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[RRE]The Return of Antimasonism in American Political Life
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

--- begin forwarded text Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 17:59:29 -0800 (PST) From: Phil Agre <pagre(a)alpha.oac.ucla.edu> To: "Red Rock Eater News Service" <rre(a)lists.gseis.ucla.edu> Subject: [RRE]The Return of Antimasonism in American Political Life Sender: <rre(a)lists.gseis.ucla.edu> Precedence: Bulk List-Subscribe: <mailto:rre-on@lists.gseis.ucla.edu> Conspiracy and Reason: The Return of Antimasonism in American Political Life Phil Agre http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/ (I wrote this back in the spring, but it seems even more relevant now.) When going to the movies, my favorite part is afterward, walking back out into the world, seeing everything through the prism of the movie. After seeing Terry Gilliam's bizarre "12 Monkeys", for example, I drove across San Diego in the grip of a delusion that I was Bruce Willis, warning Cassandra-like about a catastophe that nobody wanted to hear about. Of course it didn't make sense. Am I really warning anyone about a catastrophe? Is nobody really listening? But that's how it felt for a good couple of hours. I got that feeling again this afternoon. For the last few months, in amongst my official duties, I have been reading the literature on apocalytic social movements. I was originally inspired in this by David Noble's book "The Religion of Technology". Noble observes, for example, that many of the important early engineers, particularly in the United States, were Masons, and he describes the development of a particular kind of millennialism -- or at least a secularized form of religious utopianism -- among engineers that became secularized and formed the outlines of technical movements such as artificial intelligence and -- he might as well have added -- cyberspace. As part of this reading campaign, earlier this week I read large parts of Robert Fuller's "Naming the Antichrist", which is a history of social movements in the United States that, from earliest colonial times to the present, have claimed to identify the Antichrist that is mentioned briefly in the visionary books of the Bible. In reading Fuller's book, all at once it occurred to me that the ongoing tidal wave of accusations and innuendoes against Bill Clinton and his entire generation resemble nothing so much as Antimasonism. The similarities are most striking: both involve attempts to foment hatred by ordinary people against their slightly better-off and more cosmopolitan fellow citizens by implicating them in an enormous Conspiracy. Even the fine details of the accusations are similar: in each case, for example, the conspirators are said to undermine religion and promote decadence through the public schools. This analogy impressed me for a while, but then I cooled down. Even when an analogy is instructive, one should determine its limits. After all, nobody is claiming that Bill Clinton is mounting his vast campaign of murder, drug dealing, treason, and bank fraud on behalf of the Illuminati, right? And with that thought I filed the whole thing in my notebook. That was Tuesday. This afternoon, Friday, I happened to pass through a Barnes and Noble in Costa Mesa, California. I was there because the bookstore has a public restroom and is on the way to the most excellent El Toro Bravo taco stand, which does not. Briefly inspecting the "New Non-Fiction Books" shelves as is my custom, I noticed a new book by Tony Brown. Its title, "Empower the People", was not so promising, given that I've already read quite a few books by conservative authors about how the free market empowers people to make choices etc etc etc. Yet something poked at me to look closer, and I saw the subtitle: "A 7-Step Plan to Overthrow the Conspiracy That Is Stealing Your Money and Freedom". I opened the book and found to my utter slack-jawed amazement that it described none other than the great Conspiracy by the Illuminati, led by Bill Clinton. I am not making this up. Now, if the author of this book were a fringe crazy then it would only be mildly odd to find the book in Barnes and Noble. Just the other day I sat on the floor in the Barnes and Noble at Pico and Westwood in Los Angeles and read large parts of a well-produced volume entitled "A Woman Rides the Beast" by Dave Hunt, which argues that the woman seen riding on the back of the Beast in the Book of Revelation is none other than the Virgin Mary as she is worshipped in the Catholic Church. (This is part of a resurgence of anti-Catholicism among some American evangelical Protestants that deserves much more attention than it has gotten -- see, for example, Michael W. Smith singing on a recent record, amidst a lamentation of various