I've posted this in a previous topic relevant to the practices of the Bush administration and I'll post it here since it's relevant yet again despite those, apparently, Bush supporters with mod points who marked my previous post a flamebait or a troll.
" I don't care who he is; if he compared Bush to Hitler as reported he's right on this, and he's not being inventive and this isn't new; it is widely known by anyone in the know. Anyone who knows enough about History and Political Philosophy knows for sure that Bush is comparable to Hitler as both are on the same side of History, same side of ideology, and same side of conduct, and the GOP ideologues are not shy about this; they have not hidden their admiration of the chilean fascist economics model, they have not hidden their cultish affiliation around Leo Strauss the protege of Carl Schmitt the prime Nazi ideologue, and they have not hidden their originalist and essentialist fixation on the relevant thought of Aristotle and Plato. Yes, it goes that far back in History, to Ancient Greece; Bush and Hitler, and the Nazi party and the GOP, are upholders of Sparta, the violent rural oligarchic dictatorship, they are not upholders of Athens, the peaceful cosmopolitan liberal democracy.
He's right.
Both Hitler and Bush were ultra-nationalist simpletons who exploited the Nation-Under-Attack anxieties and the 'patriotic' impulses of the simple, blood-and-soil masses and enlisted the interests of a corrupt, racketeering cadre of industrialists and financiers that foresaw in their domestic, social restructuring projects at home and warmongering, imperialist ambitions abroad ample profit opportunities. Both Hitler and Bush were messianic men with a passionate 'vision' and a sense of 'mission' who were obsessed with their personal safety and paranoid about the risk of assassination and their parties (Nazi, GOP) were suspicious and intolerant of disagreement and dissent to the extent of using the "treason" label (treason, un-Patriotic, un-American, hates America, and so on) against those who don't tow the party line. Both the parties of Hitler and Bush scapegoated minorities as political devices to forewarn of calamitious dangers to the original integrity of a good and glorious nation, most prominent of whom in Hitler's Germany were the Jews, and in Bush's USA were the Gays. Both parties pushed for legislation that suspended civil liberties and human rights in the name of national security, in Hitler's case it was the Enabling Act, and in Bush's it was the Patriot Act, which presence served to intimidate many ordinary citizens for fear of being suspected of "treason" and being persecuted on mere suspicion without due process, and both leaders and parties maintained an atmosphere of terror, applauded military armament and endorsed doctrines of preemptive war, with which they invaded other countries. Furthermore, Bush is supported by the same wealthy elements that tried to erect a fascist government in the US in the 1933 after the election of a populist president, Franklin D Roosevelt; the businessmen and bankers who admired European Fascism at the time and its heavy-handed stance against communists in its countries, and intensely disliked Roosevelt's "communist" reforms that entailed heavier taxes on the wealthy, concessions to labor rights movements, relief for the unemployed, controls over corporations, a social security program, a legal right for the government to regulate the economy, and so on, and conspired with Major General Smedley Butler to erect a Fascist government in the US. Butler exposed the attempt, and Roosevelt went on to enact his populist reforms, then later on he went to war against European fascism and went on to defeat Hitler in WWII, and several decades later here we have a leader in the US akin to Hitler, widely compared to Hitler, supported by the same those who tried to erect a fascist government in the US, who is at war domestically with Roosevelt's legacy and is disassembling the Roosevelt reforms one by one, from tax cu
Back in the days a millionaire was a big deal, much like how Dr Evil in Austin Powers demanded "ONE MILLION DOLLARS!" when he held the world for ransom. Now it has to be a billionaire to be significantly wealthy. What's interesting is that while the wealthy have seen their riches increase exponentially, the majority of the population still have never held a million or such worth.
This personally happened to me too and to many, I heard. In my experience a word document got too large that word would no longer open it, and when you consider that it got so huge due to the HUGE amount of work that went into it you can imagine the amount of frustration. Openoffice opened it swiftly.
I'm a power user and have been using openoffice, and before that staroffice, since 2000. I can't see why kids in a school would need any more than I do. I have access to MS office 2003, yet openoffice, and especially with the promising beta of version 2, remains my choice for now and perhaps a time to come.
