From: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org (fegmaniax-digest) To: fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Subject: fegmaniax-digest V9 #297 Reply-To: fegmaniax@smoe.org Sender: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk fegmaniax-digest Saturday, October 21 2000 Volume 09 : Number 297 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: politicz [Terrence Marks ] Re: second joe's pub setlist [HwyCDRrev@aol.com] RE: Heifer Nixon ["Todd K. Tabor" ] internet origins ["jbranscombe@compuserve.com" ] RE: Heifer Nixon ["Bachman, Michael" ] Re: internet origins [drop the holupki ] Nixon Mojo [The Great Quail ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 22:06:51 -0400 (EDT) From: Terrence Marks Subject: Re: politicz On Sat, 21 Oct 2000, James Dignan wrote: > > wow! interesting stuff - If you went by NZ TV news, you'd be sure there > were only two parties running. And even for the more enlightened of us > (surfing to various news sources as often as possible), well... I'd only > heard of Buchanan and Nader's campaigns other than the big two this time, > although a lot of the other names mentioned I knew as historical entities > (Reform, for instance). Well, apart from the Green and Reform parties, the other minor parties aren't important. They're a few thousand people without important resources. Most Americans, even politically aware ones, don't know that they exist. Terrence Marks Unlike Minerva (a comic strip) http://www.unlikeminerva.com HCF (another comic strip) http://www.mpog.com/hcf normal@grove.ufl.edu ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 20:36:30 EDT From: HwyCDRrev@aol.com Subject: Re: second joe's pub setlist any idea about set length . . when the show's start (in relation to scheduled start time) etc . .. 2nd boston show added!!! ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 19:31:17 -0400 From: "Todd K. Tabor" Subject: RE: Heifer Nixon What history did you glean this info from? -----Original Message----- From: owner-fegmaniax@smoe.org [mailto:owner-fegmaniax@smoe.org] On Behalf Of Bachman, Michael Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 5:38 PM To: 'Christopher Gross'; Squidmaniax! Subject: RE: Heifer Nixon Nixon also did a dirty trick in 1968 to get elected. He had his agent, the Chinese widow of the WW2 Flying Tigers comander Clare Chennault, secretly negotiating with the South Vietnamese to stall and not make progess durring the 1968 Paris Peace talks. That way, the possible peaceful settlement would be delayed and LBJ and Hubert Humphrey would not have a peace agreement before the 1968 election. Had the agreement been signed or progess had been made, Nixon would never have been elected in 1968. The talks collapsed, Nixon got elected, thousands more died, and South Vietnam folded in 1975. LBJ found about Nixon's dirty trick later and could have spilled the beans but didn't do so. Nixon is pretty much scum in my book. A 1/2 step above U.S. Grant as our worse President ever. Michael ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 22:49:42 -0400 From: "jbranscombe@compuserve.com" Subject: internet origins I'm sure this has been gone into a million times, but can someone outline for me how Bill Gates ripped off "computer things" and how he benefitted from public money in the process. If that * is* the case. Off-list if it has been done several quintillion times before. I pretty much won the argument in the pub without recourse to proper info, but there was one belligerent bastard who insisted on crap like*facts* - you know the sort... I'm relying on you, whichever way you vote. Several of you would have loved this article in The Guardian recently lauding the televised presidential candidates' debate. One of our best political commentators, Hugo Young, thought that the concept represented the height of the democratic process. Proves how some of the most intelligent can still be taken in... jmbc. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 18:24:34 +1300 From: grutness@surf4nix.com (James Dignan) Subject: Re: politicz >On Sat, 21 Oct 2000, James Dignan wrote: > >> >> wow! interesting stuff - If you went by NZ TV news, you'd be sure there >> were only two parties running. And even for the more enlightened of us >> (surfing to various news sources as often as possible), well... I'd only >> heard of Buchanan and Nader's campaigns other than the big two this time, >> although a lot of the other names mentioned I knew as historical entities >> (Reform, for instance). > >Well, apart from the Green and Reform parties, the other minor parties >aren't important. They're a few thousand people without important >resources. Most Americans, even politically aware ones, don't know that >they exist. doesn't surprise me - the same sort of thing goes on here - we've got about half a dozen parties that everyone knows about, but there are dozens of tiny ones from the fringes that most people have never even heard of. James James Dignan, Dunedin, New Zealand. =-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-= -=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.