Kerry had been in a garage band...
What's so heinous about women in the military?! ... Been there, done that, got the DD214....
The Minutemen had muskets, musketballs, and powder in their homes. They also used the muskets to shoot moose and bear with...
I remember some of the re-enactors of Patriots' Day showing off their (unloaded) muskets explaining that an antique gun, or replica, that can take down a moose, is going to do even worse things to people, and that the things are kept unloaded and under very close supervision at home, and everywhere else. They're loaded only during e.g. musket shooting competitions.
[disclaimer--speaking for -myself- here, all below is personal opinions and commentary, and does not presume to speak for anyone but my own opinion]
Requirements for voting membership in NESFA include attending meetings in person--this effectively limits NESFA voting membership to people who either live in the area or who will go to a lot of time and effort to show up for NESFA meetings.
MCFI's membership includes people who live thousands of miles away from New England, and has since 1975.
When there are active bids going on from MCFI, the organization is more active than when there isn't a bid going on. A bid going on means that there is something that people are working together on planning and running--throwing seriois bid parties is not a trivial undertaking. It pulls in people, some because they like throwing parties and want to help out that way, some because they want to help plan a Worldcon, some because their friend are working on the bid and working on the bid means they get to spend time with their friends they otherwise would not be able to spend with them...
When there is an active Worldcon, there are people who get involved because they want to work on the worldcon and have experience and/or enthusiasm or whatever considered desirable to include them. It takes more people and more effort to put on a Worldcon than run a bid, it's more exciting to put on a Worldcon than running bidding parties usually, and involved more people and more excitement and time running a bid, that being in keep-alive-mode for a non-profit group that sometimes runs worldcons and continued to exist when not doing so and not participating on Other Groups' Worldcons [MCFI has run areas for other worldcons at other worldcons, particularly art shows].
The mode that MCFI works is in that after a Worldcon it gets quiet, and some of the members drop out--Life interferes with e.g. they may move elsewhere, they may gafiate, they may find some other fannish interest they put a higher priority on, they may have gotten tired of working on Worldcons or only are interested in being involved with Boston ones and putting on Boston ones, etc. Bidding for a Worldcon, the organization gets more active and more people want to be involved because it is running bid parties and needs people to organize and work on parties, generate and distribut flyers, maintain a dynamic website, etc., so more people do get involved and the MCFI membership increases.
Even more people are needed to manage planning and running a Worldcon, and that involves adding more people. And significant numbers of people who get responsible positions at Worldcons are from out of the locale the convention is in, so that increases the membership and particularly the out of town membership.
And once again, after the convention, things come to a lull, and people drop out.
NESFA, again, has a different model. Someone who isn't around, can't be a voting member, they don't meet the meeting attendance requirements. NESFA very much has localized foci, the NESFA Clubhouse has to be kept intact and the floor tiles replaced at time, doors and windows replaced, books moved around, there's Boskone every year and sorting through the stuff in the clubhouse and packing up books to be at the NESFA Sales Table, there's the Gestetner/whatever-the-replacement-name-product-name-is, there are computers, printers, the NESFA Library, NESFA Press books in various states of production, orders to fulfil for NESFA Press, meetings, Instant Message collations with collating and stapling and labeling--those activities involve people physically going to the same place at the same time and working on the same things, month after month for years. It's on-going, and there are one or two meetings a month plus collations and such, Boskone occurs every year, NESFA Press usually gets a table at Readercon and usually has one at the Worldcon, so for those it's pack up books to get hauoled to conventions.... Worldcons don't have the same continuity, and the Worldcon moves around every years, with independent committees and parent organizations.
MCFI formed and incorporated to bid for and run the worldcon Noreascon II. NESFA was formed as an SF club and to be an SF club--different purposes, different organizations, -some- of the same people. There has never been a complete overlap. Not everyone in NESFA wanted to be obligated to work on a Worldcon in Boston. Not everyone who was a volunteer to bid for and run a Worldcon, was interesting in the weeks to weeks NESFA activities. There are lots more SF fans around Boston than are in NESFA, or in MCFI. And there are members of MCFI who live outside the area, while almost all NESFA's voting members live within an hour and a half from the NESFA Clubhouse, with most of those rather less than an hour and a half away.
