My druthers would be to draw the line between Timothy McVie's and Osama bin Laden's crew, precisely in this way: Citizenship should continue to have its full privileges, in so far as technologically possible. Noncitizens, however, should be segregated in at least the following ways: (1) no university study in sensitive areas unless they are full citizens of absolutely friendly countries which share the fundamentals of our culture, (2) no right to operate a motor vehicle, (3) full strip search before any use of public transport as at least a random possibility, (4) no right to use unsurveilled communications or encryption over communications. Because citizens' rights can be preserved at the cost of further raising the borders to non-citizens, let's do it!
Sure, we'll get occassional local kooks doing harm. That may be the acceptable cost of freedom - sometimes a few score of lives, but not thousands. For the freedom of the road, we also tolerate traffic deaths. The difference with foreigners is that the cost of lack of vigilence there is as demonstrated in the thousands. Curtailing citizens' freedoms to stop this is like poisoning the rats to keep away the wolves, at best.
Yes, we're an immigrant country. Every country has been beyond our original home in Africa. Our borders are much too open, especially to those from cultures that don't share the values of civilization. To remedy that there are two things to do: (1) spread the values of civilization, yes, even in a crusade and (2) close the borders to those without our values.
Okay, now show how this is wrong, how we can preserve both the rights of citizens and the rights we have so far generously granted to foreigners. Because if it's a choice, I think we ought to preserve the rights of citizens which establish the foundation for our social and material civilization, without which foreigners wouldn't be attracted here anyway. So let's largely lock them out until they attain civilized maturity. Again, these are dark thoughts. But far darker the thought of taking from ourselves our own hard-earned liberties.
Wouldn't be too useful, since the infection is spreading so fast. Running the simple script donated by a user here to add ipchains rules based on Apache logs and running it from cron, I'm up over 1000 blocked hijacked machines at present - it's increasing geometrically. If finds a usable machine near you, it will find all the usable machines near you, and they will all focus on their IP neighborhood while also testing addresses farther away - so what's after you is also somewhat about your IP.
From varlinux.org, just in case you have redirects enabled in Apache:
[F]or those of you using Apache, here's one way you can redirect these nimda probes just like you could the Code Red probes. All the requests vary, but they seem to include a call to one or more of the following somewhere in the string: cmd.exe, root.exe, or Admin.dll. You can't count on these appearing at the beginning or end of the string, so you have to match it anywhere within. I just took the simplest approach by matching either.exe or.dll.
So if you want to redirect such requests to Microsoft support, for example, you might use the following:
Since you're using Linux or some other Unix-like operating system (I presume), it's unlikely you need to serve up any pages that include the strings ".exe" or ".dll", so this shouldn't interfere with the normal operation of your site.
In the Topaki Palace Museum in Istanbul is a letter from Mohammed to the head of the Egyptian Coptic Christians explaining (according to the translation posted with it) that those Christians could either (1) convert or (2) be killed. Since Muslim practice follows not just the Koran but also the examples from Mohammed's life (and from the example of the customs of the community around him), and since Mohammed seemed to offer genocide to the Coptic Christians in this instance... well, I'm not a Jew or Christian either, but neither Moses nor Jesus is on record threatening genocide towards nonbelievers. Moses may have drowned an Egyptian army, but they were chasing him.
Of course, we should recognize the Copts were not innocent in the eyes of Mohammed, since they failed to convert. Nor can we be.
Dan Rather was just on Letterman crying about how this isn't about Islam, but just "pure evil that can't be explained." Since I doubt anyone reading/. believes in pure evil that can't be explained, let us at least consider that there may be serious flaws in Islam, particularly concerning the evil that can be explained in its false founding prophet, who was an empire builder using religion as a cover, somewhat as Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot used Marx, all of whom managed to say some beautiful things. And Marx, like Mohammed, had a vision of an impossible paradise, that led people to die, and to act against others, in explainably evil ways.
They hate us because we have good lives here, now; not in a worker's utopia beyond the fall of capitalism, and not in a Muslim heaven beyond the end of life. We are not as harsh as their prophet; their choice is not to convert or be killed. But their choice is certainly to cease attacking us or be killed, because if they come after us they will find themselves like the army chasing Moses. Self-defense is not genocide. If they're there when the Red Sea closes, it's their own damn fault.
Look, it's a serious, pertinent issue when we're fighting for democracy and our own democracy, arguably and in the eyes of a great many people both here and abroad, was subverted in the process of the presidential election. The Electoral College representation was determined by the Supreme Court decision, and the Supreme Court had no Constitutional role to play in this, since the Constitution explicitly reserves resolving disputes in the course of presidential elections to the Congress. It may or may not be that if the process had been conducted constitutionally Bush would have won; but since it quite specifically was not conducted constitutionally Bush is not the duly elected president of the United States.
Despite that, we must hope he will make a good war leader, and also that he will honor the lip service he pays to our liberties. On the latter we need to remain vigilent, and recall that his supporters' short-circuiting of the constitutional process - when that very Constitution is the foundation of our liberties - is a troubling precident.
RMS's calling him 'unelected' is literally, technically true: he was not duly elected according to Constitutional process, but took a short-cut through a Supreme Court with no Constitutional authority to inject itself in the process. Do we need to pretend this isn't so just to rally behind him in this war?
