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Re: sed /s/United States/Roman Empire/g --------------090600030109070305070809 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Owen Byrne wrote: > R. A. Hettinga wrote: > >> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- >> Hash: SHA1 >> >> At 10:32 AM -0400 on 9/21/02, Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote: >> >> >> >> >>> Cool --- I wasn't aware that the US had lifted it's population out >>> of poverty! When did this happen? I wonder where the media gets the >>> idea that the wealth gap is widening and deepening... >>> >> >> >> All the world loves a smartass... >> >> :-). >> >> Seriously. Look at he life expectancy and human carrying capacity of >> this continent before the Europeans got here. Look at it now. Even >> for descendants of the original inhabitants. Even for the descendents >> of slaves, who were brought here by force. >> >> More stuff, cheaper. That's progress. >> >> Poverty, of course, is not relative. It's absolute. Disparity in >> wealth has nothing to do with it. >> >> It's like saying that groups have rights, when, in truth, only >> individuals do. Like group rights, "disparity" in wealth is >> statistical sophistry. >> >> >> Besides, even if you can't help the distribution, industrial wealth >> is almost always transitory, and so is relative poverty, even when >> there are no confiscatory death-taxes. The 20th anniversary Forbes >> 400 just came out, and only a few tens of people are still there >> since 1982, a time which had significantly higher marginal taxes on >> wealth, income, and inheritance than we do now. More to the point, >> they're nowhere near the top. >> >> Lovely quote from the Forbes 400 list: "and not a single Astor, Vanderbilt or Morgan rates a mention on the current Forbes Four Hundred. " But you have to studiously ignore the 4 Rockefellers, 3 Gettys, 3 Hearsts, Fords, Kelloggs, Wrigleys, and so on. There are more self-made people on the list than I previously alluded to - I made a mistake. Most of them seem to have Ivy League educations, or are Ivy League dropouts, suggesting to me that they weren't exactly poor to start with. Some of them have lovely self-made stories like: #347, Johnston, Summerfield K Jr track this personTrack This Person <http://www.forbes.com/peopletracker/add_person.jhtml?successURL=%2Fpeopletracker%2Fprotected%2Frich_tracker.jhtml&errorURL=%2Fpeopletracker%2Ferror.jhtml&personId=221899> | See all Bacon Makers <http://www.forbes.com/lists/results.jhtml?passListId=54&passYear=2002&passListType=Person&resultsStart=1&resultsHowMany=25&resultsSortProperties=%2Bnumberfield1%2C%2Bstringfield1&resultsSortCategoryName=rank&searchParameter1=10Str%7C%7CPatCS%7C%7CBacon+Makers&category1=Magazine+Section&category2=category&searchParameter2=unset> 70 , self made *Source: Food <http://www.forbes.com/lists/results.jhtml?passListId=54&passYear=2002&passListType=Person&resultsStart=1&resultsHowMany=25&resultsSortProperties=%2Bnumberfield1%2C%2Bstringfield1&resultsSortCategoryName=rank&searchParameter1=5Str%7C%7CPatCS%7C%7CFood&category1=Industry>, Coca-Cola* (quote <http://www.forbes.com/finance/mktguideapps/compinfo/CompanyTearsheet.jhtml?tkr=CCE>, executives <http://www.forbes.com/peopletracker/results.jhtml?startRow=0&name=&ticker=CCE>, news <http://markets2.forbes.com/rpt/Company_News.asp?Symbol=CCE>) Net Worth: *$680 mil* returnee Hometown: Chattanooga , TN *Marital Status:* married , 5 children Grandfather James and partner landed first Coca-Cola bottling franchise in 1899. Company passed down 3 generations to Summerfield 1950s. Became largest independent Coke bottler. Merged with Coca-Cola Enterprises 1991. <javascript:openMap('pol');> <javascript:openMap('dist');> (...by a compensation committee) Owen --------------090600030109070305070809--

Re: flavor cystals "Oh my Janitor, boom, boom, boom." The best place for new music is right where it's always been. College radio. UCI, UCSD,USD, Claremont(?)'s KSPC, UCLA, Cal Fullerton, Cal LA, Cal Pomona. Greg Joseph S. Barrera III wrote: > Can anyone stop talking politics long enough to let me know that, > yes, indeed, they do remember the Suburban Lawns? > > Better yet, tell me where I should be listening for new music now that > P2P is dead and I still can't pick up KFJC very well. > > - Joe >

Crony Capitalism (was RE: sed /s/United States/Roman Empire/g) reminds me of Cheney during the VP debates, when he declared his wealth was not the product of government favors. http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/communications/logs/Gulf-War/desert-stor m/07 (good time to refresh our memories re iraq . . .) starting a debate on govt. contracts, gg -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of Owen Byrne Sent: Sunday, September 22, 2002 11:04 AM To: Owen Byrne Cc: Gary Lawrence Murphy; Mr. FoRK; [email protected]; Digital Bearer Settlement List Subject: Re: sed /s/United States/Roman Empire/g Owen Byrne wrote: > R. A. Hettinga wrote: > >> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- >> Hash: SHA1 >> >> At 10:32 AM -0400 on 9/21/02, Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote: >> >> >> >> >>> Cool --- I wasn't aware that the US had lifted it's population out >>> of poverty! When did this happen? I wonder where the media gets the >>> idea that the wealth gap is widening and deepening... >>> >> >> >> All the world loves a smartass... >> >> :-). >> >> Seriously. Look at he life expectancy and human carrying capacity of >> this continent before the Europeans got here. Look at it now. Even >> for descendants of the original inhabitants. Even for the descendents >> of slaves, who were brought here by force. >> >> More stuff, cheaper. That's progress. >> >> Poverty, of course, is not relative. It's absolute. Disparity in >> wealth has nothing to do with it. >> >> It's like saying that groups have rights, when, in truth, only >> individuals do. Like group rights, "disparity" in wealth is >> statistical sophistry. >> >> >> Besides, even if you can't help the distribution, industrial wealth >> is almost always transitory, and so is relative poverty, even when >> there are no confiscatory death-taxes. The 20th anniversary Forbes >> 400 just came out, and only a few tens of people are still there >> since 1982, a time which had significantly higher marginal taxes on >> wealth, income, and inheritance than we do now. More to the point, >> they're nowhere near the top. >> >> Lovely quote from the Forbes 400 list: "and not a single Astor, Vanderbilt or Morgan rates a mention on the current Forbes Four Hundred. " But you have to studiously ignore the 4 Rockefellers, 3 Gettys, 3 Hearsts, Fords, Kelloggs, Wrigleys, and so on. There are more self-made people on the list than I previously alluded to - I made a mistake. Most of them seem to have Ivy League educations, or are Ivy League dropouts, suggesting to me that they weren't exactly poor to start with. Some of them have lovely self-made stories like: #347, Johnston, Summerfield K Jr track this personTrack This Person <http://www.forbes.com/peopletracker/add_person.jhtml?successURL=%2Fpeopletr acker%2Fprotected%2Frich_tracker.jhtml&errorURL=%2Fpeopletracker%2Ferror.jht ml&personId=221899> | See all Bacon Makers <http://www.forbes.com/lists/results.jhtml?passListId=54&passYear=2002&passL istType=Person&resultsStart=1&resultsHowMany=25&resultsSortProperties=%2Bnum berfield1%2C%2Bstringfield1&resultsSortCategoryName=rank&searchParameter1=10 Str%7C%7CPatCS%7C%7CBacon+Makers&category1=Magazine+Section&category2=catego ry&searchParameter2=unset> 70 , self made *Source: Food <http://www.forbes.com/lists/results.jhtml?passListId=54&passYear=2002&passL istType=Person&resultsStart=1&resultsHowMany=25&resultsSortProperties=%2Bnum berfield1%2C%2Bstringfield1&resultsSortCategoryName=rank&searchParameter1=5S tr%7C%7CPatCS%7C%7CFood&category1=Industry>, Coca-Cola* (quote <http://www.forbes.com/finance/mktguideapps/compinfo/CompanyTearsheet.jhtml? tkr=CCE>, executives <http://www.forbes.com/peopletracker/results.jhtml?startRow=0&name=&ticker=C CE>, news <http://markets2.forbes.com/rpt/Company_News.asp?Symbol=CCE>) Net Worth: *$680 mil* returnee Hometown: Chattanooga , TN *Marital Status:* married , 5 children Grandfather James and partner landed first Coca-Cola bottling franchise in 1899. Company passed down 3 generations to Summerfield 1950s. Became largest independent Coke bottler. Merged with Coca-Cola Enterprises 1991. <javascript:openMap('pol');> <javascript:openMap('dist');> (...by a compensation committee) Owen

dubyadubyadubya.dubyaspeak.com A worthy study procrastination tool: ) A few choice phrases from ol dubya himself: "And all our history says we believe in liberty and justice for all, that when we see oppression, we cry." "If you want to keep the peace, you've got to have the authorization to use force. -- White House, Sep. 19, 2002" "The United States will remain strong in our conviction that we must not, and will not, allow the world's worst leaders to hold the United States and our friends and allies blackmail, or threaten us with the world's worst weapons." -- Whats truly sad about the "United States and our friends and allies /blackmail/, is that he said the same thing in the SAME speech in a paragraph or two before. "If you find a neighbor in need, you're responsible for serving that neighbor in need, you're responsible for loving a neighbor just like you'd like to love yourself." -- Snerk. This just begs for potty-mouth comedy. Too bad the kids on southpark just aren't that political. "I want to send the signal to our enemy that you have aroused a compassionate and decent and mighty nation, and we're going to hunt you down. -- No, I didn't make this one up. Louisville, Kentucky, Sep. 5, 2002 Hee.. Mkay. http://www.dubyaspeak.com -- Best regards, bitbitch mailto:[email protected]

Re: flavor cystals On Saturday, September 21, 2002, at 10:59 PM, Joseph S. Barrera III wrote: > Better yet, tell me where I should be listening for new music now that > P2P is dead and I still can't pick up KFJC very well. KFJC has a MP3 stream at kfjc.org. I'd also recommend radioparadise.com. I remember the Suburban Lawns, but I don't know what became of them. Apropos of nothing: "Spirited Away" is amazing. Go see it now. -- whump

Colonial Script ... Oh, they were plenty upset about the tea taxes. But the crack down on colonial script certainly screwed over the American Colonies. And, BTW, England as well. Dear Ben Franklin was right for the wrong reasons. First of all the colonies were not prosperous compared to England proper. Second, the issuance of colonial script had nothing to do with full employeement. (In fact, it is almost inconceivable he would make that claim. It sounds like a modern Keynsian was creating an urban legend.) OTOH the lack of sufficient circulating monetary instruments was economically crippling. Imagine trying to buy your supplies by offering IOUs on your own name -- and then trying to market / exchange the paper as the merchant who took the IOU. =========================== The most common problem in the world is when a government prints too much money. The effects are a complete disaster. There are a lot of incentives that push governments into doing this even though it is incredibly stupid. So almost all the literature talks about that. But you can ALSO screw an economy over by taking all the money out of circulation. The fundamental cause of the American Great Depression was exactly this, courtesy of the Federal Reserve Board. I don't think shifting the power to print money to the bank of Canada had much effect. And Canada is still a prosperous country. > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Gary > Lawrence Murphy > Sent: Saturday, September 21, 2002 7:31 AM > To: Mr. FoRK > Cc: [email protected] > Subject: Re: sed /s/United States/Roman Empire/g > > >>>>> "f" == fork list <Mr.> writes: > > f> "Free trade and free markets have proven their ability to lift > f> whole societies out of poverty" I'm not a > f> socio-political/history buff - does anybody have some clear > f> examples? > > China? Ooops, no wait, scratch that. > > There is one counter example that I can think of, but it may not be > precisely "free trade/markets" -- when Ben Franklin first visited > England he was asked why the colonies were so prosperous. Ben > explained that they used "Colonial Script", a kind of barter-dollar, > and increasing the supply of script ensured complete employment. The > British bankers were furious and immediately lobbied parliament to > clamp down on the practice. Within a few years, the colonies were > rife with unemployment and poverty just like the rest of the Empire. > > According to questionable literature handed out by a fringe political > party here in Canada, the Founding Fathers had no real complaint about > tea taxes, it was the banning of colonial script they were > protesting. If this is true, then it comes right back to the forces > that killed Ned Ludd's followers as to why popular opinion believes > they were protesting a tea tax. The same pamphlet claimed that Canada > was also a prosperous nation until, by an act of parliament in the > late-50's or early 60's, the right to print money was removed from the > juristiction of parliament and handed over to the Bank of Canada. > > I've wondered about all this. Certainly the timeline of the collapse > of the Canadian economy fits the profile, but there are oodles of > other causes (for example, spending money like we had 300M people when > we only had 20M) Anyone have any further information on this? > > -- > Gary Lawrence Murphy - [email protected] - TeleDynamics Communications > - blog: http://www.auracom.com/~teledyn - biz: http://teledyn.com/ - > "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." (Picasso)

RE: sed /s/United States/Roman Empire/g > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mr. > FoRK > Also, the lifestyle of the remnants of those > societies is on average only marginally above poverty even today. As I understand it, there is a huge difference between native Americans who speak english at home and those who do not. I don't have figures that separate those at hand, though. 1989 American Indians (US Pop as a whole) -- Families below poverty 27.2% (10%), Persons below poverty 31.2 (13.1), Speak a language other than English 23 (13.8) Married couple families 65.8 (79.5) Median family income $21,619 ($35,225) Per Capita $8,284 ($14,420). Note: High Income countries in 1989 were defined as having over $6,000 per capita. American Indians separated from the rest of the US society would still be considered a high-income society.

Re: SunMSapple meta4 of the day Clearly, it is US/NATO = Sun/IBM/OSS, USSR = MS "Where we want you to go in our 5 year plan?" sdw Tom wrote: >Im feeling a bit farklempt having spent the night at Todais with the >family so talk amongst yourself..here Ill give you a topic > >The current state of IT can be thought of in terms of the Cold war with >the US and the UUSR being MS and Sun/IBM/OSS (does it matter which side >is which?), Apple as Cuba and the US legal system as the UN. > >Discuss. > > -- [email protected] http://sdw.st Stephen D. Williams 43392 Wayside Cir,Ashburn,VA 20147-4622 703-724-0118W 703-995-0407Fax Dec2001

Comrade Communism (was Re: Crony Capitalism (was RE: sed -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 11:15 AM -0400 on 9/22/02, Geege Schuman wrote: > Most of them seem to have Ivy League educations, or are Ivy League > dropouts suggesting to me that they weren't exactly poor to start > with. Actually, if I remember correctly from discussion of the list's composition in Forbes about five or six years ago, the *best* way to get on the Forbes 400 is to have *no* college at all. Can you say "Bootstraps", boys and girls? I knew you could... [Given that an undergraduate liberal arts degree from a state school, like, say, mine, :-), is nothing but stuff they should have taught you in a government-run "high" school, you'll probably get more of *those* on the Forbes 400 as well as time goes on. If we ever get around to having a good old fashioned government-collapsing transfer-payment depression (an economic version of this summer's government-forest conflagration, caused by the same kind of innumeracy that not clear-cutting enough forests did out west this summer :-)) that should motivate more than a few erst-slackers out there, including me, :-), to learn to actually feed themselves.] The *next* category on the Forbes 400 list is someone with a "terminal" professional degree, like an MBA, PhD, MD, etc., from the best school possible. Why? Because, as of about 1950, the *best* way to get into Harvard, for instance, is to be *smart*, not rich. Don't take my word for it, ask their admissions office. Look at the admissions stats over the years for proof. Meritocracy, American Style, was *invented* at the Ivy League after World War II. Even Stanford got the hint, :-), and, of course, Chicago taught them all how, right? :-). Practically *nobody* who goes to a top-20 American institution of higher learning can actually afford to go there these days. Unless, of course, their parents, who couldn't afford to go there themselves, got terminal degrees in the last 40 years or so. And their kids *still* had to get the grades, and "biased" (by intelligence :-)), test scores, to get in. The bizarre irony is that almost all of those people with "terminal" degrees, until they actually *own* something and *hire* people, or learn to *make* something for a living all day on a profit and loss basis, persist in the practically insane belief, like life after death, that economics is some kind of zero sum game, that dumb people who don't work hard for it make all the money, and, if someone *is* smart, works hard, and is rich, then they stole their wealth somehow. BTW, none of you guys out there holding the short end of this rhetorical stick can blame *me* for the fact that I'm using it to beat you severely all over your collective head and shoulders. You were, apparently, too dumb to grab the right end. *I* went to Missouri, and *I* don't have a degree in anything actually useful, much less a "terminal" one, which means *I*'m broker than anyone on this list -- it's just that *you*, of all people, lots with educations far surpassing my own, should just plain know better. The facts speak for themselves, if you just open your eyes and *look*. There are no epicycles, the universe does not orbit the earth, and economics is not a zero-sum game. The cost of anything, including ignorance and destitution, is the forgone alternative, in this case, intelligence and effort. [I will, however, admit to being educated *waay* past my level of competence, and, by the way *you* discuss economics, so have you, apparently.] BTW, if we ever actually *had* free markets in this country, *including* the abolition of redistributive income and death taxes, all those smart people in the Forbes 400 would have *more* money, and there would be *more* self-made people on that list. In addition, most of the people who *inherited* money on the list would have *much* less of it, not even relatively speaking. Finally, practically all of that "new" money would have come from economic efficiency and not "stolen" from someone else, investment bubbles or not. That efficiency is called "progress", for those of you in The People's Republics of Berkeley or Cambridge. It means more and better stuff, cheaper, over time -- a terrible, petit-bourgeois concept apparently not worthy of teaching by the educational elite, or you'd know about it by now. In economic terms, it's also called an increase in general welfare, and, no, Virginia, I'm not talking about extorting money from someone who works, and giving it to someone who doesn't in order to keep them from working and they can think of some politician as Santa Claus come election time... In short, then, economics is not a zero sum game, property is not theft, the rich don't get rich off the backs of the poor, and redistributionist labor "theory" of value happy horseshit is just that: horseshit, happy or otherwise. To believe otherwise, is -- quite literally, given the time Marx wrote Capital and the Manifesto -- romantic nonsense. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 7.5 iQA/AwUBPY511cPxH8jf3ohaEQLAsgCfZhsQMSvUy6GqJ5wgL52DwZKpIhMAnRuR YYboc+IcylP5TlKL58jpwEfu =z877 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [email protected]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Goodbye Global Warming ... and say hello to the cool: Oooo ... /this/ is going to cause some stir ... http://www.atmos.uah.edu./essl/msu/background.html received via http://ontario.indymedia.org:8081/front.php3?article_id=12280 Using satellites to monitor global climate change Earth System Science Laboratory The University of Alabama in Huntsville For Additional Information: Dr. John Christy, Associate Professor of Atmospheric Science Earth System Science Laboratory, The University of Alabama in Huntsville Phone: (205) 922-5763 E-mail: [email protected] Dr. Roy Spencer, Space Scientist Global Hydrology & Climate Center, NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center Phone: (205) 922-5960 E-mail: [email protected] SUMMARY As part of an ongoing NASA/UAH joint project, Dr. John Christy of UAH and Dr. Roy Spencer of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center use data gathered by microwave sounding units (MSUs) on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration TIROS-N satellites to get accurate, direct measurements of atmospheric temperatures for almost all regions of the Earth, including remote deserts, rain forests and oceans for which reliable temperature data are not otherwise available. The accuracy and reliability of temperature data gathered by the satellites since January 1979 has been confirmed by comparing the satellite data to independent temperature data. A recent study (1) found a 97 percent agreement between the MSU data and temperatures measured by thermometers suspended beneath weather balloons released by meteorologists for weather observations. Once the monthly temperature data is collected from the satellites and processed, it is placed in a "public" computer file for immediate access by atmospheric scientists in the U.S. and abroad. It has become the basis for a number of major studies in global climate change, and is cited in reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. GATHERING THE DATA While traditional thermometers measure the temperature at a specific point in the air, a microwave sounding unit on a satellite takes readings that are average temperatures in a huge volume of the atmosphere. Each of the more than 30,000 readings per day per satellite is an average temperature for more than 75,000 cubic kilometers of air. The MSU makes a direct measurement of the temperature by looking at microwaves emitted by oxygen molecules in the atmosphere. The intensity of the microwave emissions - their "brightness" - varies according to temperature. Christy and Spencer developed a method to take the data from several satellites and produce a unified temperature dataset. VERIFYING THE ACCURACY OF MSU MEASUREMENTS A recent comparison (1) of temperature readings from two major climate monitoring systems - microwave sounding units on satellites and thermometers suspended below helium balloons - found a "remarkable" level of agreement between the two. To verify the accuracy of temperature data collected by microwave sounding units, Christy compared temperature readings recorded by "radiosonde" thermometers to temperatures reported by the satellites as they orbited over the balloon launch sites. He found a 97 percent correlation over the 16-year period of the study. The overall composite temperature trends at those sites agreed to within 0.03 degrees Celsius (about 0.054� Fahrenheit) per decade. The same results were found when considering only stations in the polar or arctic regions. "The idea was to determine the reliability of the satellite data by comparing it to an established independent measurement," Christy said. "If satellite data are reliable when the satellites are over the radiosonde sites, that means you should be able to trust them everywhere else." The 99 radiosondes reported an aggregate warming trend of 0.155 degrees Celsius (about 0.28� Fahrenheit) per decade since 1979. Over those 99 spots on the globe, the satellites also recorded a warming trend: 0.128 degrees Celsius (about 0.23� Fahrenheit) per decade. Globally, however, the satellite data show a cooling trend of 0.03 degrees Celsius per decade since the first NOAA TIROS-N satellites went into service. "These 99 radiosonde launch sites are just not distributed evenly around the planet," Christy said. "They are not representative of the total globe." Radiosonde balloons are released from stations around the world, usually at noon and midnight Greenwich standard time. As each balloon climbs from the surface to the stratosphere, the temperature is measured and relayed to the ground by radio. While there are more than 1,000 radiosonde launch sites globally, the data from many sites either are not readily available or are not consistently collected. Christy used data from 99 sites at which there has been long-term systematic and reliable data collection. These 99 radiosonde launch sites are in a box bounded by Iceland, Trinidad, Truk Island and Alaska. In an earlier study, an upper air temperature record compiled by NOAA from 63 daily weather balloon sites around the world indicated a 17-year climate trend of -0.05� C per decade, which was in exact agreement with the satellite data at that time, Christy said. GLOBAL COVERAGE One advantage of the MSU dataset is its global coverage. Microwave sounding units aboard NOAA satellites directly measure the temperature of the atmosphere over more than 95 percent of the globe. Each satellite measures the temperature above most points on Earth every 12 hours. The 'global temperature' that has been frequently reported from surface measurements is neither global in extent nor systematic in measurement method. It neglects vast oceanic and continental regions, including Antarctica, the Brazilian rain forests, the Sahara Desert and Greenland. The most commonly cited historical temperature dataset is from ground-based thermometers. More than 5,000 thermometers worldwide provide almost instantaneous local temperature data through links to weather services and scientists. Most of these thermometers, which are usually in small shelters about five feet above the ground, are in areas easily accessible to people. In the U.S. and other industrial countries, these thermometers are most often found at airports. The ground-based network is extensive in North America, Europe, Russia, China and Japan. It is less comprehensive in Africa, South America, Australia and across much of Southern Asia. Temperatures on the surface and vertically through the atmosphere are gathered daily by thermometers carried aloft by helium balloons. "Radiosonde" balloons are released from stations around the world, usually at noon and midnight Greenwich standard time. While balloon release sites are scattered throughout the world, they are concentrated in industrial nations. There are more than 1,000 radiosonde launch sites globally. If they were evenly distributed around the world, that would equal approximately one for every 195,000 square miles of the Earth's surface. Water temperatures, which are used to derive estimates of atmospheric temperatures, come from thermometers on piers and buoys, and aboard "ships of opportunity." The ships record the temperature of water drawn in to cool their engines. The water temperature data from these instruments is also not global in its coverage, tending instead to be concentrated in heavily-travelled shipping lanes, and in harbors. In the past 12 years, a new system of approximately 100 deep ocean buoys has been established, gathering both atmospheric and water temperature data. INSTRUMENT ACCURACY; MSU With nine satellites measuring the temperature over periods of from one to six years, a method was devised to merge all the data into a single, consistent time series. Each satellite has its own bias that, if not calculated and removed, would introduce spurious trends. The biases are calculated by directly comparing each satellite with others in operation at that time. Periods of overlapping operation ranged from three months to three years, and were sufficient to determine these biases. Because the MSU instruments are so stable and have so many thousands of observations, the biases between the satellites are known to within 0.01 deg. The final product removes these biases so that all data are referenced to a common base. (2) To check the final product, comparisons were made over a 16-year period with balloon measurements as stated above, and the phenomenal agreement provided the independent validation necessary to conclude that the merging technique developed for this dataset was accurate. INSTRUMENT ACCURACY; GROUND-BASED THERMOMETERS Of great concern to scientists is the lack of consistency in the way readings are taken and in the thermometer surroundings. Since most thermometers for which long-term records exist are in towns and cities, the effects of population growth and the construction of nearby roads, parking lots, runways and buildings may cause the temperature to rise a little due of urbanization. This temperature change may be an artifact of a local "asphalt effect" rather than a long-term widespread climate change. INSTRUMENT ACCURACY; SHIPS OF OPPORTUNITY While the temperature data collected by ships at sea is reported as a sea surface temperature, this data reflects water temperatures from about three to 60 feet below the surface - the level from which water is drawn into the ships. The thousands of individual thermometers used to collect this data are not calibrated against a scientific standard, nor is there a method for verifying the accuracy of either the thermometers or the reports matching temperature readings to specific times and places. Only in places where there are many overlapping observations can there be any confidence in their accuracy. THE SCIENTISTS In 1996, Spencer and Christy received the American Meteorological Society's Special Award. They were honored "for developing a global, precise record of the Earth's temperature from operational polar-orbiting satellites, fundamentally advancing our ability to monitor climate." AMS Special Awards are given to individuals or organizations not appropriately recognized by more specifically-defined awards, and who have made important contributions to the science or practice of meteorology or to the society. In 1991, Spencer and Christy received NASA's Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal. DR. JOHN CHRISTY Christy began his scientific career as a senior research associate at UAH in 1987, after earning his B.A. (1973) in mathematics from California State University-Fresno, his M.Div. (1978) from Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, and his M.S. (1984) and Ph.D. (1987) degrees in atmospheric sciences from the University of Illinois. He was an instructor of mathematics at Parkland College in Champaign, IL, 1983-87, an instructor of mathematics at the University of South Dakota, 1981-82, and an instructor of mathematical sciences at Yankton (S.D.) College, 1980-81. He also served as pastor of the Grace Baptist Church in Vermillion, S.D., 1978-82, and as science master at Baptist High School, Nyeri, Kenya, 1973-75. He has published more than 20 refereed scientific papers. Christy serves on the NOAA National Scientific Review Panel for the National Climatic Data Center, and on NOAA's Pathfinder Review Panel. He was an "invited key contributor" to the 1995 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's scientific assessment of climate change, and served as a contributor to the 1992 and 1994 IPCC reports. DR. ROY SPENCER Spencer began his career as a research associate at the Space Science and Engineering Center in Madison, WI, in 1981, after earning his B.S. (1978) in meteorology at the University of Michigan and his M.S. (1979) and Ph.D. (1981) degrees in meteorology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was a Universities Space Research Association visiting scientist at MSFC, 1984-87, before joining the MSFC staff in 1987. He is the U.S. team leader for the Multichannel Microwave Imaging Radiometer Team and has served on numerous committees relating to remote sensing. He directs a program involving satellite and aircraft passive microwave data to build global climate data sets and to address climate research issues. Spencer is lead author on sixteen scientific papers. BIBLIOGRAPHY (1) J.R. Christy, 1995, "Climatic Change," Vol. 31, pp. 455-474. (2) J.R. Christy, R.W. Spencer and R.T. McNider, 1995, "Journal of Climate," Vol. 8, pp. 888-896. R.W. Spencer, J.R. Christy and N.C. Grody, 1990, "Journal of Climate," Vol. 3, pp. 111-1128. R.W. Spencer and J.R. Christy, 1992, "Journal of Climate," Vol. 5, pp. 858- SEE ALSO http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/essd5feb97_1.htm http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/notebook/essd13aug98_1.htm http://www.ghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/MSU/hl_measuretemp.htm http://www.atmos.uah.edu/atmos/christy.html -- Gary Lawrence Murphy - [email protected] - TeleDynamics Communications - blog: http://www.auracom.com/~teledyn - biz: http://teledyn.com/ - "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." (Picasso)