sins, of people who are "jaded by hypocrisies behind cathedral walls"). This is the sort of fringe weirdness that is easy to write off. But the author of "Empower the People", Tony Brown, is not a marginal crazy. I hate to be the one to break this to you, but the United States is now a country in which a man who believes that the President is an agent of the Illuminati has a regular program on public television. What are we to make of this? Several things. First, in the astonishing climate of political warfare now under way in the United States, when the speaker of the House insinuates in a speech at Stanford University that the President is systematically killing his enemies (NY Times 5/3/98) and nobody finds this even slightly odd, we have to confront the fact that in the late 18th century, during the formative decades of the political culture of the United States, this country was positively addled by conspiracy theories. These theories were not prominent in the writings of the educated secular elites who officially founded the country. But the rank and file of the Revolution were animated in large part (though not, of course, solely) by elaborate claims to have located the Antichrist in the crown and church of England, and in their adherents in America. Nor the American cultural inclination to conspiracy theories end with the Constitution. As the new country fought its first round of political conflicts, the theories suddenly shifted their attention -- to the Masons. This happened precisely 200 years ago, in fact, in 1798, when the first tracts appeared describing the great Conspiracy of the Illuminati, a subgroup of the Masons from Bavaria. After smouldering for several years, opposition to this Conspiracy became a substantial social movement beginning around 1830 in the "burned-over district" of upstate New York, so-called because of the waves of evangelical religious enthusiasm that had swept over the area. (Madison probably had an earlier wave of revivals, the First Great Awakening, in mind when he expressed relief in the famous tenth Federalist Paper that social movements that rise up in one part of the country, particularly religious movements that devolve into political ones, cannot easily spread to other areas.) The Antimasonic movement became a political party which contested several elections before collapsing a decade later. You will recall that many early American engineers were Masons, as were many of the Founding Fathers. But who exactly were the Masons? The Masons originated as a medieval guild, but during the period in question they were a semi-secret society of white men who constituted themselves on classical Greek and Roman models as the intellectual elites of their respective countries. In this sense, Antimasonism was very much a revolt against educated people. That it was also a revolt against the same people who founded the country was, so far as I can determine, little-noted at the time. It is often observed that cultural patterns are able to go underground for decades or centuries, only to spring fully-formed to the surface once again, as if they were brand new, when the time is right. And that, I would suggest, is what's happening now. If this were the late 18th century, white men who rose through education from relatively poor backgrounds -- men such as Bill Clinton -- would be spinning classical political philosophies and writing the Constitution, and conservative evangelical ministers would be spinning conspiracy theories and opposing the Constitution on the grounds that (quite the opposite of what many such ministers say today) it does not create a Christian nation. The vigorous but ideologically vague patriotism of the contemporary anti- government movement likewise corresponds to the equally vague ideas of the 18th century conspiracy theorists. In drawing out these parallels, I am particularly struck by the place of technology in American political culture. The early engineers -- the men who founded the country's original technological institutions -- were largely Masons, and popular reactionary movements in the United States have increasingly incorporated technological themes into their theories. Computers, for example, play an important role in conspiracy theories based on the Book of Revelation. Viewed superficially, these theories sometimes seem to resemble the much more serious ideas of privacy and civil liberties advocates. My experience, however, is that the people who spin such theories are indifferent to accurate information about the nature and use of computers, no matter how unsettling; their concern with the technology is much more symbolic. In my view, a critical turning point in American cultural constructions of information technology occurred in the 1970's, in the wake of the Vietnam war. This cultural shift has been brilliantly