China is a country that is "friendly" to the U.S., despite their human rights abuses, because China is so profitable for many Americans to deal with. So sure, you can get TV broadcasts from countries friendly to the U.S. Freedom of speech doesn't mean speech for people your government agrees with. It's for people you *disagree* with.
What you can't get easily is broadcasts from countries unfriendly to the U.S., like Al-Manar. Set up a cable tv system that offers Al-Manar, and you'll get arrested fast enough. You'll probably get something like 6 1/2 years like Javed Iqbal did.
I realize that the U.S. has a great deal of freedom of expression, compared to other countries in the world, but if you were a black person in the South in the 1960s, or an accused Communist in the McCarthy era, or a homosexual prior to Stonewall, or a muslim or arab today, you'd have a lot of oppression.
I think it's better to acknowledge that oppression and work to stop; it, than to deny it exists and let it continue.
The Black Panthers weren't muslims. They weren't particularly religious.
I think there were a couple of cases of mosques burned down. You seem to be arguing that, if their mosques weren't burned down, and they weren't deported, they weren't oppressed. I think people can be oppressed without having their mosques burned down or being deported.
If you want cases of non-Muslims being prosecuted for expressing their First Amendment rights, look at the Communists during the McCarthy days, and in particular look up the Supreme Court case of Dennis vs. United States.
Of course, we oppressed the black slaves for the first 100 years of our country, and we continued to oppress the freed slaves for 100 years after the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. I think slavery qualifies as oppression, and so does killing somebody because he wants to vote.
We have the highest rates of imprisonment in the world. We have about 2% of the population in jail, and 10-20% of the black population, even though white people commit crimes just as frequently. That's oppression.
You can't get Al-Manar on CCTV in the US. A cable operator in Staten Island, NY tried to offer it, he was arrested, and sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison.
So what exactly is this oppression you're speaking of?
Well, there's Javed Iqbal who wound up sentenced to 6 1/2 years for offering a cable channel the government didn't like -- al-Manar. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/25/nyregion/25tv.html There are dozens of cases of muslims who were convicted and jailed as the result of entrapment or sometimes even innocent activities like holding paintball games.
The FBI treatment of the Black Panthers is probably the best recent textbook example of oppression of a political movement because of their beliefs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton
But 50 years ago, people didn't know how dangerous cigarettes were. They "sort of" knew that cigarettes were bad for your health, but they didn't appreciate *how dangerous* they were. For example, they didn't know that lung cancer is almost always fatal (John Wayne unusually had lung cancer and survived). People had the idea that if they did get lung cancer, they would get it cured. They didn't know about chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which kills off a *lot* of smokers, more than lung cancer itself. The increase in heart disease and stroke also kills more smokers than lung cancer.
Probably the first definitive study was the Surgeon General's 1964 report, and in response, the cigarette industry went into overdrive to convince their customers -- particularly young teenagers who were just starting out -- that the Surgeon General's report was wrong, that cigarettes really weren't that harmful, that doctors smoked cigarettes and recommended different brands (Camels, Chesterfields, whatever) to their patients.
Since cigarettes were one of the major advertisers for most newspapers and magazines (with a few notable exceptions like Good Housekeeping and the Readers Digest), you could read articles about every cancer except lung cancer. Some magazines commissioned stories "debunking" the Surgeon General's report, to suck up to their cigarette company advertisers.
The cigarette industry kept coming up with new lies, and each lie required a well-designed study to refute it.
One of the big debates was about whether nicotine was addicting, or whether smokers could stop whenever they felt like it. Teenagers thought they could start smoking for a while to be cool, and then stop later on when they felt like it. The tobacco executives literally swore under oath that nicotine wasn't addictive. It took a couple of "duh" studies to prove they were lying.
Only recently we've had studies of personal networks that showed *why* people start smoking. Basically they follow the lead of certain friends. That may sound like a "duh" study but the details weren't obvious.
One argument is that the antibiotics farmers use to promote animal growth are different from the ones used for human disease.
