If patriotism couldn’t rein them in, then surely simple humaneness should … one might suppose.
After all, who benefits from the publication of such a story at this time?
Only one group: People who want to bring down or weaken President Bush and everything he stands for, no matter the cost.
The press isn’t running for office. To say that the media culture is unpatriotic isn’t a political ploy, it’s an obvious observation. Oh, if my words actually mattered to them, they’d howl and scream about my illegitimate attack. But in private, they are perfectly happy to mock patriotism in all its forms. They’re only patriotic when somebody says they aren’t.
They are loyal to a community — but it’s not America.
It’s Smartland. The nation of the newsmedia people. That’s where they live. Not in America. These newspeople generally don’t even know anybody, apart from “sources,” who serves America in the military. Smartland consists of a very different crowd.
I know that crowd. I’ve heard them jeer at all the values that most Americans still care about, laughing at religious people, at the middle class, at suburbanites, at the poor ignorant saps who don’t think correct thoughts all the time. You know — the citizens of Heartland. Those poor sentimental fools who stood in line to see The Passion and who like Adam Sandler movies and who get tears in their eyes when they see the American flag and whose hearts break a little when it burns.
And yet the irony is that the reason the radical Islamists hate the West so much is primarily because of the unchecked and uncheckable excesses of the Smartish. From Hollywood to newspeople to the soft-subject professors in our universities, the culture that makes people like Osama bin Laden want to blow us up or crush us into dust is the culture of the R-rated movie, the anti-religion intellectual, the glorified abortionist, the babies-without-marriage crowd, and the what-me-worry media elite.
Osama isn’t much worried about Christianity. Why should he? If a Muslim converts to Christianity in a Muslim country, he’ll just be killed. Christianity, despite our apparent numbers, has been reduced to nothing more dangerous to Islam than a swarm of gnats.
It’s a lot harder to keep dirty movies and atheistic Western ideas out of Muslim lands. That’s the established church of the West these days — liberty without responsibility, filth praised as “edgy” and virtue despised as “bourgeouis.”
If the Islamists ever ruled the world — and only a fool thinks that history offers some guarantee against it — then America’s unpatriotic elite will realize …
No they won’t. Whom do I think I’m kidding? They’ll still blame it on Bush or the Christian right or the oil companies, because the central tenet of their belief is that their side can do no wrong.
Wow. That sounds just like “my country, right or wrong.” Only instead of a country with borders, they have Smartland, the nation of people who know far better how to order the world than those ignorant unwashed masses of voters that keep electing morons who can’t pronounce “nuclear.”
They’re fanatical Smartland patriots. So fanatical they don’t hesitate long enough to get their facts right before running a story that seriously weakens America’s position in a deadly war that has already blown up the two tallest buildings in the capital city of Smartland. Because they haven’t recognized yet that Smartland only exists as a parasite, sucking the blood out of the Heartland that they have such contempt for.
One thing for sure. At Newsweek, nobody better ever say again, “We don’t make the news, we just print it.”
3. Muslims in Muslim countries can dish it out, but they can’t take it. They had no problem expelling all the Jews from their countries in an ethnic cleansing every bit as vicious as anything the Spaniards did in 1492. They desecrated Torahs left and right. Nowadays they blow up babies and call it a heroic act, because they were Jewish babies.
But let somebody start a rumor that somebody dunked a Quran in the toilet, and they go insane and riot and kill people.
What planet do these people live on?
It’s Earth.
What you see in those riots is the result of centuries of being in an almost complete majority — and having nothing to show for it. Not freedom, not prosperity, not even respect.
Practically everybody they know is Muslim and yet they are still powerless and ashamed and angry.
Muslims in the United States might feel all the same things, but they know they’re not in the majority and they’ve learned to keep their heads down. Like every other minority that doesn’t have the power of the state behind them.
The religious right in America thought they were in the majority back in the 1980s, when Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and others flexed their political muscle, only to discover — oops — that committed Christians had somehow slipped into a despised minority position without even realizing it.
They didn’t have anywhere near the muscle they thought they had and they soon relapsed back into relative quiet. (Forget the way they keep getting trotted out as dangerous demons — that’s just the Left, looking for somebody to demonize so they can whip up support. The new McCarthyism; they always need devils.)
It’s hard for me to feel even a shred of pity for all those poor Muslims who heard that somewhere in the world, their holy book might have been desecrated. Do they really expect people outside their religion to take their beliefs as seriously as they do?
Why, just a few weeks ago a CBS television show (Cold Case Files) ran an episode that made an outrageous attack on my church, in which items as sacred to us as the Quran is to Muslims were openly displayed and mocked on national television.
But you didn’t see Mormons rioting over it. Oh, we were angry enough– it was infuriating to be treated with such contempt, as CBS, without a second thought, turned its airwaves over to some Mormon-hating writer who reveled in having the power to get at us with impunity.
But you see, we Mormons are very much aware of being in the minority. The memory of “Christian” mobs and state militias murdering helpless Mormon men, women and children, and then betraying and assassinating our leaders while they were in government custody, is still keen within our culture. It didn’t happen far away, it happened in Missouri and Illinois. And it has continued in the years since then, in isolated incidents of murder and expulsion throughout the world, not least in America.
