I would hesitate to label a game "Christian." That's like labeling food "Christian."
Scary thing is, I HAVE seen stuff like that before--specifically, types of Middle Eastern bread sold as "Bible Bread" (yes, that is the literal brand name, and no, I am not making this up, either) in odd-lots stores.
Then again, something as an aside that I think is getting a bit neglected in all this (possibly because most people just plain aren't aware of it)--this is, in all odds, being marketed mainly to very right-wing fundamentalist groups.
A fair number of fundy groups in the US, including some fairly large denominations (including at least one which has over two million members in the US, is linked with the vast majority of your politically active Religious Reich groups to the extent that the political groups are the de facto political wing of this denomination, is linked with Irangate suspect Colonel Oliver North, had quite a bit of controversy in the 80's with the televangelist scandals and has some controversy with the whole "Brownsville Revival Movement" thing, and is the very denomination Skipp Porteous [founder of Institute for First Amendment Studies which includes a section for walkaways] walked away from--I won't go into too many details because it would make me a HUGE target, but let's just say the denomination's initials are A.O.G.) in effect are groups that use mind control techniques. Yes, I'm going to come out and say it--most of them are under mind control and are not in their right minds, many of the techniques are well known to be harmful (I'll get to this in a paragraph or two), and many of them are increasingly being literally placed under coercive conditions from birth onwards.
To give an example, the unnamed denomination I mentioned above uses a fair number of coercive techniques that people outside the church would find frankly bizarre (including a fair number of moderate and liberal Christians who don't attend churches that are Bible-based cults). I'm going to compare these with a coercive group most of us are familiar with and can agree is a Bad Thing, namely Scientology...
The denomination believes in so-called "Deliverance Ministry"--in other words, the world is literally demon-haunted, any doubts one has about the minister or even doubts on one's faith are the sign of demonic obsession or posession, and one must be either exorcised, "rededicated", or otherwise get even more involved with the church at all costs. (This is very similar to the concept of "engrams" and "thetans" in Scientology; I'm sure all of you can look up on the subject on any number of websites. As an aside, this is now recognised by therapists as one of the single most damaging bits of mind-control used in Scientology.)
The denomination states flat out that whomever is not working for them is literally working for Satan; literally anyone who is not a fundamentalist of that denomination is a Satanist (including "lukewarm Christians"), if one does not totally isolate one's self from non-Christian media one risks demonic obsession (and thus you end up doing Satan's work), and you are supposed to completely isolate yourself from the world (to the point of only watching Christian television networks such as TBN and PAX, only listening to Christian radio stations and Christian music [some even say Christian metal is STILL "Satanic" because it "has a rock beat"], only associating with other Christians when possible, and even only doing business with other Christians from that denomination [there is actually a "Christian Yellow Pages" distributed where one has to take an oath that one is an Evangelical to even be listed, and it encourages members to "do business with those of like faith"]). (This is similar to how Scientologists isolate people from the outside world to keep them from being infected by "Thetans".)
The denomination has been known to expressly target celebrities, such as football stars, NASCAR drivers, etc. as celebrity spokesmen. (Scientology targets Hollywood for the same reason.)
There are typically different members of membership, depending on how new one is in the group; groups for "new Christians" are common, as are other programs meant to make the person more involved and isolated. The "Christian theme parks" are even part of this, as are "Christian DOOM clones" and whatnot. (Scientology has this with the different levels.)
There is a big emphasis on always giving money to the church; monetary scandals are often glossed over or the investigation is even discouraged by the ministers claiming that "Satan is trying to defeat this church". (Same goes for Scientology.)
Critics are often harassed; persons supporting things the church does not approve of have been picketed at best; the church believes it is morally right to lie about its aims to the outside, because "good people will go to hell and bad people will go to heaven". It also believes it is morally permissible to libel other groups (one group put out flyers during a referendum to add gay/les/bi/trans people to civil rights laws, claiming all gays were members of NAMBLA, in grocery stores across the county). (Scientology has this too, and even special sub-orgs to do this.)
The group tries to isolate them as early as possible, encouraging parents to pull the children out of schools and to not even allow them to associate with people outside of the religion. (This, as a minor aside, is why homeschool programs generally scare hell out of me. Something like 70-80 percent of homeschool groups and programs in the US are run by fundamentalist groups that are pretty well Bible-based cults, they use the exact same curriculum as used in fundamentalist schools, and the expressed purpose of this is to isolate them from anything that might taint them--in other worlds they'd never know ANY worldview outside of that approved by the church. There are nastier bits yet with this, which I'll hit on in a later section.) (Scientology isolates kids like this too, sometimes raising them communally without outside parent help.)
The group makes high demands on members--members must often attend church for multiple hours a day and for several days a week, participation in "cell groups" (more on these below) and prayer-groups and tract-handling is expected, etc. (Again, same as in Scientology--big emphasis is put in on suckering new recruits in.)
Some additional stuff this denomination gets into, which is either unique to fundamentalist religious groups or to other coercive groups, is below:
The church increasingly practices "shepherding" and "cell churches"--in essence, you are organised into groups of five houses or so, and every week (or sometimes more) one of the church members checks up on you to make sure you are being a "good Christian" or not. (Yes, it's exactly what it sounds like--"Big Brother". It is also seen as one of the most destructive practices in Bible-based coercive groups.)
The group practices what is known as "Dominion Theology"--that is, that Christians are meant to be the rulers of the world (more on this below) and everyone else is literally on the side of Satan--including anyone who tells them they're farged in the head.
Much emphasis is given on stuff like "speaking in tongues" and whatnot--not a sign of a cult in itself--but if you somehow are unable to do so you just "aren't in touch enough with God" and "need to get closer with God".
Outright lies are often told to churchgoers. Among classics I heard in Sunday school--that facial cream contains ground-up aborted fetuses, that the ERA would require women to be lesbians (being gay is right up there with Satanism with them), and that the CEO of NBC was a practicing Satanist.
The churchmembers, again, believe anything is morally permissible to get more suckers in. ANYTHING. Parody slogans (like the Pepsi spoof shirts saying "Jesus--Choice of The Last Generation"), lying to folks outside in recruiting, "bait-and-switch" recruitment tactics ("Hell Houses" which are fundy-themed haunted houses in which the persons going through are often forced to hear a sermon at the end, and billed as regular haunted houses, are common; cases are also known where pizza-parties are held where kids are forced to hear sermons and not allowed to leave till the sermon is over, or fundy-sponsored athletes have done talks in public schools under the guise of "anti-drug programs" where sermons go on and the kids are not allowed to leave and attendance is mandatory), libeling entire groups or threatening physical violence (Fred "godhatesfags.com" Phelps is a classic example of this; we have a Phelps wannabe in Kentucky, too, who's the head of the AFA here), etc.
Confession of sins to everyone--willing or not--is a big thing. (Gay kids have been outed by church leaders in past; I'm sure people have been blackmailed or could use confessions in blackmail.) So is involuntary "exorcisms" of people whose biggest crime may be being gay or having doubts about fundamentalism (and in some cases--nationwide and in Australia--people have actually died from this).
In other words, folks, the people pushing this stuff and the folks likely to buy it are as sunk in as your average clam in Scientology, if not WORSE (many people are raised in this, and statistics for walkaways from Bible-based groups who were raised in it aren't even available because it is so rare--especially when multiple generations have been raised in a coercive group, as is common with a lot of Bible-based groups). The world they live in is something between a funhouse mirror distortion of the world we live in and a house of horrors where Satan is waiting at every turn to devour them...it's really sad, if you think of it.
I would be content merely to pity these folks if it weren't for the following three things:
The group I used as an example--and that's just an example, there are many more groups like it--is considered not only the largest "Pentecostal" group in the nation but has over two million members in the US alone and has been around since the 1900's...and people still tend not to think of "Bible-based" groups being coercive. (Skipp Porteous was really the first to get the word out on how things are rotten throughout that denomination, and a few brave souls have spoken out including some Christian apologetics about some of the bad things going on...most recently about the "Brownsville Movement" stuff (just do a Google search, folks, you'll learn a ton) that led to a 20/20 investigation.)
The group believes in Christian reconstructionism, which is a subset of "Dominion Theology" and has ties to other nasty stuff like deliverance ministry--in essence, it is a canard that claims the Founding Fathers were fundamentalists (most were moderate Christians at most, and many were Deists who didn't believe in Christianity at all), that the Founding Fathers meant for the US to be a fundamentalist theocracy, and all laws ought to be interpreted according to Biblical guidelines (a number of versions actually state the Constitution should be replaced with the Biblical version of sharia law). Also, a fair number believe that anyone who works against them is working for Satan.
They've been working for some time to try to turn America into a fundamentalist theocracy and have gotten rather frighteningly far at it. (Among other fun things: The Christian Coalition has de facto taken over the Republican Party apparatus in 34 states. One of the major plans in guides by Religious Reich groups is for school boards nationwide to be taken over by fundamentalists (because they know most folks don't give a damn for school board elections) and basically fundamentalise and/or run the school systems into the group so kids are forced to go to fundy schools or do without schooling. [Think about THAT the next time something for school vouchers comes up...they have stated PUBLICALLY the ultimate goal is to destroy the school system and replace it with fundamentalist schools, and they can pretty much at that point either forcibly convert kids or kick out "pagan" kids...and the voucher folks want to do this with your tax dollars.] A college is being set up specifically for "Christian homeschooled youth" to not only isolate them from non-fundamentalist influences but to "train them to be political soldiers to take this nation for Christ"...in other words, as a political training college to make new Religious Reich political candidates to take over the US and convert it to a fundamentalist theocracy. The US is approximately four or five states away from having a Constitutional Convention (or ConCon) approved, states cannot rescind a call for a ConCon once issued, and things go entirely up in the air once one is called [a ConCon is a convention to rewrite the Constitution of the United States]--and most of those pushing for a ConCon have been fundamentalist Christian Reconstructionists that want to turn the US into the Christianised version of Taliban Afghanistan.)
It's a shame they're pretty much under mind control to the point they might as well be the Borg...but at the same time, I'm gonna be damned if I let them turn the official government of the US into essentially a Bible-based cult.:) I'm also to the point I can't stay quiet about the abuses that DO go on in coercive groups like that...I walked away 13 years ago, finally broke all links something like six months ago, and it's part of my healing in a way to let folks know just what does go on and how it IS hurtful to folks.
You're right, it wasn't cut... I saw the Miramax version at the Toronto Film Festival (where Miyazaki introduced the movie BTW). There were some obvious differences in the dialog compared to the subtitled version I saw, though... but apparently the changes were approved by Miyazaki himself.
Yup...then again, most of the changes I've heard that were done to the script (alas, I've only seen the sub, and damnit, I want EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU WHO READ SLASHDOT TO GO SEE PRINCESS MONONOKE ON THE 29TH IF AT ALL POSSIBLE, because this movie REALLY REALLY REALLY deserves to be in more than twenty cities) were mostly to clarify plot points that would not be obvious to American audiences or of Japanese idioms that didn't translate 100% well to English. (For example, they explain more on the history and mythology, and that the hero is "dead to the world" when he cuts his topknot [Japanese audiences would Get This but American audiences wouldn't, most likely]; another thing I know they changed is part was retranslated from "this soup tastes like water" to "this soup tastes like piss" (which is a LOT closer to what is meant in Japanese by saying your soup tastes like water!).)
There's a lot of VERY neat info about the translation and the process of bringing the movie over to the States on the official website along with some trailers and whatnot...and yes, Miyazaki made it a condition of Disney/Miramax releasing his films (Princess Mononoke is not the only or even the first film Disney bought the distribution rights to; they bought the rights to five of his films including "Kiki's Delivery Service" though Princess Mononoke is probably going to be the only one to see theatrical release Stateside) that none be cut or bobbitted...just dubbed and released, and he had final approval on all dubs.:)
In all seriousness, this is a beautiful movie, one which I seriously think everyone needs to see (and for those of you worried about the kids, Miyazaki himself recommends "fifth grade and up"). I can certainly see why it ended up being the highest grossing film in Japan of all time for quite some time (only being beaten by the Japanese release of "Titanic", for which Leonardo Decaprio should be sacrificed to the forest gods;). Lotta important messages in it that everyone could stand to hear an' all...and no, it's not preachy about it.
(And yes, I'm serious about everyone needing to go see the movie and all. The opening on October 29th is a limited showing; nationwide theatrical release is largely going to depend on how well the movie does in the limited opening and how much "buzz" it creates. I can't afford to drive over 300 miles to the nearest showing...and I promise each and every one of you right now, if you DON'T go see it and I have to wait nine months for the fucker to come out on video because it never made it to Louisville because SOME people didn't go see it when they didn't HAVE to drive three hundred miles out of the way, I will PERSONALLY sic the Inugami on each and every one of you. I mean it. Seriously. Goddamnit, I want this thing to go NATIONWIDE AND BEYOND. I want little kids to grow up wanting to be San-sama, already...don't deprive me of this once-in-a-lifetime chance to corrupt^H^H^H^H^H^H^H teach America's children and adults of a beautiful movie:)
Not coming from the "Committee To Hopelessly Addict Americans To Ghibli Films",
Here we have Amazon offering 'a major prize' for cracking the code. This reminds me of the sceen in the movie 'A Christmas Story' where the star of the movie (an 8 year old boy) is trying to 'crack the code offered by a radio show (the show was sponsored by Ovaltine). To every day, the little boy listened intently as they gave another piece of the puzzle, and every day, the little boy would use his secret decoding ring to decipher another piece. And finaly, after weeks and weeks of work and toil, the final message was finaly deciphered, and it read: 'Drink more Ovaltine'
*chuckle* It's funny you mention that...I thought the same thing, m'self. (Then again, I've been reminiscing on that anyways; Jean Shephard, who wrote the book that "A Christmas Story" was based off of ["In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash"], passed away a few days ago.) Thinking of Little Ralphie and the Little Orphan Annie decoder pin:3
Oddly, that one movie was responsible more than anything (short of my grandpa's old radio) for me getting into old-time radio MP3s...:)
Seriously, though...(ObSlashdot) I've been farting about with the idea of maybe making a little decoder proggie based off the Captain Midnight and Radio Orphan Annie decoder pins. (There are at least three models of the latter and two of the former, with different key setups. I unfortunately haven't yet been able to find a good picture from the 1940 model of the Radio Orphan Annie decoder pin (the last year they did them, if memory serves) to get the code-key for that...shame, too, because I wanted to see what the radio program decoded to and if it really DID decode to "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine".:) I figure it should only be a little more difficult to implement than ROT13:) and preferably menu-selectable as to what code key you're using (yes, this is meant for OTR buffs who want to decode along:).
ObSlashdot the Second: over on one of the OTR sites (which I can't seem to place at the moment) there is actually a discussion on substitution cyphers and other forms of cyphers in relation to the Captain Midnight/Radio Orphan Annie decoder pins:) If it can be found again, it'd prolly be useful for ideas as to how to solve the cypher for the Cryptonomicon copy.
Dumb Useless Trivia: Both Captain Midnight (in the early-to-late 40's) and Radio Orphan Annie (in the mid-30's to early-40's) were sponsored by Ovaltine. Probably not incidentially, both were sponsored by Ovaltine at the same time they had the decoder pins going (Ovaltine switched to Captain Midnight in the 40's, figuring kids liked Indy Jones-esque pilots rather than little girls with auburn locks to hock chocolate malt mix). The code spoken in the Radio Orphan Annie segment in "A Christmas Story" might not be what Ralphie wrote down (I need to watch it again to make sure...gods help me, I've damn near got the entire movie memorised to the point I can recite lines from it before they happen:). Radio Orphan Annie really WAS largely an Ovaltine advert (I've got a Real Audio recording of a show from 1938-ish, the show was all of fifteen minutes long, and fully seven of it was an advert for Ovaltine), so that much is right (yes, I HAD to check to see if it really was that bad...you all think commercials are bad NOW...some of the 1940's kid's shows WERE in all essence infomercials). There's at least another movie based off "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash" ("Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss", which at least in the mid 90's sometimes showed on the Disney Channel, and is depicted as showing Ralphie and co when Ralphie is around twelve-ish). Yes, there really were such things as Red Ryder BB Guns, there really was a radio promotion, and yes, I'm proud to say they are still being manufactured (I've seen the actual things at Wal-Marts before, and yes, they really ARE branded as Red Ryder air rifles:).
And finally...I can sympathise with Ralphie on the Ovaltine bit. My folks, instead of buying Quik, bought Ovaltine because it was supposedly "healthier". They still did sillybuggers with the caps up to 1979-ish (with stickers free in a can of Ovaltine)...as far as I know they are STILL doing crap with the lids and/or for sendoffs. (I seriously doubt that most Americans drink Ovaltine that much anymore; at least not kids, because there's prepackaged chocolate milk and Quik and other chocolate-drink mixes. They still sell the stuff, though...) Oddly, though...I am maybe one of three Americans who has never drank Tang. Sunny Delight, yes. Tang, no. I expect some day I shall be caged in a museum as an example of the last natural-born American citizen who has never drank Tang (to hear folks talk, it must be the official childhood "health-drink" the same way Ovaltine was in the 40's, and that apparently if you have never drank the Orange Stuff That Is Product Of NASA Engineering as a kid you were either an immigrant, raised by wolves, or both).:) At least AFAIK Tang hasn't done sillybuggers with the caps yet though:)
Meat proteins are actually harder to extract and require a longer intestinal tract than we posesse to digest properly.
Minor nit to pick here--actually, most carnivores have short intestines, whilst herbivores have long intestines.
For examples, cats, which are obligate carnivores (cats require a certain amino acid, taurine, that only occurs in meat; if a cat is fed a vegetarian diet the cat will get fatty heart degeneration and die...taurine deficiency was actually discovered when well-meaning vegans tried to feed kitty a vegan diet, and most vets now agree that trying to make kitty a vegan is an act of cruelty) have guts that (proportionally) are shorter than those of a human. Cows, which generally don't eat meat unless one is boffo stupid enough to put rendered animal parts in commercial cow feed (which is how we got BSE and "new variant" Creutzfeld-Jakob disease--apparently some of those rendered remains in Britain included sheep who had died from scrapie), have far longer gut tracts than humans, proportionally speaking (and also have special compartments in their gastrointestinal tracts to help them digest plant food).
Humans, along with most other great apes (and let's all be honest here--creationist, evolutionist, whatever, the evidence shows humans can be classified as great apes--our closest relatives are chimps and bonobos, and it's generally agreed we share a common ancestry somewhere even by genetic evidence (and that humans are more closely related to chimps and bonobos than chimps and bonobos or humans are to gorillas); those who don't want to think we're cousins to Washoe may boil it down to the fact that God indeed has a sense of humour, but the fact remains that in physiological terms and genetic linking we may well be classified as a family of great apes) are (surprise, surprise) omnivorous. They don't eat as much meat as humans, but this is largely because most have to catch their food (and there are reports from primatologists that chimps HAVE killed and eaten animals for food). Remains of hominids from roughly the time we split from the chimps and bonobos to modern times have shown evidence that we are in fact omnivorous. Our gut tract is right in the range for omnivores (along with chimps and bears and--this may shock you--some canids). In fact, the only major exception to omnivorousness in apes is gorillas (which are largely vegetarian, and have evolved the gut tract to deal with a mainly vegetarian diet--this is why gorillas have pot bellies).
This is not to say I think people should go hog wild on meat. I think (ObSlashdot) that a lot of the things they do to grow meat anymore, from how they raise veal to loading chickens and cows up with antibiotics to feeding them sheep remains to injecting them fulla hormones IS asking for trouble, to put it mildly (and people wonder why we get crap like BSE and haemorragic E. Coli food poisoning:P...the conditions most animals are raised in are damn near the perfect breeding grounds for it). Then again, the same argument can be done for plants (injected fulla hormones, often artificially ripened, full of God-only-knows what chemicals both GM-engineered and sprayed on). Perhaps we should all go back to growing our own or hunting and gathering and we'd all be much healthier:)
And for those who say meat is murder--well, when one eats plants you're either eating plant lungs (leaves), plant "naughty bits" (flowers), plant stomachs/intestines (roots), or ABORTED PLANT FETUSES (fruits/seeds). And most of the time THE POOR THINGS ARE STILL ALIVE WHEN YOU'RE EATING THEM AND ONE DOESN'T HAVE THE DECENCY TO MAKE SURE ONE'S FOOD IS PROPERLY DEAD:)
The concept is nice, but you're still stuck with the problem that most languages are based on anacdotal references as well as accual words. You can translate the words, but the concepts will still frequently be lost.
It's very interesting that you bring that up. Idioms can be a bear to translate at times, much less cultural references (even from English to Spanish and back--in many fansubbed animes, the fansubbers have to include a section at the beginning for cultural references and idioms that Americans wouldn't necessarily get but Japanese audiences would). Not only that, some concepts do not translate clearly across languages (I actually find it easier to think of the Japanese concept of honour in terms of the Tao or the Dine' {Navaho} concept of the Path of Beauty than in English!).
A really good shot of how translation can require translating idioms and noting cultural reference is the discussion of the upcoming American release of "Mononoke Hime"/"Princess Mononoke" (click here for the gory details:). Neil Gaiman is translating for the dub, and apparently there were multiple major issues in translating it including:
The fact the entire dialogue in the movie is not in modern Japanese but in an archaic form (roughly akin to Middle English or the old form of English used in the King James Bible)
A mess of cultural references that Americans would not be aware of (such as one of the main characters cutting his hair--in Japan this is recognised that a warrior is leaving forever and to be among the dead)
A number of idiomatic phrases that had to be translated into American idioms (such as a comment that a character's soup tasted like water--which is about as low as one can go to insult one's cooking...this ended up being retranslated into "Your soup tastes like piss" which is more understandable to silly gaijin:).
Needless to say, it was quite illuminating...especially since some cultural references were noted that I didn't pick up on the first time I saw it (I've seen the fansubbed version) and I'm an otaku. Apparently Gaiman has rewritten the script explaining some stuff that American audiences wouldn't catch, either...and to be honest (IMHO) Gaiman is probably one of the few people who could've pulled it off.
Another really good example of this is the first tape of the anime "Compiler"--which was dubbed, but they STILL had to explain at the end why a giant Colonel Sanders turned into a Japanese baseball player and defeated a mad statue:) (Basically...Roy Bass won the Japanese equivalent of the World Series for the Tigers...the celebrating fans grabbed a statue of Colonel Sanders from a KFC, it being the only Anglo-looking statue that could be found, and threw it into the sea...they have not won the pennant since, and legend goes that some say the town will not win the pennant until the statue of Colonel Sanders is retrieved because the sea gods are pissed.:) Neat story, but not one most Americans would get...then again, the Japanese wouldn't get why octopi are often thrown at Detriot games if they get in the Stanley Cup:)
fter Kentucky and Kansas, it's nice to see a state with some stones. It's a crying shame that this is even an issue in this day.
At least in Kentucky's case, evolution isn't against the law (yet) nor do they have to teach creationism (yet)--it's more of a matter of the word "evolution" being dropped and the definition of evolution substituted.
In this case, I expect this was done to make it harder for the Religious Reich in Kentucky to try to mount a legal challenge. (As it is, the entire school reform program is under attack by the Religious Reich because the school system now recognises the idea of multiple intelligences and much of the system is set up similar to gifted/talented or Montessori schools.) I'll also note that this was basically done by the superintendant of public schools without the permission of the teacher's council, and the latter are QUITE angry over it.
Sadly, I can understand why they'd want to cover their arse over it. When I was young and stupid and didn't know any better and hadn't walked away yet, I went to a fundy church in Kentucky that is, for all intents and purposes, the headquarters of the Religious Reich in Kentucky (I can't give out any more details, or I would have to post this as an Anonymous Coward--suffice it to say the Kentuckians on the list will recognise the name of Frank Simon [for those of you outside the state--he's essentially a little fundy who wants to be Fred "godhatesfags.com" Phelps when he grows up, and has distributed libel-rags claiming all homosexuals are members of NAMBLA in grocery stores when the idea of banning discrimination against gay/les/bi/trans folks came up--in the city of Louisville I'm proud to say he was told to Fuck Off]...he happens to be a deacon at the church in question.) The church, in addition to being the de facto headquarters of the Religious Reich in Kentucky, also happens to use coercive tactics and can be described as a Bible-based cult not unlike that whole "Brownsville Revival" crap in Pensacola [same denomination, yet]...I can testify that the people there are NOT the most stable individuals in the world, and it doesn't help that a fair number have practically been brainwashed from birth.
It also doesn't help that a fair percentage of Kentucky's population doesn't vote, to the point that the Religious Reich has more power than one would think in terms of population (this is pretty much true all over the US, though--so kids, if you don't want the fundies dictating what to do then VOTE and if you're of legal age run for local offices--even school board. Vote, even if you have to write in "None of the Above" or Bill the Cat or Dunkelzahn the Fuckin' Dragon). At least two persons on the General Assembly (Gex Williams {R}, who [thank the god and the goddess] is no longer in office, and state rep Tom Riner [R] [who is so far in with the Religious Reich that he's campaigned on the grounds of aforementioned fundy cult in direct violation of Kentucky and US elections law, and is a member of the Council for National Policy which is pretty much the major think-tank/brains nationally for the Religious Reich])...at least they're still being able to teach evolution.
That's not the only crying shame, really...two school districts in rural Kentucky are STILL fighting to try to put the Ten Commandments up in the classrooms. Almost twenty years after a US Supreme Court order to remove them. (And yes, I WOULD find the Ten Commandments in a classroom as offensive AT THE LEAST--as I noted above, I'm a walkaway from a fundamentalist group that could be described as a Bible-based coercive group that did many of the same nasty tricks as Scientology tends to do--including trying to ruin the lives of people who are outspoken against them, the fundy version of "engrams" ["deliverance ministry"--in essence, any doubt you have about the church is the result of demons that must be "exorcised" or prayed out--the Scientology version {replace demons with engrams} is known as possibly one of the most damaging tactics used in coercive groups], and other fun stuff. Even now, over thirteen years since I walked away, it is STILL painful for me to look at anything of a heavy Christian bent, and for someone walking away being exposed to tools used by the group that used to abuse you can be damaging. [It would have been twice as damaging in my case, because I would have probably known several of the people who pushed for it.] Even now, sometimes when the local fundies are really pushing for something I feel trapped like they're trying to suck me back in-- which is a common fear of walkaways, even if the group you walked away from hasn't taken over a major political party in your state.)