The leaders of the South travelled throughout that region before the war arguing that slavery - the foundation of their economy and society - was under threat from political forces in the North. Meanwhile, the "states rights" argument came from the North, not the South. The South, due to the apportionment of two senators to each state regardless of population, and the granting of each state with one extra congressman beyond those provided in proportion to population, had disproportionate power in the federal government, and were using that power to, for instance, pass federal legislation to prevent those in the North from aiding escaped slaves. There are a number of quotes from before the war started of Jefferson Davis and associates proclaiming that the central issue was precisely slavery. Lincoln indeed had a broader view of history, which included the denial by the South of states rights for the North. The notion that the South had been for rather than against states rights before the war is a post-war fabrication, along with the claim that slavery wasn't precisely and explicitly what the South organized to defend. And yes, this was evil.
Psychologically, human beings are like other creatures, in that we will pursue the good. Unlike most other creatures, we do not need to have the good immediately before us - it can be over the horizon.
Where certain religions promote psychopathic behavior is when they create a third category of good which is not only beyond the horizon of the present space and time, but beyond even the horizon of life. In doing this, they convince their followers to pervert this human ability, to live for a better tomorrow on this earth while making sacrifices today, into an ability to live for a better tomorrow beyond this earth by sacrificing the quality of life on this earth both today and tomorrow.
On the one hand, we should live for a better life on this earth tomorrow even beyond our individual deaths - the motivation of the firemen who lost their lives in the towers; on the other hand we must recognize that any 'religion' that causes people to turn from the goodness of this earth (including even and especially the beauty of the human form) truly produces psychopathy, substituting false images of a heaven beyond to derrange the minds of those brainwashed by it, who thus lose their organic allegiance to all that is good in life.
Certain Muslims hate the West because we show that good lives can be had on this earth, contrary to certain claims in their religion that the only good life is to be had in a heaven after death (for men only - Muslim women, it is taught, don't have souls). Those who view the pleasures of this earth as evil will always be our implacable enemies.
While the West has most assuredly not been consciously trying to undermine this psychological basis of psychopathic madness among Muslims (and those strains of Falwellian Christianity which still renounce the good of this world for a mythical future one), the very success of our way of life is exactly the threat to their madness they take it to be. To end their resulting suicidal threat to us, and to this world's future, we should more consciously work to get the message to coming generations across the globe that the only heaven worth pursuing is here on earth ("at hand," as Christ said), and that to renounce this earth for some other heaven beyond it is truly to go mad, and lose ones moorings as an ethical human being.
A year or so back when it came out that certain cops in LA were killing gang members and then planting weapons on them to provide an excuse, reportedly most people in those neighborhoods supported the cops. Similarly, we may find that most Afghanis applaud us as we take out the Taliban, even if we go outside of 'ethics' to do it.
Make no mistake, the LA police in question are in jail where they belong. But the morality of war is far different than the morality of city policing.
In the lead editorial in this week's New York Observer, "Let's not build any more atom bombs until we use the ones we have."
The Afghan valleys with the training camps need to be sterilized - it's not the camps, but the trainees and support personel who must be fully eradicated. All the weapons that can do that are ugly. The question is which are capable. Gas would probably work, but violate international treaties. Conventional explosives won't work - so the Russians have shown us there. What to do?
Anyone who agrees to be recruited for or recruits for bin Laden is conspiring to commit murder. What if the Cosa Nostra advertised openly for hit men? At the very least, arrest them all for racketeering, let them try to find a jury that won't lock them away for the maximum.
If we really want to win this war, we should cease diverting energies and debasing the justness of government with the "war on drugs." Declare a total truce and amnesty, or at least offer amnesty to anyone jailed for drugs who will volunteer for the armed forces. This would unify our society where currently we divide it, free us where we currently limit liberty and right of individuals to pursue their own mentalities (a goal the Taliban also pursues).
It would also remove the financial basis that supports certain terrorist groups backed by the illegal suppliers of drugs who flourish in the absense of legal alternatives, and gain the support of peasant populations currently in thrall to those terrorists.
More freedom, not less, is the key to uprooting fundamentalist evils both at broad and at home. In a truly free and open world, their seeds will wither. Meanwhile, by uniting in greater freedom, rather than contracting into less - which leaves many of our own people outside that constricted circle - we can be assured that we do not just advance one despotism against another as we free the Afghanis from the Nazi-like rule of the Taliban. If we will buy their hashish, they will not be driven by desparation to send their assassins, and both their and our freedoms will be recovered.
Nazis = Muslim Fundies?
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The Nazis were the product of the sustained policies of the victors in WWI. Chamberlain appeased them precisely out of guilt at what he saw as overly harsh policies. The current attack - according to a great many experts who aren't part of the current administration - was Bin Laden acting as a front for Iraq. Iraq is mad at us because of our sustained policies. We needed to destroy and rebuld Germany. We need to do the same for Iraq, Afghanistan, and possibly Pakistan. 'Christian' guilt is as dysfunctional as fundie Mohammedism. And it must be remembered that Mohammed was primarily a political actor, building an empire in which his personal cult was no different in kind from Hitler's or Mao's, and no less muderous. That it survived as a 'religion' is no reason to accord that 'religion' special respect.
Who are we to doubt the mullah's really hear from their Allah? If there are Gods, there are other Gods besides Allah, and Allah is not the same God as the God of the Christians and Jews. Either that, or Mohammed was not His Prophet. Religion is often politics under other cover. We must be as ruthless at exposing false and evil religions as we are at exposing false and evil political ideologies. We must also field armies to destroy both, without mercy, when they've taken the Hitlerian turn.
