See http://waragainsttheweak.com/ - IBM's punch card technology was instrumental in helping Hitler round up the Jews during his 'Final Solution'.
So, they are trying to stake out a visible position in this issue, now, knowing that ultimately, the GOP is so behind this that its pretty much inevitable. The GOP is pushing medical IT very hard.. This is basically a way to implement the insurance industry's wet dream.. genetic information for everybody in databases.. This is the whole goal of the Human Genome Project..
Its eugenics - with a friendly, neofascist face..
See http://waragainsttheweak.com/
this.. For example, by not hiring people with a given gene, they might be preventing themselves from hiring the next Einstein or Newton...
The insurance companies may whine, but ultimately, they will need to abandon this eugenics thing. Why? Because eugenics and Medical IT don't get along... Doctors will refuse to use databases if the information in them is ruining people's lives as well as saving them.. They may say that they cant be profitable unless they know this information, but thats a baldfaced lie..
That is, unless they are forced to... by the 'government'
father|brother|sister|mother|cousin|aunt had XYZ disease...
Why? Because insurance companies wouldn't insure you... Thats the beauty of private insurance... They can use information like that to create an underclass of permanently marginalized people..
wall.. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, was Hitler's American financier.. (or 'Hitler's Angel' as the NY Daily Tribune put it) and the US was uber-friendly with many Nazis after WWII. It does need to be added that this was in our fight against also-*quite*-evil Stalin and the then hyperrepressive USSR, but this cozy relationship with fascists and fascism survives to this day, as evidenced by the ongoing 'ethnic outreach' efforts of the GOP, which targets many former fascists and their communities that have emigrated to the US, as natural allies of the American far right.
of US technical workers is just that, a myth?
The problem is that business would rather hire low-cost foreign labor, either here or abroad, than train their own loyal staff members, or hire domestically, at domestic wages that reflect the cost of living in the US. However, they have no problem with charging domestic rates for their services, and freezing out foreign firms when it comes to providing many much-needed inexpensive services in the US (like blocking access to identical, but low-cost prescription drugs, inexpensive hardware from abroad, etc.)
Working Americans living and working abroad are also expected to pay US taxes!
Meanwhile, many of the nations richest pay little or no taxes, by manipulating the rules to exploit loopholes.
In "Fascism Anyone?," Laurence Britt identifies 14 characteristics common to fascist regimes. His comparisons of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, and Pinochet yielded this list of 14 "identifying characteristics of fascism."
http://www.oldamericancentury.org/14pts.htm
I would call the modern China fascist as well. (of course, the Nationalists started out as admitted fascists who admired Hitler and Mussolini, but Taiwan has been democratic for the last decade, and the bloodbaths of the past are clearly over..)
All totalitarian governments are very similar. They worship power and feel might makes right. They seek control over one's thoughts and over information, always seeking to block outside information or inconvenient facts. They are almost always strikingly racist, to the point of organizing genocides and often democides (genocide of one's own people) based on politicl beleifs or family history of dissent or employment, or marital status. (Many fascist governments discriminate against the unmarried and they also almost always outlaw abortion, desiring many young men to serve as cannon fodder, in a state of perpetual warfare or near warfare)
Fascism was very strong in the US in the past. (Henry Ford was Hitler's main inspiration- he said, and Prescott Bush, the current President's grandfather, was his angel investor - according to the New York Tribune.) The CIA had a cozy relationship with many ex-Nazis after the war, in a story which to this day largely remains untold..
At least that seems to be the neocons position. We seem to have a special distaste for nations that are supporting the International Criminal Court. (set up to try the 'people' who have committed CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY)
Add that to our repeated support of fascist governments around the world - and our overthrowing of pluralistic (i.e two party) alternatives that displease the US corporate power brokers.. and I would say that 'Houston, we have a problem' - and that problem is real-world, ugly, nascent American fascism.
Organ Sales and Forced Removal of Organs
on
The New Face Lift
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Is already a BIG problem.. China sells the organs of condemmed prisoners - a LOT of innocent people I am sure suffer this.. It could happen here as well if jobs keep disappearing..
