If you bought a TV in 1970 for $400, you would likely
spend another $400 in the next 4 years having it repaired. But then there was
a revolution. Famous quality control expert W. Edwards Deming and others
helped managers realize the importance of doing things right. Now airplane,
computer, television, and drug makers, to give just a few examples, are
extremely serious about quality and reliability.
The quality revolution has not yet come to the legal
profession. Laws are still allowed to be sloppy. Often imperfect results are
simply ignored.
The DMV laws are an example. The auto insurance law in
Oregon is based on "belief" and is structured in such a way that you can lose
your driver's license because of a clerical error. It doesn't seem to bother
the law makers that "belief" cannot be reliably known, and the insurance
companies sometimes make mistakes. Amazed? Skeptical? Have a look at Oregon
law ORS 806.245 (b).
The laws define driving as a "privilege" in spite of the
fact that driving is a necessary freedom for a large percentage of us.
Calling driving a "privilege" supports a system in which insurance companies
make more profit.
Oregon law ORS 25.750 suspends a person's driver's license
for being behind in child support payments. But there are obvious problems
with this. Not having a driver's license is likely to make someone, usually a
man, less able to pay.
The child support law supports a common fraud: A woman
convinces a man she is serious about having a relationship, when in fact she
has no serious intent. Even though there is an understanding that they will
not have a child, the woman deliberately becomes pregnant. The woman
disconnects from the relationship, but gets paid by the man for her personal
project of having a baby. The child support also supports the woman, who can
quit her full-time job and get an easier part-time job to supplement the
money from the man.
Your telephone always works. Electricity is always
delivered. The reliability comes from investigating and correcting any
problem. In contrast, there is little desire to clean up faulty laws. Lawyers
don't want to disturb a system that pays them $100 to $350 an hour. Often
laws are allowed to be so confusing that citizens can't understand them.
Part of the reason that laws lack quality control is that
there are people who want to use the power of government to make money. If you
lose your driver's license in Oregon for a reason not related to safety, once
you get your license back you will have to pay about $3,000 extra to some auto
insurance company, even though the risk is not greater. It is easy to
construct a more perfect auto insurance law, but that would reduce the
unearned profit of the insurance companies.
This scheme of using the laws to make unearned profit is
used in other areas, also. In Oregon, if a car is towed because of being in a
wrong parking place, the cost of the tow to the car owner is far greater the
true cost. The extra money goes to the towing company.
Part of the problem of making laws is that lawmakers often
don't realize that lawmaking is difficult. The author of this article has, at
different times in his life, repaired the automatic flight control systems of
aircraft, worked in a Physics research laboratory, and written complex
computer programs. None of this is as difficult as making good laws. However,
people with no experience recognize that they should not repair aircraft. In
contrast, the only requirement to be elected a lawmaker is popularity, and
that is considered sufficient preparation.
Why don't judges demand quality control in laws? One reason
is that the legislature tells them they can't look before they decide. Oregon
law ORS 183.400 (4) limits the power of the Judiciary: A DMV agency rule, for
example, can only be examined to see if it (a) violates constitutional
provisions, or (b) exceeds the statutory authority of the agency; or (c) Was
adopted without compliance with applicable rule-making procedures.
That means that, if the DMV says that black is white,
judges must pretend they don't notice. Why? Well, (a) there is nothing in the
constitution that prevents someone from saying something that is obviously
crazy. (b) As long as the rule is about cars or driving, it is within the
authority of the DMV. (c) And, since the DMV mostly makes it own procedures,
it is unlikely a rule won't be in compliance.
If you studied American government in high school, you
learned that the U.S. Constitution establishes separation of powers. The
executive, legislative, and judicial branches are not allowed to interfere
with each other. In Oregon, there are numerous ways this sensible law is not
observed.
For example, the DMV is an agency of the executive branch,
but it is allowed to make rules that bind the citizen as surely as any law.
The only way an agency rule differs from a law is that it is not called a
law.
The DMV has its own judges called ALJs, Administrative Law
Judges, who decide whether those rules have been observed. So, the DMV has
departments that perform functions of all three branches of government.
