Do you know much of the many Nyssas which the Gods Osiris and Dionysus founded -- and that "Dionysus" itself means "God of Nysa" meaning that He was born there? Googling "Nysa Osiris Dionysus" makes for interesting reading! (Since everybody can Google I'm not gonna bother with links.)
According to Religions, the first Nysa was in Egypt. Osiris went a-touring the world. He founded a Nysa in Arabia Felix, and one in India that some think is today's Peshawar.
Dionysos (I alternate spellings religiously) was from the Nysa in Arabia Felix. Or maybe a Nysa in what is today NE Iran, to the SE of Caspian, on the road from Tehran to Balkh in Bactria. The Persian legend says that He first cultivated the Vine in these mountains around their Nysa, producing His
entheogen, Wine.
The Nysa of Dionysos is also placed in Libya or Ethiopia. And here we meet an interesting concept, "(A)Ethiopia." The Greek means "Burning Eyes" and it's easy to see why sub-Saharan Africans might be so called. The "Aeth" can, however, also refer to "ethereal" and as such is the root of our English "ether." It refers to the "upper air" a realm of Gods.
It is the root of the name of Aeetes King of Colchis, Son of Helios the Sun, and father of Medea. Colchis is the region to the east and southeast of the Black Sea, it's where the Golden Fleece was kept for Jason to fetch. There are maps showing this region to be called "Ethiopia!" Herodotus records the presence of woolly-haired people there, and it has been guessed that a Pharoah Sesostris (I forget which) founded a colony there.
(The Royal Family of Persia claimed descent from Aeetes through Medea. If biblical Jesus is a descendant of biblical Esther and her husband a King of Persia, then biblical Jesus might actually be the descendant of a God: Helios!)
St. Helena mother of Constantine "the Great" ("the great what?" is my question) was from a Balkan Nysa, though whether this be the same as Drepanum later Helenopolis I don't know.
There is a Nysa in Greater Syria that is also associated with Dionysus.
Strangely, the Nysa in Anatolia was founded much too late to be a birthplace of the God Dionysos, like 3 centuries before Julius Ceasar. The Religion of Dionysus was imported to Greece from Anatolia, but not from Anatolian Nysa.
All of this is Googled and approximate, the reader is urged to good sources like pantheon.org for more accurate and useful stuff.
Because it would be stupid to have Dan Rather (or Ed Herlihy) broadcast war plans should he come across them.
"American forces are scheduled to invade Syria tomorrow at eight PM Damascus time. Special forces have already airdropped in at the following GPS coordinates...."
The Syrians might be watching their buddies at CBS and go kill Americans.
The story at Origin was that Richard "Lord British" Garriot was proud that he had only read nine fiction books. Because that meant that his ideas were his own, not borrowed or plagiarized.
The National Endowment for the Arts has released a study that shows a decline in the reading of fiction, poetry, and short stories.
That's because the other NEA has destroyed American education.
But the schools do turn out plenty of stupid Democrats, who empower the "education lobby" NEA, who make more stupid Democrats, who empower the NEA, who make more Democrats.
I think the article means "the government" in the context of a court case wherein "the government" is one of the parties. You know, like "The State of California versus Cher" or "The United States versus Flynt," or versus visa.
Wikipedia by its very nature can be and has been hijacked by people with an axe to grind.
For instance, the article on Scythians was hijacked by a Turkic party (person or group) and re-written to say that Scythians were really Turks, and of course the Scythians-are-IndoEuropean theory was a racist theory foisted by colonialist Westerners.
The article has since been corrected. What about the student who has written about the Turk Scythians? He has just written complete bullshiite.
Of course all reference material suffers from bias, but none are as vulnerable to distortion as Wikipedia. That's just the way Wikipedia is.
An article on Wikipedia needs to be corroborated by other, more reputable sources, because of the purposeful and accidental errors on Wikipedia.
The best articles on Wikipedia are those that are just repeats of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica!
Correction: my Hari Seldon chant should not have been in italics, the local convention for quoting. It is not a quote (that I know of). I should have chosen some other way to denote the chant. Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.
If you cannot have a control and it is non-repeatable then I'd argue that it is not a science.
Is astronomy a science? Especially in its cosmological aspects? Astronomers have no "control universe" and I'd rather they not repeat the big bang any time soon.
In archeology, you have hypotheses (like various answers to "What was Stonehenge for?") and you have data against which to test the hypotheses. Hypothesis and data are the only two necessary pillars of science.