If anyone tells you otherwise, they don't know much about power and the powerless.. and how frequently the powerless lose anything of value they have to the rich and powerful..
what does that mean? By any measure, American workers are paid very well, compared to their counterparts in most of the rest of the world. So we need to justify that increased cost with increased value.. Higher productivity. Seriously.
Nobody owes us a free lunch. Businesses are not in business to 'provide jobs' they are here to make money.. Its surprising how few people get that..
OTOH, the US *desperately* needs a HUGE increase in the priority we give to education of the jobs of the 21st century will pass us by..
Programming in the near future will be done by software.. Only people with truly creative jobs will be employed.
Most people won't be able to hack it and they will be out of work. Nomatter how little they are willing to work for.. Its supply and demand.. Lots of supply and little demand equals low salaries..
Lots of people may starve.. This is no joke.. Under capitalism, business doesnt exist for people, its the other way around.. We exist for them..
Or don't, its your choice.. Yes, maybe we need to change that situation.. But I don't see it happening - people are completely clueless that we need to look ahead and plan for technology's successes in improving productivity's implications..
in less than a generation.. Globally..
Its already almost there in most of the developed world. If we can only survive the next 30 years or so, we will turn the corner and technology will start to catch up with the world's population..
Assuming we dont have a war.. If we do, we could be annihilated.. All of us.. And then some...
Even the 75% of the people on Earth who know or care next to nothing about the US could end up dying..
In fact, its been happening for a long time now..
The net result, within our lifetimes, will be what we make of it.. Either we will have a world where hunger and the hatred that comes from extremes of poverty and affluence will be a memory, or we will have a very horrible world indeed..
We don't know.. But we do know that computers and Moore's Law are unavoidably making strides that will make all scriptable jobs redundant. That is most jobs.. 90% of all jobs..
How are we going to deal with this..
I wouldn't in a million years be able to tell you how.. Do you?
The US seems to think scientists will take words instead of wages. That scientists will accept abuse, rather than seek a more receptive climate elsewhere. Its the typical approach of narcissists. Those who take and never give. Those who think they have some kind of right to lie.
Which brings me to a question.
Why are scientists being persecuted here in the US?
Could it be because science refuses to be politicized? Or because scientists are speaking out against the looting of Americas future 9and treasury). About global warming? It just might.
There was another global superpower that made the mistake of persecuting the learned, the cosmopolitan and the scientists. Spain.
They never recovered.
In the Inquisition, (which officially lasted until the 1800s.) During that time Spain threw away a positin that made them the envy of the entire world in the 1500s and 1600s..
Why? Like the US, they were fatally obsessed with the preservation of their rigid status quo..
Millions were tortured to death for witchcraft and heresy.
I've read quite a few good things about the SGI Altix, which uses Itanium 2, I think.
They have a 1024 processor syetem that runs Linux very well and I think it's one of the very best and most scalable systems out there, and additionally their hardware architecture uses a very clean design with incredibly good memory bandwidth. Maybe one of the very best out there, if not the best.
They are not a has-been by any means.
This is a no-compromise company with some very solid products that still deserves a *lot* of respect.
They have also made quite a few contributions back to the open-source community, not just recently, over the last ten years or more..
The Web offers too much freedom. You should not be able to turn ads off. You should not be able to scroll away from them (that was the original purpose of frames, did you know?)
To make a long story short, you *will* be assimilated...
Gore never claimed that..
It was part of a coordinated right-wing disinformation campaign, just one of many many many..
Read about it in about a zillion books on your newsstand now.. David Brock's "Blinded by the Right" and "The Great Republican Noise Machine" both describe this incredible force for evil in chilling detail. He used to be a GOP insider, so he knows of what he speaks. These people have no shame. Now they have targeted blogs.. perhaps the parent post was part of it..
Another big part of the GOP disinfo campaign are framing attacks.. Typically, they describe an issue in terms that have the exact opposite meaning of what they describe..