The ultimate method of assuring there won't be close
scrutiny of the application of law is used in Oregon: The Legislative branch
doesn't give the Judicial branch enough money to operate. More than 40 people
have told the author that the Courts are under-funded and under-staffed.
Starving the judiciary is the surest means of preventing good judicial
action.
Do you want to experience for yourself how laws are made in
Oregon? The Oregon Department of Transportation is developing a system to
charge by the mile for driving in Oregon, and you can participate at the
February 14, 2003 meeting. ODOT plans to install GPS radio receivers in every
car to track where each car goes.
GPS stands for Global Positioning System. The system uses
satellite radio transmissions to show pilots or hikers their position, for
example. The GPS would calculate how many miles you drove in Oregon, and you
would pay when you bought gasoline. See the December 31, 2002 Associated Press
article at StatesmanJournal.com: Oregon drivers may pay more: http://news.statesmanjournal.com/article.cfm?i=541 84
Lawmaking is made to look very official and respectable.
But underneath, it often isn't. One of the Oregon government's web pages says
that ODOT's work is based partly on the "results of research of consultants
from Oregon State University and Portland State University". However, it takes
someone who has a minimal understanding of GPS about 10 seconds to realize
that the system they are considering won't work. The GPS system depends on
receiving the GPS radio signals. Anyone who covered the GPS antenna with
aluminum foil would show that they had driven zero miles in Oregon, and
therefore would pay no tax.
Aside from the fact that it won't work, there are so many
other problems with this idea that they cannot all be listed here. For
example, a system that charges by the mile will make the road taxes for SUVs
the same as the cost for fuel-efficient vehicles. At present, owners of SUVs
pay more because they pay a tax on gasoline. Another problem is that tracking
where each vehicle goes means that there will be no privacy.
Michael Jennings Futurepower P.O. Box 14491
Portland, OR 97293-0491
503-233-7820
E-Mail: MJennings AT myrealbox DOT com
(Take out the spaces, change AT to @, and change DOT to a
period to e-mail the author. The coded e-mail address helps discourage misuse
of the address by computer robots that harvest email addresses for sale to
those who send unwanted e-mail.)
It probably is not a good idea to be extremely demanding about the language used in Slashdot posts. I was typing very fast. Anyhow, I think that everyone knew what I meant: Windows XP seems to have problems when RAM begins is full and the OS begins using hard disk swap space.
I didn't word what I said very well, apparently. The councilman was saying that people should be ticketed for being in an intersection when the light is yellow, so that the yellow light was equivalent to a red light.
A city councilman in Portland, the largest city, tried to promote a law that
would require giving people tickets for going through a yellow (not red)
light. Of course, the purpose of a yellow light is to warn drivers that the
light will soon be red, not to make them stop.
For a while, there was a law in Portland that said you could be fined $400 for
jaywalking. This was especially foolish because there are many times when the
streets of Portland are empty.
Recently I talked with a programmer friend who said that he had spent a week
finding a subtle bug that mildly affected the user interface of one of his
company's products.
However, when I talk with people in Oregon government about the major defects
in Oregon law, they just dismiss the issue with very little thought. One
recently told me something to the effect of, "It would be too difficult to
make a more perfect law." Another said, "This is the legislature's
responsibility," which I understood to mean, "I don't have to think about it."
Mozilla doesn't often crash, as you say. It crashes (for me) only when there are a lot of instances of Mozilla running with a lot of tabs and I am typing rapidly or choosing menu operations rapidly. The crash problem seems to be caused by a buffer of operations being overrun.
The crashing may be associated with the known problems of Windows XP when the OS is operating close to the limits of installed memory, and it beginning to use virtual memory.
I often need to research several topics at the same time. For example, when a
customer calls I may need to open a new topic. I open several instances of Mozilla,
each with several tabs on one topic.
However, when Mozilla crashes, all instances of Mozilla browser and all
instances of Mozilla mail disappear.
It would be great if Mozilla would save its state after every operation, as
Opera does. It would be necessary that each instance maintain its own state
file. Then the topics could be reloaded after a crash, or after re-booting
the computer.
Questions such as this are interesting. However, the Slashdot editors seem to have lost interest in computing, but I haven't.