(As an arch-reductionist, I might argue that data alone is necessary for science, as data will give rise to hypotheses thus bootstrapping the entire endeavor, but I'm suffering a caffeine shortage at the moment and don't feel I can do justice to this view.)
Repeatability, controls, falsifiability and so on are good guidelines and good practice. But for some fields of knowledge, they are impractical. In some fields of knowledge, they must be interpreted expansively to have any usefulness.
By an expansive interpretation, "repeatability" in archeology could be as simple as digging another hole a meter away and seeing if you get the same pottery shards. For a control, dig a hole several kilometers away.
I am not suggesting expanding the concepts past the point of usefulness -- repeatability w.r.t. archeology should not include the repetition of irrelevant actions like cleaning your navel (I hope). I am suggesting that in many fields of knowledge, an expansive interpretation of the scientific method is applicable and therefore those fields can indeed be called "science."
A few decades ago, few thought of history as a science. Those proposing such view were shouted down with jeers of "Hari Seldon!" But today, people like Jared Diamond (trained as a biologist) and Luca Cavalli-Sforza are building on the work of historians and archeologists and forging a truly scientific method for history.
Hari Seldon Hari Seldon Hari Hari Seldon Seldon...
IAACP2, and have worked with ancient (in industry time) codebases, so I have usefully applied archeological insights to the computer science. Layers of kludges and counter-kludges provide the stratigraphy, and the changing idioms are like pottery styles. Since the code was criminally awful, I thought of it as "forensic CS." But since it was also phenomenally crappy code, I ended up regarding it as pure scatology.
Tiny nit-picking: Mac OS X is a BSD (depending on the meaining of "is") so it would be in your "next in line for accusations" category.
I disagree with your dismissal of Microsoft as possible culprit. A mass migration from Linux to Windows XP could easily be set in motion. All it would take is a few hundred poorly-informed CIOs to order their folks to switch. Never mind that XP isn't up to the job: that has never stopped Microsoft before. The AdTI book is exactly the kind of disinformation that can mislead CIOs into a migration.
Also, consider Microsoft's widespread astroturfing. These script kiddies fill public forums with any kind of crap as long as it's pro-Microsoft. Microsoft's FUD machine is in no way above "troll trash." Rather, they are behind it.
Dear god that had to be the worst star trek episode, EVER.
I don't know if it's as bad as "And the Children Shall Lead," but the Nazi alien made me bust out laughing. (It comes to mind that putting a spoiler warning on this message would be so redundant.)
Thank the Gray Ghost of Gauss that SpikeTV is showing "Deep Space Nine." It is becoming my favorite Trek series -- as much as I wanted to hate it as a "Babylon 5" rip-off, it won me over.
Maybe "Enterprise" is going to do something very great and cool with the Nazi aliens. Maybe they will borrow some old "Hogan's Heroes" plots. What's Arlene Martel up to lately?
Either that, or it will go down in infamy, drummed out of canon like the awful "Galactica 1980."
no need to nuke Japan, since they were getting ready to surrender anyway
Why didn't they?! Getting ready doesn't cut it. To quote Colonel O'Neill, "that's what you get for dickin' around."
In English, it takes all of two seconds to state clearly, "We Surrender." I can't imagine it would take days, weeks, months, or years to say it in Japanese.
The (peace-loving) Japanese were gettin' ready to, gettin' ready to, was gonna, fixin' to, thinking about getting ready -- all a huge load of horse shit the anti-American imbeciles of the world will use to second-guess the most important decision in history and cast America as The Bad Guy in their own little mental melodrama.
If the Japanese were so damn ready to surrender, then why did they not surrender immediately after the first nuking? Certainly, many responsible human beings in their chain of command were thinking of it, but it took TWO nukings for this view to become predominant in the chain of command.
Even before the EM disturbances from the first nuking were over, the Emperor could have been on the radio offering surrender. Immediately! That he did not, shows exactly what he was getting ready to do until a second nuking finally changed his mind.
Your "intermediate options" are fantasy: if a nuking didn't convince the Japanese to surrender, why would a mere demonstration? These silly options amount to appeasement. We should have offered the Japanese the Hawaiian Islands after they dropped love-bombs on Pearl Harbor. It would have been better than war. Surrender like a Spaniard at the first hint of aggression!
(On the other front, was the destruction of Dresden a missed opportunity to make nice with the Nazis?)