This is not to say there aren't, for instance, Sufi variants on Muslim belief that have transfigured the leaden political evils of Mohammed into true spiritual gold. We should no more oppose such people than we do the current German population. In fact, those who can be accepted as brothers by the fundie fanatics owe it to the world to infiltrate their cells and help us destroy them. They also owe it to the world to help root out the evil political agenda at the heart of Mohammedan 'religion' that will continue to call 'martyrs' to 'jihad' until it is fully discredited among all peoples.
"Pearl Harbor" - when did they know?
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According to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, as InfoWorld reports, Western intelligence services knew for months that exactly this sort of attack by hijacked airplanes against highly symbolic targets was planned. Why was airport security not tightened? Why were there no fighters at hair-trigger readiness to be scrambled? As a patriot, I have to hope that the FAZ report is disinformation. But I also recall the claim by some historians that our intelligence services at the time knew Pearl Harbor was coming, and allowed it to get us into the war.
Was shaving when girlfriend said "The radio says there's an explosion at the World Trade Center." Went to front room, saw flames near top of center, huge smoke plume. Switched on TV. Announcers saying it was a plane, but probably a small one, speculating that somehow "faulty airport radar" had sent it into the building - totally absurd on a crystal clear morning. Was turned away from window when heard the boom of the second jet hitting. Looked out to see small mushroom cloud rising from impact. Lose broadcast TV except for CBS station with backup transmitter on Empire State - switch to even more vapid newscasters now talking about "possible terrorist attack," as if there's still room for doubt, and also speculating about some flaw in air traffic control that just might be sending jets into the towers. The first tower falls, and a gray cloud sweeps through the spaces between the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan. The smoke plume is immense for the rest of the day, with occassional office papers falling miles away in Brooklyn. At diner for dinner waitress says because of a fight with her by phone last week her brother had not come back from Florida the day before, and had not been at his office in one of the Towers.
Okay, hackers, here's the challenge: Osama bin Laden is said to have hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for this kind of thing. Some reader here may know which offshore banks he keeps it in. Please, please let us and the government know, so that action might be taken against those bankers and the nations that harbor them.
In a museum in Istanbul is displayed a letter from the Prophet to the head of the Egyptian Coptics saying in so many words that he can convert or be killed. The very source of the Muslim faith explicitly favored killing. We do not serve truth or tolerance by pretending that Mohammed was a good man, or that anyone who truly follows him was good. We will be accosted by more 'martyrs' as long as that Faith persists in its fundamentalist form, because the Prophet was in many dimensions truly evil.
This is not to say that Muslims are evil - most are not fundamentalists, and are no better or worse than the rest of the run of humanity. But there's a very good reason why Turkey outlaws Muslim fundamentalism, even though their culture remains of the Faith - they know that the core is dangerously laced. We must not fall into the error that Muslim fundamentalists are no worse than, say, Christian fundamentalists (who after all only shoot physicians who provide abortions). There is no difference in kind between fundamentalist Muslim and fundamentalist Nazi belief, and neither should be tolerated when it is armed, anywhere on the face of this Earth.
Excuse me, I watch the towers fall this morning from my window.
Of course, in your own car you'd just disable the sensors or transmitter (with a discrete toggle to put it back on for vehicle inspection). For rentals, get an acquarium air pump, the air hose that goes with it, some temporary putty adhesive, and a map of where the sensors are for popular models (from the best selling Alcohol Sensor Maintenance Guide). And, while it's still legal, drive with the windows down.
For extra credit, splice a black box into the transmitter line to send out the license plate code of that car that's tailgating you. Or, if the device uses vehicle registration numbers, start a Website to mine the public vehicle records for acceptible codes, then we'll set our cars to flip broadcast identities like Bond's car flips license plates.
Have to admit you have a point there. Some 18 years ago I financed some grad school by running a word processing service on my Kaypro II, and the absolutely worst writing was from the English majors, while most of the science papers weren't half bad.
Still, knowledge shouldn't be departmentalized to begin with. Departmentalization reflects human job specialization, not the rather wholistic way most of the world is actually fit together. It's suitable for trade school, but doesn't belong in an elite education. Even in computers, the folks who are worth the most (with a few prominent exceptions) are those who know as much about some other aspects of the world as they do about computational paradigms - the money is in the interfaces between and collaborations across fields, just as many of the great fortunes have historically come from trade between cultures rather than slogging along in your own back yard.
Let's face it, Wall Street spent five years giving the nerds all the money, on the supposition that we could learn enough about the other aspects of the world to leverage our computer skills against it. Turns out we didn't have a f-ing clue. That's bad education - biggest opportunity you could imagine lands in our lap to inherit the world, and we dropped it like a greased ball.
To be fair about it the tax should go to anyone who has produced any sort of content that is (1) copyright and (2) can be burned to a CDR. Which means (1) software, (2) e-books, (3) anything published to the Web (which being freely available in that medium does _not_ imply that it is freely publishable in other media).
Of these, the most valuable is software. So let's get the tax set up so that about 60% of it goes to the GNU project, since it produces the software most commonly burned to CDR, which is of far more real value to society than the silly music put out by Butch Goddess Hillary's buddies.
Heck, I've got sequential backups here going back years, all full of GNU software. Music? Sorry, the only CDR music I have is either (1) out of copyright (old blues) or (2) stuff recorded by friends who are independent musicians. So here's the deal to offer: If the tax goes through, it goes to GNU!
The recent Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in Sweden had strong tracks in both quantum theory (which is in part proposed to explain why consciousness is not like a Turing machine -- but I'm no physicist) and AI. The AI side, while presented by some obviously fine people, was disturbing because most of them seemed to agree that if you had a bus full of AIs collide with a bus full of people, and limited resources to devote to saving people and AIs, you should save some of the AIs ahead of the people.
