Actually, i'm not, since the doping thing is mostly written into law at this point.
Nothing illustrates the 'bread and circuses' viewpoint of today so much as the recent doping scandals and the lawmaker response to same. Sports are there to keep the general public dopey and not politically active, but ironically the players themselves can't use dope. That and a SNAP card and the Roman Emperors would be envious.
Welll....the Saturday Night Massacre was what did him in with the public. That was out in the open and would have gotten covered regardless of Felt and the W&B activity in the Post. It's probably possible that Nixon could have explained it away assuming a dearth of reporting on Watergate, but by the time of the Massacre in August 1973, there had been public hearings on Watergate for months and Woodward and Bernstein were hardly the only purveyors of Watergate news. If there was a time when Felt and Woodward and Bernstein were important, it was much earlier on when there wasn't a lot of information on the story, but once the burglars were mapped to the Nixon campaign (at latest, January 1973), there wasn't a lot that could have stopped the path things took because of Nixon's strategic errors.
Probably the biggest error was having a group of "Plumbers" in the first place, and choosing such excruciatingly thick ones. Liddy was a bright guy but wtf, burglarizing a national party headquarters to get dirt on your guy? You'd have to be nuts - the juice was never worth the squeeze and you're creating MORE dirt on your guy by doing it.
I'm not sure Felt was the key to anything, which complicates the narrative. It was Dean, the White House Counsel, turning on Nixon that caused the fall. And the existence of the taping system...if that hadn't existed, Dean would have been hung out to dry and Nixon would have survived. The investigations were going to happen regardless of the level of media interest, as the President and Congress were of opposing parties with no interest in making this go away.
In the commentary department, Nixon shouldn't have been recording everything if he was going to issue orders like he did. Johnson had had a taping system but it was very limited and it had to be manually turned on and off. The Nixon system was voice activated.
If they want to be modern day gladiators and kill themselves, then that's their right to be dumb as fuck for people's enjoyment.
I think enough allowance would be made for this by allowing them to dope if they really want to. If they choose to kill themselves or make their junk fall off, that's not my fault and I actually have no control over it - as stated, they'll shoot up junk-destroying drugs regardless of what I think.
In summary, Nixon employed as an arm of his re-election campaign in 1972 a group of operatives including several former government officials, a serving member of the CIA and a private detective. This group liked to call itself the "Plumbers" - they stopped leaks, get it? This group was involved more or less in the response to the release of the Pentagon Papers the previous year, breaking into Daniel Ellsberg's shrink's office and rifling his files. One of them was used to investigate Chappaquiddick (Teddy Kennedy's swimming incident where Mary Jo Kopechne was killed). Their activities were liased through the White House Counsel's office - John Dean.
The Plumbers got the idea somehow that the Democratic National Committee headquarters had 'secrets' for them to get. Probably oppo research on Nixon. So, they hired a group of expatriate Cubans who had fled Castro to break into the DNC offices at the Watergate complex. They did a very poor job of it and were caught and arrested. For a while, campaign funds were used to pay hush money to the people involved to keep things quiet. The election passes - a landslide for Nixon vs McGovern. Then the hush money stops. Then they start talking slowly. Then a House committee gets involved and an independent prosecutor is appointed. The independent prosecutor follows the case until he reaches a point where John Dean realizes he's going to be the scapegoat for this.
Dean starts testifying to the grand jury and to Congress. He identifies Alexander Butterfield, a White House official who knew about the taping system Nixon had. Then, Cox, the independent prosecutor, tried to subpoena the tapes. Nixon orders his AG to fire Cox. AG resigns, his deputy resigns also. Robert Bork, the solicitor general, agrees to fire Cox. It was called the "Saturday Night Massacre". The upshot was that Nixon's popularity goes underwater, articles of impeachment are introduced in Congress, and he is pressured into appointing another special prosecutor. Then Nixon tries to fight the tape release on the basis of "Executive Privilege". His court fight fails. The tapes start coming, slowly. They find an 18 minute gap. Nixon's secretary says she deleted the tape inadvertently, but the belief is that it was purposeful. Evidence that he knew about the burglary after the fact and ordered it covered up is on the tapes, nevertheless. Facing impeachment, he resigns in August 1974.
