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Constitution, has no right to provide Healthcare. Not true at least if you are in jail / prison.

http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/c...

Here's my reference.

Before you deny it, maybe you should read Mussolini's definition of Fascism.

The most important point he makes? Give the people just enough decision making power for them to believe they're in control, while reserving the true decision making power for the state.

I very well can, but it will take me the whole day to list out hundreds of points in Shariah that respect human rights. For starters:

A few points from Quran:

http://www.quran-institute.org/articles/human-rights-in-the-quran-part-one

Please read the last sermon of Muhammad (PBUH) also:

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/muhm-sermon.asp

You can go on and read the Seerah of Prophet (PBUH) in as much detail as possible (Sealed Nectar is an excellent book). Interestingly, Muhammad (PBUH) is the only prophet whose entire life has been documented in such detail. If you want some youtube videos on it, you can watch this series: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOUp3ZZ9t3A

In the summer of 2002, city councils throughout the country began to boycott the PATRIOT Act claiming they would not comply with its provisions and would not assist the federal government in enforcing the Act

http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2097&context=ulj about 10 pages in.
That means we've been bitching for over a decade - and it's still around. It hasn't been curtailed. It hasn't been slowed down. It has advanced and progressed and we keep letting the cocksuckers get away with it.

I'm not surprised the Wall Street Journal allowed Mr. Lukianoff to mischaracterize the contents of Fordham's statement.
Read it for yourself and see if it really matches the tone of WSJ's article : http://www.fordham.edu/Campus_Resources/eNewsroom/topstories_2601.asp

November 9, 2012

The College Republicans, a student club at Fordham University, has invited Ann Coulter to speak on campus on November 29. The event is funded through student activity fees and is not open to the public nor the media. Student groups are allowed, and encouraged, to invite speakers who represent diverse, and sometimes unpopular, points of view, in keeping with the canons of academic freedom. Accordingly, the University will not block the College Republicans from hosting their speaker of choice on campus.

To say that I am disappointed with the judgment and maturity of the College Republicans, however, would be a tremendous understatement. There are many people who can speak to the conservative point of view with integrity and conviction, but Ms. Coulter is not among them. Her rhetoric is often hateful and needlessly provocative--more heat than light--and her message is aimed squarely at the darker side of our nature.

As members of a Jesuit institution, we are called upon to deal with one another with civility and compassion, not to sling mud and impugn the motives of those with whom we disagree or to engage in racial or social stereotyping. In the wake of several bias incidents last spring, I told the University community that I hold out great contempt for anyone who would intentionally inflict pain on another human being because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or creed.

"Disgust" was the word I used to sum up my feelings about those incidents. Hate speech, name-calling, and incivility are completely at odds with the Jesuit ideals that have always guided and animated Fordham.

Still, to prohibit Ms. Coulter from speaking at Fordham would be to do greater violence to the academy, and to the Jesuit tradition of fearless and robust engagement. Preventing Ms. Coulter from speaking would counter one wrong with another. The old saw goes that the answer to bad speech is more speech. This is especially true at a university, and I fully expect our students, faculty, alumni, parents, and staff to voice their opposition, civilly and respectfully, and forcefully.

The College Republicans have unwittingly provided Fordham with a test of its character: do we abandon our ideals in the face of repugnant speech and seek to stifle Ms. Coulter's (and the student organizers') opinions, or do we use her appearance as an opportunity to prove that our ideas are better and our faith in the academy--and one another--stronger? We have chosen the latter course, confident in our community, and in the power of decency and reason to overcome hatred and prejudice.

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., President

Compare and contrast with

Mr. Lukianoff says that the Fordham-Coulter affair took campus censorship to a new level:
"This was the longest, strongest condemnation of a speaker that I've ever seen in which a university president also tried to claim that he was defending freedom of speech."

I guess in the print edition, the WSJ and Lukianoff can assume most people won't actually read the statement being attacked.

Sorry, but on this issue, I'll take Nikita Khruschev's recounting of history over yours, as he was probably a little more familiar with the situation than you.

After the criminal murder of S. M. Kirov, mass repressions and brutal acts of violation of Socialist legality began. On the evening of December 1, 1934, on Stalin's initiative (without the approval of the Political Bureau - which was passed 2 days later, casually) the Secretary of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee, Yenukidze, signed the following directive: ...

This directive became the basis for mass acts of abuse against Socialist legality.

An example of vile provocation of odious falsification and of criminal violation of revolutionary legality is the case of the former candidate for the central committee political bureau, one of the most eminent workers of the party and of the Soviet Government, Comrade Eikhe, who was a party member since 1905.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1956khrushchev-secret1.html

And on, and on.

You can't quite seem to win on any point, can you? You're just making assertions of its ethical status, in the face of you agreeing with a directly-equivalent action in WW2. And, do note, emptily using the term "ethical" neither means you've connected your assertion to any demonstrated system of ethical axioms, nor, well, that you have the slightest idea what you mean when using the term "ethical", other than philosophically parasiting off of -my- metaphysical justification by cultural assimilation of the norms of theism. Yes, I actually do know at least a dozen formalized systems of proposed secular-based ethics, and their respective weaknesses. You completely defaulting on justifying your characterizations -at all-, drawing from the resources of -your worldview-, isn't even getting started on what you need to do here.

Again, still waiting for any objection you care to forward on the basis of evolution, or anything to give your self-contradicting subjective utterances any weight at all. Until then, carry on as the sole party here advocating mass-murder.

Oh really? This study [ http://www.fordham.edu/images/academics/graduate_schools/gsas/elections_and_campaign_/poll%20accuracy%20in%20the%202008%20presidential%20election.pdf ] indicates that Rasmussen was the most accurate of pollsters in the last U.S. Presidential election.

Science isn't gay.

Actually, science is pretty gay, since science has lots of smart people and smart people tend to be gay.

There is published evidence (sorry, paywall) of a moderately strong correlation between very high intelligence and homosexuality. That is, very smart people are significantly more likely to be gay than people of normal or even just somewhat high intelligence (the numbers I've seen are a factor of ~2-3). This "large tail" isn't enough to bring up the IQ of gay people as a full group since there aren't that many really smart people. The cause of this correlation is unclear (but also irrelevant to my point that science is pretty gay).