documented by James W. Gibson's "Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America" (1994). The Vietnam war, Gibson observes, was organized largely by men from elite institutions who believed in formal rationality and made heavy use of mathematical decision-making models. They lost, and there arose in the aftermath of that loss an important cultural narrative that was best captured by Sylvester Stallone's "Rambo". Rambo is a lone individual who keeps fighting despite having been betrayed by decadent institutions. Cold War heroes, by contrast, may have been ambivalent about their institutions, but they were insiders -- they were part of the institution. Rambo is an outsider. He has two enemies, the "official" enemy and the institution itself. This figure of the betrayed and wounded hero fighting two enemies has become deeply engraved in American culture. Constrast, for example, the original Cold War era (1966-1969) "Mission: Impossible" television series and the 1996 movie version starring Tom Cruise. In the television version, the government is completely unquestioned, but for Tom Cruise, the CIA is the enemy as well. Rambo epitomized a new cultural construction of masculinity, set against institutions rather than identifying with them. And technology was identified with the institutions. This helps to explain why Hollywood has apparently decided that computers and rationality are feminine domains. (Think, for example, of "The X-Files".) Cultures often define men as "outside" of something and women as "inside"; what varies is the something. In this case, the something is the institutional world, technology and all. The Rambo phenomenon also helps to explain the otherwise mysterious shift that took place during the 1980's in prevailing cultural constructions of computer hackers: the original hackers were comfortably identified with military-sponsored research institutions, but then the word "hacker" suddenly shifted around to refer to men, whether bad criminals or virtuous rebels, who were outside of and opposed to institutions. This, in turn, helps explain the peculiar divide on the political right between those cultural conservatives -- the inheritors of the Antimasonites -- who persist in identifying technology with oppressive institutions and a demographically narrow but highly educated group of libertarians who have redefined technology as an instrument for the destruction of institutions. The point here is not that Rambo appeared from nowhere. Quite the contrary, "Rambo"'s construction of the Vietnam war drew upon and revalued elements of American historical memory that have been handed down, for the most part unconsciously, by all sorts of mechanisms throughout the country's history. And once it did, neoconservative intellectuals such as Irving Kristol set about reinterpreting those cultural forms in terms of their "New Class" political strategy. That phrase, "New Class", was originally applied by Milovan Djilas in his analysis of the bureaucrats who consolidated their power in the Soviet Union. True to the ideologies of Lenin and Stalin, these people were drawn primarily from the lower strata of Russian society, semi-educated and selected through the Soviet examination system (itself originally derived, via European variants, from the classical Chinese system), and installed in positions of power that they proceeded to consolidate over several decades. The neoconservatives' strategy is to portray American liberals as an analogue of the Soviet New Class and to use the money of the rich to mobilize working people against professionals and the poor. This helps to explain why conservative rhetoric virtually never discloses the existence of working-class liberals, and why the party that enjoys the overwhelming support of wealthy Americans persists in appropriating generations of left-wing rhetoric to portray liberals as a wealthy "elite". (It's bad to foment envy against the rich, apparently, but not against college professors.) This whole strategy succeeds in large part because of the whole historical inheritance of Antimasonism and its successive generations of descendents. The liberals, in short, are the new Masons. In his history of German intellectual life in the era that led up to the Nazis, Georg Lukacs spoke of a "destruction of reason" -- a step- by-step demolition of rational thought that became possible as Germans found themselves willing to project more and more and more of their own negative impulses into a vast enemy. Tony Brown's "Empower the People", it seems to me, is one very clear step in a destruction of reason that is currently far along in the United States. Antimasonism is the American equivalent of fascism, and Antimasonism is coming back. Will the relatively rational antiliberalism of neoconservative intellectuals be drowned by the unfortunate tradition of conspiratoralism upon which it draws its emotional force? That, it seems to me, is an urgent question for our country right now. end --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.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'