See this excerpt from the recent book "Don't Think of an Elephant" for more on how this works.. Its excellent..
http://www.chelseagreen.com/images/DTE_Sampler.pdf
Theres also much more on the GOP's deceptive framing attacks at the Rockridge Institute
http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/bookstore/elepha nt
Is there a better URL? The Minoans are fascinating
on
Atlantis Found. Again.
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm fascinated by the culture of the ancient Minoans, that lived in this area during the late Bronze Age.
The Atlantis myth is almost certainly about them. They thrived for at least 2000 years, until a series of volcanic events around 1700 BC that appear to have destroyed their major cities (and others) and ended in the assimilation of their culture into others, most notably the Mycaenians - the ancestors of the ancient Greeks, and the beginnings of a long dark age in the Mediterranean that halved the population or more, lasted several hundred years and reduced many area cultures to pre-literacy. Our historical era begins in the dawn of literacy out of the ashes of this time.
The Minoan millennia's history is still almost completely unguessable. Archaeological sites that exist are difficult to find, sometimes obscured by this volcanic action, water (changing sea levels) or by the massive desertification that occurred in North Africa. There may be still much to learn from seawrecks on the bottom of the Mediterranean, though.
These events probably also formed the factual basis for the Biblical plagues of Egypt. (huge volcano-caused climate changes, tsunamis, earthquakes, etc. resulting in a 'nuclear winter' lasting several years in which a significant portion of the Northern Hemisphere's population died of starvation.)
The volcanic caldera of the present-day Aegean island of Santorini was probably the location of this explosion.
The surviving Minoans clearly were scattered across the world...the Phoenecians, the Carthaginians, and many other ancient Semitic cultures (the Sephardic Jews and the Arabs) may all be descended from them. So were the Pelasgians. And perhaps the Philistines of the Biblical era.
The Minoans were probably the real proto-Greeks.
They are truly an enigma. It appears that they lived most of this time in peace, indeed, the remains of their cities that we have found never have walls.
They had indoor plumbing, flush toilets, buildings up to five stories high.
There are traces of their influence all the way from Spain to India. They were probably the model for Tolkien's "Numenorians", as well as many cultural myths..
Read Platos "Critas' and "Timmaeus' for his version of the story.. Its fascinating.
They were Europe's first advanced civilization...
Their written language (what little that we have) Linear A has still not been deciphered and it is one of the great mysteries in linguistics...and cryptology..
Slashdot Mirror
See http://waragainsttheweak.com/ - IBM's punch card technology was instrumental in helping Hitler round up the Jews during his 'Final Solution'. So, they are trying to stake out a visible position in this issue, now, knowing that ultimately, the GOP is so behind this that its pretty much inevitable. The GOP is pushing medical IT very hard.. This is basically a way to implement the insurance industry's wet dream.. genetic information for everybody in databases.. This is the whole goal of the Human Genome Project.. Its eugenics - with a friendly, neofascist face.. See http://waragainsttheweak.com/
this.. For example, by not hiring people with a given gene, they might be preventing themselves from hiring the next Einstein or Newton... The insurance companies may whine, but ultimately, they will need to abandon this eugenics thing. Why? Because eugenics and Medical IT don't get along... Doctors will refuse to use databases if the information in them is ruining people's lives as well as saving them.. They may say that they cant be profitable unless they know this information, but thats a baldfaced lie.. That is, unless they are forced to... by the 'government'
father|brother|sister|mother|cousin|aunt had XYZ disease... Why? Because insurance companies wouldn't insure you... Thats the beauty of private insurance... They can use information like that to create an underclass of permanently marginalized people..
wall.. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, was Hitler's American financier.. (or 'Hitler's Angel' as the NY Daily Tribune put it) and the US was uber-friendly with many Nazis after WWII. It does need to be added that this was in our fight against also-*quite*-evil Stalin and the then hyperrepressive USSR, but this cozy relationship with fascists and fascism survives to this day, as evidenced by the ongoing 'ethnic outreach' efforts of the GOP, which targets many former fascists and their communities that have emigrated to the US, as natural allies of the American far right.