We remember our forebears leaving their homes again and again to get away from an oppressive majority. We remember our haven being invaded by the United States Army; we remember being prepared to burn our homes and crops and flee again, leaving our homeland a desert rather than submit to oppression again.
But in the years afterward, we learned something else, too: How to get along. How to avoid making waves. How to blend in. How to make a moral stand when it matters, without alienating those who might stand with us and without (usually) provoking those who stand against us.
That’s what you learn when you’re in a perpetual minority.
When would Muslims in the Middle East have learned lessons like that?
What the rioters haven’t learned is that blowing up with rage accomplishes nothing except to make themselves look like big babies throwing tantrums. It doesn’t make anybody in the world respect Islam more — it makes us respect Islam less.
After all, when babies are prone to throwing tantrums, we may tiptoe around the house to avoid waking them up, but we don’t give them the car keys. It’s not respect you’re giving them. You can’t take them seriously as equals. You only avoid provoking them. They’re a nuisance.
I can hear people already complaining that my rhetoric is “excessive” and I have indulged in “name-calling.”
I have not. What I have indulged in here is correct labeling. Rioters have surrendered to their passions precisely as babies do, instead of controlling their emotions and acting sensibly, the way grownups are expected to.
Nobody respects people who riot over such offenses, period. But we’re so used to lying about things like that and pretending to take this sort of thing seriously that the truth has become unspeakable in polite company.
Yet this is precisely the truth that most needs to be spoken. The fact that Muslims riot over such an offense does not make anybody in the world admire Islam more, or take the words of the Prophet Muhammed more seriously. It just makes us shake our heads and think, Are these people supposed to be ready for self-government?
The fact is that most Muslims in Muslim countries did not riot. Most of them were appalled and frightened when so many of their fellow citizens went crazy in the streets.
But those aren’t the people who shape the image of Islam. It’s the rioters who make the news and get the airtime.
The rioters and the terrorists. For what is Osama’s “movement” if not a tantrum that has been cynically focused and organized in order to get the maximum attention.
Not real damage, mind you. They’re big babies, kicking mommy’s shins and screaming “I hate you I hate you.” We have to stop them. To that extent we take them seriously. But not as equals.
And yet that is the thing that hurts them most. The thing they crave. To be treated with respect. Oh, they can say “We don’t care if you respect us,” but their actions prove that to be utterly false. All they care about is gaining the respect of the world. And yet they behave in ways that
guarantee they’ll never have it.
4. Seeing Kingdom of Heaven this week, I was sharply reminded of the fact that Islam has produced great leaders who accomplished great things. The portrayal of Saladin in that movie coincided very closely with the historical record. And if this movie were actually to be shown in the Muslim world, Saladin’s words in the script could be read as a political instruction manual for political Islam today.
Instead, the Muslim world has turned its back on Saladin and embraced leaders who are exactly the kind of people shown in the movie as fanatical warmongering Christians.
Sure that God would protect them, the true believers wanted all-out war with the surrounding Muslim world. Never mind that they were unprepared and their enemy vastly outnumbered them — God would provide! So they murdered innocents in the name of God … and got God’s answer. Because whatever else God may or may not do, he certainly does not help those who commit murder and other crimes in his name.
Osama and his ilk are identical to the monsters in this film. Some of them are true believers even if they violate every aspect of Islam with the crimes they commit against humanity; others, like the character Guy, are jockeying for command of a ship — and they’ll sink it if that’s what it takes to get control of the helm.
Which should mean that we are like Saladin. After all, without even being asked we waged and are waging the most humane major war in history. Our efforts to save the lives of our enemies have cost us many casualties that we need not have suffered — who does that?
5. A house divided against itself cannot stand. The greatest asset that Osama and his tribe have going for them is not the tantrumlike behavior of their supporters. It’s the fact that the West is deeply divided, as a new religious movement — politically correct puritanism — is perilously
close to seizing control of the governments of most of the major nations of the West.
These citizens of Smartland disingenuously claim that they are neither organized nor a religion — organized religions are the bogeyman they invoke to frighten their opponents into silence.
But let’s remember, please, that Puritanism wasn’t an organized religion, either. (Nor was anarchism; nor, for that matter, is Islamicism.) Without ever quite being organized as a church, Puritanism still managed to seize power in England in the 17th century, rather the way that Islamicism seized power in Iran and Afghanistan in the 20th.
How long did it take for the people to be utterly disenchanted by government-by-fanatics, who see every opponent as evil and make every political decision an article of faith? Afghanistan longed to be free of the Taliban; the people of Iran hunger for freedom now. And when the Puritans were toppled in
England, the people rejoiced.
Just so the fanatics who now rule the Democratic Party, serving the cause of Smartland at the expense of the Heartland, will find that if they ever really get control of government, they will quickly be the most hated rulers our country ever had.
Already large numbers of Americans seethe over the puritanical laws imposed on us by anti-democratic judges, who cannot wait for compromise and the political process to “purify” us. Already we are outraged by the propaganda they foist on our children in the schools, without reference to the values of the community or the roots of the American culture.