The reason that doesn't hold up is that bacteria develop antibiotic resistance through "cassettes" of antibiotic resistance genes, which contain genes that provide resistance to many antibiotics, by many mechanisms, and are spread among different bacterial species.
So when bacteria develop resistance to one antibiotic, they also develop resistance to other antibiotics.
That's my understanding, anyway. I'm not a bacteriologist.
Yes, it doesn't seem as if there's any legal basis to auctioning off a lot of these items.
I assume the theory is that he damaged his victims, and they have a right to sue him, get a judgment, and sell his possessions.
Where does the marshall's office get the right to take property seized for one purpose (evidence in a criminal case), and sell it for another purpose (compensation for victims)? If they wanted to proceed in a legal way, shouldn't someone have brought a civil suit against Kaczynski? Did that happen?
It sounds like they're extending some abuses of the abuses they established for the drug war into other areas.
Even when they win a civil suit, there are some materials that are judgment-proof. I didn't think you could take away a person's personal possessions, like diaries, family photos, etc.
If I sue you for a traffic accident, and wind up with a judgment that you can't pay, I don't have a right to get your personal diaries and family photos.
The fact that Kaczynski seems to be mentally ill makes it worse.
It's giving a cop the opportunity to perform a public humiliation on a mentally ill person.
When I used to do video and film work years ago, we had something called matte spray or anti-reflective spray.
We would spray it on anything that was causing reflections during the filming. It was temporary, and could be washed off (I think with alcohol).
I just did a Google search for "matte spray" and I saw some permanent sprays that are used on photographs. I'd prefer something that I could wash off with alcohol if I didn't like it or if it got dirty. So it would take some research to find the removable stuff.
But that might be a quick, cheap fix, or at least something to try out.
(I would however check very carefully first to make sure it didn't hurt the screen and could be cleaned off if you didn't like it. But you knew that.)
P.S. Be sure not to use matte black paint by mistake.
The brain isn't designed to think independent of context. It's built to be part of a social system. Yes, people need to think for themselves, but to mandate that requires us to break the architecture of our minds.
It requires a strong cognitive effort, anyway. Going along with the crowd is the default.
I think that most intelligent people can at least be trained to think for themselves. People who are trained as scientists or lawyers often go against the consensus -- they're trained to go against the consensus and often rewarded for doing so.
Going against the crowd probably goes against evolutionary fitness most of the time, but once in the while it has a big payoff.
Just for the record -- the WSJ series, which won a Pulitzer prize, is factual.
The reports of white flag killings were investigated by B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, by the BBC, by other news media and human rights organizations, and by the Goldstone Commission. The checked out the facts as thoroughly as possible, and the facts held up. For example, the BBC reporter noted that the witnesses reported that the IDF soldier was sitting on his tank eating potato chips, and they did find a bag of potato chips on the ground. Most significantly, they gave the Israeli government an opportunity to respond, and the Israeli government refused. That's verification.
Whatever other complaints you have, those are not "unverified" claims. They are unrebutted charges, because the Israeli government didn't rebut them.
I repeat: whenever anybody protests, the Hasbara squad calls him an "Israel hater." That's what you're doing.
I'm not going to debate this with you any more. My only purpose in posting this is to demonstrate to other Slashdotters that the the community that we no longer accept these Israeli crimes. It's bad for Israel and bad for the U.S.
I've always supported Israel but I can't support killing 2-year-old children.
You lost the debate. You're losing public support. Palestine will soon be a state. Go home.
Or you identify a massive illegal warrantless wiretapping campaign against American citizens, blow the whistle, and face 35 years in prison. That is what happened in referenced article...
I didn't feel quite as bad about it when I saw that he volunteered to be an undercover agent in a drug bust in his high school.
"They hate us because we blindly support Israel" "US foreign policy has caused this hatred"
Another Israel hater, how charming.
So, if we withdraw our "blind" support for Israel and let the chips fall where they may, the Islamists will stop hating us?
Hardly.
Let me contribute some facts here. The Wall Street Journal was across the street from the World Trade Towers. After 9/11, they were barely able to evacuate their offices before the WSJ offices were destroyed.
