HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Tue, 1 Sep 1992 14:01:18 EDT
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Briefer rantings

I thank Renato Barrahona for providing useful feedback, which is always
appreciated, believe it or not, for purposes of product development. I can
always count on someone jumping through the fire-escape window to land a
glancing blow on behalf of academic pablum, musty cobwebby thinking, sound
professionalism which is whatever sound professionals do in one another's
company (viz, the current thread on ANTHRO-L collectively boasting of the
prodigious drinking done by anthropologists at anthropology conventions and
how they are to outdo themselves this year), and quotidian frivolity sustaining
the increasingly dubious assumption that the stupidities of the present will
continue on into the indefinite future differing only in detail.

Someone who does this is of course motivated by exactly the same thing as I am,
fame and glory and popular acclaim and the love of women.

My excuse is that we are in the midst of one of the great historic failures of
social science. What makes one of the great histoiric failures of social
science easy to let pass is that it is not yet in the shameful past where we
are forced to contemplate the possibility that had we recognized what was
going on as is the job of social scientists to do as their public trust, and
then served the public by alerting it to horrible possibilities immanent in the
social-economic-political-cultural situation, we might have prevented the
worst.

We are, that is, you are, they are not paying me for this, covering ourselves
with the same kind of shame that lay to the discredit of our precursors in the
1930s. When I accost the Europeans at this University (1) they have no doubt
that there is Bigtime Crisis in this country which is scary to them if not
necessarily to the people of the US.

It is you, Renato Barrahona, YES, YOU, who brought this thing up, I'd given up
on this place on account of all that Grits, so you'd better have good reason
why we should not look at the true dimensions of the mess. As opposed to what
*you* did, which was to say, "Lookit those silly Republicans, hee hee." Some
people are more childish than I am, I swear.

Daniel A. Foss

1. Scarce due to the ill-fame of Stony Brook, thanks to Mario Cuomo neglect,
see USA Today for today, nationally ranked for "prison-like dormitories" and
No. 2 for "boring teachers." Mario, you Clintonlover, go emulate your hero St.
Thomas More, get your head chopped off.
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Date:         Sat, 29 Aug 1992 16:05:35 EDT
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU>
Subject:      Briefer rantings

Agnes,

Well, as the first step on my Spiritual Path toward transcendence of male
northamericanism, whereat I was a total flop anyhow so good riddance, I am
not, guru's orders, allowed to write more than you. It seems that men in the
US talk twice as much as women, complain women talk too much, and interrupt
them all the time.

Guru is a macroeconomist from New Delhi. Usually you have to go to India as all
the gurus in private practice are booked up; but as I said, where you find
Chinese on this island you will also find Indians as a minority group. It's the
disciple's job to seek out the guru. "I believe you are the smartest person in
the building." "You lie, I am the most beautiful woman in this building. You
must learn to experience me as pure cognitivity."

Step two is, I have to get here even earlier than I would have to if I were
working for a living every day weekends and legal holidays inclusive to
overcome physical infirmity and male pride; guru would otherwise erase message
on A(191) before 8. If there's no message in two years, I should make the
appointment on this card to check on my purification.

Daniel A. Foss
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Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Wed, 2 Sep 1992 16:22:00 EDT
From:         DGPAZ@CLEMSON.BITNET
Subject:      Re: U.S Military Intervention

On Wed, 2 Sep 1992 13:08:18 EDT mgarber@DHVX20.CSUDH.EDU said:
> wouldn't the invasion of lower Canada be attributable to
> the British?

Why would the British invade their own colony? We, the
USA, did it.

Denis Paz
dgpaz@clemson.bitnet
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Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Thu, 27 Aug 1992 15:44:26 -0400
From:         ICJME@ASUACAD.BITNET
Subject:      Online Archives, etc.

