Jihad needs scientists
in [Design]
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From: lucasea on 17 Oct 2006 22:49 "T Wake" <usenet.es7at(a)gishpuppy.com> wrote in message news:7c6dncRVMMO6tajYRVnyiQ(a)pipex.net... > "EMILY's List WOMEN VOTE!? is going door to door in Columbus, OH to help > turn out voters for House candidate Mary Jo Kilroy, who is dizzyingly > close to defeating Rep. Deborah Pryce, the fourth-highest ranking woman in > the House leadership I've been watching this race closely for quite a while. I think Kilroy was the wrong basket into which to put their eggs, so to speak. Pryce is the fourth-highest ranking woman in the House for a good reason--she appears to be straightforward, honest and professional, and her ads reflect that. Kilroy's ads have been nothing but mudslinging from the beginning. > and Jennifer Brunner, who is running to claim the secretary of state's > office." She's not advertised on TV, so I don't really know much about her campaign. The race I desparately hope falls to the Democrats is Sherrod Brown vs. Mike DeWine. DeWine is one of the sleaziest politicians left standing in Ohio (after the whole Ney/Noe/Abramoff flap), who is used to riding into office on his "golly-gee-whiz" boyish charm and playing up his lisp in exactly the same way Bush does. DeWine's campaign has been *entirely* 100 % negative, mostly fear-mongering, and Brown comes across as someone who thinks about the issues, and doesn't just shoot from the hip. His ads have been by and large positive and provide a vision for improvement. It also appears (thankfully) that Blackwell is likely to lose to Strickland. Aside from Blackwell's fiscal idiocies, I have a *huge* moral problem with Blackwell being rewarded for his very poor handling of the conflict of interest (and widespread demonstrable voting irregularities) in the 2004 election...up to and including the fact that he has had an extended battle in the Ohio Supreme Court to destroy all documents from the 2004 election, so that no evidence of these irregularities could come to light. Thankfully, the Supreme Court didn't let him. Eric Lucas
From: lucasea on 17 Oct 2006 23:03 "T Wake" <usenet.es7at(a)gishpuppy.com> wrote in message news:2aydnQ5hfotjtKjYRVnytw(a)pipex.net... > > "John Larkin" <jjlarkin(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote in > message news:0h7aj25ckalb1dr630lm9apu323h2hj3ah(a)4ax.com... >> On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 16:45:03 GMT, Jonathan Kirwan >> <jkirwan(a)easystreet.com> wrote: >> >>>On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 08:50:18 -0700, John Larkin >>><jjlarkin(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: >>> >>>>On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 15:38:17 GMT, <lucasea(a)sbcglobal.net> wrote: >>>> >>>>>"Jonathan Kirwan" <jkirwan(a)easystreet.com> wrote in message >>>>>news:i9n8j29atodlsous5hl3bpuk1avrj0s9a4(a)4ax.com... >>>>>> On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 03:39:16 GMT, <lucasea(a)sbcglobal.net> wrote: >>>>>> >>>>>>>Nicely written. >>>>>> >>>>>> Thanks. >>>>>> >>>>>>>Ever heard of a dinky, crappy little liberal arts college called Kent >>>>>>>State? >>>>>> >>>>>> I'm not sure how you intend that to be applied, of course, since you >>>>>> don't say what you are thinking here. >>>>> >>>>>Sorry if that sounded snotty--no hidden agenda, just the obvious >>>>>example of >>>>>troops being ordered into a situation and attacking their own people. >>>> >>>>Somehow it never occurred to me to throw rocks at armed National Guard >>>>troops. >>> >>>And by that comment do you mean to justify the application of deadly >>>force and the taking of lives in this particular circumstance? Just >>>curious. >>> >> >> Of course not. But if you do really, really stupid things, you can get >> hurt, no different from poking a pit bull with a stick. > > It is sad that your national guard are pit bulls. Are stones really that > frightening for them? Especially considering that they were in full riot gear, with body shields and all, it is a bit surprising. However, I guess I don't know how I would have reacted if an angry mob was attacking me in that situation. I was really too young to comprehend the situation at that time, but I understand that there were a lot of conflicts on compuses around the country between ROTC and non-ROTC students, and as many of the National Guard were probably ROTC graduates, the shootings could have been a spillover of that emotional conflict. > It is sad that people are pushed to the point at which they feel they need > to throw stones at Soldiers to