Mandelson is famously gay. He also famously befriends the rich. I really don't think he's sleazy, and of all the gay people, he's one of those who earn my highest respect, along with Michael Stipes of REM. This is not meant to sound as anti-gay, but there are too many gay men who give the gay community a bad reputation for being bitchy and immature. I think the likes of Mandelson and Stipes are very positive role models even for hetersexual men.
Years ago many of us would cringe at the thought, but these days Big Blue has taken on a certain cachet with their cozying up with Tux, sharing the wealth (IP, source and application contributions) and profit(!!!)ing (which many of us don't mind, because it helps promote the cause.)
Sun has made FAR more source and application contributions than IBM, yet too many people act like a vindictive bratty bitch that the nicer you are to her the more she'll want to step all over you. Too many people "cringe at the thought" that Sun may (.. *gasp*...) "profit(!!!)" from anything remotely open-source.
Yes, kudos to IBM for having known how to manage the suckers with little gestures while they reek billions.
I think your problem, besides critical fallacies, is probably that you're one of those people who's clearly not rich but count yourself on the side of rich, and it's clear in those opinions or numbers you expressed or cited. Either that or you're deliberately trying to mislead, or are misled. I would NOT count the top 25% of the population "rich", or even the top %10. The top 1%, yes. Those are the Rich. And if they contribute any noteworthy amount of tax it's because they own a HUGE proportion of the wealth. "Underscoring the concentration of wealth among the very rich, a study last fall by Arthur Kennickell of the Federal Reserve Board shows the nation's wealthiest 1% owned about $2.3 trillion in stocks, or about 53% of all individually or family-held shares. The wealthiest 1% owned 64% of bonds held by families or individuals, and 31% of total financial assets held by families or individuals, which includes everything from stocks to bonds to cash."
Besides, that's NOT how you consider "tax burden"; you need to learn some "felicity calculus", or in fact, just basic commonsense, to realize that someone earning $56K a year, to use your figure, with a mortgage to pay, a family to provide for, tuition fees for his children, and is one serious medical illness or a layoff from bankruptcy, is NOT less *burderened* by taxes than a multimillionaire is.
I don't know what "rich" people you've known to come to the conclusion that they are 'hard working, dedicated" people; I went to school with rich people, in fact, my partner in most school tasks for many years (on alphabetic basis) was the son of a head of a family that founded a business that lost over a billion in a day, and my best friend during that period whom I shared accomodation with and most of my time was the nephew of a multibillionaire.
The Bush tax burden dispropotionally beneiftted the rich and was driven by politics and NOT economics, especially so as it made NO economic sense http://www.openlettertothepresident.org/. You may want to read this book http://www.savingcapitalism.com/.
Oh, and stop siding with the rich; you're not one of them no matter how you wish to be... you clearly don't think like they do or know the real situation.
The above is nonsense. You clearly don't understand socialism or even capitalism itself. Ever since the magna carta taxation has favored the rich and burdened the poor for mostly political and NOT economic reasons.
I second that. I've used Mozilla ever since they had those M13 and before version numbers, mozilla phoenix (firebird/firefox) ever since it was 0.1, and I never had any problems with rendering slashdot.
From the site "Professors not opposed to Academic Fraud and Terrorism: One hundred and ninety-nine faculty members at the University of Colorado at Boulder dishonored their school today by signing an advertisement in the Boulder Daily Camera in support of Professor Ward Churchill."
The article post is a lot of fuss over nothing, and here's why; I believe nothing on this highly partisan, truly tashy site that publishes junk such as the above is worth reading.
For a start, focus on the user experience. A small but very significant example for me; google has its sponsored search results listed vertically on a semi-bar on the right out of the way of my eyes, whereas Yahoo has its sponsored search results right at the top and every time I do a search there's a mental effort, however brief, that requires me to check where the first unsponsored search result is in space on the page, and whether what my eyes landed on first is a sponsonred of unsponsored result. As such, Google is considerate and Yahoo is rudely intrusive to an extent that I loathe using it for simply this reason, no matter what else they do.
Other examples abound; when it comes to search, Google seems to focus on the users, Yahoo seems to keep on the overture approach of focusing more on those who pay it, the advertisers, and annoying the users.
