Mother of all Web link lists:
The link below will take you to the C-SPAN web resources page. It is the most extensive I have seen regarding public interest/political sites.
C-SPAN.ORG
Saturday, April 30, 2005
Democrat hubris:
The article linked below makes a good case. I wonder how long the link will be valid? That is, how long do web sites keep this stuff?
The 'We're Smart, You're Dumb' Principle
The article linked below makes a good case. I wonder how long the link will be valid? That is, how long do web sites keep this stuff?
The 'We're Smart, You're Dumb' Principle
Thursday, April 28, 2005
Monday, April 25, 2005
Muslims Murdering for Allah:
It is awful how the insurgents are killing Iraqis. This is Muslim murdering Muslim. If you include the nine year Iraq-Iran war and the Iraq invasion of Kuwait the slaughter of Muslims by Muslims in recent times is huge. Bin Laden pretends he is concerned about Americans hurting Muslims while his hands are covered with Muslim blood. The radical Imans and bloodthirsty insurgents slaughter their fellow Muslims like they are cattle and then piously praise Allah. It is disgusting and primitive.
It is awful how the insurgents are killing Iraqis. This is Muslim murdering Muslim. If you include the nine year Iraq-Iran war and the Iraq invasion of Kuwait the slaughter of Muslims by Muslims in recent times is huge. Bin Laden pretends he is concerned about Americans hurting Muslims while his hands are covered with Muslim blood. The radical Imans and bloodthirsty insurgents slaughter their fellow Muslims like they are cattle and then piously praise Allah. It is disgusting and primitive.
Why Poverty?
According to the World Almanac 2005 – which now lists illegitimate birth rates under the politically correct heading "Nonmarital Childbearing" – nearly 70 percent of black children are born outside of wedlock. With Latinos, the rate is almost 45 percent, whites nearly 30 percent, and Asians 15 percent. Overall, about 34 percent of America's children today are born outside of wedlock.
Bearing and raising children has a big economic impact on any normal family of two married people. Out-of-wedlock births to a single mom are devastating to the chance of escaping poverty. We are not talking about mature women with good jobs deciding to have a child that they can support and raise. We are talking about mostly teenage girls who are clueless about work and responsibility and welfare queens having multiple children. This is the largest single factor in family poverty statistics. In the black community, especially, leaders we see or read in the media seem to be in total denial about this.
According to the World Almanac 2005 – which now lists illegitimate birth rates under the politically correct heading "Nonmarital Childbearing" – nearly 70 percent of black children are born outside of wedlock. With Latinos, the rate is almost 45 percent, whites nearly 30 percent, and Asians 15 percent. Overall, about 34 percent of America's children today are born outside of wedlock.
Bearing and raising children has a big economic impact on any normal family of two married people. Out-of-wedlock births to a single mom are devastating to the chance of escaping poverty. We are not talking about mature women with good jobs deciding to have a child that they can support and raise. We are talking about mostly teenage girls who are clueless about work and responsibility and welfare queens having multiple children. This is the largest single factor in family poverty statistics. In the black community, especially, leaders we see or read in the media seem to be in total denial about this.
Sunday, April 24, 2005
Satellite stuff
(Click to enlarge pic)When you put up a satellite dish on your house in Indiana you’re required to point it to the South West. The reason for this is television satellites must be in an orbit over the equator and they are roughly centered on North America. Therefore we need to point our dish south and west. The only way an orbit can be synchronized with the rotation of the earth so that the satellite appears to be stationary overhead is with the equatorial orbit at an altitude of about 23,000mi. There is no other orbit which can achieve this apparently stationary antenna effect.
Once a satellite is put into orbit it must be maintained in that orbit by the use of small gas jets on board. Orbit’s can decay over time and the satellite must be steered back into its proper position and attitude (pointed correctly). Interestingly, running out of gas for the jets is frequently the cause of death for the satellite. This can occur perhaps after eight or ten years. Note that the space shuttle can only reach low earth orbit and therefore can not reach Geostationary satellites to repair them.
The global positioning satellite (GPS) system requires three satellites be in view to an earth observer in order to calculate location. Therefore many GPS satellites are used in many orbits. Spy satellites like to fly low to take detailed pictures and frequently use an elliptical orbit so that they are quite low on their nearest approach. But when they are out on the ellipse they are useless and you must wait for them to swing back. By using control jets orbits can be modified so that the satellite can take a different track. If your orbit is north-south (polar orbit) the earth will rotate underneath the satellite and different areas of the earth will be in view on every pass.