Re: Goodbye Global Warming Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote: >and say hello to the cool: Oooo ... /this/ is going to cause some stir ... Of course not. Some people just don't want to be confused by the facts. >SUMMARY > >As part of an ongoing NASA/UAH joint project, Dr. John Christy of UAH >and Dr. Roy Spencer of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center use data >gathered by microwave sounding units (MSUs) on National Oceanic and >Atmospheric Administration TIROS-N satellites to get accurate, direct >measurements of atmospheric temperatures for almost all regions of the >Earth [...] But some plonker will come up with yet another computer model predicting global warming and storms and floods in 50 years even though it can't predict next week's weather. And predict widespread cooling in some parts of the globe (which is now part of global "warming"). And will get plenty of publicity for even more conclusive scaremong^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H proof. >[...] >Globally, however, the satellite data show a cooling trend of 0.03 >degrees Celsius per decade since the first NOAA TIROS-N satellites >went into service. Umpteen studies have already shown that temperature variations, when even detectable in the noise, go either way depending on which data you look at. >Of great concern to scientists is the lack of consistency in the way >readings are taken [...] the construction of >nearby roads, parking lots, runways and buildings may cause the >temperature to rise a little due of urbanization. This temperature >change may be an artifact of a local "asphalt effect" rather than a >long-term widespread climate change. One study from Vienna showed long-term warming from thermometers at the airport, and none from other sites. Another study with data from Antarctica which was touted as supporting global warming while being free from this urbanization effect later turned out to be dominated by the time of day at which the airplane that made the measurements flew (I may have mentioned this one b4...) "There are no facts, only interpretations." - Friedrich Nietzsche. "Bullshit!" - Rob. .-. .-. / \ .-. .-. / \ / \ / \ .-. _ .-. / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / `-' `-' \ / \ / \ \ / `-' `-' \ / `-' `-'

Re: Comrade Communism (was Re: Crony Capitalism (was RE: sed In a message dated 9/22/2002 11:38:01 PM, [email protected] writes: >the *best* way to >get on the Forbes 400 is historically: real estate Tom

High-Altitude Rambos http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/23/opinion/23HERB.html?todaysheadlines=&pagewanted=print&position=top The New York Times September 23, 2002 High-Altitude Rambos By BOB HERBERT Dr. Bob Rajcoomar, a U.S. citizen and former military physician from Lake Worth, Fla., found himself handcuffed and taken into custody last month in one of the many episodes of hysteria to erupt on board airliners in the U.S. since the Sept. 11 attacks. Dr. Rajcoomar was seated in first class on a Delta Airlines flight from Atlanta to Philadelphia on Aug. 31 when a passenger in the coach section began behaving erratically. The passenger, Steven Feuer, had nothing to do with Dr. Rajcoomar. Two U.S. air marshals got up from their seats in first class and moved back to coach to confront Mr. Feuer, who was described by witnesses as a slight man who seemed disoriented. What ensued was terrifying. When Mr. Feuer refused to remain in his seat, the marshals reacted as if they were trying out for the lead roles in Hollywood's latest action extravaganza. They handcuffed Mr. Feuer, hustled him into first class and restrained him in a seat next to Dr. Rajcoomar. The 180 or so passengers were now quite jittery. Dr. Rajcoomar asked to have his seat changed and a flight attendant obliged, finding him another seat in first class. The incident, already scary, could - and should - have ended there. But the marshals were not ready to let things quiet down. One of the marshals pulled a gun and brandished it at the passengers. The marshals loudly demanded that all passengers remain in their seats, and remain still. They barked a series of orders. No one should stand for any reason. Arms and legs should not extend into the aisles. No one should try to visit the restroom. The message could not have been clearer: anyone who disobeyed the marshals was in danger of being shot. The passengers were petrified, with most believing that there were terrorists on the plane. "I was afraid there was going to be a gun battle in that pressurized cabin," said Senior Judge James A. Lineberger of the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, a veteran of 20 years in the military, who was sitting in an aisle seat in coach. "I was afraid that I was going to die from the gunfire in a shootout." Dr. Rajcoomar's wife, Dorothy, who was seated quite a distance from her husband, said, "It was really like Rambo in the air." She worried that there might be people on the plane who did not speak English, and therefore did not understand the marshals' orders. If someone got up to go to the bathroom, he or she might be shot. There were no terrorists on board. There was no threat of any kind. When the plane landed about half an hour later, Mr. Feuer was taken into custody. And then, shockingly, so was Dr. Rajcoomar. The air marshals grabbed the doctor from behind, handcuffed him and, for no good reason that anyone has been able to give, hauled him to an airport police station where he was thrown into a filthy cell. This was airline security gone berserk. No one ever suggested that Dr. Rajcoomar, a straight-arrow retired Army major, had done anything wrong. Dr. Rajcoomar, who is of Indian descent, said he believes he was taken into custody solely because of his brown skin. He was held for three frightening hours and then released without being charged. Mr. Feuer was also released. Officials tried to conceal the names of the marshals, but they were eventually identified by a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter as Shawn B. McCullers and Samuel Mumma of the Transportation Security Administration, which is part of the U.S. Transportation Department. The Transportation Security Administration has declined to discuss the incident in detail. A spokesman offered the absurd explanation that Dr. Rajcoomar was detained because he had watched the unfolding incident "too closely." If that becomes a criterion for arrest in the U.S., a lot of us reporters are headed for jail. Dr. Rajcoomar told me yesterday that he remains shaken by the episode. "I had never been treated like that in my life," he said. "I was afraid that I was about to be beaten up or killed." Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union have taken up his case and he has filed notice that he may sue the federal government for unlawful detention. "We have to take a look at what we're doing in the name of security," said Dr. Rajcoomar. "So many men and women have fought and died for freedom in this great country, and now we are in danger of ruining that in the name of security." -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [email protected]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Rebuild at Ground Zero http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB10327475102363433,00.html The Wall Street Journal September 23, 2002 COMMENTARY Rebuild at Ground Zero By LARRY SILVERSTEIN Earlier this month, we New Yorkers observed the solemn anniversary of the horrific events that befell our city on Sept. 11, 2001. All of those who perished must never be forgotten. The footprints of the fallen Twin Towers and a portion of the 16-acre site must be dedicated to a memorial and civic amenities that recall the sacrifices that were made there and the anguish that those senseless acts of terror created for the victims' families and, indeed, for all of us. But for the good of the city and the region, the 10-million-plus square feet of commercial and retail space that was destroyed with the Twin Towers must be replaced on the site. About 50,000 people worked in the World Trade Center. Those jobs are lost, along with those of another 50,000 people who worked in the vicinity. Together, those jobs in lower Manhattan, for which the Trade Center was the economic stimulus, produced annual gross wages of about $47 billion, or 15% of the annual gross wages earned in the entire state. Some of the firms have relocated elsewhere in the city and region, but many have not. New York City is facing a budget deficit. Without additional jobs, the deficit may become permanent. This is one reason for the importance of rebuilding. If we do not replace the lost space, lower Manhattan never will regain the vibrancy it had as the world's financial center. Love them or hate them, and there were lots of New Yorkers on both sides of the issue, the Towers made a powerful statement to the world that said, "This is New York, a symbol of our free economy and of our way of life." That is why they were destroyed. This is a second reason why the towers must be replaced, and with buildings that make a potent architectural statement. In recent weeks, redevelopment proposals have been circulated from many sources. Most of these focus not on the Trade Center site, however, but on all of lower Manhattan. Further, many believe that the 10 million square feet either could be located elsewhere, scattered in several sites, or simply never rebuilt. These proposals miss the point. What was destroyed, and what must be recovered, was the Trade Center, not all of lower Manhattan. Except over the towers' footprints, where there must be no commercial development, the office and retail space lost has to be rebuilt on or close to where it was. Access to mass transit makes the site ideal for office space of this size. That was a major reason why the Twin Towers were leased to 97% occupancy before 9/11. None of the other sites proposed for office development has remotely equal transportation access. With the reconstruction of the subway and PATH stations, plus an additional $4.5 billion in transit improvements planned, such as the new Fulton Transit Center and the direct "Train-to-the-Plane" Long Island Rail Road connection, the site becomes even more the logical locus of office development. And New York will need the space. Before 9/11, the Group of 35, a task force of civic leaders led by Sen. Charles Schumer and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, concluded that the city would need an additional 60 million square feet of new office space by 2020 to accommodate the anticipated addition of 300,000 new jobs. The loss of the Twin Towers only heightens the need. As for those who say that 10 million square feet of office space downtown cannot be absorbed by the real estate market, I would simply point out that history shows them wrong. New York now has about 400 million square feet of office space. All new construction underway already is substantially leased up. New York had 48 million square feet of vacant office space at the beginning of the recession in 1990. By 1998, this space had been absorbed, at an annual rate of about 6 million square feet. We are seeking to rebuild 10 million square feet on the Trade Center site over a period of about 10 years, with the first buildings not coming on line until 2008 and the project reaching completion in 2012. This is an annual absorption rate of about a million feet, much lower than the 1990s' rate. Those who argue that New York cannot reabsorb office space that it previously had are saying that the city has had its day and is entering an extended period of stagnation and decline. I will not accept this view, nor will most New Yorkers. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a recent interview with the New York Times that the city "has to do two things: memorialize, but also build for the future." I believe that the Twin Towers site can gracefully accommodate -- and that downtown requires -- office and retail space of architectural significance, a dignified memorial that both witnesses and recalls what happened, and cultural amenities that would benefit workers as well as residents of the area. The challenge to accomplish this is enormous. But our city is up to the task. Mr. Silverstein is president of Silverstein Properties, a real estate firm whose affiliates hold 99-year leases on the World Trade Center site. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [email protected]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Anarchist 'Scavenger Hunt' Raises D.C. Police Ire (fwd) [Destined to be a new reality TV Show?] Anarchist 'Scavenger Hunt' Raises D.C. Police Ire Sat Sep 21, 3:37 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An online "anarchist scavenger hunt" proposed for next week's annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund ( news - web sites) and World Bank ( news - web sites) here has raised the ire of police, who fear demonstrators could damage property and wreak havoc. Break a McDonald's window, get 300 points. Puncture a Washington D.C. police car tire to win 75 points. Score 400 points for a pie in the face of a corporate executive or World Bank delegate. D.C. Assistant Police Chief Terrance Gainer told a congressional hearing on Friday that law authorities were in talks to decide whether planned protests were, "so deleterious to security efforts that we ought to take proactive action." Several thousand people are expected to demonstrate outside the IMF and World Bank headquarters next weekend. The Anti-Capitalist Convergence, a D.C.-based anarchist group, is also planning a day-long traffic blockade, banner-drops and protests against major corporations in the downtown core. Chuck, the 37 year-old webmaster of the anarchist site www.infoshop.org who declined to give his last name, told Reuters his scavenger hunt was meant as a joke. "People were asking for things to do when they come to D.C. We made the list to get people thinking, so they don't do the boring, standard stuff," he said. "I doubt people will actually keep track of what they do for points."

Re: Comrade Communism (was Re: Crony Capitalism (was RE: sed R. A. Hettinga wrote: >-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- >Hash: SHA1 > >At 11:15 AM -0400 on 9/22/02, Geege Schuman wrote: > > > > >>Most of them seem to have Ivy League educations, or are Ivy League >>dropouts suggesting to me that they weren't exactly poor to start >>with. >> >> > >Actually, if I remember correctly from discussion of the list's >composition in Forbes about five or six years ago, the *best* way to >get on the Forbes 400 is to have *no* college at all. Can you say >"Bootstraps", boys and girls? I knew you could... > > Sure - discussion in Forbes - rigorous research, that. Especially when the data in their own list contradicts them. I continue to look at the list and all the "inherited, growed" entries. I guess if I read it enough times my vision will clear. >[Given that an undergraduate liberal arts degree from a state school, >like, say, mine, :-), is nothing but stuff they should have taught >you in a government-run "high" school, you'll probably get more of >*those* on the Forbes 400 as well as time goes on. If we ever get >around to having a good old fashioned government-collapsing >transfer-payment depression (an economic version of this summer's >government-forest conflagration, caused by the same kind of >innumeracy that not clear-cutting enough forests did out west this >summer :-)) that should motivate more than a few erst-slackers out >there, including me, :-), to learn to actually feed themselves.] > > >The *next* category on the Forbes 400 list is someone with a >"terminal" professional degree, like an MBA, PhD, MD, etc., from the >best school possible. > >Why? Because, as of about 1950, the *best* way to get into Harvard, >for instance, is to be *smart*, not rich. Don't take my word for it, >ask their admissions office. Look at the admissions stats over the >years for proof. > > I, at on point, looked into Stanford Business School. After learning that tuition was > 20K, no financial aid was available, and part-time work was disallowed, this smart person decided that I was not willing to spend the $150 application fee (non-refundable). During attendance at my local business school, I was told repeatedly I should have gone for it - to quote a prof, (Northwestern MBA), it has nothing to do with the education you receive - in general European (and Canadian) business schools are better and more innovative - its the connections. He used the words "American nobility." >Meritocracy, American Style, was *invented* at the Ivy League after >World War II. Even Stanford got the hint, :-), and, of course, >Chicago taught them all how, right? :-). Practically *nobody* who >goes to a top-20 American institution of higher learning can actually >afford to go there these days. Unless, of course, their parents, who >couldn't afford to go there themselves, got terminal degrees in the >last 40 years or so. And their kids *still* had to get the grades, >and "biased" (by intelligence :-)), test scores, to get in. > > "invented" being the right word. Dubya went to Yale and HBS. I guess "practically" gets you around that problem. > >The bizarre irony is that almost all of those people with "terminal" >degrees, until they actually *own* something and *hire* people, or >learn to *make* something for a living all day on a profit and loss >basis, persist in the practically insane belief, like life after >death, that economics is some kind of zero sum game, that dumb people >who don't work hard for it make all the money, and, if someone *is* >smart, works hard, and is rich, then they stole their wealth somehow. > >BTW, none of you guys out there holding the short end of this >rhetorical stick can blame *me* for the fact that I'm using it to >beat you severely all over your collective head and shoulders. You >were, apparently, too dumb to grab the right end. *I* went to >Missouri, and *I* don't have a degree in anything actually useful, >much less a "terminal" one, which means *I*'m broker than anyone on >this list -- it's just that *you*, of all people, lots with >educations far surpassing my own, should just plain know better. The >facts speak for themselves, if you just open your eyes and *look*. >There are no epicycles, the universe does not orbit the earth, and >economics is not a zero-sum game. The cost of anything, including >ignorance and destitution, is the forgone alternative, in this case, >intelligence and effort. > >[I will, however, admit to being educated *waay* past my level of >competence, and, by the way *you* discuss economics, so have you, >apparently.] > > > Its interesting but in this part of the World (Nova Scotia) a recent study found that college graduates earn less than graduates of 2 year community colleges (trade schools). They did decline to mention that the demand for some trades is so great that some of them are demanding university degrees to get in. Just for the record - the average salary for a university graduate (including advanced degree holders) here is C$ 21,000 -- < $14,000 US. No wonder half of San Francisco has set up here - we have a whole whack of call centers that have arrived here in the last couple of years - I think they hire some entry level IT people for around $10 ($6 US) an hour, which of course, fits perfectly for me - my entry level job, in 1986, paid $11.00 an hour. The fundamental difference is that most of the jobs that require a trade are *unionized*.In other words, in this part of the world, for the vast majority of people, union dues are a better investment than tuition. The counter-argument to this is that many college graduates leave for better work elsewhere, but the counter-counter argument is that we are the thin edge (one of several really - prison labor in the US would be another) of third-world wages and work practices coming to North America. I worked at a company that had a 14-year wage freeze. The fact that they could maintain that (and prosper) just says volumes about the economy in this part of the world. I met many people there, like me, who felt that was fine, I can vote with my feet. They didn't quite realize that just about every large employer in the area has similar, or worse, policies. Anyway eventually they started a union drive. During the vote, retired employees were brought in by the employer (rumours were that they were paid the going rate for a vote around here - a bottle of rum) and somehow allowed to vote . The union filed a grievance - which was denied - by a Minister of Labour, who, hey, guess what - used to be a VP at the company. That's free labor markets at work. The business continues to prosper - as I was told when I was there - it is a cash cow as long as the JOA (Joint Operating Agreement) with the competing paper is in place. And if you think that any of those wonderful American companies, out of some free-enterprise belief in competing for the best talent, are going to do anything about that, sorry, most of them received generous subsidies, in return, I'm sure, for an understanding about the labor markets here. > >BTW, if we ever actually *had* free markets in this country, >*including* the abolition of redistributive income and death taxes, >all those smart people in the Forbes 400 would have *more* money, and >there would be *more* self-made people on that list. In addition, >most of the people who *inherited* money on the list would have >*much* less of it, not even relatively speaking. Finally, practically >all of that "new" money would have come from economic efficiency and >not "stolen" from someone else, investment bubbles or not. > >That efficiency is called "progress", for those of you in The >People's Republics of Berkeley or Cambridge. It means more and better >stuff, cheaper, over time -- a terrible, petit-bourgeois concept >apparently not worthy of teaching by the educational elite, or you'd >know about it by now. In economic terms, it's also called an increase >in general welfare, and, no, Virginia, I'm not talking about >extorting money from someone who works, and giving it to someone who >doesn't in order to keep them from working and they can think of some >politician as Santa Claus come election time... > > Much as I like to accept what you say - I do believe in free markets , I have difficulty finding any - except of course for labor markets, which governments go to great lengths to protect (well unless the supply is tight) It was a great run with the technology industry - producing most of the self-made billionaires on the list, but now we've got a government-sponsored monopoly, and the concept of "more stuff, cheaper" which it has always promised - seems to be disappearing. A particularly galling example is high-speed internet access. An article I read a couple of years ago that it is an area where the pricing approaches of the IT industry (cheaper, better or you die) and the telecom industry (maintain your monopoly through regulation, and get guaranteed price increases through the same regulators) meet. Sadly to say, the telecom industry seems to have won. The whole entertainment industry/RIAA/Palladium thing seems to be another instance where actually giving value to the customer seems less important than using regulation to reduce competition and substitute products in order to produce profits for the favored few. > >In short, then, economics is not a zero sum game, property is not >theft, the rich don't get rich off the backs of the poor, and >redistributionist labor "theory" of value happy horseshit is just >that: horseshit, happy or otherwise. > >To believe otherwise, is -- quite literally, given the time Marx >wrote Capital and the Manifesto -- romantic nonsense. > > I usually agree - but when there's a Republican in office - I feel like they're the biggest believers in the Manifesto, in reverse. Create a reserve pool of labor, reduce the rights of that "proletariat" you've just created with bogus "law and order" policies , concentrate capital in the hands of a few (ideally people who can get you reelected) and the economy will take care of itself. Oh, and lie - use the word "compassionate" a lot. I guess I tend to believe that a certain amount of poverty reduction actually helps a modern capitalist state - the basic economic tenet of the Republic party seems to be the more homeless under each overpass, the more efficient the rest of us will be. And the facts are, for most people in the Western world are declining standards of living, declining benefits, disappearing social safety net, greater working hours, essentially since the entrance of women into the work force (not blaming women in any way, they have a right to work but its now 2 wage-earners in each family and still declining standards of living) is the reality. Again to quote that wonderfully liberal document I keep coming back to - the CIA world factbook - on the US economy: "Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20% of households" Owen

Re: sed /s/United States/Roman Empire/g Hmm, if the shoe fits... I think these five attributes could more or less describe various actions of the US over the past decade or so... > In the 1990s we witnessed the emergence of a small number of rogue > states that, while different in important ways, share a number of > attributes. These states: > > * brutalize their own people and squander their national resources > for the personal gain of the rulers; The first part of this doesn't really fit, except in isolated cases - certainly not en mass. The second part though... Hmm... > * display no regard for international law, threaten their > neighbors, and callously violate international treaties to which they > are party; Well, think about it. > * are determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction, along with > other advanced military technology, to be used as threats or > offensively to achieve the aggressive designs of these regimes; We already have weapons of mass destruction, but are actively developing bigger and better ones. > * sponsor terrorism around the globe; and Heheh... Anyone know about the 'School of the Americas'? What about the monies, supplies, and training that supported the contra rebels? Oh, I forgot, their government was "bad" and needed to be overthrown (with out help). > * reject basic human values and hate the United States and > everything for which it stands. Basic human values like the first ammendment? The fourth ammendment? Sorry, Shrub, your political newspeak is falling on deaf ears. Oh, sorry, maybe I should self-censor my thoughts to avoid being put in a 're-education camp' by Ashcrofts gestappo? Gads, maybe someone on FoRK has joined your T.I.P.S. program and became an official citizen spy? In disgust, Elias

Re: [VoID] a new low on the personals tip... > * Too much information? The saying, as I recall, is along the lines of "put your best foot forward". (In this case, you seem to have put everything forward, in a Fosbury Flop consisting of the best foot, the worst foot, enough arms for a diety and his consort, and even a set of spare limbs from Hoffa or the space aliens or whatever it is you keep locked up in the trunk of the Bonneville) > ... replied ... in one go, in a matter of minutes. I *do* > really think this way, complete with footnotes. So if it's too much > information, I still stand by my reply: I wouldn't be myself if I > started off playing games. Pascal could write short letters, when he had the time. Is editing to provide an "executive summary" really being untrue to yourself? (We are all used to a full-bore real-time Rohit streaming, but that's because we are already "Friends of", and know to set our buffers accordingly. For a stranger's sake, it may be best to provide the "elevator pitch Rohit" -- and negotiate upwards only after a session has been established) -Dave ::::: Thomas Jefferson writes: > I served with General Washington in the legislature of Virginia before > the revolution and during it with Dr. Franklin in Congress. I never > heard either of them speak [for as long as] ten minutes at a time ...