Since AIs will be expensive machines representing vast corporate investments, one can easily imagine pressure on legislatures to mandate saving the AIs ahead of (some) people, on the excuse that they'd passed the Turing test and we had equal ethical obligations to them, and similar clever-seeming arguments. Beware, any argument to give machines rights, because it may be the slipperiest slope towards losing our own the human imagination has yet invented. The oh-so-charming AI researchers are setting up to provide ideological cover to some really evil shit.
Swedish national radio reported from the conference that true AI is "just around the corner." The public is all juiced to receive this nonsense favorably. Can you imagine some rich guy's 'AI-enhanced' car collides with yours, and the emergency crew saves his car first while you bleed to death? We're not far from that; we're an infinite distance from anything like true AI, but we're not far from that at all.
what do they want to limit the distribution of? the very 'entertainment' that consolidates their power base. useful triage here: separate out the regulations that end up strangling the interests of the regulators (remember the soviet union's demise?) from the regulations that would actually prevent the arising of independent, alternative, subversive media. do anything to prevent the latter regulations, and as for the first, let them stew in their own juices....
meanwhile, concentrate on creating the music, video, literature that's truly outside and free (tho not necessarily beyond renumeration). all we have to do for the rest of the culture is what free software is already doing to its cyber core: while it rots from without, replace it piece-by-piece with a solid and economically-undeniable alternative from within the live center of things, which is the creative ability of individuals.
some day soon maggie will wake up to discover she doesn't own the farm anymore.
True musicianship is Elvis at Sun records going into a 1-track tape, or Muddy Waters on the Delta going into a portable 1-track, or Blind Willie McTell in Atlanta playing into the horn of a wax cylinder recorder; or the Beatles on a three-track - and then all of these played over a tube radio in a '58 Ford - and the musicians having the ears to hear that this is their target. In the mid '70s Garcia had a private pirate radio station in Marin so he could broadcast the stuff he was working on in the studio for himself as he drove around town - playing it at low volume.
Many guitarists prefer tube amps because they've learned to exploit and incorporate the distortion they lend, which tends to ring more than the distortion out of transistors. A good vocalist knows that all microphones distort... differently, and works with that.
A good musician releasing stuff in a lossy format composes for it - it's like a ballplayer hitting a ball into a crosswind - if you can't handle it, you aren't pro.
There are perhaps two climatologists with tenure at top universities who like to get quoted in the business press about the limitations of scientific knowledge and the supercomputer models used to track and predict climate. They may be sincere; they may be whores. Some of the rest of the field may be whores too. But not the whole field, about 98% of which, by conventional measures of who gets called a 'scientist,' agree we have a tremendously serious threat.
Just curious, where do you "science is whatever it's convenient for me to believe, I burn a lot of gas, I want to believe I'm innocent" folks get your misinformation? And are you all regular/.ers - who seem generally aligned to rational, even deep discussions of science and technology premised on the truth of natural law and the reality of evidence - or is there some IRC channel where the 'global warming: myth' crowd gets their latest action alert to go to/. or wherever and moderate each other's nonsense up?
Sorry about the trolling, but jeeze y'all are doing way too much of it too.
Use that ID in all Web access, TV access, pring mag subs.
Use that ID in all credit card purchases.
Tax all merchants 0.5% on credit card purchases.
Distribute the tax on an individual's purchases to the media the individual accesses.
Now, the payoff is you then do data mining, and let the merchants know precisely which media their customers visit in what proportions. The resulting efficiency in advertising would more than pay for the 0.5% tax.
You can also create _useful_ police profiles based on correlating clothing styles with consumption of subversive media, correcting the current bias towards hassling only the darker skinned.
Of course, individual identities will be protected by law. You can trust this system. After all, you already post to/. in the clear.
The highest density of information is in a wilderness, the second-highest density is in a city with a lively downtown, the lowest, among human habitats, is in the suburbs - except that with advanced media the suburbs can approach the density of a live city (not to be confused with one with a hollow core sucked dry by suburbs).
We are natively evolved for the highest-density information environments. As environments have been simplified by the orderliness of civilizations (e.g., a slave whose life is only in the kitchen, a serf confined to the lord's lands and forbidden the lord's right to hunt, a child in an American grade school), there have been adjustments in enculturation whose role is to make us - by nature intensely alert and curious - fit the constraints of servitude; constraints often dressed up as and justified by religion, ideology and mass entertainment. (The high point of civilization may have been feeding the Christians to the lions for the good of Rome.)
The good news: our cultures are less dependent on servitude than before, more allowing, even encouraging and dependent on, individual freedoms. The good news is also that by our nature we can handle a density of information far beyond our typical modern environment. The bad news: we've only begun to untangle the centuries of cultural adaptation that fit us to information-poor niches characteristic of servitude. This adaptation is displayed in our uncomfortable, neurotic responses to both wide-open freedom and information-rich contexts.
The mentalities we need are those of our distant, more information-rich past: shamanistic, taoist, certain strains of buddhist thought regarding navigating by attention and intuition, more polytheistic or pantheistic than monotheistic, polyvocal rather than TV-announcer-as-scientist monovocal authority. But this isn't the first time we've turned back that way: the Renaissance consisted largely of a revival of older polytheistic insights and alchemies, coinciding with the demise of serfdom and constraints on travel, and the rise of trade and communication.