After 9/11 (and before it was bought up by Murdoch), the WSJ made a major effort to find out *why* terrorists would hate us. They used the resources of their worldwide bureaus and international editions. They *already* had access to leaders of the Arab world, and had been interviewing everybody from top rulers and billionaires to college students in MacDonald's. People subscribed to the WSJ and trusted them. This was the effort in which Daniel Perl was killed.
They got several important answers. One response kept coming up repeatedly. One interview summed it up. The guy said, "I love America. I got my MBA in America. But you must do something about Israel." People around the Arab world are really upset about the Israeli treatment of Palestinians. Some of them are using it cynically, but others are sincere.
I'm Jewish and I'm upset about it. For 20 years B'Tselem has been documenting atrocities that sound like what the Nazis did to the Jews. Now we have the Goldstone report.
The most outrageous and well-documented ones, I think, are the "white flag" cases. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/01/27/60853/israeli-troops-killed-gaza-children.html An Israeli soldier got out of a tank and machine-gunned down a 2-year-old and 7-year-old child, while their grandmother was standing outside their house waving a white flag. This really is the kind of thing the Nazis did to the Jews. There were many cases like this. It's been going on for 20 years. Israel didn't investigate them or prosecute the soldiers involved.
Our government has been supporting Netanyahu and the settlers on this. When reporters go to the site of a massacre like this, they often find equipment stamped "Made in USA". Whenever anybody protests, the Hasbara squad calls him an "Israel hater."
This understandably makes many Arabs hostile towards the U.S. If we hadn't let it get to this point starting 20 years ago, we wouldn't have so many Arabs that hate us. If we made Israel stop, we wouldn't have so many more Arabs hating us.
The solution is simple -- the settlements are illegal, and Israel should obey the law and get them out. Netanyahu won't do that because he's the party of the settlers. Our government won't force them, because the AIPAC lobby has a lock on our government.
I think the most likely solution is that the Palestinians will get their state. That will make the legal status of the settlements even worse. The Israelis will probably wind up with a worse solution than they could have gotten from Arafat. The settlers will have to choose between living as law-abiding citizens under a Palestinian government -- including Hamas -- or getting out. And unlike Gaza, they might not get $200,000 to $300,000 compensation for their homes this time. I just hope theydon't come back to Brooklyn.
I guess I am confused why you think this idiot should have a standing in the world among Muslims? He was a terrorist
Why does George W. Bush have standing among Americans? He was a terrorist who invaded Iraq, based on the lie that Saddam had WMDs, resulting in the deaths of 150,000 to 600,000 Iraqis (and the deaths of 4,000 Americans, if you don't care about Iraqis).
In the US, our state and federal governments are attacking teachers' unions, attacking teachers, firing teachers based on (unvalidated and fake) student test scores http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Rhee#Testing_Scandal, and requiring science teachers to teach evolution.
Canadians are teaching their kids real science. In 20 years, they're going to be up there with the Chinese, Europeans and Australians at the cutting edge of scientific research, and our kids are going to be sneaking over the border to get jobs serving bacon cheeseburgers in the Canadian fast food restaurants and trying to sell mortgage-backed securities.
Maybe if the Canadians humiliate us enough, it will be a wakeup call.
Interestingly, a lot of the Canadian research is not for developing a new drug, but for figuring out whether a treatment that is widely used but has never been tested before actually works.
Don't ever tell me that Canadians are taking advantage of U.S. research.
Slashdot Mirror
China is a country that is "friendly" to the U.S., despite their human rights abuses, because China is so profitable for many Americans to deal with. So sure, you can get TV broadcasts from countries friendly to the U.S. Freedom of speech doesn't mean speech for people your government agrees with. It's for people you *disagree* with.
What you can't get easily is broadcasts from countries unfriendly to the U.S., like Al-Manar. Set up a cable tv system that offers Al-Manar, and you'll get arrested fast enough. You'll probably get something like 6 1/2 years like Javed Iqbal did.
I realize that the U.S. has a great deal of freedom of expression, compared to other countries in the world, but if you were a black person in the South in the 1960s, or an accused Communist in the McCarthy era, or a homosexual prior to Stonewall, or a muslim or arab today, you'd have a lot of oppression.