Re: sed /s/United States/Roman Empire/g > > Sorry, Shrub, your political newspeak is falling on deaf ears. Oh, > sorry, maybe I should self-censor my thoughts to avoid being put in a > 're-education camp' by Ashcrofts gestappo? Gads, maybe someone on FoRK > has joined your T.I.P.S. program and became an official citizen spy? > > > In disgust, > Elias Well the message was clear to me - the US wants to start an arms race to jack up their world arms sales monopoly. Owen

RE: Goodbye Global Warming > Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote: > >and say hello to the cool: Oooo ... /this/ is going to cause > some stir ... > > Of course not. Some people just don't want to be confused by the facts. For anyone to fully bury global warming, they would need to explain why the dramatic increase in CO2 concentrations are not increasing the global temperature. They would also need to explain why, worldwide, glaciers are melting faster than they have previously in the historical record. That is, people need more than refutations, they need a compelling alternate explanation (hint: climate variability doesn't cover all the bases). - Jim

Re: Goodbye Global Warming >>>>> "J" == Jim Whitehead <[email protected]> writes: J> For anyone to fully bury global warming, they would need to J> explain why the dramatic increase in CO2 concentrations are not J> increasing the global temperature. They would also need to J> explain why, worldwide, glaciers are melting faster than they J> have previously in the historical record. The associated links cover that: The surface temperature in spots frequented by people is warmer (hence all our groundbased sensors reporting global warming) although the overall environmental temperature is decreasing. Apparently, the real news is not that there is no global warming, but that our models of the warming were seriously flawed by naive convection models. This too was not news to the theoreticians: All that has happened is that NASA has confirmed the naiive convection concerns. -- Gary Lawrence Murphy - [email protected] - TeleDynamics Communications - blog: http://www.auracom.com/~teledyn - biz: http://teledyn.com/ - "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." (Picasso)

RE: Goodbye Global Warming "the historical record", by which you mean *human* historical record, is highly overrated (nigh worthless) when you are talking about geological timescales, even on topics with as short a timescale as climate. My problem with global warming (or cooling for that matter), is that the supposedly profound recent changes in temperature, both in absolute terms and as a function time, very arguably fall well below the noise floor of the natural fluctuations that have occurred over the last 50,000 years both in terms of absolute average temperature and the rate of temperature change. People unfamiliar with history of global temperature since the advent of modern humans may think that a degree here or there over a century is a lot, not realizing that global temperatures regularly whipsaw with far greater extremity. I therefore immediately dismiss any theory of global warming that cannot explain why temperatures whipsawed more severely in pre-history than in the last couple thousand years (which have been relatively calm by geological standards). This is a very inconvenient fact for people trying to use climate to push a particular social agenda. It is worth noting that underneath the receding glaciers deposited during the last major ice age, they are finding substantial evidence of humans living in what was a nice temperate climate before the glaciers paved over their civilization. The receding glaciers have turned into a bit of an archaeological treasure chest, as they expose artifacts buried in and underneath them as they shrink that have been preserved by the ice for thousands of years. I don't see any compelling reason to "save the glaciers" anyway, particularly in light of the fact that their existence has always been transient. For anyone to insist that the current negligible fluctuations are anthropogenic just heaps one ridiculous assertion upon another. I'll just stick with Occam's Razor for now. In my humble opinion. Cheers, -James Rogers [email protected] On Mon, 2002-09-23 at 12:23, Jim Whitehead wrote: > > For anyone to fully bury global warming, they would need to explain why the > dramatic increase in CO2 concentrations are not increasing the global > temperature. They would also need to explain why, worldwide, glaciers are > melting faster than they have previously in the historical record. That is, > people need more than refutations, they need a compelling alternate > explanation (hint: climate variability doesn't cover all the bases).

RE: Goodbye Global Warming For anyone to fully bury global warming, they would have to bury the Greens. A Green once said that if the Spotted Owl hadn't existed they would have had to invent it. So it is with global warming. Their fundamental opposition isn't to a warmer earth, it is to industrial civilization. The fact that the sattelites didn't match what the global warming theorists said should be there is old news. The news here is that the temperature measures via sattelite have gotten even better and they have been validated with a different means of measurement. Rather than have to defend CO2 concentrations as not causing global warming, people who believe in CO2 need a good explanation of the "Medieval Warm Period". Said period was warmer than what we have now, and it obvioiusly wasn't caused by CO2. In point of fact the predicted global warming due to CO2 is not caused DIRECTLY by CO2. CO2 doesn't trap that much heat. Water vapor does, and if you can get more water vapor in the air due to CO2 then you have your warming theory. Yet it would seem that the very stability of the earth's climate over long periods argues not for an unstable system with positive feedback loops but one where negative feedback loops predominate. More water vapor can increase temperatuers, but that also leads to more clouds. Clouds both trap heat and reflect it, so it depends a great deal on how the cloud formation shakes out. Most climate models admit they do clouds very poorly. A good link is: http://www.techcentralstation.be/2051/wrapper.jsp?PID=2051-100&CID=2051- 060302A > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jim > Whitehead > Sent: Monday, September 23, 2002 12:23 PM > To: Robert Harley; [email protected] > Subject: RE: Goodbye Global Warming > > > Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote: > > >and say hello to the cool: Oooo ... /this/ is going to cause > > some stir ... > > > > Of course not. Some people just don't want to be confused by the facts. > > For anyone to fully bury global warming, they would need to explain why > the > dramatic increase in CO2 concentrations are not increasing the global > temperature. They would also need to explain why, worldwide, glaciers are > melting faster than they have previously in the historical record. That > is, > people need more than refutations, they need a compelling alternate > explanation (hint: climate variability doesn't cover all the bases). > > - Jim >

RE: Goodbye Global Warming > J> For anyone to fully bury global warming, they would need to > J> explain why the dramatic increase in CO2 concentrations are not > J> increasing the global temperature. You have not explained why the increase in CO2 concentrations is not contributing to increasing global temperature. > This too was not news to the theoreticians: All > that has happened is that NASA has confirmed the naiive convection > concerns. Precisely which theoreticians do you mean? What, exactly, do you mean by a global warming theoretician -- scientists in this area don't use that term. I assure you that not all scientists performing modeling of global temperature phenomena agree with your assertions. - Jim

RE: Goodbye Global Warming > "the historical record", by which you mean *human* historical record, is > highly overrated (nigh worthless) when you are talking about geological > timescales, even on topics with as short a timescale as climate. There has been a significant recent increase in global CO2 concentrations. The vast preponderance of the new CO2 in the atmosphere is due to human activity starting around the industrialization of Europe, and accelerating after WWII. Most scientists studying global climate change believe that these increased CO2 concentrations are the primary causal agent for increased global warming. Hence our interest in items of human time scale. > It is worth noting that underneath the receding glaciers deposited > during the last major ice age, they are finding substantial evidence of > humans living in what was a nice temperate climate before the glaciers > paved over their civilization. The receding glaciers have turned into a > bit of an archaeological treasure chest, as they expose artifacts buried > in and underneath them as they shrink that have been preserved by the > ice for thousands of years. I don't see any compelling reason to "save > the glaciers" anyway, particularly in light of the fact that their > existence has always been transient. Most global climate change scientists would agree that temperatures in the past have often been much warmer than today. The point of global warming isn't to save the Earth -- the planet is not sentient. The point is to understand and potentially reduce the impact of increasing temperatures on global human activity. > For anyone to insist that the current negligible fluctuations are > anthropogenic just heaps one ridiculous assertion upon another. I'll > just stick with Occam's Razor for now. The increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration is due to human activity. It is generally accepted that increases in CO2 in a closed environment subject to solar heating retain more of that solar energy. This is the current best explanation for the high temperature of Venus. If the CO2 concentration goes up globally (which it has), then theory states the earth should be retaining greater solar energy. This process may be slow, and may be difficult to monitor due to the variability of temperatures worldwide. I encourage you to refute any part of this causal chain linking CO2 to eventual increases in global energy content, part of which will be evident as heat. - Jim

Re: Goodbye Global Warming ----- Original Message ----- From: "James Rogers" <[email protected]> > > It is worth noting that underneath the receding glaciers deposited > during the last major ice age, they are finding substantial evidence of > humans living in what was a nice temperate climate before the glaciers > paved over their civilization. The receding glaciers have turned into a > bit of an archaeological treasure chest, as they expose artifacts buried > in and underneath them as they shrink that have been preserved by the > ice for thousands of years. Got bits?

Re: Goodbye Global Warming ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Hall" <[email protected]> > A Green once said that if the Spotted Owl hadn't existed they > would have had to invent it. A Republican once said "I am not a crook".

Re: Goodbye Global Warming --]> A Green once said that if the Spotted Owl hadn't existed they --]> would have had to invent it. --]A Republican once said "I am not a crook". --] Oh great, another round of Lableisms....Let me know when you get back to real data..

RE: Goodbye Global Warming "I did not have sex with that woman." > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mr. > FoRK > Sent: Monday, September 23, 2002 2:12 PM > To: FoRK > Subject: Re: Goodbye Global Warming > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "John Hall" <[email protected]> > > > A Green once said that if the Spotted Owl hadn't existed they > > would have had to invent it. > A Republican once said "I am not a crook".

Re: Goodbye Global Warming I've seen articles on this type of stuff passing through various forums for several years. I've always found archaeology interesting for no particular reason. Here is a recent article from U.S. News that I actually still have in the dank recesses of my virtual repository. -James Rogers [email protected] -------------------------------------------- http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/020916/misc/16meltdown.htm Defrosting the past Ancient human and animal remains are melting out of glaciers, a bounty of a warming world BY ALEX MARKELS As he hiked near Colorado's Continental Divide in the summer of 2001, Ed Knapp noticed a strange shape jutting from a melting ice field at 13,000 feet. "It looked like a bison skull," the building contractor and amateur archaeologist recalls. "I thought, 'That's strange. Bison don't live this high up.' " Knapp brought the skull to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, where scientists last month announced that it was indeed from a bison�one that died about 340 years ago. "This was an extraordinary discovery," says Russ Graham, the museum's chief curator, adding that it could alter notions of the mountain environment centuries ago. "There's probably a lot more like it yet to be found." And not just bison. Colorado isn't the only place where glaciers and snowfields are melting. Decades of unusual warmth in regions from Peru to Alaska�a trend some think is linked to emissions from cars and industry�have shrunk or thawed many of the world's 70,000 glaciers. As the ice recedes, a treasure-trove of human and animal artifacts is emerging, extraordinarily well preserved after centuries in the deep freeze. The fabrics, wood, bone, and DNA-rich tissue found on the mucky fringes of the ice are revising scientists' understanding of our predecessors' health, habits, and technology, and the prey they pursued. "It's mind-boggling how many different fields are being advanced through studying these remains," says Johan Reinhard, a high-altitude archaeologist and explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society. Rare, spectacular finds like the frozen mummies he discovered in the Andes of Peru in the 1990s and the legendary 5,300-year-old "Ice Man," found at the edge of a receding glacier in the Alps in 1991, have offered time capsules of cultural and biological information. Now, as the ice continues to retreat, it is yielding not just occasional treasures but long records of humans and animals in the high mountains. Vanishing act. The trick is finding such specimens before Mother Nature�and looters�take them first. Once uncovered, frozen remains can deteriorate within hours or be gnawed by animals. Moreover, they're often so well preserved when they emerge that people who come upon them don't even realize they're ancient. That was the case when three men hunting sheep near a high glacier in British Columbia, Canada, three years ago saw what they thought was a dead animal. "It looked a little like sealskin buried in the ice," recalls Warren Ward, a teacher from nearby Nelson. "But when I looked closer I could see leather fringe from a coat and finger bones." Figuring they had found the remains of another hunter, or perhaps a fur trapper, the men stowed a flint knife and other artifacts in a Zip-Loc bag and delivered them to local officials. Archaeologists later exhumed the fallen hunter's body, along with a woven hat, fur clothing, and what seemed to be a medicine bag. Carbon dating revealed that the hunter lived about 550 years ago. Dubbed Kwaday Dan Ts'inchi, or Long Ago Person Found, by people of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations (who may be his direct descendants), he is perhaps the best-preserved human from the period ever found in North America. Other findings from melting ice in the neighboring Yukon region could explain what that long-ago person was doing in the mountains in the first place. "Before this there was no archaeological record of people living here," says Greg Hare, a Yukon government archaeologist. "Now we see that this area was very much part of people's seasonal activities." Like Ward's discovery, the search began by chance, when Kristin Benedek caught a whiff of what smelled like a barnyard as she and her husband, Gerry Kuzyk, hunted sheep at 6,000 feet in the mountains of the south Yukon. They followed the scent to a melting patch of ice covered in caribou dung. "It was really odd, because I knew there hadn't been caribou in the area for at least 100 years," recalls Kuzyk, then a wildlife biologist with the Yukon government. Caribou cake. Returning a week later, he found "what looked like a pencil with string wrapped around it." It turned out to be a 4,300-year-old atlatl, or spear thrower. Further investigation of the ice patch�and scores of others around the region�revealed icy layer cakes filled with caribou remains and human detritus chronicling 7,800 years of changing hunting practices. Scientists now believe ancient caribou and other animals flocked to the ice each summer to cool down and escape swarming mosquitoes and flies. Hunters followed the game. They returned for centuries and discarded some equipment in the ice. "We've got people hunting with throwing darts up until 1,200 years ago," says Hare, who now oversees the research project. "Then we see the first appearance of the bow and arrow about 1,300 years ago. And by 1,200 years ago, there's no more throwing darts." Now scientists are trying to make the search less a matter of luck. They are developing sophisticated computer models that combine data on where glaciers are melting fastest and where humans and animals are known to have migrated to pinpoint the best places to search in Alaska's Wrangell and St. Elias mountain ranges�the United States' most glaciated terrain�and in the Andes. Johan Reinhard thinks the fast- thawing European Alps could also deliver more findings, perhaps as exquisite as the Ice Man. "Global warming is providing us high-altitude archaeologists with some fantastic opportunities right now. We're probably about the only ones happy about it."

How about subsidizing SSL access to Google? [a cheeky letter to the editors of the Economist follows, along with the article I was commenting on... Rohit] In your article about Chinese attempts to censor Google last week ("The Search Goes On", Sept. 19th), the followup correctly noted that the most subversive aspect of Google's service is not its card catalog, which merely points surfers in the right direction, but the entire library. By maintaining what amounts to a live backup of the entire World Wide Web, if you can get to Google's cache, you can read anything you'd like. The techniques Chinese Internet Service Providers are using to enforce these rules, however, all depend on the fact that traffic to and from Google, or indeed almost all public websites, is unencrypted. Almost all Web browsers, however, include support for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption for securing credit card numbers and the like. Upgrading to SSL makes it effectively impossible for a 'man-in-the-middle' to meddle; censorship would have to be imposed on each individual computer in China. The only choice left is to either ban the entire site (range of IP addresses), but not the kind of selective filtering reported on in the article. Of course, the additional computing power to encrypt all this traffic costs real money. If the United States is so concerned about the free flow of information, why shouldn't the Broadcasting Board of Governors sponsor an encrypted interface to Google, or for that matter, the rest of the Web? To date, public diplomacy efforts have focused on public-sector programming for the Voice of America, Radio Sawa, and the like. Just imagine if the US government got into the business of subsidizing secure access to private-sector media instead. Nothing illustrates the freedom of the press as much as the wacky excess of the press itself -- and most of it is already salted away at Google and the Internet Archive project. On second thought, I can hardly imagine this Administration *promoting* the use of encryption to uphold privacy rights. Never mind... Best, Rohit Khare =========================================================== The search goes on China backtracks on banning Google�up to a point Sep 19th 2002 | BEIJING From The Economist print edition IN CHINESE, the nickname for Google, an American Internet search engine, is gougou, meaning �doggy�. For the country's fast-growing population of Internet users (46m, according to an official estimate), it is proving an elusive creature. Earlier this month, the Chinese authorities blocked access to Google from Internet service providers in China�apparently because the search engine helped Chinese users to get access to forbidden sites. Now, after an outcry from those users, access has been restored. An unusual climbdown by China's zealous Internet censors? Hardly. More sophisticated controls have now been imposed that make it difficult to use Google to search for material deemed offensive to the government. Access is still blocked to the cached versions of web pages taken by Google as it trawls the Internet. These once provided a handy way for Chinese users to see material stored on blocked websites. After the blocking of Google on August 31st, many Chinese Internet users posted messages on bulletin boards in China protesting against the move. Their anger was again aroused last week when some Chinese Internet providers began rerouting users trying to reach the blocked Google site to far less powerful search engines in China. Duncan Clark, the head of a Beijing-based technology consultancy firm, BDA (China) Ltd, says China is trying a new tactic in its efforts to censor the Internet. Until recently, it had focused on blocking individual sites, including all pages stored on them. Now it seems to be filtering data transmitted to or from foreign websites to search for key words that might indicate undesirable content. For example earlier this week when using Eastnet, a Beijing-based Internet provider, a search on Google for Falun Gong�a quasi-Buddhist exercise sect outlawed in China� usually aborted before all the results had time to appear. Such a search also rendered Google impossible to use for several minutes.