Your post is empty of substance that there is really nothing I find in it I can respond to; here's what's in your post: "loony rant", "reverse troll", "whined", "spun around", "ignorantly mischaracterized", "mindless partisan idiocy and distortion". All these are namecalling, not intelligent, evidence-based discussion or arguments. Go read some history and political philosophy to educate yourself, learn how to discuss evidence and provide counter-evidence, how to analyze arguments and provide counter-arguments, and then come back and try again. It's ironic that you used a phrase such as "mindless partisan idiocy" when your entire post is nothing but that.
You guys in the US have been misinformed and made illiterate enough to think that liberal and socialist are bad words. Liberals are socialists, and neither is a bad word at all. Liberal and Socialist are labels to be proud of; fascist and oligarchic are what should be shameful to you. Liberals or Socialists are secular humanists in favor of progressive reform and enlightening society, not reverting back to antiquated practices, ideologies, or institutions of the past; in fact, if anyone wants to revert back it is the originalists and essentialists (The GOP/Republicans) who want to return the US to a Spartan rural oligarchy. I have just written about this on usenet.
I'll cut and paste it here
"
I don't care who he is; if he compared Bush to Hitler as reported he's right on this, and he's not being inventive and this isn't new; it is widely known by anyone in the know. Anyone who knows enough about History and Political Philosophy knows for sure that Bush is comparable to Hitler as both are on the same side of History, same side of ideology, and same side of conduct, and the GOP ideologues are not shy about this; they have not hidden their admiration of the chilean fascist economics model, they have not hidden their cultish affiliation around Leo Strauss the protege of Carl Schmitt the prime Nazi ideologue, and they have not hidden their originalist and essentialist fixation on the relevant thought of Aristotle and Plato. Yes, it goes that far back in History, to Ancient Greece; Bush and Hitler, and the Nazi party and the GOP, are upholders of Sparta, the violent rural oligarchic dictatorship, they are not upholders of Athens, the peaceful cosmopolitan liberal democracy.
He's right.
Both Hitler and Bush were ultra-nationalist simpletons who exploited
the Nation-Under-Attack anxieties and the 'patriotic' impulses of the
simple, blood-and-soil masses and enlisted the interests of a corrupt,
racketeering cadre of industrialists and financiers that foresaw in their
domestic, social restructuring projects at home and warmongering,
imperialist ambitions abroad ample profit opportunities. Both Hitler
and Bush were messianic men with a passionate 'vision' and a sense of
'mission' who were obsessed with their personal safety and paranoid
about the risk of assassination and their parties (Nazi, GOP) were
suspicious and intolerant of disagreement and dissent to the extent of
using the "treason" label (treason, un-Patriotic, un-American, hates
America, and so on) against those who don't tow the party line. Both
the parties of Hitler and Bush scapegoated minorities as political
devices to forewarn of calamitious dangers to the original integrity of
a good and glorious nation, most prominent of whom in Hitler's Germany
were the Jews, and in Bush's USA were the Gays. Both parties pushed for
legislation that suspended civil liberties and human rights in the name
of national security, in Hitler's case it was the Enabling Act, and in
Bush's it was the Patriot Act, which presence served to intimidate many
ordinary citizens for fear of being suspected of "treason" and being
persecuted on mere suspicion without due process, and both leaders and
parties maintained an atmosphere of terror, applauded military armament
and endorsed doctrines of preemptive war, with which they invaded other
countries. Furthermore, Bush is supported by the same wealthy elements
that tried to erect a fascist government in the US in the 1933 after
the election of a populist president, Franklin D Roosevelt; the
businessmen and bankers who admired European Fascism at the time and
its heavy-handed stance against communists in its countries, and
intensely disliked Roosevelt's "communist" reforms that entailed
heavier taxes on the wealthy, concessions to labor rights movements,
relief for the unemployed, controls over corporations, a social
security program, a legal right for the government to regulate the
economy, and so on, and conspired with Major General Smedley Butler to
erect a Fascist government in the US. Butler exp
I'm really surprised that there is a Western democracy where Suicide, or the attempt of it, is still an illegal act. This is so medieval, so behind the times. This is almost as if Psychiatry never happened; do they still accuse the old and frail of witchery when they become mentally ill in Australia and burn them at the stake?! Do they still throw them in flotation tanks to see if they sink like the healthy would be expected, or if their osteoporotic bodies with their brittle bones, lacking in lean mass, as most elderly women are, float in water and hence conclude that they floated because they lack a soul and the devil had possessed them? Do they still torture them and search the genitalia of elderly women looking for the "devil's mark", because the devil is "cunning" and has hidden it from sight, which they often found because the searchers were ignorant and the women were of poor health?