Homosexuality has been associated with high intelligence for a long time apart from published research. I'm reminded of the movie Bedazzled where Brendan Frasier's character wishes to be smart and cultured ("isn't secular humanism yummy?") and the devil who grants the wish also makes him gay. I'm also reminded of Plato's Symposium, where he compared homosexuality to philosophy:

"Homosexuality," Plato wrote, "is regarded as shameful by barbarians and by those who live under despotic governments just as philosophy is regarded as shameful by them, because it is apparently not in the interest of such rulers to have great ideas engendered in their subjects, or powerful friendships or passionate love-all of which homosexuality is particularly apt to produce."

(Translation taken from here. It should be noted that Plato's views changed over time.)

Finally, my personal anecdotal evidence agrees with the conclusion that STEM people are far more likely to be gay than average. My college was highly competitive and had almost exclusively STEM majors. My dorm had a huge number of gay people, something like 1 in 5 compared to the national average of something like 1 in 20. I myself am a very intelligent gay mathematician.

The only reason that this is now true is that Christianity has long since adapted to the cruel fact that the Bible, its nominal description of God, the origins of the Universe and humans in it, its accounting of history and morality, has been shown to be false everywhere that it matters. Shown long ago to be false. However, for most of the last 2000 years one would have been burned alive, hung, imprisoned, tortured, ostracized, or stoned to death for any such assertion because it is in fact the case that belief in Christianity and life outside of the Earth -- hell, belief in an "outside of the Earth" for there to be life in -- were mutually exclusive.

Christians have responded to the troubling news (as described, for example, in Cardinal Saint Bellarmine's letter to Galilieo -- http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1615bellarmine-letter.asp -- required reading for any Christian interested in the truth as opposed to excuses for continuing to accord partial faith to a stack of myths, legends, and self-serving lies) by simply eliding all of the contradicted and self-contradictory passages in the Bible out of their mental space. They do exactly the same thing that the selfsame Catholic Church has done with pederastic priests -- tried to pretend that they don't exist, or that they are "something else", for example metaphor, not literal truth, even though the original patriarch's of the church clearly thought they were literal truth and at least in the early 1600's acknowledged that if they were not, it was frighteningly probable that the whole structure of assertions of truth that is Christian Scripture was probably false -- probable enough to convince almost anybody, unless convinced otherwise by an increasingly tangled morass of "interpretation" of scripture that says one thing into something else entirely.

This has resulted in the shrinkage of sound core belief in Biblical scripture to the bare minimum to support Christianity -- at this point we are to believe that Christ existed, did all of these miracles, is misreported when he is asserted to have referred to Noah and the Flood as actual events, was crucified, died, rose from the dead, and will come back one day to judge humanity and bring in a golden age after a really big war against antichrists like myself where he will (one presumes) kill us for our disbelief and then condemn us all to a fiery furnace for eternity for the insult. Everything else is up for grabs as it contradicts yet another piece of science or historical analysis, but if Jesus did not exist, did not die and come back to life, then Christianity itself has no basis at all in fact.

Fortunately (for "Christianity", the hodge-podge of Christian faiths), it is impossible to disprove this because the events in question happened 2000 years ago, safely beyond the ability of telescopes to disprove them, and the Church itself long since destroyed any historical records that might have contradicted its account of the events of that time. All one can combat this with is sheer common sense -- the assertions are absurd -- and the fact that everywhere we can actually check the miraculous assertions of the Bible, they are false. The Bible is a false witness. It has zero credibility. It endorses slavery and marriage by rape. Moses, were he alive today, would face a Nuremberg-like trial for the slaughter and rape of the Midianites and be hung by the neck until he was dead. Its morality is not just suspect, it is openly wrong. The God it portrays is a cross between a tempery three-year old child whose name is "Jealous" and an ego-bound Earthly King.
br rgb

As a math teacher, I'm tired of every Joe Millionaire stepping up and saying that education needs to be fixed. Education isn't the problem. For the millionaires who don't understand yet...public education is not about raising test scores. Public education is about civilizing our citizens. Without public education, the public will not understand civility en mass. As a teacher in a high-poverty rural school district, and I've seen how uncivil kids and adults can be even when they're educated. If we don't force parents to educate their kids, they'll run free, they'll run wild, and they'll be a plague on our populace.

That being said, if you want to raise test scores, there is one variable that has more correlation than all the others combined. Poverty. And I have the numbers to back it up. Using my home state of Minnesota as an example, look at the state test results hosted by the Star Tribune. Run a correlation study between percent proficiency on either test, and the % of test takers that are low-income. (Remove the districts w/ the small samples of less than 10 -- they're specialized cooperatives & magnet schools whose sample of students taking the test do not follow the same sampling as with general Independent School Districts.) Even better, run it on just the Minneapolis / St. Paul Metro Area districts.

I haven't calculated the results for 2011 yet, but I ran it for 2010 in the metro area. Metro-wide, the correlation coefficient between % proficient and low-income for math was -0.91 and -0.93 for reading. That's insane. You almost never get correlation coefficients that good anywhere in statistics, but it's happening here. Forget teachers. Forget schools. The single biggest factor impacting education is poverty and low-income. (And for those who want to chant, "correlation is not causation," I challenge you to walk into any inner-city school district and witness the behavior yourself. I promise you, there's more than just correlation there.)

If millionaires really wanted to fix schools, they'd have a much greater impact on education (and our society at large) if they gave away their money to the poor. Better yet, set up a stipend program like Brazil and other countries have.

Cataracts are one possible effect; clouding of the lens due to exposure to bands of UV light. Certain medication can also contribute to the effects of light on the eye, but the common one that many people use without knowing the potential effect is St. John's Wort.

I'm profoundly affected by the shortened (and usually sunless) days beginning in the fall, through the awful winter, and into the spring. (I'm self-diagnosing, but I'd say it qualifies as SAD.) I've used St. John's Wort in the winter months with a reasonable degree of success, but I think adding bright light to my work area helped a lot more. As in, four 300W fluorescent bulbs.

Much to my chagrin, however, I learned that St. John's Wort and Bright Light don't Mix.

Cataracts are (generally) easily treated, thankfully, but that might not be the extent of the possible effect. And I don't particularly want cataracts before I hit 40.