- .-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=- You talk to me as if from a distance -.-=-.- And I reply with impressions chosen from another time =-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-. (Brian Eno - "By this River") ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 18:32:27 +1300 From: grutness@surf4nix.com (James Dignan) Subject: Ecologically Ruud Pianos >>> George Micheal bought Lennon's piano for 2 million. >>> It was the piano Lennon used to compose Imagine. >> >> imagine no possessions...i wonder if you can. >> >> imagine no george michael...noooooo problem! it should be noted that he plans to donate it to the Beatles Museum in Liverpool. >``Mankind cannot afford to keep drawing so heavily on the world's >natural resources,'' said Professor Ruud Lubbers, the former Dutch >prime minister Professor Ruud Lubbers. Now THAT'S a great band name... can't say that the article surprised me too much, mind you. James James Dignan, Dunedin, New Zealand. =-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-= -=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.- .-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=- You talk to me as if from a distance -.-=-.- And I reply with impressions chosen from another time =-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-. (Brian Eno - "By this River") ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 03:06:33 -0700 (PDT) From: Capuchin Subject: Re: internet origins Well, more than you care and much that you know: A brief history of personal microcomputers. On Fri, 20 Oct 2000, jbranscombe@compuserve.com wrote: > I'm sure this has been gone into a million times, but can someone outline > for me how Bill Gates ripped off "computer things" and how he benefitted > from public money in the process. If that * is* the case. Benefit from public money... that's a tough one to justify. That all came later. A quick note: I learned much of what's in the first bit from Robert X. Cringley and his great work "Triumph of the Nerds". But in the beginning... Microsoft made a BASIC compiler that was all the rage. They distributed an operating system called XENIX developed and marketed jointly with SCO under license from Bell Labs (being a genuine Unix derivitive). Seattle Computer Products spent two man-months developing QDOS v0.10 (Quick and Dirty Operating System) and then added edlin (the line editor) intending to change it within the next six months (before the 1.0 release of QDOS). QDOS was intended to be a Digital Research CP/M clone... a bit like the way Linux was intended to be a Unix workalike, only commercial and all that. IBM started to work on project Acorn. This was their idea to combat Apple in the Personal Computer space, as the droids say. They figured shipping with MS BASIC was a good idea... at least, that's what Microsoft had convinced them. But they needed an operating system. They were ready to go with a little company in the bay area, but when the grey suits of IBM showed up at the left coast home, the software guy's hippie wife turned them away. This is the billionaire that almost was. I think he's in real estate now. A few months later, when QDOS was made v0.3 and the name changed to 86-DOS and SCP granted a limited license to Microsoft to use for development purposes and distribution with their MSBASIC programming package. Microsoft then takes SCP's 86-DOS and shows it to IBM saying it's theirs and they have every right to give non-exclusive license to IBM to distribute it. This is quite a lie. But IBM agrees and Microsoft quickly buys 86-DOS from SCP and makes a deal with IBM on the side without Seattle Computer Product's knowledge. And if you think that's shitty, they then gave QDOS v0.3 to IBM as IBM-PC DOS v1.0... virtually unaltered. They then marketed the same product as MS-DOS on the side. IBM was using the 16 bit Intel 8086 processor because it was abundant and cheap (for the day) and NOT the Z80, which everyone else was using. The IBM PC was introduced with a 4.77 Mhz 8086 Intel processor, 64Kb RAM, and 40Kb ROM (which you loaded with DOS on boot and programs as you needed them) for US$3000. The funny thing is that Intel developed the 32 bit 437 processor right about this time and intended to bring the world up to speed, but because of Microsoft and IBM, they didn't get around to it... ever. Actually, here's an interesting note: The Intel 4004 processor was a 4-bit machine that used 8-bit instructions. Seattle Computer Products used this when developing QDOS. So QDOS had 8-bit instructions just like CP/M. But IBM shipped it on the 16-bit 8088. Now, latter versions of DOS supported the 16 