We're on the third series here in Sweden. First one began in 1997.... and there was me thinking the US got all the good TV first.
Actually, you'd prolly be shocked to see how many rather popular TV shows in America are direct ripoffs of European, British, or Japanese TV shows:) For example, "Ready, Set, Cook" (TV Food Network) is an Americanised version of the British "Ready, Steady, Cook"; the same network is apparently now showing an Americanised version of the Japanese show (and cult classic) "Iron Chefs" (imagine Ready, Steady, Cook on major crack:)... "Survivor" is apparently a ripoff of "Expedition Robinson" on Swedish and Swiss TV; even "America's Funniest Home Videos" is an Americanised version of a Japanese "funniest home videos" program (watch the credits for proof--that is, if you can stand more than five seconds of Bob Saget without bearing an amazing resemblance to someone who has just downed an entire bottle of syrup of ipecac).
Seriously, though...I don't want to think of all the legal disclaimers contestants will have to sign (the US is decidedly more sue-happy than Europe is, has no legal caps on damages, and game shows HAVE been sued in past). If someone ends up dying or going seriously ill on the show, the lawyer packs are liable to be on them anyways...and I hope they're timing this fairly carefully to avoid hurricane season or areas known for tsunamis:) (Tsunamis wouldn't be a concern in the Carribean, where I expect they'd hold the contest--many cruise lines actually own private "vacation islands", and I imagine it'd be a similar setup--but if the contest lasts past June or so they ARE going to have to worry about hurricanes...)
Actually, the opposite is true. The genetic causes of many diseases are well-understood, but therapy is difficult. For example, it's well-understood how diabetes works - and has been for decades. But curing diabetes has proven impossible so far, because you can't do 'gene therapy' - restore gene copy in an entire tissue/organ. Regrowing organs externally alleviates this difficulty, since you don't have to worry about good delivery vectors or efficient transfection of your adenovirus or any other such bullshit - you just fix a few cells, grow the organ, and swap it in.
In some cases, yes...in most cases of genetic diseases an organ transplant will do exactly Jack and Shite, because most genetic diseases are from complex inborn errors of metabolism. (To tie onto another thread here, the infant euthanasia one--I seriously doubt organ-growing clinics are going to help kids with fatal degenerative brain diseases like Tay-Sach's or ALD (adrenoleukodystrophy--the "Lorenzo's Oil" disease) or chromosomal disorders like inversions and trisomies/monosomies, because even WITH organ-growing clinics it's going to be a long time, if ever, before we can grow a baby a new brain [and you could seriously argue that in that case you're not so much giving a dying child a new brain as giving a new intelligence a donated body, if one sees the essence of "what makes me, me" as centered in the brain]...and in the case of most of your really bad genetically-based brain diseases (like most of your brain degenerative diseases that do not involve the actual chromosomes fucking up in replicating themselves) you will have to repeat the process every so often because the brain gets destroyed by toxic byproducts the body can't remove because of a farged-up metabolism. This is also true in most cases of muscular dystrophy [you are either going to have to do a transplant of ALL the muscles in someone's body, or replace ALL the mitochondria in their body [a really surprising number of forms of muscular dystrophy are inherited NOT by one's chromosomal genes but are actually genetic diseases of one's mitochondria--a "Parasite Eve" sort of situation would not mutate one so much as probably leave one unable to move and probably brain damaged to boot].)
For that matter, let's take the example you noted above--diabetes. (I happen to have a personal interest in the genetics of diabetes and other disorders of glucose metabolism. I happen to be from a family of which I am one of maybe four or five people in a large extended kindred who does not yet have something wonky going on with my glucose metabolism [hypoglycemia or diabetes]; in my family it's also been shown that hypoglycemia and diabetes are related, and we've actually been asked to join in genetic studies because we're a glucose-metabolism-disorder cluster.) There are two main types of diabetes mellitus ("sugar diabetes"--there is another kind of diabetes, diabetes insipidus, which is due to inappropriate secretion of diuretic hormones from one's pituitary gland and is not related at all other than being yet another endocrine disorder; both are named diabetes because a major symptom of both is one has to pee a lot:)--type 1, which usually hits from birth to one's twenties, and type 2 which hits from about the late 20's onward and is associated with obesity.
There is a lot of evidence to point to the fact that diabetes in general is inherited, and that certain populations [Native Americans and, if memory serves, Australian Aboriginals as well] have a much higher susceptibility to Type II diabetes because they essentially don't have the ability to handle refined sugars and carbohydrates as well as Europeans [it's the same reason Asians and some other folks have a high incidence of lactose intolerance--it's also been experimentally proven European diet is to blame at least among Pima peoples in the US Southwest, who have an unusually high incidence of Type II diabetes but tend NOT to have the problems when eating a traditional diet]. Type I diabetes tends to occur at roughly the same rate everywhere except in certain kindreds.
Type I diabetes is now pretty well known to be an autoimmune disorder in which somehow the body is tricked into destroying its own Islet cells; most research is pointing to viral infections being the main trigger, and several genes for Type I diabetes have been found. I honestly don't know what use a pancreas transplant would do long-term (there are the beginnings of clinical trials being done with Islet cell transplants); you might also have to replace their bone marrow to fix the underlying autoimmune disorder. (As an aside--some scientists now think something similar may also happen with Crohn's disease [a severe form of colitis that is sometimes associated with colon cancer] and with multiple sclerosis--since certain types of immune-system regulators DO relieve symptoms of the diseases. There are some clinical trials also being done in this vein with people in Type I diabetes "clusters" in an attempt to keep them from ever developing diabetes.)
Just as a minor aside--Type I diabetes used to be called "juvenile diabetes" but it does not just occur in juveniles--20- and 30-year-old people (and sometimes older) have spontaneously developed Type I diabetes. With this kind you have to take insulin shots--diet and/or "diabetes pills" will NOT control it, and if it is not controlled you WILL get desperately sick. The really bad kind of Type I where one has a devil of a time controlling blood glucose is sometimes known as "brittle diabetes". (My grandmother died of complications of late-onset Type I diabetes, so I know all too well that it ain't just kids who get it.) You could also prolly call this "Bret Michaels Disease" if one wants a nice celebrity spokesperson (Bret Michaels, formerly of the band Poison and now a movie director, has Type I diabetes and did a lot of spokespersoning for the American Diabetes Association in the 80's).:)
Type II diabetes is generally caused because one's body produces insulin normally but somehow one's body stops reacting to it normally. [The underlying mechanisms of this are still being figured out; in some cases it's a kind of autoimmune disorder where the body develops antibodies to insulin, in others there are other mechanisms.] A lot of times Type II diabetes can be controlled by diet or by losing weight [obesity is a MAJOR risk factor for Type II]; for those who can't, there are "diabetes pills" that basically help the body's own insulin work better. In cases where they get bad enough to require insulin, sometimes they have to receive massive doses. An organ transplant or "grow-your-own" probably would NOT work here (except, again, for those rare kinds of Type II where the body has antibodies to insulin) because it's more of a metabolic disorder that is still not entirely well understood.
There might be another type of diabetes yet-- in many cases that seem to fall between Type I and Type II diabetes, it's almost as if the Islet cells "burn out"--people tend to either become hypoglycemic, will go straight to diabetes, or will be hypoglycemic for some years before converting to full-blown diabetes (which may or may not be insulin-dependant). (This happens to be the particular variant that runs in my family, and may actually be some weird form of Type I diabetes.) I also don't know how an organ transplant or "grow-your-own" would help here; if it's like Type I you'd prolly need a bone marrow transplant too, and if it's due to some funky metabolic disorder that causes one's Islet cells to essentially be the equivalent of tiny insulin-producing Replicants there might be no cure other than constantly replacing them and carrying candies around [because it might be an underlying metabolic disorder].
Needless to say, though, "pancreas on a Petri dish" is not going to be a cure for diabetes anytime soon.:P
If you want to see a Dungeons-&-Dragons-like show with some actual plot and no Yoda-oid floating deus-ex-machina, may I recommend the anime series Slayers?
*chuckle* What's funny...nearly everyone I game with (I'll state now my gaming circle tends to be comprised entirely of otaku; those of us who have seen Vision of Escaflowne are very hard at work addicting those few of us who haven't:) is quite convinced that Slayers in general is based off someone's D&D or Lodoss War game that went terribly, terribly wrong.:) (Yes, I mention the latter because Record of Lodoss War was based off a Japanese roleplaying game of the same name that was directly inspired by D&D. See previous post.:)
We are especially inclined to think Slayers is based off of D&D/Lodoss games gone horribly wrong because, for some reason, EVERY roleplay game we're in--especially D&D or anything involving human and/or elven mages--WILL eventually devolve into something bearing a remarkable resemblance to a Slayers episode. (Example--in a Shadowrun game I am in, one of the mages cast Accident to cause a delay for us to get to someone we were supposed to capture...the Accident spell ended up causing an airplane to crash into a bus full of nuns and schoolchildren, causing a traffic jam that pretty much caused all traffic in Tacoma to stop...I am not mentioning the name of the mage who did this, because the person who played her WILL probably hunt me down and kill me.:)
The Slayers reference is also especially funny to me for another reason. My husband was creating a half-elven paladin for a D&D game we're in...he was planning to base the character off Folken in Escaflowne (for those who have not yet seen it--and you are poor, poor, POOR deprived children and must correct this Right Now, and no, you don't have to hunt for fandubs; you can go right down the local Suncoast or Anime Nation and get it--Folken is a rather dark badass).
He rolls the dice. What he ended up with bears FAR, FAR more of a resemblance to none other than Gourry Gabriev (blonde, strong as an ox, and has the rough Int of an ox too...Str: 25. Int: 9).:)
I guess it could've been worse, though...he could've ended up with Dilandau...:)
Re:No they're not. Look at Deedlit and Pirotess.
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Some anonymous coward dun said about Deedlit an' Pirotess:
These two being from Lodoss War, of course, which is what this movie would probably like to be.
It's funny you should mention Record of Lodoss War in relation to this thread.:)
Not many people know the anime "Record of Lodoss War" is actually based off of a Japanese RPG of the same name. So the story goes, the creator of the game spent some time overseas in the States and was introduced to one of the early versions of Dungeons and Dragons; he enjoyed it so much that when he went back to Japan he created a fantasy roleplaying game that was roughly based on D&D (enough is different TSR/WoTC/Hasbro/whatever won't be suing them anytime soon--if they did, they'd also have to sue FASA for Earthdawn:).
Apparently the Lodoss War game became quite popular in Japan, seeing as it was the first pencil-and-paper RPG sold there...obviously popular enough that several anime series have been done off it.
So, then, Record of Lodoss War is, in a roundabout way, a Dungeons and Dragons anime.:)
Get married and have a couple of kids. Or just spend some time working with the very young. Sexual differenciations start at the same time personalities start. It's hardwired in the brain
Then either I must have been born miswired or am a closet gay man in a woman's body who doesn't know it.:)
I am a woman physically, last I checked, and straight to boot. I also have never--not once, nada, NEVER--had any interest in baby dolls or Barbies other than mutilating them by shaving their hair off, drawing tattoos on them, or generally disassembling them to see how the wetting baby doll or the arm-movement Barbie worked.:) (Had I thought of this at the tender age of four or five, I could have started that whole darn Feral Cheryl thing and made a minor killing in Australia.:)
My favourite toys have generally always been in the realm of a) stuff I can take apart and put together again (loved Legos and Tinkertoys, am damn tempted to get a Mindstorm set Just Because [tm], still like to assemble my own computer boxen by hand, still like Slackware Linux because I can muck about with it and take it apart and put it back together, still like to compile straight from source rather than use a damn RPM or binary:), b) toys traditionally considered "boy toys" (like Tonka trucks or Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars, or toy guns, or train sets), or c) toys I made by my lonesome (like pipe-cleaner animals an' whatnot)...I could make my own playsets with the tree out back and a dirtpile and a water hose, which was always great fun, and I've liked stuff I can build m'self.
My sister liked trains and Hot Wheels cars as much as Barbies (she used to get furious when I converted her Barbies to proto-Feral Cheryl dolls:) but my parents refused to get her "boy toys". They finally broke down with me because boy-toys were generally less destructible:)
Then again, I've NEVER really fit in the traditional "girl" mode anyways...I liked maths and sciences in school, read the Physician's Desk Reference for fun (and STILL do along with other medical stuffle...it's a damn pain trying to find sites on the Internet what have prescribing info for new drugs or investigational drugs, though *sigh*), think Harlequin romances are so boring as to drive me to tears, and I tend to be the fixit person about the house.:) (My husband is a better cook than I; he brought cooking supplies whilst I brought a toolbox when we moved.:) Then again, he likes to do a lot of his tinkering in the kitchen too.)
Some might be nature, but I think some of it is nurture too...in any case, if a girl wants to play with a Lionel train set or Matchbox cars, or a boy wants to play with Barbies or an Easy-Bake Oven, I don't think they should be discouraged from that...give 'em chances to play with both an' see what they like.
(ObWhinge--I just wish Mindstorm sets an' Erector sets weren't so darn expensive...ah well. This is what I get for spending money on silly things like food an' Internet accounts to suck down tons of ham-radio homebrew radio plans and make the occasional post to Slashdot...as it is, I'm rather surprised Tandy Corporation hasn't asked me to purchase stock in them, I've bought enough from 'em over the years...:)
i mean seriously whos gonna launch a bomb containing the smallpox virus to anyone? thats just insane
Who'd bomb abortion clinics, or bomb gay clubs, or bomb churches, or blow the bejeesus out of civilians? Who the hell would set up crematoria and extensive transport networks and accounting systems and even new forms of poisons specifically so they could kill mass numbers of people in the shortest amount of time with minimum fuss? Who'd pay out upwards of three hundred thousand dollars to become mentally ill, then to find all their problems are supposedly the result of an evil alien having thrown them in a Hawaiian volcano some time before dinosaurs went extinct?;)
No, I'm not stating that to be facetious. I am stating that...well...there are a lot of Very Crazy People out there, and a fair number of them have in essence given up their minds and free will to authoritarian leaders who pretty much keep them in a state of fear, loathing, and self-guilt.
Go read up sometime on coercive tactics and tactics of mind control for starters. A good start would be reading on the mind-control stuff Scientology uses against members, and read how exactly Hitler rose to power in Germany.
Another good source--and this is REALLY relevant for you in the US, and in the Middle East, and possibly other places--is reading up on fundamentalist movements in general. (As an aside, an awful, AWFUL lot of fundy movements do use coercive tactics. In essence, a fundy who bombs a building does not see what he's doing as wrong; he sees himself as a member of the Chosen People, frequently sees the world outside of his cluster as deluded at best and outright Satanic and worthy only of extinction at worst, and thus terrestrial law is not to be obeyed as it is preempted by "God's law"; many think they will either become martyrs or will be Raptured or receive reward in the afterlife; many are taught not to question their leaders as "thou shalt not judge a man of God" and are told to avoid all media outside the group.)
A real good example of the kind of person who just MIGHT be nuts enough to set off a smallpox bomb would be Eric Rudolph, or some of the folks who work for the godhatesfags.com people...I expect they would think NOTHING of setting off such a device in Las Vegas or in a gay nightclub, because they'd think they were "delivering God's vengeance". Hell, you see this in MAINSTREAM fundy churches in the US; I've heard preachers make excuses for people who killed abortion providers ("It's wrong to kill, but they were baby-killers and had it coming to them so we can't shed too many tears...") and damn near erupted all over themselves during both the Gulf War and the crises during the Cold War because they were convinced a nuclear war would take place, that it'd be over Israel, and it would mean they would be raptured and be able to sit in heaven as all the sinners perished in nuclear hellfire [yes, they literally believed this, and they didn't care that all life might be destroyed because they were going to get a "new heaven and new earth"].
Most of those are, for some reason or another (either because they are nuts, malignant, or are being led by the nose by people who are nuts or malignant), are not in their right minds to begin with. They don't CARE about this world because they think it's evil anyways...so they would probably drop a smallpox bomb without a thought. They might even see it like God is using them to unleash a plague, like the plagues mentioned in the story of Passover. They've stopped seeing everyone outside of their group as human, and see them as The Enemy.
Then again, at least speaking for the United States...these people would not use ICBMs. They'd likely use suitcase bombs or something similar, and odds are the US would not even suspect it was an act of domestic terrorism till weeks afterwards, if ever. (Both the OKC bombing and the Olympic bombing were thought to be the work of foreign terrorists at first; turned out in both cases it was domestic terrorism, in at least one case linked to a particularly hateful offshoot of fundamentalism known as Christian Identity. [I've also heard this about the other case, but it's also likely he's a regular foamin' fundy and not the race-baiter flavour. "Christian militias" that are as dangerous as the hate-group linked kind, but have nothing to do with "Christian Identity", do exist; most see themselves as "Entime preparation" groups. I'm rather worried about what a few of these groups might pull if Y2K doesn't mean Armageddon, especially since a fair number of them are the ones pushing "Y2K Survival Communities" and Y2K shelters and Y2K food barns and survival camps and whatnot.]
The two most likely countries to use ICBMs with biological weapons, methinks, would be Pakistan and India; they've been in a shooting war since 1948, are both nuclear, both have received assistance from Russia in past, are dancing every bit as close to a nuclear war as the US and USSR were over those Cuban missiles in the 60's, and are the two countries most expected to eventually have a nuclear war. They pretty much see each other as the Enemy at this point, both countries have raving fundies as their leaders [the BJP in India is essentially a fundamentalist Hindu party; Pakistan is run pretty much by fundy Muslums--Pakistan is pretty much the ONLY country right now on good terms with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and provide training for the Taliban], they damn near see getting Kashmir as the Holy Grail...it wouldn't shock me if the idea of anthrax-bombing or smallpox-bombing one or the other comes in their heads eventually, if it hasn't already. [This would be a Really Bad Thing, too--pretty much at least a billion people would die (Pakistan and India's combined population, roughly) and if it spread to China kiss another billion goodbye...not to mention it'd REALLY destabilise the area and increase the risk China and the US could go to a shooting war.]
Another possibility is South and North Korea, but I'm not so sure on this seeing as North Korea would likely want the food reserves uncontaminated; they've been through a rather severe famine where anywhere from 200,000 to 2 million people have died (depending on who's statistics you believe)
What Illuminati really needs, of course, is a slashdot card.
Ah, Illuminati.:) Several of my friends knew it in the original version, so when it was re-released earlier this year (and it's been out for several months...got ours back in June) it Had To Be Bought...and I was introduced to the good, old, original game of Fsck Thy Neighbour in its original form.;) Very cool game, it is.:3
Seriously, though...the new decks (both the re-release and the Y2K Expansion Pack--which contains a card for the Church of the Subgenius:) do have two blank power cards and two blank Illuminati cards...as a power, I figure a Slashdot Effect card could be done up giving +6 Attack power to any card held by CotSG or the Network...;) Or maybe even automatic successes on privileged attacks on other Illuminati...:) Alignment is gonna be a bastard though...;)
Seriously, I think we could come together and actually cook something up for this...;)
Using Slashdot as an Illuminati would be harder. The Network IS essentially Slashdot:3
You could also do up cards for the Freaks Software Foundation (RMS in beatnik clothes or somethin', alignment Weird Communist Liberal;) an' other stuff...I think we can let our imaginations run wild on this...
Gods, I think TOO DAMN MUCH on this.:3 Then again, I'm also one of the folks who's given real thought (after one too many incidents of kitty deciding SHE wants to play Illuminati, too, in the way kitties tend to define "read" or "play" or "type on keyboard" by laying on top of what you are doing:) to making up a Ferlie Kitty Card which enables one to randomly rearrange one's OPPONENT'S power structure...:)
Re:About "tapping" the Internet...offtopic?
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Bald Wookie dun said:
If you use, there is a good chance that you will fall into excessive use no matter the legal status of the drug. After all, that is why they are considered addictive.
To tie a minor thread on this...oddly, the three legal drugs (caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol) are known to not only have as many bad health effects as many of your illegal drugs, but in some cases are every bit as addictive or moreso.
To give an example--nicotine, which is legal to the point of being an OTC drug, is now known to be as addictive as, and probably more addictive than, opiate narcotics and probably is equivalent to or even slightly more addictive than cocaine on "liking indexes" (measures of physical addiction that show how hard it is to "kick the habit") and by biochemistry. Some scientists studying the mechanisms of addiction have stated that nicotine may be the most addictive substance known...smoking is well known to cause health problems (just read a cigarette packet, already), cigarette manufacturers are known to "dope" cigarettes with nicotine (this came out publically in the tobacco hearings in the US, and has been common knowledge for years if you live anywhere near a cigarette plant or know employees--there's vats that if you so much as touch they HAVE to send you to hospital because those vats are full of nicotine and have nicotine residue on the outside to the extent it will give you nicotine poisoning, and nicotine poisoning is NOT fun--much the same effects as strychnine poisoning).
Alcohol, too, has known health effects if taken in excess, is poisonous in quantities only slightly above that necessary to get one bombed, slows reflexes enough that one becomes dangerous if one tries to drive, and is known to cause physical dependence. In fact, a fair number of liver transplants in adults have to be done because of cirrhosis of the liver--basically the liver gets burnt out by long-term attempts to detoxify ethyl alcohol once one gets physically addicted to it.
If we want to talk prescription medications, some opiates are actually available over the counter (Cheracol and, in some states, paregoric) and most are schedule IV or III (addictive potential, but you've got to take a fair amount) drugs...benzodiazepine tranquilisers are KNOWN to be physically addictive (most responsible doctors will NOT give you more than a week's supply of Valium or Xanax for that reason)--are every bit as physically addictive as morphine in fact, taking them with alcohol or driving whilst taking them is a good way to get one's self dead, and yet they're only Schedule IV.
Marijuana is not known to be physically addictive (the only indications of physical addiction are in rats given obscenely huge doses) and doesn't necessarily have to be smoked (some of the bad effects of smoking are from the smoke itself; ANY smoke will give off carcinogens if you burn organic material). Psychological addiction is probably another story, but people can get psychologically addicted to everything from sex to Quake to reading Slashdot (you could seriously argue that autistic kids are psychologically addicted to "self-stimming" [rocking back and forth, or smacking one's self...the kinds of "stereotypical" actions you see in a lot of autistic kids; they do this to calm themselves down after being overstimulated--the major problem in autism is that they essentially can't filter out stimulus and/or are oversensitive to it--rainfall might sound like millions of hammers on tin, and in the worst cases sight and sound and smell might blend all into each other not unlike how one's senses get scrambled on LSD; a good way of thinking of how severely autistic folks have to deal is they are undergoing a perpetual bad acid trip] because it's relaxing:), and the mechanisms for psychological addiction have more to do with probable imbalances in body chemistry to begin with rather than body chemistry being altered by a drug itself. The worst effects that have ever been proven for long-term marijuana use are maybe problems with memory; the jury is still out on whether pot reduces initiative [for that matter, so does alcohol; so does Valium--both of these are quite legal]. Marijuana has several beneficial uses, not the least among them being as a mild tranquiliser and possible antidepressant, and the only known treatment for AIDS Wasting Syndrome and wasting syndromes of cancer.
However, pot is still illegal--Schedule I. Oddly, pure THC is Schedule II (same as morphine) and legally sold as dronabinol, though it's not been proven to have the same bad health effects as morphine or amphetamine. I've heard that this is largely due to lobbying by alcohol companies after Prohibition (they didn't want pot cutting into profits--especially since they were having to recover from the LAST War on Drugs, folks finding out there were better drugs and better drugs FOR you could well have caused serious hurt to the spirits industry in the US).
Now, to steer this back on topic--I think that giving anyone in power to tap into someone's convo IF THERE IS NOT EXISTING PROOF THAT THE PARTY IS DOING A BAD THING is just plain Wrong and WILL ultimately be abused. Period. Look at COINTELPRO or records of the CIA's investigation of Catholic refugee support groups if one needs examples...or the list of groups listed as Officially Subversive (which includes--and I am not making this up--the SCA, the Jihad Against Barney the Dinosaur [must have been that "jihad" word;)], the NAACP, Amnesty International [because AI has reported on how the US commits human rights violations and supports groups that violate human rights in other countries], Human Rights Watch [same thing], most people who have protested major military actions, and probably by this date the EFF and Slashdot's entire membership:). It is entirely possible that we could get Bad Folks in government and this info could be used against one.
For instance, I happen to think fundamentalist "Christianity" sucks arse (largely because I grew up in a family of raving fundies, and I've seen enough of the bad side of the Religious Reich to REALLY make yer hair curl--folks drooling over any possibility that nuclear war might break out and bring the Rapture early is damned scary, and I'm just now realising just HOW wacko some of what goes on in there was). As a result, I do support groups fighting the influence of the Religious Reich as well as groups speaking out against religious abuse in general.
I also happen to know that more than a few fundies, including people from the very church I left, are...to put it mildly...extremely active in politics from school boards on up [this is what likely happened with the Kansas school board, btw; it's been a position plank of the UnChristian Coalition and a number of groups even FARTHER to the right to take over the school boards and move up from there to infiltrate political parties]. (Some of you in Kentucky might recognise Frankie Simon's name...for those who don't, let's just say he's trying his best to outdo Fred "godhatesfags.com" Phelps, and also happens to be the head of most of the fundy and pro-censorship groups in Kentucky. And happens to be a deacon at aforementioned fundy pit, and most of the rest of the "deep in" members of the church are as rabid as he is...nasty place.)
If--God and Goddess forbid--one of these fundy groups were to get a candidate in who could appoint heads of the FBI or a state equivalent, I can GUARANTEE you that everyone in the US or in that state who is a member of the ACLU, People for the American Way, a member of an anti-censorship group, anyone who's ever supported or has run a Fairness campaign so people can't be fired just for being gay, anyone who has ever talked publically about being a walkaway from a Bible-based coercive group or who operates a walkaway group for folks escaping from Bible-based coercive groups, and a fairly long list of others WILL end up on a shitlist somewhere...and they will probably abuse the "secret wiretaps" so they can hope to find something to bust these folks on. (An example I can think of off the top of my head--a walkaway or gay-teens support group talks to a kid who is having real doubts about fundamentalism because he's discovered he might be gay...and the state just passed a law against kids getting any counseling at all without parental consent...except the kid CAN'T get parental consent because if he stated he had doubts about fundamentalism and/or he was gay he'd be putting himself at severe risk for physical abuse and/or basically being psychologically tortured by the church members trying to "exorcise" the "demons of rebellion" or the "demons of homosexuality" out...and yes, people have died in these before, and many more have ended up in mental hospitals).