 *** Reply to note of 08/27/92 12:12
 Greetings and Salutations
 McGill School of Computing runs a database, called archie, that keeps a list
 of "anonymous" ftp sites. These sites allow you to log on using the username
 of "anonymous" and with a password of your user id, e.g. icjme@asuacad.edu. To
 get to archie, issue the command "telnet 132.206.2.3" and wait for the login
 prompt. When it shows on the screen, type "archie". For your first time, use
 the help facility for list and prog. List will give you a list of all or some
 of the ftp sites, while prog will give you a list of some or all of the
 programs/files available at the various sites. To find out exactly how to
 telnet and ftp from your site, contact your system administrators/tion, or
 find someone who is literate about this stuff.
   Good luck,

 |---------------|        To desire the end is to desire the
 |Jim Emmons     |        means; if you are not prepared to do
 |<icjme@asuacad>|        what is necessary to achieve it,
 |---------------|        you never wanted it at all.
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Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Wed, 26 Aug 1992 08:00:22 CDT
From:         Don Mabry <djm1@RA.MSSTATE.EDU>
Subject:      RE: ftp archives
Comments: To: HISTORY@UBVM.cc.buffalo.edu

	Haines Brown raises valuable issues concerning FTP archives
here (and at Kansas).
	I do serve as a gatekeeper. That has to be done not only
to keep junk out, thus perserving disk space, but also to
avoid legal violations.
	One service this archive can perform is to make available
copies of papers that may be presented to a professional meeting
but which may not be published or may be published in a form not
readily accessible to others. Such papers can be valuable to
researchers and other serious students of history.
	Initially, I did give people the opportunity to store
short biographical information (including area of interest and
e-mail address) about themselves. Because of events here last
academic year, I was unable to continue. My goal is to start
that process again.
	One of the Vietnam War discussion list's logfiles are
stored here because there is no disk space available at the
node of the list. (Lydia, I haven't received new ones for some
months!).
	If someone has something he/she would like to make
available to the international community, contact me.

Don Mabry <djm1@ra.msstate.edu>
Interim Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences,
Professor of History
Mississippi State University
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Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Fri, 28 Aug 1992 20:15:22 CDT
From:         U17801@UICVM.BITNET
Subject:      Re: Rantings of the 'new' religious right

On Fri, 28 Aug 1992 19:59:14 EDT Lenny said:
>Hot Damn!!!  DAF sent a one-screen message!
>
>Praise be to God (whom I do not believe in, but thank him anyway).
>
>Lenny

Why are you -- and we -- thankful? Because it was *only* a one-screen msg? Are
they usually longer? More or less coherent? Being a novice helps to ask the dum
b questions --rhetorical ones of course! No answers necessary.

Renato
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Original_To:  JNET%"history@rutvm1"
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Thu, 3 Sep 1992 19:55:00 PDT
From:         ANTHRO@TRIUMFRG.BITNET
Subject:      PS to the previous post about JFK

Also, does not the fact that so much of the information surrounding JFK's
assasination was sealed up amount to a tacit admission that something funny
*was* going on, but involving characters of such power or position that to
throw them to the jaws of the American legal system would create so much
damage to the American infrastructure that it was thought expedient to
let the bastards die and let God sort them out.

What have been the rationalizations for sealing the files and withholding
the 16mm film?

Dave
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Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Wed, 2 Sep 1992 17:04:18 EDT
From:         VH2@NIHCU.BITNET
Subject:      Historians' drinking and other health habits

Aside from cost considerations, have historians lowered
their intake of alcohol because of health warnings over
the last 10 years?  In general, do historians react
to prescriptive health messages (exercise, drink less,
don't smoke, stay out of the sun, etc.) any differently
than nonhistorians do, given that many health prescriptions
have changed over time?  In the 1920s, for example, sunshine
was prescribed as a great good.  It prevented rickets in
children's bones, and the more one could get, the better.
Today, sunshine is often viewed as a carcinogen.  Does
historical perspective inform personal decisions along
these lines?

Victoria A. Harden
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X-VMS-To: IN%"HISTORY%RUTVM1.BitNet@pucc.PRINCETON.EDU"
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Wed, 26 Aug 1992 21:16:00 CST
From:         JCFITZHARRIS@STTHOMAS.EDU
Subject: Re: the value of money
Comments: To: HISTORY%RUTVM1.BitNet@pucc.PRINCETON.EDU

On 26 Aug 92 Don Mabry said:
>        Pasker asks a very good question when he asks how to determine the
>value of the dollar over time.
>        One possible approach is to find a standard unit of measure. For
>example, the daily wage of a worker can often be discovered for different
>time periods and for different societies. One can try to get at the
>question of how long one had to work in order to buy a certain [standard]
>article. Through extrapolation one can then approximate value.