When does a city of peace-loving children become an industrial center? How many armaments factories, port facilities, transportation facilities, barracks and airfields does a city need before the city as a whole might be considered a defacto (if not by doctrine) target? We shouldn't ever bomb any place, because it might make a child cry.
Cities are important places. Capturing or destroying them is the way war has been fought for millenia. Getting all weepy over it is to wallow in pusillanimity.
The way Hiroshima and Nagasaki went down saved lives then, and continues to do so. It kept the Soviets out of Japan, saving millions of lives and also creating the economic and scientific powerhouse that is postwar Japan. Nuking (baby-filled!) cities showed exactly how bad another World War would be, and this alone has kept that war from happening.
All peace-loving people should offer thanks to Truman and attempt the deepest possible understanding of the most important decision in history.
As to global warming, I apply a little heuristic to help discern any real scientific consensus: if an article is by James Hansen of NASA Goddard, or uses him as an affirmative source, I simply ignore the article. If there is truly a consensus, ignoring just one scientist (fairly or unfairly!) should not matter.
I may indeed read James Hansen's articles, like his recent Scientific American contribution. But I won't use his articles to determine the existence of a consensus.
I find the heuristic invaluable in filtering out "Chicken Littles." Further application of this heuristic is left as an exercise for the reader.
responsibility but not control - you're not allowed to change anything
On the other side of Telecom Island, Team MCI/Worldcom also worked under this odious rule. Programmers were told to fix a 20-year-old codebase, but they were forbidden to change anything.
For instance, new functionality had to be implemented without new functions! Adding a new function was too much of a change. So we had 5000-line functions with all kinds of junk in them.
Data abstraction was also frowned upon, so those 5000-line functions took a pointer to the global data structure as their argument. If two functions needed to do the same thing to the global data, the code was duplicated in the two functions: adding a third function which only did that specific action to that specific member of the global data, which would be called by the two extant functions, was an impossibility.
Source code control was performed by a(n alleged) human who distributed and collected paper reservation tickets. He wasn't totally useless, however: he drank lots of coffee. Other than that, he was a waste of a cubicle.
Add to that aged numbskulls just getting around to learning C++, and freshly minted CS grads who as usual don't know anything (what the hell are schools doing these days?!), and criminal managers ---
[If there aren't at least a thousand of those people in jail after the DoJ is finished with MCI, the DoJ will have failed. Just getting the top two or three people will be enough to fool investors and other imbeciles, but the rot is much more pervasive.] ---
and you have an industrial-scale Charlie Foxtrot situation.
And if there are any fundamentalist ARI types out there, be thankful for antitrust regulation which kept MCI/Worldcom from buying Sprint. Antitrust is the only reason MCI/Worldcom's criminal activity was brought to a screeching halt. As a Mahayana Objectivist, I think antitrust should be applied to other criminals like the music and software cartels. Under capitalism, having control of a market is a sure sign of criminal activity.
in highschool most of the people in my AP and advanced classes [emphasis added]
In your what?!
You mean your school actually had classes for advanced students? That students operating above their grade level were not harassed by their teacher-coaches?
You went to a very, very good school compared to the average American NEA-infected jockstrap factory!
So of course the students respected achievement: they were taught to. Very few have it that good. The usual in my state is for coaches to double as science teachers, and illiterate union members to teach literature: the teachers themselves cannot operate at the grade level they teach.
I suppose I am jealous (really, ain't no supposin' to it!). If the administration of your school actually rewards rather than denigrates achievement, then you had it EASY.
Its a lot easier to blame it on everyone else then take some responsibility. Thats why you hear so many complaints about being beaten up and harassed.
You're so amazingly spoiled you don't understand how bad some people really do have it. So it's easy to see why you would blame the victims, when the hell they inhabit is not part of your spoiled worldview.
Advanced classes! Realize that most smart American students can only daydream of a school system that rewards intelligence. In most NEA-infected jockstrap factories, the students are taught to harass the smart kids.
[Even with your spoiled background, you were never taught the proper use of apostrophes, nor the difference between "then" and "than." I'm not usually a grammar Nazi, but when the subject is education and the post is dripping with snobbery, I cannot help but point out the irony.]
My least favorite part of SimCity was that for a mere $1, you could bulldoze a block.
The Fifth Amendment was completely ignored,
"nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
I do not think this was an intentional pro-totalitarian "statement." Very likely it was for pure gameplay purposes, $1/block flat fee vs. long involved condemnation procedures.