Read The Primal Scream, a book by Arthur Janov. He was a Los Angeles Russian who didn't have the good fortune to be connected with Brazil.
The practices of Primal Therapy bring back memories. Janov found people who say they can remember being born. After having done Primal Therapy for 4 years, I find the claims credible. (This was more than 20 years ago.)
John Lennon of The Beatles did Primal Therapy. Before he was doing 4 drugs and sleeping around. After, he stayed home with his child. The therapy seemed to have done him some good.
Your comment added some serious understanding to the article.
There is a big issue here. About half of the cost of DSL broadband in Portland, Oregon, USA is for the telephone company to deliver it. ATT has a monopoly on cable distribution here, so they do not sell cheaper than DSL.
Powerline distribution is cheaper and opens the market to competitors.
One thing to realize is that Hong Kong is a very small island with very high population density. Even so, the story says the company is only serving selected areas. That means there is very little distance between the server and the customers.
I will soon be trying the newest version of Ghost. I've been trying PowerQuest Drive Image and DeployCenter, and it is rather flaky the way it is designed. The old version of Ghost (4 years ago) were worse.
I totally agree that I should move to a more competent web host company. However, in three days of looking I was not able to find a better one. Any suggestions?
The people who stole the articles probably have no intention to resell them. Probably, they were just doing it because they could. The articles will sit on some hard drive somewhere, and eventually be deleted.
It would be impossible to resell the articles without revealing who stole them. Also, would you want an article from an unknown source, that could have changed it?
There is an excellent short book available online that explains the
conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. It was written by Jews who
recognize that there was unfairness by Jews in the formation of Israel. The
title is The
Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict. Here is a quote
from the chapter called Conclusion for Jewish Readers: "We know it is hard to accept emotionally, but in this case the Jewish people are
in the wrong. We took most of Palestine by force from the Arabs and blamed the
victims for resisting their dispossession."
The book says:
"During the 1948 war, 750,000 Palestinians fled in terror or were actively expelled from their ancestral homeland and turned into refugees. The state of Israel then refused to allow them to return and either destroyed their villages entirely or expropriated their land, orchards, houses, businesses and personal possessions for the use of the Jewish population. This was the birth of the state of Israel."
The Palestinians have, ever since, been living in refugee camps.
Why does the U.S. government give huge amounts of money to an already
prosperous country? An article written from notes of a speech by San
Francisco, California, political science professor Stephen Zunes explains
that U.S. weapons manufacturers sell weapons to both Israel and to
Arab countries. The article, U.S. Aid to Israel: Interpreting the "Strategic
Relationship" says,
According to Zunes, "The Israelis announced back in 1991 that they
supported the idea of a freeze in Middle East arms transfers, yet it was the
United States that rejected it."
Arguing about who is right in the daily battles obscures the underlying
reality. Once again, the Jews are doing something they have done many times in
the 3,200 years since Abraham, they are getting themselves killed. What do you
think will be the outcome when the 14 million Jews (total) in the world get
into gun battles with the 1.1 billion Muslims? Do you know that the Christian
fundamentalists have a tradition that all Jews will be killed or converted?
Why do you think the U.S. gives money to the Jews so they can buy U.S.
weapons? They are accomplishing exactly what they plan. The Jews will arrange
their own deaths. (Do you think that Christian fundamentalists are any more
Christian than Muslim fundamentalists are Muslim?)
The fact is that the land of Israel was populated with Arabs before the Jews
came. Arabs were moved off the land to make room for Jews. That's the
underlying problem.
There is nothing about being Jewish that depends on land. Being Jewish
is something of the heart and head. Albert Einstein said this, and I agree.
I'm not Jewish, and no one in my family is Jewish. However, I have respect for
the ancient books. "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.
That is the whole of the Torah. All else is commentary." - Hillel
For the last 30 years I've been trying to teach myself to be a social
theorist. It is impossible to predict the affairs of humans, even for someone
who has studied 30 years. However, it is at least a plausible theory that the
Jews are arranging once again to be victims. What number holocaust will this
be? The fifth? The tenth?
My Jewish friends are the least streetwise people I know. They continue a
tradition of thousands of years. It would not have required much insight,
during those hysterical times, to know that it was dangerous to draw a crowd.