Discredited theories.
Freud’s theories have now been mostly discredited by new knowledge about the effects of chemicals on the brain, genetics and culture. Freud made up names such as ego, superb ego and id to create a theory of behavior. This is not science, this is fantasy given undeserved credibility by impressive terms that sound scientific. Marxs, Engels and others created a phony scientific aura around communism by making up and defining terms like proletariat, bourgeois, etc. We need to remember these theories were put forth in a more primitive era (both men were born in the early 1800’s). It has always been more difficult to be truly scientific in the “soft” sciences like Society and Economics. Many people feel qualified to expound their theories in these areas simply because, after all, they are a member of society and part of the economy.
Fanatical and ruthless men such as Lenin used Communist theories to justify revolution. I saw a biography on the History channel on Lenin. An anecdote...He loved listening to classical music but denied himself that pleasure in order to focus on his ‘work’. He also wrote furious telegrams to his field commanders asking how many people they had executed and demanding that they increase the pace of killing. The Britannica encyclopedia once had a dissertation by him on propaganda. He noted that there needs to be a obvious, crude type aimed at the lower (presumably ignorant) classes and there is need for a more sophisticated type aimed at the educated. A very cynical guy and a bloodthirsty fanatic responsible for countless deaths.
Even today there are still many regimes propped up by these theories. Of course, they also use relentless propaganda to give a false credibility to their fantasies. Advances in Economic science and the success of free enterprise have discredited Communism for most observers but nevertheless the appeal is still strong for many. Lest we think of this an academic argument consider “The Black Book of Communism”. This book claims Communism has caused 100 million deaths.
The following is from the Amazon.com website book description:
Amazon.com: Books: The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
When it was first published in France in 1997, Le livre noir du Communisme touched off a storm of controversy that continues to rage today. Even some of his contributors shied away from chief editor Stéphane Courtois's conclusion that Communism, in all its many forms, was morally no better than Nazism; the two totalitarian systems, Courtois argued, were far better at killing than at governing, as the world learned to its sorrow.
Communism did kill, Courtois and his fellow historians demonstrate, with ruthless efficiency: 25 million in Russia during the Bolshevik and Stalinist eras, perhaps 65 million in China under the eyes of Mao Zedong, 2 million in Cambodia, millions more Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America--an astonishingly high toll of victims. This freely expressed penchant for homicide, Courtois maintains, was no accident, but an integral trait of a philosophy, and a practical politics, that promised to erase class distinctions by erasing classes and the living humans that populated them. Courtois and his contributors document Communism's crimes in numbing detail, moving from country to country, revolution to revolution. The figures they offer will likely provoke argument, if not among cliometricians then among the ideologically inclined. So, too, will Courtois's suggestion that those who hold Lenin, Trotsky, and Ho Chi Minh in anything other than contempt are dupes, witting or not, of a murderous school of thought--one that, while in retreat around the world, still has many adherents. A thought-provoking work of history and social criticism, The Black Book of Communism fully merits the broadest possible readership and discussion. --Gregory McNamee
From Publishers Weekly:
In France, this damning reckoning of communism's worldwide legacy was a bestseller that sparked passionate arguments among intellectuals of the Left. Essentially a body count of communism's victims in the 20th century, the book draws heavily from recently opened Soviet archives. The verdict: communism was responsible for between 85 million and 100 million deaths in the century. In France, both sales and controversy were fueled, as Martin Malia notes in the foreword, by editor Courtois's specific comparison of communism's "class genocide" with Nazism's "race genocide." Courtois, the director of research at the prestigious Centre Research National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris and editor of the journal Communisme, along with the other distinguished French and European contributors, delivers a fact-based, mostly Russia-centered wallop that will be hard to refute: town burnings, mass deportations, property seizures, family separations, mass murders, planned faminesAall chillingly documented from conception to implementation. The book is divided into five sections. The first and largest takes readers from the "Paradoxes of the October Revolution" through "Apogee and Crisis in the Gulag System" to "The Exit from Stalinism." Seeing the U.S.S.R. as "the cradle of all modern Communism," the book's other four sections document the horrors of the Iron Curtain countries, Soviet-backed agitation in Asia and the Americas, and the Third World's often violent embrace of the system. A conclusion "Why?" by Courtois, points to a bureaucratic, "purely abstract vision of death, massacre and human catastrophe" rooted in Lenin's compulsion to effect ideals by any means necessary. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Freud’s theories have now been mostly discredited by new knowledge about the effects of chemicals on the brain, genetics and culture. Freud made up names such as ego, superb ego and id to create a theory of behavior. This is not science, this is fantasy given undeserved credibility by impressive terms that sound scientific. Marxs, Engels and others created a phony scientific aura around communism by making up and defining terms like proletariat, bourgeois, etc. We need to remember these theories were put forth in a more primitive era (both men were born in the early 1800’s). It has always been more difficult to be truly scientific in the “soft” sciences like Society and Economics. Many people feel qualified to expound their theories in these areas simply because, after all, they are a member of society and part of the economy.