Re[2]: Goodbye Global Warming How about this: A bored FoRKer said: "YAWN" I believe Tom had it right. Signal not noise. I'll start: Los Angeles Times September 23, 2002 Monday Copyright 2002 / Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times September 23, 2002 Monday Home Edition SECTION: Main News Main News; Part 1; Page 13; National Desk LENGTH: 1013 words BYLINE: DANA CALVO, TIMES STAFF WRITER DATELINE: SEATTLE BODY: The idea came at the end of a long, frustrating brown-bag session at a public-policy think tank here. The challenge was to save the city's child-care programs. Staring into his empty coffee cup, the meeting coordinator's mind landed on an unlikely solution: Put a tax--just a "benign" dime a shot--on espresso. That led to a petition signed by more than 20,000 Seattle residents, and next year, voters will decide whether the tax becomes law, one that taps right into Seattle's legendary addiction to coffee. This is, after all, the town where Starbucks was born and where the $12 pound of beans became a staple. There is one Starbucks for every 7,000 residents in Seattle, compared to one per 64,000 in New York. Seattle also has two other major coffee chains, Tully's Coffee and Seattle's Best Coffee, as well as countless cafes and espresso carts. A recent poll showed that 74% of Seattle residents would vote for the tax. "For people outside of Seattle who don't understand the consumption of espresso, [the tax proposal] can be seen as crazy," said John Burbank, the think tank's executive director, "but it was common sense." Research by his nonprofit Economic Opportunity Institute showed that people preferred a tax on liquor or beer over one on espresso. But because of the large number of lattes and cappuccinos sold, a tax on espresso could be lower than one levied on alcohol. Burbank estimates the tax could generate $7 million to $10 million a year. City Council aides dispute his figures, saying their research shows the tax would bring in $1.5 million to $3 million a year. Burbank's institute is funded by foundations and labor unions. The think tank's mission is to promote public policy in the interests of low-income people, and it has long championed child-care issues. Burbank says the tax would restore cuts to the child-care programs made earlier this year by Gov. Gary Locke. He also says it would provide more low-income families with subsidies for child care, improve preschool programs and increase teacher salaries. At Bauhaus Books & Coffee, the sidewalk is dotted with tables of customers for whom coffee is a half-day activity, not just a drink. Espresso lovers like Chris Altman, who at a dime a day would spend an extra $36.50 a year, said the investment is worth it. "I'm OK with it," said the 35-year-old, stirring his iced latte. "The money's got to come from somewhere." Hope Revuelto, 25, was cooling her regular coffee ($1 because she brought her own mug) and reading "Zen and the Art of Pottery." She supports the initiative and said its critics are behaving as would be expected of espresso drinkers: They want the most expensive thing on the menu but resist paying 10 cents to help the needy. Some say the tax isn't the issue; they just resent being singled out. David Marsh, 45, a costume manager, drinks up to three espressos a day, which means he'd be shelling out an extra $109.50 a year. "I, for one, don't have kids, but I drink espresso," he said, as he sewed a leather collar onto a chain-mail tunic. "I don't mind paying, but I think everyone should pay." Coffeehouses are steamed about it, and they've organized as JOLT--Joined to Oppose the Latte Tax. Among the members are Seattle's Chamber of Commerce and the city's two largest coffee franchises, Starbucks and Tully's. The tax would force coffeehouses to track sales of any beverage that contains espresso, a task that could be an administrative nightmare for smaller cafes, especially during the frantic morning rush. If espresso counts come under suspicion, coffeehouse owners could face a city audit. University of Chicago economics professor Michael Greenstone said the tax doesn't add up. "The purpose of any tax is to be efficient and equitable, and this is neither," he said. "On the efficiency side, it's surely going to lead to costly efforts by both businesses and consumers to find ways to avoid the tax. For example, Starbucks could claim that they are using finely ground coffee, [instead of coffee run though an espresso maker] and that consequently, they are exempt from the tax. Would they be right? I don't know, but finding out will surely take lots of legal fees that could have gone to child care. "Of course, from a public-relations perspective, this is an ingenious idea, and I mean that in a cynical way. They've pitted espresso drinkers against child-care supporters, and who's going to side with the espresso drinkers?" In fact, the proposed tax has forced opponents into a political two-step, where their criticism must remain a beat behind their public stance of political correctness. In a liberal city like Seattle, corporations continually advertise their commitment to social activism, and throughout the debate over the initiative, JOLT members prefaced their opposition with endorsements of good child care. "Starbucks will continue to support early-learning and childhood-development programs through the millions of dollars we contribute annually," the company said. "However, Starbucks does not understand why the Economic Opportunity Institute would recommend an additional consumer tax on espresso beverages, or any other single consumer product." The City Council has yet to decide when the initiative will go before voters next year. The initiative's authors say it is directed at vendors; critics predict it will be passed on to consumers through higher prices, effectively punishing them for their choice of coffee. The tax would be applied to any drink with at least half an ounce of espresso, including decaf. Drip coffee would be exempt. Burbank says the tax would reach only a pre-selected group of consumers who are wealthier than those who drink drip. So, he's been pitching it as a modern-day Robin Hood tax, where the needy get a dime every time the affluent spend $3 to $4 on an espresso. It's the kind of political marketing that Fran Beulah, 43, finds funny. "I drink espresso," she said, laughing, "and I am not rich." JH> "I did not have sex with that woman." >> -----Original Message----- >> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of JH> Mr. >> FoRK >> Sent: Monday, September 23, 2002 2:12 PM >> To: FoRK >> Subject: Re: Goodbye Global Warming >> >> >> ----- Original Message ----- >> From: "John Hall" <[email protected]> >> >> > A Green once said that if the Spotted Owl hadn't existed they >> > would have had to invent it. >> A Republican once said "I am not a crook". -- Best regards, bitbitch mailto:[email protected]

Re: Goodbye Global Warming Sorry... I just had a run-in with a neighbor whom I've never met before who pigeonholed me within one minute after I asked a question - he said 'Are you one of them environmentalists?' For some reason that narrowminded attitude of not listening to what I was saying and categorizing me into a box in his little paranoid republican fantasy world just pissed me off. Sheesh... I've been out of work too long... ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tom" <[email protected]> To: "Mr. FoRK" <[email protected]> Cc: "FoRK" <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, September 23, 2002 2:22 PM Subject: Re: Goodbye Global Warming > > --]> A Green once said that if the Spotted Owl hadn't existed they > --]> would have had to invent it. > --]A Republican once said "I am not a crook". > --] > > Oh great, another round of Lableisms....Let me know when you get back to > real data.. >

RE: Re[2]: Goodbye Global Warming > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] > > Burbank says the tax would reach only a pre-selected group of > consumers who are wealthier than those who drink drip. So, he's been > pitching it as a modern-day Robin Hood tax, where the needy get a dime > every time the affluent spend $3 to $4 on an espresso. The people who pour the espresso aren't rich. An interesting issue might be how it affects employment. Still, it is a 1% or less sales tax. That might not make that big of a difference. The costs of tracking revenue and collecting the tax might be onerous. Worse than the cost of the tax itself. Me: I hate coffee anyway. But if they put a $.10/can tax on Diet Dr. Pepper I might have to start buying them in Oregon. (Yes, I drink that much Diet Dr. Pepper).

SF Weekly's Ultimate SF Date lineup :-) I love the absurd sense of humor it takes to build up such an elaborate evening only to note that "even if the date's a bust you can always have a hundred people up for cocktails" in your penthouse suite at the end of the night :-) Personally, I'd put one point in favor of the Redwood Room over Lapis: on a weeknight, you can still whip out a TiBook and write, since it's a hotel bar. And it seems to give people all sorts of license to interrogate you as to why you're writing with a double of scotch :-) Best, Rohit > Five Best Ways to Impress Your Date > > You've met the biped of your dreams at the corner laundromat and, > wonder of wonders, she's agreed to go out with you this Saturday. Don't > blow it! Follow the instructions below and even if you impress your > date so much you never see her again, your evening will be a memorable > one. All you need are a chauffeur, a change of clothes, and several > hundred thousand dollars. > > Luxury Suite at Pacific Bell Park > > Third and King streets, 972-2000, www.sfgiants.com > > Kick off your date with an afternoon at the ballpark -- not just any > ballpark, but just about the best ballpark in the country, and not in > some drafty, behind-the-plate box seat but in one of the park's lushly > accessorized luxury suites. An elevator whisks you from a private > entrance on Willie Mays Plaza to your dwelling place above the infield. > Besides the excellent views of the bay, the park, and the Giants in > action, there's a balcony, a wet bar, a refrigerator, two televisions, > a stereo/CD player, a dual-line phone, Internet access, room service, > and a concierge to call you a cab or make your restaurant reservations > for you. No one is admitted without proper clearance, ensuring your > utmost privacy. Next: Pull yourself together for ... > > Cocktails at Lapis > > Pier 33 (Embarcadero at Bay), 982-0203, > > www.lapis-sf.com > > Now that the Redwood Room has devolved into just another velvet-rope > yuppie hangout, the city has no clear-cut, top-of-the-line cocktail > lounge such as Chicago's Pump Room or New York's King Cole Bar > (although Maxfield's, the Compass Rose, and the Top of the Mark are > excellent runners-up). Best of all is Lapis, where the wannabe Noel > Coward can sip an estimable Gibson in the lounge adjoining the dining > room. The dramatically backlit bar is framed by lush bronze draperies > that complement the room's deep-blue setting, and towering ceilings > give the lounge a graceful, airy ambience. Floor-to-ceiling windows > provide a lush panorama of the bay and the hills beyond. > > > Dinner at the Dining Room > > Ritz-Carlton Hotel, 600 Stockton (between Pine and > > California), 296-7465, www.ritzcarlton.com > > Your next stop on the road to beguilement is one of the handsomest > dining rooms in the country. The tranquil sounds of a harp underscore a > sumptuous setting of polished mahogany, soft linens, and fine crystal > gleaming in the candlelight. Chef Sylvain Portay prepares luxurious > nouvelle cuisine in several courses: lobster salad with caviar cream; > turbot with crayfish and truffles; roasted squab with port-marinated > figs; saffron-poached pear with guanaja chocolate gratin. Sommelier > St�phane Lacroix maintains a fabulous cellar, the service is impeccable > and inviting, and intimate discourse is practically inevitable. Next: > > Charter the Rendezvous From Rendezvous Charters > > Pier 40 (in South Beach Harbor), 543-7333, > > www.baysail.com > > Nothing's more enticing than an evening cruise around San Francisco > Bay, and the islands, bridges, and lights of the city are especially > entrancing viewed from this vintage brigantine schooner. Built in 1933 > and recently restored to its former glory, the 78-foot Rendezvous looks > like a clipper ship out of the Gold Rush era, with its 80-foot masts > and square-rigged sails. Intricately carved mahogany, pecan, ash, and > rosewood accent the brass-railed, velvet-cushioned rooms below decks, > the perfect spot for a sip of Veuve Cliquot and some subtle canoodling. > > Penthouse Suite at the Fairmont Hotel > > 950 Mason (between California and Sacramento), > > 772-5000, www.fairmont.com > > Last but not least, escort your companion to what has been described as > the most expensive hotel accommodation in the world: the Fairmont's > elaborate penthouse. The eight-room suite (including three bedrooms, > three baths, a dining room, a library, a billiard room, a fully > equipped kitchen, and a living room with fireplace and baby grand > piano) comes with its own maid, butler, and limousine and is accessed > by private elevator. The library alone is worth investigating: two > circular floors of books encapsulated by a domed ceiling etched with > the constellations. The view from the terrace is enthralling, and even > if the date's a bust you can always have a hundred people up for > cocktails. > > sfweekly.com | originally published: May 15, 2002

Googlenews The further googlization of my screentimes....News...No not just news...google news. I love the line that tells me how fresh/stale the news item is....phreaking cewl. So far I like the content range.

Here Come Da Feds The damn Federalists are at it again, another bumsrush on Oregons states rights.. [Being a 5 year translplant out here I say the best thing to do is bring back the plans to make the state of Jefferson, then have Oregon, Washington and Jefferson break away from the union.] http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/09/23/oregon.assisted.suicide/ SAN FRANCISCO, California (CNN) -- The U.S. Justice Department filed an appeal Monday to overturn a federal judge's ruling that upheld Oregon's doctor-assisted suicide law. A spokesman for Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers said the state views the appeal as "same story, different day." Oregon voters approved doctor-assisted suicide twice, in ballot initiatives in 1994 and 1997. But in November, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft warned Oregon doctors they would be prosecuted under federal law if they prescribed lethal doses of drugs for dying patients.

Re: SF Weekly's Ultimate SF Date lineup :-) SF Weekly: >Nothing's more enticing than an evening cruise around San Francisco Bay, >and the islands, bridges, and lights of the city are especially entrancing >viewed from this vintage brigantine schooner. Built in 1933 and recently >restored to its former glory, the 78-foot Rendezvous looks like a clipper >ship out of the Gold Rush era, with its 80-foot masts and square-rigged >sails. That sounds like fun. But it sets the wrong precedent. Here's the better idea. Invite her for an afternoon cruise under the Golden Gate bridge in your Stonehorse day sailor. Under way, ask her if she'd like to take the stick. Back at slip, cook her dinner. Something simple, but good, maybe a stir fry or a stew, served in the cockpit, with an inexpensive but potable wine. If she runs away after that, 'tis good riddance. If she wants to try it again, another day, she shows promise. If she asks you to show her the V berth, you have a girlfriend. If she notes your brightwork needs another coat, and asks what you're using on it, propose on the spot. ;-) _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx

Re: SF Weekly's Ultimate SF Date lineup :-) On Mon, 23 Sep 2002, Russell Turpin wrote: --]Here's the better idea. Invite her for an afternoon --]cruise under the Golden Gate bridge in your Stonehorse --]day sailor. Good way, heres one that worked for me. Work on a database project with that person. After a while hand her the keyboard to go get some lunch. If when you come back she is talking to the person in the next cube about survivor all the time you were gone...go for the one night boom boom plan If when you return she has read thru the help screen to try to figure out what your working on...go fro the week long dine and do with options for more IF she finishes the help docs and does some code. If when you come back she has done some work on the db's infrastructure, cleaned up your code and made a few "additions" to make it work better and figures that since you have done enough work for the day asks that you bring lunch and your lap top to the big screen projection room to watch your new DVD of startship troopers..marry her

Not just like a virgin...a virgin...birth Rare Virgin Shark Births Reported in Detroit Voice of America - 5 hours ago A female shark has become a single mother - in the strictest sense of the term. Officials at Detroit's Belle Isle Aquarium say a shark there recently produced three babies in an event they are calling virgin births. http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/Midwest/09/23/offbeat.shark.births.ap/ http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/4124307.htm http://www.startribune.com/stories/1451/3320433.html

RE: Comrade Communism (was Re: Crony Capitalism (was RE: sed First, misattribution. I did not write the blurb below. I made one statement about VP Cheney only, to wit, that he has a short memory. I couldn't agree with you more on this: "in short, then, economics is not a zero sum game, property is not theft, the rich don't get rich off the backs of the poor, and redistributionist labor "theory" of value happy horseshit is just that: horseshit, happy or otherwise," however, I resent being lumped in a zero-sum-zealot category for suggesting nothing more than that rich and successful at face value is apropos of nothing and I am beginning to understand that people who immediately and so fiercely object to my ad hominem (re Cheney) align themselves weird sylogisms like "if rich then deservedly" or "if rich then smarter." Given that, I am also beginning to understand why some people NEED to be rich. WRT to meritocracies - all hail, meritocracies! WRT Harvard: over 90% of 2002 graduates were cum laude +. INTERESTING curve. Those eager to be measured got their wish; those unwashed shy folk who just live it provide the balast. Speaking of Forbes, was reading about Peter Norton just today in an old issue while waiting for my doctor. Norton attributes his success to LUCK. Imagine. Geege -----Original Message----- From: R. A. Hettinga [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, September 22, 2002 10:01 PM To: Geege Schuman; Owen Byrne Cc: Gary Lawrence Murphy; Mr. FoRK; [email protected]; Digital Bearer Settlement List Subject: Comrade Communism (was Re: Crony Capitalism (was RE: sed /s/United States/Roman Empire/g)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 11:15 AM -0400 on 9/22/02, Geege Schuman wrote: > Most of them seem to have Ivy League educations, or are Ivy League > dropouts suggesting to me that they weren't exactly poor to start > with. Actually, if I remember correctly from discussion of the list's composition in Forbes about five or six years ago, the *best* way to get on the Forbes 400 is to have *no* college at all. Can you say "Bootstraps", boys and girls? I knew you could... [Given that an undergraduate liberal arts degree from a state school, like, say, mine, :-), is nothing but stuff they should have taught you in a government-run "high" school, you'll probably get more of *those* on the Forbes 400 as well as time goes on. If we ever get around to having a good old fashioned government-collapsing transfer-payment depression (an economic version of this summer's government-forest conflagration, caused by the same kind of innumeracy that not clear-cutting enough forests did out west this summer :-)) that should motivate more than a few erst-slackers out there, including me, :-), to learn to actually feed themselves.] The *next* category on the Forbes 400 list is someone with a "terminal" professional degree, like an MBA, PhD, MD, etc., from the best school possible. Why? Because, as of about 1950, the *best* way to get into Harvard, for instance, is to be *smart*, not rich. Don't take my word for it, ask their admissions office. Look at the admissions stats over the years for proof. Meritocracy, American Style, was *invented* at the Ivy League after World War II. Even Stanford got the hint, :-), and, of course, Chicago taught them all how, right? :-). Practically *nobody* who goes to a top-20 American institution of higher learning can actually afford to go there these days. Unless, of course, their parents, who couldn't afford to go there themselves, got terminal degrees in the last 40 years or so. And their kids *still* had to get the grades, and "biased" (by intelligence :-)), test scores, to get in. The bizarre irony is that almost all of those people with "terminal" degrees, until they actually *own* something and *hire* people, or learn to *make* something for a living all day on a profit and loss basis, persist in the practically insane belief, like life after death, that economics is some kind of zero sum game, that dumb people who don't work hard for it make all the money, and, if someone *is* smart, works hard, and is rich, then they stole their wealth somehow. BTW, none of you guys out there holding the short end of this rhetorical stick can blame *me* for the fact that I'm using it to beat you severely all over your collective head and shoulders. You were, apparently, too dumb to grab the right end. *I* went to Missouri, and *I* don't have a degree in anything actually useful, much less a "terminal" one, which means *I*'m broker than anyone on this list -- it's just that *you*, of all people, lots with educations far surpassing my own, should just plain know better. The facts speak for themselves, if you just open your eyes and *look*. There are no epicycles, the universe does not orbit the earth, and economics is not a zero-sum game. The cost of anything, including ignorance and destitution, is the forgone alternative, in this case, intelligence and effort. [I will, however, admit to being educated *waay* past my level of competence, and, by the way *you* discuss economics, so have you, apparently.] BTW, if we ever actually *had* free markets in this country, *including* the abolition of redistributive income and death taxes, all those smart people in the Forbes 400 would have *more* money, and there would be *more* self-made people on that list. In addition, most of the people who *inherited* money on the list would have *much* less of it, not even relatively speaking. Finally, practically all of that "new" money would have come from economic efficiency and not "stolen" from someone else, investment bubbles or not. That efficiency is called "progress", for those of you in The People's Republics of Berkeley or Cambridge. It means more and better stuff, cheaper, over time -- a terrible, petit-bourgeois concept apparently not worthy of teaching by the educational elite, or you'd know about it by now. In economic terms, it's also called an increase in general welfare, and, no, Virginia, I'm not talking about extorting money from someone who works, and giving it to someone who doesn't in order to keep them from working and they can think of some politician as Santa Claus come election time... In short, then, economics is not a zero sum game, property is not theft, the rich don't get rich off the backs of the poor, and redistributionist labor "theory" of value happy horseshit is just that: horseshit, happy or otherwise. To believe otherwise, is -- quite literally, given the time Marx wrote Capital and the Manifesto -- romantic nonsense. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 7.5 iQA/AwUBPY511cPxH8jf3ohaEQLAsgCfZhsQMSvUy6GqJ5wgL52DwZKpIhMAnRuR YYboc+IcylP5TlKL58jpwEfu =z877 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [email protected]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Re: How about subsidizing SSL access to Google? Good idea! This could also be a job for P2P; lots of people would love to devote their spare cycles, bandwidth, and unblocked IP addresses to giving the Chinese unfettered net access. In a sense, this is what the "peek-a-booty" project does: http://www.peek-a-booty.org But let's play out the next few moves: Good Guys: Google enables SSL access Bad Guys: Chinese government again blocks all access to Google domains Good Guys: Set up Google proxies on ever-changing set of hosts (peek-a-booty) Bad Guys: Ban SSL (or any unlicensed opaque traffic) at the national firewall Good Guys: Hide Google traffic inside other innocuous-looking activity Bad Guys: Require nationwide installation of client-side NetNannyish software Good Guys: Offer software which disables/spoofs monitoring software Bad Guys: Imprison and harvest organs from people found using monitoring-disabling-software ...and on and on. The best we can hope is that technological cleverness, by raising the costs of oppression or by provoking intolerable oppression, brings social liberalization sooner rather than later. - Gordon ----- Original Message ----- From: "Rohit Khare" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, September 23, 2002 2:44 PM Subject: How about subsidizing SSL access to Google? [a cheeky letter to the editors of the Economist follows, along with the article I was commenting on... Rohit] In your article about Chinese attempts to censor Google last week ("The Search Goes On", Sept. 19th), the followup correctly noted that the most subversive aspect of Google's service is not its card catalog, which merely points surfers in the right direction, but the entire library. By maintaining what amounts to a live backup of the entire World Wide Web, if you can get to Google's cache, you can read anything you'd like. The techniques Chinese Internet Service Providers are using to enforce these rules, however, all depend on the fact that traffic to and from Google, or indeed almost all public websites, is unencrypted. Almost all Web browsers, however, include support for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption for securing credit card numbers and the like. Upgrading to SSL makes it effectively impossible for a 'man-in-the-middle' to meddle; censorship would have to be imposed on each individual computer in China. The only choice left is to either ban the entire site (range of IP addresses), but not the kind of selective filtering reported on in the article. Of course, the additional computing power to encrypt all this traffic costs real money. If the United States is so concerned about the free flow of information, why shouldn't the Broadcasting Board of Governors sponsor an encrypted interface to Google, or for that matter, the rest of the Web? To date, public diplomacy efforts have focused on public-sector programming for the Voice of America, Radio Sawa, and the like. Just imagine if the US government got into the business of subsidizing secure access to private-sector media instead. Nothing illustrates the freedom of the press as much as the wacky excess of the press itself -- and most of it is already salted away at Google and the Internet Archive project. On second thought, I can hardly imagine this Administration *promoting* the use of encryption to uphold privacy rights. Never mind... Best, Rohit Khare =========================================================== The search goes on China backtracks on banning Google�up to a point Sep 19th 2002 | BEIJING From The Economist print edition IN CHINESE, the nickname for Google, an American Internet search engine, is gougou, meaning �doggy�. For the country's fast-growing population of Internet users (46m, according to an official estimate), it is proving an elusive creature. Earlier this month, the Chinese authorities blocked access to Google from Internet service providers in China�apparently because the search engine helped Chinese users to get access to forbidden sites. Now, after an outcry from those users, access has been restored. An unusual climbdown by China's zealous Internet censors? Hardly. More sophisticated controls have now been imposed that make it difficult to use Google to search for material deemed offensive to the government. Access is still blocked to the cached versions of web pages taken by Google as it trawls the Internet. These once provided a handy way for Chinese users to see material stored on blocked websites. After the blocking of Google on August 31st, many Chinese Internet users posted messages on bulletin boards in China protesting against the move. Their anger was again aroused last week when some Chinese Internet providers began rerouting users trying to reach the blocked Google site to far less powerful search engines in China. Duncan Clark, the head of a Beijing-based technology consultancy firm, BDA (China) Ltd, says China is trying a new tactic in its efforts to censor the Internet. Until recently, it had focused on blocking individual sites, including all pages stored on them. Now it seems to be filtering data transmitted to or from foreign websites to search for key words that might indicate undesirable content. For example earlier this week when using Eastnet, a Beijing-based Internet provider, a search on Google for Falun Gong�a quasi-Buddhist exercise sect outlawed in China� usually aborted before all the results had time to appear. Such a search also rendered Google impossible to use for several minutes.