During the whole time, an FBI official named Mark Felt is leaking data about the investigation to two Washington Post reporters - Woodward and Bernstein. Felt is identified as "Deep Throat". This makes for a titillating story that drives up circulation. People seemingly can't talk about anything else. Walter Cronkite was on this, every night.
President Ford, his former VP, pardons him a month later. Most of the Plumbers do jail sentences, none longer than 10 years, that I remember. Robert Bork lost his chance at the Supreme Court mostly over his part in this - the firing of Cox.
I love these audiobooks. I have some eclectic tastes - mostly secondary works on antiquity and medieval times, with an occasional divergence into the Napoleonic Era. Luckily, the books I like are long and if well written, engaging. I can rip them to my iPod and listen on my iphone or computer, and I take advantage of all these modes. The selection is not incredible in my particular area of interest, but I have a backlog of things to listen to.
Protip: copy to computer, convert to mp3, chop into 10 minute segments with sequential numbers and you can easily transit between listening methodologies without worrying about being online. The file number is a useful way to sync between streaming and listening to files. This and a pair of Bose noise cancelling phones make plane rides very pleasant.
You rules people...do you not realize that a significant portion of the population will cheat? The people you hold up as heroes and say "they'd never cheat" are the exact people I am talking about.
It's all about being properly cynical about human nature, and there's lots to be cynical about.
I venture to say just about every winning athlete has found a way to dope without getting caught. Period.
So, if we get that BS argument about "honesty and fairness" out of the way...the answer is obvious. Just let them, and let them use well understood substances.
Ironically, Snowden would have a better chance at a pardon the first day of a Trump Administration than the last one of Obama's. I don't think it absolutely would happen, but Trump is an emotional kind of guy and a plea could get to him and make him ignore his advisers.
I actually agree with you about something. It's been rare over the years.
1.Mainly, because I think people should have the liberty to be as smart or stupid as they choose to be, as long as their choice has no impact on others' lives. And competing in sport IS a choice, not a compulsion.
2. On a purely humanitarian level, artificial rules are just itching to be contravened, and i'd rather people shoot up the stuff we understand rather than new test-evading substances with unknown effects.
3. The rules whiners are the lowest form of humanity and deserve to be disappointed.
Well, Apple always loses the market eventually anyway. They make boutique goods for a high end market. Eventually, the iPhone was going to lose out as they attempt to monetize it by selling add-on crap like headphones and the like. Reducing the BOM on a device isn't going to squeeze out any more efficiencies for them, so they have to eliminate hardware, like the headphone jack and the button. Also, Jobs isn't around to tell them they are assholes anymore, so the inmates run the asylum.
This isn't a new thing, though. Apple has been going through these cycles for ages. Apple II devices, the original Macintosh, etc. The latest one was with the iPod. They took a perfectly functional device and tried to push it in a new direction with the Touch devices. I'll never buy another one because the Touch devices don't meet my needs. So they killed that market. But now the iPhone is due for a fall, and Apple is thinking they can make more money by doing this kind of stuff. They're wrong, but they'd almost assuredly get fired if they stopped "innovating".
The answer is "they did", but no one was running through poor white communities and advocating people take these benefits. In urban areas, you had activists and social workers campaigning for people to take these benefits and accept the consequences. Also, incidentally, breaking down the resistance to taking alms amongst blacks. No one did the same in white communities, so here we are.
Remember, people thought they were "helping". Before the consequences were known, people were proud of their part in doing this.
The sin of this is that fatherlessness was not an issue in the black community until the Great Society programs of the 1960s. In 1938 the fatherless rate was 13% in the black community. Today, the number is more like 72%, vs less than 25% amongst whites. This was an induced feature of black society, and if BLM and company wanted to blame racism for something in today's society - this is it. White people assisted in making happen, in some misguided attempt to help via welfare transfer payments that only applied if you didn't have a man in the house. We literally paid black people to break up their nuclear families, and the social price remains to be paid today.
Ironically, it's this very broken family structure that essentially causes black poverty. Single parent/single earner homes are where poverty lives - only 2% of two earner black households are below the poverty rate.
The US early on dispensed with state sovereignty - it was a dead letter even before the Civil War. States could not contract foreign debt. States could form a militia but that was subverted to Federal control upon demand. In addition, the US had a bond of unified language and (mostly) unified culture. Patriotism toward an idea of "United States" was an early feature of the country.