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IP: Cyber force behind protest
by Vladimir Z. Nuri 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: E Pluribus Unum <eplurib(a)infinet.com> Subject: IP: Cyber force behind protest Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 06:59:50 -0500 To: E Pluribus Unum Email Distribution Network <eplurib(a)infinet.com> Cyber force By Anne Williamson What is dismaying to Democrats is a cliche to Republicans; no one has done as much for the Republican Party over the past six years as has Bill Clinton. But Bill Clinton has succeeded in making another significant contribution to American political life. Citizenship is back with a vengeance. If you don't believe me, then just check out the hottest site on the Internet, freerepublic.com. Begun by a handful of concerned citizens who discovered their comments regarding Clinton administration corruption were being censored in an AOL political chat room, the website itself is the achievement of one man, Jim Robinson of Fresno, California. A retired software executive suffering from muscular sclerosis, Robinson marshaled his outrage and his resources to establish the website. With nearly 10,000 posters and over 120,000 daily hits, Free Republic has become a phenomenon, a community and -- most recently -- a nascent political force of mindboggling potential. Dedicated to free speech, constitutional government and the exposure of government corruption, Free Republic works on an interactive basis. The pretext for opening debate is for participants to search the Internet for pertinent news articles and post them under Free Republic's many topics to discussion boards of which "Whitewater" -- the catchall Clinton scandal header -- sizzles the loudest. And then -- like a decorative tank of pirhanas tossed a treat by a friendly barkeep -- posters move in to dissect and critique the article. What emerges by the end of the fast-moving discussion "thread" no longer bears the prejudicial marks of journalists belonging to what FR characterizes as "the lamestream media." Freepers, as Lucianne Goldberg has dubbed them, employ links to other Internet sites for unusual citations, contrary opinions and facts supportive of their various arguments. Original material found wanting is received no differently. Dubious sourcing and fuzzy thinking take a drubbing. In fact, FR's forum is rigorous enough to have helped develop several contributors' writing careers: Lawyer J. Peter Mulhern went from a lengthy call-in encounter with Rush Limbaugh to a column for The Washington Weekly after a stint as an FR regular; and David Burge, the IowaHawk, whose whimsical and hilarious "verbal cartoons" lampooning the political left make him a FR favorite, lasted just long enough to get plucked by the Conservative News Network. Since the posts and accompanying threads are indexed and archived daily, FR's history along with that of the nation is readily available. Otherwise, tinker, tailor, soldier are all to be found on the Forum -- a cornucopia of experience and knowledge -- who are joined by White House monitors, disenchanted Democrats, San Francisco "soccer moms with brains," discouraged feminists and the occasional liberal iconoclast. New players stumble onto the site usually via a link from Drudge, WorldNetDaily, Town Hall or other news site while still others are tipped to the political cyber-salon by a friend or relative. When "lurkers," who often prowl the website for months, finally emerge in discussion threads, their first comments almost always reflect the same relief, gratitude and simple awe at the human resources assembled common to most posters: "I love Free Republic!"; "I can't believe what I'm seeing, I thought I was the only person in the country concerned about this administration!"; and "Free Republic forever!"; are typical of first posts. The site's development has been fueled by the Clintons' political thuggery. En masse, freepers form one giant collective detective bent on cracking a devilishly complicated case. Relevant facts are assembled, questions asked and informed speculation engaged in daily, hour by hour. With an alert and articulate investigative team numbering in the thousands, the exercise makes for riveting entertainment. Colorful villains enliven the storyline; there's "Slick," of course, a/k/a "Bent" and "Clintoon," there's "Hitlery" a/k/a "Shrillery" and "Hildebeast," and there's "Whorealdo," "CarVILE," "Sid Bluminsky," "George Steppinalloverus" and other luminaries from the "Kneepad Democrats" branch of the