bit instructions via a kind of passive hardware interface and a 16-bit command shell. Much later, Windows 95 (and previously, win32s) came along and they used a similar procedure to run 32-bit instructions through to the hardware without really rewriting the original DOS code too much. And so we have this joke: Windows 95 is a 32-bit Gui In a 16-bit shell On an 8-bit operating system Written for a 4-bit processor By a 2-bit software company Without 1-bit of sense. But I digress. Anywho... Microsoft kinda ripped off Seattle Computer Products and got this sweet deal with IBM that guaranteed sales of PC-DOS for quite a bit of time into the future. All the while, they were still number one for developer tools like their kick-ass BASIC compiler. As we all know, VisiCalc came along and revolutionized computing. It was the PC killer app. Read this: It has some neat pictures that show that today's Microsoft Excel owes absolutely everything to VisiCalc. Oh, and the guys who wrote it made pretty much nothing from it. Compaq comes along. They decide that since IBM was dumb enough to get non-exclusive distribution contracts for most of the stuff in the IBM-PC, they could go ahead and get similar contracts and make a PC CLONE. The only thing IBM owned was the BIOS. BIOS is the sort of thingie in the computer that lets all the hardware know about each other and initializes it and tells it how to start itself. It's essentially a piece of software hardcoded into a chip (or flashed onto a programmable ROM, these days). Compaq did a bit of reverse-engineering and sort of re-invented the PC BIOS and built their own computer that worked EXACTLY like the IBM-PC... and since Microsoft was selling MS-DOS right off the shelf as an identical product to IBM PC-DOS, Compaq had the same machine IBM had. Compaq decided that their market would be portable computers. Oh, man. They were the size of suitcases and as heavy as suitcases (if you're a nudist and a very fast reader and can't bear spending time away from your exercise weights). Anyway, that's not important. What's important is that Microsoft was the only supplier of the operating system for these very popular (and cheap now that the market had some competition that couldn't compete on merits of product quality alone, being nearly identical) little microcomputers. And if you wanted other folks' software to run on an IBM-PC out of the box, it had to run on Microsoft's DOS. Now comes the begining of the worst bit. Microsoft made the BASIC and C compiler that everybody used. So Microsoft started getting snooty. They started putting a provision in their compiler licenses that essentially restricted you from using them to build applications for anything other than DOS and started implementing non-standard features to the language so the code you wrote for the MS compiler wouldn't compile without some serious tweaking on the non-MS compiler. So if you wanted to develop for more platforms than just DOS on an x86 processor (there were 286s by this time... the 286 was intended to be an intermediary between the 8086 and the 437, but we ended up with the 80386, 80486, Pentium, etc. instead. I'm sure there's a great episode of Sliders in there somewhere), you had to buy another compiler and rewrite huge chunks of your code. After a while, folks just stopped doing it. And we ended up in this vicious cycle: More applications are available for the IBM-PC (and compatibles), more people buy IBM-PCs. More people have IBM-PCs, more applications are developed for IBM-PCs. And Microsoft is making money on every PC and compatible purchased as well as nearly every software developer because of the licenses on the compilers. Enter Windows. Microsoft comes out with Windows to sort of pretend they can multitask. Multitasking was never built into DOS. There's no real job scheduler and it's just a nightmare. But they kind of fake it up. It works well enough to pretend you're doing two things at once and manage multiple programs. Time goes on and Windows comes up to v3.0. As v3.0 is being developed, IBM decides that they want their own operating system partly because they want something that's THEIRS to cut down on the clone market and partly because DOS is a turd and they know it. They work with Microsoft to develop an operating system that is multitasking, 16-bit from the ground up, and stable. OS/2 v1.0 was a joint effort of Microsoft and IBM. OS/2 v1.1 includes a graphical interface that's a bit of a departure from Windows v2.0 (available by then, I think). It sold poorly due to small application base (no surprise) and it's DOS compatability was weak. OS/2 v2.0 had a fancy object oriented interface, multimedia, full DOS support and even Windows software support by using a subset of Windows itself in the distribution. Windows 3.1 is shipped with this on the cover of the manual: "New Program Manager interface eases transition to OS/2!" OS/2 for Windows is shipped as a version for Windows owners to "upgrade" to OS/2 (really a different operating system altogether). But Microsoft is really only helping out due to its contractual obligations to IBM. They know that this will kill their business model because it will kill the clone wars (as IBM has EXCLUSIVE rights to OS/2). Microsoft starts bickering with IBM over "the future direction of OS/2" and pulls out of the deal. Microsoft quickly releases Windows 3.11 just before OS/2 Warp 3.0. Windows 3.11 includes some quirks and things that make Windows applications not run so well under OS/2 anymore. OS/2 now has a mature GUI, full TCP/IP and peer to peer network support, a wide range of hardware support, and a fairly nice filesystem. It is doomed. Microsoft has been producing Word (for DOS) since 1983 and Excel since 1987. Because of deals Microsoft has been giving manufacturers of PC clones for business applications (since the company is already more or less required to deal with Microsoft for the operating system), Word and Excel are pre-installed on business machines and becoming fairly standard. Developers soon find that programs compiled with Microsoft compilers perform better on the Microsoft operating system (imagine that! It has long been suspected and once or twice proved for particular instances that Microsoft specifically alters its operating system to recognize and, in a sense, give priority to applications built with Microsoft compilers and even more priority to applications sold by Microsoft itself.), so developers use them. As Windows 95 comes, it becomes obvious that Microsoft is keeping secrets from its developers. Office 95 has things in it that no other Windows program has (buttons that pop up as you mouse-over them, images behind the toolbars, shaded window title bars). It is soon found that the calls to do those things are built into the operating system, but undocumented even for the developers that pay Microsoft for specifications. Microsoft is clearly keeping secrets to make its products more appealing even though the ability to do those things is not in the product they are selling. Windows 95 also installs MSn whether you tell it to or not. MSn uses Microsoft networking technology as a gateway to the internet and other services. A few weeks after the Windows 95 launch, a Microsoft representative is asked in Byte magazine why Windows 95 doesn't install TCP/IP (the basic internet protocol suite) when it installs networking components. The 'Softie (I forget which one) says that they estimate fewer than 10% of the users of Windows 95 will use TCP/IP. To me, this is right up there with "Nobody will ever need more than 640Kb of RAM" (I forget if it was a Microsoft guy or an IBM guy who said that) and "No one will ever want a computer in their home" (which was spoken by the president of DEC in the late 1970s). Within two months, Bill Gates goes on television saying that Microsoft is "embraces the internet". Microsoft, since then, has used an approach to technology they call "embrace and extend". This means that when a new standard is adopted across many platforms and by many vendors, Microsoft builds in support for that technology and then proceeds to add new features to it and poorly implement the standard features and build all interacting software to require those new features. The result is Microsoft stuff works ok with other Microsoft stuff, but doesn't interact well with stuff from other vendors. So the vendors build in support for the Microsoft stuff and break their support for everything else. (One effect we can see is the insufferable mass of browser specific tags and Shockwave/Flash that the web has become since Microsoft entered the arena.) Then there are the halloween documents I think. Anyway, Microsoft has a history (and something of an old policy) for hiring "the best and brightest" right out of universities. This means they've got a whole company full of people that have never worked anywhere else and don't know that what they're doing is wrong and often illegal. Oh well. I'm sure that's not even what you wanted to know. > Off-list if it has been done several quintillion times before. Oh, you know I don't believe in off-list posts, sir! > I pretty much won the argument in the pub without recourse to proper > info, but there was one belligerent bastard who insisted on crap > like*facts* - you know the sort... Just curious, which way did you argue in the pub? > I'm relying on you, whichever way you vote. Several of you would have loved > this article in The Guardian recently lauding the televised presidential > candidates' debate. One of our best political commentators, Hugo Young, > thought that the concept represented the height of the democratic process. > Proves how some of the most intelligent can still be taken in... > > jmbc. > - -- _______________________________________________ Capuchin capuchin@bitmine.net Jeme A Brelin _______________________________________________ [cc] counter-copyright http://www.openlaw.org ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 09:12:09 -0400 From: "Bachman, Michael" Subject: RE: Heifer Nixon These facts are now just coming out. I saw a program on The History Channel that had interviews with the widow of Clare Chennault where she admitted the whole thing!! Check out Viv's e-mail with an article from The Nation that also covers this subject. Nixon was scum before he squirmed into the White House and degraded the office to such an extent that he makes Clinton look like a piker. Plus he has the deaths of thousands to atone for, if you believe in justice in the hearafter. Michael - -----Original Message----- From: Todd K. Tabor [mailto:tktabor@bellsouth.net] Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 7:31 PM To: Bachman, Michael; 'Christopher Gross'; Squidmaniax! Subject: RE: Heifer Nixon What history did you glean this info from? -----Original Message----- From: owner-fegmaniax@smoe.org [mailto:owner-fegmaniax@smoe.org] On Behalf Of Bachman, Michael Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 5:38 PM To: 'Christopher Gross'; Squidmaniax! Subject: RE: Heifer Nixon Nixon also did a dirty trick in 1968 to get elected. He had his agent, the Chinese widow of the WW2 Flying Tigers comander Clare Chennault, secretly negotiating with the South Vietnamese to stall and not make progess durring the 1968 Paris Peace talks. That way, the possible peaceful settlement would be delayed and LBJ and Hubert Humphrey would not have a peace agreement before the 1968 election. Had the agreement been signed or progess had been made, Nixon would never have been elected in 1968. The talks collapsed, Nixon got elected, thousands more died, and South Vietnam folded in 1975. LBJ found about Nixon's dirty trick later and could have spilled the beans but didn't do so. Nixon is pretty much scum in my book. A 1/2 step above U.S. Grant as our worse President ever. Michael - -----Original Message----- From: Christopher Gross [mailto:chrisg@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu] Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 2:20 PM To: Squidmaniax! Subject: Heifer Nixon What a great band name.... First off, as a Democrat-leaning independent, I quite agree that Kennedy is overrated. (But note that Bay of Pigs was actually an Eisenhower operation; JFK only decided to go ahead instead of cancelling it.) On the other hand, you are FAR too easy on Nixon. The man was slime. He gave us the EPA, true. Going to China was pretty clever too. But those are among the few bright spots in Nixon's history. The vast conglomeration of offenses we lump together under the misleading label "Watergate" were NOT typical of American government, they were vastly worse; and the idea that Nixon sacrificed himself to save the system is laughable. And let's not forget his red-baiting origins, when he did his part to create the atmosphere that led three successive presidents afraid of being eviscerated at the polls if they pulled out of Vietnam. On Fri, 20 Oct 2000, Capuchin wrote: > As far as the mainstream political US being on the right, how do you > explain the numbers (from BusinessWeek and Time): > 76% of Americans think corporations control too much of our public lives. > 71% of Americans believe abortion should be safe and legal. > 68% of Americans believe there should be LAW preventing discrimination > based on secual preference. The second two are social issues; in my post I said specifically that the country has moved rightwards on *economic* issues. As far as economic issues go, I'd say the distrust of the very idea of welfare, the popularity of the flat tax, the hostility to antitrust enforcement, and the "privatize 'em all and let God sort 'em out" attitude are all much more widespread among the American public today than they were twenty years ago. Do you disagree? > I think Chris Gross (unless I'm misinterpreting him) is the ONLY person > I've heard say that Nader wouldn't be a BETTER leader than Gore or Bush. > (More likely, Chris is just pretending to "call out sloppy thinking" and > shoot down arguments rather than making a stand himself... playing the > safe pedant rather than the at-risk advocate.) Well that is certainly what I enjoy doing, so you aren't misinterpreting my psychological motivations. However, you *are* misinterpreting my political views, kinda. I don't think any of the three, Bush, Gore or Nader, would be a "good leader" in the sense of being able to inspire and unite the nation behind a common purpose. So they're all equal there. However, I don't buy the semi-demonic picture that has been painted of Gore. And while Nader may have good positions on many issues, he'd be in no position to get most of them into law even if he *did* win the election! In *that* sense, Nader would be a poor leader. Gore, on the other hand would have the Democats in Congress, the national Democratic machine, the twenty years of favor-trading on Capitol Hill, the cutthroat instinct, and the maps to buried bodies that would help him get things done, making him, in that sense, a better potential leader than Nader. Better to get some things done with Gore than nothing with Nader. Of course this reasoning is not going to convince those who think that Gore wants to do only evil; for those of you who feel that way, Gore's ability to get things done doesn't matter. - --Chris, who BTW prefers either just "Chris" or the full "Christopher Gross," rather than the sing-songy "Chris Gross" ______________________________________________________________________ Christopher Gross On the Internet, nobody knows I'm a dog. chrisg@gwu.edu ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 10:42:35 -0400 From: drop the holupki Subject: Re: internet origins when we last left our heroes, Capuchin exclaimed: >Then there are the halloween documents > I think. , actually. >Oh, you know I don't believe in off-list posts, sir! oh yes you do! i recall at least one instance when you mistakenly sent a note to the list. (or are you making a distinction between posts (public) and notes (private)?) woj n.p. project lo -- black canvas ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 12:36:10 -0400 From: The Great Quail Subject: Nixon Mojo This post is not filled with icy moments of clarity. I am not feeling well, as I am a bit hung over, and my brain is most foggy, so forgive me if this rambles a bit. Just a warning. As a few of you know, I am genuinely fascinated by Nixon. Indeed, I just finished reading about 3000 pages worth of Nixon biography (both pro- and con, and occasionally even neutral), Vietnam history, and reportage of the 60, 68 and 72 elections. I may be too close to my "subject," but it sort of upsets me to see Nixon slandered so. Nixon was neither Satan nor God. It is true that he was generally paranoid, that he took things personally, that he told lies when he was cornered, that he placed his trust in people he should not have -- and that he probably knew better; it is true that he resorted to many dirty tricks -- as did just about everyone, though, especially the Kennedy clan. He misused government agencies; and around Watergate he came damn near close to fascism regarding his beliefs on wielding the government's power. He also prolonged the Vietnam war long before he finally ended it, not to mention expanding that war into Cambodia. He was a notorious red-baiter early in his career, and he fed into the fear of communism that locked our country into idiotic and self-destructive actions for decades. But he was also an extremely intelligent man, spiritual without being aggressively religious; he was loyal to his party even when it almost cost him his reputation and career; and he had something I feel is lacking from many of today's leaders -- vision. Though he ultimately became enmeshed in a world of lies and cover-ups, he had quite a firm moral structure, for instance, he was genuinely angry when his supporters brought up Kennedy's religious beliefs as a possible weapon against him. He was much more sensitive to other cultures and political systems than most give him credit for, and despite his stiff and smarmy public persona, he was truly interested in what the "common man" had to say in any country. For a Republican and a conservative he had many enlightened policies -- though he launched the War on Drugs (which was really inevitable), there has never been a presidency that emphasized treatment more than the Nixon program, especially at the beginning. He was more for civil rights than most Democrats, with a personal belief in equality that stemmed from his Quaker upbringing. He did create the EPA, and he had the guts and the intelligence to begin relations with China. He could also do something else I respect -- he could change his mind in the face of adversity, as he did when he went to Europe and came back in favor of financial aid and reconstruction. Additionally, his biography is *fascinating.* His struggles in the wake of adversity are damn near heroic -- it is truly a shame he developed such self-pitying defense mechanisms to cope with his inner demons. Here was a guy just as smart if not smarter than every politician around him, but forced into "second-rate" schools because of a lack of money. (He had ivy league scholarships, but couldn't afford the cost of living. Duke at the time was an experiment; and even there he sacrificed everything to stay at the top, so he could keep an academic scholarship.) He always resented the "East Coast" establishment, of course because they looked down on him, and he could never get around that. But he never put on airs -- indeed, he was much beloved by the men in his outfit in the South Pacific, where he did everything possible to make the pilots feel at home, including opening up a burger stand. I truly think he is a tragic figure -- a potential genius whose character flaws interacted dangerously with events around him, forming a bitterness and fomenting a mistrust that eventually brought him down. He really was his own worst enemy -- but I can understand that. I mean, the guy really kept getting kicked in the teeth over and over and over again, but he kept getting up and fighting on. That he became paranoid was almost inevitable, and that he eventually turned to the dark side is tragic -- but again, fascinating. Michael Bateman writes, > Nixon also did a dirty trick in 1968 to get elected. He had his agent, >the Chinese widow of the WW2 Flying Tigers comander Clare Chennault, >secretly >negotiating with the South Vietnamese to stall and not make progess durring >the 1968 Paris Peace talks. That way, the possible peaceful settlement would >be delayed and LBJ and Hubert Humphrey would not have a peace agreement >before >the 1968 election. Had the agreement been signed or progess had been >made, Nixon would never have been elected in 1968. The talks collapsed, >Nixon >got elected, thousands more died, and South Vietnam folded in 1975. I have not read the article, but the controversy is well-known in the world of Fun with Nixon. I should point out, though, that Nixon has always claimed he did not authorize her activities, and the "other side" of this debate claim that the Widow was a fairly unpredictable and meddlesome person, and was acting on her own. (In other words, she was hardly an "agent.") Of course, LBJ's failure certainly benefited the Nixon campaign, though your assumption -- passed off as a fact, I may add -- that Nixon would have lost the election is just an opinion and nothing more. I really don't know what the truth about the Widow is, but like other Nixon controversies -- Alger Hiss, for instance, and all the allegations of Watergate -- it is difficult making a decision that is not informed by personal bias. It really is a controversial issue, and comes down to a lot of he said/she said. I have an open mind, though, and I will certainly read the article -- and any rebuttals. But I think there is something more importantly off-base with your assertions. I feel that you are overlooking the fact that the North Vietnamese, the Viet Cong, the many factions of the South Vietnamese, the French, the Democrats, the Republicans, and even individual ambassadors and officials in Viet Nam were all tangled up in a cluster-fuck of negotiations both open and secret, stalling tactics of all sorts, egocentric moves of their own, and all kinds of various idiocies. The widow's meddling was not entirely a unique event, nor was stalling on *any* side! The peace talks were a near-constant aspect of the war -- implying that there was a single stalled Peace Talk that collapsed and then inevitably prolonged the war is simply untenable. And your implied approval of LBJ seems to overlook the fact that he ignored almost every piece of evidence he had that the war was going poorly, to the point of shouting down the people he sent over there until they told him we could win. Frankly, I would take Nixon over LBJ, and especially Humphrey, any day. LBJ could not even approach Nixon's understanding and knowledge of the situation, for good or ill. In my opinion, one of the real tragedies of our recent history is that from WWII onwards, America could not, as a nation, think clearly about Communism. It seriously troubled our politics both internally and internationally. Our involvement in Vietnam is just a fucking nightmare, and yet it was so preventable. Instead of supporting Ho Chi Minh, we made him an enemy. (And the French have a lot of blame here, too.) No President wanted to wage an unpopular war, but the anti-communist hysteria was a force of its own, sitting on the shoulders of Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ and Nixon, like a demon with scaly talons on the national reins. (This is NOT to say that the politicians were not complicit! After all, Nixon helped create this atmosphere. But to be fair, he also knew when it was time to start dismantling it.) I think it is *horrible* that Nixon did not end the war sooner -- but I also understand *why* he didn't, and I can't bring myself to demonize him to the extent you have. I think blame on this is spread far too wide across America to really be focused on one figure. Anyway, as I have said, I have been reading a lot about him, and maybe my fascination gives me too much of a positive bias. After all, I am also fascinated with Vlad Tepes, Hitler, Captain Ahab, and Cthulhu.... - -- The Great "Just call me Milhaus" Quail ------------------------------ End of fegmaniax-digest V9 #297 *******************************