Imagine a US where some states were Francophone (Louisiana) or Spanish-speaking (Mexican cessions, Florida) at the outset, and were allowed to stay that way. Where states like that would keep stronger ties with foreign powers than with the US itself. Where internal customs barriers were permitted to exist (at all). Where each state kept its own private army and ran its own foreign policy. Where states could contract foreign debt but were forced to denominate it in dollars. You'd have the US run mostly like the EU, and there's where the trouble would happen. In fact, this sounds like the US under the Articles of Confederation (pre-1787). It didn't work very well.
I don't know how the EU could be remade to be more like the US - some of the issues are inherent in the nature of Europe itself and can't be easily undone. Language and cultural barriers are one big one here. But I do know that loose confederations of disparate peoples don't work well in practice.
Well, you have to admit that brain surgery is a pretty shitty procedure to have to go through...so the analogy to transiting the rectum isn't totally off base.
It's what happens when you give up your sovereignty, ie via EU accession. The greedy authorities that you subjected yourself to get to decide things for you.
The correct path, if you don't like this, is to leave the EU, as Britain has chosen to do.
The EU was a stupid idea on multiple fronts, not just this one. For instance, the whole Greek thing would have been a non-issue if they were using drachma rather than Euros...they'd just have devalued their currency to cure the problem. But they don't have the ability to do that, since the ECB would have to be in on that, and they aren't interested in helping out Greece at that level. Then again, the loans would never have been issued at such low interest rates and in such quantities had Greece not been part of the EU and Euro zone. So the dumb keeps on piling up.
Or, the Schengen Area...I probably don't need to speak further on this except to note that it sounded great in theory, but the idea of having someone else essentially in charge of your immigration doesn't work well in practice.
If the US had been structured like the EU, we'd have had much more than one civil war.
Having brain cancer cannot have been fun, but being able to tell people you've had a fruit-sized chunk of brain removed...must be great in conversation.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, i'm not, since the doping thing is mostly written into law at this point.
Nothing illustrates the 'bread and circuses' viewpoint of today so much as the recent doping scandals and the lawmaker response to same. Sports are there to keep the general public dopey and not politically active, but ironically the players themselves can't use dope. That and a SNAP card and the Roman Emperors would be envious.
It works on Win7 as is, but you can also issue a command line sequence to make it happen. The breakage is in the GUI.
Welll....the Saturday Night Massacre was what did him in with the public. That was out in the open and would have gotten covered regardless of Felt and the W&B activity in the Post. It's probably possible that Nixon could have explained it away assuming a dearth of reporting on Watergate, but by the time of the Massacre in August 1973, there had been public hearings on Watergate for months and Woodward and Bernstein were hardly the only purveyors of Watergate news. If there was a time when Felt and Woodward and Bernstein were important, it was much earlier on when there wasn't a lot of information on the story, but once the burglars were mapped to the Nixon campaign (at latest, January 1973), there wasn't a lot that could have stopped the path things took because of Nixon's strategic errors.
Probably the biggest error was having a group of "Plumbers" in the first place, and choosing such excruciatingly thick ones. Liddy was a bright guy but wtf, burglarizing a national party headquarters to get dirt on your guy? You'd have to be nuts - the juice was never worth the squeeze and you're creating MORE dirt on your guy by doing it.
I'm not sure Felt was the key to anything, which complicates the narrative. It was Dean, the White House Counsel, turning on Nixon that caused the fall. And the existence of the taping system...if that hadn't existed, Dean would have been hung out to dry and Nixon would have survived. The investigations were going to happen regardless of the level of media interest, as the President and Congress were of opposing parties with no interest in making this go away.
In the commentary department, Nixon shouldn't have been recording everything if he was going to issue orders like he did. Johnson had had a taping system but it was very limited and it had to be manually turned on and off. The Nixon system was voice activated.
Reality TV is better than the place we are going right now.
If they want to be modern day gladiators and kill themselves, then that's their right to be dumb as fuck for people's enjoyment.
I think enough allowance would be made for this by allowing them to dope if they really want to. If they choose to kill themselves or make their junk fall off, that's not my fault and I actually have no control over it - as stated, they'll shoot up junk-destroying drugs regardless of what I think.
Not arguing the point, though it's academic since Snowden isnt getting pardoned by Obama.
Who needs an analog hole?
There are a lot of devices that do not like 24 hour long mp3 files.