==============
Regarding Boston in 1998 bidding--originally MCFI was bidding for 1998, with of the people who were members at the time not completely thrilled, they thought it was too soon. When the another group came in with money to offer the Sheraton Hotel to hold a convention there when MCFI had been bidding to run a Worldcon, the "Leslie's Lemonade Stand" committee got formed, to see if it would be feasible to try to run a Worldcon without the Sheraton. Discussion and investigation generated the option of using a combination of hotels spread around Boston's Back Bay, including the Park Plaza which Arisia has been in many times, and running buses around. There was substantial discussion of what would be involved in running such as convention and what it would feel like, and ultimately the vote went against MCFI running that sort of worldcon in Boston involving shuttling people around and having them spread over blocks at different hotels with programming and events spread around. The vote went against it, and MCFI started looking into a bid for Boston in 2001, and the membership voted to shift the bid from 1998 to 2001.
However, the decision to drop bidding for 1998 and for for 2001 was unattactive to a minority of MCFI members. They were were intrigued by the ideas of Leslie's Lemonade stand had come up with and wanted to bid for 1998 based on those. They started up BCEC and BCEC's Boston in 1998 bid.
The issue there was the the Worldcon was under the three year East/West/Central zone rotation rule at the time. If BCEC won for 1998, that would kill the MCFI bid for 2001--because barring things like the site selection being decided by live vote at the Business Meeting at the Convention, the worldcon couldn't be in the same city when that zone had its next worldcon three years later. MCFI being MCFI and not BCEC and its members wanting a worldcon in Boston that would "compact" and not spread out all over the Back Bay, MCFI's members were against the BCEC Bostin in 1998 bid.
[Boston in 2001 changed -latter- to Orlando in 2001 whatn inquiries to the Sheraton-Boston and nearby hotels for 2001 elicited "We would be glad to have you at room rates of $180 a day in 1993 dollars [I don't remembr the year exactly]. That was rather out of the range considered fan-feasible for most fans, scratch Boston in 2001 as feasible. Meanwhile, Orlando facilities came asking if there were people who wanted to run another Worldcon in Orlando. They had the facilities to run a Worldcon using two hotels, the Swan and the Dolphin I think they were, for a 2001 Worldcon with extremely attractive hotel rates. MCFI decided to bid for 2001 for Orlando. The Philadelphia in 2001 bid won, and when weeks after the 1998 convention MCFI members started thinking about 2004, both the Sheraton and the Marriott offerred rates a lot more attractive than the rates proposed for 2001 had been [economic changes can make =huge- diferences]].
Those without a sense of history... the term "Boston marriage" was around long long ago for two adult women not biologically related who shared living quarters year after year after year as a domestic couple. Their private bedroom life was considered mostly their own business.
Meanwhile, I don't see what the Big Deal is about formalizing relationships that have existed for -decades- of same-gender couples. It's really going To Destroy the Cultural Fabric of the United States of America to provide legal social recognition and responsibility and authority to the members of a same-gender couple who've been together for decades, as opposed to Britney Spears or JLO or Senn Penn or Eddie Fischer and their Spouse of the Day?!
I surmise that Garden in the Woods in Framingham, Massachusetts, headquarters of The New England Wild Flower Society, one of if not the earliest organization of its type in the country dedicated to native flora, was the work of a homosexual couple, who lived and gardened there together for decades until-death-did-they-part and when both had passed on, the land was willed to the New England Wild Flower Society as its permanent home. They were obviously [major sarcasm] menaces to Society and the American Way of life, each spring thousands of people show up for the annual plant sale there clogging the roads in the area, and thousands of people visit the place, especially school children, every year, seeing native plants and taking classes in native plants. Leslie Turek, who chaired Noreascon II, is one of the volunteers there. Yup, major menace to society the two men whose life work included reclaiming land denuded of life by the railroad industry into a native flora preserve were....