So all we need is a new renaissance. Simple, really. Our nature can handle rich information environments, it's just a cultural shift - real work, but far more doable (and less dangerous) than either altering our biology with cybernetic implants, or restricting information to accord with the constraining fit of our current neuroses.
There's nothing distinctive about the second part of the name, it's a functional description. This is like Kleenix Tissue trying to own the word 'Tissue.'
Slashdot Mirror
My druthers would be to draw the line between Timothy McVie's and Osama bin Laden's crew, precisely in this way: Citizenship should continue to have its full privileges, in so far as technologically possible. Noncitizens, however, should be segregated in at least the following ways: (1) no university study in sensitive areas unless they are full citizens of absolutely friendly countries which share the fundamentals of our culture, (2) no right to operate a motor vehicle, (3) full strip search before any use of public transport as at least a random possibility, (4) no right to use unsurveilled communications or encryption over communications. Because citizens' rights can be preserved at the cost of further raising the borders to non-citizens, let's do it!
Sure, we'll get occassional local kooks doing harm. That may be the acceptable cost of freedom - sometimes a few score of lives, but not thousands. For the freedom of the road, we also tolerate traffic deaths. The difference with foreigners is that the cost of lack of vigilence there is as demonstrated in the thousands. Curtailing citizens' freedoms to stop this is like poisoning the rats to keep away the wolves, at best.
Yes, we're an immigrant country. Every country has been beyond our original home in Africa. Our borders are much too open, especially to those from cultures that don't share the values of civilization. To remedy that there are two things to do: (1) spread the values of civilization, yes, even in a crusade and (2) close the borders to those without our values.
Okay, now show how this is wrong, how we can preserve both the rights of citizens and the rights we have so far generously granted to foreigners. Because if it's a choice, I think we ought to preserve the rights of citizens which establish the foundation for our social and material civilization, without which foreigners wouldn't be attracted here anyway. So let's largely lock them out until they attain civilized maturity. Again, these are dark thoughts. But far darker the thought of taking from ourselves our own hard-earned liberties.
Wouldn't be too useful, since the infection is spreading so fast. Running the simple script donated by a user here to add ipchains rules based on Apache logs and running it from cron, I'm up over 1000 blocked hijacked machines at present - it's increasing geometrically. If finds a usable machine near you, it will find all the usable machines near you, and they will all focus on their IP neighborhood while also testing addresses farther away - so what's after you is also somewhat about your IP.
[F]or those of you using Apache, here's one way you can redirect these nimda probes just like you could the Code Red probes. All the requests vary, but they seem to include a call to one or more of the following somewhere in the string: cmd.exe, root.exe, or Admin.dll. You can't count on these appearing at the beginning or end of the string, so you have to match it anywhere within. I just took the simplest approach by matching either .exe or .dll.
So if you want to redirect such requests to Microsoft support, for example, you might use the following:
RedirectMatch ^.*\.(exe|dll).* http://support.microsoft.com
Since you're using Linux or some other Unix-like operating system (I presume), it's unlikely you need to serve up any pages that include the strings ".exe" or ".dll", so this shouldn't interfere with the normal operation of your site.
In the Topaki Palace Museum in Istanbul is a letter from Mohammed to the head of the Egyptian Coptic Christians explaining (according to the translation posted with it) that those Christians could either (1) convert or (2) be killed. Since Muslim practice follows not just the Koran but also the examples from Mohammed's life (and from the example of the customs of the community around him), and since Mohammed seemed to offer genocide to the Coptic Christians in this instance ... well, I'm not a Jew or Christian either, but neither Moses nor Jesus is on record threatening genocide towards nonbelievers. Moses may have drowned an Egyptian army, but they were chasing him.
/. believes in pure evil that can't be explained, let us at least consider that there may be serious flaws in Islam, particularly concerning the evil that can be explained in its false founding prophet, who was an empire builder using religion as a cover, somewhat as Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot used Marx, all of whom managed to say some beautiful things. And Marx, like Mohammed, had a vision of an impossible paradise, that led people to die, and to act against others, in explainably evil ways.
Of course, we should recognize the Copts were not innocent in the eyes of Mohammed, since they failed to convert. Nor can we be.
Dan Rather was just on Letterman crying about how this isn't about Islam, but just "pure evil that can't be explained." Since I doubt anyone reading
They hate us because we have good lives here, now; not in a worker's utopia beyond the fall of capitalism, and not in a Muslim heaven beyond the end of life. We are not as harsh as their prophet; their choice is not to convert or be killed. But their choice is certainly to cease attacking us or be killed, because if they come after us they will find themselves like the army chasing Moses. Self-defense is not genocide. If they're there when the Red Sea closes, it's their own damn fault.
Look, it's a serious, pertinent issue when we're fighting for democracy and our own democracy, arguably and in the eyes of a great many people both here and abroad, was subverted in the process of the presidential election. The Electoral College representation was determined by the Supreme Court decision, and the Supreme Court had no Constitutional role to play in this, since the Constitution explicitly reserves resolving disputes in the course of presidential elections to the Congress. It may or may not be that if the process had been conducted constitutionally Bush would have won; but since it quite specifically was not conducted constitutionally Bush is not the duly elected president of the United States.
Despite that, we must hope he will make a good war leader, and also that he will honor the lip service he pays to our liberties. On the latter we need to remain vigilent, and recall that his supporters' short-circuiting of the constitutional process - when that very Constitution is the foundation of our liberties - is a troubling precident.