Are you referring to this:

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1615bellarmine-letter.html

That isn't exactly saying that if he is right they would have to change their doctrine, it's more like saying "We're right no matter what, so even if you're right and we're wrong, we're still right." In fact, Galileo's greatest contribution to the church is that, by showing the Book of Genesis to be systematically false (and hence by implication casting doubt on the entire "infallible" Bible, written by the holy fathers and hence -- as Bellarmine's letter clearly states -- true ad litteram) he forced them to invent whole new fields of literary endeavor, particularly hermeneutics -- the art of inventing bullshit exegesis to try to make a passage that is perfectly contradicted by simple matters of fact and observation somehow less, um, contradictory.

As for the metaphysical assumptions underlying science -- you can't be serious, can you, trying to put science and religion on the same footing! The only possible excuse you might have for this is a profound ignorance of the mathematical and philosophical underpinnings of science. But I will reduce them to a sound bite for you. The fundamental premise of science is that it is best to believe the most that which you can doubt the least, given your experience and the evidence and the entire network of other strong evidence-based beliefs that we call "knowledge" when -- and get this, as it is the important part -- we try very hard to doubt!

Religion, exposed to this simple standard for knowledge that embraces both verification and falsification and the process of forming and asserting hypotheses and is little more than quantified common sense, withers instantly and dies. If Bellarmine had applied the Cox axioms to Galileo's result, instead of seeking to reinterpret the made-up nonsense in the Bible in some way that he could pretend that it is still true, he would have reduced his belief in its truth! But alas, he didn't try to doubt very hard, did he? Rather he was eager to hold on to his belief even though at that point he knew perfectly well that it was false!

Besides, Cardinal Saint Bellarmine, who prosecuted Galileo at his infamous trial, made his real position -- and that of the Church, quite clear with actions that speak far louder over the ages than these empty words. They threatened him with being burned alive to force him to recant and then they muzzled him under house arrest for the rest of his life rather than actually look for themselves at the motions of the planets and use their own reason to conclude that yes, the Bible is in fact wrong in many places. When presented with a stark choice -- truth or power -- Bellarmine chose power. The Catholic Church chose power. It chooses it today -- with a total accumulated wealth that makes it wealthier than all but the top 18 or so nations on Earth (all administered by a tiny group of non-elected officials) it is one of the most powerful and influential political organizations on the planet. People die every day in Africa because its leader has unilaterally decreed that they should.

Not that it did them any good, of course. Now everybody knows that the book of Genesis is false -- lies, myths, fables, stories without one single word of truth in it, not even particularly good poetry -- except of course the brainless fanatic orthodox Christians that persist even today in trying to pretend that flowering plants were created before the sun, that the moon glows with its own light, and that the Universe is some 7000 years old.

Any reasonable person capable of using Bayesian reasoning at all, when confronted with the irrefutable evidence that the fundamental book of four religions is false from beginning to end would doubt the rest of the unbelievable assertions made in the later text built upon

Instead of trying to prove I'm not a terrorist by being harassed by the TSA goons, I propose a much better way to prove I'm not a terrorist:

I will burn a Quran before boarding the airplane

I know, it's April 1st, but I'm serious.

How can anyone believe that the proper response to burning a book is to kill ten innocent people halfway around the world? Those fucking morons are way beyond savage, it's not as Kipling said "Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.", those savages are one-hundred-percent devil.

It says that the assignment is testing knowledge, not understanding.

Of course testing understanding is again more difficult; The instructors in our training facilities (aka school) can't measure understanding, so we teach a series of useless facts without context, preparing the next set of cogs to man the wheels of the corporate machine.
This is why Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader works: the kids haven't yet forgotten the useless information we expect them to (temporarily) memorize.
I think we need to massively revisit how we educate. This and (pdf warning) this are about math, but I believe it actually applies quite generally.

My favorite bit is the fellow quoted in the article who laments that he doesn't think there's a solution.

Not to be too arrogant, but anyone who knows basic geometry and how to stick two lines of code together should be able to at least imagine that there exists a solution. Is there really such a wide gap in the Two Cultures that not only does the other side not know how to fix a software problem, they can't even fathom that a fix is possible?

This reminds me of the Cargo Cult mentality mentioned in an article quoted a few days ago, here, where the view of the cult is that technology is an immutable force of nature, not a tool mastered by man, and the idea that man can wield it is so foreign as to be unthinkable.

You'd think that university administrators in the US and their ilk would be advanced beyond that. I feel embarrassed for the poor dumb bastard.

Until recently? You know nothing of history. Go here and search for "the wool maid is done for" and read a few paragraphs. That's but an example.

You know that pilots, on the whole, don't bother landing their planes at ground zero and examining the carnage first hand, right? They scoot on back to their aircraft carrier or their air force base in the next country and have a cold beer. They rarely even set foot in the land they're fighting. War has been impersonal for a lot longer than UAVs have been around.

And it hasn't been a bad thing. In the days of swords and spears, massacres were the rule and not the exception. Warriors filled with the rage of battle would avenge comrades they'd seen cut down around them by razing entire towns and slaughtering every inhabitant they could find. Besiegers would happily watch entire cities perish from starvation and disease, and would often speed up the matter by flinging flaming objects and infected corpses over the walls. Fighters simply became numb to any notions of decency or morality; it was the only way to survive, both physically and mentally. If you truly think that wars were somehow more compassionate in days gone by, consider the Gesta Francorum, which chronicles another time the west decided to involve themselves in the affairs of the middle east. Indeed, read any direct account of war from any past era. Don't let yourself be fooled by later romanticizations.

The advance of military technology has slowly moved armies further and further from each other, and in the process, given them more and more opportunities to plan and consider their actions. Advances in communication have allowed everyone to witness wars being fought, and even to catch glimpses of life behind enemy lines. We've begun to notice that our enemies are people who live like us, think like us, and dream like us, and not just foes rushing at us with swords unsheathed. Not long ago, murdering or driving out an entire nation would have been hailed as a glorious victory and proof of divine providence. If the nation was not Catholic even the Pope would have praised it. Now, killing every tenth man in a country would guarantee denouncement and ostracism from the world stage, and would very likely end in a war crimes tribunal. "Civilized" countries are expected to hold back the majority of their raw strength and refrain from using the most effective elements of their arsenals. While war is still a bloody business, it is handled with a delicacy today that our ancestors never imagined.