In summary, Nixon employed as an arm of his re-election campaign in 1972 a group of operatives including several former government officials, a serving member of the CIA and a private detective. This group liked to call itself the "Plumbers" - they stopped leaks, get it? This group was involved more or less in the response to the release of the Pentagon Papers the previous year, breaking into Daniel Ellsberg's shrink's office and rifling his files. One of them was used to investigate Chappaquiddick (Teddy Kennedy's swimming incident where Mary Jo Kopechne was killed). Their activities were liased through the White House Counsel's office - John Dean.
The Plumbers got the idea somehow that the Democratic National Committee headquarters had 'secrets' for them to get. Probably oppo research on Nixon. So, they hired a group of expatriate Cubans who had fled Castro to break into the DNC offices at the Watergate complex. They did a very poor job of it and were caught and arrested. For a while, campaign funds were used to pay hush money to the people involved to keep things quiet. The election passes - a landslide for Nixon vs McGovern. Then the hush money stops. Then they start talking slowly. Then a House committee gets involved and an independent prosecutor is appointed. The independent prosecutor follows the case until he reaches a point where John Dean realizes he's going to be the scapegoat for this.
Dean starts testifying to the grand jury and to Congress. He identifies Alexander Butterfield, a White House official who knew about the taping system Nixon had. Then, Cox, the independent prosecutor, tried to subpoena the tapes. Nixon orders his AG to fire Cox. AG resigns, his deputy resigns also. Robert Bork, the solicitor general, agrees to fire Cox. It was called the "Saturday Night Massacre". The upshot was that Nixon's popularity goes underwater, articles of impeachment are introduced in Congress, and he is pressured into appointing another special prosecutor. Then Nixon tries to fight the tape release on the basis of "Executive Privilege". His court fight fails. The tapes start coming, slowly. They find an 18 minute gap. Nixon's secretary says she deleted the tape inadvertently, but the belief is that it was purposeful. Evidence that he knew about the burglary after the fact and ordered it covered up is on the tapes, nevertheless. Facing impeachment, he resigns in August 1974.
During the whole time, an FBI official named Mark Felt is leaking data about the investigation to two Washington Post reporters - Woodward and Bernstein. Felt is identified as "Deep Throat". This makes for a titillating story that drives up circulation. People seemingly can't talk about anything else. Walter Cronkite was on this, every night.
President Ford, his former VP, pardons him a month later. Most of the Plumbers do jail sentences, none longer than 10 years, that I remember. Robert Bork lost his chance at the Supreme Court mostly over his part in this - the firing of Cox.
I love these audiobooks. I have some eclectic tastes - mostly secondary works on antiquity and medieval times, with an occasional divergence into the Napoleonic Era. Luckily, the books I like are long and if well written, engaging. I can rip them to my iPod and listen on my iphone or computer, and I take advantage of all these modes. The selection is not incredible in my particular area of interest, but I have a backlog of things to listen to.
Protip: copy to computer, convert to mp3, chop into 10 minute segments with sequential numbers and you can easily transit between listening methodologies without worrying about being online. The file number is a useful way to sync between streaming and listening to files. This and a pair of Bose noise cancelling phones make plane rides very pleasant.
Why are you convinced that you or anyone else has the power to remove chemistry from the mix?
You rules people...do you not realize that a significant portion of the population will cheat? The people you hold up as heroes and say "they'd never cheat" are the exact people I am talking about.
It's all about being properly cynical about human nature, and there's lots to be cynical about.
I venture to say just about every winning athlete has found a way to dope without getting caught. Period.
So, if we get that BS argument about "honesty and fairness" out of the way...the answer is obvious. Just let them, and let them use well understood substances.
Ironically, Snowden would have a better chance at a pardon the first day of a Trump Administration than the last one of Obama's. I don't think it absolutely would happen, but Trump is an emotional kind of guy and a plea could get to him and make him ignore his advisers.
No, you don't have to be convicted to get pardoned...Nixon is the most obvious example. Though, an acceptance of a pardon is an admission of guilt.
I actually agree with you about something. It's been rare over the years.
1.Mainly, because I think people should have the liberty to be as smart or stupid as they choose to be, as long as their choice has no impact on others' lives. And competing in sport IS a choice, not a compulsion.
2. On a purely humanitarian level, artificial rules are just itching to be contravened, and i'd rather people shoot up the stuff we understand rather than new test-evading substances with unknown effects.