RMS's calling him 'unelected' is literally, technically true: he was not duly elected according to Constitutional process, but took a short-cut through a Supreme Court with no Constitutional authority to inject itself in the process. Do we need to pretend this isn't so just to rally behind him in this war?
The leaders of the South travelled throughout that region before the war arguing that slavery - the foundation of their economy and society - was under threat from political forces in the North. Meanwhile, the "states rights" argument came from the North, not the South. The South, due to the apportionment of two senators to each state regardless of population, and the granting of each state with one extra congressman beyond those provided in proportion to population, had disproportionate power in the federal government, and were using that power to, for instance, pass federal legislation to prevent those in the North from aiding escaped slaves. There are a number of quotes from before the war started of Jefferson Davis and associates proclaiming that the central issue was precisely slavery. Lincoln indeed had a broader view of history, which included the denial by the South of states rights for the North. The notion that the South had been for rather than against states rights before the war is a post-war fabrication, along with the claim that slavery wasn't precisely and explicitly what the South organized to defend. And yes, this was evil.
Psychologically, human beings are like other creatures, in that we will pursue the good. Unlike most other creatures, we do not need to have the good immediately before us - it can be over the horizon.
Where certain religions promote psychopathic behavior is when they create a third category of good which is not only beyond the horizon of the present space and time, but beyond even the horizon of life. In doing this, they convince their followers to pervert this human ability, to live for a better tomorrow on this earth while making sacrifices today, into an ability to live for a better tomorrow beyond this earth by sacrificing the quality of life on this earth both today and tomorrow.
On the one hand, we should live for a better life on this earth tomorrow even beyond our individual deaths - the motivation of the firemen who lost their lives in the towers; on the other hand we must recognize that any 'religion' that causes people to turn from the goodness of this earth (including even and especially the beauty of the human form) truly produces psychopathy, substituting false images of a heaven beyond to derrange the minds of those brainwashed by it, who thus lose their organic allegiance to all that is good in life.
Certain Muslims hate the West because we show that good lives can be had on this earth, contrary to certain claims in their religion that the only good life is to be had in a heaven after death (for men only - Muslim women, it is taught, don't have souls). Those who view the pleasures of this earth as evil will always be our implacable enemies.
While the West has most assuredly not been consciously trying to undermine this psychological basis of psychopathic madness among Muslims (and those strains of Falwellian Christianity which still renounce the good of this world for a mythical future one), the very success of our way of life is exactly the threat to their madness they take it to be. To end their resulting suicidal threat to us, and to this world's future, we should more consciously work to get the message to coming generations across the globe that the only heaven worth pursuing is here on earth ("at hand," as Christ said), and that to renounce this earth for some other heaven beyond it is truly to go mad, and lose ones moorings as an ethical human being.
A year or so back when it came out that certain cops in LA were killing gang members and then planting weapons on them to provide an excuse, reportedly most people in those neighborhoods supported the cops. Similarly, we may find that most Afghanis applaud us as we take out the Taliban, even if we go outside of 'ethics' to do it.
Make no mistake, the LA police in question are in jail where they belong. But the morality of war is far different than the morality of city policing.
In the lead editorial in this week's New York Observer, "Let's not build any more atom bombs until we use the ones we have."
The Afghan valleys with the training camps need to be sterilized - it's not the camps, but the trainees and support personel who must be fully eradicated. All the weapons that can do that are ugly. The question is which are capable. Gas would probably work, but violate international treaties. Conventional explosives won't work - so the Russians have shown us there. What to do?
Anyone who agrees to be recruited for or recruits for bin Laden is conspiring to commit murder. What if the Cosa Nostra advertised openly for hit men? At the very least, arrest them all for racketeering, let them try to find a jury that won't lock them away for the maximum.
If we really want to win this war, we should cease diverting energies and debasing the justness of government with the "war on drugs." Declare a total truce and amnesty, or at least offer amnesty to anyone jailed for drugs who will volunteer for the armed forces. This would unify our society where currently we divide it, free us where we currently limit liberty and right of individuals to pursue their own mentalities (a goal the Taliban also pursues).
It would also remove the financial basis that supports certain terrorist groups backed by the illegal suppliers of drugs who flourish in the absense of legal alternatives, and gain the support of peasant populations currently in thrall to those terrorists.
More freedom, not less, is the key to uprooting fundamentalist evils both at broad and at home. In a truly free and open world, their seeds will wither. Meanwhile, by uniting in greater freedom, rather than contracting into less - which leaves many of our own people outside that constricted circle - we can be assured that we do not just advance one despotism against another as we free the Afghanis from the Nazi-like rule of the Taliban. If we will buy their hashish, they will not be driven by desparation to send their assassins, and both their and our freedoms will be recovered.
The Nazis were the product of the sustained policies of the victors in WWI. Chamberlain appeased them precisely out of guilt at what he saw as overly harsh policies. The current attack - according to a great many experts who aren't part of the current administration - was Bin Laden acting as a front for Iraq. Iraq is mad at us because of our sustained policies. We needed to destroy and rebuld Germany. We need to do the same for Iraq, Afghanistan, and possibly Pakistan. 'Christian' guilt is as dysfunctional as fundie Mohammedism. And it must be remembered that Mohammed was primarily a political actor, building an empire in which his personal cult was no different in kind from Hitler's or Mao's, and no less muderous. That it survived as a 'religion' is no reason to accord that 'religion' special respect.