On the other hand, "using" sheep in Ultima VII.5 was absolutely a moral comment, dressed up in a joke from the great "In Living Color" variety show.
Slashdot Mirror
That is so sad.
Do you know much of the many Nyssas which the Gods Osiris and Dionysus founded -- and that "Dionysus" itself means "God of Nysa" meaning that He was born there? Googling "Nysa Osiris Dionysus" makes for interesting reading! (Since everybody can Google I'm not gonna bother with links.)
According to Religions, the first Nysa was in Egypt. Osiris went a-touring the world. He founded a Nysa in Arabia Felix, and one in India that some think is today's Peshawar.
Dionysos (I alternate spellings religiously) was from the Nysa in Arabia Felix. Or maybe a Nysa in what is today NE Iran, to the SE of Caspian, on the road from Tehran to Balkh in Bactria. The Persian legend says that He first cultivated the Vine in these mountains around their Nysa, producing His entheogen, Wine.
The Nysa of Dionysos is also placed in Libya or Ethiopia. And here we meet an interesting concept, "(A)Ethiopia." The Greek means "Burning Eyes" and it's easy to see why sub-Saharan Africans might be so called. The "Aeth" can, however, also refer to "ethereal" and as such is the root of our English "ether." It refers to the "upper air" a realm of Gods.
It is the root of the name of Aeetes King of Colchis, Son of Helios the Sun, and father of Medea. Colchis is the region to the east and southeast of the Black Sea, it's where the Golden Fleece was kept for Jason to fetch. There are maps showing this region to be called "Ethiopia!" Herodotus records the presence of woolly-haired people there, and it has been guessed that a Pharoah Sesostris (I forget which) founded a colony there.
(The Royal Family of Persia claimed descent from Aeetes through Medea. If biblical Jesus is a descendant of biblical Esther and her husband a King of Persia, then biblical Jesus might actually be the descendant of a God: Helios!) St. Helena mother of Constantine "the Great" ("the great what?" is my question) was from a Balkan Nysa, though whether this be the same as Drepanum later Helenopolis I don't know.
There is a Nysa in Greater Syria that is also associated with Dionysus.
Strangely, the Nysa in Anatolia was founded much too late to be a birthplace of the God Dionysos, like 3 centuries before Julius Ceasar. The Religion of Dionysus was imported to Greece from Anatolia, but not from Anatolian Nysa.
All of this is Googled and approximate, the reader is urged to good sources like pantheon.org for more accurate and useful stuff.
You can of course use QuickTime to transcode into a tiny little MPEG-4 file for long-term storage.
Because it would be stupid to have Dan Rather (or Ed Herlihy) broadcast war plans should he come across them.
"American forces are scheduled to invade Syria tomorrow at eight PM Damascus time. Special forces have already airdropped in at the following GPS coordinates...."
The Syrians might be watching their buddies at CBS and go kill Americans.
I do not know if this story is true.
That's because the other NEA has destroyed American education.
But the schools do turn out plenty of stupid Democrats, who empower the "education lobby" NEA, who make more stupid Democrats, who empower the NEA, who make more Democrats.
Careful with that VAX, Eugene!
I think the article means "the government" in the context of a court case wherein "the government" is one of the parties. You know, like "The State of California versus Cher" or "The United States versus Flynt," or versus visa.
For instance, the article on Scythians was hijacked by a Turkic party (person or group) and re-written to say that Scythians were really Turks, and of course the Scythians-are-IndoEuropean theory was a racist theory foisted by colonialist Westerners.
The article has since been corrected. What about the student who has written about the Turk Scythians? He has just written complete bullshiite.
Of course all reference material suffers from bias, but none are as vulnerable to distortion as Wikipedia. That's just the way Wikipedia is.
An article on Wikipedia needs to be corroborated by other, more reputable sources, because of the purposeful and accidental errors on Wikipedia.
The best articles on Wikipedia are those that are just repeats of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica!
The press is not purposely biased to the left. They are just stupid and lazy.
Leftists are also stupid and lazy.
So the press naturally -- stupidly and lazily -- reports with a leftward bias.
Heisenberg et al answer, "No."
The young musician then says, "D-minor, of course" to answer his own question. He says it in German, so "minor" becomes "moll."
Intrigued, Heisenberg asks, "Why?"
"Because they D-moll-ished the walls!"
Drug dealers should sue over being compared to Microsoft!
The way Apple counts summers, they still have until late September.