DNC. But FR is not just conservative angst and sly mockery. The site was instrumental in the quick exposure of CNN's fraudulent report regarding the alleged use of nerve gas against U.S. deserters during the Vietnam War, in the overturning of Clinton's attempt to negate U.S. federalism with Executive Order 13083 (signed when he was in Birmingham, England) and in achieving a moratorium on funding for a national identification card and for re-examining the desirability of a national data bank of all citizens' private medical records. Emboldened by success, it was shortly after the CNN fraud was revealed that Free Republic evolved yet again; organized political protest was undertaken by members of the regional chapters which formed rapidly over the summer. Ever since Labor Day, Bill Clinton has had nearly every public appearance in the course of his nonstop fundraising dogged by determined freepers waving protest signs and shouting stinging chants ("He's late, he's late, he musta had a date!"). Consequently, Barbara Boxer, Carolyn "Mostly-Fraud" and other endangered Democrats have had to resort to playing hide and seek with freepers. Some freepers suspect their growing effectiveness tipped the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post to file suit several weeks ago against Jim Robinson and Free Republic for violation of their property's copyright based on freepers posting entire articles from their respective publications. FR's position is that the postings and discussion threads compare to neighbors mulling over the daily newspapers around a kitchen table and are therefore allowed under the fair use doctrine, which permits the nonprofit use of copyrighted material for purposes of public discussion. The courts must sort it out but if I were writing the script, I'd pursue Free Republic's defense on the "creation of something new" aspect of the fair use doctrine. The website is unlike any other venue in American life; the newspaper articles alone are just so much fishwrapping for tomorrow's garbage, but the archived material is the unique product of an informed community of engaged citizenry; the very purpose the founders intended free speech to serve. This week Free Republic is undergoing another evolutionary leap, an unintended consequence of intoxicated Teamsters having roughed up demonstrators earlier this month in Philadelphia. After viewing television footage of the incident, Jim Robinson determined he'd had enough. He would, he posted to the forum, travel to Washington while the weather was still warm enough for a lone man in a wheelchair to spend the day outside the White House holding aloft a protest sign. Within hours, several hundred people determined that Jim Robinson wouldn't be making that journey alone. Now the protesters number in the thousands and Free Republic's "March for Justice" has been moved on account of its growing size from Lafayette Park to the Ellipse and from there to the Washington Monument. On Saturday, literally thousands of average Americans -- people who look like your neighbors because they are your neighbors -- from across the country, many of whom never gave a thought to political protest before in their lives, will have descended on America's national home in order to participate in a six hour grassroots protest funded out-of-pocket. They will be standing with one man in support of just one idea; the idea of one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all. Eagles up, America! Anne Williamson, a WorldNetDaily contributor, has written for the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Spy magazine, Film Comment and Premiere. An expert on Soviet-Russian affairs, she is currently working on a book, "Contagion: How America Betrayed Russia," a chapter of which can be read online. -- ****************************************************************** E Pluribus Unum The Central Ohio Patriot Group P.O. Box 791 Eventline/Voicemail: (614) 823-8499 Grove City, OH 43123 Meetings: Monday Evenings, 7:30pm, Ryan's Steakhouse 3635 W. Dublin-Granville Rd. (just East of Sawmill Rd.) http://www.infinet.com/~eplurib eplurib(a)infinet.com ****************************************************************** **************************************************** To subscribe or unsubscribe, email: majordomo(a)majordomo.pobox.com with the message: (un)subscribe ignition-point email@address or (un)subscribe ignition-point-digest email@address **************************************************** www.telepath.com/believer ****************************************************

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IP: Internet Allows Lies to Spread Far and Wide