What if the Scientologists were somehow to persuade the FBI to investigate everyone who posts on alt.religion.scientology so they can get more info to harass them? What if they do it JUST to harass them (yes, they've pulled stuff like that before)?
There's just too much potential for abuse in this...I'm beginning to wonder if there's hope to fix this other than setting up either a PAC for Internet users (one is being worked on called USORS) or starting a third party expressly for the Internet-connected...and I've been giving really serious thought to the latter recently...:)
1) It was "midichlorians" but--at least to me--it seemed pretty darned obvious they were trying to talk about mitochondria withut talking about mitochondria.
2) I agree it was quite Lame; I rather liked the idea of the Force being some mystical power like ki, not like something out of a bad ripoff of "Parasite Eve".:P
3) EVERYONE I know, when seeing TPM, made the comment "Does this mean Darth Vader is really Mitochondrial Eve in a man's body now? Does this mean Aya Brea was really a Jedi?"...taking the piss of the whole midichlorian thing. (Then again, it can be argued me and my circle of friends read too much manga, watch too much anime, and play too many Squaresoft games for it to be healthy.;)
Off to forget about the whole midichlorian fiasco and go play Final Fantasy VIII because it came out today (yay!)...
Re: the subject of anonymity and anonymous web proxies, Eric Green said:
Of course, the overseas redirectors are safe from ADM, be that as it may, so don't get too paranoid. Of course, U.S. and Canadian redirectors aren't. A court order can grab their log files. Bletch.
Actually, I'd not be entirely sure that overseas redirectors are immune from court ordered log files, either. (I'm thinking specifically of what happened to the anon.penet.fi pseudonymous redirector service--more on that below). In countries with no extradition treaty with the US or Canada, it might be harder, but not impossible. And it's not just Alphabet Agencies one has to worry about, either; private corporations, or religious groups, or basically anyone who is a) pissy enough and b) big enough can potentially either force a relay to shut down or force them to give up records.
To whit--anon.penet.fi, which for several years offered a VERY useful anonymous-remailer and Usenet posting service, was compromised and forced to shut down NOT because of the NSA or other Alphabet Agencies (and there were enough folks on anon.penet.fi posting stuff that they well could have gotten in, if only there were a way around Finland's extradition laws) but because of a court order obtained by the Church of $cientology. Apparently someone on anon.penet.fi had taken to posting the Super-Sekrit Scriptures that one has to pay upwards of three hundred thousand dollars US and a long time in $cientologist "auditing sessions" to get (spoiler for the kind readers-- ALL of your problems, from the fact that one's signifigant other is Mr. Hand to one being angry at abusive parents to major depression to sciatica, are the fault of you still having Issues from having been thrown in Mt. Kilahuea around 74 million years ago by an evil alien named Xenu--yes, they charge folks US$300,000 for a rehash of good old fundy "deliverance ministry" [aka "the devil tries to tempt you all the time and any doubts you have are due to demons oppressing you so you need to pray them out"]; replace "demons" with "engrams from your past life on Teegeeack" and it's the same darn thing). The clams were NONE too happy about it, obtained a court order for anon.penet.fi to turn over its records Right Now Or Else, and thus anon.penet.fi died.)
The only reason records were kept in the first place was to trace accounts of people who misused the accounts to flood newsgroups or spam from them. Most modern anon remailers do tracking by requiring you to have PGP and use it to encrypt and decrypt your mail to the server, or they are "one-way" servers that use only one address for relaying and strip identifying info out. Some of these keep logs by IP, but not by address, again so they can filter out those abusing the service.
Most anonymous relay proxies work much the same way as the second type of anon-remailer--they may or may not keep logs of connecting IPs, and strip out identifying info (such as IP address, cookie info, etc.). Those that do keep logs of IPs do it for preventing abuse.
However, again, someone who is Just Determined Enough and Just Big Enough and Just Pissed Off Enough to find where you're posting from--such as a multinational or something like the Co$--can probably get court orders for the identifying info if the site has it. The only safe form of relay to use in such an instance would be a relay that did not log information, period; even then, if possible, it'd be much safer to daisy-chain proxies if at all possible (just as many people daisy-chain an email using multiple anonymous remailers--in fact, applications exist like Private Idaho that automate the entire process nicely for you).
Also, just in case it's not obvious, I'm just talking on NORMAL folks. All bets are off as far as Alphabet Agencies go, or if businesses and Alphabet Agencies work together (for instance, how it's been alleged ECHLEON is used for business espionage as well as the regular kind). Then again, it's also likely that Alphabet Agencies have ways of finding you if you've pissed them off enough that don't involve the Internet or tracing traffic at all; I'm not going to go more into THAT, because frankly I'd rather not end up in the category I just talked about.:)
I don't mind a little debate from either side. (I'll note--just to state my opinion--that I definitely think marijuana should be legalised at the least for medicinal use.) I've some minor nit-picking and/or questioning of some points you've raised, though. Don't take it as a flame, but as honest questioning on some of the applications of statistics and/or studies you've quoted.
1) Although it is not proven that Marijuana causes cancer, it has been shown that it contains as much or more of same chemicals contained in cigarettes that have been shown to cause cancer.
Is this marijuana smoke, or is this the simple dried plant? (I ask for two main reasons; 1) Most figures of this type compared cigarette smoking vs. marijuana smoking, and 2) there are methods of ingesting marijuana that do not involve smoking the plant [i.e. "hash brownies"--brownies containing marijuana].)
I am also curious if this study took into account the fact that most cigarettes in the US are not only sprayed with known carcinogens for control of tobacco diseases such as blue mold, but are also "doctored" (including soaking in flavouring solutions and "doping" with nicotine) in the process of converting tobacco into cigarettes. (Yes, cigarette companies DO doping. Let's just say I have relatives who are former employees of a certain large cigarette manufacturer, and have some idea of how the average "non-specialty" cigarette is made.)
I also wonder if the study took into account the fact that MOST organic substances, when burned, produce cancer-causing substances. (For example, charred meat contains nitrosamines which are known to cause cancer. So do burning cigarettes, and so does burning plant material in general because you are burning protein matter.)
2) Marijuana users are far more prone to chest infections, such as pneumonia. Hey, what did Sagan die of? 2+2 = 5, right?
In Sagan's case, there is a rather major mitigating factor that indicates--at least to me--he well could have died of pneumonia whether or not he smoked pot. That mitigating factor is the fact he had myeloproliferative syndrome.
In case you're not aware, myeloproliferative syndrome is a precursor condition to leukemia and (occasionally) lymphoma at best. In fact, the leukemias are part of the spectrum of myeloproliferative disorders. A really good, if professionally oriented, summary including present treatment options is listed here at PDQ Cancerlink--which I'll note, as a personal aside, is a wonderful resource for anyone with cancer or who has a loved one with cancer (speaking as someone who recently had an uncle die from a rare cancer, adrenocortical carcinoma). The long and the short of it is, these disorders either ARE leukemias or have a bad tendency to convert to a form of acute myelogenous leukemia, and leukemias as a general rule tend to wreck one's immune system to begin with. Most treatments for leukemia (from chemotherapy to allotype-matched bone-marrow transplants--most folks with leukemia aren't able to do autograft BMT using their own bone marrow) tend to wreck your immune system in some form or another (folks receiving BMT basically get high-dose chemo and radiation to kill their bone marrow, then get a "rescue" from a tissue-matched donor; most regular chemo for leukemia will destroy at least a few non-leukemic white cells as well, and chemo regimens for adults tend to be heavier than for kids because adult leukemias tend to have a far worse prognosis than childhood leukemia).
In other words, pot is probably not what made his lungs susceptible to pneumonia. Odds are, it was probably the underlying condition plus whatever chemo they had him on--especially if he died from an "atypical pneumonia". (As a minor aside, folks have commented "Pot has fungus on it" and insinuated Sagan got pneumonia from that. Actually, fungal lung infections are pretty common in patients with myeloproliferative diseases including leukemia; aspergillosis and [at least here in the Ohio Valley] histoplasmosis are common, and patients often get antifungals because of it.)
3) The THC in marijuana has been shown to affect the immune system. Unlike alcohol, THC can stay in your body for weeks depending on how often you smoke.
One can't be entirely sure it's the THC and not some other factor (i.e. smoke, period, which has also been shown to affect the immune system). It would be nice in a way if a controlled study could be done with people taking dronabinol (the FDA-approved form of pure THC) to see if it's in fact the THC or some other factor. (If such a study HAS been done, in humans, using dronabinol, I'd much appreciate info please.:)
I'm not saying they didn't factor that in, just noting potential pitfalls. (One reason doctors can't decide if nicotine does affect the immune system is that no controlled studies have been done with straight nicotine [in part because nicotine IS toxic in large doses and is not normally prescribed except to wean folks off of tobacco products] and most studies have been done with smokers; they can't rule out it's something in the smoke that's doing it, though at least cigarette smoking affects one's immune system too.)
4) It is VERY evident that marijuana affects the neuralogical systems of the body. There are many well documented side effects of the drug. Doctors are still researching the effect of marijuana on the brain.
1) You should be probably careful to differenciate between marijuana and dronabinol, aka THC. I note this because separate studies ARE going into not only THC but some related compounds in marijuana. (THC isn't the only active compound!)
I should also note that not all the research is being done on account of the "bad effects" of marijuana (that is, it gets one high and possibly makes one lazy if smoked heavily for long periods--and the second is up for debate; more on this later). There are known, medically beneficial "side effects" of both THC and other compounds in marijuana; these include influence on the vomiting center of the brain (this makes dronabinol, aka THC, useful as an antivomiting drug in emetogenic chemo like cisplatin; in fact, it's one of the two indications it's officially approved for); as an appetite stimulant and also somehow helping patients keep on more weight than they normally would (this is useful in "wasting syndromes" such as AIDS Wasting Syndrome; this is the second approved use for dronabinol, and in fact is so far the only drug known to be effective); as a possible anticonvulsant; as a possible antidepressant (THC and other compounds in marijuana affect the brain in a similar way to "serotonin-receptor" antidepressants such as Zoloft, only it encourages the brain to secrete more serotonin); and as a possible antiglaucoma agent.
Also, a lot of drug research into how THC affects the brain is involved in making "cannabinoid derivatives" that can be used medicinally yet don't get one stoned (which is good for drug manufacturers, because they no longer have to deal with the red tape involved in Schedule II drug creation--more on this in a bit, with some stuff that might enlighten you).
5) Studies among teenagers have shown that those who smoke marijuana are up to 104 times more likely to try and become addicted to other, more dangerous drugs, than those who have not tried.
This is the famous "gateway drug" argument, and I should note that even among abuse specialists it is VERY controversial at best. I'll list but a few reasons why you should take the info with a grain of salt (or preferably an entire container of Morton's Kosher):
1. Most kids that are brought in for substance abuse problems have a prior history of psychological problems to begin with--many of which include family problems. (Many of the "family problems", mind, include: abusive parents, history of antisocial behaviour to begin with, history of problem with legal drugs, depression or bipolar syndrome ("manic-depression"), a history of suicide attempts, etc.) There is no good way to determine whether the kids would have gotten into "hard drugs" if marijuana hadn't existed, and there is some evidence to suggest they might well have gone into hard drugs to begin with.
2. As you are well aware, marijuana is illegal in the United States. By definition, you are going to catch more kids who go on to hard drugs, who also have used "soft drugs", who have gotten themselves involved with the psychiatric care system (and often they are referred there from schools and law enforcement) than kids who use marijuana, do NOT go on to hard drugs, are discreet about use, and do not get involved in the criminal law system. Also, marijuana use tends to label kids (in the eyes of the criminal and the psychiatric systems of the US) as "bad kids" to begin with; I would not be surprised if this is not a self-fufilling prophecy in the case of some kids.
3. There is a large, non-negligible group of people who use marijuana, have never been involved in psychiatric treatment or legal proceedings involving marijuana use (including those under 18) who will flat out lie on surveys regarding use; kids who are feeling rebellious to begin with (who are also considerably more likely to both use hard drugs and be caught smoking pot) will probably not or will not be given the chance to. (More on this in the next segment.)
4. There is a considerably large and growing body of evidence to suggest that risk-taking behaviours in general--including the use of hard drugs and the flagrant use of marijuana--are at the least determined very early in life, if not outright genetically based. (There's evidence now to suggest people who will indulge in risk-taking behaviours can be found as early as elementary school age--four or five.) Some of this is controversial, and environment is certainly involved, but the propensity to indulge in risky behaviour is probably independent of whether one smokes marijuana. (In other words, it may well be the propensity to do risky things that leads someone both to use marijuana heavily AND to use hard drugs.)
5. Any study on hard drug use and soft drug use is going to have to deal with some fairly heavy corrections for skew. Specifically, you have to correct for poverty (people in poverty are considerably more likely to use both hard and soft drugs--often as either a way to escape, or as one of the few options for making decent money), culture (in some cultures "hard" drugs are not as frowned upon), age, area of the country (in some parts of the US marijuana is dead common; in other areas alcohol or ectasy might be a "first drug"), whether or not the people involved have a bent for antisocial/rebellious behaviour to begin with, whether they have conditions that make them more likely to take risks or not evaluate consequences, etc.
6. In case you're not aware of it, the *exact same arguments* used to classify marijuana as a "gateway drug" can be used to classify both alcohol AND tobacco as gateway drugs. (Alcohol and tobacco are both illegal for those under 18 or 21; in some areas alcohol is every bit as illegal as marijuana is and has to be bought from bootleggers; similar rates of people who drink alcohol or smoke early and go to hard drugs have been noted.) In fact, some schools and psychiatrists that believe in the "gateway drug" canard have actually STATED that alcohol and tobacco are gateway drugs! For that matter, the same argument can and *has* been used for black males (by racists), to attempt to criminalise heavy metal and rap music (claiming that kids who listen to heavy metal and/or rap are more likely to use drugs--forgetting to count in the "rebellion factor" being the biggie, rather than the music), claiming in the 50s that rock music in general caused drug use, claiming jazz caused drug use, etc. One should be *extremely* careful about whom one gets one's data from in these cases--the PMRC used the "metal and rap as gateway drug" argument to push "Tipper stickers" on albums and tries to use it to criminalise album sales to people under 18.
In other words, there isn't any good evidence for even the existence of a "gateway drug effect". There IS evidence that kids who IN GENERAL are prone to antisocial or rebellious behaviour are more prone to both hard and soft drug use. (And yes, I can speak from experience--I've seen kids in the psychiatric care system, and the kids in there for hard drug use tend to have had problems even before they started pot or any hard drugs.)
6) Less than 1 in 4 high school students have ever used, or ever will use marijuana. I doubt that number is higher with responsible, job holding adults.
To quote Mark Twain, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.:) Polls on such things as illegal drug use are going to be BLATANTLY skewed for several reasons. Some of these reasons are directly attributable to the "War on (some) Drugs" in the US. I'll explain below:
1) Most people on a survey are never going to admit they use marijuana even if they DO use it on a regular basis. This is because they fear their bosses may find out, or law enforcement may find out. Drug use in practically all businesses is a mandatory firing offense, due to federal guidelines.
2) Kids sure as heck aren't going to admit it, because many kids know that there are essentially no such things as confidentiality or privacy for those under 18. (In many cases, if the survey is at a school or through a community service, the people doing the survey MUST IDENTIFY THE PARENTS BY LAW if a kid admits to them that they are using drugs.) Even if confidentiality was assured, many kids are going to assume it isn't and won't admit it.
3) Most people, period, aren't going to admit to strangers that they use marijuana unless the person's already indicated they're friendly about it. (This is the same reason that a lot of people won't state they're gay in public, or won't state they're into BDSM, or are smokers, in public; it's still seen as somewhat socially unacceptable.)
Most surveys of kids have either been by the government anti-drug task force or have been by antidrug groups like D.A.R.E. I strongly suspect that if NORML (a group promoting marijuana legalisation) were somehow by some miracle actually allowed to do a survey of drug use in schools they'd get quite a different answer from the government surveys. (NORML does have survey results from adults that indicate the number of folks who occasionally smoke marijuana is far higher than usually counted.)
The simple fact is--precisely BECAUSE of the "War on (some) Drugs" and federal and state laws relating to drug use (which basically state that you end up out of a job and ineligible for welfare or public support, even unemployment, if you admit you use drugs recreationally)--your average Joe is about as unwilling to admit he uses marijuana as, say, your average person in the 50's was willing to admit he was a Communist or sympathised with someone being charged in the House Un-American Activities Committee. Or about as unlikely as your average white person in early 60's Alabama stating he supported civil rights for blacks in public where the governor and state government were stating "Segregation Forever" and black people were actually being lynched and their homes burned. (And yes, thanks to civil forfeiture laws and thanks to federal laws requiring kids who admit to taking drugs to be referred to law enforcement, the penalties ARE approximately as severe.) Nobody in their right MIND is going to say they smoke marijuana in the present climate of "hang 'em all" in the US (which, incidentially, has also led to the US being second behind Russia in terms of persons incarcerated in terms of population, thanks to mandatory sentencing guidelines; has led to the US having the largest-growing prison population of any country; has led to upwards of one fourth of black males in the US being legally unable to vote (due to laws which disenfranchise felons, and most drug penalties outside of simple posession of small amounts of marijuana are felonies); have led to nearly a THIRD of black males who have been imprisoned or will be imprisoned in their lifetime; has led to the US being criticised by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for human rights abuses in overcrowded prisons; and has probably lead to the social problems in America due to folks being unemployable because they have been imprisoned or have admitted drug use).
I suspect, to be honest, the main reason it's steady at one-fourth is this is probably close to a mix of the numbers of students who aren't working, who have rebel-streaks to begin with (see previous statements on risk-taking), have a history with law and/or the psychiatric system and are never allowed to deny it in the first place, and kids who have tried to apply at jobs and been busted when the place did mandatory drug testing. (The "workplace" in many cases has been extended to sports, or in some places to ALL extracurricular activities; some classes require extracurricular activities in some districts, and at least one group of students is suing their districts with help from the ACLU over student urine-tests.)
7) Marijuana is addictive. While not everyone who uses becomes an addict, there are many who seek it out compulsively. In 1995 165,000 people entered drug treatment programs to seek help for marijuana abuse.
Again, I'd take care with statistics and also with definition of addiction.
First off, the very definition of a PHYSICALLY addicting substance is that if you take it for a certain amount of time and at a certain amount your body's metabolism will become dependant on it to function. This is how heroin and cocaine and nicotine and alcohol become addictive; pretty much they mimic a neurotransmitter, and the body produces lower levels of it. (This is also why you get the "shakes" when coming off of heroin or other downers.)
Scientists have found no evidence that either THC or marijuana is physically addictive.
There is some concern marijuana is PSYCHOLOGICALLY addictive. However, the evidence for this is both controversial and complicated; one major factor that has come up is that persons who suffer from psychological addictions may well be addiction-prone to begin with. (This relates both to the evidence "risk-taking personalities" may be formed at childhood or even be partly genetically based, and at the problems in psychological studies trying to determine whether marijuana really *does* turn people into apathetic slugs. There's some evidence that a lot of those folks were apathetic slugs to begin with, or had "addictive personalities"--in other words, if it wasn't pot, it would be something else like sex [so maybe THAT was what was up with Clinton's willy:)] or extreme sports or being a workaholic.)
A lot of the argument on whether marijuana is addictive actually may rest on how valid one takes the entire concept of psychological dependency; some psychiatrists honestly think the entire idea is hogwash and boils down to problems with impulse control, rather than true dependency. Time will tell on this.
8) Frequent heavy users of marijuana develop a tolerance to the drug. They require an increasingly higher dosage to get the high they seek.
I've never seen any mention of physical addiction or withdrawal syndrome in what I've read--not with THC, not with marijuana. I'd be very interested to know where you got this info.
As a minor aside...technically, caffeine is physically addictive. Users have to get more over time to get the affects, there is a mild withdrawal syndrome ("no coffee headaches") and heavy caffeine users tend to seek out high-caffeine drinks like espresso and Jolt and Ballz:) The caffeine effect/toxicity level safety margin tends to stay large, though (most people are NOT going to hit toxic levels of caffeine unless they quintuple-brew a pot of espresso using caffeinated water). Caffeine use does have some potential side effects, both short and long-term (bad for high-blood-pressure people, can possibly cause probs with calcium absorption and slightly increase risk of osteoporosis, maybe if you drink gallons of espresso increased risk of stroke over lifetime, possibly effects with fertility--enough evidence doctors encourage infertile couples not to drink coffee if they're heavy drinkers). Caffeinated drinks, by and large, aren't going to hurt most people if done to excess--I expect most Americans are closet caffeine junkies:)--and the effects of caffeine addiction are mild, as are withdrawals. Since caffeine IS addictive, do we now ban coffee and soft-drinks which are decaffeinated? Do we ban chocolate (it contains a non-negligible bit of caffeine, and also theobromine which is addictive)? Are we gonna have the DEA bust people for having supplies of Jolt?:) Because this is roughly what you're talking here, if there's any physical addiction involved in marijuana; nothing as nearly as bad as heroin or amphetamine withdrawals, which you typically have to hospitalise people for to make sure they come out ok.
If alcohol was made illegal, then you can bet that all heroin dealers would also deal in alcohol. Dealers deal in all of the drugs that they can get hold of (including weak drugs like tobbaco, cannabis, alcohol and amphetamines).
As a minor aside...in regions of the Southeast US that are dry counties (there are some in Tennessee and Georgia, and approximately 50 percent or more of the counties in Kentucky are dry; other Southern states in the "bible belt" prolly have "local option" laws) alcohol is quite illegal; in most places that are dry one can actually be charged with bootlegging for merely POSESSING alcohol, and the penalties are similar to those against marijuana posession. Penalties for SELLING alcohol can range all the way up to felony convictions policed by the ATF.
I can also state--from experiences of friends-- that in those areas of the Southeast where one MUST buy alcohol from a bootlegger, it is quite common that the bootlegger is either growing marijuana or deals in marijuana (and occasionally in harder drugs as well). In fact, most of your former "shiners" do marijuana farming as a side business or have gone completely to farming pot and bootlegging Jack Daniels and Budweiser (at twenty dollars a six-pack, yet).
As an aside--some fun statistics for folks. Kentucky--which has one of the higher percentages of dry counties of Southeast states (I don't know how many dry counties exist in Alabama or Mississippi or other states far deeper in the clutches of the Religious Reich than Kentucky is)--also had, until fairly recently, possibly the strictest law on cannabis posession in the US. (The law was eventually ruled unconstitutional because it was overbroad; the law as written defined marijuana so widely [it listed marijuana as being de jure "plants of the genus Cannabis or any parts or products derived thereof (my emphasis)] that posessing hemp rope [which is made from a Cannabis species posessing little if any THC] or taking dronabinol [the medical name for THC; more on this in a bit] would be technically illegal in Kentucky.)
Oddly enough, Kentucky is the #1 producer of marijuana in the US and it has been stated that if marijuana were taxable marijuana would likely be Kentucky's #1 cash crop (surpassing even tobacco, and Kentucky is in the top three tobacco producing states). If marijuana were legalised even for medicinal purposes in the US, most farmers could probably abandon farming tobacco; the climate and soil in Kentucky are next to perfect for growing cannabis, and in fact the US Government set up huge hemp farms in Kentucky during WW II for the war effort ("Hemp for Victory"). It is also thought it is likely impossible to eliminate all of the marijuana harvested in Kentucky, as a fair percentage of it is either growing feral in national forests or wildlife areas (where spraying paraquat is prohibited) or is outright planted in areas where spraying is prohibited.
Perversely, the main psychoactive principle in marijuana (delta-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC) is legal in the US, whilst marijuana isn't for the large part. THC is sold and marketed legally as a Schedule II drug called dronabinol (trade name is Marinol) and has been since the late 80's. The FDA, under considerable pressure from the DEA (and it may come as a surprise, or maybe not, that the DEA does have much influence over drug scheduling) has so far refused to even drop pure marijuana to Schedule II (which would legalise it for medical use in the US) even though pure THC is listed under Schedule II and even though a federal court has ruled that the FDA should drop scheduling of both pure THC and marijuana to "Schedule IV or V" (this being in a lawsuit by NORML).
(A note on how the US does drug scheduling. Drugs that have psychoactive abilities are listed from Schedule I (illegal for any use, and used for drugs considered "dangerous" and/or with no legitimate medical use that isn't served by "safer" drugs) down to Schedule V (possibly addictive in some form if you take it in the long term, but in some cases considered safe enough that prescriptions aren't required).
(Examples--heroin is listed as Schedule I here in the US (in Britain it'd be listed in the equivalent of our Schedule II). Morphine and most really strong opiates (fentanyl, oxycodone, etc.) are listed as Schedule II, along with pure amphetamine and dextroamphetamine (still legal for treatment of narcolepsy and for weight control). Schedule III is, mostly, medium-strength opiates such as codeine derivatives, a few strong benzodiazepines, and some amphetamine and barbituate derivatives [if memory serves, barbituate itself is also Schedule III]. Schedule IV includes most "downer" drugs--a lot of barbituate derivatives and drugs that metabolise to barbituates [like Ritalin], most legal benzodiazepines [Valium, Xanax, etc.], etc. as well as most codeine preparations and some barbituate relatives [Phenteramine, the "phen" part of "phen-fen", was Schedule IV before it was pulled from the market]. Schedule V listed drugs are fairly rare; the only ones I know of offhand are paregoric and "Cheracol" [which contains a weak opiate], both of which are listed as "exempt" narcotics and at least in Cheracol's case is available as an OTC drug in many states.