This is the legislation from which the criminalisation of a feature of mental illness had come; one where the faithful were promised to be joyous and therefore the wretched must had been wicked and from their sins they deserved their misery, one where God owned the soul of a man and a man should not commit a crime against his Lord. This is as if humanism never happened. I am surprised that it is still a crime in Australia! How unhuman, how inhumane!
I'm sorry for what you've been through but I'm sure your sister did NOT do it out of careless selfishness. You say that the whole family have become 'permanently melancholic', but, and I'm sorry to say this, the almost certain likelihood considering that your sister killed herself is that the family wasn't perfectly free from trouble to start with (and I'm carefully choosing my words here to remain sensitive to your feelings, so I have deliberately understated what I meant).
Your sister did NOT commit a crime to deserve your anger. I'm sure she had her reasons to die, wither justified, or out of illness.
In my humble opinion, they don't need to open up their library to everyone. Sure, it is useful, but it is mostly useful for a certain technical and professional crowd. This is not a library that the majority of the public will care about. Those for whom this library is relevant should afford to pay their IEEE membership costs, as $250 p/a is not much compared to many other disciplines and professions. Those in Academia such as students can use their Academic libraries; the IEEE does not need to subsidize Academic institutions and education.
Slashdot Mirror
I've posted this in a previous topic relevant to the practices of the Bush administration and I'll post it here since it's relevant yet again despite those, apparently, Bush supporters with mod points who marked my previous post a flamebait or a troll.
" I don't care who he is; if he compared Bush to Hitler as reported he's right on this, and he's not being inventive and this isn't new; it is widely known by anyone in the know. Anyone who knows enough about History and Political Philosophy knows for sure that Bush is comparable to Hitler as both are on the same side of History, same side of ideology, and same side of conduct, and the GOP ideologues are not shy about this; they have not hidden their admiration of the chilean fascist economics model, they have not hidden their cultish affiliation around Leo Strauss the protege of Carl Schmitt the prime Nazi ideologue, and they have not hidden their originalist and essentialist fixation on the relevant thought of Aristotle and Plato. Yes, it goes that far back in History, to Ancient Greece; Bush and Hitler, and the Nazi party and the GOP, are upholders of Sparta, the violent rural oligarchic dictatorship, they are not upholders of Athens, the peaceful cosmopolitan liberal democracy.
He's right.
Both Hitler and Bush were ultra-nationalist simpletons who exploited the Nation-Under-Attack anxieties and the 'patriotic' impulses of the simple, blood-and-soil masses and enlisted the interests of a corrupt, racketeering cadre of industrialists and financiers that foresaw in their domestic, social restructuring projects at home and warmongering, imperialist ambitions abroad ample profit opportunities. Both Hitler and Bush were messianic men with a passionate 'vision' and a sense of 'mission' who were obsessed with their personal safety and paranoid about the risk of assassination and their parties (Nazi, GOP) were suspicious and intolerant of disagreement and dissent to the extent of using the "treason" label (treason, un-Patriotic, un-American, hates America, and so on) against those who don't tow the party line. Both the parties of Hitler and Bush scapegoated minorities as political devices to forewarn of calamitious dangers to the original integrity of a good and glorious nation, most prominent of whom in Hitler's Germany were the Jews, and in Bush's USA were the Gays. Both parties pushed for legislation that suspended civil liberties and human rights in the name of national security, in Hitler's case it was the Enabling Act, and in Bush's it was the Patriot Act, which presence served to intimidate many ordinary citizens for fear of being suspected of "treason" and being persecuted on mere suspicion without due process, and both leaders and parties maintained an atmosphere of terror, applauded military armament and endorsed doctrines of preemptive war, with which they invaded other countries. Furthermore, Bush is supported by the same wealthy elements that tried to erect a fascist government in the US in the 1933 after the election of a populist president, Franklin D Roosevelt; the businessmen and bankers who admired European Fascism at the time and its heavy-handed stance against communists in its countries, and intensely disliked Roosevelt's "communist" reforms that entailed heavier taxes on the wealthy, concessions to labor rights movements, relief for the unemployed, controls over corporations, a social security program, a legal right for the government to regulate the economy, and so on, and conspired with Major General Smedley Butler to erect a Fascist government in the US. Butler exposed the attempt, and Roosevelt went on to enact his populist reforms, then later on he went to war against European fascism and went on to defeat Hitler in WWII, and several decades later here we have a leader in the US akin to Hitler, widely compared to Hitler, supported by the same those who tried to erect a fascist government in the US, who is at war domestically with Roosevelt's legacy and is disassembling the Roosevelt reforms one by one, from tax cu
So is Avast! which is free. Tiny has a beta version of it's firewall for windows 64 that you can try. Virtualdub has a 64-bit release too.