Jesus Christ, a Jew, could have gone to the closest centurion and told him, "I
recommend giving to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things
that are God's. My ministry is not of this world." "I am not trying to take
power away from the Roman government." But he didn't do that, or didn't do it
enough, and he was killed.
Osama bin Laden's main complaint is U.S. support for the House of al Saud. He
wants Saudis to determine their own fate. Logically, U.S. citizens must
support that, or vote to return the U.S. to the British Empire.
This is a good question to bring to Slashdot, because many Slashdot readers are of above average intelligence.
Highly intelligent children often have a very difficult time in elementary school, which for them is like a prison.
Highly intelligent children are likely to be more aware of the lack of caring of the adults around them. The lack of caring is extremely difficult for a child to understand.
A lot of what is done in school just doesn't make sense. Highly intelligent children are more likely to have problems with things that don't make sense.
There are a lot of people who make their livings by giving diagnoses. Those people are unlikely to see that maybe some of a child's reaction is a healthy negative reaction.
If someone tried to force me now, as an adult, to sit in a desk all day listening to someone say uninteresting things, I can guarantee that my behavior would be 100% uncooperative. But they are diagnosing your child with a disease for behavior that is probably less than 40% uncooperative. Does that mean that I am 2 1/2 times sicker than your child?
Slashdot Mirror
I updated my article about the law in Oregon, Airplanes are safe, but laws often crash, to include the GPS law mistake:
Airplanes are safe, but laws often crash.
by Michael Jennings
If you bought a TV in 1970 for $400, you would likely spend another $400 in the next 4 years having it repaired. But then there was a revolution. Famous quality control expert W. Edwards Deming and others helped managers realize the importance of doing things right. Now airplane, computer, television, and drug makers, to give just a few examples, are extremely serious about quality and reliability.
The quality revolution has not yet come to the legal profession. Laws are still allowed to be sloppy. Often imperfect results are simply ignored.
The DMV laws are an example. The auto insurance law in Oregon is based on "belief" and is structured in such a way that you can lose your driver's license because of a clerical error. It doesn't seem to bother the law makers that "belief" cannot be reliably known, and the insurance companies sometimes make mistakes. Amazed? Skeptical? Have a look at Oregon law ORS 806.245 (b).
The laws define driving as a "privilege" in spite of the fact that driving is a necessary freedom for a large percentage of us. Calling driving a "privilege" supports a system in which insurance companies make more profit.
Oregon law ORS 25.750 suspends a person's driver's license for being behind in child support payments. But there are obvious problems with this. Not having a driver's license is likely to make someone, usually a man, less able to pay.
The child support law supports a common fraud: A woman convinces a man she is serious about having a relationship, when in fact she has no serious intent. Even though there is an understanding that they will not have a child, the woman deliberately becomes pregnant. The woman disconnects from the relationship, but gets paid by the man for her personal project of having a baby. The child support also supports the woman, who can quit her full-time job and get an easier part-time job to supplement the money from the man.
Your telephone always works. Electricity is always delivered. The reliability comes from investigating and correcting any problem. In contrast, there is little desire to clean up faulty laws. Lawyers don't want to disturb a system that pays them $100 to $350 an hour. Often laws are allowed to be so confusing that citizens can't understand them.
Part of the reason that laws lack quality control is that there are people who want to use the power of government to make money. If you lose your driver's license in Oregon for a reason not related to safety, once you get your license back you will have to pay about $3,000 extra to some auto insurance company, even though the risk is not greater. It is easy to construct a more perfect auto insurance law, but that would reduce the unearned profit of the insurance companies.
This scheme of using the laws to make unearned profit is used in other areas, also. In Oregon, if a car is towed because of being in a wrong parking place, the cost of the tow to the car owner is far greater the true cost. The extra money goes to the towing company.
Part of the problem of making laws is that lawmakers often don't realize that lawmaking is difficult. The author of this article has, at different times in his life, repaired the automatic flight control systems of aircraft, worked in a Physics research laboratory, and written complex computer programs. None of this is as difficult as making good laws. However, people with no experience recognize that they should not repair aircraft. In contrast, the only requirement to be elected a lawmaker is popularity, and that is considered sufficient preparation.