of US technical workers is just that, a myth? The problem is that business would rather hire low-cost foreign labor, either here or abroad, than train their own loyal staff members, or hire domestically, at domestic wages that reflect the cost of living in the US. However, they have no problem with charging domestic rates for their services, and freezing out foreign firms when it comes to providing many much-needed inexpensive services in the US (like blocking access to identical, but low-cost prescription drugs, inexpensive hardware from abroad, etc.) Working Americans living and working abroad are also expected to pay US taxes! Meanwhile, many of the nations richest pay little or no taxes, by manipulating the rules to exploit loopholes.
In "Fascism Anyone?," Laurence Britt identifies 14 characteristics common to fascist regimes. His comparisons of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, and Pinochet yielded this list of 14 "identifying characteristics of fascism." http://www.oldamericancentury.org/14pts.htm I would call the modern China fascist as well. (of course, the Nationalists started out as admitted fascists who admired Hitler and Mussolini, but Taiwan has been democratic for the last decade, and the bloodbaths of the past are clearly over..) All totalitarian governments are very similar. They worship power and feel might makes right. They seek control over one's thoughts and over information, always seeking to block outside information or inconvenient facts. They are almost always strikingly racist, to the point of organizing genocides and often democides (genocide of one's own people) based on politicl beleifs or family history of dissent or employment, or marital status. (Many fascist governments discriminate against the unmarried and they also almost always outlaw abortion, desiring many young men to serve as cannon fodder, in a state of perpetual warfare or near warfare) Fascism was very strong in the US in the past. (Henry Ford was Hitler's main inspiration- he said, and Prescott Bush, the current President's grandfather, was his angel investor - according to the New York Tribune.) The CIA had a cozy relationship with many ex-Nazis after the war, in a story which to this day largely remains untold..
At least that seems to be the neocons position. We seem to have a special distaste for nations that are supporting the International Criminal Court. (set up to try the 'people' who have committed CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY) Add that to our repeated support of fascist governments around the world - and our overthrowing of pluralistic (i.e two party) alternatives that displease the US corporate power brokers.. and I would say that 'Houston, we have a problem' - and that problem is real-world, ugly, nascent American fascism.
Is already a BIG problem.. China sells the organs of condemmed prisoners - a LOT of innocent people I am sure suffer this.. It could happen here as well if jobs keep disappearing.. If anyone tells you otherwise, they don't know much about power and the powerless.. and how frequently the powerless lose anything of value they have to the rich and powerful..
what does that mean? By any measure, American workers are paid very well, compared to their counterparts in most of the rest of the world. So we need to justify that increased cost with increased value.. Higher productivity. Seriously. Nobody owes us a free lunch. Businesses are not in business to 'provide jobs' they are here to make money.. Its surprising how few people get that.. OTOH, the US *desperately* needs a HUGE increase in the priority we give to education of the jobs of the 21st century will pass us by.. Programming in the near future will be done by software.. Only people with truly creative jobs will be employed. Most people won't be able to hack it and they will be out of work. Nomatter how little they are willing to work for.. Its supply and demand.. Lots of supply and little demand equals low salaries.. Lots of people may starve.. This is no joke.. Under capitalism, business doesnt exist for people, its the other way around.. We exist for them.. Or don't, its your choice.. Yes, maybe we need to change that situation.. But I don't see it happening - people are completely clueless that we need to look ahead and plan for technology's successes in improving productivity's implications..
in less than a generation.. Globally.. Its already almost there in most of the developed world. If we can only survive the next 30 years or so, we will turn the corner and technology will start to catch up with the world's population.. Assuming we dont have a war.. If we do, we could be annihilated.. All of us.. And then some... Even the 75% of the people on Earth who know or care next to nothing about the US could end up dying..