Your history is bad. America was colonised by puritans fleeing the lack of religious values in Europe (read: puritans were no longer in power) which is why it is not really ironic that they persecuted non-Christians and burned wiccan or suspected wicca at the steak.

No, your history is bad. I. America as a Religious Refuge: The Seventeenth Century Says "Many of the British North American colonies that eventually formed the United States of America were settled in the seventeenth century by men and women, who, in the face of European persecution, refused to compromise passionately held religious convictions and fled Europe."
Notice the "loc.gov", that's a governmental website.

For more...
Calverts of Roman Catholic faith, who had fled religious persecution in England, founded Maryland in 1632." Or Religious Persecution in Ireland.

Quite simply early settlers of the New World fled religious persecution. On the other hand you were right about them wanting to persecute others in Europe. I have never denied that. I have actually accused European Christians of persecuting people. The NAZI Holocaust wasn't the first tyme Jews were persecuted, nor were they the only ones. Spain, which was not united until Queen Isabella united it, was quite efficient at persecuting people. Jews, Muslims, other Christians, and others were persecuted. Isabella told Jews and Muslims to convert, leave Iberia, or die. Of course because Jews and Muslims were educated Spain suffered a massive brain drain which set back their civilization back. At least they were given a choice, Agnostic Christians weren't. They were slaughters by the hundreds if not thousands. So called Catholics would burn down entire villages that were still inhabited and make sure no one could escape. Much like Muslims did in Saudi Arabia in 2002 when a girls' school got on fire.

Read up on the Magna Carta, it is the basis of constitutional law and English common law. It was the influence of many constitutional documents including the United States Constitution.

I have read about the Magna Carts, as well as actually read it myself. I have also read the writing of the USA's Founding Fathers. One of the writers of the Constitution of the USA was John Rutledge of South Carolina and he "proposed they model the new government they were forming into something along the lines of the Iroquois League of Nations, which had been functioning as a democratic government for hundreds of years, and which he had observed in Albany."

Falcon

Most of the Germans we are talking about here were living within the German borders before the war. Two of the largest criminals of the 20th century (Hitler and Stalin) teamed up to divide Poland amongst Germany and the Soviet Union. Since the Soviet Union won the war, they got to keep (mostly) their part of the deal. Instead (and to get rid of the Polish population living there) Poland got new territory from Germany. This is why suddenly so many Germans lived "within the borders of other countries". Yes, I know there are other cases, like the Germans living in Czechoslovakia...

I'll agree that Stalin, in a perfect (or even better than average) world wouldn't have gotten as much out of the deal at Potsdam as he did. However, on balance, the Cold War between the U.S. and then-Soviet Union was a better result for the world than a Cold War between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, which would have left many more dead in its wake than WWII eventually did (e.g., finishing off the Jews entirely, to start with). I simply don't see how the Allies could have taken on Hitler entirely alone. It was the suicidal mission against Russia that eventually led to the German defeat.

Me neither. This is why I wrote about the dangers of racism *and* nationalism. Both of which played a big role in WWII. I also have no problem with being anti-Nazi-Germany. But one should not forget that people have their nationality rather independently from the current politics of their country.

Under most circumstances, I'd buy that, except for the fact that the Nazi party had absolutely no subtlety concerning its goals during its rise to power. This isn't a case where people were duped by a deceptive smooth talker. They were who would be persecuted, and those groups were persecuted. The 25 Points don't mention executions for Jews explicitly, but check out #18, keeping in mind all the new restrictions the 25 Points lay out for Jews:

18. We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, Schieber and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.

It's not the worst thing that happened. And it clearly can only be judged in the historic context. But even then, it is something that should not have happened. A large scale annexation and expulsion of millions of people is a crime. And, in the grand scheme of things, we are not talking about some spontaneous actions by people traumatized by suffering from the German invasion and occupation. We are talking about an operation planned and orchestrated by politicians/leaders, most of all Stalin, who also used other opportunities to prove that his valuation of human life and dignity was not much further developed than that of the Nazis.

Clearly, Stalin rates right up there with Hitler as one of the 20th century's greatest scumbags. No argument there. And I won't defend the behavior of the Soviet army. But do you really see a rational way for this to have gone down other than the German expulsion from areas outside of what became Germany after the war? Again, how safe could one possibly feel with a large German population in one's borders, given what had just gone on? Does that mean I support wholesale slaughter? No. But the simple movement (coerced or not) of Germans to within Germany's new borders (again, leaving aside the activities of the Soviet army against the populace) barely rates a mention when compared to the acts of inhumanity committed during that war.

In these times we probably should remember that Economics is a scientific discipline. When reading it it seems it could have been written yesterday, but was really written in 1776.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/adamsmith-summary.html

See, for example, one of the most famous historical essays on the function of higher education: John Henry Newman's "The Idea of a University" (1854).
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/newman/newman-university.html

Over 150 years ago, Newman noted that some people would argue that you could learn everything you wanted from the scholarly discourse in books, because some said that all knowledge that was worth knowing was available through written materials.

But Newman concluded that the true value of a university was never about classroom learning, per se. It was about being in a community of scholars, where the true learning was about all the various interpersonal interactions that happen. Some of this can happen online, it is true, but universities in a particular place won't be extinct until we can model all the social interactions that generate knowledge and learning in a virtual reality. Even then, it's an open question whether people would trade in real interactions for total virtual interactions.

Posner's comment is pretty flawed, when you look at it in detail; I don't think he thought out the implications very clearly. This can all be found In re: Aimster Copyright Litigation.

He wasn't talking about VOD - he was talking about the Sony Betamax, and says that

"skipping commercials by taping a program before watching it and then, while watching the tape, using the fast-forward button on the recorder to skip over the commercials... amounted to creating an unauthorized derivative work... namely a commercial-free copy that would reduce the copyright owner's income from his original program, since "free" television programs are financed by the purchase of commercials by advertisers."

Posner later suggests that Sony could have prevented this infringing use by removing the fast-forward button (I'm not making this up), but for other reasons, they didn't have to.