" And then there was the fine Nixon-era bumper-sticker, Nobody wants a crooked Dick."
I don't remember that one. The bumper stickers around here said, "Massachusetts, the One and Only," and, my all-time favorite bumper sticker,
"Let Teddy take Dicky for a ride."
Months ago my memory dredged up a line from the Nixon Era "Don't change Dicks in the middle of a screw."
Then there was all that witchhunting of Clinton and the claims of his desecrating the Oval Office yaddayaddayadda... perhaps with Cheney's comment "I felt better afterwards," and his utter unrepentance and -pride- in being crudely insulting and offensive (oh, what erudition, not!), what was going on was Cheney's version of public orgasm.... After all, what's -lots- of hypocrisy to Bully Boy Bush and his Buddies? I'd taken to among other sobriquets referring to him as "Hubris Boy" but it seems applicable to Cheney, too.
What's Rush Limbaugh but a derisive rich huypocritical junkie "-money talks, Limbaugh walks-" whose words on Family Values flunk a mirror test of "how many times have you been married, divorced, and remarried Mr Limbaugh? What's this sanctity of marriage of one man and one woman ordure you're popping off having been married to how many still living women, Mr Limbaugh?"
No -teacher- ever saw me being assaulted by other students, the attacks all took place when teachers weren't in the room/in the hallway/etc. That didn't mean there wasn't abuse, it meant that the teachers didn't see it, and didn't really I suspect particularly -care- if it occurred or not, what they didn't see....
=================
There are reports that the pictures showing abuse, were taken between 2 and 4 AM local, when others weren't around to see it, and when those involved in committing the abuse were sure that they wouldn't be caught.
I would expect that it's not going on -now-, if nothing else, because of all the attention that's been directed at it since the public notification hit. There's the deterrent factor that the public and the Upper Management is -watching- at present.
Lois Fundis ::: (view all by) ::: May 09, 2004, 01:21 AM wrote:
"Well, here's a LJ post from a Marine who's currently stationed at Abu Ghraib -- he's someone from fandom too, a member of the Bujold mailing list, which is why he's one of my LJ "friends".
"Anyway, he just posted a few hours ago, or an hour from now (thanks to time zones), so this cutoff hadn't taken effect yet."
Er. The fellow is a very staunch Bush supporter and supporter of many of Bush's policies and attitudes. I gave up trying to argue directly with him on the sff.net military newsgroup because even when I attempted to reply POLITELY to him directly disputing his points, he'd often launch gratuitous personal attack attacks at me, he does not seem to comprehend that my thought processes and analysis processes being different from his do not constitute me being depraved, or stupid, or insane, or inane, etc. He usually completely misreads what I write, and sometimes not even metaphorically misinterpre-misreads it.
I believe the fellow is dedicated, loyal, and well-meaning and hardworking, but nonetheless I view a lot of what he believes in is -wrong- and that his defense of a pack of slime and that he's got a very narrow mind... and that it's counterproductive for me to attempt to engage him directly, because I don't appreiciate emotional abuse for not being on the same wavelengths as he's on.
===============
Regarding digital cameras -- Napoleon had artists with him in his expeditions, whose job was to create documentation --to draw a permanent graphical record. Digital cameras are merely more convenient and faster to use and less effort for the person creating the archive, to generate individual graphics documents with.
But any time someone has seen something, and can -communicate- what they've seen, the "information" can be turned into graphical images. It happens all the time with crimes, when illustrators working for police departments draw pictures of people wanted for rape, murder, armed robbery, based on descriptions and feedback from witnesses. Recreations of crimes and traffic accidents, illustration gets used--states and insurance companies have forms that have pictures on them, for the people involved in car accidents to pick a picture and add details, to show where the cars collided and in what position on what shape of road/intersection.
Banning digital cameras makes it less convenient, but doesn't prevent -images-....