I think it's better to acknowledge that oppression and work to stop; it, than to deny it exists and let it continue.
The Black Panthers weren't muslims. They weren't particularly religious.
I think there were a couple of cases of mosques burned down. You seem to be arguing that, if their mosques weren't burned down, and they weren't deported, they weren't oppressed. I think people can be oppressed without having their mosques burned down or being deported.
If you want cases of non-Muslims being prosecuted for expressing their First Amendment rights, look at the Communists during the McCarthy days, and in particular look up the Supreme Court case of Dennis vs. United States.
Of course, we oppressed the black slaves for the first 100 years of our country, and we continued to oppress the freed slaves for 100 years after the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. I think slavery qualifies as oppression, and so does killing somebody because he wants to vote.
We have the highest rates of imprisonment in the world. We have about 2% of the population in jail, and 10-20% of the black population, even though white people commit crimes just as frequently. That's oppression.
Al-Manar is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Manar
You can't get Al-Manar on CCTV in the US. A cable operator in Staten Island, NY tried to offer it, he was arrested, and sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison.
So what exactly is this oppression you're speaking of?
Well, there's Javed Iqbal who wound up sentenced to 6 1/2 years for offering a cable channel the government didn't like -- al-Manar. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/25/nyregion/25tv.html There are dozens of cases of muslims who were convicted and jailed as the result of entrapment or sometimes even innocent activities like holding paintball games.
The FBI treatment of the Black Panthers is probably the best recent textbook example of oppression of a political movement because of their beliefs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton
Yes, as you correctly suggest, before you were born.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_A._Wallace
And the surprising result that teenagers who lost their virginity earlier were less likely to become delinquents.
Sex education courses used to teach the opposite.
Hindsight is wonderful.
But 50 years ago, people didn't know how dangerous cigarettes were. They "sort of" knew that cigarettes were bad for your health, but they didn't appreciate *how dangerous* they were. For example, they didn't know that lung cancer is almost always fatal (John Wayne unusually had lung cancer and survived). People had the idea that if they did get lung cancer, they would get it cured. They didn't know about chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which kills off a *lot* of smokers, more than lung cancer itself. The increase in heart disease and stroke also kills more smokers than lung cancer.
Probably the first definitive study was the Surgeon General's 1964 report, and in response, the cigarette industry went into overdrive to convince their customers -- particularly young teenagers who were just starting out -- that the Surgeon General's report was wrong, that cigarettes really weren't that harmful, that doctors smoked cigarettes and recommended different brands (Camels, Chesterfields, whatever) to their patients.
Since cigarettes were one of the major advertisers for most newspapers and magazines (with a few notable exceptions like Good Housekeeping and the Readers Digest), you could read articles about every cancer except lung cancer. Some magazines commissioned stories "debunking" the Surgeon General's report, to suck up to their cigarette company advertisers.
The cigarette industry kept coming up with new lies, and each lie required a well-designed study to refute it.
One of the big debates was about whether nicotine was addicting, or whether smokers could stop whenever they felt like it. Teenagers thought they could start smoking for a while to be cool, and then stop later on when they felt like it. The tobacco executives literally swore under oath that nicotine wasn't addictive. It took a couple of "duh" studies to prove they were lying.
Only recently we've had studies of personal networks that showed *why* people start smoking. Basically they follow the lead of certain friends. That may sound like a "duh" study but the details weren't obvious.
Watch out who you're calling jackass, unless you want to demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Somebody once calculated that if you could otherwise live forever, but you smoked cigarettes, you'd live for 80 years.
It was more fun back in the old days when cigarette companies used to go to court and argue
(1) Cigarettes didn't cause your cancer because cigarettes don't cause cancer
(2) Everybody knows cigarettes cause cancer so you're totally responsible for your own decision to smoke.
One argument is that the antibiotics farmers use to promote animal growth are different from the ones used for human disease.
The reason that doesn't hold up is that bacteria develop antibiotic resistance through "cassettes" of antibiotic resistance genes, which contain genes that provide resistance to many antibiotics, by many mechanisms, and are spread among different bacterial species.