The Taliban of Smartland will be just as repugnant to the people of America as the Islamist Taliban was to most of the people of Afghanistan.
So as we watch the Democratic Party flush away democratic processes in order to get correct outcomes, it’s worth remembering that we’re not so different from “those wacky Muslims.”
People who are so sure they’re right that they are willing to eliminate democratic processes in order to get and keep power are the enemies of freedom for everyone. We may be slow to recognize the danger, but one thing is certain: Once the Puritans have power, everyone else will finally see the cost of their utopia.
And as the Iranians and North Koreans have learned, it’s very very hard to get rid of a dictatorship with a puritan ideology. Sometimes you’re lucky and a big country comes along and liberates you. But sometimes there’s no country big enough to do it, and you just have to hunker down and pretend to think correct thoughts and live some kind of life below the radar.
You know, the way believing Christians do right now at American universities.
Copyright © 2005 by Orson Scott Card.
yeah, what he said.
— end of line —
By Sylverstone, on August 9th, 2004 There may be few words today which are more politically important, more widely used, and less understood than the word terrorism.
Even trying to come up with a dictionary-style definition for the term is not easy. Having every radical out there suddenly decide that their mortal enemies are “terrorists”, in some way or other, doesn’t help any. Nor is the situation clarified by supporters of terrorist groups who deny that they are terrorists.
The basic doctrine of terrorism as a form of warfare developed in the 20th century. In the era of industrial warfare, God fights on the side with the biggest guns, and terrorism was one of two major doctrines of “asymmetrical warfare” which were developed which would permit small, badly-financed forces to engage in war against opponents who were overwhelmingly larger and more powerful.
The other was guerrilla warfare. They share similar problems and some aspects of them are similar, but they are definitely distinct. The most important goal of both is to maintain initiative so as to control tempo.
Both were developed primarily as forms of domestic warfare, either by a resistance movement against foreign occupiers in a conquered nation, or by a revolutionary movement against the existing government. (Terrorism as a form of offensive war is new. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.)
In all warfare, there are five critical elements: objectives, strategy, tactics, logistics, and morale. In the era of industrial war, logistics became the most critical of those five, which is why interdiction and attrition are the most important features of industrial war, and why God seemed to fight on the side with the biggest guns.
The doctrines of terrorism and guerrilla warfare both aim to neutralize the logistical superiority of their stronger foe. They maintain initiative in order to control the tempo of war at a level which is logistically sustainable for the weaker opponent, thus avoiding defeat through attrition.
In terms of classic doctrine, the critical difference between terrorist warfare and guerrilla warfare is that attacks made by guerrillas are primarily intended to directly harm the enemy, whereas attacks made by terrorists are primarily intended to provoke reprisals.
For the remainder of this article, I will use the words guerrilla and terrorist to refer to combatants fighting their wars in accordance with those two classic doctrines.
In order to discuss these doctrines, it’s necessary to speak of seven critical groups: our forces, our people, our allies, their forces, their people, their allies, and everyone else.
Our forces and their forces include both leadership and military formations.
For resistance movements, our people is the population of the conquered nation, and their people is the citizenry of the conquering nation. For revolutionary movements it’s more complicated and fluid. Basically, our people are the portions of the nation which are at least mildly sympathetic to our revolutionary cause, and their people are those who generally support the government. (But these things are always driven by specific circumstances; the devil is always in the details.)
Terrorists make their attacks and then fade away into the population. They tailor their attacks to inspire the maximum horror and anger from the enemy’s people, bringing irresistible pressure to bear on the enemy’s leadership to do something, while depriving the enemy leadership of any obvious target to do something against. If the enemy leadership does nothing or does something token and useless, it will look weak to our people and make us look like winners, increasing support. It can decrease support from its own people.
But if the enemy leadership does respond strongly, we hope it will target our people (as distinct from our forces, which the enemy can’t actually locate). That will anger our people, again increasing support for us. In many cases it will also help discredit the enemy leadership, making them look brutal rather than weak. (That depends enormously on who the enemy people are and how they view themselves.)
We also hope that our allies will become more committed, and their allies will become less so. We hope that the world’s uncommitted may come to support us.
Which is why propaganda is an essential part of both doctrines. It is not enough to organize, to plan, and to carry out acts of war. It is vital to try to control perception of events. Both sides are fighting a dirty war, but it is vital that they be portrayed as dirtier than we are.
Guerrilla war and terrorist war, when fought according to classic doctrine, are long slow wars. These are marathons, not sprints.
But terrorists and guerrillas can be defeated, in the sense that they can be weakened and marginalized enough so that they have no hope of victory. Usually defeated guerrillas and terrorists fade away slowly, caught in a downward spiral of decreasing support, decreasing resources, and decreasing ability to operate offensively.
Those doctrines were developed incrementally, by groups who studied and built upon previous groups. Much of it was developed by sundry Communist and/or Marxist movements around the world.