(No, the way the US does scheduling makes no sense at all. Hallucinogens and narcotics are seen as Really Bad and usually get listed as Schedule I or II; benzodiazepines, like Xanax or Valium, are well known to have a high potential for abuse [lots of people, LOTS, have been hooked on Valium and other tranquilisers; I happen to know a member of my family who has been hooked on Xanax for approximately the last twelve years yet refuses to get help, and the doctors fear the shock of withdrawal at this point would cause her serious harm] yet are listed as Schedule IV in most cases [along with codeine which takes some time to get addicted to--it's been said one can get hooked on Valium after a week or so of use]...I know of one case where a benzodiazepine has been listed as Schedule I (Rohypnol; "roofies", "date-rape drug") and only because it was being used in assaults and people had OD'd on it, and valerian root (which actually contains a very small amount of Valium in it, and has other active principles which your body metabolises to Valium--it's where the whole idea for benzodiazepines came from!) isn't even scheduled at all and can be bought over the counter at your local grocery in the "health-food" or "vitamins-n-herbs" section. The vast majority of drugs that can cause hallucinations at ANY dose [LSD, ketamine, psilocybin, ibogaine, etc.] are listed as Schedule I, even in cases where medical benefit has been proven in clinical trials [ibogaine has been proven to be useful in treating addictions to cocaine and heroin, and is one of the few useful agents known for treating the former]; usually at the moment it is discovered clinical trials are being started, permission is denied for continuing trials by the DEA. Marijuana is in much the same boat; in part the drug was banned in large part due to lobbying from liquor companies [who had JUST had liquor re-legalised and who were scared to death that marijuana would sink their chances at re-establishing legal business] and the DEA refuses to re-legalise because of the canard that marijuana is a "gateway drug" and also because marijuana is classified as a hallucinogen. [As a minor aside--Ectasy is also banned as a hallucinogen, NOT as an amphetamine derivative. As another aside, "anti-drug" programs with kids are also starting to label tobacco and alcohol as "gateway drugs"--especially tobacco. I expect after tobacco and alcohol have been banned they shall start next on cappuccino being a "gateway drug" and calling for the coffeehouses of the US to first stop serving to anyone looking younger than thirty, then closing up altogether.] Ketamine, which is a Schedule I drug in humans, isn't even scheduled AFAIK in veterinary use [where it is used as an anesthetic in larger animals, particularly equines--and yes, before one asks, veterinary drugs ARE scheduled just like human drugs are; many opiates used for tranquiliser darts and the like are licensed as Schedule II drugs [like carfentanyl] or are dual-scheduled [PCP was formerly Schedule I save for veterinary settings, in which it was Schedule II...] Nicotine for medicinal use [in "quit smoking" programs] isn't even scheduled AT ALL and most forms are available OTC, even though most scientists who have studied mechanisms of addiction will state nicotine is at least every bit as addictive as heroin or cocaine, if not more so; methadone is listed as Schedule II for treatment of addiction to opiates [and yes, it is directly comparable].
(If I were drawing up the scheduling, morphine and Valium would BOTH be at Schedule II, with all the strict licensing requirements and paper-trail required; marijuana I'd place in Schedule IV or V for medical use. The medical data just aren't there for it to be at tighter scheduling; there is evidence (from old copies of the US Pharmacopeia all the way to informal trials) that marijuana and cannabinoids DO have benefit in a number of illnesses, such as AIDS Wasting Syndrome, cancer wasting syndromes, severe vomiting from chemo, glaucoma, and epilepsy; in many cases pot is being used for treatment of illnesses that are refractory to standard treatment--nothing else works. The FDA apparently thinks there's enough benefit to allow *pure THC* as a legal drug, and a number of companies are working on cannabinoid derivatives that don't get you high but still have the same medical effects [they could work with pot, but pure pot is still Schedule I and even pure THC (which doesn't work as well for cancer patients and AIDS patients, which indicates that THC derivatives or "chemical cousins" in pot may also be helping there) is Schedule II which many doctors don't like to prescribe--one of the big problems with pain management in terminal cancer patients in hospitals/nursing homes/hospice is that doctors in the US are very hesitant to prescribe strong opioid painkillers because they are convinced their patients will become addicts and/or they do not want to deal with the red tape involved with Schedule II drugs (you have to have a DEA license to even prescribe them, prescriptions CANNOT be renewed, you CANNOT write prescriptions for over a month's supply, the pharmacist must likewise be DEA-licensed, and the DEA can block a prescription being filled if they feel it's for an "excessive" amount and bust the doc for drug trafficking), even if the only way a patient CAN get relief is through a Schedule II drug]. There is [at least according to the 1989 version of the Physician's Desk Reference, in the prescribing info for Marinol (dronabinol)] only one recorded death even remotely attributable to THC overdose, and even then it is doubtful whether THC was all that was involved [other drugs were in the person's system]...it isn't as dangerous as Valium, certainly, or other benzodiazepines [Valium is very, very bad to take with alcohol or other depressants; people have died from this; people have also died from accidential OD's of Valium and Xanax, as well as from deliberate OD's in suicide attempts], and I seriously doubt that even a six-month supply of pure THC [which is the maximum for Schedule IV or V drugs; some states have lower limits] is going to kill someone unless they already have something seriously wrong with them. Hell, people have been known to get addicted to Cheracol cough syrup, and it's listed as an "exempt narcotic" which can legally be sold OTC--to the point some states have legal restrictions on how many bottles one can buy, or keep the stuff behind-the-counter. The only iffy thing is synergy effects, but as far as that goes--both NSAID drugs like ibuprofen and aspirin and acetominophen and its derivatives are Very Bad to take if you are drinking alcohol, and Seldane (an antihistamine) was sold OTC in Canada till it was found out that it caused fatal heart rythym disturbances when taken with damn near everything from common antibiotics to medications for yeast infections and athlete's foot sold OTC. [It and Hismanal, a similar drug, got pulled from the US market around a year ago. Dunno if the Canadian equivalent of the FDA did so, too.] At the very least, if they legalised the stuff even for medical use it'd help a lot of farmers here in Kentucky, especially considering that if things keep going the way they are the largest legal cash crop in the state may eventually become illegal [tobacco] and Kentucky is not a particularly rich state to begin with; besides, the state already makes nearly *all* of its money on vices [gambling (the horse industry), alcohol (mess of distilleries, mostly bourbon but other stuff too--perversely in a lot of dry counties), tobacco, coal-mining (often, unfortunately, strip mining), exporting drivers of fast cars to NASCAR, and marijuana if you ignore the fact it's slightly illegal] to begin with.:)
(Another fun drug fact--many people note that marijuana is safer than aspirin and/or acetominophen. This is true. What many people may not realise is that aspirin and acetominophen *both* were grandfathered in when the FDA was formed. It's been stated that were they developed under today's drug safety testing schemes, aspirin would likely not get FDA approval and FDA approval would be iffy for Tylenol (the main way it'd get in is as an alternative for people who absolutely CANNOT take NSAIDs [the large class of painkillers known as Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Agents of which aspirin is one member], and whom doctors do not want to use steroids or opiates in--because aside from Tylenol one's choices ARE pretty much NSAIDs, opiates, or steroids). One of the main reasons ibuprofen, ketoprofen, etc. are marketed and have done so well is BECAUSE those NSAIDs are safer than aspirin and are proven well enough to be sold safely OTC. [Ibuprofen is actually *better* at treating some kinds of pain, too--in particular, it blocks prostaglandins which are a big cause of menstrual pain. Women all over the US *still* silently thank the FDA for the day they approved Motrin OTC.:)] Also, I should probably refer to asprin as acetylsalicylic acid rather than aspirin, considering Aspirin (R) is actually a registered trademark in most of the rest of the world [including Canada] for what we in the US just know as Bayer aspirin.:) [Thank the gods that the Canadians aren't Trademark Nazis or I'd have a mess of Mounties riding down to carry me away.:)])
Doesn't scale? Actually, in some ways I'd say IRC scales better...if the traffic gets excessive, people start new servers on the network which are closer. (I'd say it scales approximately as well as large FTP sites like Simtel or Freshmeat; Freshmeat in particular is actually mirrored on a large number of sites and one is routed to a server semi-local to one.)
IRC does not have a user registration system
Depends on the network, actually. The largest IRC network admittedly has no facilities for nick registration (then again, the largest IRC network is next to useless for many reasons). Second- and third-generation IRC networks, such as DALnet and SorceryNet have NickServ programs that allow registration of nicks...if someone else tries to logon with your nick, they have to give your password within 30 seconds or their nick gets autochanged. (You can also specify hosts that don't have to give a password.)
IRC does not have offline messaging
Again, this varies with IRC network and server. IRC servers on DALnet, SorceryNet, and other networks that use the DALnet server software do have offline messaging capability as long as your nick has been registered. The tool is called MsgServ, and when someone logs on they'll get a message to the effect "x messages are waiting for you. Type/msg MsgServ read 1 to start reading".
IRC servers periodically split off because of the massive amount of traffic since IRC as a protocol forwards every single message, not just the ones the people on the other server are interested in seeing
I've got some news for you...so does AIM. So does ICQ. The servers by definition carry every message on them, not just the ones one is interested in seeing! You just see the ones you're interested in seeing because you're in a chatroom (the exact equivalent of a room on IRC) or you are in private chat with a person on your Buddy list (the exact equivalent of either private chat (/msg) or DCC chat in IRC).
The real reason IRC tends to lag is because of network conditions in GENERAL on modern IRC networks (like Undernet and DALnet and SorceryNet). They often have to cross country and worse...AOL actually uses multiple servers for AIM (and I expect for ICQ as well) but they're located in two or three places. I'll also note that IRC networks with two or three servers almost never experience lag problems; I've not yet run into serious lag on SorceryNet, for instance.
As a minor aside...I have run into problems with network lag with ICQ (at times I honestly wish you could select the server you connect to; sometimes ICQ is so slow as to be unusable) and I know folks who've run into it with AIM too. The problem isn't exclusive to IRC. Just three problems, I can easily give you a hundred more if you like.
Most of the problems I've seen with IRC versus "chat clients" such as AIM or ICQ mostly occur on EFnet (a first-generation IRC network which is mostly plagued by script kiddies). Modern servers such as DALnet and SorceryNet (and networks and private IRC servers using the DALnet ircii server) generally do not have the problems with script-kiddies and people on kick-frenzies, and have security for nicks and channels as well as less problems with netsplits. (And yes, I've seen the equivalent of netsplits on other chat clients; with ICQ "netsplits" you generally are unable to talk to the person even though they are still online.)
In fact, I'll even go so far as to note that there are problems with AIM and ICQ that do not exist on third-generation IRC systems. Firstly, it is well known that the name registration in both AIM and ICQ are insecure and it is possible to spoof nicks (BUGTRAQ has good info on vulnerabilities in the clients). Secondly, it is more difficult to secure non-private chatrooms in AIM (ICQ's chats are, essentially, the equivalent of invite-only IRC rooms; third- and even second-gen IRC servers allow one to set a room's mode automatically to only allow certain people in, or only allow certain people to post, and keep those configurations fairly permanently set even when one is not on IRC). Thirdly, you're relying on protocols which are largely proprietary and (as is being shown by the entire AIM debacle) permission for clones to operate can be revoked at a moment's notice leaving you to either buy a client from a proprietary vendor (if you use Windoze or maybe MacOS) or leaving you essentially SOL (if you use Linux or any other OS, or if you don't like giving AOL your dime so they can keep sending coasters, er, "try out AOL free for thirty days" CDs). It is rather difficult to start one's own ICQ server, and probably impossible to start one's own AIM server, if you don't like AOL's policies.
Other chat clients are even worse. Ichat, a common "web chat" util, pretty much has equivalent function to IRC but with none of the security features of even first-generation IRC servers...I personally have seen script-kiddies spoof nicks, do kicks of entire channels, effectively take over entire servers, commit DoS attacks on users...and there is no way to set operator status on a channel (it's only server-wide, the equivalent of an IRCOp) and no way to protect users or channels from this sort of sillybuggers (not even bots to guard a channel).
With IRC, on the other hand...third-gen clients allow all of the features of ICQ or AIM, with more security. IRC is an open protocol; clients are available for damn near every system under the sun (including DOS boxen as low as 8086's and old Amigas), most IRC servers are open-source (the complete source for the DALnet server, the base for most third-gen IRC servers, is available from their website; it's basically a version of the regular EPIC ircii server with extra features), and if you don't like the policies a server or network is doing you can get with friends and start your own server (this is exactly how SorceryNet started, btw; they thought DALnet's admins were being right bastards, so they took their toys and started their own network).
The only problem is there are several IRC networks. I do know that at least some folks are working on various ways of letting them talk to each other, though...this includes gateways (I knew a person working on an experimental DALnet/ SorceryNet gateway, for instance) and clients that allow people even on different services to talk to each other (in essence the clients act as IRC/AIM/ICQ/whatever gateways).
Chibi-bits?! Ugh! I can just imagine a mutie-freak HD with pink hair being installed in my machine...
Never mind that...would Macintoshes label Chibi-bytes as Sammy-bytes? Would TurboLinux start describing things in terms of Kerbybytes (making it REALLY confusing if you happened to be running Kerberos)? Would we have sama-bytes and sensei-bytes and chan-bytes?:)
OK, so it's blatantly obvious that I watch more anime than is generally regarded as healthy.:) I'll also note that, as a rule, I genreally can't watch more than about five minutes of Sailor Moon without bleeding eardrums and/or tooth decay setting in, and I prefer shows that take the piss of magical princess shows (like Magical Girl Pretty Sammy--actually a Tenchi Muyo spinoff--or Card Captor Sakura (yeah, it's magical princess, but not tooth-decay inducing)...).
ObSlashdot: Yes, there are computer puns/references above. Kerberos (aka Kerby-chan) in Card Captor Sakura appears as a winged stuffed lion thingie (a very kawaii stuffed lion thingie) whilst Pretty Sammy is in general a pretty savage satire of Sailor Moon in general and (in episode 2) has an extremely wicked funny parody of Microsoft:) (Which is even funnier when you realise the two best-supported OS's for Kanji are MacOS and TurboLinux, and the Japanese version of Win95/98 blows goats even worse than the American version--to the point many Japanese consider it literally unusable...:)
2) You (at least in the US) revoke your US citizenship (you can't have dual citizenship in the US past the age of 18) and you learn REAL fast what a plus it really is in the world to be a US citizen.
A wee bit of correction on two fronts:
1) It is and has been legal to have dual citizenship in the United States, as long as you were born a citizen of the US, since 1967 (when the Supreme Court ruled the law stating you couldn't be a dual citizen was unconstitutional); it has been expressly permitted by law since 1978. (Mind, the Department of State doesn't encourage it, but they CANNOT legally keep you from doing it now, and anymore unless the US is at war with the other nation you want to be a citizen of it is next to impossible to just lose your citizenship.) There's quite an informative FAQ that provides more info on dual citizenship for US citizens; the author himself is a dual US/Canadian citizen.
There are advantages to being a US citizen, but there are also some distinct disadvantages (as compared to, say, Canada)...for starters, it's next to impossible for private citizens to work on strong encryption if they want to export it outside the US (there are cases where people have literally had to renounce their US citizenship so they could continue to work on encryption-related stuff). Terrorists are considerably more likely to target US citizens than, say, Canadians (to the point the State Department has to issue advisories warning Americans not to go to certain countries; I somehow doubt Canadians have to worry so much). Countries are probably going to be less likely to respect consular agreements regarding prisoners, considering the US has flagrantly violated international law on repeated occasions regarding non-US-citizen prisoners such as required consular access and notification (more info is at Amnesty International's web pages; the only other countries that routinely violate consular access requirements are third-world countries with severe records of human rights abuses...positively shameful if you think about it, and I don't blame other countries for being pissed off at the US for it). US citizens have to be REALLY careful when shopping overseas, because most of the world trades with Cuba while US citizens are actually prohibited from buying anything (even clothes) that are MADE in Cuba on pain of imprisonment (yes, people HAVE been locked up for importing Cuban cigars bought in Canada). There are several countries (including Cuba) that US citizens are NOT allowed to visit without literally filing a request with both the State Department and the Treasury Department--in some cases, requiring a list of family members and the last time you were in the country--on pain of imprisonment, and on the off chance you DO get approved (which is almost never) you can only spend $100/day for ALL needs--food, lodging, etc.--and you cannot bring ANY souveneirs back. Some countries will actually give you a worse time if you are American (as opposed to, say, Canadians). It is hellaciously harder to get citizenship in many countries if you are American than Canadian (most folks in Commonwealth countries can get citizenship in other Commonwealth countries fairly easily; if you aren't from one, you have to take a points test to see if you can even get a visa). Last I heard, embassies of most other "First World" nations with the exception of Israel do not have to be periodically closed down due to threats of terrorism and yahoos attempting to occasionally blow up embassies (and occasionally succeeding at it).
(Yes, I do know what I am talkin' on here, btw. I read travel advisories for kicks.:) I also had a friend of my love's, who is from Belfast, come over...he couldn't believe some of the stuff US citizens routinely put up with, especially with travel restrictions and censorship [he was quite amazed that we cannot legally say "fuck" on the air, and this is why a popular British comedy which involves several priests and naughty language (which is also apparently wildly popular in most of Europe and the rest of the free world) will probably never see the light of day in the US, not even on late-night PBS:P]. And he's from a part of the world we normally associate with a bunch of gits on both sides trying very hard to blow each other up on account of a long-standing religious pissing match. And he says WE'RE fucked up.:P)
Whiskey and Bourbon are not synonyms for each other, despite the fact people misuse these two often. As I recall from someone explaining it to me after a few in some bar, Bourbon has to be distilled in one of a few countys in Kentucky and goes through an additional stage of filtering through charcoal I believe.
Correct on bourbon only being a subset of whisky; some minor corrections on how to legally call some types of whisky bourbon, though.:)
Whisky can be made from several different types of grain, including corn. Bourbon must have corn in it; if memory serves, bourbon is actually brewed from pure corn. (Sour-mash whisky, which is closely related, is also pure corn. So is moonshine, aka "corn whisky"/"puregrain" [what they call it depends largely on whether you get the 80-100 proof or the 190-proof "This will strip paint, your stomach lining, and can be used as a cheap substitute for chemists' grade ethanol" stuff; from what I hear, many states (possibly most) don't sell puregrain, though Kentucky does]; corn whisky never sits in barrels and is straight from the still, while sour-mash and bourbon are aged.)
Bourbon and sour-mash are both aged, but (trusting this from my memories of being at the Maker's Mark and Jim Beam distilleries; no, I've not been to the Jack Daniel's one yet in Tennessee) the insides of barrels used for bourbon are fire-charred (this is the charcoal filtering you are thinking of, and also gives bourbon its distinctive flavour) oak barrels. I cannot remember if Tennessee sour-mash barrels are charred on the inside, but if memory serves they aren't.
Bourbon may be legally marketed as bourbon if it is sour-mash corn whisky which has been distilled and aged for at least 2 years in Kentucky (no, it's not specific counties nor is it Bourbon County, though there is a "bourbon belt" of distilleries in Kentucky) and is aged in charred oak barrels. Bourbon-like whisky which has not aged in Kentucky is typically sold as sour mash whisky (if memory serves, they don't char the barrels either).
OK, so I know too darn well how bourbon is made. It is almost a state requirement that every child in Kentucky must be taken on a distillery tour at least once so they can see how the state makes its money besides the two-minute excuse for a two-week party known as the Kentucky Derby, the rest of the horse industry, coal, tobacco, and marijuana.:)
As for good bourbon and good whisky...I myself like maker's Mark. Not hellaciously expensive here in this part of Kentucky [a little more than Jack or Beam], very smooth...Knob Creek is also good. If you get the chance, though...and the money:)...try to get yourself a bottle of Blanton's bourbon. The stuff is hellaciously expensive (something like fifty dollars on average for a fifth, and approaching 30 even for smaller bottles; even the airplane bottles push six or seven bucks...and this is in Kentucky, where they MAKE THE STUFF for Grud's sake) but, from what I have heard, it is worth every penny and is like pure gold to the tongue...I, alas, have a hard time justifying fifty dollars a fifth for whisky so I've not tried it yet. YET.:) As far as non-bourbon whisky, I also like Cardhu (VERY nice and also quite expensive [30 bucks/fifth] single-malt Scotch)...very, very good stuff, either drunk straight or used in making one's own Irish cream:)
Three things more of trivia note than anything else...there are three or four major distillery companies here in Kentucky (one being Seagram's who owns Heavin' Hell); for example, Jim Beam actually makes Knob Creek and in the same distillery they make Beam proper in. Most distilleries nationwide seem to be in (now this is REALLY perverse) dry counties (Beam isn't, but the Maker's Mark distillery in KY and the Jack Daniels distillery in TN can't give samples of their whisky because they're in dry counties). And (when I heard this it really surprised me, because bourbon is traditionally considered a "good ol' boy" drink here in KY) supposedly in New York City and London and other places folks have started bourbon-tasting parties:)
Spammers use security holes? Even if they did, which they don't since it's so easy to find an open relay, those holes would have to be fixed anyway. Whoever creates, uses, whatever, security holes, doesn't matter. It's the admin's job to make sure they aren't there in the first place, and fix them when he finds out. I suppose you are grateful when someone "finds" a security hole for you.
As someone who's been fighting the good fight against spam for some time;), I can tell you that yes, indeed, spammers do exploit security holes. A rough list:
Third-party relaying being turned on by default IS a security hole anymore, and spammers increasingly target sites that have poorly configured or ancient versions of sendmail or other "wide open" mail daemons. (Particularly bad ones in this regard are foreign servers in Asian or African countries (there's an increasing amount of spam being relayed through open servers in India and Pakistan and breakaway "formerly-Soviet" countries), unsecured standard IRIX sendmail, unsecured older Sun sendmails...don't even get me started on IBM mainframe mail daemons...:P)
Some spammers increasingly target mail daemons with othervulnerabilities as well. Older versions of IRIX sendmail and unpatched versions of IBM VM SMTP (a mail daemon for IBM mainframes running VM/CMS or VM/EISA) in particular can be and have been abused by spammers to hide the true source of a spam by forging paths; both of these have two separate security flaws in that they are both wide open to third-party relaying AND they leave no identifying info (IP lookup, etc.) in the headers--in other words, they can be used as essentially anonymous sites for spamming, and the only way to find where the spammer is really from is to talk to the admin and have hir look through the logs. It's also fairly non-trivial to fix these, as IBM no longer supports VM SMTP (I spent a fun summer sending "unsupported" patches to sites running IBM mainframes that had been relay-raped...:P) and most IRIX boxen still running those old versions of sendmail aren't supported by SGI anymore.
Spammers have, on occasion, been known to launch denial-of-service attacks against others, usually admins or anti-net.abuse activists who have reported on their behaviour. This is so common that it's now known as "joe-jobbing" (after joes.com, attacked by the "Herbalife serial spammer" after the spammer's web-page was yanked; the spammer forged a spam appearing to be from joes.com's admins and meant to get him mailbombed, and the resulting volume of mail was so heavy that it knocked both joes.com and its upstream site off the net). Spammers have also been known to "listserv-bomb" (taking advantages of security flaws in some list-servers that don't "ack" whether someone wants to be added to a list), abuse mail-2-news gateways to mailbomb someone (taking advantage of security flaws), abuse *.test autoresponders to mailbomb people, abuse the "sendsys" command in Usenet news to send mailbombs (sendsys bombs are nasty) and "Hipcrime" (use a Usenet script to send forged supercedes to a group) persons. Many of these attacks themselves abuse security flaws.
Usenet spammers abuse open NNTP servers (servers available to posting by anyone; usually the admins don't intend for this to happen), mail-2-news servers, or sites known to have lax policies against net.abuse. Most spammers use the open NNTP route; it is precisely because of abuse of open NNTP servers and mail-2-news gateways that very few legitimate servers are still around.
It's been reported as of late that spammers are taking advantage of a specific flaw in sendmail to defeat blocks against third-party relaying.
There have been a very few confirmed reports of spammers who have actually compromised the machines of others to spam.
This isn't a case of someone finding a security hole, changing a web-page to say something clever, and saying "OK, you got owned, here's how we did it". The spammer tends to use a security hole either to make it more difficult or impossible to be traced (to make it harder to tell the admin to spank the Bad Person and make him go away), to use a third party's machine without permission because they know that their home site will spank them (and you try telling an admin whose server has been relay-raped that they should be "grateful" that the spammer found the hole--especially if the poor guy is in Pakistan, and is using an ancient machine, and has to pay by the byte to the national telco, and his country doesn't HAVE that much bandwidth to begin with...), or to get back at someone who has caused them to be spanked. It's the same as a script-kiddie who got pissed off he got k-lined from an IRC server for excessive use of nuke scripts, and now he's gonna try to break into somewhere else so he can nuke folks for jollies or he's gonna try to crash the server that gave him the boot. No different, really.
Also--just as an aside, and speaking from experience dealing with 'em--most serial spammers (those who get bounced from site to site, yet continue to spam and spam and spam--folks like Jeff Slaton, "Krazy" Kevin Lipsitz, and Sanford Wallace when they were actively spamming) are probably sociopaths of some sort. It takes it literally making it a) impossible for them to spam or b) costing them so much in time and money that it's no longer worth it to them to make them stop; they have no consideration for others outside of themselves. Sanford Wallace is an especially interesting case in this regard; he is the main party responsible for getting junk faxes banned in the US (he used to be one of the larger junk faxers in the US), kept spamming till he was almost literally run off the Internet and thrown in jail for contempt of court, and may well be one of the main parties responsible for spam being banned in many states. I'm not certain what is to be done with the main problem; hell, psychiatrists can't figure out how to cure sociopaths, and many psychiatrists think the only thing to be done for them is to lock them away so they can't hurt themselves or others. *shrug*
eah I guess you're right.. I'm not considering spamming, I'm just trying to view this from all directions.. however, if I have a good standing relationship with my provider and he with his provider, and me with his provider, which has a direct connection to a major backbone, nobody could stop me right? like say my best friend works for splitrock.. nobody would risk cutting off a whole backbone for a simple spammer so it wouldnt be pushed too far if my ISP ignores the requests. I'm just saying this because I've noticed alot of spammers that I've been spammed with have their own mail server and had a direct connection to a major backbone provider and its possible they had inside connections that would prevent them from getting disconnected. right?
Not only could many ISPs blackhole an entire backbone to "get rid of a single spammer", entire backbones have historically been blackholed to get rid of spammers.
Some examples I can think of off the top of my head:
AGIS, a backbone which was given the "Internet Death Penalty" (had all Usenet posts shunned or cancelled, and many sites shunned all email and blocked all other connections, including web and FTP, to sites that got feeds through AGIS) due to their hosting of several major spam sites associated with the IEMMC (a now-defunct spammers' trade group) including sites associated with Nancynet and Sanford Wallace's spams. AGIS refused to remove IEMMC sites, even when confronted with info that IEMMC "remove" lists were actually being used to add folks to spam lists. It literally took a large portion of the sites on the Internet refusing to exchange ANY packets that went through AGIS's backbone before AGIS finally dropped Sanford Wallace and company like a hot potato.