Back in the days a millionaire was a big deal, much like how Dr Evil in Austin Powers demanded "ONE MILLION DOLLARS!" when he held the world for ransom. Now it has to be a billionaire to be significantly wealthy. What's interesting is that while the wealthy have seen their riches increase exponentially, the majority of the population still have never held a million or such worth.
Microsoft using scarcity of resources as an excuse is something I find dififcult to accept.
This personally happened to me too and to many, I heard. In my experience a word document got too large that word would no longer open it, and when you consider that it got so huge due to the HUGE amount of work that went into it you can imagine the amount of frustration. Openoffice opened it swiftly.
Openoffice.org 1.x is what mozilla seamonkey is. It's not comparable to firefox yet.
I'm a power user and have been using openoffice, and before that staroffice, since 2000. I can't see why kids in a school would need any more than I do. I have access to MS office 2003, yet openoffice, and especially with the promising beta of version 2, remains my choice for now and perhaps a time to come.
Mandelson is famously gay. He also famously befriends the rich. I really don't think he's sleazy, and of all the gay people, he's one of those who earn my highest respect, along with Michael Stipes of REM. This is not meant to sound as anti-gay, but there are too many gay men who give the gay community a bad reputation for being bitchy and immature. I think the likes of Mandelson and Stipes are very positive role models even for hetersexual men.
mod parent up please!
Sometimes i wonder if the tabloid drama generated by changing actors makes for more publicity than the quality of the show itself.
Years ago many of us would cringe at the thought, but these days Big Blue has taken on a certain cachet with their cozying up with Tux, sharing the wealth (IP, source and application contributions) and profit(!!!)ing (which many of us don't mind, because it helps promote the cause.)
Sun has made FAR more source and application contributions than IBM, yet too many people act like a vindictive bratty bitch that the nicer you are to her the more she'll want to step all over you. Too many people "cringe at the thought" that Sun may (.. *gasp*...) "profit(!!!)" from anything remotely open-source.
Yes, kudos to IBM for having known how to manage the suckers with little gestures while they reek billions.
Fox News makes "improper reporting" hour after hour, day after day, and they never apologize.
I think your problem, besides critical fallacies, is probably that you're one of those people who's clearly not rich but count yourself on the side of rich, and it's clear in those opinions or numbers you expressed or cited. Either that or you're deliberately trying to mislead, or are misled. I would NOT count the top 25% of the population "rich", or even the top %10. The top 1%, yes. Those are the Rich. And if they contribute any noteworthy amount of tax it's because they own a HUGE proportion of the wealth. "Underscoring the concentration of wealth among the very rich, a study last fall by Arthur Kennickell of the Federal Reserve Board shows the nation's wealthiest 1% owned about $2.3 trillion in stocks, or about 53% of all individually or family-held shares. The wealthiest 1% owned 64% of bonds held by families or individuals, and 31% of total financial assets held by families or individuals, which includes everything from stocks to bonds to cash."
Besides, that's NOT how you consider "tax burden"; you need to learn some "felicity calculus", or in fact, just basic commonsense, to realize that someone earning $56K a year, to use your figure, with a mortgage to pay, a family to provide for, tuition fees for his children, and is one serious medical illness or a layoff from bankruptcy, is NOT less *burderened* by taxes than a multimillionaire is.