Why don't judges demand quality control in laws? One reason is that the legislature tells them they can't look before they decide. Oregon law ORS 183.400 (4) limits the power of the Judiciary: A DMV agency rule, for example, can only be examined to see if it (a) violates constitutional provisions, or (b) exceeds the statutory authority of the agency; or (c) Was adopted without compliance with applicable rule-making procedures.
That means that, if the DMV says that black is white, judges must pretend they don't notice. Why? Well, (a) there is nothing in the constitution that prevents someone from saying something that is obviously crazy. (b) As long as the rule is about cars or driving, it is within the authority of the DMV. (c) And, since the DMV mostly makes it own procedures, it is unlikely a rule won't be in compliance.
If you studied American government in high school, you learned that the U.S. Constitution establishes separation of powers. The executive, legislative, and judicial branches are not allowed to interfere with each other. In Oregon, there are numerous ways this sensible law is not observed.
For example, the DMV is an agency of the executive branch, but it is allowed to make rules that bind the citizen as surely as any law. The only way an agency rule differs from a law is that it is not called a law.
The DMV has its own judges called ALJs, Administrative Law Judges, who decide whether those rules have been observed. So, the DMV has departments that perform functions of all three branches of government.
The ultimate method of assuring there won't be close scrutiny of the application of law is used in Oregon: The Legislative branch doesn't give the Judicial branch enough money to operate. More than 40 people have told the author that the Courts are under-funded and under-staffed. Starving the judiciary is the surest means of preventing good judicial action.
Do you want to experience for yourself how laws are made in Oregon? The Oregon Department of Transportation is developing a system to charge by the mile for driving in Oregon, and you can participate at the February 14, 2003 meeting. ODOT plans to install GPS radio receivers in every car to track where each car goes.
GPS stands for Global Positioning System. The system uses satellite radio transmissions to show pilots or hikers their position, for example. The GPS would calculate how many miles you drove in Oregon, and you would pay when you bought gasoline. See the December 31, 2002 Associated Press article at StatesmanJournal.com: Oregon drivers may pay more: http://news.statesmanjournal.com/article.cfm?i=541 84
Also see the Oregon government's own web site: Road User Fee Task Force, http://www.odot.state.or.us/ruftf/documents.html.)
Lawmaking is made to look very official and respectable. But underneath, it often isn't. One of the Oregon government's web pages says that ODOT's work is based partly on the "results of research of consultants from Oregon State University and Portland State University". However, it takes someone who has a minimal understanding of GPS about 10 seconds to realize that the system they are considering won't work. The GPS system depends on receiving the GPS radio signals. Anyone who covered the GPS antenna with aluminum foil would show that they had driven zero miles in Oregon, and therefore would pay no tax.
Aside from the fact that it won't work, there are so many other problems with this idea that they cannot all be listed here. For example, a system that charges by the mile will make the road taxes for SUVs the same as the cost for fuel-efficient vehicles. At present, owners of SUVs pay more because they pay a tax on gasoline. Another problem is that tracking where each vehicle goes means that there will be no privacy.
See the DMV laws for yourself:
ORS 806.245 (b): http://www.leg.state.or.us/ors/806.html
ORS 25.750: http://www.leg.state.or.us/ors/025.html
ORS 183.400 (4): http://www.leg.state.or.us/ors/183.html
January 2, 2003, 9:56 AM, #1 (file lics001h.htm)
Michael Jennings
Futurepower
P.O. Box 14491
Portland, OR 97293-0491
503-233-7820
E-Mail: MJennings AT myrealbox DOT com
(Take out the spaces, change AT to @, and change DOT to a period to e-mail the author. The coded e-mail address helps discourage misuse of the address by computer robots that harvest email addresses for sale to those who send unwanted e-mail.)
It probably is not a good idea to be extremely demanding about the language used in Slashdot posts. I was typing very fast. Anyhow, I think that everyone knew what I meant: Windows XP seems to have problems when RAM begins is full and the OS begins using hard disk swap space.
I didn't word what I said very well, apparently. The councilman was saying that people should be ticketed for being in an intersection when the light is yellow, so that the yellow light was equivalent to a red light.