Pluck and Luck Anyone who doesn't appreciate both PLUCK and LUCK is only looking at part of the equation. America has, in fact, moved hard toward Meritocracy. But -- and this is a huge one -- you don't necessarily find it on the Forbes list. There is an element of LUCK, even if only being in the right place at the right time, to go that high. Beyond the Forbes List, there are many ways in which almost pure LUCK is involved in significant wealth. Being a super-model, for example. Though I think most people would be surprised by a lot of super-models. Cindy Crawford was valedictorian of her high school. Most people, of course, aren't in those stratified realms. It is the rest of us who tend to sort. There is a huge philosophical problem with the concept of Merit in the first place. Rawls claims Merit doesn't exist. Sowell seems to agree at least in part, but I'm sure Sowell would also state that the benefits of pretending it exists for society at large are enormous. And if Merit does exist then exactly what is it measuring? IQ? Purity of heart? Or the ability to satisfy customers? Functionally most people seem to equate Merit with IQ though they say it would be better if it were purity of heart. Yet the type of Merit that lands you on the Forbes list, or even just being a garden variety 'millionaire next door' is more likely to be the 'serving customers' definition. Differences due to merit, when they are perceived as such, generate far more animosity than differences due to luck. Luck can be forgiven. Superior performance, often not. > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Geege > Schuman > Sent: Monday, September 23, 2002 4:44 PM > To: R. A. Hettinga; Geege Schuman; Owen Byrne > Cc: Gary Lawrence Murphy; Mr. FoRK; [email protected]; Digital Bearer > Settlement List > Subject: RE: Comrade Communism (was Re: Crony Capitalism (was RE: sed > /s/United States/Roman Empire/g)) > > First, misattribution. I did not write the blurb below. I made one > statement about VP Cheney only, to wit, that he has a short memory. > > I couldn't agree with you more on this: "in short, then, economics is not > a > zero sum game, property is not theft, the rich don't get rich off the > backs > of the poor, and redistributionist labor "theory" of value happy horseshit > is just that: horseshit, happy or otherwise," however, I resent being > lumped > in a zero-sum-zealot category for suggesting nothing more than that rich > and > successful at face value is apropos of nothing and I am beginning to > understand that people who immediately and so fiercely object to my ad > hominem (re Cheney) align themselves weird sylogisms like "if rich then > deservedly" or "if rich then smarter." Given that, I am also beginning to > understand why some people NEED to be rich. > > WRT to meritocracies - all hail, meritocracies! WRT Harvard: over 90% of > 2002 graduates were cum laude +. INTERESTING curve. Those eager to be > measured got their wish; those unwashed shy folk who just live it provide > the balast. > > Speaking of Forbes, was reading about Peter Norton just today in an old > issue while waiting for my doctor. Norton attributes his success to LUCK. > Imagine. > > Geege > > -----Original Message----- > From: R. A. Hettinga [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Sunday, September 22, 2002 10:01 PM > To: Geege Schuman; Owen Byrne > Cc: Gary Lawrence Murphy; Mr. FoRK; [email protected]; Digital Bearer > Settlement List > Subject: Comrade Communism (was Re: Crony Capitalism (was RE: sed > /s/United States/Roman Empire/g)) > > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > At 11:15 AM -0400 on 9/22/02, Geege Schuman wrote: > > > > Most of them seem to have Ivy League educations, or are Ivy League > > dropouts suggesting to me that they weren't exactly poor to start > > with. > > Actually, if I remember correctly from discussion of the list's > composition in Forbes about five or six years ago, the *best* way to > get on the Forbes 400 is to have *no* college at all. Can you say > "Bootstraps", boys and girls? I knew you could... > > [Given that an undergraduate liberal arts degree from a state school, > like, say, mine, :-), is nothing but stuff they should have taught > you in a government-run "high" school, you'll probably get more of > *those* on the Forbes 400 as well as time goes on. If we ever get > around to having a good old fashioned government-collapsing > transfer-payment depression (an economic version of this summer's > government-forest conflagration, caused by the same kind of > innumeracy that not clear-cutting enough forests did out west this > summer :-)) that should motivate more than a few erst-slackers out > there, including me, :-), to learn to actually feed themselves.] > > > The *next* category on the Forbes 400 list is someone with a > "terminal" professional degree, like an MBA, PhD, MD, etc., from the > best school possible. > > Why? Because, as of about 1950, the *best* way to get into Harvard, > for instance, is to be *smart*, not rich. Don't take my word for it, > ask their admissions office. Look at the admissions stats over the > years for proof. > > Meritocracy, American Style, was *invented* at the Ivy League after > World War II. Even Stanford got the hint, :-), and, of course, > Chicago taught them all how, right? :-). Practically *nobody* who > goes to a top-20 American institution of higher learning can actually > afford to go there these days. Unless, of course, their parents, who > couldn't afford to go there themselves, got terminal degrees in the > last 40 years or so. And their kids *still* had to get the grades, > and "biased" (by intelligence :-)), test scores, to get in. > > > The bizarre irony is that almost all of those people with "terminal" > degrees, until they actually *own* something and *hire* people, or > learn to *make* something for a living all day on a profit and loss > basis, persist in the practically insane belief, like life after > death, that economics is some kind of zero sum game, that dumb people > who don't work hard for it make all the money, and, if someone *is* > smart, works hard, and is rich, then they stole their wealth somehow. > > BTW, none of you guys out there holding the short end of this > rhetorical stick can blame *me* for the fact that I'm using it to > beat you severely all over your collective head and shoulders. You > were, apparently, too dumb to grab the right end. *I* went to > Missouri, and *I* don't have a degree in anything actually useful, > much less a "terminal" one, which means *I*'m broker than anyone on > this list -- it's just that *you*, of all people, lots with > educations far surpassing my own, should just plain know better. The > facts speak for themselves, if you just open your eyes and *look*. > There are no epicycles, the universe does not orbit the earth, and > economics is not a zero-sum game. The cost of anything, including > ignorance and destitution, is the forgone alternative, in this case, > intelligence and effort. > > [I will, however, admit to being educated *waay* past my level of > competence, and, by the way *you* discuss economics, so have you, > apparently.] > > > > BTW, if we ever actually *had* free markets in this country, > *including* the abolition of redistributive income and death taxes, > all those smart people in the Forbes 400 would have *more* money, and > there would be *more* self-made people on that list. In addition, > most of the people who *inherited* money on the list would have > *much* less of it, not even relatively speaking. Finally, practically > all of that "new" money would have come from economic efficiency and > not "stolen" from someone else, investment bubbles or not. > > That efficiency is called "progress", for those of you in The > People's Republics of Berkeley or Cambridge. It means more and better > stuff, cheaper, over time -- a terrible, petit-bourgeois concept > apparently not worthy of teaching by the educational elite, or you'd > know about it by now. In economic terms, it's also called an increase > in general welfare, and, no, Virginia, I'm not talking about > extorting money from someone who works, and giving it to someone who > doesn't in order to keep them from working and they can think of some > politician as Santa Claus come election time... > > > In short, then, economics is not a zero sum game, property is not > theft, the rich don't get rich off the backs of the poor, and > redistributionist labor "theory" of value happy horseshit is just > that: horseshit, happy or otherwise. > > To believe otherwise, is -- quite literally, given the time Marx > wrote Capital and the Manifesto -- romantic nonsense. > > Cheers, > RAH > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: PGP 7.5 > > iQA/AwUBPY511cPxH8jf3ohaEQLAsgCfZhsQMSvUy6GqJ5wgL52DwZKpIhMAnRuR > YYboc+IcylP5TlKL58jpwEfu > =z877 > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > > -- > ----------------- > R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [email protected]> > The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> > 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA > "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, > [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to > experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' > >

Re: Goodbye Global Warming Thanks for the link - I'm fascinated by archaeology as well. ----- Original Message ----- From: "James Rogers" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, September 23, 2002 2:48 PM Subject: Re: Goodbye Global Warming I've seen articles on this type of stuff passing through various forums for several years. I've always found archaeology interesting for no particular reason. Here is a recent article from U.S. News that I actually still have in the dank recesses of my virtual repository. -James Rogers [email protected] -------------------------------------------- http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/020916/misc/16meltdown.htm Defrosting the past Ancient human and animal remains are melting out of glaciers, a bounty of a warming world BY ALEX MARKELS As he hiked near Colorado's Continental Divide in the summer of 2001, Ed Knapp noticed a strange shape jutting from a melting ice field at 13,000 feet. "It looked like a bison skull," the building contractor and amateur archaeologist recalls. "I thought, 'That's strange. Bison don't live this high up.' " Knapp brought the skull to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, where scientists last month announced that it was indeed from a bison�one that died about 340 years ago. "This was an extraordinary discovery," says Russ Graham, the museum's chief curator, adding that it could alter notions of the mountain environment centuries ago. "There's probably a lot more like it yet to be found." And not just bison. Colorado isn't the only place where glaciers and snowfields are melting. Decades of unusual warmth in regions from Peru to Alaska�a trend some think is linked to emissions from cars and industry�have shrunk or thawed many of the world's 70,000 glaciers. As the ice recedes, a treasure-trove of human and animal artifacts is emerging, extraordinarily well preserved after centuries in the deep freeze. The fabrics, wood, bone, and DNA-rich tissue found on the mucky fringes of the ice are revising scientists' understanding of our predecessors' health, habits, and technology, and the prey they pursued. "It's mind-boggling how many different fields are being advanced through studying these remains," says Johan Reinhard, a high-altitude archaeologist and explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society. Rare, spectacular finds like the frozen mummies he discovered in the Andes of Peru in the 1990s and the legendary 5,300-year-old "Ice Man," found at the edge of a receding glacier in the Alps in 1991, have offered time capsules of cultural and biological information. Now, as the ice continues to retreat, it is yielding not just occasional treasures but long records of humans and animals in the high mountains. Vanishing act. The trick is finding such specimens before Mother Nature�and looters�take them first. Once uncovered, frozen remains can deteriorate within hours or be gnawed by animals. Moreover, they're often so well preserved when they emerge that people who come upon them don't even realize they're ancient. That was the case when three men hunting sheep near a high glacier in British Columbia, Canada, three years ago saw what they thought was a dead animal. "It looked a little like sealskin buried in the ice," recalls Warren Ward, a teacher from nearby Nelson. "But when I looked closer I could see leather fringe from a coat and finger bones." Figuring they had found the remains of another hunter, or perhaps a fur trapper, the men stowed a flint knife and other artifacts in a Zip-Loc bag and delivered them to local officials. Archaeologists later exhumed the fallen hunter's body, along with a woven hat, fur clothing, and what seemed to be a medicine bag. Carbon dating revealed that the hunter lived about 550 years ago. Dubbed Kwaday Dan Ts'inchi, or Long Ago Person Found, by people of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations (who may be his direct descendants), he is perhaps the best-preserved human from the period ever found in North America. Other findings from melting ice in the neighboring Yukon region could explain what that long-ago person was doing in the mountains in the first place. "Before this there was no archaeological record of people living here," says Greg Hare, a Yukon government archaeologist. "Now we see that this area was very much part of people's seasonal activities." Like Ward's discovery, the search began by chance, when Kristin Benedek caught a whiff of what smelled like a barnyard as she and her husband, Gerry Kuzyk, hunted sheep at 6,000 feet in the mountains of the south Yukon. They followed the scent to a melting patch of ice covered in caribou dung. "It was really odd, because I knew there hadn't been caribou in the area for at least 100 years," recalls Kuzyk, then a wildlife biologist with the Yukon government. Caribou cake. Returning a week later, he found "what looked like a pencil with string wrapped around it." It turned out to be a 4,300-year-old atlatl, or spear thrower. Further investigation of the ice patch�and scores of others around the region�revealed icy layer cakes filled with caribou remains and human detritus chronicling 7,800 years of changing hunting practices. Scientists now believe ancient caribou and other animals flocked to the ice each summer to cool down and escape swarming mosquitoes and flies. Hunters followed the game. They returned for centuries and discarded some equipment in the ice. "We've got people hunting with throwing darts up until 1,200 years ago," says Hare, who now oversees the research project. "Then we see the first appearance of the bow and arrow about 1,300 years ago. And by 1,200 years ago, there's no more throwing darts." Now scientists are trying to make the search less a matter of luck. They are developing sophisticated computer models that combine data on where glaciers are melting fastest and where humans and animals are known to have migrated to pinpoint the best places to search in Alaska's Wrangell and St. Elias mountain ranges�the United States' most glaciated terrain�and in the Andes. Johan Reinhard thinks the fast- thawing European Alps could also deliver more findings, perhaps as exquisite as the Ice Man. "Global warming is providing us high-altitude archaeologists with some fantastic opportunities right now. We're probably about the only ones happy about it."

Re: Goodbye Global Warming Of the three lying politicians, which liar would you take? ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Hall" <[email protected]> To: "FoRK" <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, September 23, 2002 2:23 PM Subject: RE: Goodbye Global Warming > "I did not have sex with that woman." > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of > Mr. > > FoRK > > Sent: Monday, September 23, 2002 2:12 PM > > To: FoRK > > Subject: Re: Goodbye Global Warming > > > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: "John Hall" <[email protected]> > > > > > A Green once said that if the Spotted Owl hadn't existed they > > > would have had to invent it. > > A Republican once said "I am not a crook". >

Re: Goodbye Global Warming At 5:22 PM -0400 on 9/23/02, Tom wrote: > --]> A Green once said that if the Spotted Owl hadn't existed they > --]> would have had to invent it. > --]A Republican once said "I am not a crook". > --] > > Oh great, another round of Lableisms....Let me know when you get back to > real data.. Not me. I have another one, instead: Green = Red. ;-). Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [email protected]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Re: Goodbye Global Warming At 2:57 PM -0700 on 9/23/02, Mr. FoRK wrote: > I just had a run-in with a neighbor whom I've never met before who > pigeonholed me within one minute after I asked a question - he said 'Are you > one of them environmentalists?' <snip> > > Sheesh... I've been out of work too long... We'll ignore the possibility of a correlation here in the interest of charity... Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [email protected]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Re: How about subsidizing SSL access to Google? On Mon, 23 Sep 2002, Gordon Mohr wrote: --] --]The best we can hope is that technological cleverness, by raising the --]costs of oppression or by provoking intolerable oppression, brings --]social liberalization sooner rather than later. In a very real sense we are still playing the "stone hurst man, man wears hide, stone dont hurt no more so now we use arrows, arrows go thru hide dang lets try this chain mail stuff, arrows dont go thru chain mail so now we try crafting long spears with chain ripping heads, hey there buddy try that against my plate mail, well F you and the horse you plated try doging a bullets, holy shit where is my kevlar, does you kevlar stop nukes..." game. In this mad mad mad mad james burkian cum chucky darwin world there is no rest for either the wicked or the nonwicked, there is just the ramp up to the Brand New Jimmiez. the trick I think should all be learning is not so much looking for the THE KILLER APP but instead to look for the "really cool app that mutates to meet changes" Bascialy give china no choise but to shoot its own head off to stop the music. bang bang ... have a nice day. -tom

Re: Goodbye Global Warming On Monday, September 23, 2002, at 03:25 PM, R. A. Hettinga wrote: > Green = Red. Capitalist = Nazi. Information content of the above statements === 0. Meanwhile, the angels of light (tm) are having a great knock-down drag-out with the eldrich kings of .NET on XML-DEV. -- whump ---- Bill Humphries <[email protected]> http://www.whump.com/moreLikeThis/

Re: Goodbye Global Warming Mr. FoRK: >Of the three lying politicians, which liar would you take? No, no. The riddle is, asking only one question, how do you determine which is which? "If I were to ask you whether he would say you were a crook, or if the other had sex ..?" _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com

Re: How about subsidizing SSL access to Google? On Monday, September 23, 2002, at 06:51 PM, Tom wrote: > Bascialy give china no choise but to shoot its own head off to stop the > music. Or we could have the audacity to tell them to shape up or get cut out of the global marbles game. Unfortunately that model only seems to apply to despots with oil and WMDs, rather than despots with WMDs. -- whump

RE: Goodbye Global Warming funny. i read it as green = red, as in accounting, as in fiscally irresponsible. which do you think is the worse indictment - overregulation or overspending? there are many (dickheads) who buy into the neo-conservative media's (fox's) definiton of "liberal" as "one who seeks to impose both." hannity and glove. best quote, wish i could remember who said it: "we tend to describe our own party by its ideals and our opponents' party by its reality." geege -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of Bill Humphries Sent: Monday, September 23, 2002 10:00 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Goodbye Global Warming On Monday, September 23, 2002, at 03:25 PM, R. A. Hettinga wrote: > Green = Red. Capitalist = Nazi. Information content of the above statements === 0. Meanwhile, the angels of light (tm) are having a great knock-down drag-out with the eldrich kings of .NET on XML-DEV. -- whump ---- Bill Humphries <[email protected]> http://www.whump.com/moreLikeThis/

Re: Pluck and Luck At 5:29 PM -0700 on 9/23/02, John Hall wrote: > Rawls claims Merit doesn't exist. Nozick claims that Rawls doesn't exist. God says that Nozick is dead? :-). Cheers, RAH Quine, of course, read the Herald, not the Globe. With him and Nozick went political "diversity" at Hahvahd... -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [email protected]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

RE: Comrade Communism (was Re: Crony Capitalism (was RE: sed At 7:44 PM -0400 on 9/23/02, Geege Schuman wrote: > First, misattribution. My apologies. Rave on... Cheers, RAH "Where all the children are above average..." -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [email protected]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

liberal defnitions Depends on how much over spending vs. how much (and what type) over regulation. The biggest problem with over regulation is the costs can be invisible. It also has the ability to single out particular people, while over spending spreads the damage more evenly. Rent control would be an example of a regulation solution that is in general worse than spending tons of money on public housing. As for the definition of a liberal being someone who seeks to impose both, I find no fault in that definition whatsoever. The opinion that EITHER we are spending too much OR we have too much regulation is pretty much anathema to liberal politics. Finally, those who argue that there are private replacements for much government regulation are not saying that a state of nature (no private replacements, no government regulation) is better than government regulation itself. And in my experience people who label themselves 'Green' (which does not include everyone who loves trees and thinks smokestacks are ugly) is a watermelon. > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Geege > Schuman > > funny. i read it as green = red, as in accounting, as in fiscally > irresponsible. which do you think is the worse indictment - > overregulation > or overspending? there are many (dickheads) who buy into the > neo-conservative media's (fox's) definiton of "liberal" as "one who seeks > to > impose both."

Re: flavor cystals It's only 64kbps, but http://noise.ktru.org/ can be tasty. Presently playing Fille Qui Mousse, Collage in Progress, and other happy nibbles. Sounds a bit like The Avalanches, but that will change soon. Cheers, Wayne

RE: liberal defnitions per john hall: "The opinion that EITHER we are spending too much OR we have too much regulation is pretty much anathema to liberal politics." no it's not. geege

RE: liberal defnitions from slate's "today's papers": The New York Times and Los Angeles Times both lead with word that a federal judge ruled yesterday that the nation's largest national gas pipeline company, El Paso, illegally withheld gas from the market during California's energy squeeze in 2000-01. The judge concluded that El Paso left 21 percent of its capacity in the state off-line, thus driving up the price of gas and helping to induce rolling blackouts. and this is the product of overregulation? -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of John Hall Sent: Monday, September 23, 2002 11:57 PM To: FoRK Subject: liberal defnitions Depends on how much over spending vs. how much (and what type) over regulation. The biggest problem with over regulation is the costs can be invisible. It also has the ability to single out particular people, while over spending spreads the damage more evenly. Rent control would be an example of a regulation solution that is in general worse than spending tons of money on public housing. As for the definition of a liberal being someone who seeks to impose both, I find no fault in that definition whatsoever. The opinion that EITHER we are spending too much OR we have too much regulation is pretty much anathema to liberal politics. Finally, those who argue that there are private replacements for much government regulation are not saying that a state of nature (no private replacements, no government regulation) is better than government regulation itself. And in my experience people who label themselves 'Green' (which does not include everyone who loves trees and thinks smokestacks are ugly) is a watermelon. > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Geege > Schuman > > funny. i read it as green = red, as in accounting, as in fiscally > irresponsible. which do you think is the worse indictment - > overregulation > or overspending? there are many (dickheads) who buy into the > neo-conservative media's (fox's) definiton of "liberal" as "one who seeks > to > impose both."

Re: SF Weekly's Ultimate SF Date lineup :-) In a message dated 9/23/2002 6:30:31 PM, [email protected] writes: > why you're writing with a double of scotch :-) because, obviously, after the inevitable second double, you won't remember anything you say unless you write it down :-) Tom

Re: 2002.06.00.00 On Tue, 24 Sep 2002 [email protected] wrote: --]Klez, most likely. It'll pick up your address and send mail to all your --]friends, and your strangers, as if coming from you. Nice way to lose friends --]and meet strangers. Better than typing gibberish (or Hemingway, but I repeat --]myself) in a bar with a double of scotch. Friends dont let friends use Outlook....even after a douly shot of the scotch with a chaser. All hands on the stinky one. -tom(the other tommeat)

A different sort of Fox News This was just *too* funny.. rotflma. http://www.ozyandmillie.org/comics/om20020924.gif -- #ken P-)} Ken Coar, Sanagendamgagwedweinini http://Golux.Com/coar/ Author, developer, opinionist http://Apache-Server.Com/ "Millennium hand and shrimp!"

