03-11-2003 09:05									#91
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---

"Er, Designer People."

"What?"

"The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation were awarded a huge research grant to design and produce synthetic personalities to order. The results were uniformly disastrous. All the 'people' and 'personalities' turned out to be amalgams of characteristics which simply could not coexist in naturally occurring lifeforms. Most of them were just poor pathetic misfits, but some were deeply, deeply dangerous. Dangerous because they didn't ring alarm bells in other people. They could walk through situations the way that ghosts walk through walls, because no one spotted the danger.

"The most dangerous of all were three identical ones -- they were put in this hold, to be blasted, with this ship, right out of this universe. They are not evil, in fact they are rather simple and charming. But they are the most dangerous creatures that ever lived because there is nothing they will not do if allowed, and nothing they will not be allowed to do..."

Zaphod looked at the dim yellow lights, the two dim yellow lights. As his eyes became accustomed to the light, he saw that the two lights framed a third space where something was broken. Wet, sticky patches gleamed dully on the floor.

Zaphod and the official walked cautiously toward the lights. At that moment, four words came crashing into the helmet headsets from the other official.

"The capsule has gone," he said tersely.

"Trace it," snapped Zaphod's companion. "Find exactly where it has gone. We must know where it has gone!"

Zaphod approached the two remaining tanks. A quick glance showed him that each contained an identical floating body. He examined one more carefully. The body, that of an elderly man, was floating in a thick yellow liquid. The man was kindly looking, with lots of pleasant laugh lines around his face. His hair seemed unnaturally thick and dark for somone of his age, and his right hand seemed continually to be weaving forward and back, up and down, as if shaking hands with an endless succession of unseen ghosts. He smiled genially, babbled and burbled like a half-sleeping baby, and occassionally seemed to rock very slightly with little tremours of laughter, as if he had just told himself a joke he hadn't heard before, or didn't remember properly. Waving, smiling, chortling, with little yellow bubbles beading on his lips, he seemed to inhabit a distant world of simple dreams.

Another terse message suddenly came through his helmet headset. The planet toward which the escape capsule headed had already been identified. It was in Galactic Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha.

Zaphod found a small speaker by the tank, and turned it on. The man in the yellow liquid was babbling gently about a shining city on a hill.

He also heard the Official from the Safety and Civil Reassurance Administration issue instructions to the effect that the missing escape capsule contained a "Reagan" and taht the planet in ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha must be made "perfectly safe".

---

Guess the short story.

	03-11-2003 09:05									#92
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Churchill had a saying that went something like this. If a man in his twenties was not a liberal, he had no heart. If a man in his thirties was not a conservative, he had no brain.

	03-11-2003 09:06									#93
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Man, I'm watching the Viking game in HDTV. Again, it is amazing in quality!

	03-11-2003 09:14									#94
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quote: Originally posted by Ned Churchill had a saying that went something like this. If a man in his twenties was not a liberal, he had no heart. If a man in his thirties was not a conservative, he had no brain.

Oh, crap. I might have to undergo a sex change to remain a liberal in my thirties. : (



Btw, the appropriate rejoinder to my reply is "This is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put".

	03-11-2003 09:15									#95
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quote: Originally posted by Odin Reagan's policies drove my family to near poverty. My fammily has always done well under dems and goes down the drain when the repugs are in power. Supply-side econommics is just sucking up to Big Business in disguise. His religious fundimentalism and the crap he pulled supporting tinpot dictators, like Saddam. Reagan is the 2nd worst president of the century, just behind Hoover.

Perhaps you should take the multi-generational hint and get into some career that looks to be in demand in the long run. Studying radical politics isn't going to make you rich, and neither is assuming that you can fool the rest of the country into paying you welfare for the rest of your life. Earn plenty of money and you can take care of you and yours, and even help out your friends and others who need it from time to time. I do.

	03-11-2003 09:27									#96
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quote: Originally posted by nato Savings & Loan Scandal. A devestating blow to our economy. Also a brilliant way for the republicans to transfer money from the poor and middle class to the rich. A classic!

This was Reagan's fault? Didn't the democratically controlled congress and senate pass that bit of crap? Debit where debit is due after all.

quote: Originally posted by nato The standard enormous republican deficits.

See above.

quote: Originally posted by nato Selling arms to terrorists.

What are you talking about?

quote: Originally posted by nato Iran-Contra, an attempt to set up a shadow government and bypass that pesky Constitution.

Which part of the constitution says that we can't sell arms to Iran or supply money to the Contras? This had nothing to do with the constitution. It didn't even have anything to do with the law purported to have been broken. No one was convicted of anything but lying to congress in the longest and most expensive (at the time) independent counsel investigation ever. The reason is that none of the actions for which people were charged were illegal.

quote: Originally posted by nato The mess in Nicaragua.