In fact, its been happening for a long time now.. The net result, within our lifetimes, will be what we make of it.. Either we will have a world where hunger and the hatred that comes from extremes of poverty and affluence will be a memory, or we will have a very horrible world indeed.. We don't know.. But we do know that computers and Moore's Law are unavoidably making strides that will make all scriptable jobs redundant. That is most jobs.. 90% of all jobs.. How are we going to deal with this.. I wouldn't in a million years be able to tell you how.. Do you?
The US seems to think scientists will take words instead of wages. That scientists will accept abuse, rather than seek a more receptive climate elsewhere. Its the typical approach of narcissists. Those who take and never give. Those who think they have some kind of right to lie. Which brings me to a question. Why are scientists being persecuted here in the US? Could it be because science refuses to be politicized? Or because scientists are speaking out against the looting of Americas future 9and treasury). About global warming? It just might. There was another global superpower that made the mistake of persecuting the learned, the cosmopolitan and the scientists. Spain. They never recovered. In the Inquisition, (which officially lasted until the 1800s.) During that time Spain threw away a positin that made them the envy of the entire world in the 1500s and 1600s.. Why? Like the US, they were fatally obsessed with the preservation of their rigid status quo.. Millions were tortured to death for witchcraft and heresy.
I've read quite a few good things about the SGI Altix, which uses Itanium 2, I think. They have a 1024 processor syetem that runs Linux very well and I think it's one of the very best and most scalable systems out there, and additionally their hardware architecture uses a very clean design with incredibly good memory bandwidth. Maybe one of the very best out there, if not the best. They are not a has-been by any means. This is a no-compromise company with some very solid products that still deserves a *lot* of respect. They have also made quite a few contributions back to the open-source community, not just recently, over the last ten years or more..
The Web offers too much freedom. You should not be able to turn ads off. You should not be able to scroll away from them (that was the original purpose of frames, did you know?) To make a long story short, you *will* be assimilated...
Gore never claimed that.. It was part of a coordinated right-wing disinformation campaign, just one of many many many.. Read about it in about a zillion books on your newsstand now.. David Brock's "Blinded by the Right" and "The Great Republican Noise Machine" both describe this incredible force for evil in chilling detail. He used to be a GOP insider, so he knows of what he speaks. These people have no shame. Now they have targeted blogs.. perhaps the parent post was part of it.. Another big part of the GOP disinfo campaign are framing attacks.. Typically, they describe an issue in terms that have the exact opposite meaning of what they describe.. See this excerpt from the recent book "Don't Think of an Elephant" for more on how this works.. Its excellent.. http://www.chelseagreen.com/images/DTE_Sampler.pdf
Theres also much more on the GOP's deceptive framing attacks at the Rockridge Institute
http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/bookstore/elepha nt
The Minoan millennia's history is still almost completely unguessable. Archaeological sites that exist are difficult to find, sometimes obscured by this volcanic action, water (changing sea levels) or by the massive desertification that occurred in North Africa. There may be still much to learn from seawrecks on the bottom of the Mediterranean, though.
These events probably also formed the factual basis for the Biblical plagues of Egypt. (huge volcano-caused climate changes, tsunamis, earthquakes, etc. resulting in a 'nuclear winter' lasting several years in which a significant portion of the Northern Hemisphere's population died of starvation.) The volcanic caldera of the present-day Aegean island of Santorini was probably the location of this explosion. The surviving Minoans clearly were scattered across the world...the Phoenecians, the Carthaginians, and many other ancient Semitic cultures (the Sephardic Jews and the Arabs) may all be descended from them. So were the Pelasgians. And perhaps the Philistines of the Biblical era.
The Minoans were probably the real proto-Greeks.
They are truly an enigma. It appears that they lived most of this time in peace, indeed, the remains of their cities that we have found never have walls. They had indoor plumbing, flush toilets, buildings up to five stories high. There are traces of their influence all the way from Spain to India. They were probably the model for Tolkien's "Numenorians", as well as many cultural myths.. Read Platos "Critas' and "Timmaeus' for his version of the story.. Its fascinating. They were Europe's first advanced civilization... Their written language (what little that we have) Linear A has still not been deciphered and it is one of the great mysteries in linguistics...and cryptology..