Elric wrote,
"I've never had a good opinion of him. Or of his handlers. Even given that, I thought they'd started going for a new low by having him say, in the same speech, how wonderful it was that Iraq was free of Saddam Hussein and his death squads and torture chambers, and how awful it was that Americans were torturing prisoners.
"Is the entire administration that stupid?"
It's arrogance and hubris, that's why I've taken to calling it "Hubris Boy" as one of a set of sobriquets.
["Mongo's not a who, Mongo's a What." To a degree Bush II reminds me of Mongo--riding into town on a big hunk of hooved beef as a bully unafraid of anyone else because it's meaner than anyone else and is bigger [read, has more influential buddies with tons of money to buy political influence]]
What got me was all the hoohah over what looks like such bad fantasy alleged SF. Like, yeah, riiiiiggghhhttt, giant Walls of Water are going to hit the US coasts from global warming. Snort, snort, snort.
There hasn't been a film called "Tsunami," has there? Now that, -could- happen, but not over both coasts Incoming.
It just utterly boggles me that the Bushites think that people a/r/e a/s s/t/u/p/i/d a/s t/h/e/y a/r/e think that the events in piece of bad fantasy like The Day after Tomorrow could happen that way and that the film is -credible-...
"No, global warming is NOT going to sent tsunamis around the planet, a many story wall of water is not going to come smash into New York City. Wall of water waves HAVE hit coastlines, from tsuanmis-- Krakatoa blowing up set one off. Tsunamis have hit Japan. There was probably a huge one where Thera blew up. There wasn't one when Mt St Helen erupted because it's inland on dry land and didn';t propagate an earthquake underwater to generate a hydaulic shock wave to create a giant waves heading out to crash onto shores hundreds of miles away."
On the other hand, if it makes people question the Bushites and decide that the Bushites are louts requiring excision from the US Government, that apparently appalling piece of garbage film, shall have served a noble purposel
I used to say unkind things when I heard Clinton say "noocular," too.
I think that "I could care less" actually is code for "I could care less about this, but I don't" which translates as "this isn't worthy of any/anymore of my attention than I'm paying to it, or want to pay to it."
For that matter, terms like "worthless" and "careless" are to an extent oxymorons, to what "less" is supposed to mean.
"less" isn't "null," or "lacking." "Careless" gets used to mean "lacking in care" as opposed to a value judgment of less care versus more care. "Worthless" gets used to mean "has no value" as opposed to having less value. "Meritless" denotes having no merit, not have less merit. "Depraved" denoted absence or lack of a quality, not "less". "less" is a comparative term...
Meanwhile, every time I head a broadcaster say "one year anniversary" or "five year anniversary" I want to scream at them. I do yell everytime I hear Bush say "noocular."
[Bush wart discussion below.... hmm, Bushwarting as opposed to Bushwhacking?]
I've got -another- sobriquet for Bush, to go along with the collect of Chief Thief, Wargasm, and Bully Boy Bush -- it's Hubris Boy. [Some other people refer to his as "the Resident"... which for me personally is much too dignified and subject to being heard as a term with more more letter that starts with a P -- my geek engineer/science background is showing there, in wanting clarity and unambiguity when being deprecatory, of not having anyone think that I'm using an actual complimentary and non-ironic title. That's my particular idiosyncratic reaction of why I don't use "Resident," and not applicable to anyone else.]
It's hubris because because expecting that a reasonable impartial journalist given free reign to interview and write as opposed to one's paid spinmeister and religious fanatics buddies is going to write a book that won't show warts--or more to the point, believing one is RIGHT and that any who question or don't agree are minions of Evil, IS hubris....
I wonder what else is going to come out, there been Clarke's book, the one about O'Neil, Molly Given's, Al Franken's book...? Oh, right, isn't there a book going to come out from the former ambassador whose wife was outed, violating US law, as an intelligence agent? And just where is -that- investigation, at the moment, what White House flunky leaked the information outing -that- national secret?!
