"So you're telling me that after that vote, the south switched to voting republican?"
Yes. Johnson carried every state but Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and "We Don't Recognize MLK Day" Arizona, which all went to the Party of That Damned Yankee Lincoln. This is the first time in the century that had passed since the formation of the Republican Party that the Deep South ever voted for a Republican candidate. Not 1928, not 1952 or 1956, and not even in 1948, no matter how much they hated Truman.
On the other side of the Mason-Dixon, Goldwater in 1964 was also the first Republican candidate who didn't carry a single New England state. Maine and Vermont were the only states to nevervoteforFDR.
"Or maybe you are talking about the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Oops--probably not. Republican support was 82% in the house and 94% in the senate."
1965, the 89th House. Compare the colors of the Deep South to its colors in the 88th. I'll save you the trouble of searching: the Deep South had been that lovely shade of blue seen in the 88th all the way back to, well, pretty much the 1st.
"Sounds like another racist Democrat."
Considering that he mentioned Reconstruction, the native Texan sounded like another racist Southerner. And he still went ahead with civil rights legislation because, ultimately, it got him re-elected.
"Little known by many today is the fact that it was Republican Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois,"
Today, both Illinois Senators are Democrats. Johnson's home state is now represented by two Republicans.
"So once again, which party is the 'racist' party?"
Easy: the one the South votes for. The party of Truman and Johnson was no longer the party of Jackson and Davis, so Southerners started to vote for the party of Goldwater and Reagan instead. Lincoln Chafee's loss in 2006 marks the first time New England didn't have any Republicans in the Senate in the history of the Republican Party, and I wouldn't hold my breath hoping for Mary Landrieu, the last remaining Democratic Senator from Goldwater country, to hold onto her seat this year.
Now, if you're trying to hide behind the fact that the political makeup of Congress didn't change immediately you're seriously downplaying the power of incumbency and nepotism in federal politics. Members of Congress leave office not by losing elections, but by being either incarcerated or dead; the aforementioned holdouts of Chafee and Landrieu came to power based on who their respective daddies were. Looking at the presidential elections, where voters are presented with two new faces at least every eight years, is a more accurate barometer of political opinions, and 1964 was the first time in over a century that a Republican won even one state in the Deep South.
"The problem is when you discover that you don't have enough and need to take some of my money too."
Then the next time you're using anything that touches upon the Gulf of Mexico (like, say, domestic petrochemicals), make sure it didn't come through Louisiana. Because it's their Gulf access, not yours.
The price of supporting such a major shipping center in southeast Louisiana is cheaper than trying to expand something in, say, Galveston to be able to meet the demand and rerouting all the railroads and pipelines there, and that still doesn't take into account the commerce going up and down the Mississippi River. Shut down the New Orleans area, and the price of imports go up, not that you can afford them since the price of your exports went up to the point and became less competitive.
But, hey, the size of the check the federal government writes to rebuild the area is a nice, easy number to pin down without even having to stand up out of your chair, so it's the perfect thing for armchair economists to jump on. You don't like having to pay for flood-prone river deltas? Find yourself a nice, landlocked country to live in and don't complain about the associated cost of living.
47 stories, about five times the height of the building pictured. Everything else I said about the weight of a building going up exponentially with height remains the same.
Now, is there anything else you're too lazy to look, or do you wish to continue feeling self-important?
"Heh. You can't be from an anglophone country if you think we vote for our government."
OK, so we get to blow people up in the name of "democracy," but once somebody tries to hold us to democratic standards, we get to fall back and say "Oh, we don't really vote?" How convenient!
"That in itself is a farce before you look into allegations of postal vote fraud and more fundamental issues, like the fact that a northerner (typically left-Labour) is worth 1.5 southerners"
If the rotten boroughs are really such a big deal, why haven't they been fixed yet?
"Even regarding the hated Dubya in 2004, electorate turnout was 60.7% and he won just over 50% of the popular vote in 2004[3]. This means that only 1/3 Americans *eligible to vote* voted for Dubya."
This means that 30 % went to the polls and voted for Bush... and 40 % voted for the status quo by sitting on their asses. 70 % of the American enfranchised gave their assent to the Bush administration in one way or another, so why should they be given a pass for the actions of the government they so overwhelmingly supported in one way or another?