"The Next World Order http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?020401fa_FACT1 The New Yorker THE NEXT WORLD ORDER by NICHOLAS LEMANN The Bush Administration may have a brand-new doctrine of power. Issue of 2002-04-01 Posted 2002-03-25 When there is a change of command-and not just in government-the new people often persuade themselves that the old people were much worse than anyone suspected. This feeling seems especially intense in the Bush Administration, perhaps because Bill Clinton has been bracketed by a father-son team. It's easy for people in the Administration to believe that, after an unfortunate eight-year interlude, the Bush family has resumed its governance-and about time, too. The Bush Administration's sense that the Clinton years were a waste, or worse, is strongest in the realms of foreign policy and military affairs. Republicans tend to regard Democrats as untrustworthy in defense and foreign policy, anyway, in ways that coincide with what people think of as Clinton's weak points: an eagerness to please, a lack of discipline. Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national-security adviser, wrote an article in Foreign Affairs two years ago in which she contemptuously accused Clinton of "an extraordinary neglect of the fiduciary responsibilities of the commander in chief." Most of the top figures in foreign affairs in this Administration also served under the President's father. They took office last year, after what they regard as eight years of small-time flyswatting by Clinton, thinking that they were picking up where they'd left off. Not long ago, I had lunch with-sorry!-a senior Administration foreign-policy official, at a restaurant in Washington called the Oval Room. Early in the lunch, he handed me a twenty-seven- page report, whose cover bore the seal of the Department of Defense, an outline map of the world, and these words: Defense Strategy for the 1990s: The Regional Defense Strategy Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney January 1993 One of the difficulties of working at the highest level of government is communicating its drama. Actors, professional athletes, and even elected politicians train for years, go through a great winnowing, and then perform publicly. People who have titles like Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense are just as ambitious and competitive, have worked just as long and hard, and are often playing for even higher stakes-but what they do all day is go to meetings and write memos and prepare briefings. How, possibly, to explain that some of the documents, including the report that the senior official handed me, which was physically indistinguishable from a high-school term paper, represent the government version of playing Carnegie Hall? After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dick Cheney, then the Secretary of Defense, set up a "shop," as they say, to think about American foreign policy after the Cold War, at the grand strategic level. The project, whose existence was kept quiet, included people who are now back in the game, at a higher level: among them, Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense; Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff; and Eric Edelman, a senior foreign-policy adviser to Cheney-generally speaking, a cohesive group of conservatives who regard themselves as bigger-thinking, tougher-minded, and intellectually bolder than most other people in Washington. (Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, shares these characteristics, and has been closely associated with Cheney for more than thirty years.) Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, mounted a competing, and presumably more ideologically moderate, effort to reimagine American foreign policy and defense. A date was set-May 21, 1990-on which each team would brief Cheney for an hour; Cheney would then brief President Bush, after which Bush would make a foreign-policy address unveiling the new grand strategy. Everybody worked for months on the "five-twenty-one brief," with a sense that the shape of the post-Cold War world was at stake. When Wolfowitz and Powell arrived at Cheney's office on May 21st, Wolfowitz went first, but his briefing lasted far beyond the allotted hour, and Cheney (a hawk who, perhaps, liked what he was hearing) did not call time on him. Powell didn't get to present his alternate version of the future of the United States in the world until a couple of weeks later. Cheney briefed President Bush, using material mostly from Wolfowitz, and Bush prepared his major foreign-policy address. But he delivered it on August 2, 1990, the day that Iraq invaded Kuwait, so nobody noticed. The team kept working. In 1992, the Times got its hands on a version of the material, and published a front-page story saying that the Pentagon envisioned a future in which the United States could, and should, prevent any other nation or alliance from becoming a great power. A few weeks of controversy ensued about the Bush Administration's hawks being "unilateral"-controversy that Cheney's people put an end to with denials and the counter-leak of an edited, softer version of the same material. As it became apparent that Bush was going to lose to Clinton, the Cheney team's efforts took on the quality of a parting shot. The report that the senior official handed me at lunch had been issued only a few days before Clinton took office. It is a somewhat bland, opaque document-a "scrubbed," meaning unclassified, version of something more candid-but it contained the essential ideas of "shaping," rather than reacting to, the rest of the world, and of preventing the rise of other superpowers. Its tone is one of skepticism about diplomatic partnerships. A more forthright version of the same ideas can be found in a short book titled "From Containment to Global Leadership?," which Zalmay Khalilzad, who joined Cheney's team in 1991 and is now special envoy to Afghanistan, published a couple of years into the Clinton Administration, when he was out of government. It recommends that the United States "preclude the rise of another global rival for the indefinite future." Khalilzad writes, "It is a vital U.S. interest to preclude such a development-i.e., to be willing to use force if necessary for the purpose." When George W. Bush was campaigning for President, he and the people around him didn't seem to be proposing a great doctrinal shift, along the lines of the policy of containment of the Soviet Union's sphere of influence which the United States maintained during the Cold War. In his first major foreign-policy speech, delivered in November of 1999, Bush declared that "a President must be a clear-eyed realist," a formulation that seems to connote an absence of world-remaking ambition. "Realism" is exactly the foreign-policy doctrine that Cheney's Pentagon team rejected, partly because it posits the impossibility of any one country's ever dominating world affairs for any length of time. One gets many reminders in Washington these days of how much the terrorist attacks of September 11th have changed official foreign-policy thinking. Any chief executive, of either party, would probably have done what Bush has done so far-made war on the Taliban and Al Qaeda and enhanced domestic security. It is only now, six months after the attacks, that we are truly entering the realm of Presidential choice, and all indications are that Bush is going to use September 11th as the occasion to launch a new, aggressive American foreign policy that would represent a broad change in direction rather than a specific war on terrorism. All his rhetoric, especially in the two addresses he has given to joint sessions of Congress since September 11th, and all the information about his state of mind which his aides have leaked, indicate that he sees this as the nation's moment of destiny-a perception that the people around him seem to be encouraging, because it enhances Bush's stature and opens the way to more assertive policymaking. Inside government, the reason September 11th appears to have been "a transformative moment," as the senior official I had lunch with put it, is not so much that it revealed the existence of a threat of which officials had previously been unaware as that it drastically reduced the American public's usual resistance to American military involvement overseas, at least for a while. The Clinton Administration, beginning with the "Black Hawk Down" operation in Mogadishu, during its first year, operated on the conviction that Americans were highly averse to casualties; the all-bombing Kosovo operation, in Clinton's next-to-last year, was the ideal foreign military adventure. Now that the United States has been attacked, the options are much broader. The senior official approvingly mentioned a 1999 study of casualty aversion by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies, which argued that the "mass public" is much less casualty-averse than the military or the civilian �lite believes; for example, the study showed that the public would tolerate thirty thousand deaths in a military operation to prevent Iraq from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. (The American death total in the Vietnam War was about fifty-eight thousand.) September 11th presumably reduced casualty aversion even further. Recently, I went to the White House to interview Condoleezza Rice. Rice's Foreign Affairs article from 2000 begins with this declaration: "The United States has found it exceedingly difficult to define its 'national interest' in the absence of Soviet power." I asked her whether that is still the case. "I think the difficulty has passed in defining a role," she said immediately. "I think September 11th was one of those great earthquakes that clarify and sharpen. Events are in much sharper relief." Like Bush, she said that opposing terrorism and preventing the accumulation of weapons of mass destruction "in the hands of irresponsible states" now define the national interest. (The latter goal, by the way, is new-in Bush's speech to Congress on September 20th, America's sole grand purpose was ending terrorism.) We talked in her West Wing office; its tall windows face the part of the White House grounds where television reporters do their standups. In her bearing, Rice seemed less crisply military than she does in public. She looked a little tired, but she was projecting a kind of missionary calm, rather than belligerence. In the Foreign Affairs article, Rice came across as a classic realist, putting forth "the notions of power politics, great powers, and power balances" as the proper central concerns of the United States. Now she sounded as if she had moved closer to the one-power idea that Cheney's Pentagon team proposed ten years ago-or, at least, to the idea that the other great powers are now in harmony with the United States, because of the terrorist attacks, and can be induced to remain so. "Theoretically, the realists would predict that when you have a great power like the United States it would not be long before you had other great powers rising to challenge it or trying to balance against it," Rice said. "And I think what you're seeing is that there's at least a predilection this time to move to productive and co�perative relations with the United States, rather than to try to balance the United States. I actually think that statecraft matters in how it all comes out. It's not all foreordained." Rice said that she had called together the senior staff people of the National Security Council and asked them to think seriously about "how do you capitalize on these opportunities" to fundamentally change American doctrine, and the shape of the world, in the wake of September 11th. "I really think this period is analogous to 1945 to 1947," she said-that is, the period when the containment doctrine took shape-"in that the events so clearly demonstrated that there is a big global threat, and that it's a big global threat to a lot of countries that you would not have normally thought of as being in the coalition. That has started shifting the tectonic plates in international politics. And it's important to try to seize on that and position American interests and institutions and all of that before they harden again." The National Security Council is legally required to produce an annual document called the National Security Strategy, stating the over-all goals of American policy-another government report whose importance is great but not obvious. The Bush Administration did not produce one last year, as the Clinton Administration did not in its first year. Rice said that she is working on the report now. "There are two ways to handle this document," she told me. "One is to do it in a kind of minimalist way and just get it out. But it's our view that, since this is going to be the first one for the Bush Administration, it's important. An awful lot has happened since we started this process, prior to 9/11. I can't give you a certain date when it's going to be out, but I would think sometime this spring. And it's important that it be a real statement of what the Bush Administration sees as the strategic direction that it's going." It seems clear already that Rice will set forth the hope of a more dominant American role in the world than she might have a couple of years ago. Some questions that don't appear to be settled yet, but are obviously being asked, are how much the United States is willing to operate alone in foreign affairs, and how much change it is willing to try to engender inside other countries-and to what end, and with what means. The leak a couple of weeks ago of a new American nuclear posture, adding offensive capability against "rogue states," departed from decades of official adherence to a purely defensive position, and was just one indication of the scope of the reconsideration that is going on. Is the United States now in a position to be redrawing regional maps, especially in the Middle East, and replacing governments by force? Nobody thought that the Bush Administration would be thinking in such ambitious terms, but plainly it is, and with the internal debate to the right of where it was only a few months ago. Just before the 2000 election, a Republican foreign-policy figure suggested to me that a good indication of a Bush Administration's direction in foreign affairs would be who got a higher-ranking job, Paul Wolfowitz or Richard Haass. Haass is another veteran of the first Bush Administration, and an intellectual like Wolfowitz, but much more moderate. In 1997, he published a book titled "The Reluctant Sheriff," in which he poked a little fun at Wolfowitz's famous strategy briefing of the early nineties (he called it the "Pentagon Paper") and disagreed with its idea that the United States should try to be the world's only great power over the long term. "For better or worse, such a goal is beyond our reach," Haass wrote. "It simply is not doable." Elsewhere in the book, he disagreed with another of the Wolfowitz team's main ideas, that of the United States expanding the "democratic zone of peace": "Primacy is not to be confused with hegemony. The United States cannot compel others to become more democratic." Haass argued that the United States is becoming less dominant in the world, not more, and suggested "a revival of what might be called traditional great-power politics." Wolfowitz got a higher-ranking job than Haass: he is Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Haass is Director of Policy Planning for the State Department- in effect, Colin Powell's big-think guy. Recently, I went to see him in his office at the State Department. On the wall of his waiting room was an array of photographs of every past director of the policy-planning staff, beginning with George Kennan, the father of the containment doctrine and the first holder of the office that Haass now occupies. It's another indication of the way things are moving in Washington that Haass seems to have become more hawkish. I mentioned the title of his book. "Using the word 'reluctant' was itself reflective of a period when foreign policy seemed secondary, and sacrificing for foreign policy was a hard case to make," he said. "It was written when Bill Clinton was saying, 'It's the economy, stupid'-not 'It's the world, stupid.' Two things are very different now. One, the President has a much easier time making the case that foreign policy matters. Second, at the top of the national-security charts is this notion of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism." I asked Haass whether there is a doctrine emerging that is as broad as Kennan's containment. "I think there is," he said. "What you're seeing from this Administration is the emergence of a new principle or body of ideas-I'm not sure it constitutes a doctrine-about what you might call the limits of sovereignty. Sovereignty entails obligations. One is not to massacre your own people. Another is not to support terrorism in any way. If a government fails to meet these obligations, then it forfeits some of the normal advantages of sovereignty, including the right to be left alone inside your own territory. Other governments, including the United States, gain the right to intervene. In the case of terrorism, this can even lead to a right of preventive, or peremptory, self-defense. You essentially can act in anticipation if you have grounds to think it's a question of when, and not if, you're going to be attacked." Clearly, Haass was thinking of Iraq. "I don't think the American public needs a lot of persuading about the evil that is Saddam Hussein," he said. "Also, I'd fully expect the President and his chief lieutenants to make the case. Public opinion can be changed. We'd be able to make the case that this isn't a discretionary action but one done in self-defense." On the larger issue of the American role in the world, Haass was still maintaining some distance from the hawks. He had made a speech not long before called "Imperial America," but he told me that there is a big difference between imperial and imperialist. "I just think that we have to be a little bit careful," he said. "Great as our advantages are, there are still limits. We have to have allies. We can't impose our ideas on everyone. We don't want to be fighting wars alone, so we need others to join us. American leadership, yes; but not American unilateralism. It has to be multilateral. We can't win the war against terror alone. We can't send forces everywhere. It really does have to be a collaborative endeavor." He stopped for a moment. "Is there a successor idea to containment? I think there is," he said. "It is the idea of integration. The goal of U.S. foreign policy should be to persuade the other major powers to sign on to certain key ideas as to how the world should operate: opposition to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, support for free trade, democracy, markets. Integration is about locking them into these policies and then building institutions that lock them in even more." The first, but by no means the last, obvious manifestation of a new American foreign policy will be the effort to remove Saddam Hussein. What the United States does in an Iraq operation will very likely dwarf what's been done so far in Afghanistan, both in terms of the scale of the operation itself and in terms of its aftermath. Several weeks ago, Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, the Iraqi opposition party, came through Washington with an entourage of his aides. Chalabi went to the State Department and the White House to ask, evidently successfully, for more American funding. His main public event was a panel discussion at the American Enterprise Institute. Chalabi's leading supporter in town, Richard Perle, the prominent hawk and former Defense Department official, acted as moderator. Smiling and supremely confident, Perle opened the discussion by saying, "Evidence is mounting that the Administration is looking very carefully at strategies for dealing with Saddam Hussein." The war on terrorism, he said, will not be complete "until Saddam is successfully dealt with. And that means replacing his regime. . . . That action will be taken, I have no doubt." Chalabi, who lives in London, is a charming, suave middle-aged man with a twinkle in his eye. He was dressed in a double-breasted pin-striped suit and a striped shirt with a white spread collar. Although he and his supporters argue that the Iraqi National Congress, with sufficient American support, can defeat Saddam just as the Northern Alliance defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan, this view hasn't won over most people in Washington. It isn't just that Chalabi doesn't look the part of a rebel military leader ("He could fight you for the last petit four on the tray over tea at the Savoy, but that's about it," one skeptical former Pentagon official told me), or that he isn't in Iraq. It's also that Saddam's military is perhaps ten times the size that the Taliban's was, and has been quite successful at putting down revolts over the last decade. The United States left Iraq in 1991 believing that Saddam might soon fall to an internal rebellion; Chalabi's supporters believe that Saddam is much weaker now, and that even signs that a serious operation was in the offing could finish him off. But non-true believers seem to be coming around to the idea that a military operation against Saddam would mean the deployment of anywhere from a hundred thousand to three hundred thousand American ground troops. Kenneth Pollack, a former C.I.A. analyst who was the National Security Council's staff expert on Iraq during the last years of the Clinton Administration, recently caused a stir in the foreign-policy world by publishing an article in Foreign Affairs calling for war against Saddam. This was noteworthy because three years ago Pollack and two co-authors published an article, also in Foreign Affairs, arguing that the Iraqi National Congress was incapable of defeating Saddam. Pollack still doesn't think Chalabi can do the job. He believes that it would require a substantial American ground, air, and sea force, closer in size to the one we used in Kuwait in 1990-91 than to the one we are using now in Afghanistan. Pollack, who is trim, quick, and crisp, is obviously a man who has given a briefing or two in his day. When I went to see him at his office in Washington, with a little encouragement he got out from behind his desk and walked over to his office wall, where three maps of the Middle East were hanging. "The only way to do it is a full-scale invasion," he said, using a pen as a pointer. "We're talking about two grand corps, two to three hundred thousand people altogether. The population is here, in the Tigris-Euphrates valley." He pointed to the area between Baghdad and Basra. "Ideally, you'd have the Saudis on board." He pointed to the Prince Sultan airbase, near Riyadh. "You could make Kuwait the base, but it's much easier in Saudi. You need to take western Iraq and southern Iraq"-pointing again-"because otherwise they'll fire Scuds at Israel and at the Saudi oil fields. You probably want to prevent Iraq from blowing up its own oil fields, so troops have to occupy them. And you need troops to defend the Kurds in northern Iraq." Point, point. "You go in as hard as you can, as fast as you can." He slapped his hand on the top of his desk. "You get the enemy to divide his forces, by threatening him in two places at once." His hand hit the desk again, hard. "Then you crush him." Smack. That would be a reverberating blow. The United States has already removed the government of one country, Afghanistan, the new government is obviously shaky, and American military operations there are not completed. Pakistan, which before September 11th clearly met the new test of national unacceptability (it both harbors terrorists and has weapons of mass destruction), will also require long-term attention, since the country is not wholly under the control of the government, as the murder of Daniel Pearl demonstrated, and even parts of the government, like the intelligence service, may not be entirely under the control of the President. In Iraq, if America invades and brings down Saddam, a new government must be established-an enormous long-term task in a country where there is no obvious, plausible new leader. The prospective Iraq operation has drawn strong objections from the neighboring nations, one of which, Russia, is a nuclear superpower. An invasion would have a huge effect on the internal affairs of all the biggest Middle Eastern nations: Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and even Egypt. Events have forced the Administration to become directly involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as it hadn't wanted to do. So it's really the entire region that is in play, in much the way that Europe was immediately after the Second World War. In September, Bush rejected Paul Wolfowitz's recommendation of immediate moves against Iraq. That the President seems to have changed his mind is an indication, in part, of the bureaucratic skill of the Administration's conservatives. "These guys are relentless," one former official, who is close to the high command at the State Department, told me. "Resistance is futile." The conservatives' other weapon, besides relentlessness, is intellectualism. Colin Powell tends to think case by case, and since September 11th the conservatives have outflanked him by producing at least the beginning of a coherent, hawkish world view whose acceptance practically requires invading Iraq. If the United States applies the doctrines of Cheney's old Pentagon team, "shaping" and expanding "the zone of democracy," the implications would extend far beyond that one operation. The outside experts on the Middle East who have the most credibility with the Administration seem to be Bernard Lewis, of Princeton, and Fouad Ajami, of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, both of whom see the Arab Middle East as a region in need of radical remediation. Lewis was invited to the White House in December to brief the senior foreign-policy staff. "One point he made is, Look, in that part of the world, nothing matters more than resolute will and force," the senior official I had lunch with told me-in other words, the United States needn't proceed gingerly for fear of inflaming the "Arab street," as long as it is prepared to be strong. The senior official also recommended as interesting thinkers on the Middle East Charles Hill, of Yale, who in a recent essay declared, "Every regime of the Arab-Islamic world has proved a failure," and Reuel Marc Gerecht, of the American Enterprise Institute, who published an article in The Weekly Standard about the need for a change of regime in Iran and Syria. (Those goals, Gerecht told me when we spoke, could be accomplished through pressure short of an invasion.) Several people I spoke with predicted that most, or even all, of the nations that loudly oppose an invasion of Iraq would privately cheer it on, if they felt certain that this time the Americans were really going to finish the job. One purpose of Vice-President Cheney's recent diplomatic tour of the region was to offer assurances on that matter, while gamely absorbing all the public criticism of an Iraq operation. In any event, the Administration appears to be committed to acting forcefully in advance of the world's approval. When I spoke to Condoleezza Rice, she said that the United States should assemble "coalitions of the willing" to support its actions, rather than feel it has to work within the existing infrastructure of international treaties and organizations. An invasion of Iraq would test that policy in more ways than one: the Administration would be betting that it can continue to eliminate Al Qaeda cells in countries that publicly opposed the Iraq operation. When the Administration submitted its budget earlier this year, it asked for a forty-eight-billion-dollar increase in defense spending for fiscal 2003, which begins in October, 2002. Much of that sum would go to improve military pay and benefits, but ten billion dollars of it is designated as an unspecified contingency fund for further operations in the war on terrorism. That's probably at least the initial funding for an invasion of Iraq. This spring, the Administration will be talking to other countries about the invasion, trying to secure basing and overflight privileges, while Bush builds up a rhetorical case for it by giving speeches about the unacceptability of developing weapons of mass destruction. A drama involving weapons inspections in Iraq will play itself out over the spring and summer, and will end with the United States declaring that the terms that Saddam offers for the inspections, involving delays and restrictions, are unacceptable. Then, probably in the late summer or early fall, the enormous troop positioning, which will take months, will begin. The Administration obviously feels confident that the United States can effectively parry whatever aggressive actions Saddam takes during the troop buildup, and hopes that its moves will destabilize Iraq enough to cause the Republican Guard, the military key to the country, to turn against Saddam and topple him on its own. But the chain of events leading inexorably to a full-scale American invasion, if it hasn't already begun, evidently will begin soon. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, who was the principal drafter of Cheney's future-of-the-world documents during the first Bush Administration, now works in an office in the Old Executive Office Building, overlooking the West Wing, where he has a second, smaller office. A packet of public-relations material prompted by the recent paperback publication of his 1996 novel, "The Apprentice," quotes the Times' calling him "Dick Cheney's Dick Cheney," which seems like an apt description: he appears absolutely sure of himself, and, whether by coincidence or as a result of the influence of his boss, speaks in a tough, confidential, gravelly rumble. Like Condoleezza Rice and Bush himself, he gives the impression of having calmly accepted the idea that the project of war and reconstruction which the Administration has now taken on may be a little exhausting for those charged with carrying it out but is unquestionably right, the only truly prudent course. When I went to see Libby, not long ago, I asked him whether, before September 11th, American policy toward terrorism should have been different. He went to his desk and got out a large black loose-leaf binder, filled with typewritten sheets interspersed with foldout maps of the Middle East. He looked through it for a long minute, formulating his answer. "Let us stack it up," he said at last. "Somalia, 1993; 1994, the discovery of the Al Qaeda-related plot in the Philippines; 1993, the World Trade Center, first bombing; 1993, the attempt to assassinate President Bush, former President Bush, and the lack of response to that, the lack of a serious response to that; 1995, the Riyadh bombing; 1996, the Khobar bombing; 1998, the Kenyan embassy bombing and the Tanzanian embassy bombing; 1999, the plot to launch millennium attacks; 2000, the bombing of the Cole. Throughout this period, infractions on inspections by the Iraqis, and eventually the withdrawal of the entire inspection regime; and the failure to respond significantly to Iraqi incursions in the Kurdish areas. No one would say these challenges posed easy problems, but if you take that long list and you ask, 'Did we respond in a way which discouraged people from supporting terrorist activities, or activities clearly against our interests? Did we help to shape the environment in a way which discouraged further aggressions against U.S. interests?,' many observers conclude no, and ask whether it was then easier for someone like Osama bin Laden to rise up and say credibly, 'The Americans don't have the stomach to defend themselves. They won't take casualties to defend their interests. They are morally weak.' " Libby insisted that the American response to September 11th has not been standard or foreordained. "Look at what the President has done in Afghanistan," he said, "and look at his speech to the joint session of Congress"-meaning the State of the Union Message, in January. "He made it clear that it's an important area. He made it clear that we believe in expanding the zone of democracy even in this difficult part of the world. He made it clear that we stand by our friends and defend our interests. And he had the courage to identify those states which present a problem, and to begin to build consensus for action that would need to be taken if there is not a change of behavior on their part. Take the Afghan case, for example. There are many other courses that the President could have taken. He could have waited for juridical proof before we responded. He could have engaged in long negotiations with the Taliban. He could have failed to seek a new relationship with Pakistan, based on its past nuclear tests, or been so afraid of weakening Pakistan that we didn't seek its help. This list could go on to twice or three times the length I've mentioned so far. But, instead, the President saw an opportunity to refashion relations while standing up for our interests. The problem is complex, and we don't know yet how it will end, but we have opened new prospects for relations not only with Afghanistan, as important as it was as a threat, but with the states of Central Asia, Pakistan, Russia, and, as it may develop, with the states of Southwest Asia more generally." We moved on to Iraq, and the question of what makes Saddam Hussein unacceptable, in the Administration's eyes. "The issue is not inspections," Libby said. "The issue is the Iraqis' promise not to have weapons of mass destruction, their promise to recognize the boundaries of Kuwait, their promise not to threaten other countries, and other promises that they made in '91, and a number of U.N. resolutions, including all the other problems I listed. Whether it was wise or not-and that is the subject of debate-Iraq was given a second chance to abide by international norms. It failed to take that chance then, and annually for the next ten years." "What's your level of confidence," I asked him, "that the current regime will, in fact, change its behavior in a way that you will be satisfied by?" He ran his hand over his face and then gave me a direct gaze and spoke slowly and deliberately. "There is no basis in Iraq's past behavior to have confidence in good-faith efforts on their part to change their behavior." -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [email protected]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' "

RE: liberal defnitions This situation wouldn't have happened in the first place if California didn't have economically insane regulations. They created a regulatory climate that facilitated this. So yes, it is the product of over-regulation. -James Rogers [email protected] On Tue, 2002-09-24 at 05:17, Geege Schuman wrote: > from slate's "today's papers": > The New York Times and Los Angeles Times both lead with word that > a federal judge ruled yesterday that the nation's largest > national gas pipeline company, El Paso, illegally withheld gas > from the market during California's energy squeeze in 2000-01. > The judge concluded that El Paso left 21 percent of its capacity > in the state off-line, thus driving up the price of gas and > helping to induce rolling blackouts. > > and this is the product of overregulation?