Hmmm, so far the on-going investigations include:
1. 9/11 -- but they don't seem to be much probing questions like why was the INS so completely ineffectual, why did the FBI branch managers -stomp- on the agents who wanted to further investigate Suspicious Saudi and other Middle Eastern Nationals with dubious bases for being in the USA [not here for education, not here for work, not here to be in a more socially liberal society and have a life in a more open and pluralistic society, not here to avoid getting into bloodfeuds at home--that's one of the reasons members of the royal family get shipped over here, to get them something else to do with the lives besides lethal succession intriguings] and taking flight training for big commercial passenger and cargo planes, without any prior aviation background/interest/experience.
2. Who outed the ambassador's wife as a spy? Was it a White House flunky, and who?
3. Why did Bush squash all Congresional attempts to get FBI records about mobster James "Whitey" Bulger regarding FBI coddling and cossetting and giving Bulger total immunity to every attempt by Boston local and Massachusetts state cops to collar him for murder, racketeering, gun-running, drug crimes, etc. etc. etc.? What or who has Bush been protecting by doing this?
3. Who did Cheney have making up US energy policy, why is Cheney spiting the spirit of the law and the idea of open and honest government by refusing to allow even the names of the people involved be known? It's not as if they're spies and their contacts are going to -die- for it...
4. Bush and the Saudi connection, regarding compromise of top secret NOFORM military information and who knows what else, to a representative of a foreign government, which foreign government has -not- disavowed providing funding and support to terrororist organizations (Hamas, at the least, and I think also Hezbollah, and others). The level of hypocrisy in the Bush regime is breathtaking, to say the least, regarding "terrorism" and financial and moral support for it. Meanwhile, US Cabinet members get informed about deals with foreign nationals, -afterwards-, and probably not in any detail. I thought the Department of State was supposed to handle foreign relations?!
Regarding the oil price rigging that Woodward's alleging, that to me looks like secret deals with foreign governments to harm the US general public -- the rising fuel and gas prices are not something that would hurt the Rich Folks spending $50,000 on SUVs that terrorize everyone else on the road, but something to make the rest of the population even more malleable and looking for Leadership and someone to look Heroic and reduce the misery and pain.
Bush doesn's care that higher gas prices means everything -else- goes up--the price of anythign that has to be transported, such as food, clothing, consumer electronics, the price of anything manufactured in the USA to pay for electricity -- but wait, Bush and his buddies own lots of stocks in companies that have assiduously been moving all their manufacturing and software development and administration and data entry and
customer support centers OVERSEAS to China and India and Romania and Bulgaria and Russia and Malysia and the Phillipines and South Korea, so the fact that electricy costs are going up due to rising fuel costs, doesn't cut the Bush Buddies Benevolent Coprospherity Sphere's profits, it makes them -higher- because Bush is Oil Patch, and raise the prices enough and Bush and his buddies with their oil and gas industry holdings in the USA, get lots of money from production and sale of oil and gas from US sources (the USA has the second largest oil reserved in the world, but it's mostly shale oil, which is more expensive to turn into fuel).
Regarding timing, November is STILL more than half a year away. It's too early for the gas prices to drop to make Bush look Heroic, it would have to be a lot closer to the election, after gas prices had gone even -higher-, such as in September or better still, October or even November -- have the ordinary citizens -hurting- during the summer travel season, but have the prices drop at a time when people aren't driving as much, aren't thinking of how much they were being hurt during the -summer-, and have them be Grateful for the falling prices.
Note the state of the economy -- a friend told me that I ought to post my resume on dice.com; I did, and in less that 48 hours have had two inquiries. The job market seems to have hit the bottom, and companies which were not filling vacancies last year and which had unfilled slots and management which refused to open up requisitions for filling them, and had cut way back on personnel despite good profits, seem to be in the situation where if they don't now start hiring people, they're going to be losing the business they have -- not not gaining new business, but losing existing business and sales -- for lack of people to do the work.