So when bacteria develop resistance to one antibiotic, they also develop resistance to other antibiotics.
That's my understanding, anyway. I'm not a bacteriologist.
Yes, it doesn't seem as if there's any legal basis to auctioning off a lot of these items.
I assume the theory is that he damaged his victims, and they have a right to sue him, get a judgment, and sell his possessions.
Where does the marshall's office get the right to take property seized for one purpose (evidence in a criminal case), and sell it for another purpose (compensation for victims)? If they wanted to proceed in a legal way, shouldn't someone have brought a civil suit against Kaczynski? Did that happen?
It sounds like they're extending some abuses of the abuses they established for the drug war into other areas.
Even when they win a civil suit, there are some materials that are judgment-proof. I didn't think you could take away a person's personal possessions, like diaries, family photos, etc.
If I sue you for a traffic accident, and wind up with a judgment that you can't pay, I don't have a right to get your personal diaries and family photos.
The fact that Kaczynski seems to be mentally ill makes it worse.
It's giving a cop the opportunity to perform a public humiliation on a mentally ill person.
When I used to do video and film work years ago, we had something called matte spray or anti-reflective spray.
We would spray it on anything that was causing reflections during the filming. It was temporary, and could be washed off (I think with alcohol).
I just did a Google search for "matte spray" and I saw some permanent sprays that are used on photographs. I'd prefer something that I could wash off with alcohol if I didn't like it or if it got dirty. So it would take some research to find the removable stuff.
But that might be a quick, cheap fix, or at least something to try out.
(I would however check very carefully first to make sure it didn't hurt the screen and could be cleaned off if you didn't like it. But you knew that.)
P.S. Be sure not to use matte black paint by mistake.
They already refuse to process payments to Wikileaks.
The brain isn't designed to think independent of context. It's built to be part of a social system. Yes, people need to think for themselves, but to mandate that requires us to break the architecture of our minds.
It requires a strong cognitive effort, anyway. Going along with the crowd is the default.
I think that most intelligent people can at least be trained to think for themselves. People who are trained as scientists or lawyers often go against the consensus -- they're trained to go against the consensus and often rewarded for doing so.
Going against the crowd probably goes against evolutionary fitness most of the time, but once in the while it has a big payoff.
Just for the record -- the WSJ series, which won a Pulitzer prize, is factual.
The reports of white flag killings were investigated by B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, by the BBC, by other news media and human rights organizations, and by the Goldstone Commission. The checked out the facts as thoroughly as possible, and the facts held up. For example, the BBC reporter noted that the witnesses reported that the IDF soldier was sitting on his tank eating potato chips, and they did find a bag of potato chips on the ground. Most significantly, they gave the Israeli government an opportunity to respond, and the Israeli government refused. That's verification.
Whatever other complaints you have, those are not "unverified" claims. They are unrebutted charges, because the Israeli government didn't rebut them.
I repeat: whenever anybody protests, the Hasbara squad calls him an "Israel hater." That's what you're doing.
I'm not going to debate this with you any more. My only purpose in posting this is to demonstrate to other Slashdotters that the the community that we no longer accept these Israeli crimes. It's bad for Israel and bad for the U.S.
I've always supported Israel but I can't support killing 2-year-old children.
You lost the debate. You're losing public support. Palestine will soon be a state. Go home.
Or you identify a massive illegal warrantless wiretapping campaign against American citizens, blow the whistle, and face 35 years in prison. That is what happened in referenced article...
I didn't feel quite as bad about it when I saw that he volunteered to be an undercover agent in a drug bust in his high school.
"They hate us because we blindly support Israel" "US foreign policy has caused this hatred"
Another Israel hater, how charming.
So, if we withdraw our "blind" support for Israel and let the chips fall where they may, the Islamists will stop hating us?
Hardly.
Let me contribute some facts here. The Wall Street Journal was across the street from the World Trade Towers. After 9/11, they were barely able to evacuate their offices before the WSJ offices were destroyed.