Fanatical and ruthless men such as Lenin used Communist theories to justify revolution. I saw a biography on the History channel on Lenin. An anecdote...He loved listening to classical music but denied himself that pleasure in order to focus on his ‘work’. He also wrote furious telegrams to his field commanders asking how many people they had executed and demanding that they increase the pace of killing. The Britannica encyclopedia once had a dissertation by him on propaganda. He noted that there needs to be a obvious, crude type aimed at the lower (presumably ignorant) classes and there is need for a more sophisticated type aimed at the educated. A very cynical guy and a bloodthirsty fanatic responsible for countless deaths.
Even today there are still many regimes propped up by these theories. Of course, they also use relentless propaganda to give a false credibility to their fantasies. Advances in Economic science and the success of free enterprise have discredited Communism for most observers but nevertheless the appeal is still strong for many. Lest we think of this an academic argument consider “The Black Book of Communism”. This book claims Communism has caused 100 million deaths.
The following is from the Amazon.com website book description:
Amazon.com: Books: The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
When it was first published in France in 1997, Le livre noir du Communisme touched off a storm of controversy that continues to rage today. Even some of his contributors shied away from chief editor Stéphane Courtois's conclusion that Communism, in all its many forms, was morally no better than Nazism; the two totalitarian systems, Courtois argued, were far better at killing than at governing, as the world learned to its sorrow.
Communism did kill, Courtois and his fellow historians demonstrate, with ruthless efficiency: 25 million in Russia during the Bolshevik and Stalinist eras, perhaps 65 million in China under the eyes of Mao Zedong, 2 million in Cambodia, millions more Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America--an astonishingly high toll of victims. This freely expressed penchant for homicide, Courtois maintains, was no accident, but an integral trait of a philosophy, and a practical politics, that promised to erase class distinctions by erasing classes and the living humans that populated them. Courtois and his contributors document Communism's crimes in numbing detail, moving from country to country, revolution to revolution. The figures they offer will likely provoke argument, if not among cliometricians then among the ideologically inclined. So, too, will Courtois's suggestion that those who hold Lenin, Trotsky, and Ho Chi Minh in anything other than contempt are dupes, witting or not, of a murderous school of thought--one that, while in retreat around the world, still has many adherents. A thought-provoking work of history and social criticism, The Black Book of Communism fully merits the broadest possible readership and discussion. --Gregory McNamee
From Publishers Weekly:
In France, this damning reckoning of communism's worldwide legacy was a bestseller that sparked passionate arguments among intellectuals of the Left. Essentially a body count of communism's victims in the 20th century, the book draws heavily from recently opened Soviet archives. The verdict: communism was responsible for between 85 million and 100 million deaths in the century. In France, both sales and controversy were fueled, as Martin Malia notes in the foreword, by editor Courtois's specific comparison of communism's "class genocide" with Nazism's "race genocide." Courtois, the director of research at the prestigious Centre Research National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris and editor of the journal Communisme, along with the other distinguished French and European contributors, delivers a fact-based, mostly Russia-centered wallop that will be hard to refute: town burnings, mass deportations, property seizures, family separations, mass murders, planned faminesAall chillingly documented from conception to implementation. The book is divided into five sections. The first and largest takes readers from the "Paradoxes of the October Revolution" through "Apogee and Crisis in the Gulag System" to "The Exit from Stalinism." Seeing the U.S.S.R. as "the cradle of all modern Communism," the book's other four sections document the horrors of the Iron Curtain countries, Soviet-backed agitation in Asia and the Americas, and the Third World's often violent embrace of the system. A conclusion "Why?" by Courtois, points to a bureaucratic, "purely abstract vision of death, massacre and human catastrophe" rooted in Lenin's compulsion to effect ideals by any means necessary. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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