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Re: Torture done correctly is a terminal process
by netkita＠earthlink.net 25 Jun '03

25 Jun '03

Just out of suriosity .. do you have any of the poems or a location for them? Sorry for the delay in answering them. Deirdre On 21 Nov 2002 at 23:17, James A. Donald wrote: > > -- > > On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 09:33:39AM -0800, Greg Broiles wrote: > > > To flesh this out a little more - the judge was Stephen > > > Trott, speaking on September 18 2002 at the Commonwealth > > > Club. Trott credits the torture warrant idea to Alan > > > Dershowitz, whom he describes as a good friend and a "great > > > civil libertarian". > > On 21 Nov 2002 at 22:24, Declan McCullagh wrote: > > Yes. Clearly it's okay for torture warrants to exist -- as > > long as you're a member of the political class that gets to > > approve them... > > At present, if the US wants someone terminally interrogated, > they ship him to Egypt and ask the Egyptians to do the > interrogation. > > I am mildly suprised they do not ask the Afghans to do the > interrogations, since poems have been written concerning the > remarkable effectiveness of Afghan interrogations. > > --digsig > James A. Donald > 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG > Jyf5nXEcZGYbFVFMsrtVZ973GZhAHY04PCKLDC4a > 4OpiaSbnH8yY1vYQHQAPfTAfNqbAvyyBgFMDUG6Ir

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Re: Torture done correctly is a terminal process
by Major Variola (ret) 25 Jun '03

25 Jun '03

At 01:39 PM 6/25/03 -0400, netkita(a)earthlink.net wrote: >> At present, if the US wants someone terminally interrogated, >> they ship him to Egypt and ask the Egyptians to do the >> interrogation. More chance of a leak there; Mossad is highly recommended. But a terminal interrogation might bury some secrets. Whereas a mindfuck approach --fake newspapers, fabricated environments, informers, nonlethal psychotropics-- can keep your resource going, and make him leak. Why do you think the captured al Q dudes are not allowed to speak to others, it would trash the illusion. "Torture done correctly is a terminal process" is so old-school...

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Pro-gun Federal Judge Nominee In Trouble (fwd)
by J.A. Terranson 25 Jun '03

25 Jun '03

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 17:49:45 -0400 From: Gun_Owners_of_America(a)capwiz.mailmanager.net To: Gun_Owners_of_America(a)capwiz.mailmanager.net Subject: Pro-gun Federal Judge Nominee In Trouble Senate Democrats Trying To Torpedo Pro-gun Judicial Appointee -- Calls needed to Senate to help break upcoming filibuster Gun Owners of America E-Mail Alert 8001 Forbes Place, Suite 102, Springfield, VA 22151 Phone: 703-321-8585 / FAX: 703-321-8408 http://www.gunowners.org "As a law enforcement official, I know crimes are caused by criminals, not by the gun industry. Indeed, by providing good-quality firearms at reasonable prices to law-abiding citizens and lawmen, the gun industry helps reduce crime." -- Bush nominee to the federal bench, Attorney General Bill Pryor (AL) (Tuesday, June 24, 2003) -- As you read that quote above, you can see why Democrat Senators Charles Schumer (NY) and Dianne Feinstein (CA) don't want Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor confirmed to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Simply put, Bill Pryor is way too pro-gun for them. You may remember U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft stated in 2001 that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. Well, it was Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor who mobilized attorneys general in 17 other states to sign a letter commending Ashcroft for his position. The Pryor letter cites different scholarly law review articles and Supreme Court opinions that substantiate the true meaning behind the Second Amendment. The letter also quotes gun-hating constitutional scholars (like Laurence Tribe) who have reluctantly concluded that the Second Amendment does indeed protect an individual right to bear arms. Finally, the Pryor letter references the work of John Lott which shows that putting guns in the hands of good people is good public policy. Why? Because "more guns [means] less crime." President George Bush nominated Gen. Pryor to be a judge in the federal court system, but the Democratic leadership has stonewalled his confirmation -- just as it has done with so many other appointees. The Senate Judiciary Committee was expected to vote on Pryor's nomination this week. But minority party delay tactics have pushed back that vote until sometime in July. (Democrats have submitted an unprecedented number of questions for General Pryor to answer before the Judiciary Committee acts on his nomination.) Please contact your Senators and ask them to support the Pryor nomination. He is unabashedly pro-gun, and deserves the support of gun owners nationwide. ACTION: Help get pro-gun Attorney General William Pryor confirmed to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. You can contact your Senators by visiting the Gun Owners Legislative Action Center at http://www.gunowners.org/activism.htm and sending them a pre-written e-mail message. Or, you can cut-and-paste the text below and fax it to your two Senators (fax numbers can be found at the above URL). ------ Pre-written message ------ Dear Senator: I am very disturbed that the U.S. Senate is dragging its feet in confirming pro-gun Alabama Attorney General William Pryor to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Make no mistake, General Pryor is more than qualified to assume a position on the federal bench. Not only does he have a "qualified" rating from the American Bar Association, he has spent years distinguishing himself as a top-class public servant. He has served as the Editor in Chief of the Tulane Law Review. He has personally argued a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. And he has been elected to the position of Attorney General in the state of Alabama. Even partisan opponents have heaped high praise on him. Dr. Joe Reed, the chairman of the Alabama Democratic Conference, says that William Pryor is a "first-class public official" who "will be a credit to the judiciary and will be a guardian for justice." I support General Pryor's nomination because he is pro-Constitution and pro-Second Amendment. And I will consider ANY vote to delay or filibuster his nomination as an anti-gun vote. I hope you will oppose any stall tactics and vote to CONFIRM William Pryor to the federal bench. Gun Owners of America will report to me how you vote. Thank you. Sincerely, **************************** "Live Fire" radio with Larry Pratt is now broadcast by the Information Radio Network on Saturdays at 12:00 Noon Eastern. "Live Fire" is simulcast on the web at http://inforadionet.com and previous episodes are archived at http://www.soundwaves2000.com/livefire/ in RealAudio. **************************** Please do not reply directly to this message, as your reply will bounce back as undeliverable. To subscribe to free, low-volume GOA alerts, go to http://www.gunowners.org/ean.htm on the web. Change of e-mail address may also be made at that location. To unsubscribe send a message to gunowners_list(a)capwiz.mailmanager.net with the word unsubscribe in the subject line. Problems, questions or comments? The main GOA e-mail address goamail(a)gunowners.org is at your disposal. Please do not add that address to distribution lists sending more than ten messages per week or lists associated with issues other than gun rights.

