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Post by Mike Thorson on Apr 24, 2003 8:47:50 GMT -5
If there are problems with missing posts I'm not aware of it and if it is happening I dont know why. You can try to do a search of keywords and make sure to put in how far back to search (number of days). That might find it for you.
Some posts have been moved around here and there. Other threads that were overly contentious were deleted outright by me.
In any case it's always a good idea to cut & paste stuff you want to 'save' into a doc on your own hard drive for future reference just in case stuff goes missing.
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Post by Mike Thorson on Jun 18, 2002 11:13:52 GMT -5
Impressive - was this correction due to you directly contacting them?? Very cool Good job - I guess things CAN be changed and updated. I don't think it would be quite as easy to do it on the SHSW website but that's understandable. By the way I keep calling it the State Historical Society of Wisconsin becasue its always been called that and they were quick to correct you if yo mis-stated it. Apparently form the literature I am receiving form them now they are called the Wisconsin Historical Society.
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Post by Mike Thorson on Oct 8, 2002 17:19:12 GMT -5
Ok Bob, you'll have to stop harassing Bob or I'll have to ban Bob. Sorry for the Bobbing
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Post by Mike Thorson on Feb 17, 2005 13:15:34 GMT -5
NOT CRAZY HORSE, JUST CRAZY
Wed Feb 16, 7:59 PM ET
By Ann Coulter
University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill has written that "unquestionably, America has earned" the attack of 9/11. He calls the attack itself a result of "gallant sacrifices of the combat teams." That the "combat teams" killed only 3,000 Americans, he says, shows they were not "unreasonable or vindictive." He says that in order to even the score with America, Muslim terrorists "would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people."
Ann Coulter
To grasp the current state of higher education in America, consider that if Churchill is at any risk at all of being fired, it is only because he smokes.
Churchill poses as a radical living on the edge, supremely confident that he is protected by tenure from being fired. College professors are the only people in America who assume they can't be fired for what they say.
Tenure was supposed to create an atmosphere of open debate and inquiry, but instead has created havens for talentless cowards who want to be insulated from life. Rather than fostering a climate of open inquiry, college campuses have become fascist colonies of anti-American hate speech, hypersensitivity, speech codes, banned words and prohibited scientific inquiry.
Even liberals don't try to defend Churchill on grounds that he is Galileo pursuing an abstract search for the truth. They simply invoke "free speech," like a deus ex machina to end all discussion. Like the words "diverse" and "tolerance," "free speech" means nothing but: "Shut up, we win." It's free speech (for liberals), diversity (of liberals) and tolerance (toward liberals).
Ironically, it is precisely because Churchill is paid by the taxpayers that "free speech" is implicated at all. The Constitution has nothing to say about the private sector firing employees for their speech. That's why you don't see Bill Maher on ABC anymore. Other well-known people who have been punished by their employers for their "free speech" include Al Campanis, Jimmy Breslin, Rush Limbaugh, Jimmy the Greek and Andy Rooney.
In fact, the Constitution says nothing about state governments firing employees for their speech: The First Amendment clearly says, "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." Firing Ward Churchill is a pseudo-problem caused by modern constitutional law, which willy-nilly applies the Bill of Rights to the states -- including the one amendment that clearly refers only to "Congress." (Liberals love to go around blustering "'no law' means 'no law'!" But apparently "Congress" doesn't mean "Congress.")
Even accepting the modern notion that the First Amendment applies to state governments, the Supreme Court has distinguished between the government as sovereign and the government as employer. The government is extremely limited in its ability to regulate the speech of private citizens, but not so limited in regulating the speech of its own employees.
So the First Amendment and "free speech" are really red herrings when it comes to whether Ward Churchill can be fired. Even state universities will not run afoul of the Constitution for firing a professor who is incapable of doing his job because he is a lunatic, an incompetent or an idiot -- and those determinations would obviously turn on the professor's "speech."
If a math professor's "speech" consisted of insisting that 2 plus 2 equals 5, or an astrophysicist's "speech" was to claim that the moon is made of Swiss cheese, or a history professor's "speech" consisted of rants about the racial inferiority of the n-----s, each one of them could be fired by a state university without running afoul of the constitution.
