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rec.arts.books - 7 new messages in 5 topics - digest

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Today's topics:

* University Students Take Over South Vietnam Province - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.books/t/faf54095b98b5830?hl=en
* Cheaper Kindle - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.books/t/83369cb7977feb61?hl=en
* Now Available--Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.books/t/a1ec18db1299613c?hl=en
* Bring Back the Hot-Seat! - 3 messages, 3 authors
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.books/t/63fc4bffc3d4bb77?hl=en
* Ender's Game Review - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.books/t/096e40e5b8b3c172?hl=en

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TOPIC: University Students Take Over South Vietnam Province
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.books/t/faf54095b98b5830?hl=en
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== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Oct 17 2009 8:50 am
From: "Don Phillipson"


"Tim Bruening" <tsbrueni@pop.dcn.davis.ca.us> wrote in message
news:4AD97CA0.C7E54889@pop.dcn.davis.ca.us...

> PP 206-207 of Norman Vincent Peale's "Enthusiasm Makes The Difference":
> Peale says that he was told that a dozen students came to South
> Vietnamese Premier Ky (who was Premier in the mid 1960s) and said "Turn
> over a province to us, let us administer it". He was started at their
> audacity, but found that they had dreams and practical plans to go with
> it, so gave them a province of 30,000 people. Said province was a
> depraved section and a hotbed for Communist espionage. The students dug
> into the mud, repaired bulldozers, helped farmers with their livestock,
> drained swamps, cleaned up sewer systems, and built 600 homes, a
> hospital, and 17 health centers. Inside of a year, they had closed up
> the Communist leak, cleaned up the entire surroundings, and made it a
> place of health. Ky wished that he could do with the entire country
> what the students did with one province. Does anyone know more about
> the above story than what Peale said? (Peale neglected to identify the
> province, nor did he say why the students weren't directed to administer
> the entire nation!).

We have reasons to doubt the veracity of this.

1. A province of only 30,000 people would be very unusual in
Vietnam, which had in the 1980s 53 million people in 37
provinces (most over 1M population, the smallest 322,000
according to my Statesman's Year Book.)

2. We are invited to believe a dozen newcomers, few or none
of them experienced in building trades, completed within a
year construction of 600 houses and 18 health centres. (In the
French or US building industries, no group of 12 people could
be expected to do this let alone while simultaneously draining
swamps and cleaning up sewage systems.)

--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Cheaper Kindle
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.books/t/83369cb7977feb61?hl=en
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sun, Oct 18 2009 6:57 am
From: rmak


x-no-archive:yes
On Oct 7, 9:23 am, rab <remai...@reece.net.au> wrote:
> MarketWatch - Anticipating the arrival of fresh
> competition, Amazon.com Inc. on Wednesday slashed the price
> of its Kindle electronic-book reader by $40 to $259
> (Amazon.com: http://xrl.us/Kindle259) and announced a
> version that can work internationally.
>
>
> More: http://xrl.us/Kindle2A

"10 reasons to buy a Kindle 2...and 10 reasons not to": http://tinyurl.com/Kindle10


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TOPIC: Now Available--Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.books/t/a1ec18db1299613c?hl=en
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== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sun, Oct 18 2009 7:27 am
From: wdstarr@panix.com (William December Starr)


In article <4AD47300.9030205@columbia-center.org>,
Dan Clore <clore@columbia-center.org> said:

> "Tho-ag in Zhi-gyu slept seven Khorlo. Zodmanas
> zhiba. All Nyug bosom. Konch-hog not; Thyan-Kam
> not; Lha-Chohan not; Tenbrel Chugnyi not;
> Dharmakaya ceased; Tgenchang not become; Barnang
> and Ssa in Ngovonyidj; alone Tho-og Yinsin in
> night of Sun-chan and Yong-grub (Parinishpanna),
> &c., &c.,"
> -- The Book of Dzyan.

Zirn Left Unguarded,
the Jenghik Palace in Flames,
Jon Westerly Dead.

-- wds


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TOPIC: Bring Back the Hot-Seat!
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.books/t/63fc4bffc3d4bb77?hl=en
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== 1 of 3 ==
Date: Sun, Oct 18 2009 1:35 pm
From: Piet de Arcilla


On Oct 15, 12:24 pm, Just Me <jpd...@gmail.com> wrote:
> And burn 'em at low voltage, right along with Mama. Strap her in
> first.