Baathist forces in Iraq continued to fight after Baghdad fell last year. Iraq’s conventional military forces were decisively crushed by a combined Australo-Anglo-American conventional military force. Most news coverage and most common discussion tended to refer to their campaign as being “terrorist”, but in fact it was a sort of hybrid, primarily relying on the doctrine for guerrilla war but adopting some elements of terrorist doctrine.
The strategic foundation was the assumption that America had no staying power. This was based on observation and analysis of such events as the American response to the takeover of the embassy in Tehran, American operations in Beirut and Somalia, and responses to various attacks made by al Qaeda. The strategy was to try to turn Iraq into a “quagmire” in hopes that the American people would lose heart and rapidly give up in a matter of weeks or at most months.
Of course it didn’t work, in the sense of actually achieving the political goal of causing us to “cut and run”.
There was also a bit of a hope that they could provoke reprisals, or at the very least induce American soldiers to fear and distrust Iraqis collectively, and thus to poison all interactions between the occupation force and the people of Iraq. The main purpose of that wasn’t so much to rally support for the resistance as to seriously impede “nation building” by the coalition. It was hoped that gradually American and British troops would cease being thought of by Iraqis as liberators and more as conquerors.
That, too, ultimately failed; that, too, did not achieve the political goal. Its ultimately failure took place on June 28, when sovereignty was transferred to a transitional Iraqi government.
Thus the insurgency now has been unwillingly transformed, forced to change from resistance movement to revolutionary movement. It now fights against an Iraqi government.
Let it be clear that there really isn’t one single unified “insurgency”. There are many, and their goals are not necessarily totally congruent. What I’m mainly discussing here is the Sunni insurgency, which right now is generally identified with Falluja.
They’re trying to portray themselves as a resistance movement by trying to portray the government as a puppet of the conquerors, but I don’t think that’s working very well.
In terms of my seven critical groups, “their people” are more or less the Sunnis. That’s where they hope they can build strength and support.
But what I noticed today is that they have also largely abandoned classical doctrine. That’s because classical doctrine will no longer serve. Time is against them.
They’ve adopted an entirely different doctrine now, one which could also be thought of as terrorism, but one which has nothing to do with the terrorist doctrine I described above (and also described here and here). They have ceased relying on the teachings of Mao and Guevara.
The fundamental personality of their campaign has changed, and it is coming more and more to resemble the revolutionary fascism of Mussolini.
There are two primary strategic targets now, one of which serves the other.
They have given up on inducing Bush to cut and run. If Bush loses this election, it might end up being a good thing for them, but any benefit from that will be delayed by months, and they can’t afford to wait. Instead, they have begin to target weak links in the coalition. The insurgency inside Iraq was a beneficiary of the Madrid attack, but almost certainly was not involved in it directly. However, that showed them the way, and they had their first solid success with the Philippines.
They are not exclusively focusing on foreign governments. They’re also going after individual companies. The preferred tactic seems to be kidnapping and threats of brutal decapitation against nationals of a target government or employees of a target corporation. They demand to be paid, and they demand that the target withdraw from Iraq.
Obviously any ransoms they might collect directly aid them. But the demand for withdrawal is the more important one.
Like classic terrorist warfare and classic guerrilla warfare, this kind of warfare is cheap and easy. Potential victims are plentiful and can be captured easily with little risk. Each success is huge; each foreign target which capitulates is a huge victory. When a foreign target stands strong, the terrorists can brutally murder their captive and put video of his death online, making it that much more difficult for the next target to stand strong.
The only real significant way this could lead to “failure” would be if the gangs engaged in these kidnappings were found and taken out within days of a kidnapping, or if they encountered unexpected resistance in a kidnapping attempt. So far, neither risk has been significant. (The risk of the latter is very much a function of victim selection. Some victims are more likely to fight back.)
As foreign targets capitulate and withdraw, the insurgency has also begun to issue threats against foreign forces which are considering getting involved…
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By Sylverstone, on August 9th, 2004 “History is a reminder of what’s possible.” These were the words spoken by President George Bush as he emerged from a guided tour of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The former Nazi death camp in Poland was one of the first stops on his seven-day tour of Europe and the Middle East.
What precisely the US president meant by this banal comment is not clear. However, given Bush’s political record—assembly-line executions in Texas, Guantanamo’s Camp X-Ray, the indefinite imprisonment of US citizens without charges, two preemptive wars — it could be open to the most sinister of interpretations…
There is no doubt that the visit to Auschwitz was choreographed to serve immediate policy objectives: invoking the horrors of Hitler’s concentration camps to further an agenda of militarism and domestic repression. Perhaps no greater disservice could be done to the memory of the six million Jews and the millions of others who were murdered by the Nazis.
In a speech delivered in Krakow that same day, Bush declared that the concentration camps “remind us that evil is real and must be called by name and must be opposed.” He continued: “Having seen the works of evil firsthand on this continent, we must never lose the courage to oppose it everywhere.”
The cause of the Holocaust, Bush suggested, was “evil.” For the US president, the word “evil” serves to cover up a multitude of sins. He has used it repeatedly to describe the Islamic fundamentalist group that carried out the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. On numerous occasions he has referred to the leader of Al Qaeda as “the evil one.” This particular expression serves a very immediate political purpose, since it avoids naming Osama bin Laden and thereby calling to mind the longstanding business association between the Bushes and the wealthy bin Laden family of Saudi Arabia.
