Yeah. Now here’s the tricky part. Who needs the Kwik-E-Mart? You DO!
See, things like a quart of milk or a loaf of bread can’t just be copied onto a floppy. They have to be made of SCARCE resources. So you and Jimmy can enjoy your commie paradise, but what works in Linux doesn’t work anywhere else and never will. Prone to profound delusion folks. Jimmy and apparently some dopers. Oh well.
And I find it absolutely fascinating that no-one is disputing that Carter is a commie. No, it’s “Communism can work, just look at linux”, and “well, I thought Venus was a UFO once too”. So I am glad everyone thinks it is fine that we have had a President who is a self-admitted communist. Pathetic.
[quote]
As far as Venus and optical illusions… well, I could talk about the moon at apex and how it looks larger when it is all but touching the horizon. I could talk about many things. It hardly makes the man a nutbag to call it an Unidentified Flying Object. It was unidentified, it was in the air, and it was an object.
As far as the video? Apparently, no such thing. It was captured on film. Yes. A picture.
http://www.narsil.org/politics/cart...ler_rabbit.html
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_019.html
I have never heard of a moving picture of the rabbit incident, sir.
[/qwuote]
Carter’s UFO report was analyzed in depth by Robert Shaeffer in The UFO Verdict:
Shaweffer found it well-reported and properly restrained. There was sufficient data from the report to deduce that it almost certainly was Venus. Venus is frequently the subject of such spurioous reports, simply because it is frequently much brighter than expected, and it can be further disfuised by viewing conditions (like fog). See Shaeffer, Philip Klass, Donald Menzel and others on this. People who reoport Venus as a UFO aren’t raving loonies. Especially if they don’t claim that they’re alien spacecraft.
As for the rabbit, the political cartoonists had a field day with this, but I don’t recall any film of it, either. I Do know that a small mammal that isn’t domesticated making its way without fear towards a human is often seen as evidence of rabies. They tell you to aboid, say, a fox that is coming right towards you. I wouldn’t blame Carter at all for trying to shoo away a rabbit that was determinedly swimminf toward his canoe.
Long ago, people thought that women were lesser beings, and any number of other things. Technology is a wonderful thing, and really, especially to a true and honest Christian like Carter, aren’t we all God’s children? Aren’t all men created equal?
As time passes, perhaps we will find a way to eliminate physical scarcity of resources. I can hypothesize any number of ways, really. From nanotech to planetary evacuation. To simple social evolution.
Now, as implemented in our modern world. Communism was a horror. And a sham. But there’s no reason it has to be. Don’t hate the concept. Don’t hate the Russian or Chinese people, either. Place the blame where the blame goes, at the monsters who ruled.
And I say that as someone who grew up as the last generation to do duck-and-cover drills, who knew until 1989 that it was entirely possible I would not die instantly, but would be close enough to a major target that I would suffer for weeks to months before dying, but I had no real chance of survival.
That said, I simply don’t have enough information on Carter’s ‘communist’ comment.
I have essentially proved you reasonably wrong-to-freaking insane in the statements I do have information on, with the mention of a video hanging out as a possible outright lie.
Does anyone have any information on this video? I can’t find it anywhere.
(And yes, if I found a muskrat swimming out to me in a 420 or Zodiac, I’d splash it off, too. Weird-ass behavior like that is indicative of rabies. Heck, I’d shout like mad and wave my hands. No sense in smacking it if I could scare it off.)
Just for the hell of it: Notes on an Open Source Car.
http://www.makezine.com/01/car/
Admittedly, in… hm. Last quarter’s issue, there was a great article on how to make the equivalent of a Caterham Super 7, one of my favorite cars, for about ten grand. I fully intend to do so, once I get garage space… few years, you know?
Oh, and I really apologize for the hijack.
Actually, we’re still waiting for your cite on that point. Can’t meaningfully respond until you provide it.
“Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom.” comes pretty darn close. Still looking for the other quote. A lot of quotation sites ignore Carter. For a guy that singlehandedly talked the country into a recession, the guy wasn’t very quotable.
:dubious: No it doesn’t, Happy.
As has been mentioned, there are only photos and mutliple credible eyewitness accounts. So the incident did happen. You have a point about the rabies. I just think it is kind of comical, especially when you consider Jimmuh out in the boat all alone while everyone in the press corp stands on shore.