"Ironically, the fact that the information never actually hits US-based networks makes it vastly more legal for our intelligence agencies to intercept."
Unless they get caught by the country in question, at which point you have a diplomatic brouhaha. Does the name Gary Powers ring a bell?
"America's biggest image problem is that people around the world can't distinguish between an American and the Federal Government of the United States of America."
So they dislike the US government and the very people that voted the US government into power? Shocking!
"Here's a clue: Moby Dick isn't really about a whale."
And Nathaniel Hawthorne didn't really spend a good deal of time conversing with ghosts, but both he and Melville managed to create something in their readers usually referred to as "suspension of disbelief."
"The story that is style and allegory, or the one devotes pages of exposition to laughably wrong predictions of a supposedly realistic future? It all might as well be spaceports in Ohio."
"Predictions?" As I said before, anybody since Sir Isaac Newton could easily see that lower latitudes were beneficial. Jules Verne didfigure it out. Better still, Bradbury could have set it in segregated Florida and maybe get away with combining a story or two.
And the image of the destruction of Australia (!!!) being visible with the naked eye from the surface of Mars isn't a "wrong prediction," it isn't "obsolete scientific opinion," it's the writings of a man who never actually looked up at the night sky and noticed "Gee, it's just a rust-colored dot, can't really see much from this distance," in spite of writing a book that supposedly takes place there. Aside from being a visual too jarring for the reader to stay in the narrative, it reflects Bradbury's own geocentrism, a notion he spends a great many pages mocking and belittling his characters for showing.
Just as discongruent was the idea that almost everybody on Mars would go back to Earth (even after seeing such a spectacle) to die with that planet, rather than accepting a flood of war refugees. But any amount of believability that gets in the way of Father Bradbury's sermon has to go, he's got A Point to Make.
"a superior power invading what was though the premier power with nightmarish force saying 'Mars, bitches!', and a man venturing to different lands where there happens to be a society that resembles what his is like at the extremes in 'teh future!'."
But the key here is that Wells actually worked on the metaphor. Good science fiction tends to be stories of "Let's take contemporary society (or some other meme), but dial up Aspect X a few orders of magnitude and explore what happens." Most of Bradbury's work starts with "Let's take contemporary society," and that's as far as he ever gets.
One of the more damning criticisms of science fiction as a genre, all the more damning because it's often true, is that many science fiction authors write science fiction because the standards are so much lower than for other forms of fiction or literature. For every genuinely good book in the genre, there are fifty that wouldn't even get shelf space in the trashy romance section.
Other than the very end, where Earth is destroyed in a fashion that more resembles Alderaan than Hiroshima, Martian Chronicles could just as easily have been written about a previously undiscovered island in the South Pacific somewhere, followed by its subsequent colonization and subjugation of its peoples (you know, what Bradbury was trying so God damned hard to write about). But "Polynesian Chronicles," named and written as such, sitting in some other part of the bookstore, wouldn't have sold enough to merit a second printing. Put "Mars" on the cover, and there's a chance that preteen boys of the day will buy your (supposedly) Mars-themed book rather than a Mars-themed trading cards, Mars-themed comic book, or Mars-themed horror movie ticket that week.
The government wants to keep you stupid, people never change, and atoms are bad, mmmkay?
"Someday in the future, if F451's distopia prevails (or more likely, Idiocracy's), 'teh future!' and 'Mars, bitches!' might be labels on the bindings of Bradbury's work in an incredibly dusty library."
Except, even then, George Orwell managed to do a much better job with the theme of a deliberately illiterate state/society four years prior. Orwell thought up Minipax and Minitruth, while Bradbury had "He's called a 'fireman' because he starts fires! I'm so clever!"
(What do you call the guy who shovels the coal into the locomotive and generally tends the fire again?)
"Your Heinlein paperbacks are sticky, aren't they?"
While Heinlein does tend to be "Ayn Rand in Spaaaaaace!" at least it actually feels like space! Stranger in a Strange Land had flying cars and bounce tubes and stuff. The Martian Chronicles took place on Mars for no other reason than because the author says so.