get their voices heard. Isn't democracy > wonderful. The wheels of the US version of a representative democracy do indeed turn slowly sometimes--in 2/4/6 year chunks, usually. A true democracy might be more responsive, but it's also *completely* impractical on the scale of anything more than a few hundred people. The thing that I find more insidious, and thus far more offensive, is the type of "crowd control" used at politicians' public appearances these days. Bush has been in the habit, since 2000, of having any possible protesters banished from his appearances, and either falsely imprisoned (for example, for wearing a T-shirt with an anti-Bush slogan) or bused to so-called "Free Speech Zones" (how's that for a 1984-type euphemism) outside of town in remote areas where they're guaranteed not to be heard by more than a few people. That sort of quashing of debate and opposing opinions makes my spine curl. > This is also one of the reasons why using solders on public disorder > duties is wrong. Shooting someone for throwing a stone is far from > justified. In the fullness of time, the police have developed and begun using more non-lethal crowd control means. Accidents still happen, but I think they're much less likely. Eric Lucas
From: lucasea on 17 Oct 2006 23:07 "T Wake" <usenet.es7at(a)gishpuppy.com> wrote in message news:yKCdnU0EBp8At6jYRVnyrA(a)pipex.net... > > If legislation came into force which demanded I worship in Church every > Sunday I would happily throw rocks at soldiers in protest. If they killed > me as a result it would, if nothing else, highlight to others how unjust > the system had become. I think that sort of dedication to principles has become very rare in the US, perhaps through a few decades of unparalleled peace and prosperity. People are so insistent on having an existence with as close to a zero chance of dying as possible, that doing something like that, which carries some risk of dying, is unthinkable. Eric Lucas
From: lucasea on 17 Oct 2006 23:20 "John Larkin" <jjlarkin(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote in message news:qndaj2p3kovkgrk7g4ijnppv9d1ptn2qfm(a)4ax.com... > On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 20:07:41 +0100, "T Wake" > <usenet.es7at(a)gishpuppy.com> wrote: > >>It is sad that people are pushed to the point at which they feel they need >>to throw stones at Soldiers to get their voices heard. Isn't democracy >>wonderful. > > How does hurling rocks get "their voices heard"? Well, in fact I think it was exactly events like KSU that made visible/audible a rising tide of discontent with Vietnam, that Nixon could no longer ignore, and ultimately led to our complete withdrawal. >>> As I said, I >>> wouldn't throw rocks at people with guns; I don't fancy being in the >>> right, and dead. >> >>It is fortunate your countries founding fathers didn't hold this >>viewpoint. > > They threw rocks at people with guns? Maybe not the "Founding Fathers" as in Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, etc, but in fact, yes. The famous "shot heard round the world" was a British soldier firing on an angry mob, some of whom were throwing stones. One of the first people killed was a child, if I remember my 10th-grade American History class correctly. (This could have been a little bit of jingoistic rewriting of history, though.) If my memory is correct, it was precisely this act of firing on the mob that incensed the population, and served to motivate the revolutionaries through the ensuing brutal years of fighting. Eric Lucas
From: lucasea on 17 Oct 2006 23:27
"David Bostwick" <david.bostwick(a)chemistry.gatech.edu> wrote in message news:eh3g6g$1fm$2(a)news-int.gatech.edu... > In article <K38Zg.17285$6S3.4370(a)newssvr25.news.prodigy.net>, > <lucasea(a)sbcglobal.net> wrote: >> >>"John Larkin" <jjlarkin(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote in >>message >>news:100aj2tujd38kum9omn0ni4tcbd22cfdbe(a)4ax.com... > > [...] > >>> >>> There are plenty of tax-exempt nonprofits on both sides, or rather all >>> sides. >> >>The ones I'm objecting to are the religious ones, and they're almost >>invariably aligned with the right. >> >> > > So you haven't been in many African-American churches, eh? No, not really. They don't have much use for Renaissance/Baroque recorder quartets. :^) However, it is my understanding that the trusim that black churches vote Democrat is now dated. I understand part of the reason that Bush carried the South in 2000 and 2004 is because the black churches gave up on the Democrats who had largely been ignoring them for many years. Not true? Eric Lucas |