Pasker's question leads, as Diamond, Koester, Paz, et. al., note, to
considerable confusion.  Lodging, bread, labor effort all vary in
composition over time.  The "unit of measure" is not standard.  Even silver
or gold has potential problems as a standard.  Don Mabry's suggestion is
sound, but he qualifies his suggestions carefully.

We need to minimize the ambiguities inherent in the exchange problem
Don notes - time worked to buy a "certain [standard] article" as revealed
by the daily wage relative to the price of the good.  The price ratio is
a problem.    So too is labor (what skill, quality are we using?  Does
the laborer's age or gender matter?)  Lodging and bread are composites.

The standardized unit of measure (a physical commodity) needs to be very
basic.  We also need to limit the necessity of indexing the series so
that we either avoid or minimize the difficulties of the "index number
problem (using the early years as the base overstates the second half of
the series, and the end years understates the first half, while the middle
understates the early years and overstates the end years).

Instead of lodgings or labor, wheat (threshed) can be used.  We have a decent
(still not really good) idea of the changing units (quintals, bushels, etc.)
Other basic agricultural commodities could be used, although fruits and
easily injured products have to be reduced to a standard quality.  Wheat
is sufficiently uniform in quality and grown widely enough in time and
space that it gives a certain (false?) sense of security in the analysis.
Since labor is used to produce it, and labor is sometimes paid in wheat,
and other crops are comparable to wheat in yields, or labor to produce,
or in price, it appears basic enough.  However, since it is subject to scarcity
(drought, insects, etc.) and to oversupply as well, its exchange value
fluctuates widely over time.  Fortunately, we have relatively good ideas of
the prices in gold and,or silver, and have some ideas of the alloy compo-
sition and so on.

Ultimately (betraying my agricultural focus) I come back to wheat as a
reasonable "standard unit of measure."  Flaws, bugs (polite tonight),
and all, wheat is fairly uniform, basic, ubiquitous, and known.  We
could do (and often do) worse.

Joe Fitzharris
History, Univ. of St. Thomas
 St Paul, MN 55105
 (612) 647-5667
 JCFitzharris@StThomas.edu
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Date:         Fri, 4 Sep 1992 14:58:53 EDT
From:         Ken Koester <MAINT2@ERS.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Private filibustering
              3 Sep 1992 14:53:52 EDT from <DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.ED U>

On Thu, 3 Sep 1992 14:53:52 EDT Daniel A. Foss said:
>The distinction between private filibustering and official policy, under
>conditions of "plausible deniability," cui bono, etc, which prevail, is
>menaingful if and only if the state which stood to benefit by the adventure,
>the slavocrats with respect to Nicaragua in 1855, the US with Hawaii, 1893,
>not merely disavows it if it succeeds but actively intervenes to restore the
>status quo ante with indemnification of the victim state.
>
Not necessarily.  The state might have its hands forced by popular sentiment
after/during a filibustering expedition.
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Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Mon, 31 Aug 1992 08:26:31 PDT
From:         David Baird <DBAIRD@PEPVAX.BITNET>
Subject: Re: Online Archives, etc.

Jim, thanks for the helpful information.  Regards, David Baird.
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Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Mon, 31 Aug 1992 13:58:00 EDT
From:         DGPAZ@CLEMSON.BITNET
Subject:      English geographers

Can anyone supply me, please, with the e-mail addresses
of Paul Coones, School of Geography, and Hertford College, Oxford
         and/or
John Patten, Fellow of Hertford College and (in 1986) Minister of
   State for Housing, Urban Affairs, and Construction.

Thanks,

Denis Paz
dgpaz@clemson.bitnet
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Date:         Thu, 3 Sep 1992 10:50:59 EST
From:         "Sidney W. Kitchel" <kitchel@OCTOPUS.DPSI.COM>
Subject: Re: Beyond the drinking age
Comments: To: HISTORY%RUTVM1.BITNET@pucc.princeton.edu
              92 9:49 am