Also, the assumption that the various commercials and the television program together constitute a single work is almost certainly wrong - the commercials are probably all individually copyrighted by different authors, and licensed to the broadcaster.

I ran across this stuff in an article about commercial skipping (PDF).

Sanya Reid Smith is clearly incorrect as far as Switzerland and chemical patents goes. The Swiss legislature enacted a law in 1907 that enabled chemical process patents.

http://law.fordham.edu/publications/articles/200flspub6401.pdf

Your sources of information clearly have nothing to do with reality.

As far as outflow of royalties - big deal. You are trading the royalties for a institutional structure that will doom your society to being an economic backwater. There is a reason that every nation on the planet that has any serious intent to become developed adopts some sort of patent system. It is simple; the loss in royalties is far outweighed by the benefits to the local economy.

With such strong public feeling against patent protection it is no wonder that it took Switzerland--a conservative country where national referenda often determine important policy decisions-- almost half a century to enact its first national patent law in 1888. The law was so limited in scope, however, that its usefulness for patent protection was at best dubious. Indeed, successful lobbying by the Swiss chemical industry resulted in the 1888 national patent law protecting only inventions that could be represented by mechanical models. Two decades and some international pressure were necessary for the legislature to rectify this Swiss anomaly. One explanation for this long and laborious legislative history can be found in the Swiss constitutional requirements. Switzerland is a federal state with a strict separation of powers between the confederation and the cantons, and a patent law on a national scale could not be enacted by the federal government in the absence of constitutionally granted authority.

A footnote to the above states "that in 1907 the Swiss legislature enacted a law that eliminated the "mechanical model" requirement and extended protection to chemical processes after pressure from Germany, the biggest market for Swiss chemical products."

the real key IMHO is a detailed education in history

Seconded! Scientific developments make more sense in historical context.

What generally passes for history education is actually a summary of an idealized point of view about what happened on a bunch of dates

- and that's for the lucky ones! Rumors and propaganda are the modern historian's stock-in-trade.

Herodotus alone displays more skepticism than all 20th century historians combined.

The good news is that historical sciences like archeology are rescuing History from the historians. It will be a slow process, because the scientists themselves are victims of the historians' political perversions, and likewise skepticism is being devalued even in the sciences.

How do we deal with an untrustworthy media?

Shoot them. Until that's made legal, do as you suggest, "compare different sources to learn more."

Real history education begins with researching the original sources, or as close as you can come.

One of my favorite places on the whole wide Internet is Fordham's Ancient History Sourcebook. Their more modern sourcebooks are typical products of modern historiography, and may be valuable to document the rates of perversion, but the study of Ancient History began centuries before the modern trends and the brilliance of the Ancients themselves shines through.

• Populations that don't expect to be exterminated won't fight as hard for governments that are at best ambivalent to their welfare
• No resources need to be expended in either killing or converting native populations, which allowed for the incredible of rate growth of the Caliphate into the 8th century.
• Most importantly, converting Jews and Christians to Islam would have exempted them from the jizya reducing the tax revenue brought in by conquest.

And think of all the great literary works that were written on paper, they are still readable today.

Really? Let's see just how readable the english language is a few versions back: Middle English or how about Old English Those texts aren't readable. But we still know what they say because they have been translated into the modern English, just like someone needs to translate some PowerPoint presentations from several versions ago into the modern usage.

Face it, formats and applications evolve over time and expecting every evolution to be backwards compatible for more than one generation is foolish, of course having a new generation of OS every three years might also be a foolish. But if the new generations of OS are in fact justified, then by those very same reasons so are the OS bound evolutions of applications.

generally mediocre work

Well, he might not be Shakespeare, but try reading, say, Dan Brown or Tom Clancy, and then tell me he's mediocre. When you're better than 90% of the tripe out there, sci-fi included, you've wandered away a little bit from "mediocre".

As for Disch and Delany, never read 'em, unless they were in one of the many millions of sf short stories I devoured as a kid. All you need is Bradbury and Heinlein to get by anyway. Everything else is icing on the cake.

Oh, and don't let anyone go and call you elitist. You just don't have the common touch. We can't all be perfect.

maybe it's better in Italian but if that's what you consider an accurate definition then I hope you don't work in the sciences.

About the only thing you can take away from it is that Fascism values authority..

Consider this bit of history:

Hippocrates [ca 400 BC] writes about the use of willow bark to relieve pain.
The active ingredient in willow bark is isolated and extracted in concentrated form. [1828-1839]

The problem was that salicylic acid was tough on stomachs and a means of 'buffering' the compound was searched for. The first person to do so was a French chemist named Charles Frederic Gerhardt. In 1853, Gerhardt neutralized salicylic acid by buffering it with sodium (sodium salicylate) and acetyl chloride, creating acetylsalicylic acid. Gerhardt's product worked but he had no desire to market it and abandoned his discovery.

In 1899, a German chemist named Felix Hoffmann, who worked for a German company called Bayer, rediscovered Gerhardt's formula. Felix Hoffmann made some of the formula and gave it to his father who was suffering from the pain of arthritis. With good results, Felix Hoffmann then convinced Bayer to market the new wonder drug. Aspirin was patented on March 6, 1889.

Aspirin was first sold as a powder. In 1915, the first Aspirin tablets were made. Interestingly, Aspirin ® and Heroin ® were once trademarks belonging to Bayer. After Germany lost World War I, Bayer was forced to give up both trademarks as part of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The History of Aspirin

And most of the chemical industry was founded in Switzerland at the turn of the century

I would have placed the origins of the modern chemical industry in Germany ca. 1860 with companies like Bayer and with the exploitation of coal tar dyes - modern organic chemistry. Harold Baron: The Chemical Industry on the Continent

I guess Paul Graham may have been making a literary reference. Friedrich Nietzsche famously announced "God is dead" and put the thought in a "parable of a madman".

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/nietzsche-madma n.html

Of course, the thought there is that the "death" is a actually terrible thing:

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?"