The existence of “evil” constitutes the only explanation given by the Bush administration for the emergence of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. Such a semi-mystical and religious presentation (which, of course, assumes that the United States government embodies “good”) has the advantage of precluding any consideration of politics or history. In particular, it obscures the role played by US foreign policy—Washington’s alliance with despotic oil-rich regimes such as the one in Saudi Arabia, US sponsorship of the Afghan Mujahadeen, the CIA’s covert war against secular nationalist and socialist groups in the Middle East, the unconditional support for Israel against the Palestinians—in creating the social and political conditions in which retrograde tendencies like Al Qaeda could grow.
The use of the word “evil” serves a similar function in the case of the Holocaust. This attempt to obscure the social, political and economic roots of the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s and the horrific crimes that followed is not unique to Bush. The adoption of anti-communism as the core of the post-World War II US ideology made any analysis of the anti-socialist roots of fascism inconvenient. Rather, communism and fascism were equated as “totalitarian” and “evil.”
“Fascism is the continuation of capitalism, an attempt to perpetuate its existence by the most bestial and monstrous measures,” wrote Leon Trotsky on the eve of his assassination in 1940. “Capitalism obtained an opportunity to resort to fascism only because the proletariat did not accomplish the socialist revolution in time.”
This was not just the opinion of Trotsky. It was widely understood that the Nazis, like Mussolini’s fascist party, had been elevated to power with the backing of big business for the purpose of smashing the socialist workers’ movement and eradicating the threat of revolution. The “final solution” that Hitler’s regime developed against the Jews was bound up with this essential mission.
In his authoritative biography of Hitler, Ian Kershaw, describing the path taken by the Third Reich to the “final solution,” noted that the war in the East—and ultimately the Holocaust itself—was portrayed in Nazi propaganda as a “crusade against Bolshevism.” Kershaw wrote:
“The more ideologically committed pro-Nazis would entirely swallow the interpretation of the war as a preventive one to avoid the destruction of western culture by the Bolshevik hordes. They fervently believed that Europe would never be liberated before ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ was utterly and completely rooted out. The path to the Holocaust, intertwined with the showdown with Bolshevism, was prefigured in such notions. The legacy of hatred towards Bolshevism, fully interlaced with anti-Semitism, was about to be revealed in its full ferocity.” (Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis, New York and London, 2001, p. 389).
In the immediate aftermath of the war, the US occupation authorities found themselves obliged to recognize the culpability of German big business in the crimes carried out by the Nazi regime. Gen. Telford Taylor, one of the principal prosecutors in the Nuremberg war crimes trials, pressed for the conviction of some of the top German industrialists. One of these was Friedrich Flick, the co-owner of the German Steel Trust with Fritz Thyssen. From 1932 on, he was one of the main financial contributors to the Nazis and the SS.
Taylor declared in his summation to the court: “We are dealing with men so bent on the attainment of power and wealth that all else took second place. I do not know whether or not Flick and his associates hated the Jews; it is quite possible that he never gave the matter much thought until it became a question of practical importance, and not their inner feelings and sentiments.”
He continued: “The defendants were men of wealth; many mines and factories were their private property. They will certainly tell you that they believed in the sanctity of private property, and perhaps they will say that they supported Hitler because German communism threatened that concept. But the factories of Rombach and Riga belonged to someone else.”
So, one might well add, did the oil wells of Iraq.
The description given by General Taylor of the German ruling elite could, with little alteration, be applied to the predatory layer of multi-millionaires that constitutes the principal base of the Bush administration.
General Taylor, it should be noted, found himself out of step with the subsequent anti-communist historical revisionism until his death in 1998. He was among the earliest figures to publicly confront Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunt. And he was a prominent opponent of the US war in Vietnam, arguing that the trial of Lt. William Calley for the massacre of some 500 women and children at My Lai should have been extended right up the US military chain of command.
Prescott Bush and the Nazis
In Bush’s case, covering up the historical origins of fascism in Germany serves a particular, indeed personal, function. While the president’s father had dealings with the bin Ladens, his grandfather made a considerable share of the family fortune through his dealings with Nazi Germany. Some have suggested that the Bushes’ assets have their ultimate source, in part, in the exploitation of slave labor at Auschwitz itself.
From the 1920s into the 1940s—after the Second World War had begun—Prescott Bush was a partner and executive in the Brown Brothers Harriman holding company on Wall Street and a director of one of its key financial components, the Union Banking Corporation (UBC).
Together with his father-in-law George Herbert Walker—the current president’s great grandfather—Prescott Bush controlled another asset of the holding company, the Hamburg-Amerika shipping line, which was utilized by the Nazi regime to transport its agents in and out of North America.
Another subsidiary of the Harriman group, Harriman International Co., struck a deal with Hitler’s regime in 1933 to coordinate German exports to the US market.
UBC, meanwhile, managed all of the banking operations outside of Germany for Fritz Thyssen, the German industrial magnate and author of the book I Paid Hitler, in which he acknowledged having financed the Nazi movement from 1923 until its rise to power.