And just in case no one gets it, the remarks about UFOs and the “Rabbit” incident were just my lame attempt at humor. Still looking for a cite about the communism comment. It may come as a surprise to some, but not everything that ever happened in the history of the world is linkable on the Internet. If I recall, the comment was made in a print interview and didn’t make a lot of stir. It was after his presidency was over.
Nobody denied it happened. My god, man, there are much bigger things to be pissed at Carter about.
What is the obvious explanation for a mammal behaving in an uncharacteristically aggressive manner?
If your answer to Question 1 is the same as mine (and, I daresay, the same as quite a few other people’s), are you going to let the critter close in, or are you going to use whatever you have at hand to keep it at a distance?
Cite?
I’d hardly call [URL=news.com.com/2100-1001-825723.html]IBM
[/QUOTE]
“no one”.
I think if a former U.S. president has ever made a public or recorded statement that could in any way be construed as sympathetic to big- or small-“c” communism, that statement will be available on the Internet somewhere. This is one of those situations where absence of evidence really is evidence of absence.
And don’t forget, that was the years after Monty Python and the Holy Grail came out. You have to make allowances. We were all a little nervous about rabbits. :eek:
The booooones! Look at the boooones!
That’s hilarious. What great power Carter had! He could start a recession with the power of his eloquent oratory!
Certainly any significant quote from any recent president is going to be all over cyberspace. If Carter had espoused communism, it would have been documented. The logical conclusion is that he did not, meaning that the source of your information is in error.
Now, now, be fair – we could also simply be using the “wrong” definition of “communism” here (i.e., anything that differs from Happy Wanderer’s own interpretation of the word).
Happy Wanderer said that Jimmy Carter said:
Thomas Jefferson’s version:
Personally, I could do with a little more wisdom in my goverment right about now.
Everybody talks about how honest Jimmy Carter was. The fact is, his last years as Governor of Georgia were laced with scandal and corruption-a nursing home scandal almost landed him i court. He also brought a fair number of crooks with him to Washington-like Burt Lance (budget director and check-kiter). As president, the man was like a Boy Scout surrounded by riverboat gamblers-he was an easy mark for every crook in Washington. His foreighn policy was a mess-he allowed a band of thugs in Iran to humiliate him for 3 years-and ended the farce with a failed rescue attempt-which the Israelis warned him NOT to try.
Now he travels the world, bad-mouthing GWB. That is his right, but it is NOT what he should be doing. His activities have undermined several diplomatic efforts. So I say to JC: shut up and build houses!
Having traveled extensively overseas, mostly in the third world, I’m always interested in what people think about or remember about our US Presidents. So I ask about them as I travel.
Carter, curiously, was one of the ones I got the biggest response to. The reason? “Derechos humanos”, as they told me in Latin America. Human rights.
Before Carter, human rights were not a legitimate subject for discussion among governments. They were seen as an “internal” affair that each country got to choose about, and nobody could say anything.
Carter brought human rights front and center in the diplomatic world, and for that, he is remembered warmly by the folks at the bottom of the pile, the folks for whom “human rights” is more than just a slogan …
I consider this to be the most lasting, and by far the most important, of Carter’s presidential contributions. It far outweighs the problems with bunnies and hostages. He changed the landscape of international relations, and of human rights, forever.
For example, in large part, the huge debate about Guantanamo would not exist if the idea of universal human rights were not in its modern form … and for a lot of that form, we can thank Jimmy.
w.
PS - Busting Carter for the economic woes during his presidency is like busting Herbert Hoover for the Great Depression. The President has very little power over the economy, unless he wants to go on an FDR NRA kick, and modern presidents don’t really have that option.
I mean, think about it. What president wants the economy to go down? What president isn’t doing all he can to make the economy run strongly? As Clinton observed, “It’s the economy, stupid” … They’re all trying to make it work as well as it can.
And yet we still have recessions and downturns, which clearly shows the limits of presidential power over the economy.
:dubious: Why? What’s wrong with travelling the world bad-mouthing GWB? I’d be doing the same if I had Carter’s fame. And what “diplomatic efforts” has he “undermined” that should not have been undermined?