Re: [s-t] Scoot boss's wife orders hit. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 09:52:44 -0700 From: [email protected] Subject: Re: [s-t] Scoot boss's wife orders hit. the "independent", a shopper's newspaper in the sf bay area, (the operational definition of that media category is "no matter how hard you try you can't get them to stop delivering it") had this story on aug 24, 2002: "Dot-com downturn linked to domestic violence" Domestic-violence worker Kathy Black remembers watching the Nasdaq take a nastydive on MSNBC, in March 2000. "I knew then that we would have a lot of work on our hands," Black said, referring to the caseload at La Casa de las Madres, the city's largest organization serving women and children affected by domestic violence. She was right. Calls to La Casa's crisis line increased by 33% in the last financial year, and the service saw a 10 percent increase in the demand for beds, with 232 women and 215 children utilizing the shelter service. ... Black said the dot-com collapse and a growing awareness of La Casa's services were the two main reasons for the increase in calls. She said many of her clients had partners who were employed in service-industry jobs utilized by dot-com workers ... On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 04:23:17PM +0100, Gordon Joly wrote: > > > > http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/england/2276467.stm > > > Woman admits trying to hire hitman > > The former wife of an internet tycoon has admitted trying to hire a > hitman to kill him after the breakdown of their 21-year marriage. > > > -- > Linux User No. 256022/// > http://pobox.com/~gordo/ > [email protected]///

RE: liberal defnitions Yes, it is. You just want to be called a liberal when you really aren't. > -----Original Message----- > From: Geege Schuman [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Tuesday, September 24, 2002 5:12 AM > To: [email protected]; FoRK > Subject: RE: liberal defnitions > > per john hall: > "The opinion that EITHER we are spending too much OR we have too much > regulation is pretty > much anathema to liberal politics." > > no it's not. > > geege > >

Re: liberal defnitions In a message dated 9/24/2002 11:24:58 AM, [email protected] writes: >This situation wouldn't have happened in the first place if California >didn't have economically insane regulations. They created a regulatory >climate that facilitated this. So yes, it is the product of >over-regulation. > Which is to say, if you reduce the argument to absurdity, that law causes crime. (Yes, I agree that badly written law can make life so frustrating that people have little choice but to subvery it if they want to get anything done. This is also true of corporate policies, and all other attempts to regulate conduct by rules. Rules just don't work well when situations are fluid or ambiguous. But I don't think that the misbehavior of energy companies in California can properly be called well-intentioned lawbreaking by parties who were trying to do the right thing but could do so only by falling afoul of some technicality.) If you want to get to root causes, we should probably go to the slaying of Abel by Cain. Perhaps we can figure out what went wrong then, and roll our learning forward through history and create a FoRKtopia. Nonpartisanly, which is to say casting stones on all houses, whether bicameral or unicameral, built on sand or on rock, to the left of them or to the right of them, of glass or brick or twig or straw, Tom

CO2 and climate (was RE: Goodbye Global Warming) On Mon, 2002-09-23 at 13:53, Jim Whitehead wrote: > > You have not explained why the increase in CO2 concentrations is not > contributing to increasing global temperature. There are a number of reasons to think that CO2 is not important to controlling global temperature and that much of the CO2 increase may not be anthropogenic. Some recent research points worth mentioning: Recent high-resolution studies of historical CO2 concentrations and temperatures over hundreds of thousands of years have shown a modest correlation between the two. In a number of cases, CO2 level increases are not in phase with temperature increases and actually trail the increase in temperature by a short time i.e. increases in temperature preceded increases in CO2 concentrations. The more studies that are done of the geological record, the more it seems that CO2 concentrations are correlated with temperature increases, but are not significantly causative. There is a lot of evidence that CO2 levels are regulated in a fairly stable fashion. I don't believe anyone really has an authoritative answer as to exactly how this works yet. With respect to absolute CO2 concentrations, it is also important to point out that our best data to date suggests that they follow a fairly regular cycle with a period of about 100,000 years. At previous cycle peaks, the concentrations were similar to what they are now. If this cycle has any validity (and we only have good data for 4-5 complete cyclical periods, but which look surprisingly regular in shape and time), then we should be almost exactly at a peak right now. As it happens, current CO2 concentrations are within 10% of other previous cyclical concentration peaks for which we have good data. In other words, we may be adding to the CO2 levels, but it looks a lot like we would be building a molehill on top of a mountain in the historical record. At the very least, there is nothing anomalous about current CO2 concentrations. Also, CO2 levels interact with the biosphere in a manner that ultimately affects temperature. Again, the interaction is not entirely predictable, but this is believed to be one of the regulating negative feedback systems mentioned above. Last, as greenhouse gases go, CO2 isn't particularly potent, although it makes up for it in volume in some cases. Gases such as water and methane have a far greater impact as greenhouse gases on a per molecule basis. Water vapor may actually be the key greenhouse gas, something that CO2 only indirectly effects through its interaction with the biosphere. CO2 was an easy mark for early environmentalism, but all the recent studies and data I've seen gives me the impression that it is largely a passenger on the climate ride rather than the driver. I certainly don't think it is a healthy fixation if we're actually interested in understanding warming trends. Cheers, -James Rogers [email protected]

RE: liberal defnitions Read the article. I'm afraid I don't understand how the transmission prices could have hit $50/tcf. But I'm also really leery of telling a pipeline company they have to run a pipeline at a higher pressure and that they should forego maintenance. We had a big pipeline explosion up here awhile ago. So maybe the judge has a point. We'll see as the appeals work its way out. > -----Original Message----- > From: Geege Schuman [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Tuesday, September 24, 2002 5:16 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: RE: liberal defnitions > > from slate's "today's papers": The New York Times and Los Angeles Times > both lead with word that > a federal judge ruled yesterday that the nation's largest > national gas pipeline company, El Paso, illegally withheld gas > from the market during California's energy squeeze in 2000-01. > The judge concluded that El Paso left 21 percent of its capacity > in the state off-line, thus driving up the price of gas and > helping to induce rolling blackouts. > > and this is the product of overregulation? > > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of John > Hall > Sent: Monday, September 23, 2002 11:57 PM > To: FoRK > Subject: liberal defnitions > > > Depends on how much over spending vs. how much (and what type) over > regulation. > > The biggest problem with over regulation is the costs can be invisible. > It also has the ability to single out particular people, while over > spending spreads the damage more evenly. Rent control would be an > example of a regulation solution that is in general worse than spending > tons of money on public housing. > > As for the definition of a liberal being someone who seeks to impose > both, I find no fault in that definition whatsoever. The opinion that > EITHER we are spending too much OR we have too much regulation is pretty > much anathema to liberal politics. > > Finally, those who argue that there are private replacements for much > government regulation are not saying that a state of nature (no private > replacements, no government regulation) is better than government > regulation itself. > > And in my experience people who label themselves 'Green' (which does not > include everyone who loves trees and thinks smokestacks are ugly) is a > watermelon. > > > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of > Geege > > Schuman > > > > funny. i read it as green = red, as in accounting, as in fiscally > > irresponsible. which do you think is the worse indictment - > > overregulation > > or overspending? there are many (dickheads) who buy into the > > neo-conservative media's (fox's) definiton of "liberal" as "one who > seeks > > to > > impose both." > > >

Re: SF Weekly's Ultimate SF Date lineup :-) > Proving, once again, that aviators get all the chicks... Just as long as they have the wherewithal for avgas, anyway. I think Turpin once calculated that one could do a decent amount of messing about for about $30K of boat and $12K/year in living expenses. What are the equivalent figures for live aboard aircraft? -Dave (How difficult would it be to find the harbormaster, after mooring to the top of the Empire State Building?)

Random hack Q: drawing on CDs with lasers? O utensils of the world -- I wonder if it is possible to reverse-engineer the Reed-Solomon error-correcting codes to create a bytestream such that, when burned onto a CD, you can make out a picture in the diffraction pattern? I suppose this is a modern equivalent to line-printer artwork; I was imagining using a CD-RW drive to use the outer track, say, to spell out the disc title, creation time, etc. It would sure beat feeding CDs through a laser printer :-) Rohit

Re: Random hack Q: drawing on CDs with lasers? On Tue, 24 Sep 2002, Rohit Khare wrote: > I suppose this is a modern equivalent to line-printer artwork; I was > imagining using a CD-RW drive to use the outer track, say, to spell out > the disc title, creation time, etc. It would sure beat feeding CDs > through a laser printer :-) There are commercial burners which can be labeled that way. Patterns in the unburnt section.

Liberalism in America This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_0005_01C26412.7545C1D0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit liberalism propagandized as meddling in truth, the middle "American liberalism believes that in this respect it has made a major contribution to the grand strategy of freedom. Where both capitalists and socialists in the 1930's were trying to narrow the choice to either/or -- either laissez-faire capitalism or bureaucratic socialism -- the New Deal persisted in its vigorous faith that human intelligence and social experiment could work out a stable foundation for freedom in a context of security and for security in a context of freedom. That faith remains the best hope of free society today." fluid yet crunchy, gg http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/schleslib.html ------=_NextPart_000_0005_01C26412.7545C1D0 Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name="Liberalism in America.url" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="Liberalism in America.url" [DEFAULT] BASEURL=http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/schleslib.html [InternetShortcut] URL=http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/schleslib.html Modified=E0824ED43364C201DE ------=_NextPart_000_0005_01C26412.7545C1D0--

Re: SF Weekly's Ultimate SF Date lineup :-) Righ, somebody. Reminds me of the old Divorced Man's exposition of what happened to him. "First, you get a ring. Then you give it away. Then, you get a house. And you give *that* away...." Just kidding, Darling... ;-). Cheers, RAH Who, um, doesn't own a house... --- begin forwarded text Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2002 20:12:12 -0400 From: Somebody To: "R. A. Hettinga" <[email protected]> Subject: Re: SF Weekly's Ultimate SF Date lineup :-) Bob, Living aboard a Cessna 172 would be challenging, but I did meet a couple at an airshow in Point Mugu in 1995 or so that had converted an old seaplane (it was a bit larger than a PBY, I think) to something of a floating, flying RV. They visited a lot of airshows and covered a lot of miles. I'm sure maintenance (on a 50+ year old airframe), fuel (for two large radial engines) insurance and other costs were out of my price range, but what a hoot! On a more realistic note, the flight to Half Moon bay was probably 2 hours of flight time at about $75/hour in the Cessna. Not exactly a cheap date, but that's nothing compared to the money I've spent on her since. (And loved every minute of it, Darling!!) <Somebody> "R. A. Hettinga" wrote: > --- begin forwarded text > > Status: RO > Delivered-To: [email protected] > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: SF Weekly's Ultimate SF Date lineup :-) > From: Dave Long <[email protected]> > Sender: [email protected] > Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2002 13:28:04 -0700 > > > Proving, once again, that aviators get all the chicks... > > Just as long as they have the wherewithal > for avgas, anyway. > > I think Turpin once calculated that one > could do a decent amount of messing about > for about $30K of boat and $12K/year in > living expenses. > > What are the equivalent figures for live > aboard aircraft? > > -Dave > > (How difficult would it be to find the > harbormaster, after mooring to the top > of the Empire State Building?) > > --- end forwarded text > > -- > ----------------- > R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [email protected]> > The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> > 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA > "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, > [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to > experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [email protected]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Digital radio playlists are prohibited?! Anyone heard of this law before? > Q. Can I get a playlist? > A. We are unable to offer a playlist. The Digital Performance Right in > Sound Recordings Act of 1995 passed by Congress prevents us from > disclosing such information. The Digital Law states that if one is > transmitting a digital signal, song information cannot be > pre-announced. It is a Music Choice policy not to release a playlist of > upcoming or previously played songs. Recently, MusicChoice upgraded their website with a very important service, as far as I'm concerned: real-time song info from their website. My DirecTV receiver is up on a shelf (and its display scrolls intermittently); and I'm surely not going to fire up my projector while listening to the "radio", so I'm quite happy that I can retrieve r/t song info with URLs like: http://backstage.musicchoice.com/songid/channels/soundsoftheseasons.asp http://backstage.musicchoice.com/songid/channels/rap.asp http://backstage.musicchoice.com/songid/channels/opera.asp etc... Now, if I were a more eager hacker, I'd write up little WSDL stubs for these event streams (they're clearly not worried about load, since their own web pages specify 15 sec meta-refresh) and then feed 'em through a content router to alert me to cool songs. Heck, cross-reference the service to CDDB and... :-) RK

Re: SF Weekly's Ultimate SF Date lineup :-) Russell Turpin wrote: >Invite her for an afternoon cruise under the Golden Gate bridge in >your Stonehorse day sailor. Sounds good. >Under way, ask her if she'd like to take the stick. Whoah! That's a rather direct approach! R. A. Hettinga quoted: >From: Somebody >[...] what I did in 1983 was to rent a plane from the Moffett Field >flying club and take her on an aerial tour Sounds great. >I can't recall whether or not I gave her any stick time. Can't remember if he's in the mile-high club? Even worse!!! R

Re: The Great Power-Shortage Myth > The only circumstances in which a business will not be ready--indeed, > eager--to do an additional volume of business is if it is physically unable > to do so because it lacks the necessary physical means of doing so, or > because the costs it incurs in doing so exceed the additional sales revenue > it will receive. That is a fully retarded view of economics, and pretty much the same kind of clueless oversimplication that led to the blackouts. There are a bazillion factors that affect game strategies, which is what the state of California messed up and the energy producers exploited. I'm not convinced that the only way to prevent future energy debacles like the blackouts is to reregulate. Ultimately we have to blame the people who crafted the game rules in a way that invited blackouts and exploitation. Given that the particular set of rules crafted by the state of California sucked, does there exist a set of rules that doesn't suck? If there does exist a better set of rules, then reregulation isn't necessarily the answer. You can't blame businesses for being profit maximizers. Yes, the people involved were heartless and corrupt. But mainly they just did their jobs. The guilty parties are either the mathematicians and economists who wrote the rules or, if the mathematicians and economists said there were no good rules, pro-deregulation politicians who went ahead anyway. - Lucas

California needs intelligent energy deregulation --- begin forwarded text Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2002 13:57:15 -0400 To: Digital Bearer Settlement List <[email protected]> From: "R. A. Hettinga" <[email protected]> Subject: California needs intelligent energy deregulation Sender: <[email protected]> http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/4144696.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp Posted on Tue, Sep. 24, 2002 Dan Gillmor: State needs intelligent energy deregulation By Dan Gillmor Mercury News Technology Columnist The facts were trade and government secrets at the time. But the energy industry failed the smell test in 2000 and 2001 as it tried to justify soaring wholesale electricity and natural-gas prices in California. Now, as investigators and regulators unravel the reasons for a financial and fiscal mess we'll be cleaning up for decades, we're learning what everyone suspected. Market games helped engineer the price spikes. The latest manipulation was highlighted in Monday's finding by a federal administrative law judge, who said a dominant natural-gas company squeezed supplies in order to squeeze customers. His ruling came a few days after California's Public Utilities Commission reported that electricity generators mysteriously failed to use available capacity during the crunch, also driving up prices. And don't forget the sleazy games by energy traders who gleefully worked the system, in schemes best summed up by an Enron insider's boast in a memorandum made public in May, that ``Enron gets paid for moving energy to relieve congestion without actually moving any energy or relieving any congestion.'' How much of this was illegal, as opposed to simply amoral, remains to be seen. Unfortunately, California's response -- confusion, lawsuits and policy tweaks -- hasn't been sufficient. More unfortunately, even if the state suddenly did all the right things -- including a hard-nosed program designed to free ourselves from the gougers' grips -- we would need a willing federal partner. But it's foolish to think that the Bush administration would do much to help one of its least favorite states, or do anything that conflicts with its love of traditional, non-renewable energy sources. If the lawsuits against various energy companies and traders bear any fruit, the best we can expect is to pay off some of the massive debts the state amassed to prevent a total collapse in early 2001. That's a reasonable approach, but don't expect miracles. State policies are moving the wrong way on utility regulation, meanwhile. Instead of relentlessly pursuing smart deregulation -- still a good idea if it gives customers genuine choices -- state laws and regulations ``put the utilities back in the business of buying energy for captive customers,'' notes V. John White, executive director of the Sacramento-based Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies (www.ceert.org). It's tempting to call for an outright state takeover of the utilities -- tempting but a bad idea. When there's genuine competition, as we could achieve in electricity generation, the private sector tends to do a better job. Instead of abandoning deregulation, California should find a way to inject real competition into the market. We do need to recognize that the current system of delivering electricity defies privatization, at least under current conditions. Smart regulation is essential. But the best response to gouging is to use less of what the gougers control. There are two ways: conservation and replacement. We need more of both. The best recent step is a new state law that slowly but surely ratchets up the use of electricity from renewables. By 2017, California's utilities will have to get 20 percent of their power from solar and other renewable sources. Several power companies are expected to do this even sooner. But this law has an element of old-line thinking, the captive-customer model we need to be getting away from, not sustaining. Lip service to newer ideas isn't enough. The state should be removing barriers to micro-generation systems, small generators that can run on a variety of fuels and provide decentralized, harder-to-disrupt electricity to homes and businesses. This technology is coming along fast. State policies are not keeping pace. Investing to save energy is increasingly the smartest move of all. California should be doing more to encourage this, whether through tax incentives or outright grants in low-income households. California hasn't done badly on conservation in a general sense, and energy customers did react to last year's soaring rates and blackouts by cutting back, but it's lunacy to wait for the next crisis when we can do something to avoid it altogether. Maybe this is all pointless. The Bush administration's energy policies, so grossly tilted toward the unholy trinity of oil, coal and nuclear, are making us all more vulnerable. Never mind what might happen if the coming war in Iraq goes badly. It's pointless to hope for a sane federal policy -- a crash program to drastically speed the inevitable transition to a hydrogen-based energy system. But the largest state, one of the world's major economies in its own right, does have some clout. We can hit the rip-off artists where it hurts, and protect ourselves from even more serious disruptions. Maybe next year. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [email protected]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [email protected]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

RE: CO2 and climate (was RE: Goodbye Global Warming) OK, let's bring some data into the discussion: http://www.grida.no/climate/vital/02.htm (A graph, derived from Vostok ice core samples, of CO2 and temperature fluctuations over the past 400k years). > Recent high-resolution studies of historical CO2 concentrations and > temperatures over hundreds of thousands of years have shown a modest > correlation between the two. In a number of cases, CO2 level increases > are not in phase with temperature increases and actually trail the > increase in temperature by a short time i.e. increases in temperature > preceded increases in CO2 concentrations. The more studies that are done > of the geological record, the more it seems that CO2 concentrations are > correlated with temperature increases, but are not significantly > causative. Based on the Vostok data, you are right, there is a very strong correlation between temperature and CO2 concentrations, but it doesn't always appear to be causal. > With respect to absolute CO2 concentrations, it is also important to > point out that our best data to date suggests that they follow a fairly > regular cycle with a period of about 100,000 years. Also correct -- the peak of each cycle is at about 290-300 ppm CO2. > As it > happens, current CO2 concentrations are within 10% of other previous > cyclical concentration peaks for which we have good data. Not correct. Mauna Loa data <http://www.grida.no/climate/vital/06.htm> and <http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/ndp001/maunaloa.co2> show that the current CO2 concentrations are at 370ppm, 18% *greater* than the *highest* recorded value from the past 400k years. Furthermore, CO2 concentrations are growing at 15ppm every 10 years, much faster than any recorded increase in the Vostok data (though perhaps the Vostok data isn't capable of such fine resolution). > In other words, we may be adding to the CO2 levels, No, we are *definitely* adding to CO2 levels. Look at the following chart: http://www.grida.no/climate/vital/07.htm (Shows CO2 concentrations since 1870, the "historical record"). Not only is the CO2 increase over 130 years unprecedented in the Vostok record, it is clear that the rate of change is *increasing*, not decreasing. There is no other compelling explanation for this increase, except for anthropogenic input. You're really out on the fringe if you're debating this -- even global warming skeptics generally concede this point. > but it looks a lot like we > would be building a molehill on top of a mountain in the historical > record. At the very least, there is nothing anomalous about current CO2 > concentrations. Wrong again. Current CO2 levels are currently unprecedented over the past 400k years, unless there is some mechanism that allows CO2 levels to quickly spike, and then return back to "normal" background levels (and hence the spike might not show up in the ice cores). Still, by around 2075-2100 we will have reached 500 ppm CO2, a level that even you would have a hard time arguing away. > Also, CO2 levels interact with the biosphere in a manner that ultimately > affects temperature. Again, the interaction is not entirely > predictable, but this is believed to be one of the regulating negative > feedback systems mentioned above. Yes, clouds and oceans are a big unknown. Still, we know ocean water has a finite capacity to store CO2, and if the world temperature doesn't increase, but we all have Seattle-like weather all the time, the effects would be enormous. > Last, as greenhouse gases go, CO2 isn't particularly potent, although it > makes up for it in volume in some cases. Gases such as water and > methane have a far greater impact as greenhouse gases on a per molecule > basis. Water vapor may actually be the key greenhouse gas, something > that CO2 only indirectly effects through its interaction with the > biosphere. Correct. Data on relative contributions of greenhouse gasses: http://www.grida.no/climate/vital/05.htm Note that methane concentrations now are *much* higher than pre-industrial levels (many cows farting, and rice paddies outgassing), and methane is also a contributor in the formation of atmospheric water vapor. Another clearly anthropogenic increase in a greenhouse gas. I'm in favor of reductions in methane levels as well. Data on water vapor here: http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/mockler.html > CO2 was an easy mark for early environmentalism, but all the recent > studies and data I've seen gives me the impression that it is largely a > passenger on the climate ride rather than the driver. I tend to think that holistic, and techical approaches would work best in reducing global warming. I favor an energy policy that has a mix of solar, wind and nuclear, with all carbon-based combustion using renewable sources of C-H bonds. Aggressive pursuit of carbon sink strategies also makes sense (burying trees deep underground, for example). Approaches that involve reductions in lifestyle to a "sustainable" level are unrealistic -- Americans just won't do it (you'd be surprised at the number of climate change researchers driving SUVs). But, as California showed during last year's energy crisis, shifts in patterns of consumption are possible, and improved efficiency is an easy sell. - Jim

Kissinger [can't think of how I'd be running afoul of the spam filters with this post, so here's the second try...] Kissinger's book _Does America Need a Foreign Policy?_ provides a few handy abstractions: > The ultimate dilemma of the statesman is to strike a balance between > values ["idealism"] and interests ["realism"] and, occasionally, > between peace and justice. Also, he views historical American approaches to foreign policy as a bundle of three fibers: Hamiltonian - We should only get involved in foreign adventures to preserve balances of power. Wilsonian - We should only get involved in foreign adventures to further democracy, etc. Jacksonian - We should never get involved in foreign adventures. Unless we're attacked. Then we go Rambo. He has tactfully left out the hard realists*; as for the rest I gather wilsonians play the idealists, and hamiltonians act where values and interests intersect, and jacksonians act only when values and interests overlap. Kissinger himself seems to be a Hamiltonian; much of the book is about how he thinks we ought to be shaping the balance of power in various foreign regions. Maybe I've been too affected by Kant, but I can't see that such a strategy works unless one can count on a Bismarck runnning it: how lopsided does the US look if everyone tries to run a balance of power politics? - -Dave * > The road to empire leads to domestic decay because, in time, the claims > of omnipotence erode domestic restraints. No empire has avoided the > road to Caesarism unless, like the British Empire, it devolved its > power before this process could develop. In long-lasting empires, > every problem turns into a domestic issue [which should be handled > very differently from international ones] because the outside world > no longer provides a counterweight. And as challenges grow more > diffuse and increasingly remote from the historic domestic base, > internal struggles become ever more bitter and in time violent. > A deliberate quest for hegemony is the surest way to destroy the > values that made the United States great. Kings and tyrants generically have followed the same power politics: garner popular support by keeping potential oligarchs down. In other traditions, a king is a legitimate tyrant, and a tyrant an illegitimate king. In the US, I'd hope that we, like Samuel, wouldn't naturally make such fine distinctions.

Re: Digital radio playlists are prohibited?! --] --] Anyone heard of this law before? Back when I was running the WSMF shoutcast server these restrictions were just being placed on netcasters. Most folks laughed it off. Now with the license fees its not laughable anymore. If you pay the fee you are bound to the restrictions, if you dont your running the criminal line. I still run a stream up on live365. Its been playing the same 10 hour block of Jean Shepard shows for the last year. I really should change them up. If I were going to do the old WSMF shoutcast now adays I would either spend lots of time going over regulations to see what I can or cannot do or I would just chuck the regs out and do what I want. Or I might write some apps to stay in regs ..I dont know..one thing is for sure it defiently takes the spontaneous edge off things:)- F Murray Abraham F Scott Fitzgerald F Hillary Rossen -tom

Re: The Great Power-Shortage Myth On Wed, 25 Sep 2002, Gordon Mohr wrote: > In contrast, take a look at this article by Simon J. Wilkie of > Caltech: Wow, that Wilkie article is the single best explanation I've seen. The open question is whether any analysis before the fact warned the politicians, or whether the politicians were forewarned and went ahead. What did they know and when did they know it?