In October 1942, 10 months after it had entered the Second World War, the US government seized UBC and several other companies in which the Harrimans and Prescott Bush had interests. In addition to Bush and Roland Harriman, three Nazi executives were named in the order issued by Washington to take over the bank.
An investigation carried out in 1945 revealed that the bank run by Prescott Bush was linked to the German Steel Trust run by Thyssen and Flick, one of the defendants at Nuremberg. This gigantic industrial firm produced fully half the steel and more than a third of the explosives, not to mention other strategic materials, used by the German military machine during the war years.
On October 28, 1942, the US government confiscated the assets of two firms that served as fronts for the Nazi regime—the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation, both controlled by UBC. A month later, it seized Nazi interests in the Silesian-American Corporation (SAC), directed by Prescott Bush and his father-in-law, George Walker.
The seizure order, issued under the Trading with the Enemy Act, described Silesian-American as a “US holding company with German and Polish subsidiaries” that controlled large and valuable coal and zinc mines in Silesia, Poland and Germany. It added that, since September 1939 (when Hitler unleashed the Second World War) these properties had been under the control of the Nazi regime, which had utilized them to further its war effort.
Among SAC’s assets was a steel plant in Poland in the same district as Auschwitz. The plant reportedly used the concentration camp’s inmates as slave labor.
Among those who have investigated the links between the Bushes and the Nazis is John Loftus, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s War Crimes Unit, who now heads the Florida Holocaust Museum in Saint Petersburg. Loftus has charged that the Bush family received $1.5 million from its interest in UBC, when the bank was finally liquidated in 1951. “That’s where the Bush family fortune came from: It came from the Third Reich,” Loftus said in a recent speech.
Loftus argues that this money—a substantial sum at that time—included direct profit from the slave labor of those who died at Auschwitz. In an interview with journalist Toby Rogers, the former prosecutor said: “It is bad enough that the Bush family helped raise the money for Thyssen to give Hitler his start in the 1920s, but giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war is treason. The Bush bank helped the Thyssens make the Nazi steel that killed Allied solders. As bad as financing the Nazi war machine may seem, aiding and abetting the Holocaust was worse. Thyssen’s coal mines used Jewish slaves as if they were disposable chemicals. There are six million skeletons in the Thyssen family closet, and a myriad of criminal and historical questions to be answered about the Bush family’s complicity.”
Prescott Bush was by no means unique, though his financial connections with the Third Reich were perhaps more intimate than most. Henry Ford was an avowed admirer of Hitler, and together GM and Ford played the predominant role in producing the military trucks that carried German troops across Europe. After the war, both auto companies demanded and received reparations for damage to their German plants caused by allied bombing.
Standard Oil and Chase Bank, both controlled by the Rockefellers, invested heavily in Nazi Germany, as did many of Wall Street’s leading brokerage houses. These business dealings continued after the war had begun, with Standard Oil shipping fuel to the Nazis through Switzerland as late as 1942 and collaborating with I.G. Farben, the firm that manufactured Zyklon B gas for the Nazi death chambers and operated a synthetic rubber plant using slave labor from Auschwitz.
In his book Trading with the Enemy: The Nazi American Money Plot, former New York Times reporter Charles Higham noted that the US government sought to cover up the role played by Prescott Bush and many other leading US financiers and industrialists in supporting Hitler.
He wrote that the government feared that any attempt to prosecute these figures would only provoke a “public scandal” and “would have drastically affected public morale, caused widespread strikes and perhaps provoked mutinies in the armed services.” Moreover, Higham wrote, the government believed “their trial and imprisonment would have made it impossible for the corporate boards to help the American war effort.” (Trading with the Enemy—The Nazi American Money Plot 1933-1949, New York, 1983, p. xvii).
The Roosevelt administration and powerful political figures in both parties did their best to smooth over Prescott Bush’s problems arising from his business dealings with the Nazis. He was installed as chairman of the National War Board, helping raise private funds for war-related charities. Shortly after receiving his $1.5 million payout from UBC, he ran successfully for the US Senate from Connecticut, a position he held until 1963.
A considerable section of the leading American capitalists sympathized with Nazism and shared its anti-Semitic outlook, even if not as vocally as Henry Ford. These sentiments continued to inform US policy after the war had begun, with the Roosevelt administration refusing to alter its immigration policies in the slightest to admit Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust, and the military rejecting requests that the rail lines to Auschwitz be bombed, on the grounds that they constituted a “non-military target.”
While Bush’s speech writers like to portray US policy in terms of moral absolutes—the struggle of good against evil—the record of complicity of the American ruling class, and the Bush family in particular, with Nazi Germany demonstrates that the only constant is the defense of the power and privilege of the ruling oligarchy by whatever means are required.
In the 1930s and 1940s this overriding consideration led George W. Bush’s grandfather to establish a profitable commercial relationship with the Nazis. In the 1980s, it underlay the alliance forged—in no small part by George W. Bush’s father, the senior President Bush—with the Islamic fundamentalists in the war against the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan. Today it is at the heart the younger Bush’s policies of militarism and colonialism abroad and repression and social attacks at home.”