Just because we don't have bright lines for determining what speech can constitute a firing offense, doesn't mean there are no lines at all. If Churchill hasn't crossed them, we are admitting that almost nothing will debase and disgrace the office of professor (except, you know, suggesting that there might be innate differences in the mathematical abilities of men and women).
In addition to calling Americans murdered on 9/11 "little Eichmanns," Churchill has said:
The U.S. Army gave blankets infected with smallpox to the Indians specifically intending to spread the disease.
Not only are the diseased-blanket stories cited by Churchill denied by his alleged sources, but the very idea is contradicted by the facts of scientific discovery. The settlers didn't understand the mechanism of how disease was transmitted. Until Louis Pasteur's experiments in the second half of the 19th century, the idea that disease could be caused by living organisms was as scientifically accepted as crystal reading is today. Even after Pasteur, many scientists continued to believe disease was spontaneously generated from within. Churchill is imbuing the settlers with knowledge that in most cases wouldn't be accepted for another hundred years.
Indian reservations are the equivalent of Nazi concentration camps.
I forgot Auschwitz had a casino.
If Ward Churchill can be a college professor, what's David Duke waiting for?
The whole idea behind free speech is that in a marketplace of ideas, the truth will prevail. But liberals believe there is no such thing as truth and no idea can ever be false (unless it makes feminists cry, such as the idea that there are innate differences between men and women). Liberals are so enamored with the process of free speech that they have forgotten about the goal.
Faced with a professor who is a screaming lunatic, they retreat to, "Yes, but academic freedom, tenure, free speech, blah, blah," and their little liberal minds go into autopilot with all the slogans.
Why is it, again, that we are so committed to never, ever firing professors for their speech? Because we can't trust state officials to draw any lines at all here? Because ... because ... because they might start with crackpots like Ward Churchill -- but soon liberals would be endangered? Liberals don't think there is any conceivable line between them and Churchill? Ipse dixit.
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Post by Mike Thorson on Feb 10, 2005 15:19:56 GMT -5
These are excerpts from an article by Anne Coulter
"Churchill already has a phony lineage and phony war record. In 1983, Churchill met with Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi and later felt it necessary to announce that his group, the American Indian Movement, "has not requested arms from the Libyan government." In 1997, he was one of the "witnesses" who spoke at a "Free Mumia" event in Philadelphia on behalf of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Churchill's claim that he is an Indian isn't an incidental boast, it is central to his career, his writing, and his political activism. Churchill has been the co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado, the vice chairperson of the American Indian "Anti-Defamation" Council, and an associate professor and coordinator of American Indian Studies at the University of Colorado.
By Churchill's own account, a crucial factor in his political development was "being an American Indian referred to as 'chief' in a combat unit" in Vietnam, which made him sad. This is known to con men everywhere as a "two-fer."
In addition to an absence of evidence about his Indian heritage, there is an absence of evidence that he was in combat in Vietnam. After the POW Network revealed that Churchill had never seen combat, he countered with this powerful argument: "They can say whatever the hell they want. That's confidential information, and I've never ordered its release from the Department of Defense. End of story." [Mike note – doesn’t matter, military records for any individual are available by invoking the Freedom of Information Act and requesting the records]
In one of his books, "Struggle for the Land," Churchill advances the argument that one-third of America is the legal property of Indians. And if you believe Churchill is a real Indian, he also happens to be part owner of the Brooklyn Bridge.
In his most famous oeuvre, the famed 9/11 essay calling the 9/11 World Trade Center victims "little Eichmanns," he said "Arab terrorists" -- his quotes -- had simply "responded to the massive and sustained American terror bombing of Iraq" by giving Americans "a tiny dose of their own medicine."
Having blurted out "Iraq" in connection with 9/11 in a moment of pique, Churchill had to backpedal when the anti-war movement needed to argue that Iraq had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Arab terrorism. He later attached an "Addendum" to the essay saying that the 9/11 attack was not only payback for Iraq, but also for various other of this country's depredations especially against "real Indians" (of which he is not one).
In light of the fact that Churchill's entire persona, political activism, curriculum vitae, writings and university positions are based on his claim that he's an Indian, it's rather churlish of him to complain when people ask if he really is one. But whenever he is questioned about his heritage, Churchill rails that inquiries into his ancestry are "absolutely indefensible."