DGPAZ%CLEMSON.BITNET@pucc.princeton.edu writes:
|->
|-> On Thu, 3 Sep 1992 16:01:58 +1000 Marion Diamond
|-> <med@LINGUA.CLTR.UQ.OZ.AU> said:
|->
|-> > Have you looked around at your colleagues lately?  Are these the young,
|-> > convivial, confident men of the early 1970s, with a secure career ahead of
|-> > them, and youthful livers and libidoes?
|-> > Alas, twenty years on, those happy imbibers of yesteryear are middle-aged,
|-> > worried about their health, their sex lives and their chances of
 promotion,
|-> > and some of them (hush, whisper who dares) are even women.
 ords,
|->
|-> Has the demographic profile of the profession changed (In the USA)?
|-> As compared with Oz, the UK, &c.?
|-> Is there a "lost generation" of people who took their Ph.D.s in the
|-> mid-1970s to mid-1980s, but who could not get jobs? So the Pazian

	Guilty as charged, Your Honor. I went to several AHR national
meetings in the mid-1970s. There were a few "hidden" job searches,
i.e. if your advisor knew the people looking you could go to a hotel
room and interview. The public interview process was pretty sparse. I
even talked to the CIA just to have an interview. It was even harder
because I was a historian of science. History Departments are not too
bright, at least not as bright as Philosophy Depts. (Maybe that is not
news?) Philosophy Depts. know that they need philosophers of science.
History folk have heard of science and technology. They may even admit
that science and technology have played some part in history. But heaven
forbid the idea of having a historian of science or technology in most
History Depts.
	So.....I changed back to being a computer geek. Went to the
national ACM meeting and discovered 200+ tables full of recruiters,
both academic and business. When I got home the phone was ringing with
offers. Since then I've had an academic job, got tenure, had the nerve
and good ethics to quit the tenured job, and been off to industry to
do REAL stuff. I now have a supercomputer as my personal computer.
							--Sid
--
Sidney W. Kitchel  	    kitchel@cs.indiana.edu, kitchel@dpsi.com
Data Parallel Systems, Inc.  ============||  DPSI  ||===============
4617 E. Morningside Drive	                      (812) 334-8100
Bloomington, Indiana,  47408  USA		FAX:  (812) 334-8121
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Date:         Thu, 3 Sep 1992 10:04:00 EDT
From:         DGPAZ@CLEMSON.BITNET
Subject:      Re: U.S Military Intervention

On Thu, 3 Sep 1992 07:47:42 EDT Ken Koester <MAINT2@ERS.BITNET> said:
> Don't you really want to make a distinction between private filibustering and
> official action?

A good point. Sometimes, however, private filibustering
serves the interests of the state, or is permitted to
be carried on with state connaivance. Perhaps the
Honourable East India Company is the most spectacular
example of private filibustering, with Rajah Brooke
running a close second.

Still, the nice thing about filibustering is that if it
works, the state gets the lolly; if it fails, the state
has plausible deniability.

Denis Paz
dgpaz@clemson.bitnet
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Via:         UK.AC.ULCC.CLUS1; 28 AUG 92 10:42:45 BST
X-Mailer:    ELM [version 2.3 PL8]
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Date:         Fri, 28 Aug 1992 10:39:45 BST
From:         Christopher Currie <c.currie@CLUS1.ULCC.AC.UK>
Subject: Re: the value of money

> is 4s.3d, the phone call is 2s.4d, and the newspaepr is 9 bob!

8 bob, marion :-)


Christopher
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Date:         Wed, 26 Aug 1992 08:13:00 EDT
From:         DGPAZ@CLEMSON.BITNET
Subject:      Re: musical borrowings

On Tue, 25 Aug 1992 14:58:19 EDT Ken Koester <MAINT2@ERS.BITNET> said:

> an artist who borrows hasn't integrated the material into his/her own
> oeuvre--it's still returnable--; an artist who steals has--no deposit, no
> return.

I don't understand the distinction that you are making, or the
analogy that you are drawing.
I would have thought that it is of greater artistic integrity to
integrate the material into one's work, to make it one's own,
internalize it, and begin to create with it, than not to
integrate the material into one's own work--which last I take to
mean to play for pay.
I do not understand the analogy between a drinks bottle and a
piece of music. If I don't return the bottle, but keep it on
my shelf, then no one else can use that bottle. But if I "steal"
a musical passage, I do not thereby prevent others from using
the same passage.

Denis Paz
dgpaz@clemson.bitnet
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Date:         Thu, 27 Aug 1992 20:41:08 CDT
From:         "Renato Barahona" <U17801@UICVM.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Rantings from the 'new' religious right
              27 Aug 1992 20:32:32 EDT from <DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU>

On Thu, 27 Aug 1992 20:32:32 EDT Daniel A. Foss said:
>   Will Renato Barahona *please* recognize that we are no longer dealing here
>with some fringe nut groups but with the mass organizational base of one of
>the two great US political parties? One which, moreover, claims the active
>support of the incumbent President: Said Pat Buchanan, "He's with us in the
>religious war, he's with us in the cultural war." Or, this means that they are
>holding George Bush prisoner.

>   I, for one, intend to treat the Republicans with the respect they deserve.
>That is, when they start coming through my bedroom windown, as they are
>threatening to do, they will find me hiding under the bed if not under the
>floorboards.
>
>   I warned you all this was going to happen, I told you so, I told you so.
>
>Daniel A. Foss
Daniel,
       Please calm down first. First, my posting said nothing about fringe grou
ps or the like. Secnd, I tend to agree with your premise that these people -- h
owever we describe or label them -- are part of the organizational base (albeit
 a minoritary one) of the GOP. Third, they don't have to come thru your window
-- because they have done so in many instances thru state-run organizations, an
d might increasingly do so if the Supreme Court tilts evermore rightward. Four,
 hiding under a bed will do little good -- active political involvement and pro
test *before* the fact would be far more effective. And finally, being new to t
his list, I must have missed your warnings.  On balance, however, we probably w
ould tend to agree more than disagree, I suspect.

Renato
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Date:         Fri, 4 Sep 1992 07:59:46 EDT
From:         Ken Koester <MAINT2@ERS.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: PS to the previous post about JFK

On Thu, 3 Sep 1992 19:55:00 PDT <ANTHRO@TRIUMFRG> said:
>Also, does not the fact that so much of the information surrounding JFK's
>assasination was sealed up amount to a tacit admission that something funny
>*was* going on, but involving characters of such power or position that to
>throw them to the jaws of the American legal system would create so much
>damage to the American infrastructure that it was thought expedient to
>let the bastards die and let God sort them out.
>
No.  A clever conspiracy would have managed to release some, but not all,
information, just to allay this sort of suspicion.

>What have been the rationalizations for sealing the files and withholding
>the 16mm film?
>
>Dave

I don't know what you mean by "witholding the 16mm film"; stills from Zapruder
have been reprinted ad nausem over the last 29 years.  IMHO, the film is too
grainy for anyone not a professional to make much out of it.
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Date:         Mon, 31 Aug 1992 10:55:32 CDT
From:         "Renato Barahona" <U17801@UICVM.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Rantings of the 'new' religious right

On Sat, 29 Aug 1992 15:29:00 EDT <DGPAZ@CLEMSON> said:
>On Fri, 28 Aug 1992 21:44:55 CDT U17801@UICVM.BITNET said:
>>       We should all be thankful for the PF2/discard keys on our terminals.
>It
>
>My PF2 key splits the screen.
>
>Denis Paz
>dgpaz@clemson.bitnet

Denis: What a bummer! Foss in split screen! Pretty scary. And I guess one can b
e extremely brilliant and incoherent, but for all my money not in this case. Wh
at we're dealing with here defies words (and logic).

Renato
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Date:         Thu, 3 Sep 1992 12:28:37 EDT
From:         Ken Koester <MAINT2@ERS.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: U.S Military Intervention

On Thu, 3 Sep 1992 10:04:00 EDT <DGPAZ@CLEMSON> said:
>On Thu, 3 Sep 1992 07:47:42 EDT Ken Koester <MAINT2@ERS.BITNET> said:
>> Don't you really want to make a distinction between private filibustering and
>> official action?
>
>A good point. Sometimes, however, private filibustering
>serves the interests of the state, or is permitted to
>be carried on with state connaivance.  {deletions}

>Still, the nice thing about filibustering is that if it
>works, the state gets the lolly; if it fails, the state
>has plausible deniability.
>
>Denis Paz
>dgpaz@clemson.bitnet

Or you get the odd & embarassing situation shown in the intervention megapost
of the government intervening in another country to corral one its private
citizen's filibustering.
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