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By Sylverstone, on August 5th, 2004 What’s the right way for a billionaire to help the poor? There are two paths to take, with very different results…
A century ago it was Andrew Carnegie. Now it’s Bill Gates. A fortune is amassed, and then most of it is given away. It is likely that a large portion of the $946 billion of private wealth represented in these pages will find its way into charitable endeavors.
As there are different approaches to creating wealth, there are different approaches to giving it away. It is oversimplifying only a little to say that there are two ways to be charitable, an old-fashioned way and a modern one, and that they have very different results. You can appreciate the contrast by comparing the works of two folks on The Forbes 400–Theodore Forstmann and Ted Turner
Forstmann has given away upwards of $200 million to the Children’s Scholarship Fund, which offers free private-school tuition to indigent kids willing and able to do the work it takes to stay in school. This is a very old-fashioned approach, one that makes moral judgments about potential beneficiaries. Contrast Turner’s $1 billion pledge to the United Nations, an organization that, by and large, adopts the modern approach. The U.N. makes moral distinctions not among individuals but among nations. Poverty, in this world view, is caused by large economic forces, and it is the job of the philanthropist to combat these forces.
Philanthropy changed dramatically in the 1960s. Until then, most Americans believed that neediness was only occasionally a material question alone: as when a sober workman needed cash assistance while recovering from an injury or a new widow needed tiding over until she could find work. More often, charity went beyond just handing out cash. Philanthropy in the 19th and early 20th centuries concentrated on education and acculturation, on moral reclamation–on turning lives around and getting people on the right track. It cared for the mind and soul, not just the body. Abhorring the idea of dependency and marginalization, it aimed to make its beneficiaries self-sufficient and to bring them into the mainstream: to make them fully American, fully working class–or, even better, middle class.
Traditional American charity stressed the skills and attitudes of self-reliance and personal responsibility; it aimed to spark an inner change by inculcating missing virtues and skills that allowed recipients to succeed on their own. Secular, or (as was frequently the case) religious, charity was heavily values-laden.
In the 19th century the Catholic Protectory in New York ran a residential school that rescued orphaned or abandoned kids, mostly Irish, who roamed the city’s streets, ragged and often dangerous. Between 1863 and 1938 it socialized something like 100,000 youngsters who might have grown up to be low-lifes, if they grew up at all.
The school aimed to make its charges law-abiding and useful citizens by means of a clear set of faith-based values, stressing responsibility and respect. “Our great aim,” explained Protectory founder Levi Ives, “is to mold their hearts to the practice of virtue.” The Protectory kindled self-esteem by constantly assuring the kids that they were the children of a loving, all-powerful God, even if their own parents had abandoned them. It taught discipline and structure through military-style drills and group music-making, where they learned to play an individual part in a larger, transcendent harmony. Their academic and vocational courses allowed most to become skilled tradesmen and some to attend college.
All this went up in smoke during the 1960s. You can trace the change in such monuments of philanthropy as the great charitable foundations or the annual New York Times “Hundred Neediest Cases” appeal. Its typical beneficiary for the half-century following its founding in 1912 was the delicate wife working long hours to support three babies and a husband dying of TB. Or the “little mother,” a 19-year-old orphan working hard as a showgirl to earn enough to care for her younger siblings. The beneficiaries were people doing everything right, who needed help in overcoming temporary (though grievous) misfortune. They were called the “deserving poor”–those trying to play by the rules and help themselves–as opposed to the “undeserving poor,” whose self-destructive and antisocial behavior helped cause their troubles.
During the 1960s the focus of philanthropy shifted from the personal to the systemic, and from the moral to the political. If people were poor and in need, no longer were they assumed to be victims of misfortune or in need of developing the skills or moral qualities to succeed on their own. Instead, they were victims of the vast, impersonal forces of capitalism or racism that doomed them to failure, regardless of their own efforts or inner qualities. To help them, philanthropists would need to become political activists and lobbyists for ever-increasing government benefits. Charity became a wholesale, rather than a retail, enterprise.
The Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas project, which turned out to be the pilot program for the Johnson Administration’s failed, costly War on Poverty, is a luminous case in point. So is the foundation’s support of Mobilization for Youth, an in-your-face group that agitated for increased welfare spending, trapping hundreds of thousands of New York women in welfare dependency.
By the end of the 1960s the New York Times “Neediest Cases” appeal was filled with drug-using or alcoholic single mothers dependent on welfare, whose dysfunctional behavior the Times ascribed to the environment to which society had consigned them. No one suggested that any of these needy individuals was creating her own misery (and that of her children)–or that true charity might help her stop the self-destructive (and immoral) behavior that was her real problem.
Such is the world view of many of today’s most prominent philanthropic organizations–the NAACP, the Children’s Defense Fund, the pro bono operations of some of the big law firms. At the start of the 1970s Catholic Charities changed its focus from charity to individuals to combating “the root causes of poverty and oppression” by means of “social action” and “making a contribution to the formation of public policy.” A far cry from the vision of the Catholic Protectory 100 years earlier.
