xipe posted:

its about time to join some of these dots on a big board so we can gesticulate wildly at it


maybe get in touch with the university of nebraska-omaha?
the current director of the afghanistan department was invovled in the book project in he 80s.

also apparently pakistani/afghani teachers are still photocopying and and using them for their classes.
maybe it would be possible to get in touch online with someone who could ask someone to ask someone to make a copy?

I'm trying but no luck so far, will keep you posted

Caesura109 posted:

Very angry these past few days, America is irredeemable, someone give Iran and Hamas nukes

settle down beavis

On June 30th of 1998, Henry Lee Lucas, arguably the most prolific and certainly one of the most sadistic serial killers in the annals of crime was scheduled for execution by the state of Texas. Given the advocacy of the death penalty by Governor George W. Bush, things clearly weren't looking good for Henry at that time.

Bush had not granted clemency to any condemned man in his tenure as governor. In fact, no governor of any state in the entire history of the country has carried out more judicial executions than has Governor George. At last count, the state of Texas had dispatched 130 inmates on Bush's watch.

So Texas was definitely not the place to be for a man in Henry's position. And considering the nature of Henry's crimes, it seemed a certainty that nothing would stand in the way of Henry's scheduled execution. There weren't likely to be any high-profile supporters, a la Karla Faye Tucker (though even personal appeals to Bush from the likes of Pat Robertson failed to dissuade the governor from proceeding on schedule with Miss Tucker's execution). Not likely because Henry's crimes were of a particularly brutal nature, involving rape, torture, mutilation, dismemberment, necrophilia, cannibalism, and pedophilia, with the number of victims running as high as 300-600 by some accounts - including Henry's own, at times - though this figure is likely inflated.

By all accounts though, Lucas, frequently working with partner Ottis Toole - a self described arsonist and cannibal - savagely murdered literally scores of victims of all ages, races, and genders. All indications were then that this was pretty much of a no-brainer for America's premier hanging governor. But then a most remarkable thing happened. On June 18, just twelve days before Henry's scheduled demise, Governor Bush asked the State Board of Pardons and Paroles, whose members are appointed by Bush himself, to review Henry's case. Strangely enough, eight days later the Board uncharacteristically recommended that Henry's execution not take place.

The very next day, just three days short of Henry's scheduled exit from this world, Lucas became the first - and to date only - recipient of Governor Bush's compassionate conservatism. The official rationale for this act of mercy was, apparently, that the evidence on which Lucas was sentenced did not support his conviction. There was a possibility that Henry was in fact innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. Never mind that many of the 130 death row inmates who did not get special gubernatorial attention prior to their executions had credible claims of innocence that were met with by nothing but scorn and mockery.

Suddenly Little George had developed a keen interest in not executing innocent convicts. Never mind as well that some of those who have been executed despite claims of innocence were - other than the crime for which they were being executed - law-abiding citizens. Whereas Henry was by all accounts a serial rapist, kidnapper, torturer and murderer. And never mind that once Henry was spared, Bush promptly lost this passing interest and began once again rubber stamping every execution order that crossed his desk, including that of a great-grandmother in her sixties who was convicted of killing her chronically abusive husband (Betty Lou Beets, in February 2000).

And never mind that Bush has made no effort in the two years since Henry's commutation to seek a new trial for Henry on one of the murders for which there is conclusive evidence of Lucas' guilt. Neither has he made any effort to extradite Henry to any of the other states in which Henry is wanted for various murders. It seems to me that the last time I checked, there was no statute of limitations for the crime of murder. Why is Law-and-Order George not seeking a new death sentence for Lucas? And why is it that Henry was granted full clemency, rather than a temporary stay during which his case could have been reviewed? This is exactly what Bush has just done in the case of convicted murderer Ricky Nolen McGinn.

Tellingly, the proliferation of press reports on the McGinn case, apparently meant to soften Bush's image somewhat, have made virtually no reference to the governor's earlier actions on behalf of Lucas. Reporting on the McGinn case has avoided the mention of Lucas in one of two ways: by noting that this is the first capital case for which Bush has issued a stay (which is true but deliberately deceptive), or by claiming outright that this is the first death penalty case in which Bush has intervened (which is an outright and absolutely shameless lie).

And what if Lucas was in fact falsely convicted and his innocence was so blatantly obvious that the governor had no choice but to commute Henry's sentence? What then does this say about the Texas criminal justice system and the ease with which it sends innocent men to their deaths? Are we to believe that Henry's case was an isolated one and that none of the other men put to death during Bush's reign had equally credible claims of innocence?

Clearly, there was something more at work then in the Lucas case than simply a question of guilt. There had to be another reason why Bush would take such extraordinary steps to spare the life of a man who had led a life of such brutality. And this was certainly not the first time that the criminal justice system had shown such extraordinary leniency towards Lucas.