UUnet's dialups have been periodically blackholed by ISPs because of severe problems with net.abuse (including spam) from the dialups and UUnet being slow to provide tracing info. It took the real threat of possibly the largest backbone's dialups being left to talk to the ether bunnies for UUnet to shape up.
While not backbones, national-level ISPs and servers have been blackholed for reasons of spam and/or net.abuse. (Among a short list: AOL, Netcom (has been IDP'd at least twice), Earthlink (in association with Scientology-related net.abuse), Zippo (pay news service; was unblocked after strong AUP enforced), Altopia (blackholed due to "Hipcrime" related net.abuse and refusal of admin to investigate), Demon Internet (open NNTP servers), etc.) In fact, there is serious talk of blackholing an entire name domain registry due to spam (Network Solutions, aka InterNIC).
An increasing number of sites--largely because it's been shown that People Just Plain Don't Like Spam and because spam does consume a gawdawful amount of system resources (I've done a rough essay on the subject)--are joining blackholing mechanisms. Spam-cancels and UDPs were the first of these; a later incarination is the famous Blacklist of Internet Advertisers, then NoCeM was developed to replace spam cancellation (as well as provide for global killfiles for end-users) and now blackholing mechanisms such as the Realtime Blackhole List; the RBL is now explicitly supported by most modern mail daemons, including sendmail.
In other words...don't assume that people won't blackhole an entire backbone if the backbone won't wack people who are using it to spam. Some folks will. They've done it before, they'll do it again, and it is literally easier than ever to leave a spamaceous site--backbone or no--talking to itself and the ether bunnies. This way of dealing with Bad Folks is as old as the Amish and it's not gonna go away anytime soon. >;)=
've heard that the Ohio Department Of Agriculture is the governmental body that inspects and certifies rollercoasters as safe.
Actually, having the Department of Agriculture for a state inspecting rides isn't that terribly weird if you think about it (especially if you think how amusement rides started in a lot of states)...
In many states, there aren't formal amusement parks and rides primarily are set up during church fish-frys and...state fairs. (Kentucky's state fair--which is supposedly the second largest in the nation--has HUGE midways and Kentucky Kingdom was actually part of the midway during the fair till Kentucky Kingdom got bought out by Six Flags. Also, just as an aside--the one state with a (supposedly) larger state fair happens to be Ohio.) State agriculture departments are usually quite involved in state and county fair inspections anyways.
A lot of states actually have their Weights and Measures departments (basically state bureaus of standards) under their Department of Agriculture. (It's actually the Weights and Measures guys who inspect the coasters and other rides, btw--basically to make sure they're within safe tolerances.) Weights and Measures departments have historically been associated with agriculture departments anyways; pretty much they determine stuff like fuel standards, standardised loads, etc.
Considering that most Weights and Measures departments in most states are under the state Department of Agriculture *anyways*, and further considering that most rides in states aren't at amusement parks but rather in state and county fairs and church festivals, it isn't weird that the Department of Agriculture inspects rides at Cedar Point.:)
(And to think that me going to the fair every year--both to see the crops-n-critters and to get myself disgustingly dizzy on the midway--would ever pay off in a Slashdot post. Maybe there ARE advantages to living in a semi-rural state.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Rick Razzano dun said:
Scary thing is, I HAVE seen stuff like that before--specifically, types of Middle Eastern bread sold as "Bible Bread" (yes, that is the literal brand name, and no, I am not making this up, either) in odd-lots stores.
Then again, something as an aside that I think is getting a bit neglected in all this (possibly because most people just plain aren't aware of it)--this is, in all odds, being marketed mainly to very right-wing fundamentalist groups.
A fair number of fundy groups in the US, including some fairly large denominations (including at least one which has over two million members in the US, is linked with the vast majority of your politically active Religious Reich groups to the extent that the political groups are the de facto political wing of this denomination, is linked with Irangate suspect Colonel Oliver North, had quite a bit of controversy in the 80's with the televangelist scandals and has some controversy with the whole "Brownsville Revival Movement" thing, and is the very denomination Skipp Porteous [founder of Institute for First Amendment Studies which includes a section for walkaways] walked away from--I won't go into too many details because it would make me a HUGE target, but let's just say the denomination's initials are A.O.G.) in effect are groups that use mind control techniques. Yes, I'm going to come out and say it--most of them are under mind control and are not in their right minds, many of the techniques are well known to be harmful (I'll get to this in a paragraph or two), and many of them are increasingly being literally placed under coercive conditions from birth onwards.
To give an example, the unnamed denomination I mentioned above uses a fair number of coercive techniques that people outside the church would find frankly bizarre (including a fair number of moderate and liberal Christians who don't attend churches that are Bible-based cults). I'm going to compare these with a coercive group most of us are familiar with and can agree is a Bad Thing, namely Scientology...
The denomination believes in so-called "Deliverance Ministry"--in other words, the world is literally demon-haunted, any doubts one has about the minister or even doubts on one's faith are the sign of demonic obsession or posession, and one must be either exorcised, "rededicated", or otherwise get even more involved with the church at all costs. (This is very similar to the concept of "engrams" and "thetans" in Scientology; I'm sure all of you can look up on the subject on any number of websites. As an aside, this is now recognised by therapists as one of the single most damaging bits of mind-control used in Scientology.)
The denomination states flat out that whomever is not working for them is literally working for Satan; literally anyone who is not a fundamentalist of that denomination is a Satanist (including "lukewarm Christians"), if one does not totally isolate one's self from non-Christian media one risks demonic obsession (and thus you end up doing Satan's work), and you are supposed to completely isolate yourself from the world (to the point of only watching Christian television networks such as TBN and PAX, only listening to Christian radio stations and Christian music [some even say Christian metal is STILL "Satanic" because it "has a rock beat"], only associating with other Christians when possible, and even only doing business with other Christians from that denomination [there is actually a "Christian Yellow Pages" distributed where one has to take an oath that one is an Evangelical to even be listed, and it encourages members to "do business with those of like faith"]). (This is similar to how Scientologists isolate people from the outside world to keep them from being infected by "Thetans".)
The denomination has been known to expressly target celebrities, such as football stars, NASCAR drivers, etc. as celebrity spokesmen. (Scientology targets Hollywood for the same reason.)
There are typically different members of membership, depending on how new one is in the group; groups for "new Christians" are common, as are other programs meant to make the person more involved and isolated. The "Christian theme parks" are even part of this, as are "Christian DOOM clones" and whatnot. (Scientology has this with the different levels.)
There is a big emphasis on always giving money to the church; monetary scandals are often glossed over or the investigation is even discouraged by the ministers claiming that "Satan is trying to defeat this church". (Same goes for Scientology.)
Critics are often harassed; persons supporting things the church does not approve of have been picketed at best; the church believes it is morally right to lie about its aims to the outside, because "good people will go to hell and bad people will go to heaven". It also believes it is morally permissible to libel other groups (one group put out flyers during a referendum to add gay/les/bi/trans people to civil rights laws, claiming all gays were members of NAMBLA, in grocery stores across the county). (Scientology has this too, and even special sub-orgs to do this.)
The group tries to isolate them as early as possible, encouraging parents to pull the children out of schools and to not even allow them to associate with people outside of the religion. (This, as a minor aside, is why homeschool programs generally scare hell out of me. Something like 70-80 percent of homeschool groups and programs in the US are run by fundamentalist groups that are pretty well Bible-based cults, they use the exact same curriculum as used in fundamentalist schools, and the expressed purpose of this is to isolate them from anything that might taint them--in other worlds they'd never know ANY worldview outside of that approved by the church. There are nastier bits yet with this, which I'll hit on in a later section.) (Scientology isolates kids like this too, sometimes raising them communally without outside parent help.)
The group makes high demands on members--members must often attend church for multiple hours a day and for several days a week, participation in "cell groups" (more on these below) and prayer-groups and tract-handling is expected, etc. (Again, same as in Scientology--big emphasis is put in on suckering new recruits in.)
Some additional stuff this denomination gets into, which is either unique to fundamentalist religious groups or to other coercive groups, is below:
The church increasingly practices "shepherding" and "cell churches"--in essence, you are organised into groups of five houses or so, and every week (or sometimes more) one of the church members checks up on you to make sure you are being a "good Christian" or not. (Yes, it's exactly what it sounds like--"Big Brother". It is also seen as one of the most destructive practices in Bible-based coercive groups.)
The group practices what is known as "Dominion Theology"--that is, that Christians are meant to be the rulers of the world (more on this below) and everyone else is literally on the side of Satan--including anyone who tells them they're farged in the head.
Much emphasis is given on stuff like "speaking in tongues" and whatnot--not a sign of a cult in itself--but if you somehow are unable to do so you just "aren't in touch enough with God" and "need to get closer with God".
Outright lies are often told to churchgoers. Among classics I heard in Sunday school--that facial cream contains ground-up aborted fetuses, that the ERA would require women to be lesbians (being gay is right up there with Satanism with them), and that the CEO of NBC was a practicing Satanist.
The churchmembers, again, believe anything is morally permissible to get more suckers in. ANYTHING. Parody slogans (like the Pepsi spoof shirts saying "Jesus--Choice of The Last Generation"), lying to folks outside in recruiting, "bait-and-switch" recruitment tactics ("Hell Houses" which are fundy-themed haunted houses in which the persons going through are often forced to hear a sermon at the end, and billed as regular haunted houses, are common; cases are also known where pizza-parties are held where kids are forced to hear sermons and not allowed to leave till the sermon is over, or fundy-sponsored athletes have done talks in public schools under the guise of "anti-drug programs" where sermons go on and the kids are not allowed to leave and attendance is mandatory), libeling entire groups or threatening physical violence (Fred "godhatesfags.com" Phelps is a classic example of this; we have a Phelps wannabe in Kentucky, too, who's the head of the AFA here), etc.
Confession of sins to everyone--willing or not--is a big thing. (Gay kids have been outed by church leaders in past; I'm sure people have been blackmailed or could use confessions in blackmail.) So is involuntary "exorcisms" of people whose biggest crime may be being gay or having doubts about fundamentalism (and in some cases--nationwide and in Australia--people have actually died from this).
In other words, folks, the people pushing this stuff and the folks likely to buy it are as sunk in as your average clam in Scientology, if not WORSE (many people are raised in this, and statistics for walkaways from Bible-based groups who were raised in it aren't even available because it is so rare--especially when multiple generations have been raised in a coercive group, as is common with a lot of Bible-based groups). The world they live in is something between a funhouse mirror distortion of the world we live in and a house of horrors where Satan is waiting at every turn to devour them...it's really sad, if you think of it.
I would be content merely to pity these folks if it weren't for the following three things:
The group I used as an example--and that's just an example, there are many more groups like it--is considered not only the largest "Pentecostal" group in the nation but has over two million members in the US alone and has been around since the 1900's...and people still tend not to think of "Bible-based" groups being coercive. (Skipp Porteous was really the first to get the word out on how things are rotten throughout that denomination, and a few brave souls have spoken out including some Christian apologetics about some of the bad things going on...most recently about the "Brownsville Movement" stuff (just do a Google search, folks, you'll learn a ton) that led to a 20/20 investigation.)
The group believes in Christian reconstructionism, which is a subset of "Dominion Theology" and has ties to other nasty stuff like deliverance ministry--in essence, it is a canard that claims the Founding Fathers were fundamentalists (most were moderate Christians at most, and many were Deists who didn't believe in Christianity at all), that the Founding Fathers meant for the US to be a fundamentalist theocracy, and all laws ought to be interpreted according to Biblical guidelines (a number of versions actually state the Constitution should be replaced with the Biblical version of sharia law). Also, a fair number believe that anyone who works against them is working for Satan.
They've been working for some time to try to turn America into a fundamentalist theocracy and have gotten rather frighteningly far at it. (Among other fun things: The Christian Coalition has de facto taken over the Republican Party apparatus in 34 states. One of the major plans in guides by Religious Reich groups is for school boards nationwide to be taken over by fundamentalists (because they know most folks don't give a damn for school board elections) and basically fundamentalise and/or run the school systems into the group so kids are forced to go to fundy schools or do without schooling. [Think about THAT the next time something for school vouchers comes up...they have stated PUBLICALLY the ultimate goal is to destroy the school system and replace it with fundamentalist schools, and they can pretty much at that point either forcibly convert kids or kick out "pagan" kids...and the voucher folks want to do this with your tax dollars.] A college is being set up specifically for "Christian homeschooled youth" to not only isolate them from non-fundamentalist influences but to "train them to be political soldiers to take this nation for Christ"...in other words, as a political training college to make new Religious Reich political candidates to take over the US and convert it to a fundamentalist theocracy. The US is approximately four or five states away from having a Constitutional Convention (or ConCon) approved, states cannot rescind a call for a ConCon once issued, and things go entirely up in the air once one is called [a ConCon is a convention to rewrite the Constitution of the United States]--and most of those pushing for a ConCon have been fundamentalist Christian Reconstructionists that want to turn the US into the Christianised version of Taliban Afghanistan.)
It's a shame they're pretty much under mind control to the point they might as well be the Borg...but at the same time, I'm gonna be damned if I let them turn the official government of the US into essentially a Bible-based cult. :) I'm also to the point I can't stay quiet about the abuses that DO go on in coercive groups like that...I walked away 13 years ago, finally broke all links something like six months ago, and it's part of my healing in a way to let folks know just what does go on and how it IS hurtful to folks.
Some anonymous coward dun said:
Yup...then again, most of the changes I've heard that were done to the script (alas, I've only seen the sub, and damnit, I want EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU WHO READ SLASHDOT TO GO SEE PRINCESS MONONOKE ON THE 29TH IF AT ALL POSSIBLE, because this movie REALLY REALLY REALLY deserves to be in more than twenty cities) were mostly to clarify plot points that would not be obvious to American audiences or of Japanese idioms that didn't translate 100% well to English. (For example, they explain more on the history and mythology, and that the hero is "dead to the world" when he cuts his topknot [Japanese audiences would Get This but American audiences wouldn't, most likely]; another thing I know they changed is part was retranslated from "this soup tastes like water" to "this soup tastes like piss" (which is a LOT closer to what is meant in Japanese by saying your soup tastes like water!).)
There's a lot of VERY neat info about the translation and the process of bringing the movie over to the States on the official website along with some trailers and whatnot...and yes, Miyazaki made it a condition of Disney/Miramax releasing his films (Princess Mononoke is not the only or even the first film Disney bought the distribution rights to; they bought the rights to five of his films including "Kiki's Delivery Service" though Princess Mononoke is probably going to be the only one to see theatrical release Stateside) that none be cut or bobbitted...just dubbed and released, and he had final approval on all dubs. :)
In all seriousness, this is a beautiful movie, one which I seriously think everyone needs to see (and for those of you worried about the kids, Miyazaki himself recommends "fifth grade and up"). I can certainly see why it ended up being the highest grossing film in Japan of all time for quite some time (only being beaten by the Japanese release of "Titanic", for which Leonardo Decaprio should be sacrificed to the forest gods ;). Lotta important messages in it that everyone could stand to hear an' all...and no, it's not preachy about it.
(And yes, I'm serious about everyone needing to go see the movie and all. The opening on October 29th is a limited showing; nationwide theatrical release is largely going to depend on how well the movie does in the limited opening and how much "buzz" it creates. I can't afford to drive over 300 miles to the nearest showing...and I promise each and every one of you right now, if you DON'T go see it and I have to wait nine months for the fucker to come out on video because it never made it to Louisville because SOME people didn't go see it when they didn't HAVE to drive three hundred miles out of the way, I will PERSONALLY sic the Inugami on each and every one of you. I mean it. Seriously. Goddamnit, I want this thing to go NATIONWIDE AND BEYOND. I want little kids to grow up wanting to be San-sama, already...don't deprive me of this once-in-a-lifetime chance to corrupt^H^H^H^H^H^H^H teach America's children and adults of a beautiful movie :)
Not coming from the "Committee To Hopelessly Addict Americans To Ghibli Films",
Money dun said:
*chuckle* It's funny you mention that...I thought the same thing, m'self. (Then again, I've been reminiscing on that anyways; Jean Shephard, who wrote the book that "A Christmas Story" was based off of ["In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash"], passed away a few days ago.) Thinking of Little Ralphie and the Little Orphan Annie decoder pin :3
Oddly, that one movie was responsible more than anything (short of my grandpa's old radio) for me getting into old-time radio MP3s... :)
Seriously, though...(ObSlashdot) I've been farting about with the idea of maybe making a little decoder proggie based off the Captain Midnight and Radio Orphan Annie decoder pins. (There are at least three models of the latter and two of the former, with different key setups. I unfortunately haven't yet been able to find a good picture from the 1940 model of the Radio Orphan Annie decoder pin (the last year they did them, if memory serves) to get the code-key for that...shame, too, because I wanted to see what the radio program decoded to and if it really DID decode to "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine". :) I figure it should only be a little more difficult to implement than ROT13 :) and preferably menu-selectable as to what code key you're using (yes, this is meant for OTR buffs who want to decode along :).
ObSlashdot the Second: over on one of the OTR sites (which I can't seem to place at the moment) there is actually a discussion on substitution cyphers and other forms of cyphers in relation to the Captain Midnight/Radio Orphan Annie decoder pins :) If it can be found again, it'd prolly be useful for ideas as to how to solve the cypher for the Cryptonomicon copy.
Dumb Useless Trivia: Both Captain Midnight (in the early-to-late 40's) and Radio Orphan Annie (in the mid-30's to early-40's) were sponsored by Ovaltine. Probably not incidentially, both were sponsored by Ovaltine at the same time they had the decoder pins going (Ovaltine switched to Captain Midnight in the 40's, figuring kids liked Indy Jones-esque pilots rather than little girls with auburn locks to hock chocolate malt mix). The code spoken in the Radio Orphan Annie segment in "A Christmas Story" might not be what Ralphie wrote down (I need to watch it again to make sure...gods help me, I've damn near got the entire movie memorised to the point I can recite lines from it before they happen :). Radio Orphan Annie really WAS largely an Ovaltine advert (I've got a Real Audio recording of a show from 1938-ish, the show was all of fifteen minutes long, and fully seven of it was an advert for Ovaltine), so that much is right (yes, I HAD to check to see if it really was that bad...you all think commercials are bad NOW...some of the 1940's kid's shows WERE in all essence infomercials). There's at least another movie based off "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash" ("Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss", which at least in the mid 90's sometimes showed on the Disney Channel, and is depicted as showing Ralphie and co when Ralphie is around twelve-ish). Yes, there really were such things as Red Ryder BB Guns, there really was a radio promotion, and yes, I'm proud to say they are still being manufactured (I've seen the actual things at Wal-Marts before, and yes, they really ARE branded as Red Ryder air rifles :).
And finally...I can sympathise with Ralphie on the Ovaltine bit. My folks, instead of buying Quik, bought Ovaltine because it was supposedly "healthier". They still did sillybuggers with the caps up to 1979-ish (with stickers free in a can of Ovaltine)...as far as I know they are STILL doing crap with the lids and/or for sendoffs. (I seriously doubt that most Americans drink Ovaltine that much anymore; at least not kids, because there's prepackaged chocolate milk and Quik and other chocolate-drink mixes. They still sell the stuff, though...) Oddly, though...I am maybe one of three Americans who has never drank Tang. Sunny Delight, yes. Tang, no. I expect some day I shall be caged in a museum as an example of the last natural-born American citizen who has never drank Tang (to hear folks talk, it must be the official childhood "health-drink" the same way Ovaltine was in the 40's, and that apparently if you have never drank the Orange Stuff That Is Product Of NASA Engineering as a kid you were either an immigrant, raised by wolves, or both). :) At least AFAIK Tang hasn't done sillybuggers with the caps yet though :)
Some anonymous coward dun said:
Minor nit to pick here--actually, most carnivores have short intestines, whilst herbivores have long intestines.
For examples, cats, which are obligate carnivores (cats require a certain amino acid, taurine, that only occurs in meat; if a cat is fed a vegetarian diet the cat will get fatty heart degeneration and die...taurine deficiency was actually discovered when well-meaning vegans tried to feed kitty a vegan diet, and most vets now agree that trying to make kitty a vegan is an act of cruelty) have guts that (proportionally) are shorter than those of a human. Cows, which generally don't eat meat unless one is boffo stupid enough to put rendered animal parts in commercial cow feed (which is how we got BSE and "new variant" Creutzfeld-Jakob disease--apparently some of those rendered remains in Britain included sheep who had died from scrapie), have far longer gut tracts than humans, proportionally speaking (and also have special compartments in their gastrointestinal tracts to help them digest plant food).
Humans, along with most other great apes (and let's all be honest here--creationist, evolutionist, whatever, the evidence shows humans can be classified as great apes--our closest relatives are chimps and bonobos, and it's generally agreed we share a common ancestry somewhere even by genetic evidence (and that humans are more closely related to chimps and bonobos than chimps and bonobos or humans are to gorillas); those who don't want to think we're cousins to Washoe may boil it down to the fact that God indeed has a sense of humour, but the fact remains that in physiological terms and genetic linking we may well be classified as a family of great apes) are (surprise, surprise) omnivorous. They don't eat as much meat as humans, but this is largely because most have to catch their food (and there are reports from primatologists that chimps HAVE killed and eaten animals for food). Remains of hominids from roughly the time we split from the chimps and bonobos to modern times have shown evidence that we are in fact omnivorous. Our gut tract is right in the range for omnivores (along with chimps and bears and--this may shock you--some canids). In fact, the only major exception to omnivorousness in apes is gorillas (which are largely vegetarian, and have evolved the gut tract to deal with a mainly vegetarian diet--this is why gorillas have pot bellies).
This is not to say I think people should go hog wild on meat. I think (ObSlashdot) that a lot of the things they do to grow meat anymore, from how they raise veal to loading chickens and cows up with antibiotics to feeding them sheep remains to injecting them fulla hormones IS asking for trouble, to put it mildly (and people wonder why we get crap like BSE and haemorragic E. Coli food poisoning :P...the conditions most animals are raised in are damn near the perfect breeding grounds for it). Then again, the same argument can be done for plants (injected fulla hormones, often artificially ripened, full of God-only-knows what chemicals both GM-engineered and sprayed on). Perhaps we should all go back to growing our own or hunting and gathering and we'd all be much healthier :)
And for those who say meat is murder--well, when one eats plants you're either eating plant lungs (leaves), plant "naughty bits" (flowers), plant stomachs/intestines (roots), or ABORTED PLANT FETUSES (fruits/seeds). And most of the time THE POOR THINGS ARE STILL ALIVE WHEN YOU'RE EATING THEM AND ONE DOESN'T HAVE THE DECENCY TO MAKE SURE ONE'S FOOD IS PROPERLY DEAD :)
Akatosh dun said:
It's very interesting that you bring that up. Idioms can be a bear to translate at times, much less cultural references (even from English to Spanish and back--in many fansubbed animes, the fansubbers have to include a section at the beginning for cultural references and idioms that Americans wouldn't necessarily get but Japanese audiences would). Not only that, some concepts do not translate clearly across languages (I actually find it easier to think of the Japanese concept of honour in terms of the Tao or the Dine' {Navaho} concept of the Path of Beauty than in English!).
A really good shot of how translation can require translating idioms and noting cultural reference is the discussion of the upcoming American release of "Mononoke Hime"/"Princess Mononoke" (click here for the gory details :). Neil Gaiman is translating for the dub, and apparently there were multiple major issues in translating it including:
The fact the entire dialogue in the movie is not in modern Japanese but in an archaic form (roughly akin to Middle English or the old form of English used in the King James Bible)
A mess of cultural references that Americans would not be aware of (such as one of the main characters cutting his hair--in Japan this is recognised that a warrior is leaving forever and to be among the dead)
A number of idiomatic phrases that had to be translated into American idioms (such as a comment that a character's soup tasted like water--which is about as low as one can go to insult one's cooking...this ended up being retranslated into "Your soup tastes like piss" which is more understandable to silly gaijin :).
Needless to say, it was quite illuminating...especially since some cultural references were noted that I didn't pick up on the first time I saw it (I've seen the fansubbed version) and I'm an otaku. Apparently Gaiman has rewritten the script explaining some stuff that American audiences wouldn't catch, either...and to be honest (IMHO) Gaiman is probably one of the few people who could've pulled it off.
Another really good example of this is the first tape of the anime "Compiler"--which was dubbed, but they STILL had to explain at the end why a giant Colonel Sanders turned into a Japanese baseball player and defeated a mad statue :) (Basically...Roy Bass won the Japanese equivalent of the World Series for the Tigers...the celebrating fans grabbed a statue of Colonel Sanders from a KFC, it being the only Anglo-looking statue that could be found, and threw it into the sea...they have not won the pennant since, and legend goes that some say the town will not win the pennant until the statue of Colonel Sanders is retrieved because the sea gods are pissed. :) Neat story, but not one most Americans would get...then again, the Japanese wouldn't get why octopi are often thrown at Detriot games if they get in the Stanley Cup :)
Number7 dun said:
At least in Kentucky's case, evolution isn't against the law (yet) nor do they have to teach creationism (yet)--it's more of a matter of the word "evolution" being dropped and the definition of evolution substituted.
In this case, I expect this was done to make it harder for the Religious Reich in Kentucky to try to mount a legal challenge. (As it is, the entire school reform program is under attack by the Religious Reich because the school system now recognises the idea of multiple intelligences and much of the system is set up similar to gifted/talented or Montessori schools.) I'll also note that this was basically done by the superintendant of public schools without the permission of the teacher's council, and the latter are QUITE angry over it.
Sadly, I can understand why they'd want to cover their arse over it. When I was young and stupid and didn't know any better and hadn't walked away yet, I went to a fundy church in Kentucky that is, for all intents and purposes, the headquarters of the Religious Reich in Kentucky (I can't give out any more details, or I would have to post this as an Anonymous Coward--suffice it to say the Kentuckians on the list will recognise the name of Frank Simon [for those of you outside the state--he's essentially a little fundy who wants to be Fred "godhatesfags.com" Phelps when he grows up, and has distributed libel-rags claiming all homosexuals are members of NAMBLA in grocery stores when the idea of banning discrimination against gay/les/bi/trans folks came up--in the city of Louisville I'm proud to say he was told to Fuck Off]...he happens to be a deacon at the church in question.) The church, in addition to being the de facto headquarters of the Religious Reich in Kentucky, also happens to use coercive tactics and can be described as a Bible-based cult not unlike that whole "Brownsville Revival" crap in Pensacola [same denomination, yet]...I can testify that the people there are NOT the most stable individuals in the world, and it doesn't help that a fair number have practically been brainwashed from birth.
