LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Luddite
built 150 days ago
The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had been putting people out of work for well over two centuries. Everybody saw this happening -- it became part of daily life. They ... saw the machines coming more and more to be the property of men who did not work, only owned and hired. It took no German philosopher, then or later, to point out what this did, had been doing, to wages and jobs. Public feeling about the machines could never have been simple unreasoning horror, but likely something more complex: the love/hate that grows up between humans and machinery -- especially when it's been around for a while -- not to mention serious resentment toward at least two multiplications of effect that were seen as unfair and threatening. One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work -- to be "worth" that many human souls.
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The last Luddite official is Elton Bomer, the former legislator and Insurance Commissioner who stepped down as George W. Bush’s Secretary of State in December 2000. As Texas’ “chief election officer,” the Secretary of State might be expected to lead the way in electronic filing. As an appointed official, Bomer did not need to raise and spend thousands of political dollars. His reports show that Bomer received large checks from some of the state’s most powerful PACs, businesspeople and lobbyists and spent much of this money along the Bush campaign trail.
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The word Luddite has an interesting origin in pop culture of the early 1800's. Legend has it that a young man name Ned Ludd broke an expensive knitting machine in Nottingham, England. Because Ned was considered to be "feeble-minded" by his boss, he wasn't held financially responsible for the broken equipment. Afterwards, when factory equipment broke, the damage was always blamed on Ned Ludd.
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The Luddite.This guitar model represents a return to simplicity, back to a time when pushing the envelope was less important to successful marketing than structural integrity and long-lasting functionality. Over the years I have watched the metamorphosis of the electric guitar as it passed through a series of stages: the Floyd Rose Vibrato, the single HOT bridge pickup, the cut-away, the double cut-away, 18 frets, 24 frets, self-sustaining pickups, neck joints at the 14th fret, neck joints at the 16th fret, and on some neck-through models the joint occurs even higher up the neck. While each of these innovations was new and exciting to some, every time a structural limitation was pushed a compromise had to be made. This Luddite is a modern manifestation of the 1920s parlour guitar. It has a single neck pickup, a tunamatic-style bridge with a short trapeze tailpiece and the neck joins the body at the 12th fret. The slotted headstock provides the strings a greater break angle over the nut.
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The Luddite movement, which began in 1811, took its name from the earlier Ned Ludd. For a short time the movement was so strong that it clashed in battles with the British Army. Measures taken by the government included a mass trial at York in 1812 that resulted in many executions and transportations (removal to a penal colony).
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This report on the Luddite rising appeared in The Times on April 21, 1812. The Luddite movement occurred at a brief moment in the early years of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. It comprised organized groups of craftsmen who attacked and destroyed the machinery of the new textile industries that were destroying their traditional livelihoods and independence. Luddite riots began in Nottingham in late 1811 and soon spread north in early 1812. The Luddite riot described here took place in the mill town of Macclesfield and was part of a wider series of disturbances that took place throughout the north of England that month. The riots were ended only by the repressive measures of the government of the day (the riots took place at a time of war with Napoleonic France), including the Frame Breaking Act that made the destruction of machines a capital offence.
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Luddite