Very interesting. It's good to see that something is being done.
Oregon has a lot of foolishness surrounding laws. For example, see this: Airplanes are safe, but laws often crash..
A city councilman in Portland, the largest city, tried to promote a law that would require giving people tickets for going through a yellow (not red) light. Of course, the purpose of a yellow light is to warn drivers that the light will soon be red, not to make them stop.
For a while, there was a law in Portland that said you could be fined $400 for jaywalking. This was especially foolish because there are many times when the streets of Portland are empty.
Recently I talked with a programmer friend who said that he had spent a week finding a subtle bug that mildly affected the user interface of one of his company's products.
However, when I talk with people in Oregon government about the major defects in Oregon law, they just dismiss the issue with very little thought. One recently told me something to the effect of, "It would be too difficult to make a more perfect law." Another said, "This is the legislature's responsibility," which I understood to mean, "I don't have to think about it."
Mozilla doesn't often crash, as you say. It crashes (for me) only when there are a lot of instances of Mozilla running with a lot of tabs and I am typing rapidly or choosing menu operations rapidly. The crash problem seems to be caused by a buffer of operations being overrun.
The crashing may be associated with the known problems of Windows XP when the OS is operating close to the limits of installed memory, and it beginning to use virtual memory.
After every operation, like loading a web page, but before it crashes.
I often need to research several topics at the same time. For example, when a customer calls I may need to open a new topic. I open several instances of Mozilla, each with several tabs on one topic.
However, when Mozilla crashes, all instances of Mozilla browser and all instances of Mozilla mail disappear.
It would be great if Mozilla would save its state after every operation, as Opera does. It would be necessary that each instance maintain its own state file. Then the topics could be reloaded after a crash, or after re-booting the computer.
Security flaws in windows have done billions of dollars of damage. Somehow this fact is being astroturfed.
Users don't always know what caused their computers to crash. Even system administrators don't know, sometimes.
Questions such as this are interesting. However, the Slashdot editors seem to have lost interest in computing, but I haven't.
Read The Primal Scream, a book by Arthur Janov. He was a Los Angeles Russian who didn't have the good fortune to be connected with Brazil.
The practices of Primal Therapy bring back memories. Janov found people who say they can remember being born. After having done Primal Therapy for 4 years, I find the claims credible. (This was more than 20 years ago.)
John Lennon of The Beatles did Primal Therapy. Before he was doing 4 drugs and sleeping around. After, he stayed home with his child. The therapy seemed to have done him some good.
Your comment added some serious understanding to the article.
There is a big issue here. About half of the cost of DSL broadband in Portland, Oregon, USA is for the telephone company to deliver it. ATT has a monopoly on cable distribution here, so they do not sell cheaper than DSL.
Powerline distribution is cheaper and opens the market to competitors.
I read the article, but I don't know Hong Kong well enough to know what you said. Anyhow, it doesn't change my comment.
There is something different about the H.K. power system, as I remember. Can you help with this?
One thing to realize is that Hong Kong is a very small island with very high population density. Even so, the story says the company is only serving selected areas. That means there is very little distance between the server and the customers.
We've had major problems with the latest version of Dreamweaver making a mess of our HTML.
He's right. Modulated light avoids electromagnetic noise.
The local library treats donations of DVDs and CDs separately.
There is a simple way you can take action against the MPAA and RIAA. Donate your old music CDs and movie videos to your public library.
If you later decide that you want to hear or watch something you donated, just get it out of the library.
I will soon be trying the newest version of Ghost. I've been trying PowerQuest Drive Image and DeployCenter, and it is rather flaky the way it is designed. The old version of Ghost (4 years ago) were worse.
"12x ought to be enough for everyone
What? A number 2 pencil and several boxes of paper ought to be fast enough for everyone.
No, forget the paper. Just memorizing everything should be fast enough.
I totally agree that I should move to a more competent web host company. However, in three days of looking I was not able to find a better one. Any suggestions?
This seems like a good idea to me. However, both of my web hosts don't keep the time on their own servers current. I've never explored why.