I don't know what "rich" people you've known to come to the conclusion that they are 'hard working, dedicated" people; I went to school with rich people, in fact, my partner in most school tasks for many years (on alphabetic basis) was the son of a head of a family that founded a business that lost over a billion in a day, and my best friend during that period whom I shared accomodation with and most of my time was the nephew of a multibillionaire.
The Bush tax burden dispropotionally beneiftted the rich and was driven by politics and NOT economics, especially so as it made NO economic sense http://www.openlettertothepresident.org/. You may want to read this book http://www.savingcapitalism.com/.
Oh, and stop siding with the rich; you're not one of them no matter how you wish to be... you clearly don't think like they do or know the real situation.
The above is nonsense. You clearly don't understand socialism or even capitalism itself. Ever since the magna carta taxation has favored the rich and burdened the poor for mostly political and NOT economic reasons.
I wonder what he thinks of their customer service now.
Well, 2222222222 is Sat, 02 Jun 2040 03:57:02 GMT
I second that. I've used Mozilla ever since they had those M13 and before version numbers, mozilla phoenix (firebird/firefox) ever since it was 0.1, and I never had any problems with rendering slashdot.
So what if wikipedia is number 1?
Those searching for online poker will skip wikipedia and number 2 and on is still good enough.
I don't see them really affecting the spammers.
From the site "Professors not opposed to Academic Fraud and Terrorism: One hundred and ninety-nine faculty members at the University of Colorado at Boulder dishonored their school today by signing an advertisement in the Boulder Daily Camera in support of Professor Ward Churchill."
The article post is a lot of fuss over nothing, and here's why; I believe nothing on this highly partisan, truly tashy site that publishes junk such as the above is worth reading.
For a start, focus on the user experience. A small but very significant example for me; google has its sponsored search results listed vertically on a semi-bar on the right out of the way of my eyes, whereas Yahoo has its sponsored search results right at the top and every time I do a search there's a mental effort, however brief, that requires me to check where the first unsponsored search result is in space on the page, and whether what my eyes landed on first is a sponsonred of unsponsored result. As such, Google is considerate and Yahoo is rudely intrusive to an extent that I loathe using it for simply this reason, no matter what else they do.
Other examples abound; when it comes to search, Google seems to focus on the users, Yahoo seems to keep on the overture approach of focusing more on those who pay it, the advertisers, and annoying the users.
Your post is empty of substance that there is really nothing I find in it I can respond to; here's what's in your post: "loony rant", "reverse troll", "whined", "spun around", "ignorantly mischaracterized", "mindless partisan idiocy and distortion". All these are namecalling, not intelligent, evidence-based discussion or arguments. Go read some history and political philosophy to educate yourself, learn how to discuss evidence and provide counter-evidence, how to analyze arguments and provide counter-arguments, and then come back and try again. It's ironic that you used a phrase such as "mindless partisan idiocy" when your entire post is nothing but that.
You guys in the US have been misinformed and made illiterate enough to think that liberal and socialist are bad words. Liberals are socialists, and neither is a bad word at all. Liberal and Socialist are labels to be proud of; fascist and oligarchic are what should be shameful to you. Liberals or Socialists are secular humanists in favor of progressive reform and enlightening society, not reverting back to antiquated practices, ideologies, or institutions of the past; in fact, if anyone wants to revert back it is the originalists and essentialists (The GOP/Republicans) who want to return the US to a Spartan rural oligarchy. I have just written about this on usenet.
I'll cut and paste it here
" I don't care who he is; if he compared Bush to Hitler as reported he's right on this, and he's not being inventive and this isn't new; it is widely known by anyone in the know. Anyone who knows enough about History and Political Philosophy knows for sure that Bush is comparable to Hitler as both are on the same side of History, same side of ideology, and same side of conduct, and the GOP ideologues are not shy about this; they have not hidden their admiration of the chilean fascist economics model, they have not hidden their cultish affiliation around Leo Strauss the protege of Carl Schmitt the prime Nazi ideologue, and they have not hidden their originalist and essentialist fixation on the relevant thought of Aristotle and Plato. Yes, it goes that far back in History, to Ancient Greece; Bush and Hitler, and the Nazi party and the GOP, are upholders of Sparta, the violent rural oligarchic dictatorship, they are not upholders of Athens, the peaceful cosmopolitan liberal democracy.