Churchill has gone from claiming he is one-eighth Indian "on a good day" to claiming he is "three-sixteenths Cherokee," to claiming he is one-sixty-fourth Cherokee through a Revolutionary War era ancestor named Joshua Tyner. (At least he's not posing as a phony Indian math professor.) A recent investigation by The Denver Post revealed that Tyner's father was indeed married to a Cherokee. But that was only after Joshua's mother -- and Churchill's relative -- was scalped by Indians.
By now, all that's left of Churchill's claim to Indian ancestry is his assertion: "It is just something that was common knowledge in my family."
Over the years, there were other subtle clues the university might have noticed.
Churchill is not in the tribal registries kept since the 1800s by the federal government.
No tribe will enroll him -- a verification process Churchill dismisses as "poodle papers" for Indians.
In 1990, Churchill was forced to stop selling his art as "Indian art" under federal legislation sponsored by then-representative -- and actual Indian! -- Ben Nighthorse Campbell, that required Indian artists to establish that they are accepted members of a federally recognized tribe. Churchill responded by denouncing the Indian artist who had exposed him.
In the early '90s, he hoodwinked an impecunious Cherokee tribe into granting him an "associate membership" by telling them he "wrote some books and was a big-time author." A tribal spokeswoman explained: He "convinced us he could help our people." They never heard from him again -- yet another treaty with the Indians broken by the white man. Soon thereafter, the tribe stopped offering "associate memberships."
A decade ago, Churchill was written up in an article in News From Indian Country, titled, "Sovereignty and Its Spokesmen: The Making of an Indian." The article noted that Churchill had claimed membership in a scrolling series of Indian tribes, but over "the course of two years, NFIC hasn't been able to confirm a single living Indian relative, let alone one real relative that can vouch for his tribal descent claim."
When real Indians complained to Colorado University in 1994 that a fake Indian was running their Indian Studies program, a spokeswoman for the CU president said the university needed "to determine if the position was designated for a Native American. And I can't answer that right now." Apparently it was answered in Churchill's favor since he's still teaching.
If he's not an Indian, it's not clear what Churchill does have to offer a university. In his book, "A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present," Churchill denounces Jews for presuming to imagine the Holocaust was unique. In the chapter titled "Lie for Lie: Linkages between Holocaust Deniers and Proponents of the Uniqueness of the Jewish Experience in World War II," Churchill calls the Third Reich merely "a crystallization" of Christopher Columbus' ravages of his people (if he were an Indian).
His research apparently consisted of watching the Disney movie "Pocahontas," which showed that the Indians meant the European settlers no harm.
Even the credulous Nation magazine -- always on red alert for tales of government oppression -- dismissed Churchill's 1988 book "Agents of Repression" about Cointelpro-type operations against the American Indian Movement, saying the book "does not give much new information" and "even a reader who is inclined to believe their allegations will want more evidence than they provide."
In response to the repeated complaints from Indians that a phony Indian was running CU's Indian Studies program, Churchill imperiously responded: "Guess what that means, guys? I'm not taking anyone's job, there wouldn't be an Indian Studies program if I wasn't coordinating it. ... They won't give you a job just because you have the paper." This white man of English and Swiss-German descent apparently believes there are no actual Indians deserving of his position at CU. "
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Post by Mike Thorson on Dec 8, 2004 15:33:57 GMT -5
Oh there you Bleanists go again.....
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Post by Mike Thorson on Nov 3, 2004 19:48:54 GMT -5
Agree with you wholeheartedly Bob.
I think the reason the major media claims that we are bitterly divided is that they don't like the election results, and that if the majority of Americans don't think like THEY do - well, then there's a problem by gum!
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Post by Mike Thorson on Oct 26, 2004 10:41:10 GMT -5
Mike wrote ... "I don't agree with your analogy. We are not talking about denying Civil Rights to a certain group of American citizens. I don't think the comparison comes anywhere close and for advocates to use this analogy I think further hurts their cause, because it diminishes real abuses of civil rights." Think again - you might be mistaken.
I showed your comments to a Civil Rights attorney here in Washington and he replied -
"The United States Commission on Civil Rights is preparing to address this long-standing national issue. According to recently published news accounts the Commission is currently investigating the possibility that the institutionalized use of "Indian" sports team tokens may violate Title II and/or Title IV Civil Rights Laws of 1964."