The people who stole the articles probably have no intention to resell them. Probably, they were just doing it because they could. The articles will sit on some hard drive somewhere, and eventually be deleted.
It would be impossible to resell the articles without revealing who stole them. Also, would you want an article from an unknown source, that could have changed it?
You said, "I'm not an expert on history..."
There is an excellent short book available online that explains the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. It was written by Jews who recognize that there was unfairness by Jews in the formation of Israel. The title is The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict. Here is a quote from the chapter called Conclusion for Jewish Readers: "We know it is hard to accept emotionally, but in this case the Jewish people are in the wrong. We took most of Palestine by force from the Arabs and blamed the victims for resisting their dispossession."
The book says:
"During the 1948 war, 750,000 Palestinians fled in terror or were actively expelled from their ancestral homeland and turned into refugees. The state of Israel then refused to allow them to return and either destroyed their villages entirely or expropriated their land, orchards, houses, businesses and personal possessions for the use of the Jewish population. This was the birth of the state of Israel."
The Palestinians have, ever since, been living in refugee camps.
Why does the U.S. government give huge amounts of money to an already prosperous country? An article written from notes of a speech by San Francisco, California, political science professor Stephen Zunes explains that U.S. weapons manufacturers sell weapons to both Israel and to Arab countries. The article, U.S. Aid to Israel: Interpreting the "Strategic Relationship" says,
According to Zunes, "The Israelis announced back in 1991 that they supported the idea of a freeze in Middle East arms transfers, yet it was the United States that rejected it."
Arguing about who is right in the daily battles obscures the underlying reality. Once again, the Jews are doing something they have done many times in the 3,200 years since Abraham, they are getting themselves killed. What do you think will be the outcome when the 14 million Jews (total) in the world get into gun battles with the 1.1 billion Muslims? Do you know that the Christian fundamentalists have a tradition that all Jews will be killed or converted? Why do you think the U.S. gives money to the Jews so they can buy U.S. weapons? They are accomplishing exactly what they plan. The Jews will arrange their own deaths. (Do you think that Christian fundamentalists are any more Christian than Muslim fundamentalists are Muslim?)
The fact is that the land of Israel was populated with Arabs before the Jews came. Arabs were moved off the land to make room for Jews. That's the underlying problem.
There is nothing about being Jewish that depends on land. Being Jewish is something of the heart and head. Albert Einstein said this, and I agree.
I'm not Jewish, and no one in my family is Jewish. However, I have respect for the ancient books. "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole of the Torah. All else is commentary." - Hillel
For the last 30 years I've been trying to teach myself to be a social theorist. It is impossible to predict the affairs of humans, even for someone who has studied 30 years. However, it is at least a plausible theory that the Jews are arranging once again to be victims. What number holocaust will this be? The fifth? The tenth?
My Jewish friends are the least streetwise people I know. They continue a tradition of thousands of years. It would not have required much insight, during those hysterical times, to know that it was dangerous to draw a crowd. Jesus Christ, a Jew, could have gone to the closest centurion and told him, "I recommend giving to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's. My ministry is not of this world." "I am not trying to take power away from the Roman government." But he didn't do that, or didn't do it enough, and he was killed.
Osama bin Laden's main complaint is U.S. support for the House of al Saud. He wants Saudis to determine their own fate. Logically, U.S. citizens must support that, or vote to return the U.S. to the British Empire.
This is a good question to bring to Slashdot, because many Slashdot readers are of above average intelligence.
Highly intelligent children often have a very difficult time in elementary school, which for them is like a prison.
Highly intelligent children are likely to be more aware of the lack of caring of the adults around them. The lack of caring is extremely difficult for a child to understand.
A lot of what is done in school just doesn't make sense. Highly intelligent children are more likely to have problems with things that don't make sense.
There are a lot of people who make their livings by giving diagnoses. Those people are unlikely to see that maybe some of a child's reaction is a healthy negative reaction.
If someone tried to force me now, as an adult, to sit in a desk all day listening to someone say uninteresting things, I can guarantee that my behavior would be 100% uncooperative. But they are diagnosing your child with a disease for behavior that is probably less than 40% uncooperative. Does that mean that I am 2 1/2 times sicker than your child?