Jules Verne figured out that Floridian latitudes were convenient, and yet "Rocket Summer" took place in Ohio? And for how many centuries did we know that the surface of Earth was mostly water, and yet he consistently describes Earth as a green dot in the Martian sky? These are things that anybody living after 1750 or so with a globe on their desk could deduce (and they often did), but Bradbury couldn't be bothered to exercise his supposedly vast imagination even that much? Even if it helped immerse the reader just a little bit? No, such things would get in the way of The Point. Instead of creating an imaginative world that was "the same, but different" where he could explore ideas, he created a world that was "the same, only they say they're on Mars."
Agree or disagree with Heinlein, the man could write a good story. Agree or disagree with Ellison, the man could write a good story. Ray Bradbury cannot write.
Clarke is dead but Bradbury persists. There is no God.
Oh yes, I've read your precious Fahrenheit and your Martian Chronicles, much to my dismay. Simply because he said 'teh future!' in one and 'Mars, bitches!' in the next somehow makes these browbeating, one-dimensional allegories that could literally have been set in any place and time "Great Works in Science Fiction" (TM).
The building you're showing has about 10 floors. WTC 1 and 2 had 10 times that and weighed exponentially more, in spite of being made with substantially similar materials. What would be strong enough to act as a pivot point for a 10 story building would buckle like a house of cards under a 100 story building, long before leaning over enough to "topple over" properly.
"It is so that you have representatives of both parties at the polling places."
Those are "election monitors," not "poll workers." Really, just about anybody is allowed to hang around and watch the process, so long as they stay out of the way and don't violate any electioneering laws.
The music industry abandoned this particular standard years ago, as it doesn't support DRM. It's been supplanted by something that may or may not play on a legitimate player of compact discs (the publisher makes no guarantees), but will fuck up your Windows or OS/X installation regardless.
"Entrapment is when a law enforcement official convinces you to break the law. If a drug dealer walks up to you on the street and convinces you to buy a kilo of heroin, you're going to jail buddy."
Mobsters beating up shopkeeper for protection money: very naughty. Shopkeeper not paying protection money: exactly as naughty.
"Exactly right. Bust em all for attempted wire fraud to start with and go from there."
And then why, exactly, would they come forward to report they've been scammed?
"We have to get serious about stopping this crap."
By punishing the people who come forward to report it?
I'll grant you that your plan will lower the reported frequency of the crime. That always looks good for elections and the like.
(Not that I agree with with the parent's assertion that the victim's role in the classic Nigerian scam is a financial crime. Mob accountants skate on far thinner ice and still manage to stay legit, de jure if not de facto.)
"In Celsius a normal human temperature is NOT 37 degrees, but 36.6 or 36.7 depending on a country."
And that changes the fact that 1 degree is too large and 1 decidegree is too small to be particularly meaningful units of measuring that temperature how?
"And since most current weather forecasts give a range of temperatures"
Because they're forecasts. The numbers given are as precise as they can predict at the given time.
"I highly doubt there's a single human in the world that can detect a difference between 27-29C and 77-82F."
Then I'll issue you the same challenge I issued the parent: bump up your thermostat 2 degrees Celsius. It's August and oil is expensive; provided you're not in the southern hemisphere, you'd be saving a few kW h by increasing the temperature in your home by an amount you claim you cannot detect.
"If they call a second time, you get all the info from them that they will give, addresses, phone numbers, etc."
That they choose to give. They're supposed to give you all the necessary information to track them down, but there's little, if any, recourse if they decide not to anyway.
"and that next call you receive from them will be referred to your state's attorney general they will go away."
And then they'll point out that they were following the letter of the law, while you never uttered the words "remove" "me" and "calling list."
If you simply say "no thanks," they will call back again later. You must say "remove me from your calling list." Telemarketing outfits make their money by number of calls made, and it is in their financial interest to do everything they can to keep you on their list. Any degree of ambiguity will be used as an implicit approval of future calls.
Slashdot Mirror
"So you're telling me that after that vote, the south switched to voting republican?"
Yes. Johnson carried every state but Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and "We Don't Recognize MLK Day" Arizona, which all went to the Party of That Damned Yankee Lincoln. This is the first time in the century that had passed since the formation of the Republican Party that the Deep South ever voted for a Republican candidate. Not 1928, not 1952 or 1956, and not even in 1948, no matter how much they hated Truman.