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Army patents biowar tech, aiding the enemy, indicting itself
by Major Variola (ret.) 24 Jun '03

24 Jun '03

Helping the Enemy? The U.S. Army is catching some flak for patenting two devices that could be used to launch bioweapons. Critics say the patents may violate a weapons-control treaty--and could give terrorists a blueprint for manufacturing the devices. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued the two patents (numbers 6,523,478 and 6,047,644) over the last year. One details a "nonlethal cargo dispenser" that attaches to the end of a rifle and uses a bullet's momentum to zip a chemical or biological payload to its target. The other describes a cartridge that can spread an aerosol cloud. The Sunshine Project, a nonprofit arms-control group with offices in Austin, Texas, and Hamburg, Germany, first raised questions about the patents last month, saying they appeared to violate the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, which bars the development of delivery devices. And this month, Greg Aharonian, publisher of the prominent Internet Patent News Service, piled on. "Which words in the phrase 'aiding and abetting the enemy' does the Army not understand?" he asks, adding that "it is hypocritical to complain about countries developing biological and chemical weapons when we are openly educating them on how to do so." He says the military should have classified the patents. The Army says it is looking into the issue. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol300/issue5627/r-samples.shtml#300/5627…

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Genes want to be free (MP3=GMO)
by Major Variola (ret.) 24 Jun '03

24 Jun '03

I caught a session of the CA legislature hearing folks talk about GMOs. Many of the speakers were wanting to ban them from CA, worrying that if they arrive, they'll contaminate agriculture & commerical fishing, thereby closing markets (some of which want GMO-free food) or adding to producer costs via diagnostic tests to assure those markets. It struck me how 1. futile this is 2. similar to the RIAA's efforts to stop file sharing. Because in both cases you can't stop *others* from inserting a gene, or ripping a track. And once others do so, its very difficult to stop their propogation --information wants to be free, as the teenagers say, or more accurately, is readily copied. And *short of a police state*, you can't catch 100% of them. (This point I learned from this list.) There are a lot of dead British sheep and Hong Kong chickens, but pathogens (information) will reappear, and the pathogen-sharing (P2P) conditions continue. Hoof & mouth, avian flu, BSE, SARS, HIV. Napster, Morpheus, KaZaa, Gnutella, etc. If you say you have no fruit when driving into CA, the CA food police (yes, they exist) won't search your car. (Again, the point about anything less than a police state.) The RIAA can screw with CD formats and try to 0wn hardware OEMs and ISPs, but someone will just use the analog hole, and encrypted onion-routing P2P. Maybe Zebra mussels will contain a cure for SARS :-)

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[Brinworld] LATimes article on Event Data Recorders, privacy, teentrackers
by Major Variola (ret.) 24 Jun '03