by Vladimir Z. Nuri 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: Richard Sampson <rjsa(a)sprintmail.com> Subject: IP: Internet Allows Lies to Spread Far and Wide Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 09:04:48 -0500 To: "ignition-point(a)majordomo.pobox.com" <ignition-point(a)majordomo.pobox.com> Internet Allows Lies to Spread Far and Wide Oct. 30 (Detroit Free Press/KRTBN)--When the telephone was introduced to the American home, party lines and gossip ruled the day, as two, three or half a dozen households shared one phone line. Imagine, though, linking thousands of gossips on a party line. That's how rumors called urban legends travel the Internet. In April, the Taubman Co., the Bloomfield Hills shopping center developer, was on the receiving end of an Internet whopper about a mysterious stalker at the Mall at Tuttle Crossing in Columbus, Ohio. The bad-guy-in-the-parking-lot story spread through Columbus, reaching about 200,000 people. Within months, the same story, which originated at least a decade earlier -- no one knows where -- had been applied to malls as far as San Francisco and Seattle. Counteracting the fear sparked by such rumors takes a new approach, and a new breed of consultants such as New York's Middleberg Interactive On-Line Communications. Taubman turned to Middleberg with a $10,000 retainer to stem the damage. Amy Jackson, a consultant with Middleberg, began working on Taubman's predicament in mid-April and kept on until mid-June. "When Taubman came to us, the process had begun," Jackson said. "While they had a superior PR staff, they had no experience in addressing an Internet hoax." The Taubman legend had the marks of a classic. "No one can identify where it's sourced from; it's national," Jackson said. "It's a very serious problem. There's absolutely no truth to it, but the Internet spreads information instantly and globally." Middleberg defines urban legends as false stories with multiple variations. A story which varies in the telling is also the first red flag to investigators that it probably isn't true. Johnny Scales, general manager of the Mall at Tuttle Crossing, said he read three versions of the story before crafting a response for the Internet. "In one version it was a security guard, in another it was a well-dressed man in a dark blue suit, and in the third it was a guy in a T-shirt," Scales said. Scales investigated the rumor and consulted with police before going to the news media to refute it. This particular urban legend was spread mainly by a network of business and professional women, its membership ranging from secretaries to executives. Many received the rumor, then hit a button and E-mailed the story to friends, relatives and colleagues, without questioning its origin or validity. "There was a woman in Columbus who had hundreds of names on her list," said Chris Tennyson, Taubman's senior vice president of corporate affairs. Defusing the rumors is far more difficult than spreading them, and laws about passing on urban legends over the Internet are vague. Larry Dubin, constitutional law professor at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law, said liability for making defamatory statements could extend to the Internet, but it's difficult to prove a rumor's source. "If someone merely repeats what they've heard as a means of providing needed information to someone else," they aren't liable, Dubin said. "The question is: Does communicating through the Internet, because you are disseminating information through large numbers of people, create a duty on the part of the communicator to check sources, like a journalist would?" Dubin said. For now, the answer is no. The law figures public people and institutions have access to the media to defend themselves, says Dawn Phillips-Hertz, general counsel of the Michigan Press Association. So businesses dogged by Internet rumors must use means other than the courts to dispel them. Taubman discovered what other companies, such as Neiman Marcus, have discovered -- that the Internet has an almost magical effect on the psychology of otherwise sensible people. Neiman Marcus was the subject of a false rumor, about a dozen years old, but new to the Internet. It said a woman went into Neiman Marcus and ordered a Mrs. Field's cookie. She asked for the recipe, was given it and later got a bill for $250. The story was sent all over the Internet with a cookie recipe. Neiman Marcus spokeswoman Molly Garr said when Neiman's gets E-mail on the cookie incident, it sends customers an explanatory letter, and includes the recipe. Jerry Herron, director of the American Studies program at Wayne State University, said stories like the shopping center stalker tale give people a reason to avoid malls -- especially if they feel uncomfortable there. "The very qualities that first made malls desirable -- open spaces, consistent temperatures and lighting -- now make them spooky," Herron said. "You feel creeped out at the mall, and you think, 'What's wrong with me?' You listen to the story and you think, 'There's nothing wrong with me at all. It's the mall, not me,' " Herron said. By Molly Brauer -0- Visit the four World Wide Web sites of the Detroit Free Press. Visit Auto Authority at http://www.auto.com, the Freep at http://www.freep.com, Jobspage at http://www.freep.com/jobspage and Yaks Corner for kids at http://www.yakscorner.com (c) 1998, Detroit Free Press. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. TCO, NMG, END!A19?DE-INTERNET News provided by COMTEX. [!ENVIRONMENT] [!WALL+STREET] [BUSINESS] [CORPORATE] [E-MAIL] [INTERNET] [KRT] [MEDIA] [MICHIGAN] [NEW+YORK] [NEWS] [NEWSGRID] [OHIO] [POLICE] [TRAVEL] [USA] [WOMEN] -- ----------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ----------------------- **************************************************** To subscribe or unsubscribe, email: majordomo(a)majordomo.pobox.com with the message: (un)subscribe ignition-point email@address or (un)subscribe ignition-point-digest email@address **************************************************** www.telepath.com/believer ****************************************************

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IP: Thousands to Demand Removal of Clinton at 'March for Justice' -Oct 31
by Vladimir Z. Nuri 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: believer(a)telepath.com Subject: IP: Thousands to Demand Removal of Clinton at 'March for Justice' -Oct 31 Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 10:43:26 -0600 To: believer(a)telepath.com Source: US Newswire http://www.usnewswire.com/topnews/Current_Releases/1029-136.txt Thousands to Attend 'March for Justice' Rally Oct. 31 U.S. Newswire 29 Oct 19:56 Thousands to Demand Removal of Clinton from Office at Oct. 31 'March for Justice' Rally To: Assignment Desk, Daybook Editor Contact: Connie Hair or Carla Michele, 202-965-2700 (Oct. 29-Nov. 1), or 202-256-5042 (on-site cellular) News Advisory: People from across the United States will travel to Washington, D. C., to exercise their Constitutional right of assembly to petition their elected representatives to remove President Clinton from office at a massive rally being held this Saturday, Oct. 31 on the Washington Mall. The event, which is being organized by Web site www.FreeRepublic.com, will bring together citizens -- both Democrats and Republicans -- from all walks of life who are concerned about the corruption of the Office of the Presidency by Bill Clinton. Speakers for the event include both people who have been thrust into the limelight by the White House scandals as well as a number of prominent national leaders. Heading the line-up will be Ambassador Alan Keyes and Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.). What: "March for Justice" rally on Washington Monument When: Saturday, Oct. 31, noon-6 p.m. Where: The Washington Monument Who: -- Ambassador Alan Keyes -- Rep. Bob Barr -- Jim Robinson, founder, www.FreeRepublic.com -- Larry Klayman -- Gary Aldrich -- Lucianne Goldberg -- Former Rep. Ben Jones -- Dr. Paul Fick -- Rev. Jesse Peterson -- LD Brown -- Thousands of concerned Americans from all walks of life. -0- /U.S. Newswire 202-347-2770/ 10/29 19:56 Copyright 1998, U.S. Newswire ----------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ----------------------- **************************************************** To subscribe or unsubscribe, email: majordomo(a)majordomo.pobox.com with the message: (un)subscribe ignition-point email@address or (un)subscribe ignition-point-digest email@address **************************************************** www.telepath.com/believer ****************************************************

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No Subject
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 testing... me -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPfreeware 6.0 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com> iQA/AwUBNjnTTXUkEFXvH2ZAEQLfaACfdpJivYj4Cz8BQWSBn+bcNjkfKTsAoIpF s7LLMoFoUJqld5+r/C+mJQly =LzNe -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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No Subject
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 From: Petro [SMTP:petro@playboy.com] Sent: Friday, October 30, 1998 12:07 PM To: cypherpunks(a)einstein.ssz.com Subject: Re: FW: rules of engagement (fwd) I am not sure, but is this an idea to put the 3 line RSA Perl implementation in the classified adds? (as near as I could gather trying to read ahead) If not, what is it? Yes. The reference was to the 3 line RSA Perl implementation in ads. Didn't seem to get as an enthusiastic response as back in late summer. me. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPfreeware 6.0 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com> iQA/AwUBNjnS1nUkEFXvH2ZAEQIYewCfbUfDHUF51IjAl1u2q1wC9JcWS7gAn325 V8c9VPuwEZmebGX2s9tJqkap =CD5B -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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New Crypto Application