Gssh posted:

https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp?personId=844015&privcapId=240672662o_0

"Energous Corporation" is the kind of name you give to the front company for your evil conspiracy in a standard cyberpunk novel or jrpg

Gssh posted:

Other Affiliations:
Troika Networks, Inc.

nice, they made a bunch of classic rpgs

xipe posted:

Personally I think the fact that DIY BIO labs today allow garage generic tinkerers and average racist terror groups to create bioweapons

do you have any sources on this because i'm not really clear on specific examples of this happening. also the aids stuff doesn't hold up to scrutiny(although I think its understandable why those theories developed during the 80s and why they're still prevalent) because the evolutionary history of hiv is reasonably well known at this point and theres no indication of any kind of tampering, and if there was it would have had to have been done impossibly early(like 1920s), since it was present in the human population for decades in africa before spreading very far or being known about. there are some interesting things you could probably talk about in regard to the spread of aids at that time and colonialism though, since it seems to have originated and subsequently spread in the belgian congo:

..a roaring sex trade, rapid population growth and unsterilised needles used in health clinics probably spread the virus.

Meanwhile Belgium-backed railways had one million people flowing through the city each year, taking the virus to neighbouring regions.

lo posted:

xipe posted:

Personally I think the fact that DIY BIO labs today allow garage generic tinkerers and average racist terror groups to create bioweapons

do you have any sources on this because i'm not really clear on specific examples of this happening.

....

there are some interesting things you could probably talk about in regard to the spread of aids at that time and colonialism though, since it seems to have originated and subsequently spread in the belgian congo:

..a roaring sex trade, rapid population growth and unsterilised needles used in health clinics probably spread the virus.

Meanwhile Belgium-backed railways had one million people flowing through the city each year, taking the virus to neighbouring regions.

No source, just following the proliferation of biotinkering labs that are accessable to non wealthy or specialist people, and matching that with genetically modified viruses.


Re: the Congo AIDS origin, that source talks about how the virus was brought from there to Haiti in the 60s.
That reminds me of a different conspiracy (well, really more of an imperialism thing) which I think deserves a more comprehensive look: UN complicity in invasions and various other scummy behaviour

The UN brought cholera to Haiti (as did the UN Human Rights & Women's Rights chair Saudi Arabia bring cholera to Yemen)
https://www.un.org/press/en/2016/sgsm18323.doc.htm

The Media have been framing UN mass rape and paedophilia networks as 'transactional sex', red meat to the humanitarian NGO complex
https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/guilaine/since-i-gave-you-phone-it-s-not-rape

Here is a look at the rich recent history of UN agencies cashing in the credibility we give them to manufacture outright lies on behalf of US war against Iraq Syria and Iran
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/syria-experts-and-george-monbiot-how-the-iaea-conspire-with-israel-and-us/

Syria's UN envoy tells some interesting stories here, including how the UN organised a secret midnight 'session' to cover up its own fake investigation (all $billion expenses paid for by Iraqi people) to try to back up Bush's WMD claims


Sorry to jump around a bit.
I haven't really investigated bioweapons stuff

Facebook can be disrupted. But it cannot be disrupted unless there is something else for people to plug into. It cannot be surpassed unless we are willing to accept that the widespread apathy and resignation surrounding the apparent inevitably of Facebook’s global supremacy is Zuckerberg’s greatest, and yet most undeserved, achievement.

The only way to free ourselves from this inexplicable condition is to shake off the resignation; it is not real...

Drop everything, yes literally, drop everything and support the building of alternatives to the future Zuckerberg and his colleagues are busy building for you. These alternatives will ground in a fundamentally different orientation: alternatives which are about decentralizing and redistributing access to resources; enhancing the way we approach information; and encouraging generative ways of interacting with one another.

I am afraid this might be missing the mark somewhat. He makes a very important point when he says the resignation felt towards Facebook's domination isn't real, but I think the solution is not to build a "facebook killer" alternative social network. This has been tried many times, incorporating the kinds of ideas he mentions (like open source alternatives that are decentralised rather than relying on monolithic corporate servers), but of course it always fails because there is nothing motivating the average person to shift from a network that all their friends and family use to one that's empty.

Instead I think the solution lies in moving past this poisonous 'social network' phase in the short history of the internet. I don't know how, or how quickly, this could happen, but I see a contest between Facebook's ability to build hooks into people's lives (by trying to replace the functionality of important personal things like photo albums and home movies) and its nature as a plodding behemoth that constantly needs to squeeze money out of users and their data. The latter is more likely than anything to make people get jack of platforms like this and just go back to living a real life with real personal connections, free of ads that pop up every time they try to look at a video of their friend's cat or baby or whatever. Facebook's very nature will likely be its undoing. One can only hope, anyway, because I can't think of anything proactive people can do apart from deleting their own accounts.