But I think I can live in a world in which we've all lost faith in Microsoft, and I'm sure Paul Graham can, too.

http://www.hannibal.net/twain/works/person_in_dark ness_1901/

http://www.hannibal.net/twain/works/missionary_cri tic_1901/appendixa.shtml

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/Kipling.html

http://www.hannibal.net/twain/works/disgraceful_pe rsectution_1807/disgraceperseofaboy.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Tigers

http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/brochures/72-38/72-38.h tm

http://www.tribo.org/nanking/

KFG

Rome wasn't a power when Alexander was alive. The primary power in the world during his lifetime was Persia. According to the Internet Ancient History Source Book, Alexander lived between 356 BC and 323 BC. Rome didn't become a serious regional power until 100 years later, around 200 BC. For example, the Battle of Cannae, where the Carthiginian Hannibal wiped out a huge Army from the Roman Republic, occured in 216 BC.

Rome wasn't a power when Alexander was alive. The primary power in the world during his lifetime was Persia. According to the Internet Ancient History Source Book, Alexander lived between 356 BC and 323 BC. Rome didn't become a serious regional power until 100 years later, around 200 BC. For example, the Battle of Cannae, where the Carthiginian Hannibal wiped out a huge Army from the Roman Republic, occured in 216 BC.

I agree with you almost entirely -- all except for the term Islamofascist. The Islamists are actually Islamic Theocratists -- they seek rule by religious institutions and religious law. That is the system in place now in Iran, where Sharia law and imams are the ultimate decision makers.

Fascism is, as Mussolini defined it, when the interest of the state comes before any interest of an individual. Al-Qaida and the other Islamic radicals we are fighting are not facists. They are theocratists and want the rule of Sharia law and Clerics.

I can't help but find it disturbing that the Bush administration would consistently mischaracterize the enemy as fascists. If they enemy is fascist, we are in no danger of becoming fascist ourselves because that's who we are fighting, right? If we are fighting fascists, we must be the opposite of fascists, right? It couldn't be that we might become fascists fighting theocratists...

Are you sure you are not mistaking France with China ? I'll give you a couple hints. One is a democratic country and the other isn't. One has had people demonstrating in the street for just about any reason under the Sun, with the result that government policy on the issue generally changed, while the other had one demonstration in a big square that lasted for a month and ended in bloodshed.

Let us not forget The Terror brought to the French by Maximilien Robespierre during the French Revolution. Fact is is bloodshed is part of most political revolutions, luckily some of the USA's Founding Fathers worked to stop what bloodshed they could, Thomas Jefferson even defended some British soldiers in a court of law.

It started to sing the Internationale so I took it back to store.

That's what Vasari says, in his Lives of the Artists (1550): http://www.fordham.edu/HALSALL/basis/vasari/vasari 5.htm

Imagine a new line of German schnaps being promoted with those crossed symbolic fasces. It would -- understandibly -- cause an outrage.

Understandably. And stupidly. The delusional mass hysteria facing the swastika (and indeed all things supposedly-Nazi) is one of the more disheartening symptoms of the prevailing hypocrisy and idiocy of the hoi polloi in western society.

But new Russian vodkas continue to proudly display the murderous Red Star, and the above mentioned tools.

What about whiskies with American flags on them, then?

There have been smart people in the past who've thought about that. Among those that are at the same time religious and sane, your question is an important one. Sadly, we tend to hear more from the religious and somewhat insane, so...

Galileo quotes in his letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, which everybody should read at least three times (the full text is here in English, and here in the original Italian) St. Augustine:

If' anyone shall set the authority of Holy Writ against clear and manifest reason, he who does this knows not what he has undertaken; for he opposes to the truth not the meaning of the Bible, which is beyond his comprehension, but rather his own interpretation, not what is in the Bible, but what he has found in himself and imagines to be there.

A bit slater, Galileo says:

I entreat those wise and prudent Fathers to consider with great care the difference that exists between doctrines subject to proof and those subject to opinion. Considering the force exerted by logical deductions, they may ascertain that it is not in the power of` the professors of demonstrative sciences to change their opinions at will and apply themselves first to one side and then to the other. There is a great difference between commanding a mathematician or a philosopher and influencing a lawyer or a merchant, for demonstrated conclusions about things in nature or in the heavens cannot be changed with the same facility as opinions about what is or is not lawful in a contract, bargain, or bill of exchange. This difference was well understood by the learned and holy Fathers, as proven by their having taken great pains in refuting philosophical fallacies. This may be found expressly in some of them; in particular, we find the following words of St. Augustine:

"It is to be held as an unquestionable truth that whatever the sages of this world have demonstrated concerning physical matters is in no way contrary to our Bibles, hence whatever the sages teach in their books that is contrary to the holy Scriptures may be concluded without any hesitation to be quite false. And according to our ability let us make this evident, and let us keep the faith of our Lord, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom so that we neither become seduced by the verbiage of false philosophy nor frightened by the superstition of counterfeit religion."

From the above words I conceive that I may deduce this doctrine That in the books of the sages of this world there are contained some physical truths which are soundly demonstrated, and others that are merely stated; as to the former, it i the office of wise divines to show that they do not contradict the holy Scriptures And as to the propositions which are stated but not rigorously demonstrated, anything contrary to the Bible involved by them must be held undoubtedly false and should be proved so by every possible means.

Now if truly demonstrated physical conclusions need not be subordinated to biblical passages, but the latter must rather be shown not to interfere with the former, then before a physical proposition is condemned it must be shown to be not rigorously demonstrated-and this is to be done not by those who hold the proposition to be true, but by those who judge it to be false. This seems very reasonable and natural, for those who believe an argument to be false may much more easily find the fallacies in it than men who consider it to be true and conclusive. Indeed, in the latter case it will happen that the more the adherents of an opinion turn over their pages, examine the arguments, repeat the observations, and compare the experiences, the more they will be confirmed in that belief. And Your Highness knows what happened to the late mathematician of the University of Pisa who undertook in his old

As soon as you show me a single straight person who is allowed to marry a member of the same sex, you'll have a point.

Now, if you want to discuss a new institution to encompass spousal rights for gay couples, I say go for it.

But don't act like it's about equality. That's a lie, and it serves no purpose.

Homosexual sex was widespread in the Middle Ages and there is abundant information on what church writers and secular legislators thought about it. Shoddy or partisan scholarship and a distinctly modern disdain of homosexuals by scholars until recently marked much of the discussion of the history of this medieval homosexuality. Since 1955, and especially since 1975, much work has been done that is of reasonable quality [1]. The concentration has tended to be on the Church's, or society's, attitude to homosexuality. This paper takes a different tack and looks at the personal experience in the Middle Ages of those we would now call homosexuals and the structures in which they were able to experience their sexuality. Their experience fits in with the wider experience of sexuality in Middle Ages and this also will be considered. Naturally, we can say little about what sexuality felt like for individuals, but a possible framework for their experience can be reconstructed from existing sources. This will be, necessarily, a framework for the experience of homosexual males for significant information exists only about men and boys [2].

The main focus of the present paper will be on the experience of homosexuality for individuals and on what can be gleaned about the subcultures or other kinds of social networks homosexuals belonged to in diverse medieval periods. There are theoretical issues to face in this inquiry, about the concept of homosexual and homosexuality, and the overall place of homosexuality in the study of medieval sexuality. Only after looking at these will we move to a consideration of sources and the uses that can be made of them. A examination of the often ignored issue of why people engaged in homosexual activities will help us to focus better on the core of this paper which will be to consider those medieval societies in which we have knowledge of homosexuality and to see if they fit into any typology. The typologies looked at are of the types of homosexuality we can see present and at the social contexts in which this sexuality was expressed. ...

Very clearly there were distinct types of sexual activity in different periods and areas, but these activities do not seem to accord with any particular social organization of homosexuals: there was a pederastic emphasis in the Spain, with a developed subculture, and there were relationships conducted on a more equal basis in areas where there is little evidence of homosexual social organization. What has become clear is that homosexuality existed in immensely varied forms in the Middle Ages. A global approach to the whole period is of some use and interest, but to try to understand the lives of homosexual individuals it is necessary to consider their local circumstances and the structures in which they lived.

Homosexuality.

With the decline of the Roman Empire, and its replacement by various barbarian kingdoms, a general tolerance (with the sole exception of Visigothic Spain) of homosexual acts prevailed. As one prominent scholar puts it, "European secular law contained few measures against homosexuality until the middle of the thirteenth century." (Greenberg, 1988, 260) Even while some Christian theologians continued to denounce nonprocreative sexuality, including same-sex acts, a genre of homophilic literature, especially among the clergy, developed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Boswell, 1980, chapters 8 and 9).

The latter part of the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries, however, saw a sharp rise in intolerance towards homosexual sex, alongside persecution of Jews, Muslims, heretics, and others. While the causes of this are somewhat unclear, it is likely that increased class conflict alongside the Gregorian reform movement in the

The point is that when the Old testament was written there were no Romans yet and the idea as males as heads of the household and as priests was established then.

This statement almost caused me to decide not to read the rest of your comment, because it is utterly wrong. The Jews were under Roman rule when Jesus started his preachin' and Christianity began as a splinter cult of Judaism. It would likely not exist today if not for Roman oppression. See this document for more info on rome. Note that the dates fall between about 100 BCE, and 200 CE. Now, if you are paying attention, you know that the date of 1 CE corresponds roughly with the existence of Yeshua of Nazareth (although of course that date is widely disputed.)

Why is it that religious types often hide behind scripture, but don't know a damn thing about the history of their religion? It only serves to prove that they don't know shit about what they're talking about.

Try reading this. Maybe it will open your eyes just a tad? Jesus preached for a year or so. He got busted for bitch slapping the money changers (take a good look at the famous painting sometime) and hung up to drip dry. Some years later, some documents were written by the Essenes, arguably the most strict cult of Judaism. They became the basis of the bible and after much revision, expurgation, and translation, we ended up with the mismash garble that we call the Bible today. Well, actually, we have a whole bunch of different bibles, because Jehovah-worshippers can't agree on a damn thing.

Women are consistently declared to be better then men in almost every aspect in the Bible. They are revered for their characteristics. The idea of the greater individual being submitting themselves and serving a lesser being (for the right reasons mind you) is Biblical as well.

That, sir, is a pile of horseshit. Women are expected to honor and obey their husbands in all things, but it's a one way street. If women are so great, why do they have to be subject to the will of men? Also, let's not forget that Original Sin entered the human race through woman. Granted, from what I've heard, that particular part of the bible is Paul's doing...

The Bible discribes two types of degeneracy. There is immoral degeneracy, the one that everyone identifies easily. This is drug use,

"And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat."

sexual promiscuity, anti-establishment activity, etc.

Sexual promiscuity is banned because it is a tool of other religions which were stamped out around this time; several of them featured "temple prostitutes" who hung around and fucked people for donations. (Just because it's in Snow Crash doesn't mean it's not true...)

And I sure am glad that anti-establishment activity is against God's will! I guess that explains why the fundies do what their president tells them?

If followed to their conclusion the individual becomes an industrious, law abiding, charitible, and wholesome citizen. Tell me how that dosen't help society and make this life better.

Like the silly Apple commercials say, it's the cracked ones that let the light into the world. Christianity's goal is the same as that of public schools - to turn out legions of easily controlled sheep who will question nothing. This, of course, guarantees the mediocrity of our nation (the US) since we now have a bunch of students who don't even know what science is, let alone a theory. Hence, the continuing

One of the other posters here is correct, the Virginia colony very likely had a harvest festival before the Plymouth colony did, if for no other reason than they started a dozen years earlier with exactly the same communal-property=starvation results.

However, if we are going to discuss the "why"s and "wherefore"s, it would be educational to remember that William Branford, the first governor of the Plymouth colony, wrote it all up.

Here are some articles with links to the original:

From http://www.mises.org/story/336

In his 'History of Plymouth Plantation,' the governor of the colony, William Bradford, reported that the colonists went hungry for years, because they refused to work in the fields. They preferred instead to steal food. He says the colony was riddled with "corruption," and with "confusion and discontent." The crops were small because "much was stolen both by night and day, before it became scarce eatable."

And from https://www.mises.org/story/1678

The Pilgrims' unhappiness was caused by their system of common property (not adopted, as often asserted, from their religious convictions, but required against their will by the colony's sponsors). The fruits of each person's efforts went to the community, and each received a share from the common wealth. This caused severe strains among the members, as Colony Governor William Bradford recorded:

" . . . the young men . . . did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense. The strong . . . had not more in division . . . than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labors and victuals, clothes, etc . . . thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And the men's wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it."

Or if you really just want the undigested original:

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1650bradford.ht ml

"The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's and other ancients applauded by some of later times; and that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God. For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort."

Lots of straight people make a big deal of living in a hetrosexual relationship. They talk about their partners, put up pictures of their partners in the workplace, invite partners to work functions. Expecting gay people to be silent about their partners is only fair if you also expect straight people to be silent about their partners.

But there are important reasons for gay people to stand up and be counted, as it were. When everyone knows someone who is gay, it makes it much more difficult for something nasty to happen again. If straight people had been tortured for being straight, then it would be important for people to make a stand about being straight.

The ill-conceived mistake that we call the Onion 'redesign' is absolutely appalling. They lost a reader in me too. It seems to be a very typical mistake: cramming loads of useless crap onto a single page, and making the site look like a clone of a 1920's newspaper. That said, the article pages are only moderately bad - like say, about as well designed as a high school student would do. All they need is a few blink tags to top it off.

What is it with these idiot designers? The web isn't a newspaper, adding extra pages to your site COSTS NOTHING.

(And apparently there are ads on The Onion? *plugs AdBlock*)

Codes of ethics, standards, practices, minimum competency, etc. specify the limits to what a Client may expect from one of these professionals. Tort, in this case, is not simply a matter of a user complaining "The equipment/software/system failed and that Engineer was the last person to look at it." (Yes, this really happens. A lot.). If the Engineer screwed up, he's liable (or his supervisor, or his company, depending on other things). But the practice of hiring a professional and then abdicating all responsibility for the entire situation does NOT work. Neither should it. A doctor/lawyer/engineer/realtor/... has a specific task that they were hired to perform, and it's typically not "make me healthy/get me out of jail/make my plant run how I want it to/get me the price I want for my house/..."

For professional responsibility to work, everybody involved needs to know WHO is responsible for WHAT. And the assignment of responsibility needs to be done by people who are competent to do so.

This is why professional organizations function as (often legally empowered) regulatory bodies. They maintain standards and practices, codes of ethics, and minimum qualifications for licensure. These bodies are self-policing, and often write the text of statutes that deal with the professions they regulate.

The types of penalties that the article talks about fall under the general concept of "Malpractice". This concept has been applied in our legal system to the activities of experts, and this is how we balance the interests of experts performing a service with the interests of people affected. Everybody knows what to expect.

In this context, "Malpractice" is understood to be: An act or continuing conduct of a professional which does not meet the standard of professional competence and results in provable damages to his/her client or patient.

This is not a new concept: Even if a man builds a house badly, and it falls and kills the owner, the builder is to be slain. If the owner's son was killed, then the builder's son is slain. . Violation of professional standards must occur (...builds a house badly...), qualifying injuries are defined (kills the owner or the owner's son) and retribution is specified for each qualifying injury. The law does not say "If the house falls down, kill the builder." Why did the house fall down? Was it maintained? How old was the house? Did an earthquake occur? Did the owner build a second and third story on top of the original house? Was the owner using the house to train soldiers in urban infiltration? The law holds the builder accountable for "building a house badly". And liability is only assigned when the builder's malpractice causes an injury. Not when "something bad happend in the house".

There is a legal system in place (you may or may not think it sucks, but it IS the social context in which these things take place), to support and balance the interests of all parties concerned in such situations.

There are other questions that should be addressed in this context as well:

  * Is licensure required to approve the work?

  * To perform the work?

  * To sell the work?

  * To present the worker as a professional

  * How is the licensing authority regulated? Who gets to be on the board? What authority do they have?

Professional licensure, professional liability, and malpractice laws are certainly not a perfect system. However, the system is predictable and manageable by the parties invovled. It is possible for the Client to know what to expect and for the licensed professional to know what standards and practices he must meet.

A knee-jerk "shoot the developer" reaction is never helpful and rarely appropriate.

Without France the US may not have existed but then you Yanks find it convenient to forget this just because they wouldn't kiss your ass over the unnecessary war in Iraq.

Actually it was people like Thomas Paine, an American, who inspired revolutionaries in both the US and France, especially his "Common Sense" and "Rights of Man". And at least the US didn't have a Maximilien Robespierre and didn't go through The Reign of Terror.

Ooh and btw, like France I was against the US invading Iraq, at least without UN support.

from The Martyrdom of Saints Perpetua and Felicity, as written by Saint Perpetua, 203 A.D.

(Background: Perpetua was a young upper-class woman of the Roman Empire. Felicita was her former slave. They were converts to Christianity. Because they refused to renounce their faith, they were sentenced to be killed by animals in a public spectacle. For this they rejoiced. Perpetua wrote an interesting document, linked above, to tell about their approaching martyrdom and what led to it. This account of their deaths was appended by an eyewitness.)

Now dawned the day of their victory, and they went forth from the prison into the amphitheatre as it were into heaven, cheerful and bright of countenance; if they trembled at all, it was for joy, not for fear. Perpetua followed behind, glorious of presence, as a true spouse of Christ and darling of God; at whose piercing look all cast down their eyes. Felicity likewise, rejoicing that she had borne a child in safety, that she might fight with the beasts, came now from blood to blood, from the midwife to the gladiator, to wash after her travail in a second baptism. And when they had been brought to the gate and were being compelled to put on, the men the dress of the priests of Saturn, the women the dress of the priestesses of Ceres, the noble Perpetua remained of like firmness to the end, and would not. For she said: For this cause came we willingly unto this, that our liberty might not be obscured. For this cause have we devoted our lives, that we might do no such thing as this; this we agreed with you. Injustice acknowledged justice; the tribune suffered that they should be brought forth as they were, without more ado. Perpetua began to sing, as already treading on the Egyptian's head. Revocatus and Saturninus and Saturus threatened the people as they gazed. Then when they came into Hilarian's sight, they began to say to Hilarian, stretching forth their hands and nodding their heads: You judge us, they said, and God you. At this the people being enraged besought that they should be vexed with scourges before the line of gladiators (those namely who fought with beasts). Then truly they gave thanks because they had received somewhat of the sufferings of the Lord.