by Guillotine 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Greetings fellow Cyphers... I'm creating a new _text_ cryptography program. The encryption algorithm, using a symmetrical is going to be as strong as legally allowed, and after copyrighting the program, I'm going to release the source code and explain everything about it (since it can be reverse engineered anyways). The reason I'm sending this e-mail to you is my request for more knowledge, and if you're like me, then you have an extreme thirst for knowledge! Any algorithm, key hashing, user interface, or other important suggestions you might have will help me immensely, and hey, maybe you'll get a free copy of this program when it comes out, but otherwise you will just have to wait until someone cracks the copyprotection because I'm going to make that extremely hard to do. I was going to call the program AlphaNumeric Encryption, but that says pretty much nothing... I might just call it something like Cipher Pad (or Cypher Pad if nobody cares that I use "cypher") , since it's only for text encryption. If you have a better idea for a name for this program, then please suggest it to me. Thanks, Guillotine

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Re: IP: FCC Proposes Location Tracking for Wireless Phones
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 01:03 AM 10/30/98 -0800, Vladimir Z. Nuri wrote: >(2) PUBLIC COMMENT SOUGHT - A CHANCE TO TELL THE FCC THAT CELL PHONE >TRACKING IS NOT ACCEPTABLE! > >CDT has established a special "Action" page to make it easy for citizens to >contact the FCC and file comments opposing the location tracking proposal: >http://www.cdt.org/action/filing.html Be sure to mention ECHELON to get it into the US public eye.

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Re: Random array (fwd)
by Jim Choate 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Forwarded message: > Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 08:53:20 -0800 > From: Jim Gillogly <jim(a)acm.org> > Subject: Re: Random array (fwd) > Jim Choate responded: > > If I understand the process. Each array would cycle through in parallel > > sorting 2 elements of each array. Once that was finished we'd then sort the > > arrays themselves according to some process. From your description it seems > > to imply that you're going to sort the 1st element descending at that point. > > This in effect mis-orders each array after every sort. > > > > This sort of system is an IFS and could lead to determinism (ie a cycle of > > sort patterns that repeat endlessly) or chaos (ie a pattern that doesn't > > repeat). It in and of itself doesn't guarantee any randomness merely a > > continously munged sort. > > I expressed myself badly. Steve Gibbons posted a message > to Coderpunks expressing more clearly what I had in mind: > Fill up the high bits of your N words with random numbers and > the low bits with an index from 0 to N-1. Sort the array, then > mask off the high bits. If the random numbers were unique, you > are left with a randomly shuffled array. Ah, ok I think I have it..... So we start out with N words (2 bytes): 0 1 2 ... n-2 n-1 n * * * * * * ^ 15...8 7...0 rng ind So the ordering of bits 8-15 moves the originaly ordered indexes to positions correlated to relative magnitude of the rng part. That certainly looks like it'd work. Thanks for the clarification. ____________________________________________________________________ To know what is right and not to do it is the worst cowardice. Confucius The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage(a)ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

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Texans Face Life For E-Mail Threats
by Anonymous 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Yahoo! News Texas Headlines Friday October 30 5:21 AM EDT Texans Face Life For E-Mail Threats - (BROWNSVILLE) -- A Brownsville jury has returned a split verdict in the trial of three alleged ``Republic of Texas'' members accused of making terrorist threats. Forty-three-year-old Jack Grebe (GREEB) and 72-year-old Johnie Wise were convicted for sending electronic e-mail to President Clinton and several other federal officials... warning they were ``targeted for revenge''. Sixty-three-year-old Oliver Emigh (EM-EE) was acquitted of all charges. The jury also found the trio NOT GUILTY of plotting to use modified cigarette lighters to fire cactus needles... tipped with a biological poison. Grebe and Wise will be sentenced in January and face a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

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