24 Jun '03

June 24, 2003 BEHIND THE WHEEL A Key Witness at Crash Scenes: the Black Box Helping investigators reconstruct accidents, data recorders are not just for jets anymore. But their use has raised privacy concerns. ... Most other car makers also use this technology. But GM, and now Ford Motor Co., decided to allow others access to the data. In 2000, Santa Barbara-based Vetronix Corp. began selling a data-retrieval system that enables insurance and accident investigators to download data recorder information. The California Highway Patrol and 10 other law enforcement departments in the state have the retrieval systems, which cost about $2,500. ... Jon Cherney, an Irvine police investigator, used data recorder information to catch a Rancho Palos Verdes man in a recent hit-and-run collision. Although the man had denied being involved in the accident, Cherney said the recorder from his impounded car showed it had been in an accident in the same time period. The case is pending, he said. ... Recently, a consumer variant of the black box has become available. The device, marketed to parents of teens, emits beeps and other noises when a driver exceeds 70 mph, takes a turn too quickly or doesn't wear a seat belt. Devices installed by car makers don't record such regular driving details. Who actually owns the data recorder information is a central question in the debate over whether it represents an invasion of drivers' privacy. "Your car effectively spies on you," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil liberties group based in Washington, D.C. "It's a little like having the guy from Allstate in the back seat of your car." <snip> http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-wheel24jun24235621,1,7942363.story?…

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Re: Senators from Utah being Southern
by Tyler Durden 24 Jun '03

24 Jun '03

Morlock Elloi wrote... >It all boils down to getting masses to farm out the inquisitivness and then >servicing it. Well, I think this is the case 99% of the time, but I don't think it has to be. When most of the earlier scriptures were written, they probably served a function vaguely similar to modern Journals now....a place were insights were recorded so that others could build on the knoweldge base (if we ignore considerations of whether the 'insights' correspond to reality, the analogy with Journals is even more apropos. Mostly, though, I agree. No wait, maybe I don't. Modern organized religion is more about stegoing control commands into 'religious' teaching so as to get the masses to support the status quo. For instance, "God wanted us to invade Iraq because he loves us and our Christian country and hates Saddam because he is evil". Actually, more than control signals there are messages that inform the pious that their self-interest is at stake, and they don't need to bother themselves with the morality of the war on US foreign policy, etc... -TD >From: Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi(a)yahoo.com> >To: cypherpunks(a)lne.com >Subject: Re: Senators from Utah being Southern >Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 19:59:05 -0700 (PDT) > > >Religions are essentially collections of stories about the latter method > >Religions are artificial shortcuts to "knowledge" and excellent method to >neutralize congenital human curiosity. If you can't comprehend it, fake it. >They all offer explanations of various phenomena by using familiar human >memes >(fathers, mothers, children, birth, death.) It works most of the time. > >The major difference between politics and religion is that politics is >streamlined, it doesn't count on the internal consistency (and related >effort >to grasp it) but instead uses (via media) brute force of repetition. > >It all boils down to getting masses to farm out the inquisitivness and then >servicing it. > > >===== >end >(of original message) > >Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows: > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! >http://sbc.yahoo.com _________________________________________________________________ MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus

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Re: Senators from Utah being Southern
by Tyler Durden 23 Jun '03