After 9/11 (and before it was bought up by Murdoch), the WSJ made a major effort to find out *why* terrorists would hate us. They used the resources of their worldwide bureaus and international editions. They *already* had access to leaders of the Arab world, and had been interviewing everybody from top rulers and billionaires to college students in MacDonald's. People subscribed to the WSJ and trusted them. This was the effort in which Daniel Perl was killed.
They got several important answers. One response kept coming up repeatedly. One interview summed it up. The guy said, "I love America. I got my MBA in America. But you must do something about Israel." People around the Arab world are really upset about the Israeli treatment of Palestinians. Some of them are using it cynically, but others are sincere.
I'm Jewish and I'm upset about it. For 20 years B'Tselem has been documenting atrocities that sound like what the Nazis did to the Jews. Now we have the Goldstone report.
The most outrageous and well-documented ones, I think, are the "white flag" cases. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/01/27/60853/israeli-troops-killed-gaza-children.html An Israeli soldier got out of a tank and machine-gunned down a 2-year-old and 7-year-old child, while their grandmother was standing outside their house waving a white flag. This really is the kind of thing the Nazis did to the Jews. There were many cases like this. It's been going on for 20 years. Israel didn't investigate them or prosecute the soldiers involved.
Our government has been supporting Netanyahu and the settlers on this. When reporters go to the site of a massacre like this, they often find equipment stamped "Made in USA". Whenever anybody protests, the Hasbara squad calls him an "Israel hater."
This understandably makes many Arabs hostile towards the U.S. If we hadn't let it get to this point starting 20 years ago, we wouldn't have so many Arabs that hate us. If we made Israel stop, we wouldn't have so many more Arabs hating us.
The solution is simple -- the settlements are illegal, and Israel should obey the law and get them out. Netanyahu won't do that because he's the party of the settlers. Our government won't force them, because the AIPAC lobby has a lock on our government.
I think the most likely solution is that the Palestinians will get their state. That will make the legal status of the settlements even worse. The Israelis will probably wind up with a worse solution than they could have gotten from Arafat. The settlers will have to choose between living as law-abiding citizens under a Palestinian government -- including Hamas -- or getting out. And unlike Gaza, they might not get $200,000 to $300,000 compensation for their homes this time. I just hope theydon't come back to Brooklyn.
OK. Correction. He's a war criminal, not a terrorist.
Do you suppose Obama has porn?
I guess I am confused why you think this idiot should have a standing in the world among Muslims? He was a terrorist
Why does George W. Bush have standing among Americans? He was a terrorist who invaded Iraq, based on the lie that Saddam had WMDs, resulting in the deaths of 150,000 to 600,000 Iraqis (and the deaths of 4,000 Americans, if you don't care about Iraqis).
This is a Canadian Sputnik.
In the US, our state and federal governments are attacking teachers' unions, attacking teachers, firing teachers based on (unvalidated and fake) student test scores http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Rhee#Testing_Scandal, and requiring science teachers to teach evolution.
Canadians are teaching their kids real science. In 20 years, they're going to be up there with the Chinese, Europeans and Australians at the cutting edge of scientific research, and our kids are going to be sneaking over the border to get jobs serving bacon cheeseburgers in the Canadian fast food restaurants and trying to sell mortgage-backed securities.
Maybe if the Canadians humiliate us enough, it will be a wakeup call.
Canadian scientists contribute their share. Pick up any major medical journal and you'll see important articles by Canadian researchers.
Like this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21488765 or this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21470008 or this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21388310 or this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21345102
Oh, yeah. Insulin. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1923/
Interestingly, a lot of the Canadian research is not for developing a new drug, but for figuring out whether a treatment that is widely used but has never been tested before actually works.
Don't ever tell me that Canadians are taking advantage of U.S. research.
You wouldn't have any interest in invading the U.S. and taking over, would you?
We'll greet you with flowers.
But Obama *appointed* her, didn't he?
I don't understand. Was this another example of his "post-partisanship"? http://www.credoaction.com/comics/2011/04/the-adventures-of-middle-man/
Sadly because of absurd Supreme Court rulings, such a law would most likely require a constitutional amendment,
Or a new Supreme Court.