3. The rules whiners are the lowest form of humanity and deserve to be disappointed.
Well, Apple always loses the market eventually anyway. They make boutique goods for a high end market. Eventually, the iPhone was going to lose out as they attempt to monetize it by selling add-on crap like headphones and the like. Reducing the BOM on a device isn't going to squeeze out any more efficiencies for them, so they have to eliminate hardware, like the headphone jack and the button. Also, Jobs isn't around to tell them they are assholes anymore, so the inmates run the asylum.
This isn't a new thing, though. Apple has been going through these cycles for ages. Apple II devices, the original Macintosh, etc. The latest one was with the iPod. They took a perfectly functional device and tried to push it in a new direction with the Touch devices. I'll never buy another one because the Touch devices don't meet my needs. So they killed that market. But now the iPhone is due for a fall, and Apple is thinking they can make more money by doing this kind of stuff. They're wrong, but they'd almost assuredly get fired if they stopped "innovating".
Exactly.
The answer is "they did", but no one was running through poor white communities and advocating people take these benefits. In urban areas, you had activists and social workers campaigning for people to take these benefits and accept the consequences. Also, incidentally, breaking down the resistance to taking alms amongst blacks. No one did the same in white communities, so here we are.
Remember, people thought they were "helping". Before the consequences were known, people were proud of their part in doing this.
I learned something from a post here. It used to happen a lot, but not so often anymore. Thanks.
The sin of this is that fatherlessness was not an issue in the black community until the Great Society programs of the 1960s. In 1938 the fatherless rate was 13% in the black community. Today, the number is more like 72%, vs less than 25% amongst whites. This was an induced feature of black society, and if BLM and company wanted to blame racism for something in today's society - this is it. White people assisted in making happen, in some misguided attempt to help via welfare transfer payments that only applied if you didn't have a man in the house. We literally paid black people to break up their nuclear families, and the social price remains to be paid today.
Ironically, it's this very broken family structure that essentially causes black poverty. Single parent/single earner homes are where poverty lives - only 2% of two earner black households are below the poverty rate.
This looks like a transaction that should not be approved.
The US early on dispensed with state sovereignty - it was a dead letter even before the Civil War. States could not contract foreign debt. States could form a militia but that was subverted to Federal control upon demand. In addition, the US had a bond of unified language and (mostly) unified culture. Patriotism toward an idea of "United States" was an early feature of the country.
Imagine a US where some states were Francophone (Louisiana) or Spanish-speaking (Mexican cessions, Florida) at the outset, and were allowed to stay that way. Where states like that would keep stronger ties with foreign powers than with the US itself. Where internal customs barriers were permitted to exist (at all). Where each state kept its own private army and ran its own foreign policy. Where states could contract foreign debt but were forced to denominate it in dollars. You'd have the US run mostly like the EU, and there's where the trouble would happen. In fact, this sounds like the US under the Articles of Confederation (pre-1787). It didn't work very well.
I don't know how the EU could be remade to be more like the US - some of the issues are inherent in the nature of Europe itself and can't be easily undone. Language and cultural barriers are one big one here. But I do know that loose confederations of disparate peoples don't work well in practice.
Well, you have to admit that brain surgery is a pretty shitty procedure to have to go through...so the analogy to transiting the rectum isn't totally off base.
It's what happens when you give up your sovereignty, ie via EU accession. The greedy authorities that you subjected yourself to get to decide things for you.
The correct path, if you don't like this, is to leave the EU, as Britain has chosen to do.
The EU was a stupid idea on multiple fronts, not just this one. For instance, the whole Greek thing would have been a non-issue if they were using drachma rather than Euros...they'd just have devalued their currency to cure the problem. But they don't have the ability to do that, since the ECB would have to be in on that, and they aren't interested in helping out Greece at that level. Then again, the loans would never have been issued at such low interest rates and in such quantities had Greece not been part of the EU and Euro zone. So the dumb keeps on piling up.
Or, the Schengen Area...I probably don't need to speak further on this except to note that it sounded great in theory, but the idea of having someone else essentially in charge of your immigration doesn't work well in practice.
If the US had been structured like the EU, we'd have had much more than one civil war.
Having brain cancer cannot have been fun, but being able to tell people you've had a fruit-sized chunk of brain removed...must be great in conversation.
Glad you came out the other end.