It also doesn't help that a fair percentage of Kentucky's population doesn't vote, to the point that the Religious Reich has more power than one would think in terms of population (this is pretty much true all over the US, though--so kids, if you don't want the fundies dictating what to do then VOTE and if you're of legal age run for local offices--even school board. Vote, even if you have to write in "None of the Above" or Bill the Cat or Dunkelzahn the Fuckin' Dragon). At least two persons on the General Assembly (Gex Williams {R}, who [thank the god and the goddess] is no longer in office, and state rep Tom Riner [R] [who is so far in with the Religious Reich that he's campaigned on the grounds of aforementioned fundy cult in direct violation of Kentucky and US elections law, and is a member of the Council for National Policy which is pretty much the major think-tank/brains nationally for the Religious Reich])...at least they're still being able to teach evolution.
That's not the only crying shame, really...two school districts in rural Kentucky are STILL fighting to try to put the Ten Commandments up in the classrooms. Almost twenty years after a US Supreme Court order to remove them. (And yes, I WOULD find the Ten Commandments in a classroom as offensive AT THE LEAST--as I noted above, I'm a walkaway from a fundamentalist group that could be described as a Bible-based coercive group that did many of the same nasty tricks as Scientology tends to do--including trying to ruin the lives of people who are outspoken against them, the fundy version of "engrams" ["deliverance ministry"--in essence, any doubt you have about the church is the result of demons that must be "exorcised" or prayed out--the Scientology version {replace demons with engrams} is known as possibly one of the most damaging tactics used in coercive groups], and other fun stuff. Even now, over thirteen years since I walked away, it is STILL painful for me to look at anything of a heavy Christian bent, and for someone walking away being exposed to tools used by the group that used to abuse you can be damaging. [It would have been twice as damaging in my case, because I would have probably known several of the people who pushed for it.] Even now, sometimes when the local fundies are really pushing for something I feel trapped like they're trying to suck me back in-- which is a common fear of walkaways, even if the group you walked away from hasn't taken over a major political party in your state.)
Ratface dun said:
Actually, you'd prolly be shocked to see how many rather popular TV shows in America are direct ripoffs of European, British, or Japanese TV shows :) For example, "Ready, Set, Cook" (TV Food Network) is an Americanised version of the British "Ready, Steady, Cook"; the same network is apparently now showing an Americanised version of the Japanese show (and cult classic) "Iron Chefs" (imagine Ready, Steady, Cook on major crack :)... "Survivor" is apparently a ripoff of "Expedition Robinson" on Swedish and Swiss TV; even "America's Funniest Home Videos" is an Americanised version of a Japanese "funniest home videos" program (watch the credits for proof--that is, if you can stand more than five seconds of Bob Saget without bearing an amazing resemblance to someone who has just downed an entire bottle of syrup of ipecac).
Seriously, though...I don't want to think of all the legal disclaimers contestants will have to sign (the US is decidedly more sue-happy than Europe is, has no legal caps on damages, and game shows HAVE been sued in past). If someone ends up dying or going seriously ill on the show, the lawyer packs are liable to be on them anyways...and I hope they're timing this fairly carefully to avoid hurricane season or areas known for tsunamis :) (Tsunamis wouldn't be a concern in the Carribean, where I expect they'd hold the contest--many cruise lines actually own private "vacation islands", and I imagine it'd be a similar setup--but if the contest lasts past June or so they ARE going to have to worry about hurricanes...)
AngryMob dun said:
In some cases, yes...in most cases of genetic diseases an organ transplant will do exactly Jack and Shite, because most genetic diseases are from complex inborn errors of metabolism. (To tie onto another thread here, the infant euthanasia one--I seriously doubt organ-growing clinics are going to help kids with fatal degenerative brain diseases like Tay-Sach's or ALD (adrenoleukodystrophy--the "Lorenzo's Oil" disease) or chromosomal disorders like inversions and trisomies/monosomies, because even WITH organ-growing clinics it's going to be a long time, if ever, before we can grow a baby a new brain [and you could seriously argue that in that case you're not so much giving a dying child a new brain as giving a new intelligence a donated body, if one sees the essence of "what makes me, me" as centered in the brain]...and in the case of most of your really bad genetically-based brain diseases (like most of your brain degenerative diseases that do not involve the actual chromosomes fucking up in replicating themselves) you will have to repeat the process every so often because the brain gets destroyed by toxic byproducts the body can't remove because of a farged-up metabolism. This is also true in most cases of muscular dystrophy [you are either going to have to do a transplant of ALL the muscles in someone's body, or replace ALL the mitochondria in their body [a really surprising number of forms of muscular dystrophy are inherited NOT by one's chromosomal genes but are actually genetic diseases of one's mitochondria--a "Parasite Eve" sort of situation would not mutate one so much as probably leave one unable to move and probably brain damaged to boot].)
For that matter, let's take the example you noted above--diabetes. (I happen to have a personal interest in the genetics of diabetes and other disorders of glucose metabolism. I happen to be from a family of which I am one of maybe four or five people in a large extended kindred who does not yet have something wonky going on with my glucose metabolism [hypoglycemia or diabetes]; in my family it's also been shown that hypoglycemia and diabetes are related, and we've actually been asked to join in genetic studies because we're a glucose-metabolism-disorder cluster.) There are two main types of diabetes mellitus ("sugar diabetes"--there is another kind of diabetes, diabetes insipidus, which is due to inappropriate secretion of diuretic hormones from one's pituitary gland and is not related at all other than being yet another endocrine disorder; both are named diabetes because a major symptom of both is one has to pee a lot :)--type 1, which usually hits from birth to one's twenties, and type 2 which hits from about the late 20's onward and is associated with obesity.
There is a lot of evidence to point to the fact that diabetes in general is inherited, and that certain populations [Native Americans and, if memory serves, Australian Aboriginals as well] have a much higher susceptibility to Type II diabetes because they essentially don't have the ability to handle refined sugars and carbohydrates as well as Europeans [it's the same reason Asians and some other folks have a high incidence of lactose intolerance--it's also been experimentally proven European diet is to blame at least among Pima peoples in the US Southwest, who have an unusually high incidence of Type II diabetes but tend NOT to have the problems when eating a traditional diet]. Type I diabetes tends to occur at roughly the same rate everywhere except in certain kindreds.
Type I diabetes is now pretty well known to be an autoimmune disorder in which somehow the body is tricked into destroying its own Islet cells; most research is pointing to viral infections being the main trigger, and several genes for Type I diabetes have been found. I honestly don't know what use a pancreas transplant would do long-term (there are the beginnings of clinical trials being done with Islet cell transplants); you might also have to replace their bone marrow to fix the underlying autoimmune disorder. (As an aside--some scientists now think something similar may also happen with Crohn's disease [a severe form of colitis that is sometimes associated with colon cancer] and with multiple sclerosis--since certain types of immune-system regulators DO relieve symptoms of the diseases. There are some clinical trials also being done in this vein with people in Type I diabetes "clusters" in an attempt to keep them from ever developing diabetes.)
Just as a minor aside--Type I diabetes used to be called "juvenile diabetes" but it does not just occur in juveniles--20- and 30-year-old people (and sometimes older) have spontaneously developed Type I diabetes. With this kind you have to take insulin shots--diet and/or "diabetes pills" will NOT control it, and if it is not controlled you WILL get desperately sick. The really bad kind of Type I where one has a devil of a time controlling blood glucose is sometimes known as "brittle diabetes". (My grandmother died of complications of late-onset Type I diabetes, so I know all too well that it ain't just kids who get it.) You could also prolly call this "Bret Michaels Disease" if one wants a nice celebrity spokesperson (Bret Michaels, formerly of the band Poison and now a movie director, has Type I diabetes and did a lot of spokespersoning for the American Diabetes Association in the 80's). :)
Type II diabetes is generally caused because one's body produces insulin normally but somehow one's body stops reacting to it normally. [The underlying mechanisms of this are still being figured out; in some cases it's a kind of autoimmune disorder where the body develops antibodies to insulin, in others there are other mechanisms.] A lot of times Type II diabetes can be controlled by diet or by losing weight [obesity is a MAJOR risk factor for Type II]; for those who can't, there are "diabetes pills" that basically help the body's own insulin work better. In cases where they get bad enough to require insulin, sometimes they have to receive massive doses. An organ transplant or "grow-your-own" probably would NOT work here (except, again, for those rare kinds of Type II where the body has antibodies to insulin) because it's more of a metabolic disorder that is still not entirely well understood.
There might be another type of diabetes yet-- in many cases that seem to fall between Type I and Type II diabetes, it's almost as if the Islet cells "burn out"--people tend to either become hypoglycemic, will go straight to diabetes, or will be hypoglycemic for some years before converting to full-blown diabetes (which may or may not be insulin-dependant). (This happens to be the particular variant that runs in my family, and may actually be some weird form of Type I diabetes.) I also don't know how an organ transplant or "grow-your-own" would help here; if it's like Type I you'd prolly need a bone marrow transplant too, and if it's due to some funky metabolic disorder that causes one's Islet cells to essentially be the equivalent of tiny insulin-producing Replicants there might be no cure other than constantly replacing them and carrying candies around [because it might be an underlying metabolic disorder].
Needless to say, though, "pancreas on a Petri dish" is not going to be a cure for diabetes anytime soon. :P
Frater219 dun said:
*chuckle* What's funny...nearly everyone I game with (I'll state now my gaming circle tends to be comprised entirely of otaku; those of us who have seen Vision of Escaflowne are very hard at work addicting those few of us who haven't :) is quite convinced that Slayers in general is based off someone's D&D or Lodoss War game that went terribly, terribly wrong. :) (Yes, I mention the latter because Record of Lodoss War was based off a Japanese roleplaying game of the same name that was directly inspired by D&D. See previous post. :)
We are especially inclined to think Slayers is based off of D&D/Lodoss games gone horribly wrong because, for some reason, EVERY roleplay game we're in--especially D&D or anything involving human and/or elven mages--WILL eventually devolve into something bearing a remarkable resemblance to a Slayers episode. (Example--in a Shadowrun game I am in, one of the mages cast Accident to cause a delay for us to get to someone we were supposed to capture...the Accident spell ended up causing an airplane to crash into a bus full of nuns and schoolchildren, causing a traffic jam that pretty much caused all traffic in Tacoma to stop...I am not mentioning the name of the mage who did this, because the person who played her WILL probably hunt me down and kill me. :)
The Slayers reference is also especially funny to me for another reason. My husband was creating a half-elven paladin for a D&D game we're in...he was planning to base the character off Folken in Escaflowne (for those who have not yet seen it--and you are poor, poor, POOR deprived children and must correct this Right Now, and no, you don't have to hunt for fandubs; you can go right down the local Suncoast or Anime Nation and get it--Folken is a rather dark badass).
He rolls the dice. What he ended up with bears FAR, FAR more of a resemblance to none other than Gourry Gabriev (blonde, strong as an ox, and has the rough Int of an ox too...Str: 25. Int: 9). :)
I guess it could've been worse, though...he could've ended up with Dilandau... :)
Some anonymous coward dun said about Deedlit an' Pirotess:
It's funny you should mention Record of Lodoss War in relation to this thread. :)
Not many people know the anime "Record of Lodoss War" is actually based off of a Japanese RPG of the same name. So the story goes, the creator of the game spent some time overseas in the States and was introduced to one of the early versions of Dungeons and Dragons; he enjoyed it so much that when he went back to Japan he created a fantasy roleplaying game that was roughly based on D&D (enough is different TSR/WoTC/Hasbro/whatever won't be suing them anytime soon--if they did, they'd also have to sue FASA for Earthdawn :).
Apparently the Lodoss War game became quite popular in Japan, seeing as it was the first pencil-and-paper RPG sold there...obviously popular enough that several anime series have been done off it.
So, then, Record of Lodoss War is, in a roundabout way, a Dungeons and Dragons anime. :)
Macdude dun said:
Then either I must have been born miswired or am a closet gay man in a woman's body who doesn't know it. :)
I am a woman physically, last I checked, and straight to boot. I also have never--not once, nada, NEVER--had any interest in baby dolls or Barbies other than mutilating them by shaving their hair off, drawing tattoos on them, or generally disassembling them to see how the wetting baby doll or the arm-movement Barbie worked. :) (Had I thought of this at the tender age of four or five, I could have started that whole darn Feral Cheryl thing and made a minor killing in Australia. :)
My favourite toys have generally always been in the realm of a) stuff I can take apart and put together again (loved Legos and Tinkertoys, am damn tempted to get a Mindstorm set Just Because [tm], still like to assemble my own computer boxen by hand, still like Slackware Linux because I can muck about with it and take it apart and put it back together, still like to compile straight from source rather than use a damn RPM or binary :), b) toys traditionally considered "boy toys" (like Tonka trucks or Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars, or toy guns, or train sets), or c) toys I made by my lonesome (like pipe-cleaner animals an' whatnot)...I could make my own playsets with the tree out back and a dirtpile and a water hose, which was always great fun, and I've liked stuff I can build m'self.
My sister liked trains and Hot Wheels cars as much as Barbies (she used to get furious when I converted her Barbies to proto-Feral Cheryl dolls :) but my parents refused to get her "boy toys". They finally broke down with me because boy-toys were generally less destructible :)
Then again, I've NEVER really fit in the traditional "girl" mode anyways...I liked maths and sciences in school, read the Physician's Desk Reference for fun (and STILL do along with other medical stuffle...it's a damn pain trying to find sites on the Internet what have prescribing info for new drugs or investigational drugs, though *sigh*), think Harlequin romances are so boring as to drive me to tears, and I tend to be the fixit person about the house. :) (My husband is a better cook than I; he brought cooking supplies whilst I brought a toolbox when we moved. :) Then again, he likes to do a lot of his tinkering in the kitchen too.)
Some might be nature, but I think some of it is nurture too...in any case, if a girl wants to play with a Lionel train set or Matchbox cars, or a boy wants to play with Barbies or an Easy-Bake Oven, I don't think they should be discouraged from that...give 'em chances to play with both an' see what they like.
(ObWhinge--I just wish Mindstorm sets an' Erector sets weren't so darn expensive...ah well. This is what I get for spending money on silly things like food an' Internet accounts to suck down tons of ham-radio homebrew radio plans and make the occasional post to Slashdot...as it is, I'm rather surprised Tandy Corporation hasn't asked me to purchase stock in them, I've bought enough from 'em over the years... :)
Discore dun said:
Who'd bomb abortion clinics, or bomb gay clubs, or bomb churches, or blow the bejeesus out of civilians? Who the hell would set up crematoria and extensive transport networks and accounting systems and even new forms of poisons specifically so they could kill mass numbers of people in the shortest amount of time with minimum fuss? Who'd pay out upwards of three hundred thousand dollars to become mentally ill, then to find all their problems are supposedly the result of an evil alien having thrown them in a Hawaiian volcano some time before dinosaurs went extinct? ;)
No, I'm not stating that to be facetious. I am stating that...well...there are a lot of Very Crazy People out there, and a fair number of them have in essence given up their minds and free will to authoritarian leaders who pretty much keep them in a state of fear, loathing, and self-guilt.
Go read up sometime on coercive tactics and tactics of mind control for starters. A good start would be reading on the mind-control stuff Scientology uses against members, and read how exactly Hitler rose to power in Germany.
Another good source--and this is REALLY relevant for you in the US, and in the Middle East, and possibly other places--is reading up on fundamentalist movements in general. (As an aside, an awful, AWFUL lot of fundy movements do use coercive tactics. In essence, a fundy who bombs a building does not see what he's doing as wrong; he sees himself as a member of the Chosen People, frequently sees the world outside of his cluster as deluded at best and outright Satanic and worthy only of extinction at worst, and thus terrestrial law is not to be obeyed as it is preempted by "God's law"; many think they will either become martyrs or will be Raptured or receive reward in the afterlife; many are taught not to question their leaders as "thou shalt not judge a man of God" and are told to avoid all media outside the group.)
A real good example of the kind of person who just MIGHT be nuts enough to set off a smallpox bomb would be Eric Rudolph, or some of the folks who work for the godhatesfags.com people...I expect they would think NOTHING of setting off such a device in Las Vegas or in a gay nightclub, because they'd think they were "delivering God's vengeance". Hell, you see this in MAINSTREAM fundy churches in the US; I've heard preachers make excuses for people who killed abortion providers ("It's wrong to kill, but they were baby-killers and had it coming to them so we can't shed too many tears...") and damn near erupted all over themselves during both the Gulf War and the crises during the Cold War because they were convinced a nuclear war would take place, that it'd be over Israel, and it would mean they would be raptured and be able to sit in heaven as all the sinners perished in nuclear hellfire [yes, they literally believed this, and they didn't care that all life might be destroyed because they were going to get a "new heaven and new earth"].
Most of those are, for some reason or another (either because they are nuts, malignant, or are being led by the nose by people who are nuts or malignant), are not in their right minds to begin with. They don't CARE about this world because they think it's evil anyways...so they would probably drop a smallpox bomb without a thought. They might even see it like God is using them to unleash a plague, like the plagues mentioned in the story of Passover. They've stopped seeing everyone outside of their group as human, and see them as The Enemy.
Then again, at least speaking for the United States...these people would not use ICBMs. They'd likely use suitcase bombs or something similar, and odds are the US would not even suspect it was an act of domestic terrorism till weeks afterwards, if ever. (Both the OKC bombing and the Olympic bombing were thought to be the work of foreign terrorists at first; turned out in both cases it was domestic terrorism, in at least one case linked to a particularly hateful offshoot of fundamentalism known as Christian Identity. [I've also heard this about the other case, but it's also likely he's a regular foamin' fundy and not the race-baiter flavour. "Christian militias" that are as dangerous as the hate-group linked kind, but have nothing to do with "Christian Identity", do exist; most see themselves as "Entime preparation" groups. I'm rather worried about what a few of these groups might pull if Y2K doesn't mean Armageddon, especially since a fair number of them are the ones pushing "Y2K Survival Communities" and Y2K shelters and Y2K food barns and survival camps and whatnot.]
The two most likely countries to use ICBMs with biological weapons, methinks, would be Pakistan and India; they've been in a shooting war since 1948, are both nuclear, both have received assistance from Russia in past, are dancing every bit as close to a nuclear war as the US and USSR were over those Cuban missiles in the 60's, and are the two countries most expected to eventually have a nuclear war. They pretty much see each other as the Enemy at this point, both countries have raving fundies as their leaders [the BJP in India is essentially a fundamentalist Hindu party; Pakistan is run pretty much by fundy Muslums--Pakistan is pretty much the ONLY country right now on good terms with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and provide training for the Taliban], they damn near see getting Kashmir as the Holy Grail...it wouldn't shock me if the idea of anthrax-bombing or smallpox-bombing one or the other comes in their heads eventually, if it hasn't already. [This would be a Really Bad Thing, too--pretty much at least a billion people would die (Pakistan and India's combined population, roughly) and if it spread to China kiss another billion goodbye...not to mention it'd REALLY destabilise the area and increase the risk China and the US could go to a shooting war.]
Another possibility is South and North Korea, but I'm not so sure on this seeing as North Korea would likely want the food reserves uncontaminated; they've been through a rather severe famine where anywhere from 200,000 to 2 million people have died (depending on who's statistics you believe)
Some anonymous coward dun said:
Ah, Illuminati. :) Several of my friends knew it in the original version, so when it was re-released earlier this year (and it's been out for several months...got ours back in June) it Had To Be Bought...and I was introduced to the good, old, original game of Fsck Thy Neighbour in its original form. ;) Very cool game, it is. :3
Seriously, though...the new decks (both the re-release and the Y2K Expansion Pack--which contains a card for the Church of the Subgenius :) do have two blank power cards and two blank Illuminati cards...as a power, I figure a Slashdot Effect card could be done up giving +6 Attack power to any card held by CotSG or the Network... ;) Or maybe even automatic successes on privileged attacks on other Illuminati... :) Alignment is gonna be a bastard though... ;)
Seriously, I think we could come together and actually cook something up for this... ;)
Using Slashdot as an Illuminati would be harder. The Network IS essentially Slashdot :3
You could also do up cards for the Freaks Software Foundation (RMS in beatnik clothes or somethin', alignment Weird Communist Liberal ;) an' other stuff...I think we can let our imaginations run wild on this...
Gods, I think TOO DAMN MUCH on this. :3 Then again, I'm also one of the folks who's given real thought (after one too many incidents of kitty deciding SHE wants to play Illuminati, too, in the way kitties tend to define "read" or "play" or "type on keyboard" by laying on top of what you are doing :) to making up a Ferlie Kitty Card which enables one to randomly rearrange one's OPPONENT'S power structure... :)
Bald Wookie dun said:
To tie a minor thread on this...oddly, the three legal drugs (caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol) are known to not only have as many bad health effects as many of your illegal drugs, but in some cases are every bit as addictive or moreso.
To give an example--nicotine, which is legal to the point of being an OTC drug, is now known to be as addictive as, and probably more addictive than, opiate narcotics and probably is equivalent to or even slightly more addictive than cocaine on "liking indexes" (measures of physical addiction that show how hard it is to "kick the habit") and by biochemistry. Some scientists studying the mechanisms of addiction have stated that nicotine may be the most addictive substance known...smoking is well known to cause health problems (just read a cigarette packet, already), cigarette manufacturers are known to "dope" cigarettes with nicotine (this came out publically in the tobacco hearings in the US, and has been common knowledge for years if you live anywhere near a cigarette plant or know employees--there's vats that if you so much as touch they HAVE to send you to hospital because those vats are full of nicotine and have nicotine residue on the outside to the extent it will give you nicotine poisoning, and nicotine poisoning is NOT fun--much the same effects as strychnine poisoning).
Alcohol, too, has known health effects if taken in excess, is poisonous in quantities only slightly above that necessary to get one bombed, slows reflexes enough that one becomes dangerous if one tries to drive, and is known to cause physical dependence. In fact, a fair number of liver transplants in adults have to be done because of cirrhosis of the liver--basically the liver gets burnt out by long-term attempts to detoxify ethyl alcohol once one gets physically addicted to it.
If we want to talk prescription medications, some opiates are actually available over the counter (Cheracol and, in some states, paregoric) and most are schedule IV or III (addictive potential, but you've got to take a fair amount) drugs...benzodiazepine tranquilisers are KNOWN to be physically addictive (most responsible doctors will NOT give you more than a week's supply of Valium or Xanax for that reason)--are every bit as physically addictive as morphine in fact, taking them with alcohol or driving whilst taking them is a good way to get one's self dead, and yet they're only Schedule IV.
Marijuana is not known to be physically addictive (the only indications of physical addiction are in rats given obscenely huge doses) and doesn't necessarily have to be smoked (some of the bad effects of smoking are from the smoke itself; ANY smoke will give off carcinogens if you burn organic material). Psychological addiction is probably another story, but people can get psychologically addicted to everything from sex to Quake to reading Slashdot (you could seriously argue that autistic kids are psychologically addicted to "self-stimming" [rocking back and forth, or smacking one's self...the kinds of "stereotypical" actions you see in a lot of autistic kids; they do this to calm themselves down after being overstimulated--the major problem in autism is that they essentially can't filter out stimulus and/or are oversensitive to it--rainfall might sound like millions of hammers on tin, and in the worst cases sight and sound and smell might blend all into each other not unlike how one's senses get scrambled on LSD; a good way of thinking of how severely autistic folks have to deal is they are undergoing a perpetual bad acid trip] because it's relaxing :), and the mechanisms for psychological addiction have more to do with probable imbalances in body chemistry to begin with rather than body chemistry being altered by a drug itself. The worst effects that have ever been proven for long-term marijuana use are maybe problems with memory; the jury is still out on whether pot reduces initiative [for that matter, so does alcohol; so does Valium--both of these are quite legal]. Marijuana has several beneficial uses, not the least among them being as a mild tranquiliser and possible antidepressant, and the only known treatment for AIDS Wasting Syndrome and wasting syndromes of cancer.
However, pot is still illegal--Schedule I. Oddly, pure THC is Schedule II (same as morphine) and legally sold as dronabinol, though it's not been proven to have the same bad health effects as morphine or amphetamine. I've heard that this is largely due to lobbying by alcohol companies after Prohibition (they didn't want pot cutting into profits--especially since they were having to recover from the LAST War on Drugs, folks finding out there were better drugs and better drugs FOR you could well have caused serious hurt to the spirits industry in the US).
Now, to steer this back on topic--I think that giving anyone in power to tap into someone's convo IF THERE IS NOT EXISTING PROOF THAT THE PARTY IS DOING A BAD THING is just plain Wrong and WILL ultimately be abused. Period. Look at COINTELPRO or records of the CIA's investigation of Catholic refugee support groups if one needs examples...or the list of groups listed as Officially Subversive (which includes--and I am not making this up--the SCA, the Jihad Against Barney the Dinosaur [must have been that "jihad" word ;)], the NAACP, Amnesty International [because AI has reported on how the US commits human rights violations and supports groups that violate human rights in other countries], Human Rights Watch [same thing], most people who have protested major military actions, and probably by this date the EFF and Slashdot's entire membership :). It is entirely possible that we could get Bad Folks in government and this info could be used against one.
For instance, I happen to think fundamentalist "Christianity" sucks arse (largely because I grew up in a family of raving fundies, and I've seen enough of the bad side of the Religious Reich to REALLY make yer hair curl--folks drooling over any possibility that nuclear war might break out and bring the Rapture early is damned scary, and I'm just now realising just HOW wacko some of what goes on in there was). As a result, I do support groups fighting the influence of the Religious Reich as well as groups speaking out against religious abuse in general.
I also happen to know that more than a few fundies, including people from the very church I left, are...to put it mildly...extremely active in politics from school boards on up [this is what likely happened with the Kansas school board, btw; it's been a position plank of the UnChristian Coalition and a number of groups even FARTHER to the right to take over the school boards and move up from there to infiltrate political parties]. (Some of you in Kentucky might recognise Frankie Simon's name...for those who don't, let's just say he's trying his best to outdo Fred "godhatesfags.com" Phelps, and also happens to be the head of most of the fundy and pro-censorship groups in Kentucky. And happens to be a deacon at aforementioned fundy pit, and most of the rest of the "deep in" members of the church are as rabid as he is...nasty place.)