If the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 suggests anything, it is that most Americans believe the modern approach to helping the poor has been a tragic failure, luring millions of people into lifetimes of dependency, stripping away their dignity and making poverty an inter-generational inheritance even as the national economy has boomed and opportunity has proliferated. Nearly $6 trillion later, the U.S. has proved that money alone does not solve problems.
Now our ideas about charity are changing once more, and in a much healthier direction. You can see that change in New York’s Doe Fund and its irrepressible head, George McDonald. He was once a noisy advocate for the homeless, preaching that all they needed was “housing, housing, housing.” But when he looked closely at them, he realized their problem was their own behavior, since the overwhelming majority of them were drug users, alcoholics, or both. They had to have a change of heart and take control of their lives, McDonald came to believe. So he required those in his program to kick drugs and booze, to labor daily in the organization’s street-cleaning program and to work with a job counselor. Over half the graduates end up in their own apartments with regular jobs–remarkable for people who had hit bottom.
You can see the change, too, in President Bush’s Faith-Based and Community Initiative, which rests on the idea that the worst-off may need a moral and spiritual transformation more than they need material aid. It has taken us a long detour to return to this understanding, a detour costly in dollars and in human wreckage; but now that we have regained our bearings, we can be confident that our philanthropic giving will do good to those we sincerely aim to help.
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By Sylverstone, on March 25th, 2004 RIAA site intermittently available, now running Linux
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)’s site is now transiently available after an extended outage and now appears to be running Linux
Inevitably, this will lead to speculation that SCO might add the RIAA to the list of Linux using organizations currently receiving attention from its lawyers.
Of course, the RIAA is itself well endowed with lawyers should it need to defend itself.
heh.
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By Sylverstone, on January 15th, 2004 the truth about our enemy…
(Steven Den Beste says things so much better than i)
The nations and the peoples within the zone of our enemy’s culture are complete failures. Their economies are disasters. They make no contribution to the advance of science or engineering. They make no contribution to art or culture. They have no important diplomatic power. They are not respected. Most of their people are impoverished and miserable and filled with resentment, and those who are not impoverished are living a lie.
They hate us. They hate us because our culture is everything theirs is not. Our culture is vibrant and fecund; our economies are successful. Our achievements are magnificent. Our engineering and science are advancing at breathtaking speed. Our people are fat and happy (relatively speaking). We are influential, we are powerful, we are wealthy. “We” are the western democracies, but in particular “we” are the United States, which is the most successful of the western democracies by a long margin. America is the most successful nation in the history of the world, economically and technologically and militarily and even culturally. …
We’re everything that they think they should be, everything they once were, and by our power and success we throw their modern failure into stark contrast, especially because we’ve gotten to where we are by doing everything their religion says is wrong. We’ve deeply sinned, and yet we’ve won. They are forced to compare their own accomplishments to ours because we are the standard of success, and in every important way they come up badly short. In most of the contests it’s not just that our score is higher, it’s that their score is zero.
They have nothing whatever they can point to that can save face and preserve their egos. In every practical objective way we are better than they are, and they know it.
well said.
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By Sylverstone, on January 4th, 2004 I see a lot of people yelling for peace but I have not heard of a plan for peace. So, here’s one plan
1. The US will apologize to the world for our “interference” in their affairs, past & present. You know, Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Noriega, Milosevic and the rest of those ‘good ole boys.’ We will never “interfere” again.
2. We will withdraw our troops from all over the world, starting with Germany, South Korea and the Philippines. They don’t want us there. We would station troops at our borders. No one sneaking through holes in the fence.
3. All illegal aliens have 90 days to get their affairs together and leave. We’ll give them a free trip home. After 90 days the remainder will be gathered up and deported immediately, regardless of who or where they are. France would welcome them.
4. All future visitors will be thoroughly checked and limited to 90 days unless given a special permit. No one from a terrorist nation would be allowed in. If you don’t like it there, change it yourself and don’t hide here. Asylum would never be available to anyone. We don’t need any more cab drivers or 7-11 cashiers.
5. No “students” over age 21. The older ones are the bombers. If they don’t attend classes, they get a “D” and it’s back home baby.
6. The US will make a strong effort to become self-sufficient energy wise. This will include developing non-polluting sources of energy but will require a temporary drilling of oil in the Alaskan wilderness. The caribou will have to cope for a while
7. Offer Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries $10 a barrel for their oil. If they don’t like it, we go some place else.They can go somewhere else to sell their production. (About a week of the wells filling up the storage sites would be enough.)
8. If there is a famine or other natural catastrophe in the world, we will not “interfere.” They can pray to Allah or whomever, for seeds, rain, cement or whatever they need. Besides most of what we give them is stolen or given to the army. The people who need it most get very little, if anything.
9. Ship the UN Headquarters to an isolated island some place. We don’t need the spies and fair weather friends here. Besides, the building would make a good homeless shelter or lockup for illegal aliens.
10. All Americans must go to charm and beauty school. That way, no one can call us “Ugly Americans” any longer.
Now, ain’t that a winner of a plan.
“The Statue of Liberty is no longer saying ‘Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses.” She’s got a baseball bat and she’s yelling, ‘You want a piece of me?’”
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