23 Jun '03

>Religions are essentially collections of stories about the latter method >of modeling, created for people who can't do the math, 20 years ago, I might have agreed with this assessment. Actually, written in the present tense it is largely true. 3,000 years ago is a different story, however, and modern religionists often forget that. The earliest religious texts (including the Torah) are written in such a 'primitive' time that I don't think any of the modern notions apply. For instance, in the Torah it would seem that there are clearly plenty of other Gods to choose from, but the one the jews were commanded to choose was (Tetragrammaton). He doesn't even seem to have the qualities of "justice" righteousness, truth, peace, compassion blah blah blah that we are supposed to associate with God today. In fact, the Torah was written in the form of a peace treaty, with the implication that if the jews stopped obeying their end of the bargain, they'd get the CRAP kicked out of them. Period. Likewise, the Vedas and the earliest portions of the I Ching come from a time that is probably incomprehensible now. >and who have never >bothered to wonder why all the choirs of angels form such neat little >arrays A reference to group theory, eh? Nice. The Jungians of the world might argue otherwise, that religion to some extent codified primitive forms of group theory into symbolism. Certainly, the Dzog Chen tibetan Buddhists did comething very close to this, visualizing n-dimensional arrays of 'dieties' which are considered really focal/fold points of "psychocosmic energy"*. If you are referring to modern religion in the religious sense, I agree. But I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater...there are some very odd things tucked away into the Torah, for instance, that are arguably worth discovering. But then again, maybe I'm willing to throw the baby out with the bath water...if that water gets pooped up enough, the baby is no longer visible! -TD *: See "Psychocosmic Symbolism of the Buddhist Stupa" by Anagarika Govinda for an excellent discussion of buddhist iconography in the context of an architectural study. >From: Eric Cordian <emc(a)artifact.psychedelic.net> >To: Tim May <timcmay(a)got.net> >CC: cypherpunks(a)minder.net >Subject: Re: Senators from Utah being Southern >Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 12:29:41 -0700 (PDT) > >Tim wrote: > > > Let me remind folks that I am areligious...I no more believe in a god > > or goddess or afertlife or supernatural things than I believe in the > > Easter Bunny. I view all religions as cults of magical belief. > >There are two ways of modeling the Universe. One can build it from lots >of copies of the null set, or one can take the undifferentiated whole, and >subdivide it into countless fragments in equilibrium with each other in >various complex ways. > >Religions are essentially collections of stories about the latter method >of modeling, created for people who can't do the math, and who have never >bothered to wonder why all the choirs of angels form such neat little >arrays. > >God is the thing you have before you start chopping it up. God is the >abstraction that has everything in the universe as a possible instance. >Archangels are chunks of a coarse partition of God. We are chunks of a >fine partition of God. > > > Having said this, all of the Mormons I have known have been unusually > > honest, forthright, and hard-working. I worked with a fair number of > > them at Intel, and they were solid contributors. And the Mormons are > > doing well financially, here in the U.S. and abroad. > >Mormons make perfect employees. They are always bathed, well-dressed, >hard-working, self-reliant, well-educated, respectful of your authority, >and they hardly ever mention that after they die, they hope to rule over >other planets in physical bodies, and have a wonderful sex life. > >Then again, they'll put their teenage children in a mental institution in >a heartbeat for defying them, or acting gay. > >Mormons are the true Stepford citizen units. Perfect on the outside, >dangerous on the inside. > > > He was a hell of a lot more interesting than JC, that's for sure. I > > recommend "The Prophecy," the wonderful movie with Christopher Walken > > as the angel Gabriel. > >The Nephilim are a fun bunch. > > > As such beings and such deities are fanciful, I am more interested in > > the psychological state that allowed a 7th-century merchant to write > > such a book. > >The whole universe is inside you, Grasshopper. > >-- >Eric Michael Cordian 0+ >O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division >"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law" _________________________________________________________________ MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus

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Senators from Utah being Southern
by Major Variola (ret) 23 Jun '03

23 Jun '03

At 12:30 PM 6/19/03 -0500, John Washburn wrote: >Utah is Southern? I do not want directions from you. :-) Well, it is southern w.r.t. certain states, but yeah, y'all got me. But what I meant was, a jeebus-talking, flag-waving pinhead. A look at hatchmusic.com (while its still up :-) supports that description. Not all niggers are negroes, you know. And many negroes are not niggers. Substitute "southern"... its culture, not genes or geography. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to discover with whom I was confusing, or what other senators (and other elected federal officials) give that impression. --- "The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." George Washington, November 4, 1796

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RE: Is Hatch a Mormon or a crypto Satanist?
by Trei, Peter 23 Jun '03

23 Jun '03

> Bill Stewart[SMTP:bill.stewart@pobox.com] wrote: > > At 10:24 AM 06/21/2003 -0700, Major Variola (ret) wrote: > > > Is Hatch a Mormon? > > > >Surely you jest. Anyone in any office in Utah is a Mormon. > >And most of the profs at the universities there. > >Good luck trying to buy a beer, BTW. > > I was pleasantly surprised when I went to Salt Lake City > ten years ago that not only was it no trouble to get a drink, > it was also no trouble to get espresso, which is my usual vice - > the Nordstrom's in the mall had their little stand out front. > It's apparently more trouble to get liquor up in ski country. > > I've also found it was less trouble to get a beer and _dinner_ > late at night than in much of California, though perhaps they > have rules requiring bars to also be restaurants. > (~midnight, about 6 blocks from the temple.) > The catch was that they were also less fascist about smoking in bars, > so I had to sit off at the less-crowded end of the bar > rather than near the TV with most of the other gentiles. > SLC, while the state capital, and home of the LDS church, has a comparatively low concentration of Mormons. Provo, which is the home of BYU, is far more concentrated. The Mormons have actually eased off on the caffeine issue in the last decade or so. Coke is now OK. I'm not sure about coffee (part of the prohibition is against *hot* drinks, regardless of content). Peter

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