On the other side of the Mason-Dixon, Goldwater in 1964 was also the first Republican candidate who didn't carry a single New England state. Maine and Vermont were the only states to never vote for FDR.
"Or maybe you are talking about the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Oops--probably not. Republican support was 82% in the house and 94% in the senate."
1965, the 89th House. Compare the colors of the Deep South to its colors in the 88th. I'll save you the trouble of searching: the Deep South had been that lovely shade of blue seen in the 88th all the way back to, well, pretty much the 1st.
"Sounds like another racist Democrat."
Considering that he mentioned Reconstruction, the native Texan sounded like another racist Southerner. And he still went ahead with civil rights legislation because, ultimately, it got him re-elected.
"Little known by many today is the fact that it was Republican Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois,"
Today, both Illinois Senators are Democrats. Johnson's home state is now represented by two Republicans.
"So once again, which party is the 'racist' party?"
Easy: the one the South votes for. The party of Truman and Johnson was no longer the party of Jackson and Davis, so Southerners started to vote for the party of Goldwater and Reagan instead. Lincoln Chafee's loss in 2006 marks the first time New England didn't have any Republicans in the Senate in the history of the Republican Party, and I wouldn't hold my breath hoping for Mary Landrieu, the last remaining Democratic Senator from Goldwater country, to hold onto her seat this year.
Now, if you're trying to hide behind the fact that the political makeup of Congress didn't change immediately you're seriously downplaying the power of incumbency and nepotism in federal politics. Members of Congress leave office not by losing elections, but by being either incarcerated or dead; the aforementioned holdouts of Chafee and Landrieu came to power based on who their respective daddies were. Looking at the presidential elections, where voters are presented with two new faces at least every eight years, is a more accurate barometer of political opinions, and 1964 was the first time in over a century that a Republican won even one state in the Deep South.
"The National Hurricane Center did an excellent prediction job, just as they did with Katrina."
Hurricane Ivan, not so much.
"Mississippi got hit just as hard as Louisiana, and got just as little help from the feds."
And disaster relief needs scale linearly with population?
"The problem is when you discover that you don't have enough and need to take some of my money too."
Then the next time you're using anything that touches upon the Gulf of Mexico (like, say, domestic petrochemicals), make sure it didn't come through Louisiana. Because it's their Gulf access, not yours.
The price of supporting such a major shipping center in southeast Louisiana is cheaper than trying to expand something in, say, Galveston to be able to meet the demand and rerouting all the railroads and pipelines there, and that still doesn't take into account the commerce going up and down the Mississippi River. Shut down the New Orleans area, and the price of imports go up, not that you can afford them since the price of your exports went up to the point and became less competitive.
But, hey, the size of the check the federal government writes to rebuild the area is a nice, easy number to pin down without even having to stand up out of your chair, so it's the perfect thing for armchair economists to jump on. You don't like having to pay for flood-prone river deltas? Find yourself a nice, landlocked country to live in and don't complain about the associated cost of living.
"We're talking about WTC7."
47 stories, about five times the height of the building pictured. Everything else I said about the weight of a building going up exponentially with height remains the same.
Now, is there anything else you're too lazy to look, or do you wish to continue feeling self-important?
"Heh. You can't be from an anglophone country if you think we vote for our government."
OK, so we get to blow people up in the name of "democracy," but once somebody tries to hold us to democratic standards, we get to fall back and say "Oh, we don't really vote?" How convenient!
"That in itself is a farce before you look into allegations of postal vote fraud and more fundamental issues, like the fact that a northerner (typically left-Labour) is worth 1.5 southerners"
If the rotten boroughs are really such a big deal, why haven't they been fixed yet?
"Even regarding the hated Dubya in 2004, electorate turnout was 60.7% and he won just over 50% of the popular vote in 2004[3]. This means that only 1/3 Americans *eligible to vote* voted for Dubya."
This means that 30 % went to the polls and voted for Bush... and 40 % voted for the status quo by sitting on their asses. 70 % of the American enfranchised gave their assent to the Bush administration in one way or another, so why should they be given a pass for the actions of the government they so overwhelmingly supported in one way or another?
"spy on the communications in and out of their countries?"
Will the Canadians read the contents of my email? Maybe. Will the Canadians extraordinarily render me if they don't like its contents? Probably not.