I don't think vengeance or retribution should ever be a basis for a
punishment for a crime. Only deterrence, rehabilitation, or
prevention.

On the other hand, I don't understand why people think the death
penalty is particularly immoral when it's applied to children or the
mentally disabled. If someone does something like this, they would
seem unfit for society and unlikely to get better. IQ and age are
irrelevant.

== 2 of 3 ==
Date: Sun, Oct 18 2009 6:52 pm
From: Just Me


On Oct 18, 3:35 pm, Piet de Arcilla <dearci...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Oct 15, 12:24 pm, Just Me <jpd...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > And burn 'em at low voltage, right along with Mama. Strap her in
> > first.
>
> I don't think vengeance or retribution should ever be a basis for a
> punishment for a crime. Only deterrence, rehabilitation, or
> prevention.

Whether frying somebody at low voltage would be an effective deterrent
and/or preventative measure or not is anybody's guess. If nothing else
it would ensure that they were no longer laughing over what they did
to that boy. Otherwise, the position you state has always been quite
the same as mine--until I heard of this case, one that actually has
the effect to horrify me more than anything Charles Manson or Jeffrey
Dahmer ever did. I mean, it's so awful that it stands to make a
prophet of Manson with his words of warning screamed from the witness
stand, "Your children will be coming after you with knives!" Well, it
seems even Manson didn't have an imagination diabolical enough to have
said, "with fire."

>
> On the other hand, I don't understand why people think the death
> penalty is particularly immoral when it's applied to children or the
> mentally disabled. If someone does something like this, they would
> seem unfit for society and unlikely to get better. IQ and age are
> irrelevant.

So, it might be argued is "getting better" so far as the ends of
justice are concerned. Would it be just for the perpetrator to be
"getting better" while the victim remains dead or maimed? Near as I
can tell, justice does not contemplate anything beyond the scope of
the crime, or so the majority who comment on the Polanski case keep
saying. "Take him out and shoot him!" says Cokie Roberts who sees
sodomy performed upon the body of a 13 year old girl as tantamount to
murder and the only penalty worthy of it.

But as Justice calls for finding an exact balance between crime and
punishment, what Roberts calls for must be judged unjust.

You raise an interesting question, which really comes to finding a
firm, clearly drawn distinction between Justice on the one hand,
vengeance or retribution on the other. And when the crime is described
as "attempted murder" with torture of being burned alive being the
means, then what can Justice see to mete out, to make the punishment
balance with the crime?

There are those who insist that a person loses his privileged status
as a juvenile when the crime he commits is not "juvenile", youthful or
young in nature but a travesty altogether so "adult" as to equal the
crimes of the S.S. officer who orders his sonderkommando to throw a
Jew into the flaming pit, alive. Shortly after the war there were
liberated Jews who joined and went on patrol with the Soviet NKVD,
rounding up SS men to be burned alive, locked in barns all over Poland
and Eastern Germany, or at least so goes the account of Martin Grey.

Was this a case of vengeance and retribution or simply the justice of
making the punishment suit the crime? Some of those SS men may never
have laid a hand on a Jew, but the organization of which they were
part could have done nothing without the force of numbers that each
and every SS man gave to it.

By this logic, the further question arises as to who or what is the SS
of which these terrible boys are part? I can tell you that as I look
back to the time when I was a kid that age, I can think of not one
juvenile crime in the news that bore the least similarity to this. In
the pages of my grandmother's Police Gazette, I once saw the photo of
a man, a victim of union violence, the owner of a non-union laundry
who had been sent for a mighty uncomfortable ride in one of his own
clothes dryers.

But you never heard of any kids doing anything like that. Who or what
is the SS from whom these kids are taking their marching orders? Is
it Hip Hop? Hollywood? The Video Game? Def Jam so-called stand-up
comedy? Or is it the Law which says to them, but for a quick trip to
the abortion clinic with Mama, their own existence as children is just
plain dumb, blind luck?

What or who is the SS for whom the value of a human life has become so
cheap, so expendable, so disposable, so easily confined to the flames?

In the end, I must conclude that you are quite right. No way should
our system of laws and justice be adding its stamp of approval to
anything in the nature of what these boys have done. They need no
more bad examples.
--
JM http://doo-dads.blogspot.com


== 3 of 3 ==
Date: Sun, Oct 18 2009 11:25 pm
From: Msg. Scooter


On , , Sun, 18 Oct 2009 13:35:09 -0700 (PDT), Re: Bring Back the Hot-Seat!, Piet
de Arcilla <dearcilla@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Oct 15, 12:24 pm, Just Me <jpd...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> And burn 'em at low voltage, right along with Mama. Strap her in
>> first.
>
>I don't think vengeance or retribution should ever be a basis for a
>punishment for a crime. Only deterrence, rehabilitation, or
>prevention.