Cliff Krainik Sorry, but there is no equal - in any way - to Native American references being used in sports teams to things such as the denial of voting or other civil rights. Making this gigantic leap cheapens real violations of civil rights and opens up a Pandora's Box of litigation. Once again I see that if advocates don't get their way through hysterical hyperbole they will try to force it by means of litigation. I agree wholeheartedly with Bob's last comment - what a waste of time and resources, both desperately needed in the Native American community, on a superficial salve for American politically correct white liberals which would ultimately result in not a single changed mind - only a more resentful one.
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Post by Mike Thorson on Oct 25, 2004 13:40:28 GMT -5
Thank you for your voice of moderation, Mike.
I think it would have been so kind of the Woolworth Corporation in Greensboro, North Carolina to decide for themselves one fine day in 1960 to start serving African American students at their lunch counters. And "Wouldn´t It Be Lovely " if Ole Miss began admitting minority students back in 1962 of their own volition.
I agree that no one likes to be called a racist or socially insensitive to others race, religion, or sex Fine - change the image - don't hate the mirror.
Thanks Cliff. I don't agree with your analogy. We are not talking about denying Civil Rights to a certain group of American citizens. I don't think the comparison comes anywhere close and for advocates to use this analogy I think further hurts their cause, because it diminishes real abuses of civil rights. I don't like the use of Native American mascots either becasue it's a faux mockery of their culture. However, I resent, as I think others do, the hyperbole and ill;-advised comparisons used by those who want to get rid of using Native American mascots. Regarding your last statement I submit this - just because someone hurls an epithet at me, it doesn't make it true. Again, calling someone 'racist' because they wear a Washington Redskins sweatshirt does not necessarily mean that person is a racist. You say "change the image - don't hate the mirror" which does not work here. If the afroementioned example is forced to take of his Redskins sweatshirt he offends less people and he appears to not be racist - but IS he?
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Post by Mike Thorson on Oct 25, 2004 9:23:45 GMT -5
Gentlemen: Other than the discussions regarding the inappropriateness of the name REDSKINS, has anyone on the BHWMB actually used the term in referring to Native Americans? Cliff Krainik No i never have. Nor would I oppose teams dropping names that refer to Native Americans, if that is their choice. One should ask though, wouldn't it be better for organizations to come to this decision on their own, without being coerced? No person, or organization, likes to be called a racist, or insensitive. As expected, people and organizations react defensively to some group "getting in their face" about something. They are going about it the wrong way, if you ask me. Is the idea to cosmetically change something so it's politically correct, while not changing the hearts or thinking of anyone at the same time?
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Post by Mike Thorson on Oct 19, 2004 9:40:40 GMT -5
OK Honkies listen up.
This part of the board is for "Open Discussion" so you CAN talk about any subject (while this may even be OK for the Native American section too but anyway....) here without fear of "straying off the subject".
We're all friends here and friends may disagree - and- in the process, we might learn something.
As far as using research that members post here - I advise extreme caution. Some people believe that just because it's on the Internet, they can cut & paste and do whatever they want with it. NOT SO. Always cite the source and then get permission to use it, you'll save yourself lots of headaches and heartache in the long run.
White Honky Cracker Boy
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Post by Mike Thorson on Sept 23, 2004 16:25:41 GMT -5
Hey Bob I'm hearing that Marquette, your alma mater, is considering changing their name back to the Warriors. Think it will happen? Is alumni $$ the biggest reason for this?
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Post by Mike Thorson on Jul 14, 2004 8:26:42 GMT -5
You can talk about ANYTHING in this forum - Black Hawk War related or not.
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Post by Mike Thorson on May 18, 2004 12:44:31 GMT -5
Sounds like an interesting program, too bad my local PBS station doesn't come in. Sounds somewhat like the description I have heard of Ted Nugent's new reality show "Surviving Nugent", which I have not seen either. SInce I've seen neither maybe I oughta shaddup.
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Post by Mike Thorson on May 12, 2004 14:34:40 GMT -5
[quote author=Chris 5. He was an American whose reason for being in Iraq had more to do with repairing the infrastructure damaged by the war.[/quote] Chris, the infrastructure of Iraq was in bad condition for one reason - Saddam Hussein. For a view of an Iraqi that the media doesn't want to touch you should read this blog (others are linked from there too)done by an Iraqi - his post about the Iraqi army is particularly interesting. Don't be thrown by his sarcasm. iraqthemodel.blogspot.com
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