Correction: my Hari Seldon chant should not have been in italics, the local convention for quoting. It is not a quote (that I know of). I should have chosen some other way to denote the chant. Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.
Is astronomy a science? Especially in its cosmological aspects? Astronomers have no "control universe" and I'd rather they not repeat the big bang any time soon.
In archeology, you have hypotheses (like various answers to "What was Stonehenge for?") and you have data against which to test the hypotheses. Hypothesis and data are the only two necessary pillars of science.
(As an arch-reductionist, I might argue that data alone is necessary for science, as data will give rise to hypotheses thus bootstrapping the entire endeavor, but I'm suffering a caffeine shortage at the moment and don't feel I can do justice to this view.)
Repeatability, controls, falsifiability and so on are good guidelines and good practice. But for some fields of knowledge, they are impractical. In some fields of knowledge, they must be interpreted expansively to have any usefulness.
By an expansive interpretation, "repeatability" in archeology could be as simple as digging another hole a meter away and seeing if you get the same pottery shards. For a control, dig a hole several kilometers away.
I am not suggesting expanding the concepts past the point of usefulness -- repeatability w.r.t. archeology should not include the repetition of irrelevant actions like cleaning your navel (I hope). I am suggesting that in many fields of knowledge, an expansive interpretation of the scientific method is applicable and therefore those fields can indeed be called "science."
A few decades ago, few thought of history as a science. Those proposing such view were shouted down with jeers of "Hari Seldon!" But today, people like Jared Diamond (trained as a biologist) and Luca Cavalli-Sforza are building on the work of historians and archeologists and forging a truly scientific method for history.
Hari Seldon Hari Seldon Hari Hari Seldon Seldon...
IAACP2, and have worked with ancient (in industry time) codebases, so I have usefully applied archeological insights to the computer science. Layers of kludges and counter-kludges provide the stratigraphy, and the changing idioms are like pottery styles. Since the code was criminally awful, I thought of it as "forensic CS." But since it was also phenomenally crappy code, I ended up regarding it as pure scatology.
I disagree with your dismissal of Microsoft as possible culprit. A mass migration from Linux to Windows XP could easily be set in motion. All it would take is a few hundred poorly-informed CIOs to order their folks to switch. Never mind that XP isn't up to the job: that has never stopped Microsoft before. The AdTI book is exactly the kind of disinformation that can mislead CIOs into a migration.
Also, consider Microsoft's widespread astroturfing. These script kiddies fill public forums with any kind of crap as long as it's pro-Microsoft. Microsoft's FUD machine is in no way above "troll trash." Rather, they are behind it.
I don't know if it's as bad as "And the Children Shall Lead," but the Nazi alien made me bust out laughing. (It comes to mind that putting a spoiler warning on this message would be so redundant.)
Thank the Gray Ghost of Gauss that SpikeTV is showing "Deep Space Nine." It is becoming my favorite Trek series -- as much as I wanted to hate it as a "Babylon 5" rip-off, it won me over.
Maybe "Enterprise" is going to do something very great and cool with the Nazi aliens. Maybe they will borrow some old "Hogan's Heroes" plots. What's Arlene Martel up to lately?
Either that, or it will go down in infamy, drummed out of canon like the awful "Galactica 1980."
Why didn't they?! Getting ready doesn't cut it. To quote Colonel O'Neill, "that's what you get for dickin' around."
In English, it takes all of two seconds to state clearly, "We Surrender." I can't imagine it would take days, weeks, months, or years to say it in Japanese.
The (peace-loving) Japanese were gettin' ready to, gettin' ready to, was gonna, fixin' to, thinking about getting ready -- all a huge load of horse shit the anti-American imbeciles of the world will use to second-guess the most important decision in history and cast America as The Bad Guy in their own little mental melodrama.
If the Japanese were so damn ready to surrender, then why did they not surrender immediately after the first nuking? Certainly, many responsible human beings in their chain of command were thinking of it, but it took TWO nukings for this view to become predominant in the chain of command.
Even before the EM disturbances from the first nuking were over, the Emperor could have been on the radio offering surrender. Immediately! That he did not, shows exactly what he was getting ready to do until a second nuking finally changed his mind.
Your "intermediate options" are fantasy: if a nuking didn't convince the Japanese to surrender, why would a mere demonstration? These silly options amount to appeasement. We should have offered the Japanese the Hawaiian Islands after they dropped love-bombs on Pearl Harbor. It would have been better than war. Surrender like a Spaniard at the first hint of aggression!