"Ironically, the fact that the information never actually hits US-based networks makes it vastly more legal for our intelligence agencies to intercept."
Unless they get caught by the country in question, at which point you have a diplomatic brouhaha. Does the name Gary Powers ring a bell?
"Open source" is not a synonym for "public records!"
WikiCourthouse, the public filings that anybody can edit!
"America's biggest image problem is that people around the world can't distinguish between an American and the Federal Government of the United States of America."
So they dislike the US government and the very people that voted the US government into power? Shocking!
"Here's a clue: Moby Dick isn't really about a whale."
And Nathaniel Hawthorne didn't really spend a good deal of time conversing with ghosts, but both he and Melville managed to create something in their readers usually referred to as "suspension of disbelief."
"The story that is style and allegory, or the one devotes pages of exposition to laughably wrong predictions of a supposedly realistic future? It all might as well be spaceports in Ohio."
"Predictions?" As I said before, anybody since Sir Isaac Newton could easily see that lower latitudes were beneficial. Jules Verne did figure it out. Better still, Bradbury could have set it in segregated Florida and maybe get away with combining a story or two.
And the image of the destruction of Australia (!!!) being visible with the naked eye from the surface of Mars isn't a "wrong prediction," it isn't "obsolete scientific opinion," it's the writings of a man who never actually looked up at the night sky and noticed "Gee, it's just a rust-colored dot, can't really see much from this distance," in spite of writing a book that supposedly takes place there. Aside from being a visual too jarring for the reader to stay in the narrative, it reflects Bradbury's own geocentrism, a notion he spends a great many pages mocking and belittling his characters for showing.
Just as discongruent was the idea that almost everybody on Mars would go back to Earth (even after seeing such a spectacle) to die with that planet, rather than accepting a flood of war refugees. But any amount of believability that gets in the way of Father Bradbury's sermon has to go, he's got A Point to Make.
"a superior power invading what was though the premier power with nightmarish force saying 'Mars, bitches!', and a man venturing to different lands where there happens to be a society that resembles what his is like at the extremes in 'teh future!'."
But the key here is that Wells actually worked on the metaphor. Good science fiction tends to be stories of "Let's take contemporary society (or some other meme), but dial up Aspect X a few orders of magnitude and explore what happens." Most of Bradbury's work starts with "Let's take contemporary society," and that's as far as he ever gets.
One of the more damning criticisms of science fiction as a genre, all the more damning because it's often true, is that many science fiction authors write science fiction because the standards are so much lower than for other forms of fiction or literature. For every genuinely good book in the genre, there are fifty that wouldn't even get shelf space in the trashy romance section.
Other than the very end, where Earth is destroyed in a fashion that more resembles Alderaan than Hiroshima, Martian Chronicles could just as easily have been written about a previously undiscovered island in the South Pacific somewhere, followed by its subsequent colonization and subjugation of its peoples (you know, what Bradbury was trying so God damned hard to write about). But "Polynesian Chronicles," named and written as such, sitting in some other part of the bookstore, wouldn't have sold enough to merit a second printing. Put "Mars" on the cover, and there's a chance that preteen boys of the day will buy your (supposedly) Mars-themed book rather than a Mars-themed trading cards, Mars-themed comic book, or Mars-themed horror movie ticket that week.
The government wants to keep you stupid, people never change, and atoms are bad, mmmkay?
"Someday in the future, if F451's distopia prevails (or more likely, Idiocracy's), 'teh future!' and 'Mars, bitches!' might be labels on the bindings of Bradbury's work in an incredibly dusty library."
Except, even then, George Orwell managed to do a much better job with the theme of a deliberately illiterate state/society four years prior. Orwell thought up Minipax and Minitruth, while Bradbury had "He's called a 'fireman' because he starts fires! I'm so clever!"
(What do you call the guy who shovels the coal into the locomotive and generally tends the fire again?)
"Your Heinlein paperbacks are sticky, aren't they?"
While Heinlein does tend to be "Ayn Rand in Spaaaaaace!" at least it actually feels like space! Stranger in a Strange Land had flying cars and bounce tubes and stuff. The Martian Chronicles took place on Mars for no other reason than because the author says so.