Who are we to doubt the mullah's really hear from their Allah? If there are Gods, there are other Gods besides Allah, and Allah is not the same God as the God of the Christians and Jews. Either that, or Mohammed was not His Prophet. Religion is often politics under other cover. We must be as ruthless at exposing false and evil religions as we are at exposing false and evil political ideologies. We must also field armies to destroy both, without mercy, when they've taken the Hitlerian turn.
This is not to say there aren't, for instance, Sufi variants on Muslim belief that have transfigured the leaden political evils of Mohammed into true spiritual gold. We should no more oppose such people than we do the current German population. In fact, those who can be accepted as brothers by the fundie fanatics owe it to the world to infiltrate their cells and help us destroy them. They also owe it to the world to help root out the evil political agenda at the heart of Mohammedan 'religion' that will continue to call 'martyrs' to 'jihad' until it is fully discredited among all peoples.
According to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, as InfoWorld reports, Western intelligence services knew for months that exactly this sort of attack by hijacked airplanes against highly symbolic targets was planned. Why was airport security not tightened? Why were there no fighters at hair-trigger readiness to be scrambled? As a patriot, I have to hope that the FAZ report is disinformation. But I also recall the claim by some historians that our intelligence services at the time knew Pearl Harbor was coming, and allowed it to get us into the war.
Was shaving when girlfriend said "The radio says there's an explosion at the World Trade Center." Went to front room, saw flames near top of center, huge smoke plume. Switched on TV. Announcers saying it was a plane, but probably a small one, speculating that somehow "faulty airport radar" had sent it into the building - totally absurd on a crystal clear morning. Was turned away from window when heard the boom of the second jet hitting. Looked out to see small mushroom cloud rising from impact. Lose broadcast TV except for CBS station with backup transmitter on Empire State - switch to even more vapid newscasters now talking about "possible terrorist attack," as if there's still room for doubt, and also speculating about some flaw in air traffic control that just might be sending jets into the towers. The first tower falls, and a gray cloud sweeps through the spaces between the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan. The smoke plume is immense for the rest of the day, with occassional office papers falling miles away in Brooklyn. At diner for dinner waitress says because of a fight with her by phone last week her brother had not come back from Florida the day before, and had not been at his office in one of the Towers.
Okay, hackers, here's the challenge: Osama bin Laden is said to have hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for this kind of thing. Some reader here may know which offshore banks he keeps it in. Please, please let us and the government know, so that action might be taken against those bankers and the nations that harbor them.
This is not to say that Muslims are evil - most are not fundamentalists, and are no better or worse than the rest of the run of humanity. But there's a very good reason why Turkey outlaws Muslim fundamentalism, even though their culture remains of the Faith - they know that the core is dangerously laced. We must not fall into the error that Muslim fundamentalists are no worse than, say, Christian fundamentalists (who after all only shoot physicians who provide abortions). There is no difference in kind between fundamentalist Muslim and fundamentalist Nazi belief, and neither should be tolerated when it is armed, anywhere on the face of this Earth.
Excuse me, I watch the towers fall this morning from my window.
Of course, in your own car you'd just disable the sensors or transmitter (with a discrete toggle to put it back on for vehicle inspection). For rentals, get an acquarium air pump, the air hose that goes with it, some temporary putty adhesive, and a map of where the sensors are for popular models (from the best selling Alcohol Sensor Maintenance Guide). And, while it's still legal, drive with the windows down.
For extra credit, splice a black box into the transmitter line to send out the license plate code of that car that's tailgating you. Or, if the device uses vehicle registration numbers, start a Website to mine the public vehicle records for acceptible codes, then we'll set our cars to flip broadcast identities like Bond's car flips license plates.
Have to admit you have a point there. Some 18 years ago I financed some grad school by running a word processing service on my Kaypro II, and the absolutely worst writing was from the English majors, while most of the science papers weren't half bad.
Still, knowledge shouldn't be departmentalized to begin with. Departmentalization reflects human job specialization, not the rather wholistic way most of the world is actually fit together. It's suitable for trade school, but doesn't belong in an elite education. Even in computers, the folks who are worth the most (with a few prominent exceptions) are those who know as much about some other aspects of the world as they do about computational paradigms - the money is in the interfaces between and collaborations across fields, just as many of the great fortunes have historically come from trade between cultures rather than slogging along in your own back yard.
Let's face it, Wall Street spent five years giving the nerds all the money, on the supposition that we could learn enough about the other aspects of the world to leverage our computer skills against it. Turns out we didn't have a f-ing clue. That's bad education - biggest opportunity you could imagine lands in our lap to inherit the world, and we dropped it like a greased ball.
To be fair about it the tax should go to anyone who has produced any sort of content that is (1) copyright and (2) can be burned to a CDR. Which means (1) software, (2) e-books, (3) anything published to the Web (which being freely available in that medium does _not_ imply that it is freely publishable in other media).
Of these, the most valuable is software. So let's get the tax set up so that about 60% of it goes to the GNU project, since it produces the software most commonly burned to CDR, which is of far more real value to society than the silly music put out by Butch Goddess Hillary's buddies.
Heck, I've got sequential backups here going back years, all full of GNU software. Music? Sorry, the only CDR music I have is either (1) out of copyright (old blues) or (2) stuff recorded by friends who are independent musicians. So here's the deal to offer: If the tax goes through, it goes to GNU!
Since AIs will be expensive machines representing vast corporate investments, one can easily imagine pressure on legislatures to mandate saving the AIs ahead of (some) people, on the excuse that they'd passed the Turing test and we had equal ethical obligations to them, and similar clever-seeming arguments. Beware, any argument to give machines rights, because it may be the slipperiest slope towards losing our own the human imagination has yet invented. The oh-so-charming AI researchers are setting up to provide ideological cover to some really evil shit.
Swedish national radio reported from the conference that true AI is "just around the corner." The public is all juiced to receive this nonsense favorably. Can you imagine some rich guy's 'AI-enhanced' car collides with yours, and the emergency crew saves his car first while you bleed to death? We're not far from that; we're an infinite distance from anything like true AI, but we're not far from that at all.
what do they want to limit the distribution of? the very 'entertainment' that consolidates their power base. useful triage here: separate out the regulations that end up strangling the interests of the regulators (remember the soviet union's demise?) from the regulations that would actually prevent the arising of independent, alternative, subversive media. do anything to prevent the latter regulations, and as for the first, let them stew in their own juices....
meanwhile, concentrate on creating the music, video, literature that's truly outside and free (tho not necessarily beyond renumeration). all we have to do for the rest of the culture is what free software is already doing to its cyber core: while it rots from without, replace it piece-by-piece with a solid and economically-undeniable alternative from within the live center of things, which is the creative ability of individuals.
some day soon maggie will wake up to discover she doesn't own the farm anymore.
True musicianship is Elvis at Sun records going into a 1-track tape, or Muddy Waters on the Delta going into a portable 1-track, or Blind Willie McTell in Atlanta playing into the horn of a wax cylinder recorder; or the Beatles on a three-track - and then all of these played over a tube radio in a '58 Ford - and the musicians having the ears to hear that this is their target. In the mid '70s Garcia had a private pirate radio station in Marin so he could broadcast the stuff he was working on in the studio for himself as he drove around town - playing it at low volume.
... differently, and works with that.
Many guitarists prefer tube amps because they've learned to exploit and incorporate the distortion they lend, which tends to ring more than the distortion out of transistors. A good vocalist knows that all microphones distort
A good musician releasing stuff in a lossy format composes for it - it's like a ballplayer hitting a ball into a crosswind - if you can't handle it, you aren't pro.
There are perhaps two climatologists with tenure at top universities who like to get quoted in the business press about the limitations of scientific knowledge and the supercomputer models used to track and predict climate. They may be sincere; they may be whores. Some of the rest of the field may be whores too. But not the whole field, about 98% of which, by conventional measures of who gets called a 'scientist,' agree we have a tremendously serious threat.
Just curious, where do you "science is whatever it's convenient for me to believe, I burn a lot of gas, I want to believe I'm innocent" folks get your misinformation? And are you all regular /.ers - who seem generally aligned to rational, even deep discussions of science and technology premised on the truth of natural law and the reality of evidence - or is there some IRC channel where the 'global warming: myth' crowd gets their latest action alert to go to /. or wherever and moderate each other's nonsense up?
Sorry about the trolling, but jeeze y'all are doing way too much of it too.
Give each person an unique ID.
/. in the clear.
Use that ID in all Web access, TV access, pring mag subs.
Use that ID in all credit card purchases.
Tax all merchants 0.5% on credit card purchases.
Distribute the tax on an individual's purchases to the media the individual accesses.
Now, the payoff is you then do data mining, and let the merchants know precisely which media their customers visit in what proportions. The resulting efficiency in advertising would more than pay for the 0.5% tax.
You can also create _useful_ police profiles based on correlating clothing styles with consumption of subversive media, correcting the current bias towards hassling only the darker skinned.
Of course, individual identities will be protected by law. You can trust this system. After all, you already post to
The highest density of information is in a wilderness, the second-highest density is in a city with a lively downtown, the lowest, among human habitats, is in the suburbs - except that with advanced media the suburbs can approach the density of a live city (not to be confused with one with a hollow core sucked dry by suburbs).
We are natively evolved for the highest-density information environments. As environments have been simplified by the orderliness of civilizations (e.g., a slave whose life is only in the kitchen, a serf confined to the lord's lands and forbidden the lord's right to hunt, a child in an American grade school), there have been adjustments in enculturation whose role is to make us - by nature intensely alert and curious - fit the constraints of servitude; constraints often dressed up as and justified by religion, ideology and mass entertainment. (The high point of civilization may have been feeding the Christians to the lions for the good of Rome.)
The good news: our cultures are less dependent on servitude than before, more allowing, even encouraging and dependent on, individual freedoms. The good news is also that by our nature we can handle a density of information far beyond our typical modern environment. The bad news: we've only begun to untangle the centuries of cultural adaptation that fit us to information-poor niches characteristic of servitude. This adaptation is displayed in our uncomfortable, neurotic responses to both wide-open freedom and information-rich contexts.
The mentalities we need are those of our distant, more information-rich past: shamanistic, taoist, certain strains of buddhist thought regarding navigating by attention and intuition, more polytheistic or pantheistic than monotheistic, polyvocal rather than TV-announcer-as-scientist monovocal authority. But this isn't the first time we've turned back that way: the Renaissance consisted largely of a revival of older polytheistic insights and alchemies, coinciding with the demise of serfdom and constraints on travel, and the rise of trade and communication.
So all we need is a new renaissance. Simple, really. Our nature can handle rich information environments, it's just a cultural shift - real work, but far more doable (and less dangerous) than either altering our biology with cybernetic implants, or restricting information to accord with the constraining fit of our current neuroses.
It's Adobe Illustrator, like McDonalds Hamburger.
There's nothing distinctive about the second part of the name, it's a functional description. This is like Kleenix Tissue trying to own the word 'Tissue.'