He's right.
Both Hitler and Bush were ultra-nationalist simpletons who exploited the Nation-Under-Attack anxieties and the 'patriotic' impulses of the simple, blood-and-soil masses and enlisted the interests of a corrupt, racketeering cadre of industrialists and financiers that foresaw in their domestic, social restructuring projects at home and warmongering, imperialist ambitions abroad ample profit opportunities. Both Hitler and Bush were messianic men with a passionate 'vision' and a sense of 'mission' who were obsessed with their personal safety and paranoid about the risk of assassination and their parties (Nazi, GOP) were suspicious and intolerant of disagreement and dissent to the extent of using the "treason" label (treason, un-Patriotic, un-American, hates America, and so on) against those who don't tow the party line. Both the parties of Hitler and Bush scapegoated minorities as political devices to forewarn of calamitious dangers to the original integrity of a good and glorious nation, most prominent of whom in Hitler's Germany were the Jews, and in Bush's USA were the Gays. Both parties pushed for legislation that suspended civil liberties and human rights in the name of national security, in Hitler's case it was the Enabling Act, and in Bush's it was the Patriot Act, which presence served to intimidate many ordinary citizens for fear of being suspected of "treason" and being persecuted on mere suspicion without due process, and both leaders and parties maintained an atmosphere of terror, applauded military armament and endorsed doctrines of preemptive war, with which they invaded other countries. Furthermore, Bush is supported by the same wealthy elements that tried to erect a fascist government in the US in the 1933 after the election of a populist president, Franklin D Roosevelt; the businessmen and bankers who admired European Fascism at the time and its heavy-handed stance against communists in its countries, and intensely disliked Roosevelt's "communist" reforms that entailed heavier taxes on the wealthy, concessions to labor rights movements, relief for the unemployed, controls over corporations, a social security program, a legal right for the government to regulate the economy, and so on, and conspired with Major General Smedley Butler to erect a Fascist government in the US. Butler exp
I'm really surprised that there is a Western democracy where Suicide, or the attempt of it, is still an illegal act. This is so medieval, so behind the times. This is almost as if Psychiatry never happened; do they still accuse the old and frail of witchery when they become mentally ill in Australia and burn them at the stake?! Do they still throw them in flotation tanks to see if they sink like the healthy would be expected, or if their osteoporotic bodies with their brittle bones, lacking in lean mass, as most elderly women are, float in water and hence conclude that they floated because they lack a soul and the devil had possessed them? Do they still torture them and search the genitalia of elderly women looking for the "devil's mark", because the devil is "cunning" and has hidden it from sight, which they often found because the searchers were ignorant and the women were of poor health?
This is the legislation from which the criminalisation of a feature of mental illness had come; one where the faithful were promised to be joyous and therefore the wretched must had been wicked and from their sins they deserved their misery, one where God owned the soul of a man and a man should not commit a crime against his Lord. This is as if humanism never happened. I am surprised that it is still a crime in Australia! How unhuman, how inhumane!
I'm sorry for what you've been through but I'm sure your sister did NOT do it out of careless selfishness. You say that the whole family have become 'permanently melancholic', but, and I'm sorry to say this, the almost certain likelihood considering that your sister killed herself is that the family wasn't perfectly free from trouble to start with (and I'm carefully choosing my words here to remain sensitive to your feelings, so I have deliberately understated what I meant).
Your sister did NOT commit a crime to deserve your anger. I'm sure she had her reasons to die, wither justified, or out of illness.
In my humble opinion, they don't need to open up their library to everyone. Sure, it is useful, but it is mostly useful for a certain technical and professional crowd. This is not a library that the majority of the public will care about. Those for whom this library is relevant should afford to pay their IEEE membership costs, as $250 p/a is not much compared to many other disciplines and professions. Those in Academia such as students can use their Academic libraries; the IEEE does not need to subsidize Academic institutions and education.