Reagan gets one share of credit for that to 5 shares for the Ortega brothers. They dissed Jimmy Carter, started to fvck with not only the regular citizens of their country but also with the indiginous peoples, starting several small civil wars only one of which was contrived in the U.S.

quote: Originally posted by nato Letting our soldiers get hit badly in Lebanon and generally making a fiasco of it.

Force protection isn't his responsibility directly, and obviously there was a let down on the ground, but back then the idea of a dump truck full of explosives with a suicidal maniac at the wheel wasn't exactly second nature to us. But he did diddle and dither around there, giving the Iranians an opportunity.

quote: Originally posted by nato Ready to sign away all our nuclear weapons at Iceland without even consulting the military guys.

This is why we require the senate to approve treaties I suppose.

[/QUOTE]

	03-11-2003 11:00									#97
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quote: Originally posted by Ned Churchill had a saying that went something like this. If a man in his twenties was not a liberal, he had no heart. If a man in his thirties was not a conservative, he had no brain.

Einstein was a communist.

	03-11-2003 11:00									#98
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quote: gorbachev? he needed standing up to?

Actually, when Reagan came into office, Gorby wasn't in charge. Breznev, Andropov, and Cherneko all had to die first. Of course while the hardliners were in charge, Reagan talked very tough. It got to the point where the Politburo, after Cherneko's death decided they needed a charasmatic younger guy to match up with Reagan, who was winning the PR war.

Basically, without Reagan there may not have been a Gorbachev in power in the SU.

Reagan was a Chairman of the Board (like AH said), but he was MUCH more intelligent than the left gives him credit for. His writings displayed a knowledge of international affairs and the scholars going over it believe him to be smarter than it was thought at the time.

	03-11-2003 11:16									#99
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quote: Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui His writings displayed a knowledge of international affairs and the scholars going over it believe him to be smarter than it was thought at the time.

Er, you don't seriously believe he wrote that stuff himself?

	03-11-2003 11:16									#100
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Well it's in his handwriting... so, unless they dictated him what to write in his journals and letters...

	03-11-2003 11:43									#101
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Nancy dictated it

	03-11-2003 11:46									#102
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Did the astrologer tell her what to write?

	03-11-2003 11:49									#103
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consistent with my softening on Reagan, I believe the man had good instincts in terms of the values he represented and sincerely believed in those values. That was what made him a good leader.

I saw a bio on Reagan and it seems he had those values all his life.

Having said that there were many dark sides - notably his close involvement in blacklisting artists in Hollywood duirng the McCarthy period. That was very nasty.

	03-11-2003 12:19									#104
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quote: Originally posted by Q Cubed democracy and the american people won the cold war. without us, they wouldn't have lost, so it's silly to say reagan won it. it was our drive in the economy, it was our technological wizardry, it was our american patriotism that proved to the soviets that they just couldn't keep up. bears can't fly.

Yeah, but as PLATO said, it took Reagan to make it happen.

The Dems were busy telling the American people that we should just resign ourselves to decline into a postindustrial miasma of menial service jobs.

LBJ's ham-handed approach at everything (coupled with his spoils for the benefit of Texas) did it's damage. Nixon tore the heart out of the Reps and defamed the Presidency with his malfeasance. Carter sucked the life out of the whole country by embracing all the negatives of the left that sprung from Vietnam and Watergate. He couldn't lead America out of the downward spiral. There really wasn't much patriotism left, more like nostalgia over past greatness.

Carter killed the nuclear power industry, tried to axe some of the most successful military projects (the 12 supercarriers, the C-17, the B-1, and others) in their infancy, etc. If he'd had his way there wouldn't have been the technical wizardry to outpace the Soviets. It still took a determined Reagan expending much of his political capital to bring those programs back.

I vaguely remember the 1976 Republican convention, when Reagan lost to Ford but was tapped as the keynote speaker. His speech was stunning, and just about everybody realized that they had chosen the wrong horse. Ford would end up falling on his sword, and one could only hope it was for the good of the party and the nation in the long run.

Q³, you should find the transcript or a tape of that speech, and compare that to what all the other mealy-mouthed politicians were saying.

Reagan knew how to lead. He knew how to inspire the American people to believe in themselves and the power of freedom. He wasn't uniformly successful, but then again he wasn't supported by Congress.

	03-11-2003 12:24									#105
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I think he just knew how to deliver his lines well

	03-11-2003 15:58									#106
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quote: Originally posted by Ned Churchill had a saying that went something like this. If a man in his twenties was not a liberal, he had no heart. If a man in his thirties was not a conservative, he had no brain.

Yup, and he used that quote to justify switching parties once his career was over with the Liberals -- and over largely because he was such a f*ck up.