Jules Verne figured out that Floridian latitudes were convenient, and yet "Rocket Summer" took place in Ohio? And for how many centuries did we know that the surface of Earth was mostly water, and yet he consistently describes Earth as a green dot in the Martian sky? These are things that anybody living after 1750 or so with a globe on their desk could deduce (and they often did), but Bradbury couldn't be bothered to exercise his supposedly vast imagination even that much? Even if it helped immerse the reader just a little bit? No, such things would get in the way of The Point. Instead of creating an imaginative world that was "the same, but different" where he could explore ideas, he created a world that was "the same, only they say they're on Mars."
Agree or disagree with Heinlein, the man could write a good story. Agree or disagree with Ellison, the man could write a good story. Ray Bradbury cannot write.
Clarke is dead but Bradbury persists. There is no God.
Oh yes, I've read your precious Fahrenheit and your Martian Chronicles, much to my dismay. Simply because he said 'teh future!' in one and 'Mars, bitches!' in the next somehow makes these browbeating, one-dimensional allegories that could literally have been set in any place and time "Great Works in Science Fiction" (TM).
H. G. Wells. E. E. Smith. Not Ray Bradbury.
"If you say so..."
The building you're showing has about 10 floors. WTC 1 and 2 had 10 times that and weighed exponentially more, in spite of being made with substantially similar materials. What would be strong enough to act as a pivot point for a 10 story building would buckle like a house of cards under a 100 story building, long before leaning over enough to "topple over" properly.
Xbox 360 helps to "rock the vote," while Diebold's machines suffer from the Red Ring of Death.
"It is so that you have representatives of both parties at the polling places."
Those are "election monitors," not "poll workers." Really, just about anybody is allowed to hang around and watch the process, so long as they stay out of the way and don't violate any electioneering laws.
"Nowadays CD has been replaced in some segments, but not on the music industry, that continues to support it massively."
I haven't seen a disc with the compact disc digital audio logo for sale in a music store for years.
The music industry abandoned this particular standard years ago, as it doesn't support DRM. It's been supplanted by something that may or may not play on a legitimate player of compact discs (the publisher makes no guarantees), but will fuck up your Windows or OS/X installation regardless.
"Entrapment is when a law enforcement official convinces you to break the law. If a drug dealer walks up to you on the street and convinces you to buy a kilo of heroin, you're going to jail buddy."
Mobsters beating up shopkeeper for protection money: very naughty.
Shopkeeper not paying protection money: exactly as naughty.
"Exactly right. Bust em all for attempted wire fraud to start with and go from there."
And then why, exactly, would they come forward to report they've been scammed?
"We have to get serious about stopping this crap."
By punishing the people who come forward to report it?
I'll grant you that your plan will lower the reported frequency of the crime. That always looks good for elections and the like.
(Not that I agree with with the parent's assertion that the victim's role in the classic Nigerian scam is a financial crime. Mob accountants skate on far thinner ice and still manage to stay legit, de jure if not de facto.)
"In Celsius a normal human temperature is NOT 37 degrees, but 36.6 or 36.7 depending on a country."
And that changes the fact that 1 degree is too large and 1 decidegree is too small to be particularly meaningful units of measuring that temperature how?
"And since most current weather forecasts give a range of temperatures"
Because they're forecasts. The numbers given are as precise as they can predict at the given time.
"I highly doubt there's a single human in the world that can detect a difference between 27-29C and 77-82F."
Then I'll issue you the same challenge I issued the parent: bump up your thermostat 2 degrees Celsius. It's August and oil is expensive; provided you're not in the southern hemisphere, you'd be saving a few kW h by increasing the temperature in your home by an amount you claim you cannot detect.
"If they call a second time, you get all the info from them that they will give, addresses, phone numbers, etc."
That they choose to give. They're supposed to give you all the necessary information to track them down, but there's little, if any, recourse if they decide not to anyway.
"and that next call you receive from them will be referred to your state's attorney general they will go away."
And then they'll point out that they were following the letter of the law, while you never uttered the words "remove" "me" and "calling list."
"immediately say "no, thanks" and hang up."
If you simply say "no thanks," they will call back again later. You must say "remove me from your calling list." Telemarketing outfits make their money by number of calls made, and it is in their financial interest to do everything they can to keep you on their list. Any degree of ambiguity will be used as an implicit approval of future calls.