(On the other front, was the destruction of Dresden a missed opportunity to make nice with the Nazis?)
When does a city of peace-loving children become an industrial center? How many armaments factories, port facilities, transportation facilities, barracks and airfields does a city need before the city as a whole might be considered a defacto (if not by doctrine) target? We shouldn't ever bomb any place, because it might make a child cry.
Cities are important places. Capturing or destroying them is the way war has been fought for millenia. Getting all weepy over it is to wallow in pusillanimity.
The way Hiroshima and Nagasaki went down saved lives then, and continues to do so. It kept the Soviets out of Japan, saving millions of lives and also creating the economic and scientific powerhouse that is postwar Japan. Nuking (baby-filled!) cities showed exactly how bad another World War would be, and this alone has kept that war from happening.
All peace-loving people should offer thanks to Truman and attempt the deepest possible understanding of the most important decision in history.
I may indeed read James Hansen's articles, like his recent Scientific American contribution. But I won't use his articles to determine the existence of a consensus.
I find the heuristic invaluable in filtering out "Chicken Littles." Further application of this heuristic is left as an exercise for the reader.
You expect Apple to trust copyright? Why should they?
And in a larger sense, why should anyone?
On the other side of Telecom Island, Team MCI/Worldcom also worked under this odious rule. Programmers were told to fix a 20-year-old codebase, but they were forbidden to change anything.
For instance, new functionality had to be implemented without new functions! Adding a new function was too much of a change. So we had 5000-line functions with all kinds of junk in them.
Data abstraction was also frowned upon, so those 5000-line functions took a pointer to the global data structure as their argument. If two functions needed to do the same thing to the global data, the code was duplicated in the two functions: adding a third function which only did that specific action to that specific member of the global data, which would be called by the two extant functions, was an impossibility.
Source code control was performed by a(n alleged) human who distributed and collected paper reservation tickets. He wasn't totally useless, however: he drank lots of coffee. Other than that, he was a waste of a cubicle.
Add to that aged numbskulls just getting around to learning C++, and freshly minted CS grads who as usual don't know anything (what the hell are schools doing these days?!), and criminal managers ---
[If there aren't at least a thousand of those people in jail after the DoJ is finished with MCI, the DoJ will have failed. Just getting the top two or three people will be enough to fool investors and other imbeciles, but the rot is much more pervasive.] ---
and you have an industrial-scale Charlie Foxtrot situation.
And if there are any fundamentalist ARI types out there, be thankful for antitrust regulation which kept MCI/Worldcom from buying Sprint. Antitrust is the only reason MCI/Worldcom's criminal activity was brought to a screeching halt. As a Mahayana Objectivist, I think antitrust should be applied to other criminals like the music and software cartels. Under capitalism, having control of a market is a sure sign of criminal activity.
Is it a shopping center, a mall, real estate development?
In your what?!
You mean your school actually had classes for advanced students? That students operating above their grade level were not harassed by their teacher-coaches?
You went to a very, very good school compared to the average American NEA-infected jockstrap factory!
So of course the students respected achievement: they were taught to. Very few have it that good. The usual in my state is for coaches to double as science teachers, and illiterate union members to teach literature: the teachers themselves cannot operate at the grade level they teach.
I suppose I am jealous (really, ain't no supposin' to it!). If the administration of your school actually rewards rather than denigrates achievement, then you had it EASY.
Its a lot easier to blame it on everyone else then take some responsibility. Thats why you hear so many complaints about being beaten up and harassed.
You're so amazingly spoiled you don't understand how bad some people really do have it. So it's easy to see why you would blame the victims, when the hell they inhabit is not part of your spoiled worldview.
Advanced classes! Realize that most smart American students can only daydream of a school system that rewards intelligence. In most NEA-infected jockstrap factories, the students are taught to harass the smart kids.
[Even with your spoiled background, you were never taught the proper use of apostrophes, nor the difference between "then" and "than." I'm not usually a grammar Nazi, but when the subject is education and the post is dripping with snobbery, I cannot help but point out the irony.]
The Fifth Amendment was completely ignored, "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
I do not think this was an intentional pro-totalitarian "statement." Very likely it was for pure gameplay purposes, $1/block flat fee vs. long involved condemnation procedures.
On the other hand, "using" sheep in Ultima VII.5 was absolutely a moral comment, dressed up in a joke from the great "In Living Color" variety show.
It went down in Baghdad.