If--God and Goddess forbid--one of these fundy groups were to get a candidate in who could appoint heads of the FBI or a state equivalent, I can GUARANTEE you that everyone in the US or in that state who is a member of the ACLU, People for the American Way, a member of an anti-censorship group, anyone who's ever supported or has run a Fairness campaign so people can't be fired just for being gay, anyone who has ever talked publically about being a walkaway from a Bible-based coercive group or who operates a walkaway group for folks escaping from Bible-based coercive groups, and a fairly long list of others WILL end up on a shitlist somewhere...and they will probably abuse the "secret wiretaps" so they can hope to find something to bust these folks on. (An example I can think of off the top of my head--a walkaway or gay-teens support group talks to a kid who is having real doubts about fundamentalism because he's discovered he might be gay...and the state just passed a law against kids getting any counseling at all without parental consent...except the kid CAN'T get parental consent because if he stated he had doubts about fundamentalism and/or he was gay he'd be putting himself at severe risk for physical abuse and/or basically being psychologically tortured by the church members trying to "exorcise" the "demons of rebellion" or the "demons of homosexuality" out...and yes, people have died in these before, and many more have ended up in mental hospitals).
What if the Scientologists were somehow to persuade the FBI to investigate everyone who posts on alt.religion.scientology so they can get more info to harass them? What if they do it JUST to harass them (yes, they've pulled stuff like that before)?
There's just too much potential for abuse in this...I'm beginning to wonder if there's hope to fix this other than setting up either a PAC for Internet users (one is being worked on called USORS) or starting a third party expressly for the Internet-connected...and I've been giving really serious thought to the latter recently... :)
Regarding "what they found in Anakin":
1) It was "midichlorians" but--at least to me--it seemed pretty darned obvious they were trying to talk about mitochondria withut talking about mitochondria.
2) I agree it was quite Lame; I rather liked the idea of the Force being some mystical power like ki, not like something out of a bad ripoff of "Parasite Eve". :P
3) EVERYONE I know, when seeing TPM, made the comment "Does this mean Darth Vader is really Mitochondrial Eve in a man's body now? Does this mean Aya Brea was really a Jedi?"...taking the piss of the whole midichlorian thing. (Then again, it can be argued me and my circle of friends read too much manga, watch too much anime, and play too many Squaresoft games for it to be healthy. ;)
Off to forget about the whole midichlorian fiasco and go play Final Fantasy VIII because it came out today (yay!)...
Re: the subject of anonymity and anonymous web proxies, Eric Green said:
Actually, I'd not be entirely sure that overseas redirectors are immune from court ordered log files, either. (I'm thinking specifically of what happened to the anon.penet.fi pseudonymous redirector service--more on that below). In countries with no extradition treaty with the US or Canada, it might be harder, but not impossible. And it's not just Alphabet Agencies one has to worry about, either; private corporations, or religious groups, or basically anyone who is a) pissy enough and b) big enough can potentially either force a relay to shut down or force them to give up records.
To whit--anon.penet.fi, which for several years offered a VERY useful anonymous-remailer and Usenet posting service, was compromised and forced to shut down NOT because of the NSA or other Alphabet Agencies (and there were enough folks on anon.penet.fi posting stuff that they well could have gotten in, if only there were a way around Finland's extradition laws) but because of a court order obtained by the Church of $cientology. Apparently someone on anon.penet.fi had taken to posting the Super-Sekrit Scriptures that one has to pay upwards of three hundred thousand dollars US and a long time in $cientologist "auditing sessions" to get (spoiler for the kind readers-- ALL of your problems, from the fact that one's signifigant other is Mr. Hand to one being angry at abusive parents to major depression to sciatica, are the fault of you still having Issues from having been thrown in Mt. Kilahuea around 74 million years ago by an evil alien named Xenu--yes, they charge folks US$300,000 for a rehash of good old fundy "deliverance ministry" [aka "the devil tries to tempt you all the time and any doubts you have are due to demons oppressing you so you need to pray them out"]; replace "demons" with "engrams from your past life on Teegeeack" and it's the same darn thing). The clams were NONE too happy about it, obtained a court order for anon.penet.fi to turn over its records Right Now Or Else, and thus anon.penet.fi died.)
The only reason records were kept in the first place was to trace accounts of people who misused the accounts to flood newsgroups or spam from them. Most modern anon remailers do tracking by requiring you to have PGP and use it to encrypt and decrypt your mail to the server, or they are "one-way" servers that use only one address for relaying and strip identifying info out. Some of these keep logs by IP, but not by address, again so they can filter out those abusing the service.
Most anonymous relay proxies work much the same way as the second type of anon-remailer--they may or may not keep logs of connecting IPs, and strip out identifying info (such as IP address, cookie info, etc.). Those that do keep logs of IPs do it for preventing abuse.
However, again, someone who is Just Determined Enough and Just Big Enough and Just Pissed Off Enough to find where you're posting from--such as a multinational or something like the Co$--can probably get court orders for the identifying info if the site has it. The only safe form of relay to use in such an instance would be a relay that did not log information, period; even then, if possible, it'd be much safer to daisy-chain proxies if at all possible (just as many people daisy-chain an email using multiple anonymous remailers--in fact, applications exist like Private Idaho that automate the entire process nicely for you).
Also, just in case it's not obvious, I'm just talking on NORMAL folks. All bets are off as far as Alphabet Agencies go, or if businesses and Alphabet Agencies work together (for instance, how it's been alleged ECHLEON is used for business espionage as well as the regular kind). Then again, it's also likely that Alphabet Agencies have ways of finding you if you've pissed them off enough that don't involve the Internet or tracing traffic at all; I'm not going to go more into THAT, because frankly I'd rather not end up in the category I just talked about. :)
Kismet said:
I don't mind a little debate from either side. (I'll note--just to state my opinion--that I definitely think marijuana should be legalised at the least for medicinal use.) I've some minor nit-picking and/or questioning of some points you've raised, though. Don't take it as a flame, but as honest questioning on some of the applications of statistics and/or studies you've quoted.
Is this marijuana smoke, or is this the simple dried plant? (I ask for two main reasons; 1) Most figures of this type compared cigarette smoking vs. marijuana smoking, and 2) there are methods of ingesting marijuana that do not involve smoking the plant [i.e. "hash brownies"--brownies containing marijuana].)
I am also curious if this study took into account the fact that most cigarettes in the US are not only sprayed with known carcinogens for control of tobacco diseases such as blue mold, but are also "doctored" (including soaking in flavouring solutions and "doping" with nicotine) in the process of converting tobacco into cigarettes. (Yes, cigarette companies DO doping. Let's just say I have relatives who are former employees of a certain large cigarette manufacturer, and have some idea of how the average "non-specialty" cigarette is made.)
I also wonder if the study took into account the fact that MOST organic substances, when burned, produce cancer-causing substances. (For example, charred meat contains nitrosamines which are known to cause cancer. So do burning cigarettes, and so does burning plant material in general because you are burning protein matter.)
In Sagan's case, there is a rather major mitigating factor that indicates--at least to me--he well could have died of pneumonia whether or not he smoked pot. That mitigating factor is the fact he had myeloproliferative syndrome.
In case you're not aware, myeloproliferative syndrome is a precursor condition to leukemia and (occasionally) lymphoma at best. In fact, the leukemias are part of the spectrum of myeloproliferative disorders. A really good, if professionally oriented, summary including present treatment options is listed here at PDQ Cancerlink--which I'll note, as a personal aside, is a wonderful resource for anyone with cancer or who has a loved one with cancer (speaking as someone who recently had an uncle die from a rare cancer, adrenocortical carcinoma). The long and the short of it is, these disorders either ARE leukemias or have a bad tendency to convert to a form of acute myelogenous leukemia, and leukemias as a general rule tend to wreck one's immune system to begin with. Most treatments for leukemia (from chemotherapy to allotype-matched bone-marrow transplants--most folks with leukemia aren't able to do autograft BMT using their own bone marrow) tend to wreck your immune system in some form or another (folks receiving BMT basically get high-dose chemo and radiation to kill their bone marrow, then get a "rescue" from a tissue-matched donor; most regular chemo for leukemia will destroy at least a few non-leukemic white cells as well, and chemo regimens for adults tend to be heavier than for kids because adult leukemias tend to have a far worse prognosis than childhood leukemia).
In other words, pot is probably not what made his lungs susceptible to pneumonia. Odds are, it was probably the underlying condition plus whatever chemo they had him on--especially if he died from an "atypical pneumonia". (As a minor aside, folks have commented "Pot has fungus on it" and insinuated Sagan got pneumonia from that. Actually, fungal lung infections are pretty common in patients with myeloproliferative diseases including leukemia; aspergillosis and [at least here in the Ohio Valley] histoplasmosis are common, and patients often get antifungals because of it.)
One can't be entirely sure it's the THC and not some other factor (i.e. smoke, period, which has also been shown to affect the immune system). It would be nice in a way if a controlled study could be done with people taking dronabinol (the FDA-approved form of pure THC) to see if it's in fact the THC or some other factor. (If such a study HAS been done, in humans, using dronabinol, I'd much appreciate info please. :)
I'm not saying they didn't factor that in, just noting potential pitfalls. (One reason doctors can't decide if nicotine does affect the immune system is that no controlled studies have been done with straight nicotine [in part because nicotine IS toxic in large doses and is not normally prescribed except to wean folks off of tobacco products] and most studies have been done with smokers; they can't rule out it's something in the smoke that's doing it, though at least cigarette smoking affects one's immune system too.)
1) You should be probably careful to differenciate between marijuana and dronabinol, aka THC. I note this because separate studies ARE going into not only THC but some related compounds in marijuana. (THC isn't the only active compound!)
I should also note that not all the research is being done on account of the "bad effects" of marijuana (that is, it gets one high and possibly makes one lazy if smoked heavily for long periods--and the second is up for debate; more on this later). There are known, medically beneficial "side effects" of both THC and other compounds in marijuana; these include influence on the vomiting center of the brain (this makes dronabinol, aka THC, useful as an antivomiting drug in emetogenic chemo like cisplatin; in fact, it's one of the two indications it's officially approved for); as an appetite stimulant and also somehow helping patients keep on more weight than they normally would (this is useful in "wasting syndromes" such as AIDS Wasting Syndrome; this is the second approved use for dronabinol, and in fact is so far the only drug known to be effective); as a possible anticonvulsant; as a possible antidepressant (THC and other compounds in marijuana affect the brain in a similar way to "serotonin-receptor" antidepressants such as Zoloft, only it encourages the brain to secrete more serotonin); and as a possible antiglaucoma agent.
Also, a lot of drug research into how THC affects the brain is involved in making "cannabinoid derivatives" that can be used medicinally yet don't get one stoned (which is good for drug manufacturers, because they no longer have to deal with the red tape involved in Schedule II drug creation--more on this in a bit, with some stuff that might enlighten you).
This is the famous "gateway drug" argument, and I should note that even among abuse specialists it is VERY controversial at best. I'll list but a few reasons why you should take the info with a grain of salt (or preferably an entire container of Morton's Kosher):
1. Most kids that are brought in for substance abuse problems have a prior history of psychological problems to begin with--many of which include family problems. (Many of the "family problems", mind, include: abusive parents, history of antisocial behaviour to begin with, history of problem with legal drugs, depression or bipolar syndrome ("manic-depression"), a history of suicide attempts, etc.) There is no good way to determine whether the kids would have gotten into "hard drugs" if marijuana hadn't existed, and there is some evidence to suggest they might well have gone into hard drugs to begin with.
2. As you are well aware, marijuana is illegal in the United States. By definition, you are going to catch more kids who go on to hard drugs, who also have used "soft drugs", who have gotten themselves involved with the psychiatric care system (and often they are referred there from schools and law enforcement) than kids who use marijuana, do NOT go on to hard drugs, are discreet about use, and do not get involved in the criminal law system. Also, marijuana use tends to label kids (in the eyes of the criminal and the psychiatric systems of the US) as "bad kids" to begin with; I would not be surprised if this is not a self-fufilling prophecy in the case of some kids.
3. There is a large, non-negligible group of people who use marijuana, have never been involved in psychiatric treatment or legal proceedings involving marijuana use (including those under 18) who will flat out lie on surveys regarding use; kids who are feeling rebellious to begin with (who are also considerably more likely to both use hard drugs and be caught smoking pot) will probably not or will not be given the chance to. (More on this in the next segment.)
4. There is a considerably large and growing body of evidence to suggest that risk-taking behaviours in general--including the use of hard drugs and the flagrant use of marijuana--are at the least determined very early in life, if not outright genetically based. (There's evidence now to suggest people who will indulge in risk-taking behaviours can be found as early as elementary school age--four or five.) Some of this is controversial, and environment is certainly involved, but the propensity to indulge in risky behaviour is probably independent of whether one smokes marijuana. (In other words, it may well be the propensity to do risky things that leads someone both to use marijuana heavily AND to use hard drugs.)
5. Any study on hard drug use and soft drug use is going to have to deal with some fairly heavy corrections for skew. Specifically, you have to correct for poverty (people in poverty are considerably more likely to use both hard and soft drugs--often as either a way to escape, or as one of the few options for making decent money), culture (in some cultures "hard" drugs are not as frowned upon), age, area of the country (in some parts of the US marijuana is dead common; in other areas alcohol or ectasy might be a "first drug"), whether or not the people involved have a bent for antisocial/rebellious behaviour to begin with, whether they have conditions that make them more likely to take risks or not evaluate consequences, etc.
6. In case you're not aware of it, the *exact same arguments* used to classify marijuana as a "gateway drug" can be used to classify both alcohol AND tobacco as gateway drugs. (Alcohol and tobacco are both illegal for those under 18 or 21; in some areas alcohol is every bit as illegal as marijuana is and has to be bought from bootleggers; similar rates of people who drink alcohol or smoke early and go to hard drugs have been noted.) In fact, some schools and psychiatrists that believe in the "gateway drug" canard have actually STATED that alcohol and tobacco are gateway drugs! For that matter, the same argument can and *has* been used for black males (by racists), to attempt to criminalise heavy metal and rap music (claiming that kids who listen to heavy metal and/or rap are more likely to use drugs--forgetting to count in the "rebellion factor" being the biggie, rather than the music), claiming in the 50s that rock music in general caused drug use, claiming jazz caused drug use, etc. One should be *extremely* careful about whom one gets one's data from in these cases--the PMRC used the "metal and rap as gateway drug" argument to push "Tipper stickers" on albums and tries to use it to criminalise album sales to people under 18.
In other words, there isn't any good evidence for even the existence of a "gateway drug effect". There IS evidence that kids who IN GENERAL are prone to antisocial or rebellious behaviour are more prone to both hard and soft drug use. (And yes, I can speak from experience--I've seen kids in the psychiatric care system, and the kids in there for hard drug use tend to have had problems even before they started pot or any hard drugs.)
To quote Mark Twain, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. :) Polls on such things as illegal drug use are going to be BLATANTLY skewed for several reasons. Some of these reasons are directly attributable to the "War on (some) Drugs" in the US. I'll explain below:
1) Most people on a survey are never going to admit they use marijuana even if they DO use it on a regular basis. This is because they fear their bosses may find out, or law enforcement may find out. Drug use in practically all businesses is a mandatory firing offense, due to federal guidelines.
2) Kids sure as heck aren't going to admit it, because many kids know that there are essentially no such things as confidentiality or privacy for those under 18. (In many cases, if the survey is at a school or through a community service, the people doing the survey MUST IDENTIFY THE PARENTS BY LAW if a kid admits to them that they are using drugs.) Even if confidentiality was assured, many kids are going to assume it isn't and won't admit it.
3) Most people, period, aren't going to admit to strangers that they use marijuana unless the person's already indicated they're friendly about it. (This is the same reason that a lot of people won't state they're gay in public, or won't state they're into BDSM, or are smokers, in public; it's still seen as somewhat socially unacceptable.)
Most surveys of kids have either been by the government anti-drug task force or have been by antidrug groups like D.A.R.E. I strongly suspect that if NORML (a group promoting marijuana legalisation) were somehow by some miracle actually allowed to do a survey of drug use in schools they'd get quite a different answer from the government surveys. (NORML does have survey results from adults that indicate the number of folks who occasionally smoke marijuana is far higher than usually counted.)
The simple fact is--precisely BECAUSE of the "War on (some) Drugs" and federal and state laws relating to drug use (which basically state that you end up out of a job and ineligible for welfare or public support, even unemployment, if you admit you use drugs recreationally)--your average Joe is about as unwilling to admit he uses marijuana as, say, your average person in the 50's was willing to admit he was a Communist or sympathised with someone being charged in the House Un-American Activities Committee. Or about as unlikely as your average white person in early 60's Alabama stating he supported civil rights for blacks in public where the governor and state government were stating "Segregation Forever" and black people were actually being lynched and their homes burned. (And yes, thanks to civil forfeiture laws and thanks to federal laws requiring kids who admit to taking drugs to be referred to law enforcement, the penalties ARE approximately as severe.) Nobody in their right MIND is going to say they smoke marijuana in the present climate of "hang 'em all" in the US (which, incidentially, has also led to the US being second behind Russia in terms of persons incarcerated in terms of population, thanks to mandatory sentencing guidelines; has led to the US having the largest-growing prison population of any country; has led to upwards of one fourth of black males in the US being legally unable to vote (due to laws which disenfranchise felons, and most drug penalties outside of simple posession of small amounts of marijuana are felonies); have led to nearly a THIRD of black males who have been imprisoned or will be imprisoned in their lifetime; has led to the US being criticised by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for human rights abuses in overcrowded prisons; and has probably lead to the social problems in America due to folks being unemployable because they have been imprisoned or have admitted drug use).
I suspect, to be honest, the main reason it's steady at one-fourth is this is probably close to a mix of the numbers of students who aren't working, who have rebel-streaks to begin with (see previous statements on risk-taking), have a history with law and/or the psychiatric system and are never allowed to deny it in the first place, and kids who have tried to apply at jobs and been busted when the place did mandatory drug testing. (The "workplace" in many cases has been extended to sports, or in some places to ALL extracurricular activities; some classes require extracurricular activities in some districts, and at least one group of students is suing their districts with help from the ACLU over student urine-tests.)
Again, I'd take care with statistics and also with definition of addiction.
First off, the very definition of a PHYSICALLY addicting substance is that if you take it for a certain amount of time and at a certain amount your body's metabolism will become dependant on it to function. This is how heroin and cocaine and nicotine and alcohol become addictive; pretty much they mimic a neurotransmitter, and the body produces lower levels of it. (This is also why you get the "shakes" when coming off of heroin or other downers.)
Scientists have found no evidence that either THC or marijuana is physically addictive.
There is some concern marijuana is PSYCHOLOGICALLY addictive. However, the evidence for this is both controversial and complicated; one major factor that has come up is that persons who suffer from psychological addictions may well be addiction-prone to begin with. (This relates both to the evidence "risk-taking personalities" may be formed at childhood or even be partly genetically based, and at the problems in psychological studies trying to determine whether marijuana really *does* turn people into apathetic slugs. There's some evidence that a lot of those folks were apathetic slugs to begin with, or had "addictive personalities"--in other words, if it wasn't pot, it would be something else like sex [so maybe THAT was what was up with Clinton's willy :)] or extreme sports or being a workaholic.)
A lot of the argument on whether marijuana is addictive actually may rest on how valid one takes the entire concept of psychological dependency; some psychiatrists honestly think the entire idea is hogwash and boils down to problems with impulse control, rather than true dependency. Time will tell on this.
I've never seen any mention of physical addiction or withdrawal syndrome in what I've read--not with THC, not with marijuana. I'd be very interested to know where you got this info.
As a minor aside...technically, caffeine is physically addictive. Users have to get more over time to get the affects, there is a mild withdrawal syndrome ("no coffee headaches") and heavy caffeine users tend to seek out high-caffeine drinks like espresso and Jolt and Ballz :) The caffeine effect/toxicity level safety margin tends to stay large, though (most people are NOT going to hit toxic levels of caffeine unless they quintuple-brew a pot of espresso using caffeinated water). Caffeine use does have some potential side effects, both short and long-term (bad for high-blood-pressure people, can possibly cause probs with calcium absorption and slightly increase risk of osteoporosis, maybe if you drink gallons of espresso increased risk of stroke over lifetime, possibly effects with fertility--enough evidence doctors encourage infertile couples not to drink coffee if they're heavy drinkers). Caffeinated drinks, by and large, aren't going to hurt most people if done to excess--I expect most Americans are closet caffeine junkies :)--and the effects of caffeine addiction are mild, as are withdrawals. Since caffeine IS addictive, do we now ban coffee and soft-drinks which are decaffeinated? Do we ban chocolate (it contains a non-negligible bit of caffeine, and also theobromine which is addictive)? Are we gonna have the DEA bust people for having supplies of Jolt? :) Because this is roughly what you're talking here, if there's any physical addiction involved in marijuana; nothing as nearly as bad as heroin or amphetamine withdrawals, which you typically have to hospitalise people for to make sure they come out ok.
Some anonymous coward noted:
As a minor aside...in regions of the Southeast US that are dry counties (there are some in Tennessee and Georgia, and approximately 50 percent or more of the counties in Kentucky are dry; other Southern states in the "bible belt" prolly have "local option" laws) alcohol is quite illegal; in most places that are dry one can actually be charged with bootlegging for merely POSESSING alcohol, and the penalties are similar to those against marijuana posession. Penalties for SELLING alcohol can range all the way up to felony convictions policed by the ATF.
I can also state--from experiences of friends-- that in those areas of the Southeast where one MUST buy alcohol from a bootlegger, it is quite common that the bootlegger is either growing marijuana or deals in marijuana (and occasionally in harder drugs as well). In fact, most of your former "shiners" do marijuana farming as a side business or have gone completely to farming pot and bootlegging Jack Daniels and Budweiser (at twenty dollars a six-pack, yet).
As an aside--some fun statistics for folks. Kentucky--which has one of the higher percentages of dry counties of Southeast states (I don't know how many dry counties exist in Alabama or Mississippi or other states far deeper in the clutches of the Religious Reich than Kentucky is)--also had, until fairly recently, possibly the strictest law on cannabis posession in the US. (The law was eventually ruled unconstitutional because it was overbroad; the law as written defined marijuana so widely [it listed marijuana as being de jure "plants of the genus Cannabis or any parts or products derived thereof (my emphasis)] that posessing hemp rope [which is made from a Cannabis species posessing little if any THC] or taking dronabinol [the medical name for THC; more on this in a bit] would be technically illegal in Kentucky.)
Oddly enough, Kentucky is the #1 producer of marijuana in the US and it has been stated that if marijuana were taxable marijuana would likely be Kentucky's #1 cash crop (surpassing even tobacco, and Kentucky is in the top three tobacco producing states). If marijuana were legalised even for medicinal purposes in the US, most farmers could probably abandon farming tobacco; the climate and soil in Kentucky are next to perfect for growing cannabis, and in fact the US Government set up huge hemp farms in Kentucky during WW II for the war effort ("Hemp for Victory"). It is also thought it is likely impossible to eliminate all of the marijuana harvested in Kentucky, as a fair percentage of it is either growing feral in national forests or wildlife areas (where spraying paraquat is prohibited) or is outright planted in areas where spraying is prohibited.
Perversely, the main psychoactive principle in marijuana (delta-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC) is legal in the US, whilst marijuana isn't for the large part. THC is sold and marketed legally as a Schedule II drug called dronabinol (trade name is Marinol) and has been since the late 80's. The FDA, under considerable pressure from the DEA (and it may come as a surprise, or maybe not, that the DEA does have much influence over drug scheduling) has so far refused to even drop pure marijuana to Schedule II (which would legalise it for medical use in the US) even though pure THC is listed under Schedule II and even though a federal court has ruled that the FDA should drop scheduling of both pure THC and marijuana to "Schedule IV or V" (this being in a lawsuit by NORML).
(A note on how the US does drug scheduling. Drugs that have psychoactive abilities are listed from Schedule I (illegal for any use, and used for drugs considered "dangerous" and/or with no legitimate medical use that isn't served by "safer" drugs) down to Schedule V (possibly addictive in some form if you take it in the long term, but in some cases considered safe enough that prescriptions aren't required).
(Examples--heroin is listed as Schedule I here in the US (in Britain it'd be listed in the equivalent of our Schedule II). Morphine and most really strong opiates (fentanyl, oxycodone, etc.) are listed as Schedule II, along with pure amphetamine and dextroamphetamine (still legal for treatment of narcolepsy and for weight control). Schedule III is, mostly, medium-strength opiates such as codeine derivatives, a few strong benzodiazepines, and some amphetamine and barbituate derivatives [if memory serves, barbituate itself is also Schedule III]. Schedule IV includes most "downer" drugs--a lot of barbituate derivatives and drugs that metabolise to barbituates [like Ritalin], most legal benzodiazepines [Valium, Xanax, etc.], etc. as well as most codeine preparations and some barbituate relatives [Phenteramine, the "phen" part of "phen-fen", was Schedule IV before it was pulled from the market]. Schedule V listed drugs are fairly rare; the only ones I know of offhand are paregoric and "Cheracol" [which contains a weak opiate], both of which are listed as "exempt" narcotics and at least in Cheracol's case is available as an OTC drug in many states.
