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Political Pressure Pushes NASA Technical Reports Offline
Trepidity writes "The extensive NASA Technical Report Archive was just taken offline, following pressure from members of U.S. Congress, worried that Chinese researchers could be reading the reports. U.S. Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA) demanded that 'NASA should immediately take down all publicly available technical data sources until all documents that have not been subjected to export control review have received such a review,' and NASA appears to have complied. Although all reports are in the public domain, there doesn't appear to be a third-party mirror available (some university libraries do have subsets on microfiche)."
To be fair, McCarthy was right. There really were Communists in the State Department.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I've referred to the NASA archive several times during my own research (based in the US, by the way). The only documents I've downloaded are from pre-1980, and they're all marked as "unclassified". I'm pretty sure that my university doesn't have a microfiche archive of this information, so now my only means to access has disappeared without warning. So, yeah, I'd agree that this is only going to harm ourselves. I find it unlikely that the evil Chinese scientists developing doomsday devices would have much use for 40 year-old, unclassified technical reports.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism#Victims_of_McCarthyism
No. The vast majority of the victims of McCarthyism were not transferring secrets to the USSR and being homosexual certainly doesn't make people into communist sympathizers.
That wasn't Joseph McCarthy, that was the Democrats on the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, or don't they teach that part in school? When Ayn Rand testified before HUAC, Joseph McCarthy was in the Senate. The HUAC was controlled by Democrats when Joseph McCarthy was making a name for himself.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Are you referring to the right Rev. Jeremiah Wright? Because Rev. Wright is an honorable, articulate, educated, honest, and forthright man, who is at least second generation military, served as a Marine and a Navy corpsman, has more academic degrees than most Tea-Baggers have fingers on their right hand, is a college professor and runs a church. The fact that the fucktard-right-- errr, I mean mainstream media-- in this country can't tell the difference between an intelligent man's hyperbole (used to illustrate a point about the history of racial oppression) and violent insurrection-- does not condemn the man.
And if not Rev. Wright, then who are you talking about?
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
This was the old Democratic party. The one popular in the deep south (yes, I knew McCarthy was from the north). It wasn't until the late 60's and the civil rights fight that the bigots left the Democratic party and joined the Republicans. McCarthy was already dead a decade by that point.
First, the Republicans were the people (google "Lincoln") who, being whacko religious nutjobs who drag morals into politics, ended slavery (which was legal, but immoral) ... even though doing so required an actual war against the southern Democrats (Historical FACT: No Republican was a slave owner).
Second, Historical FACT: the Democrats and independents who formed the KKK used to call for the deaths not only of blacks but also of Jews and Catholics and Republicans (disagree? spend more time at the national archives and lose your ignorance)
Third, The Republicans (a minority in congress at the time) helped LBJ push the civil rights legislation through because LBJ could not get enough of his fellow Democrats to support it. This, too, is well-documented historical fact, rather then blogger drivel.
Please explain how you get to the bizarre narrative that black-hating-southern-Democrats (who still DESPISED Lincoln and many of whom still call the Civil War "the war of Northern Aggression") abandon the Democrat party (which mostly opposed the civil rights law) and flock to the Republican party (which pushed the law through) in response to... that very civil rights law. Um..... I'll bet your school teacher (almost certainly a member of one of the nation's two giant teachers' unions... both very deeply in-bed with the Democratic party) told you this tale and knew that you, as a kid who was both uninterested and insufficiently bold, would not ask any questions that would expose the obvious lie in this "party line". It was NOT the civil rights bill that drove so many from the south into the arms of the GOP (which they'd been raised to HATE) it was many of the other social matters of the sixties (the sexual stuff, the drugs, the anti-military and anti-establishment stuff). These are, not surprisingly, the VERY SAME ISSUES that keep the south in with the GOP now. There is plenty of evidence for this... you can just take their word for it, or you can actually notice that they flock to support and elect those black Republicans who choose to throw their hat into the ring. It's also telling that it is the Democrats in the media who make all the savage attacks on any black Republican who rises in politics or right-leaning media (Democrats are fine with the blacks they control and who stay on the political plantation).
While we're on history and McCarthy, please note that not only did the DEMOCRATS control the House Unamerican Activites Committee, but the committee itself never "blacklisted" ANYBODY in Hollywood; No law was passed to ban Communists from acting or writing in Hollywood. Powerful people in Hollywood fell all over each-other in a panic over the idea that the public would find out some of them were Communists and they worried that the box office sales would fall and they'd all lose MONEY... so the people in Hollywood blacklisted their own people. Movie people who wanted to keep raking-in the cash, so they threw their friends under the bus and kept-on making money for themselves without looking back. There were principled guys like Kirk Douglas who while not being a Communist himself, refused to go-along and led to some "blacklisted" people being able to work. The most disgusting thing is that for decades, left-leaning people in Hollywood lied about the "black list" and instead of saying "we never should have put our bank accounts above our peers" they pretended to have "clean hands" and principles and they ranted and raved against Joe McCarthy and against Hollywood people like Elia Kazan (who had answered Congressional questions as all Americans had previously and traditionally done when called to speak to congressional inquiries). During the Oscars immediately following the death of the famous director, when he came up on screen during their "in memoriam" segment, the lemmings of Hollywood all sat on their dirty hands and with false self-righteousness denied him the customary gentle applause. Their false piety and the victim-of-persecution-by-proxy attitute they espouse gets no sympathy from me because I know the history
Surely you've heard of the southern strategy? It's not exactly a fringe theory.
[posting as A/C because I already modded in this thread]