The job increases are illusory as regards actual workforce employmnt -- the population continues growing, and the number of people entering or trying to enter the workforce keeps getting larger. The number of people who got jobs, compared to the number of people who lost jobs who didn't want to, who retired, and who are new entrants into the labor force, is -negative-. That is, if there are 100,000 new people applying for work each month, 20,000 retiring, 10,000 laid off, 2 million unemployed and wanting work but not having it, and 35,000 people hired, while that's a net increase of 5000 jobs, it's actually a deficit of 95,000 jobs needed just to deal with the new entrants to the labor force -- and does nothing to address getting work for the people who are continuing to be without jobs. It also doesn't address the issue of the quality of the jobs available and the rate of pay. One of my coworkers who was a Unix release engineer, found work -- restocking shelves at Kohls, meaning that his income is something like a quarter, or perhaps even less than a fifth, of what it had been before the tech crash.
A friend had been a trainer in the IT department at one of the companies which still I think does manufacturing in the USA, and sells equipment worldwide. The company is in high tech, and got clobbered three years ago. It's got to be doing well again now, though, because it makes equipment involved in making semiductors and there's a shortage now of semiconductor production capacity, since none of the companies were doing much in the way of production capacity the past three or four years, and weren't even doing the acquisition necessary to prevent loss of capacity (that is, the useful lifetime of seminconductor production lines is measure in months, it's not only a matter of advancing technology, which is part of it, but also, much of the equipment wears out, there are high temperature, highly corrosive reagants involved, high speed, high volume, and high purity, and the slightest contamination or leakage and there instanteously goes the production line, and several millions dollars' worth of product value lost.] The lead times in the industry for ordering parts is stretching out into months and only going to worse.... and that's likely to start causing prices to go up in consumer electronics and computers and such, if the demand keeps growing and the production capacity isn't there. And getting new facilities on line can take up to three to four years (for an entirely new plant, line refurbishing is months, provided there aren't backups of orders for the companies which make the wafer steppers, test equipment, wave soldering systems, lithography systems, etc. Given that the companies which make that stuff had cut their staffs and shutdown capacity that they had had four years ago, that's not a good bet. It's going to take them months to train new employees and expand their production and production lines....]
Oh, yeah, I got sidetracked there. The company "outsourced" its IT deparment. The "good job at good wages" she had has probably gone off to India or Singapore or some such (she did training worldwide, including getting sent to Malaysia on occasion) permanently. The company she worked for is probably looking at big fat profits headed its ways, but it's not doing her any good.... she's doing temp work for a retailer, without I presume benefits, as a contract laborer, for rather less than half that what her salary alone had been, and again, it's a temp work, which doesn't last. She doesn't want to go back into high tech stuff, but that's not the issue, the issue is the loss of "good jobs at good wages" and their replacement with low paying low benefits if any retail work of uncertain duration....
One of my pet irritations of the current times - -the use of "nuance" as a verb or verbal. I don't seen what is so subtle etc. about Bush's posturings, they make drunken bludgeonings look subtle and carefully deliberated and considered. For that matter, "nuance" has little to to with applying lots of analysis--it's orthogonal. Somone can come up with subtlety in an instant, or taken month to plan and plot and apply the subtle/fine detail touches.
I particularly get irked when the Bush regimes say "nuanced," to me they're using it as an obfuscatory, misleading, and wildly inapplicable and inappropriate piece of subterfuge. The word doesn't denote or connote to me whatever they're trying to mislead people to believe in their fake erudition.
Bush plays up being a reverse snob, despite his Ivy League matriculation. That's an impressive piece of hyprocisy, taking an anti-eastern Establishment sneering stance, when he's Gentleman's C-pedigreed smeared all over him. Or to be nastier, it's the third rater sneering at those who aren't lacking his intellectual depravities and his brandishing his intellectual depravities ("I don't read newspapers, my subordinates read them for me. I don't watch news on TV, my subordinates watch it for me." He said essentially those words/concepts as something to be proud of. "I'm a paraliterate and proud of it, I'm insulated from what the average American sees and hears and has an interest in seeing and hearing! I have flunkeys to serve as insulation!") and hypocritical reverse snobbery as evidence of his morally and ethically superior judgment and values to the rest of the population.
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