Churchill was a great wartime leader and a very witty man, but a look at his career beyond WWII reveals failure after failure, dotted with "successes" of a truly dubious nature (for example, being the first person ever to order the aerial bombardment of a civilian population for "pacification" during peacetime). I'd trust his taste in brandy and cigars, but you'd have to be a fool to look at his life and still trust his political judgment.

	03-11-2003 16:38									#107
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Reagan was Mrs Thatchers poodle

	03-11-2003 17:07									#108
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yeah, i know that, imran. gorby didn't come into power until like 83 or 84, iirc. maybe it was 86? i could look it up, but i don't wanna. the point remains, though, that gorby was a paper bear, not much of a threat to the us. by that time, neither was the soviet union, outside of those nukes.

	03-11-2003 19:07									#109
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quote: Originally posted by Alexander's Horse although if you look at his record on economic or foreign policy it isn't much better than Jimmy Carter.

Economic record—you mean inflation going down by two thirds, unemployment going down by half, overall growth rate increasing despite the S&L fiasco, and the first major revitalization of the stock markets since 1929??

If that was done by delivering his lines, bring on the orators. If policy had something to do with it, bring on the Republicans.

Foreign policy? You mean Carter going to Moscow and kissing Brezhnev's arse, or Reagan telling them to kiss his? You play the hand you're dealt, and Carter folded with a three of a kind instead of drawing for the full house, and not because he thought the Soviets had a straight flush, but because he thought the Soviets would react poorly to losing.

After Sadat was assassinated has there been any real progress in the Middle East? No, because there is nobody like Sadat on the Muslim side any more. Now it's all Arafat with a little bit of Syria and Iran thrown in (the Saudis trying to appear "neutral").

	03-11-2003 19:11									#110
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quote: Originally posted by Comrade Tassadar Einstein was a communist.

No he wasn't. He was a capitalist. He might have believed in Communism* but his actions, earnings, and life are safely capitalistic.

*And I'm not too sure about that, but I don't care to research it.

	03-11-2003 19:18									#111
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quote: Originally posted by TheStinger Reagan was Mrs Thatchers poodle

An interesting argument -- how would you support it?

	03-11-2003 19:18									#112
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quote: Originally posted by Ned Is there any hope of a cure, or is the brain damage irreversible?

Ramo's? Irreversible. Just read his words, man!

	03-11-2003 19:29									#113
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quote: Originally posted by Odin Reagan's policies drove my family to near poverty. My fammily has always done well under dems and goes down the drain when the repugs are in power. Supply-side econommics is just sucking up to Big Business in disguise. His religious fundimentalism and the crap he pulled supporting tinpot dictators, like Saddam. Reagan is the 2nd worst president of the century, just behind Hoover.

Detail, details! What did your family do? How were they ruined? What did Reagan do to cause your families ruination? Just asserting that it is so doesn't exactly convince.

My father and stepmother were thrown out of work by Reagan's Justice department in the 1984 ATT desision - 5 years later, the bankrupt, slightly-lost person that was my father at the beginning of the Reagan years was now owner of a company generating $4,000,000 in revenue and (going by what Christmas was like in 1990 - ) a pretty good profit. And he was doing the same job that he got tossed out of in 1984.

Oddly enough, I don't ascribe any of this to Reagan, other than the confident, optimistic leadership that he provided. However, the US was a far better overall position in 1989 than in 1979, both globally and internally and you cannot give the reigning president none of the credit, well, I guess you can if you're a zealot.

	03-11-2003 20:41									#114
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negative 74.

	03-11-2003 20:56									#115
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Yeah, I guess you had to live during that time to appreciate what he accomplished. The country had lost faith in itself. He got it back. That has to count against some of the mistakes he made.

	03-11-2003 22:59									#116
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the two biggest things i remember during the 80s were the challenger kablooey and the seoul olympics.

	03-11-2003 23:33									#117
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quote: Originally posted by Ned Churchill had a saying that went something like this. If a man in his twenties was not a liberal, he had no heart. If a man in his thirties was not a conservative, he had no brain.

quoting famous men doesnt make a man any wiser.

	03-11-2003 23:35									#118
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'specially since you can do it by copy-paste.

	04-11-2003 00:20									#119
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quote: Originally posted by JohnT No he wasn't. He was a capitalist. He might have believed in Communism* but his actions, earnings, and life are safely capitalistic. *And I'm not too sure about that, but I don't care to research it.

Well, your right when you say he wasn't a communst per say. However his beliefs were all very centered around socialism.
In fact, I think the FBI has over 1,000 pages concerning this.

	04-11-2003 00:29									#120
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Are you telling me to trust the records of J. Edgar Hoover? My, how lowly the US Communists must've become if they're using him as a witness.