Re: Digital radio playlists are prohibited?! On Wed, 2002-09-25 at 13:34, [email protected] wrote: > > This, kiddies was apparently the legislative beginnings of the whole > streaming audio-gets-spanked-by-fees ruling that came down in the > earlier parts of this year. This first act applied to non-exempt, > non-subscription transmission services. When Congress got around in > 1998 and realized that webcasting services -might- be different > (though I honestly can't see how) they wrote in the provision through > the DMCA to include such transmissions. The restrictive law regarding audio is actually the accumulated cruft of 30 years of various legislative acts. The totality of what we have now come from various parts of all the following re: sound recordings: 1998 - DMCA 1995 - Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act 1992 - Audio Home Recording Act 1976 - Copyright Act amendment 1972 - Copyright Act amendment It is worth noting that many people have forgotten about the 1976 Copyright Act Amendment which created the foundational law stating that the copyright owners have the right to limit personal use of audio recordings after First Sale even if you are not "making copies" in any commercial sense. Sound recordings, for many intents and purposes, are explicitly excluded from Fair Use by the 1976 amendment. -James Rogers [email protected]

dumb question: X client behind a firewall? Let's say you're behind a firewall and have a NAT address. Is there any way to telnet to a linux box out there in the world and set your DISPLAY in some way that you can create xterms on your own screen? - Joe -- That girl became the spring wind She flew somewhere, far away Undoing her hair, lying down, in her sleep She becomes the wind.

"Free" Elvis Costello CD a trojan horse for DRM malware A friend in Dublin is mailing me the CD which was in the UK Sunday Times. I've just been advised that running it in a Win32 machine is dangerous as all get out. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/27232.html -- whump ---- Bill Humphries <[email protected]> http://www.whump.com/moreLikeThis/

Re: dumb question: X client behind a firewall? "Joseph S. Barrera III" <[email protected]> writes: > Let's say you're behind a firewall and have a NAT address. > Is there any way to telnet to a linux box out there in the world > and set your DISPLAY in some way that you can create > xterms on your own screen? Assuming your local display is X, SSH. -- Karl Anderson [email protected] http://www.monkey.org/~kra/

Re: dumb question: X client behind a firewall? Wow, three replies already, all recommending ssh. Thanks! - Joe Back in my day, they didn't have ssh. Then again, back in my day, they didn't have firewalls. And I still miss X10's active icons.

Re: Digital radio playlists are prohibited?! > Subject: Re: Digital radio playlists are prohibited?! > From: James Rogers <[email protected]> > To: [email protected] > Date: 25 Sep 2002 12:52:15 -0700 > > On Wed, 2002-09-25 at 01:19, Rohit Khare wrote: > > Anyone heard of this law before? > > > Absolutely. More accurately, it is part of the RIAAs "regulation" for > broadcasting music under their auspices. This is actually part of the > default statutory license the RIAA is compelled to issue. You can try > and establish your own contract with each of the individual publishers > in addition to the writers, but that is a Herculean undertaking in its > own right. The details are really gross and complicated. Perhaps the stations cannot publish digital playlists, but you can get them from www.starcd.com anyway. They use some sort of listening and recognition technology to identify the music played on over 1000 US radio stations. Jeff;

Re: dumb question: X client behind a firewall? On Wed, 25 Sep 2002, Joseph S. Barrera III wrote: > Let's say you're behind a firewall and have a NAT address. > Is there any way to telnet to a linux box out there in the world > and set your DISPLAY in some way that you can create > xterms on your own screen? As other people suggested: SSH. PuTTY http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html can do it. Can run, say xclock (I'm running an X server under W32 at work, tunneling through a NAT box), but from Linux, not from Solaris. Probably OpenSSH misconfigurat5ion.

Native American economics (was Re: sed /s/United States/Roman I wanted to get back to this but didn't have the time. I actually lived on a couple different Indian reservations growing up in the Pacific Northwest and also spent a fair amount time in Lakota/Sioux country as well. And my parents have lived on an even more diverse range of Indian reservations than I have (my experience being a direct result of living with my parents). I do get a lot of my information first-hand, or in some cases, second-hand from my father. The income figures for the Indians are somewhat misleading, mostly because it is really hard to do proper accounting of the effective income. While it is true that some Indians live in genuine poverty, it is typically as a consequence of previous poor decisions that were made by the tribe, not something that was impressed upon them. The primary problem with the accounting is that there is a tribal entity that exists separately from the individuals, typically an "Indian Corporation" of one type or another where each member of the tribe owns a single share (the details of when and how a share becomes active varies from tribe to tribe). In most tribes, a dividend is paid out to each of the tribal members from the corporation, usually to the tune of $10-30k per person, depending on the tribe. The dividend money comes from a number of places, with the primary sources being the Federal Gov't and various businesses/assets owned by the Indian corporation. You have to understand a couple things: First, a great many Indian tribes are run as purely communist enterprises. Everyone gets a check for their share no matter what. One of the biggest problems this has caused is very high unemployment (often 70-90%) for tribal members, who are more than happy take their dividend and not work. The dividend they receive from the corporation often constitutes their sole "income" for government accounting purposes. Unfortunately, to support this type of economics when no one works, they've had to sell off most of their useful assets to maintain those dividends. Many of the tribes genuinely living in poverty do so because they have run out of things to sell yet nobody works. One of the ironies is that on many of the reservations where the tribes still have assets to burn, many of the people working in the stores and such are actually poor white folk, not Indians. Second, even though the tribe members each get a cash dividend, they also receive an enormous range of benefits and perks from the Indian corporation to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars per person annually. By benefits and perks, we are talking about the kinds of things no other ordinary American receives from either their employer or the government. It should be pointed out that while many of these Indian corporations are ineptly run, and mostly provide sinecures for other Indians, a minority are very smartly managed and a few hire non-Indian business executives with good credentials to run their business divisions. An example of this is the Haida Corporation, which while having less 1,000 tribal shareholders, has billions of dollars in assets and the various corporations they own have gross revenues in the $200-300 million range (and growing). Yet the dividend paid out is strictly controlled, about $20k in this particular case, and they engaged in a practice of waiting a couple decades before drawing money from any of the assets they were granted which has led to intelligent investment and use. They don't eat their seed corn, and have actually managed to grow their stash. In contrast, a couple islands over, there is another tribe of ~2,000 people that has a net loss of about $50 million annually IIRC while being regularly endowed by the Federal government with several billions of dollars in valuable assets. This particular tribe has a modest income in theory, but the actual expenditures per person annually is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and many borrow money against future income. Incidentally, in this particular case, the people that ARE working frequently pull in a few hundred thousand dollars a year, much of which goes back to the tribal corporation rather than their own pockets. Somewhat annoying, the Federal government semi-regularly grants valuable assets to these tribes when they've burned through the ones previously given where feasible, typically selling the assets to American or foreign companies. And the cycle continues. So what is the primary problem for the tribes that have problems? In a nutshell, a thoroughly pathological culture and society. Few women reach the age of 16 without getting pregnant. Incest, rape, and gross promiscuity is rampant. Inbreeding, heavy drug abuse during pregnancy, and other environmental factors have created tribes where a very substantial fraction of the tribe is literally mentally retarded. Many of the thoughtful and intelligent tribe members leave the reservation at the earliest opportunity, mostly to avoid the problems mentioned above. On one reservation my parents lived, the HIV infection rate was >70%. Many of these societies are thoroughly corrupt, and the administration of the law is arbitrary and capricious (they do have their own judges, courts, police etc). In short, many of these tribes that are still hanging together are in a shambles because they have become THE most pathological societies that I have ever seen anywhere. Because of their legal status, there really aren't that many consequences for their behavior. There are many things that I could tell you that I've seen that you probably would not believe unless you'd seen it yourself. There are always good people in these tribes, but it has gotten to the point where the losers and idiots outnumber the good guys by a fair margin many times, and this IS a mobocracy typically. (BTW, if any of you white folk wants to experience overt and aggressive racism as a minority in a place where the rule of law is fiction and the police are openly thugs, try living on one of these messed up Indian reservations. It will give you an interesting perspective on things.) There are only two real situations where you find reasonably prosperous Indians. The first is in the rare case of tribes run by disciplined and intelligent people that have managed their assets wisely. The second is where the tribe has dispersed and assimilated for the most part, even if they maintain their tribal identity. In both of these cases, the tribal leaders reject the insular behavior that tends to lead to the pathological cases mentioned above. The Indians are often quite wealthy technically, and a lot of money is spent by the tribe per capita. And the actual reportable income is quite high when you consider how many are living entirely off the tribal dole. It is just that their peculiar economic structure does not lend itself well to ordinary economic analysis by merely looking at their nominal income. The poverty is social and cultural in nature, not economic. This was my original point. On a tangent: One thing that has always interested me is the concept of quasi-tribal corporate socialism. Many Indian tribes implement a type of corporate socialism that is mind-bogglingly bad in execution. That they use this structure at all is an accident of history more than anything. But what has interested me is that the very smartly managed ones do surprisingly well over the long run. It is like a Family Corporation writ large. It seems that in a future where "familial" ties will be increasingly voluntary, the general concept may have some merit in general Western society, serving to create a facsimile of a biological extended family with the included dynamics, but with an arbitrary set of self-selecting individuals. Damn that was long (and its late), and it could have been a lot longer. -James Rogers [email protected] On 9/22/02 3:53 PM, "John Hall" <[email protected]> wrote: > > As I understand it, there is a huge difference between native Americans > who speak english at home and those who do not. I don't have figures > that separate those at hand, though. > > 1989 American Indians (US Pop as a whole) -- Families below poverty > 27.2% (10%), Persons below poverty 31.2 (13.1), Speak a language other > than English 23 (13.8) Married couple families 65.8 (79.5) Median family > income $21,619 ($35,225) Per Capita $8,284 ($14,420).

RE: Liberalism in America In essence, hindsight justification. The progressives weren't in the middle, they were in a society at one end and they wanted a society at the other end. The middle is more or less where they got stopped. As to an intervention that worked, I actually have some nice things to say about the SEC, at least in theory. I have a few nasty things to say as well, but on the whole it has been a very good thing. > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Geege > Schuman > Sent: Tuesday, September 24, 2002 6:37 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Liberalism in America > > liberalism > propagandized as meddling > in truth, the middle > > "American liberalism believes that in this respect it has made a major > contribution to the grand strategy of freedom. Where both capitalists and > socialists in the 1930's were trying to narrow the choice to either/or -- > either laissez-faire capitalism or bureaucratic socialism -- the New Deal > persisted in its vigorous faith that human intelligence and social > experiment could work out a stable foundation for freedom in a context of > security and for security in a context of freedom. That faith remains the > best hope of free society today." > > fluid yet crunchy, > gg > > > > > http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/schleslib.html

Re: OSCOM Berkeley report: Xopus, Bitflux, Plone, Xoops On Friday, September 27, 2002, at 11:17 AM, Jim Whitehead wrote: > I attended the OSCOM Open Source Content Management workshop at > Berkeley > yesterday. I really wanted to go to this, especially to look at XOPUS. Unfortunately, we're launching a new intranet at work next week and I couldn't get away. XOPUS + an XML native DB such as Xindice looks like something that could hit a home run. -- whump "I have a theory, it could be bunnies."

RE: The Big Jump Adjournment of Michel Fournier's big Jump in May, 2003. Two attempts of launch failed : the first because of the wind which got up prematurely and the second due to a technical hitch during the inflating of the envelope. The team of the Big Jump, folds luggage, having waited up to the end for an opportunity for the launch of the balloon stratosph�rique allowing to raise the capsule pressurized by Michel Fournier at more than 40 000 metres in height. As expected, in the date of September 20, the jets stream strengthened in 300 kph announcing the imminent arrival of the winter and closing until next May the meteorological window favorable to a human raid in the stratosphere. On the plains of Saskatchewan, the first snows are waited in the days which come.Meeting in all in May, 2003. > Today a French officer called Michel Fournier is supposed to get in a > 350-metre tall helium balloon, ride it up to the edge of space (40 km > altitude) and jump out. His fall should last 6.5 minutes and reach > speeds of Mach 1.5. He hopes to open his parachute manually at the > end, although with an automatic backup if he is 7 seconds from the > ground and still hasn't opened it. > > R > > ObQuote: > "Veder�, si aver� si grossi li coglioni, come ha il re di Franza." > ("Let's see if I've got as much balls as the King of France!") > - Pope Julius II, 2 January 1511

RE: OSCOM Berkeley report: Xopus, Bitflux, Plone, Xoops I attended the same conference, and was impressed by a few systems that Jim didn't mention. In terms of CMS, the following all had apparently been used in some fairly large implementations and looked like some pretty strong competition to commercial systems: - Midgard, http://www.midgard-project.org/ , a PHP-based content management framework that with other programs combines to be a full CMS - Redhat CCM CMS, Java-based: http://www.spamassassin.taint.org/software/ccm/cms/ - OpenCMS, Java-based: http://www.opencms.org There was agreement that usability has not generally been an open source strength, but both Plone and Xopus represented some real movement towards improving that situation. I was impressed by the spectrum of perspectives on XML. Some took for granted that XSLT was relevant to content management, others took it just as for granted that XSLT was irrelevant and seemed happy to ignore XML almost completely. I attended realizing that "content management" is generally used to apply to *Web* content management, but I was still a bit shocked how completely out of scope document management was (almost no consideration of the potential print/PDF dimension to content other than the occasional "...and you can use FOP to make PDF" as if that was functional): this seems more the case in open source content management than in commercial content management, and probably makes XML easier to ignore (if HTML is the be-all and end-all of the output...). The honesty was refreshing, Phil Suh complained about the state of current tools (both open source and commercial), and I wish I'd written down what he said, something like "it sucks so extremely, it sucks so widely, and it is so generally sucking, that it seems sometimes there is no hope." For a moment there was contemplation that perhaps commercial systems scaled so well that the commercial "big boys" were really much more functional than open source, until someone pointed out, "OK, take some average blog software, spend $500,000 on the rollout... it'll scale pretty well." Another quote (citing Brendan Quinn): "content management problems are either trivial or impossible." Mac OS X is getting popular, of the laptops there it was an even 1/3 each of Mac, Linux, Windows. I am sure it wasn't news to Jim, but I can't wait to try Subversion, a CVS replacement that supports some of the newer features of WebDAV: http://subversion.tigris.org/ I'm also eager to try Xopus, I hope the developers make it back home safely, they said they'd only been in America four days but were already homeless... Max

EBusiness Webforms: cluetrain has left the station What's wrong with doing business over the Web? Web forms. There's promising replacements forms, but this is the current state of the industry: o You find something that you want to fill out. It's a partnership form, a signup for a Web seminar, a request for more information, anything. o You start wasting time typing in all those stupid fields and spend about 10 minutes going through all their stupid qualification hoops just to get a small piece of information , whitepaper, or a callback when halfway through, you start to wonder if it's really worth your time to forever be stuck on their stupid prospect list. o Pull down tags are never put in order of use instead of alphabetized. I was on a site just now that had every single country in the world listed; the selection of your country was absolutely critical for you to hit submit, but due to the layout, the "more>" tag on the second row was offscreen so it was impossible to select any country except about two dozen third world countries. o Even worse, ever time you hit submit, all forms based things complain about using the universal country phone number format and will cause you to re-enter dashes instead of dots. o When you get something that's not entered right, you will go back and enter it right, but then some other field or most likely pulldown will automatically get reset to the default value so that you will have to go back and resent that freaking thing too. Finally after all combinations of all pulldowns, you may get a successful submit. o You wait freaking forever just to get a confirmation. o Sometimes, like today, you won't be able to ever submit anything due to it being impossible to ever submit a valid set of information that is internally non-conflicting according to whatever fhead wrote their forms submission. What's wrong with this picture? The company is screwing you by wasting your time enforcing their data collection standards on you. I'm sure there's someone in that company that would be willing to accept "US", "U.S", "USA" "United States", "U of A", "America", etc. and would know exactly which freaking country the interested party was from instead of forcing them to waste even more time playing Web form geography. I'm starting to see the light of Passport. You want more information? Hit this passport button. Voila. IE6 and Netscape 6,7 have pre-forms sutff, but I always turn it off because you never know when there's that one field that you don't want to submit to the person you are submitting to that automatically gets sent, i.e. the privacy stuff is well beyond the average user who will get screwed on privacy stuff. So, if crappy forms-based submission is the state of practice for business enablement on the Web, I can't see this whole data submission and hurry up and wait for us to get back to you business process as working all that well. Greg

Re: EBusiness Webforms: cluetrain has left the station I'll agree that webforms are a pain in the ass, however it would seem to me that the problem with passport is the same one you noted with the autoform function, providing more info than you want to. That and some entity would be holding the passport info, thus have all that data in the first place. Personally i'd never trust them not to at least use it internally to market to me, if not sell/rent out. Just think of the ability they'd have to build a profile for you since everything you went to was tracked to you. And thats just the marketing side of it. Chris On Sat, 28 Sep 2002, Gregory Alan Bolcer wrote: > What's wrong with doing business over the Web? Web forms. There's > promising replacements forms, but this is the current state of the > industry: > > o You find something that you want to fill out. It's a partnership form, > a signup for a Web seminar, a request for more information, anything. > o You start wasting time typing in all those stupid fields and spend > about 10 minutes going through all their stupid qualification hoops > just to get a small piece of information , whitepaper, or a callback > when halfway through, you start to wonder if it's really worth your > time to forever be stuck on their stupid prospect list. > o Pull down tags are never put in order of use instead of alphabetized. > I was on a site just now that had every single country in the world > listed; the selection of your country was absolutely critical for you > to hit submit, but due to the layout, the "more>" tag on the second > row was offscreen so it was impossible to select any country except > about two dozen third world countries. > o Even worse, ever time you hit submit, all forms based things complain > about using the universal country phone number format and will cause > you to re-enter dashes instead of dots. > o When you get something that's not entered right, you will go back and > enter it right, but then some other field or most likely pulldown will > automatically get reset to the default value so that you will have to > go back and resent that freaking thing too. Finally after all combinations > of all pulldowns, you may get a successful submit. > o You wait freaking forever just to get a confirmation. > o Sometimes, like today, you won't be able to ever submit anything due > to it being impossible to ever submit a valid set of information that > is internally non-conflicting according to whatever fhead wrote their > forms submission. > > What's wrong with this picture? The company is screwing you by wasting > your time enforcing their data collection standards on you. I'm sure there's > someone in that company that would be willing to accept "US", "U.S", "USA" > "United States", "U of A", "America", etc. and would know exactly which > freaking country the interested party was from instead of forcing them > to waste even more time playing Web form geography. > > I'm starting to see the light of Passport. You want more information? Hit > this passport button. Voila. IE6 and Netscape 6,7 have pre-forms sutff, > but I always turn it off because you never know when there's that one field > that you don't want to submit to the person you are submitting to that > automatically gets sent, i.e. the privacy stuff is well beyond the > average user who will get screwed on privacy stuff. > > So, if crappy forms-based submission is the state of practice for > business enablement on the Web, I can't see this whole data submission > and hurry up and wait for us to get back to you business process as > working all that well. > > > Greg >

Re: EBusiness Webforms: cluetrain has left the station >>>>> "G" == Gregory Alan Bolcer <[email protected]> writes: G> So, if crappy forms-based submission is the state of practice G> for business enablement on the Web, I can't see this whole data G> submission and hurry up and wait for us to get back to you G> business process as working all that well. I love this business. If a bridge falls over, the architect or the engineer is in court the next day, but when a /software/ bridge falls over, we blame the air beneath it, or the phase of the moon, or (more often) the people walking on it. "What idiots! Don't they know you're supposed to walk on the /balls/ of your feet, not lead with your heels? Didn't they read the blueprints? They were posted in the town hall. Any idiot would know the 0.75Hz heel cadence would pop rivets on the structural supports! Geez. Pedestrians are /so/ stupid." Ours is the /only/ industry that can hold itself 100% un-responsible for any and all sloth-inflicted doom, and the only industry which can /also/ get away with feeding this myth of infallibility unquestioned to the media, to investors, to students and to each other. "God I hate telephones. Telephones are stupid. I used a telephone to, like, call my broker yesterday, and y'know, just /after/ I'd ordered those 2000 shares of Nortel ..." You just gotta love a mass-delusion like that. Although it's like a total shock to 99.999% (5nines) of all the employed website designers out there, the truth is webforms /can/ accept "U.S. of A" as a country. Incredible, but true. Web forms can also accept /multiple/ or even /free-form/ telephone numbers and can even be partitioned into manageable steps. All this can also be done without selling exclusive rights to your wallet to the World's Second-Richest Corporation (assuming Cisco is still #1) and vendor locking your business into their "small transaction fee" tithe. Of course, try and tell one of those 5-niners that and they'll get all defensive, black list you as a sh*t disturber and undermine your reputation with the boss... not that I'm speaking first-hand or anything ;) -- Gary Lawrence Murphy - [email protected] - TeleDynamics Communications - blog: http://www.auracom.com/~teledyn - biz: http://teledyn.com/ - "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." (Picasso)

Re: EBusiness Webforms: cluetrain has left the station On Saturday, September 28, 2002, at 12:54 PM, Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote: > Although it's like a total shock to 99.999% (5nines) of all the > employed website designers out there, the truth is webforms /can/ > accept "U.S. of A" as a country. Incredible, but true. Web forms can > also accept /multiple/ or even /free-form/ telephone numbers and can > even be partitioned into manageable steps. All this can also be done > without selling exclusive rights to your wallet to the World's > Second-Richest Corporation (assuming Cisco is still #1) and vendor > locking your business into their "small transaction fee" tithe. Yes, but this is what normally happened: Engineer: we can put an input validator/parser on the backend to do that. Designer: there's a JavaScript library that can do some of the pre-validation. Creative Director: I want it in blue, with a zooming logo. Engineer: can we get to that later, we need to meet functional specs. Creative Director: You *don't* understand. *I* want it in blue. Creative Director: Oh, and the site launches this Friday because I sent out a press release about our new strategic partnership with HypeCorp. Designer: fine, we'll just put a list of countries in a drop down. Engineer: and we can validate against that list. Creative Director: I don't give a shit. As long as it's in blue. And has a link to my press release. ---- Bill Humphries <[email protected]> http://www.whump.com/moreLikeThis/

Re: EBusiness Webforms: cluetrain has left the station At 08:18 AM 9/28/02 -0700, Gregory Alan Bolcer wrote: >IE6 and Netscape 6,7 have pre-forms sutff, >but I always turn it off because you never know when there's that one field >that you don't want to submit to the person you are submitting to that >automatically gets sent, i.e. the privacy stuff is well beyond the >average user who will get screwed on privacy stuff. Opera 6 has an interesting way around this. You just right-click on each field and bring up a choice of prefilled local information that you can then choose to enter into the form. Now if they can just fix the $@!$@$# irritating memory problems that Opera6 has....Hakon, you listening? Udhay -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))

Re: EBusiness Webforms: cluetrain has left the station >>>>> "B" == Bill Humphries <[email protected]> writes: B> Yes, but this is what normally happened: B> Engineer: we can put ... B> Designer: there's a ... B> Creative Director: I want it in blue ... Yup, seen it happen oodles of times, only all three of those folks are one and the same person. The fourth is the business manager who says "whatever, so long as you do it on your own time" -- Gary Lawrence Murphy - [email protected] - TeleDynamics Communications - blog: http://www.auracom.com/~teledyn - biz: http://teledyn.com/ - "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." (Picasso)

Content management for MP3s Dear flatware, I'm about to undertake a massive project to index/catalog well over one thousand CDs that have been ripped to MP3 and set up a server to stream them to different rooms in the house. (Yes, I own them all, no I'm not broadcasting them to the 'net.) Can anyone give me some recommendations as to what (free? opensource?) software is best suited for this task? I know there are a few FoRKs out there who have tackled this problem before... I'd like to be able to dynamically generate play lists from queries like "Jazz released between 1950 and 1960" or "Artist such and such between these dates" or "Just these artists" or "Just this genre" - you get the idea. In addition to having multiple streams that I can tune in to (a la DMX), I'd like to be able to browse the database through a web interface from other computers in the house and pull specific music down to wherever I am. Thanks, Elias