There are some people that just don't learn.
Like rats or sharks or crocodiles they have no higher function, you can shoot a
rat for stealing grain and it will die with no concept of what it was doing was
wrong. Likewise sharks and crocodiles.
You can hand feed a crocodile from the day it emerges from it's egg. You can
continue to feed it till it is fully grown and the only thing it is waiting for
is the opportunity when you turn your back and it can grab you.
These people are like that. A type of person who would have been wiped out in
centuries before this are now still alive into adolescence and adulthood with no
conscience at all.

>On the other hand, I don't understand why people think the death
>penalty is particularly immoral when it's applied to children or the
>mentally disabled. If someone does something like this, they would
>seem unfit for society and unlikely to get better. IQ and age are
>irrelevant.

If they are unable to learn then executing them is the only humanitarian thing
to do. Imprisoning them does them no good, all it does is make them resentful
and looking for an opportunity to escape or go down in glory in their and other
prisoners eyes by lilling a guard. That they die in the process doesn't seem to
make much difference.
Keeping them alive and having them die old men or women, like Susan Atkins, is
unworthy of a "civilised" society.
We wouldn't do it with killer animals.
Yet we do it with "people" who richly deserve to be exterminated like a flock of
flies.

--
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor
to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
Anatole France.

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Ender's Game Review
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.books/t/096e40e5b8b3c172?hl=en
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sun, Oct 18 2009 3:12 pm
From: Gabriel


Hi all,

Thanks to everyone who has taken time to stop and read my posts on
HubPages. I appreciate you taking the time, and offering feedback. I
posted a new review today, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. I hope
you'll stop by (http://hubpages.com/hub/Enders-Game-Orson-Scott-Card)
and enjoy. Here's a short preview.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card.

Imagine a time when the Earth's population has grown to the point
where population control isn't something done by repressive regimes,
but by every nation in order to keep society from overwhelming every
resource. Imagine that families are limited to two children and must
have the governments approval for a Third. Imagine that religion is
forbidden, because the conflicts it causes are too dangerous in such a
world. Now imagine that the world is under attack from beyond, an
alien race, the Bugger's, has discovered Earth and invasion has begun.
How would we handle it? What length would you go to, as a soldier, as
an officer, as a politician, to protect the world?

In Enders's Game, originally written by Orson Scott Card as a
novelette in 1977, we catch a glimpse of one possible way such a
future could unfold. And we follow the story of one young man, a
Third, as he makes his way from his home to the forefront of battle,
all before he turns 18.

The Story of Ender.

Andrew Wiggen, known as Ender, is a Third. Resented by his brother,
loved by his sister, and wanted by the military, he shows a unique and
keen strength, and is chosen by the government to leave all he knows
behind to take his place in the Battle School, an orbiting training
ground where the International Fleets takes the Earth's best and
brightest to become officers. It isn't under the care and love of his
family that Ender grows to maturity, it's under the watchful eye and
careful manipulation of the military.

See, mankind is under attack by the Buggers, and the military knows
that to find the right leader, they need to start with someone young
that can be molded and developed into the leader they really need. And
through testing and observation, they believe they have seen something
in young Ender that will fit their needs. But just finding the right
person isn't enough, they have to be in the right environment. So the
Battle School is built in orbit, away from the distractions of the
world and the prying eyes of the politicians. With all the best that
the military can offer, young men and women from around the world are
brought to the school, trained and tested, before going out to lead
the military's fleet.

And Ender is the best there ever was, no doubt. A genius who is the
best hope to save humanity. And so the military designs a special
program for him, one designed to test him to the fullest, and if
necessary, break him, before he can break while leading the fleet.
They isolate him, not just from his family, but from his men, from his
comrades, from anyone who might keep him from reaching his fullest
potential. And Ender survives. Every day he improves. But everyone has
their limits and eventually Ender reaches his, and when he does, his
decision will leave a lasting impression on a world, and a race."


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Author & Editor

Has laoreet percipitur ad. Vide interesset in mei, no his legimus verterem. Et nostrum imperdiet appellantur usu, mnesarchum referrentur id vim.

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