(No, the way the US does scheduling makes no sense at all. Hallucinogens and narcotics are seen as Really Bad and usually get listed as Schedule I or II; benzodiazepines, like Xanax or Valium, are well known to have a high potential for abuse [lots of people, LOTS, have been hooked on Valium and other tranquilisers; I happen to know a member of my family who has been hooked on Xanax for approximately the last twelve years yet refuses to get help, and the doctors fear the shock of withdrawal at this point would cause her serious harm] yet are listed as Schedule IV in most cases [along with codeine which takes some time to get addicted to--it's been said one can get hooked on Valium after a week or so of use]...I know of one case where a benzodiazepine has been listed as Schedule I (Rohypnol; "roofies", "date-rape drug") and only because it was being used in assaults and people had OD'd on it, and valerian root (which actually contains a very small amount of Valium in it, and has other active principles which your body metabolises to Valium--it's where the whole idea for benzodiazepines came from!) isn't even scheduled at all and can be bought over the counter at your local grocery in the "health-food" or "vitamins-n-herbs" section. The vast majority of drugs that can cause hallucinations at ANY dose [LSD, ketamine, psilocybin, ibogaine, etc.] are listed as Schedule I, even in cases where medical benefit has been proven in clinical trials [ibogaine has been proven to be useful in treating addictions to cocaine and heroin, and is one of the few useful agents known for treating the former]; usually at the moment it is discovered clinical trials are being started, permission is denied for continuing trials by the DEA. Marijuana is in much the same boat; in part the drug was banned in large part due to lobbying from liquor companies [who had JUST had liquor re-legalised and who were scared to death that marijuana would sink their chances at re-establishing legal business] and the DEA refuses to re-legalise because of the canard that marijuana is a "gateway drug" and also because marijuana is classified as a hallucinogen. [As a minor aside--Ectasy is also banned as a hallucinogen, NOT as an amphetamine derivative. As another aside, "anti-drug" programs with kids are also starting to label tobacco and alcohol as "gateway drugs"--especially tobacco. I expect after tobacco and alcohol have been banned they shall start next on cappuccino being a "gateway drug" and calling for the coffeehouses of the US to first stop serving to anyone looking younger than thirty, then closing up altogether.] Ketamine, which is a Schedule I drug in humans, isn't even scheduled AFAIK in veterinary use [where it is used as an anesthetic in larger animals, particularly equines--and yes, before one asks, veterinary drugs ARE scheduled just like human drugs are; many opiates used for tranquiliser darts and the like are licensed as Schedule II drugs [like carfentanyl] or are dual-scheduled [PCP was formerly Schedule I save for veterinary settings, in which it was Schedule II...] Nicotine for medicinal use [in "quit smoking" programs] isn't even scheduled AT ALL and most forms are available OTC, even though most scientists who have studied mechanisms of addiction will state nicotine is at least every bit as addictive as heroin or cocaine, if not more so; methadone is listed as Schedule II for treatment of addiction to opiates [and yes, it is directly comparable].
(If I were drawing up the scheduling, morphine and Valium would BOTH be at Schedule II, with all the strict licensing requirements and paper-trail required; marijuana I'd place in Schedule IV or V for medical use. The medical data just aren't there for it to be at tighter scheduling; there is evidence (from old copies of the US Pharmacopeia all the way to informal trials) that marijuana and cannabinoids DO have benefit in a number of illnesses, such as AIDS Wasting Syndrome, cancer wasting syndromes, severe vomiting from chemo, glaucoma, and epilepsy; in many cases pot is being used for treatment of illnesses that are refractory to standard treatment--nothing else works. The FDA apparently thinks there's enough benefit to allow *pure THC* as a legal drug, and a number of companies are working on cannabinoid derivatives that don't get you high but still have the same medical effects [they could work with pot, but pure pot is still Schedule I and even pure THC (which doesn't work as well for cancer patients and AIDS patients, which indicates that THC derivatives or "chemical cousins" in pot may also be helping there) is Schedule II which many doctors don't like to prescribe--one of the big problems with pain management in terminal cancer patients in hospitals/nursing homes/hospice is that doctors in the US are very hesitant to prescribe strong opioid painkillers because they are convinced their patients will become addicts and/or they do not want to deal with the red tape involved with Schedule II drugs (you have to have a DEA license to even prescribe them, prescriptions CANNOT be renewed, you CANNOT write prescriptions for over a month's supply, the pharmacist must likewise be DEA-licensed, and the DEA can block a prescription being filled if they feel it's for an "excessive" amount and bust the doc for drug trafficking), even if the only way a patient CAN get relief is through a Schedule II drug]. There is [at least according to the 1989 version of the Physician's Desk Reference, in the prescribing info for Marinol (dronabinol)] only one recorded death even remotely attributable to THC overdose, and even then it is doubtful whether THC was all that was involved [other drugs were in the person's system]...it isn't as dangerous as Valium, certainly, or other benzodiazepines [Valium is very, very bad to take with alcohol or other depressants; people have died from this; people have also died from accidential OD's of Valium and Xanax, as well as from deliberate OD's in suicide attempts], and I seriously doubt that even a six-month supply of pure THC [which is the maximum for Schedule IV or V drugs; some states have lower limits] is going to kill someone unless they already have something seriously wrong with them. Hell, people have been known to get addicted to Cheracol cough syrup, and it's listed as an "exempt narcotic" which can legally be sold OTC--to the point some states have legal restrictions on how many bottles one can buy, or keep the stuff behind-the-counter. The only iffy thing is synergy effects, but as far as that goes--both NSAID drugs like ibuprofen and aspirin and acetominophen and its derivatives are Very Bad to take if you are drinking alcohol, and Seldane (an antihistamine) was sold OTC in Canada till it was found out that it caused fatal heart rythym disturbances when taken with damn near everything from common antibiotics to medications for yeast infections and athlete's foot sold OTC. [It and Hismanal, a similar drug, got pulled from the US market around a year ago. Dunno if the Canadian equivalent of the FDA did so, too.] At the very least, if they legalised the stuff even for medical use it'd help a lot of farmers here in Kentucky, especially considering that if things keep going the way they are the largest legal cash crop in the state may eventually become illegal [tobacco] and Kentucky is not a particularly rich state to begin with; besides, the state already makes nearly *all* of its money on vices [gambling (the horse industry), alcohol (mess of distilleries, mostly bourbon but other stuff too--perversely in a lot of dry counties), tobacco, coal-mining (often, unfortunately, strip mining), exporting drivers of fast cars to NASCAR, and marijuana if you ignore the fact it's slightly illegal] to begin with. :)
(Another fun drug fact--many people note that marijuana is safer than aspirin and/or acetominophen. This is true. What many people may not realise is that aspirin and acetominophen *both* were grandfathered in when the FDA was formed. It's been stated that were they developed under today's drug safety testing schemes, aspirin would likely not get FDA approval and FDA approval would be iffy for Tylenol (the main way it'd get in is as an alternative for people who absolutely CANNOT take NSAIDs [the large class of painkillers known as Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Agents of which aspirin is one member], and whom doctors do not want to use steroids or opiates in--because aside from Tylenol one's choices ARE pretty much NSAIDs, opiates, or steroids). One of the main reasons ibuprofen, ketoprofen, etc. are marketed and have done so well is BECAUSE those NSAIDs are safer than aspirin and are proven well enough to be sold safely OTC. [Ibuprofen is actually *better* at treating some kinds of pain, too--in particular, it blocks prostaglandins which are a big cause of menstrual pain. Women all over the US *still* silently thank the FDA for the day they approved Motrin OTC. :)] Also, I should probably refer to asprin as acetylsalicylic acid rather than aspirin, considering Aspirin (R) is actually a registered trademark in most of the rest of the world [including Canada] for what we in the US just know as Bayer aspirin. :) [Thank the gods that the Canadians aren't Trademark Nazis or I'd have a mess of Mounties riding down to carry me away. :)])
Just my approximately 87 cents :)
Some anonymous coward wrote:
Doesn't scale? Actually, in some ways I'd say IRC scales better...if the traffic gets excessive, people start new servers on the network which are closer. (I'd say it scales approximately as well as large FTP sites like Simtel or Freshmeat; Freshmeat in particular is actually mirrored on a large number of sites and one is routed to a server semi-local to one.)
Depends on the network, actually. The largest IRC network admittedly has no facilities for nick registration (then again, the largest IRC network is next to useless for many reasons). Second- and third-generation IRC networks, such as DALnet and SorceryNet have NickServ programs that allow registration of nicks...if someone else tries to logon with your nick, they have to give your password within 30 seconds or their nick gets autochanged. (You can also specify hosts that don't have to give a password.)
Again, this varies with IRC network and server. IRC servers on DALnet, SorceryNet, and other networks that use the DALnet server software do have offline messaging capability as long as your nick has been registered. The tool is called MsgServ, and when someone logs on they'll get a message to the effect "x messages are waiting for you. Type /msg MsgServ read 1 to start reading".
I've got some news for you...so does AIM. So does ICQ. The servers by definition carry every message on them, not just the ones one is interested in seeing! You just see the ones you're interested in seeing because you're in a chatroom (the exact equivalent of a room on IRC) or you are in private chat with a person on your Buddy list (the exact equivalent of either private chat (/msg) or DCC chat in IRC).
The real reason IRC tends to lag is because of network conditions in GENERAL on modern IRC networks (like Undernet and DALnet and SorceryNet). They often have to cross country and worse...AOL actually uses multiple servers for AIM (and I expect for ICQ as well) but they're located in two or three places. I'll also note that IRC networks with two or three servers almost never experience lag problems; I've not yet run into serious lag on SorceryNet, for instance.
As a minor aside...I have run into problems with network lag with ICQ (at times I honestly wish you could select the server you connect to; sometimes ICQ is so slow as to be unusable) and I know folks who've run into it with AIM too. The problem isn't exclusive to IRC. Just three problems, I can easily give you a hundred more if you like.
Most of the problems I've seen with IRC versus "chat clients" such as AIM or ICQ mostly occur on EFnet (a first-generation IRC network which is mostly plagued by script kiddies). Modern servers such as DALnet and SorceryNet (and networks and private IRC servers using the DALnet ircii server) generally do not have the problems with script-kiddies and people on kick-frenzies, and have security for nicks and channels as well as less problems with netsplits. (And yes, I've seen the equivalent of netsplits on other chat clients; with ICQ "netsplits" you generally are unable to talk to the person even though they are still online.)
In fact, I'll even go so far as to note that there are problems with AIM and ICQ that do not exist on third-generation IRC systems. Firstly, it is well known that the name registration in both AIM and ICQ are insecure and it is possible to spoof nicks (BUGTRAQ has good info on vulnerabilities in the clients). Secondly, it is more difficult to secure non-private chatrooms in AIM (ICQ's chats are, essentially, the equivalent of invite-only IRC rooms; third- and even second-gen IRC servers allow one to set a room's mode automatically to only allow certain people in, or only allow certain people to post, and keep those configurations fairly permanently set even when one is not on IRC). Thirdly, you're relying on protocols which are largely proprietary and (as is being shown by the entire AIM debacle) permission for clones to operate can be revoked at a moment's notice leaving you to either buy a client from a proprietary vendor (if you use Windoze or maybe MacOS) or leaving you essentially SOL (if you use Linux or any other OS, or if you don't like giving AOL your dime so they can keep sending coasters, er, "try out AOL free for thirty days" CDs). It is rather difficult to start one's own ICQ server, and probably impossible to start one's own AIM server, if you don't like AOL's policies.
Other chat clients are even worse. Ichat, a common "web chat" util, pretty much has equivalent function to IRC but with none of the security features of even first-generation IRC servers...I personally have seen script-kiddies spoof nicks, do kicks of entire channels, effectively take over entire servers, commit DoS attacks on users...and there is no way to set operator status on a channel (it's only server-wide, the equivalent of an IRCOp) and no way to protect users or channels from this sort of sillybuggers (not even bots to guard a channel).
With IRC, on the other hand...third-gen clients allow all of the features of ICQ or AIM, with more security. IRC is an open protocol; clients are available for damn near every system under the sun (including DOS boxen as low as 8086's and old Amigas), most IRC servers are open-source (the complete source for the DALnet server, the base for most third-gen IRC servers, is available from their website; it's basically a version of the regular EPIC ircii server with extra features), and if you don't like the policies a server or network is doing you can get with friends and start your own server (this is exactly how SorceryNet started, btw; they thought DALnet's admins were being right bastards, so they took their toys and started their own network).
The only problem is there are several IRC networks. I do know that at least some folks are working on various ways of letting them talk to each other, though...this includes gateways (I knew a person working on an experimental DALnet/ SorceryNet gateway, for instance) and clients that allow people even on different services to talk to each other (in essence the clients act as IRC/AIM/ICQ/whatever gateways).
Glytch sez:
Never mind that...would Macintoshes label Chibi-bytes as Sammy-bytes? Would TurboLinux start describing things in terms of Kerbybytes (making it REALLY confusing if you happened to be running Kerberos)? Would we have sama-bytes and sensei-bytes and chan-bytes? :)
OK, so it's blatantly obvious that I watch more anime than is generally regarded as healthy. :) I'll also note that, as a rule, I genreally can't watch more than about five minutes of Sailor Moon without bleeding eardrums and/or tooth decay setting in, and I prefer shows that take the piss of magical princess shows (like Magical Girl Pretty Sammy--actually a Tenchi Muyo spinoff--or Card Captor Sakura (yeah, it's magical princess, but not tooth-decay inducing)...).
ObSlashdot: Yes, there are computer puns/references above. Kerberos (aka Kerby-chan) in Card Captor Sakura appears as a winged stuffed lion thingie (a very kawaii stuffed lion thingie) whilst Pretty Sammy is in general a pretty savage satire of Sailor Moon in general and (in episode 2) has an extremely wicked funny parody of Microsoft :) (Which is even funnier when you realise the two best-supported OS's for Kanji are MacOS and TurboLinux, and the Japanese version of Win95/98 blows goats even worse than the American version--to the point many Japanese consider it literally unusable...:)
tgd sez:
A wee bit of correction on two fronts:
1) It is and has been legal to have dual citizenship in the United States, as long as you were born a citizen of the US, since 1967 (when the Supreme Court ruled the law stating you couldn't be a dual citizen was unconstitutional); it has been expressly permitted by law since 1978. (Mind, the Department of State doesn't encourage it, but they CANNOT legally keep you from doing it now, and anymore unless the US is at war with the other nation you want to be a citizen of it is next to impossible to just lose your citizenship.) There's quite an informative FAQ that provides more info on dual citizenship for US citizens; the author himself is a dual US/Canadian citizen.
There are advantages to being a US citizen, but there are also some distinct disadvantages (as compared to, say, Canada)...for starters, it's next to impossible for private citizens to work on strong encryption if they want to export it outside the US (there are cases where people have literally had to renounce their US citizenship so they could continue to work on encryption-related stuff). Terrorists are considerably more likely to target US citizens than, say, Canadians (to the point the State Department has to issue advisories warning Americans not to go to certain countries; I somehow doubt Canadians have to worry so much). Countries are probably going to be less likely to respect consular agreements regarding prisoners, considering the US has flagrantly violated international law on repeated occasions regarding non-US-citizen prisoners such as required consular access and notification (more info is at Amnesty International's web pages; the only other countries that routinely violate consular access requirements are third-world countries with severe records of human rights abuses...positively shameful if you think about it, and I don't blame other countries for being pissed off at the US for it). US citizens have to be REALLY careful when shopping overseas, because most of the world trades with Cuba while US citizens are actually prohibited from buying anything (even clothes) that are MADE in Cuba on pain of imprisonment (yes, people HAVE been locked up for importing Cuban cigars bought in Canada). There are several countries (including Cuba) that US citizens are NOT allowed to visit without literally filing a request with both the State Department and the Treasury Department--in some cases, requiring a list of family members and the last time you were in the country--on pain of imprisonment, and on the off chance you DO get approved (which is almost never) you can only spend $100/day for ALL needs--food, lodging, etc.--and you cannot bring ANY souveneirs back. Some countries will actually give you a worse time if you are American (as opposed to, say, Canadians). It is hellaciously harder to get citizenship in many countries if you are American than Canadian (most folks in Commonwealth countries can get citizenship in other Commonwealth countries fairly easily; if you aren't from one, you have to take a points test to see if you can even get a visa). Last I heard, embassies of most other "First World" nations with the exception of Israel do not have to be periodically closed down due to threats of terrorism and yahoos attempting to occasionally blow up embassies (and occasionally succeeding at it).
(Yes, I do know what I am talkin' on here, btw. I read travel advisories for kicks. :) I also had a friend of my love's, who is from Belfast, come over...he couldn't believe some of the stuff US citizens routinely put up with, especially with travel restrictions and censorship [he was quite amazed that we cannot legally say "fuck" on the air, and this is why a popular British comedy which involves several priests and naughty language (which is also apparently wildly popular in most of Europe and the rest of the free world) will probably never see the light of day in the US, not even on late-night PBS :P]. And he's from a part of the world we normally associate with a bunch of gits on both sides trying very hard to blow each other up on account of a long-standing religious pissing match. And he says WE'RE fucked up. :P)
Rombuu asks:
Correct on bourbon only being a subset of whisky; some minor corrections on how to legally call some types of whisky bourbon, though. :)
Whisky can be made from several different types of grain, including corn. Bourbon must have corn in it; if memory serves, bourbon is actually brewed from pure corn. (Sour-mash whisky, which is closely related, is also pure corn. So is moonshine, aka "corn whisky"/"puregrain" [what they call it depends largely on whether you get the 80-100 proof or the 190-proof "This will strip paint, your stomach lining, and can be used as a cheap substitute for chemists' grade ethanol" stuff; from what I hear, many states (possibly most) don't sell puregrain, though Kentucky does]; corn whisky never sits in barrels and is straight from the still, while sour-mash and bourbon are aged.)
Bourbon and sour-mash are both aged, but (trusting this from my memories of being at the Maker's Mark and Jim Beam distilleries; no, I've not been to the Jack Daniel's one yet in Tennessee) the insides of barrels used for bourbon are fire-charred (this is the charcoal filtering you are thinking of, and also gives bourbon its distinctive flavour) oak barrels. I cannot remember if Tennessee sour-mash barrels are charred on the inside, but if memory serves they aren't.
Bourbon may be legally marketed as bourbon if it is sour-mash corn whisky which has been distilled and aged for at least 2 years in Kentucky (no, it's not specific counties nor is it Bourbon County, though there is a "bourbon belt" of distilleries in Kentucky) and is aged in charred oak barrels. Bourbon-like whisky which has not aged in Kentucky is typically sold as sour mash whisky (if memory serves, they don't char the barrels either).
OK, so I know too darn well how bourbon is made. It is almost a state requirement that every child in Kentucky must be taken on a distillery tour at least once so they can see how the state makes its money besides the two-minute excuse for a two-week party known as the Kentucky Derby, the rest of the horse industry, coal, tobacco, and marijuana. :)
As for good bourbon and good whisky...I myself like maker's Mark. Not hellaciously expensive here in this part of Kentucky [a little more than Jack or Beam], very smooth...Knob Creek is also good. If you get the chance, though...and the money :)...try to get yourself a bottle of Blanton's bourbon. The stuff is hellaciously expensive (something like fifty dollars on average for a fifth, and approaching 30 even for smaller bottles; even the airplane bottles push six or seven bucks...and this is in Kentucky, where they MAKE THE STUFF for Grud's sake) but, from what I have heard, it is worth every penny and is like pure gold to the tongue...I, alas, have a hard time justifying fifty dollars a fifth for whisky so I've not tried it yet. YET. :) As far as non-bourbon whisky, I also like Cardhu (VERY nice and also quite expensive [30 bucks/fifth] single-malt Scotch)...very, very good stuff, either drunk straight or used in making one's own Irish cream :)
Three things more of trivia note than anything else...there are three or four major distillery companies here in Kentucky (one being Seagram's who owns Heavin' Hell); for example, Jim Beam actually makes Knob Creek and in the same distillery they make Beam proper in. Most distilleries nationwide seem to be in (now this is REALLY perverse) dry counties (Beam isn't, but the Maker's Mark distillery in KY and the Jack Daniels distillery in TN can't give samples of their whisky because they're in dry counties). And (when I heard this it really surprised me, because bourbon is traditionally considered a "good ol' boy" drink here in KY) supposedly in New York City and London and other places folks have started bourbon-tasting parties :)
Progman said:
As someone who's been fighting the good fight against spam for some time ;), I can tell you that yes, indeed, spammers do exploit security holes. A rough list:
Third-party relaying being turned on by default IS a security hole anymore, and spammers increasingly target sites that have poorly configured or ancient versions of sendmail or other "wide open" mail daemons. (Particularly bad ones in this regard are foreign servers in Asian or African countries (there's an increasing amount of spam being relayed through open servers in India and Pakistan and breakaway "formerly-Soviet" countries), unsecured standard IRIX sendmail, unsecured older Sun sendmails...don't even get me started on IBM mainframe mail daemons... :P)
Some spammers increasingly target mail daemons with othervulnerabilities as well. Older versions of IRIX sendmail and unpatched versions of IBM VM SMTP (a mail daemon for IBM mainframes running VM/CMS or VM/EISA) in particular can be and have been abused by spammers to hide the true source of a spam by forging paths; both of these have two separate security flaws in that they are both wide open to third-party relaying AND they leave no identifying info (IP lookup, etc.) in the headers--in other words, they can be used as essentially anonymous sites for spamming, and the only way to find where the spammer is really from is to talk to the admin and have hir look through the logs. It's also fairly non-trivial to fix these, as IBM no longer supports VM SMTP (I spent a fun summer sending "unsupported" patches to sites running IBM mainframes that had been relay-raped... :P) and most IRIX boxen still running those old versions of sendmail aren't supported by SGI anymore.
Spammers have, on occasion, been known to launch denial-of-service attacks against others, usually admins or anti-net.abuse activists who have reported on their behaviour. This is so common that it's now known as "joe-jobbing" (after joes.com, attacked by the "Herbalife serial spammer" after the spammer's web-page was yanked; the spammer forged a spam appearing to be from joes.com's admins and meant to get him mailbombed, and the resulting volume of mail was so heavy that it knocked both joes.com and its upstream site off the net). Spammers have also been known to "listserv-bomb" (taking advantages of security flaws in some list-servers that don't "ack" whether someone wants to be added to a list), abuse mail-2-news gateways to mailbomb someone (taking advantage of security flaws), abuse *.test autoresponders to mailbomb people, abuse the "sendsys" command in Usenet news to send mailbombs (sendsys bombs are nasty) and "Hipcrime" (use a Usenet script to send forged supercedes to a group) persons. Many of these attacks themselves abuse security flaws.
Usenet spammers abuse open NNTP servers (servers available to posting by anyone; usually the admins don't intend for this to happen), mail-2-news servers, or sites known to have lax policies against net.abuse. Most spammers use the open NNTP route; it is precisely because of abuse of open NNTP servers and mail-2-news gateways that very few legitimate servers are still around.
It's been reported as of late that spammers are taking advantage of a specific flaw in sendmail to defeat blocks against third-party relaying.
There have been a very few confirmed reports of spammers who have actually compromised the machines of others to spam.
This isn't a case of someone finding a security hole, changing a web-page to say something clever, and saying "OK, you got owned, here's how we did it". The spammer tends to use a security hole either to make it more difficult or impossible to be traced (to make it harder to tell the admin to spank the Bad Person and make him go away), to use a third party's machine without permission because they know that their home site will spank them (and you try telling an admin whose server has been relay-raped that they should be "grateful" that the spammer found the hole--especially if the poor guy is in Pakistan, and is using an ancient machine, and has to pay by the byte to the national telco, and his country doesn't HAVE that much bandwidth to begin with...), or to get back at someone who has caused them to be spanked. It's the same as a script-kiddie who got pissed off he got k-lined from an IRC server for excessive use of nuke scripts, and now he's gonna try to break into somewhere else so he can nuke folks for jollies or he's gonna try to crash the server that gave him the boot. No different, really.
Also--just as an aside, and speaking from experience dealing with 'em--most serial spammers (those who get bounced from site to site, yet continue to spam and spam and spam--folks like Jeff Slaton, "Krazy" Kevin Lipsitz, and Sanford Wallace when they were actively spamming) are probably sociopaths of some sort. It takes it literally making it a) impossible for them to spam or b) costing them so much in time and money that it's no longer worth it to them to make them stop; they have no consideration for others outside of themselves. Sanford Wallace is an especially interesting case in this regard; he is the main party responsible for getting junk faxes banned in the US (he used to be one of the larger junk faxers in the US), kept spamming till he was almost literally run off the Internet and thrown in jail for contempt of court, and may well be one of the main parties responsible for spam being banned in many states. I'm not certain what is to be done with the main problem; hell, psychiatrists can't figure out how to cure sociopaths, and many psychiatrists think the only thing to be done for them is to lock them away so they can't hurt themselves or others. *shrug*
Kavalier yammered:
Not only could many ISPs blackhole an entire backbone to "get rid of a single spammer", entire backbones have historically been blackholed to get rid of spammers.
Some examples I can think of off the top of my head:
AGIS, a backbone which was given the "Internet Death Penalty" (had all Usenet posts shunned or cancelled, and many sites shunned all email and blocked all other connections, including web and FTP, to sites that got feeds through AGIS) due to their hosting of several major spam sites associated with the IEMMC (a now-defunct spammers' trade group) including sites associated with Nancynet and Sanford Wallace's spams. AGIS refused to remove IEMMC sites, even when confronted with info that IEMMC "remove" lists were actually being used to add folks to spam lists. It literally took a large portion of the sites on the Internet refusing to exchange ANY packets that went through AGIS's backbone before AGIS finally dropped Sanford Wallace and company like a hot potato.
UUnet's dialups have been periodically blackholed by ISPs because of severe problems with net.abuse (including spam) from the dialups and UUnet being slow to provide tracing info. It took the real threat of possibly the largest backbone's dialups being left to talk to the ether bunnies for UUnet to shape up.
While not backbones, national-level ISPs and servers have been blackholed for reasons of spam and/or net.abuse. (Among a short list: AOL, Netcom (has been IDP'd at least twice), Earthlink (in association with Scientology-related net.abuse), Zippo (pay news service; was unblocked after strong AUP enforced), Altopia (blackholed due to "Hipcrime" related net.abuse and refusal of admin to investigate), Demon Internet (open NNTP servers), etc.) In fact, there is serious talk of blackholing an entire name domain registry due to spam (Network Solutions, aka InterNIC).
An increasing number of sites--largely because it's been shown that People Just Plain Don't Like Spam and because spam does consume a gawdawful amount of system resources (I've done a rough essay on the subject)--are joining blackholing mechanisms. Spam-cancels and UDPs were the first of these; a later incarination is the famous Blacklist of Internet Advertisers, then NoCeM was developed to replace spam cancellation (as well as provide for global killfiles for end-users) and now blackholing mechanisms such as the Realtime Blackhole List; the RBL is now explicitly supported by most modern mail daemons, including sendmail.
In other words...don't assume that people won't blackhole an entire backbone if the backbone won't wack people who are using it to spam. Some folks will. They've done it before, they'll do it again, and it is literally easier than ever to leave a spamaceous site--backbone or no--talking to itself and the ether bunnies. This way of dealing with Bad Folks is as old as the Amish and it's not gonna go away anytime soon. >;)=
Razzmataz wrote: