Are you old enough to remember the fighting between the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland?
To be more precise the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland that you make reference to are political handles more than religious agenda driven activities.
Quite a distraction for Americans that had no clue (past tense may be very wrong).
It is very necessary to look at political discussions with the eyes of a trained psychologist. One interesting thing that seems to be happening is splitting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... This all or nothing thinking is manipulated and abused by all manner of agenda driven groups. It may explain swings in poll results and more.
I am aware that the division of Northern Ireland into Catholics and Protestants merely reflected underlying social and economic causes.
The division of the Mideast into Muslim and Jewish similarly reflects underlying social and economic causes.
For Israel, it's a European-style nationalistic land grab which often uses religion as a convenient and cynical justification.
I think modern social scientists have explained the reasons for religion pretty well. It's all very nice and communal until you get to the point where they decide to kill off the people outside their group.
But I'm dismayed and outraged at this anti-Muslim racism which is promoted by the Israeli government. It's clearly part of their justification for stealing land and killing Muslims. And yes, I can see some of those psychological mechanisms in operation.
You're wrong on the facts and wrong on the law. (I know you're not a lawyer.)
I used to work in Jewish public relations. I wrote press releases for the Israeli government, on their blue letterhead. I wrote official statements that appeared the next day in the New York Times. I wrote the kind of propaganda you're spouting now.
"You don't know what you're talking about" is an overused phrase. But it's true in your case. (Especially about the law.)
Facts, logic, and law won't work on you. Time for plan B: boycotts, divestments, sanctions.
It reminds a lot of Jews, including me, of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Between 1940 when it was established and mid-1942 when the uprising started the 1,125 calories a day allocation caused over 1/5th of the population of the Warsaw Ghetto to starve to death. When the first uprising happened the Germans killed another 10% of the population within 3 months are exported the remaining population to death camps.
In Gaza the death toll from multiple uprisings is around 1/4%. The starvation is not remotely similar. It is an obscenity to compare the Warsaw Ghetto to If you are a Jew, you ought to be ashamed of yourself for saying something like that.
I read Emanuel Ringelblum's Warsaw Ghetto diaries, and I read the Amnesty International reports of Israeli human rights abuses. I read the accounts of how ambulances took pregnant Palestinian women to the border crossings, where the Israeli border guards forced them to get out and wait, until they delivered their babies at the crossing, where many of the children (and some of the mothers) died. I read a story of how a 50-year-old Palestinian man with a heart attack arrived at the border crossing, trying to get to an Israeli hospital, and the border guards wouldn't let him through, and he died. My father had a heart attack at the same age, he went to the hospital, and he lived another 20 years. I used to call the Israeli public relations office to verify these stories, and they simply lied. I saw many uncomfortable similarities between what I read in Ringelblum's diaries and what I read (and verified) in the Amnesty International report.
When I grew up, people used to say, "How could the world stand by silently when Jews were being killed?" Well, now you know. Palestinians are being killed, just as the world, including you, are standing by silently. I made a vow that if it ever happened again, I wouldn't stand by silently. That's why so many Jews led the opposition to the Vietnam war (and to every war).
If you are a Jew, or even if you're not, you should be ashamed to stand by silently while Palestinians are being killed.
Gaza is surrounded on all sides by a blockade which doesn't allow them to import or export any significant goods, or leave and come back to a university, for example.
Gaza has declared a state of war. The parent asserted that the Palestinians were interested in peace but the settlement enterprise prevented it. Gaza has no settlement enterprise.
I don't think Gaza declared a state of war, but I do know that immediately after -- at American and Israeli urging -- they had their elections, and Hamas won, the Israelis blockaded most of Gaza's imports and exports. There was no provocation. According to the Israelis themselves, they're deliberately keeping the Gazans in a state of "starvation." The doctors on the ground say that they're not getting enough food, medical supplies and other necessities. I remember Ringelblum saying that when the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto complained that they weren't allowed enough food, one of the arrogant Nazi officers said, "You Jews are very clever, you can smuggle in all the food you need." (The penalty for smuggling was death.) I saw the Israelis brag about the inadequate food they were supplying, and that's when the similarity to the Warsaw Ghetto became stark.
If that's true, then logically, the Israeli government is responsible for the illegal land grabs and killings by the settlers [in the West Bank], for example
I don't know how something that the operating government permits can be "illegal"
After WWII, a movement of international lawyers -- led in large part by Jewish lawyers, motivated by the example of the Nazi crimes -- wrote a body of law to make these activities illegal. Those were codified in the Geneva Conventions and other international laws. Even the Israeli government's own lawyers, such as Theodor
There are 0 Israelis who live in Gaza. There are 0 settlements in Gaza. All the Gazan Israeli wars of the last 10 years wars have been Gaza attacking Israel.
They tried taking the high road, the Gazans still won't accept living in Gaza and not Israel.
Gaza is surrounded on all sides by a blockade which doesn't allow them to import or export any significant goods, or leave and come back to a university, for example. It reminds a lot of Jews, including me, of the Warsaw Ghetto.
A blockade is an act of war. A people have a right to defend themselves against an attack.
The people who are firing those missiles and making those attacks are usually not controlled by Hamas, but are smaller militant factions, which don't want peace with Israel and often sabotage the peace efforts.
Israel claims that those militant factions are the "responsibility" of Hamas. If that's true, then logically, the Israeli government is responsible for the illegal land grabs and killings by the settlers, for example, but I can't remember an Israeli prosecution of settlers for killing Palestinians.
Israel would also be responsible for the illegal killings of civilians during the Gaza wars, including the "white flag" incidents where Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians, including children, who came out carrying a white flag as ordered (documented in the Goldstone report), but Israel has never prosecuted a solider for killing a Palestinian, or even admitted that it happened.
Too what extremist christian sect are you referring....I am sick and tired of hearing this as an argument. Please, citation, what modern christian group has danced around in the streets because innocent civilians where killed?....Im waiting....I really want to hear your response....
Are you old enough to remember the fighting between the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland?
When you studied history, did you learn about the Thirty Years War? The Crusades?
I dare you to try to identify another culture in the history of humanity that actually openly celebrates the murder of innocent civilians like way too many Muslims did on 9/11. Other cultures might kill innocents, but there's always reluctance to accept it and some sort of rationale used to justify it. But not Islam - Muslims were literally dancing in the streets on 9/11.
Well, let's start out with the Old Testament where the Israelis went around massacring the Caananites and other neighboring tribes, sometimes enslaving and raping the virgin girls, sometimes killing everyone.
I could also find lots of right-wing Israeli Jews who celebrated the murder of Palestinian children. Look up the "King's Torah."
Anybody who is familiar with world history can think of lots of examples in almost every culture. It's hard to find a century without a massacre.
Israel did a pretty good job of convincing the U.S. to wipe Iraq off the map. The American war hawks were people like Richard Perle, who were also right-wing Zionists. And Netanyahu was pushing us to attack Iraq.
Results: 3,000 Americans dead, 650,000 Iraqis dead, no Israelis dead.
Because Judaism doesn't have the concept of dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb, nor does Judaism demand death or conversion for all kafirs.
Modern liberal Jews, like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, don't have the concept of killing your rival Jews, massacring neighboring Jewish villages, starting wars with more powerful people and committing suicide rather than surrender.
The Israelis do. They celebrate Masada, where the Sicari, or "assassins," did all those things. You've heard of Zealots? The Sicari were the extremist wing of the Zealots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... They were a bunch of Jewish thugs and murderers who killed more Jews than Romans.
The Sicari committed suicide rather than surrender at the Roman siege of Masada.
The Israeli government brings American Jews to Masada on its Birthright tours, and they bring their army trainees to Masada as their "graduation." So what's the message: we want you to commit suicide for Zionism, rather than surrender, just as the Sicari did. The right wing Israelis celebrate Baruch Goldstein, who did just that, killing innocent Muslims at prayer in a suicide attack.
You show me the most anti-semitic, anti-Israel rants by a muslim, and I'll show you an equally anti-muslim racist rant from the Old Testament or from some modern Rabbis who are as bad or worse.
I would start with Yitzhak Shapria, who published The King's Torah, which says "There is a reason to kill babies even if they have not transgressed the seven Noahide Laws because of the future danger they may present, since it is assumed that they will grow up to be evil like their parents."
You show me the most brutal attacks by Muslims on Jews, and I'll show you ten equally brutal attacks by Jews on Muslims. I'll just look them up in the Goldstone Report and the B'Tselem web site.
Yes, well, you don't lie on security clearance paperwork.
Valerie Barr didn't lie on her security clearance. They asked her whether she was ever a member of an organization dedicated to the use of violence. She wasn't and she truthfully said no.
She was accused of lying by a special agent who thought that it was funny to post jokes on the Internet about liberal college professors getting beaten up, who interviewed her without a tape recorder and who destroyed his notes after summarizing what he thought she said, or what he wanted her to say.
There are many court cases in which an investigator or other cop claims that a defendant said something during an interview, the defense lawyer finds a tape recording of the interview, which demonstrates that the defendant didn't say that at all, and the investigator was lying. The cops are never prosecuted for lying.
That just happened with James Frascatore, the New York City cop who was caught on tape beating up James Blake for no reason. Frascatore knocked Blake to the ground and injured him, the cops made up a story to claim that Blake was resisting arrest, and the video showed the cops were lying.
In another case, he claimed that a woman was interfering with an arrest. Then her daughter's recording showed it wasn't true. http://www.nydailynews.com/new...
This sounds like one of those stories I used to hear during the cold war, about how under Communism, people could be fired just because they knew somebody who was arrested. Now we're doing it.
And you sound like one of the Communists who used to defend the practice. Which you're doing now.
http://news.sciencemag.org/peo... Researcher loses job at NSF after government questions her role as 1980s activist By Jeffrey Mervis 10 September 2014
Valerie Barr was 22 and living in New York City in 1979 when she became politically active. A recent graduate of New York University with a master’s degree in computer science, Barr handed out leaflets, stood behind tables at rallies, and baked cookies to support two left-wing groups, the Women’s Committee Against Genocide and the New Movement in Solidarity with Puerto Rican Independence. Despite her passion for those issues, she had a full-time job as a software developer—with 50-plus-hour workweeks and frequent visits to clients around the country—that took precedence.... By the late 1980s, she had resumed her pursuit of an academic career. A quarter-century later, she’s a tenured professor of computer science at Union College in Schenectady, New York, with a national reputation for her work improving computing education and attracting more women and minorities into the field.... in August 2013 she took a leave from Union College to join the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a program director in its Division of Undergraduate Education....
Federal investigators say that Barr lied during a routine background check about her affiliations with a domestic terrorist group that had ties to the two organizations to which she had belonged in the early 1980s. On 27 August, NSF said that her “dishonest conduct” compelled them to cancel her temporary assignment immediately, at the end of the first of what was expected to be a 2-year stint.
There is absolutely zero need to have everything typed as a matter of fact you are doing the kids a disservice here because they need to learn how to write legibly.
There is zero need to have the papers turned in online.
If they need to research online then they can and should use the library.
The English/Literature classes are classes where paper should still rule.
You are not an English teacher. You have no idea of the motivation that it gives kids to print out a neatly-typed page that they have written themselves.
Are any of my assumptions wrong? Are there any other options I'm not considering?
Yes, you shouldn't design your curriculum assuming students will have limitless access to a computer and internet. Don't have paper turned in online, print out resources to pass out to the student, show the videos in class, and make the amount of typing such that it can be done on school/library computers without excessive burden. There is nothing about learning the English language that requires a computer.
I write for a living. I taught a couple of writing classes. Writing on a computer is not a luxury or a convenience, it's not just easier than writing by hand, it's qualitatively different.
Writing teachers used to teach that the best way to improve a document is to rewrite it through several drafts. I used to retype a 10- or 15-page paper 5, 10 or more times on a manual typewriter.
Now on a computer I can write continuous new drafts with no effort.
As a result, I spend more time organizing my work, and get better-organized documents. I move paragraphs around, see how they look, and arrange them in a logical order.
Spelling used to be an enormous chore, but now spelling correction not only corrects your mistakes but makes it much easier to learn correct spelling in the first place.
Maybe the best value of computers is that the teacher can say, "I don't like this essay, it's wrong for this reason, change it," and you can change it with almost no effort.
You could teach auto mechanics with 1950s cars and learn how to replace spark plugs and repair carburetors. You could teach science courses with 19th century equipment and repeat Faraday's experiments.
But any kid that gets an education without the latest technology, that all his or her competitors grew up with, is getting a worse education and kept at a disadvantage.
Suppose that instead of being born into wealthy families, Steve Jobs or Bill Gates were born into simply lower-income middle-class families where they didn't have access to the latest technology like the new hobbyist computers. How far would they have gotten?
We have unfair economic discrimination in this country, wealthy kids have advantages that poor kids don't have, and there's no way to gloss over that by saying that it doesn't make any difference.
The two major activities of the Department of Labor are supporting unions regardless of merit, and attacking businesses regardless of merit. The 3rd and 4th activities are forcing employers to post silly notices and generating paperwork.
There's a story about a woman who sued her husband for divorce, on grounds of impotence.
They had a trial before a jury.
The man testified that not only was he not impotent, but he described his extravagant sexual prowess in detail.
The jury didn't believe him, and gave his wife a divorce.
They said he obviously knew nothing about the subject at all.
You remind me of that story, because you obviously know nothing about the subject at all.
After I read the studies, I called up the engineer who had done them. He was really enthusiastic about saving lives, and we had a nice conversation. He said that they had done ten studies and stopped. I asked him why they stopped and he said, "Ronald Reagan." As governor of California, Reagan cut the budget for the safety studies.
Wait, hang on. As you tell the story, "the California OSHA" did 10 studies, which all concluded that tools should come with built in GFCIs. Then, the government mandated built in GFCIs in power tools. Then, you talked to some nameless engineer who blamed Ronald Reagan for cutting off the studies..
No, there were 10 studies.
These engineers were investigating accidents and writing reports. They looked over all the reports to identify the most common categories of workplace fatalities, and then did individual studies of each of those categories to see why they were happening and whether there was any way to prevent them. They wrote a total of 10 reports. 2 of them were about electrocutions. One was about electrocutions in boom trucks, and the other was about electrocutions involving GFCIs. After they published 10 reports, Reagan, who was governor of California, used his budget authority to stop paying for the reports. He wasn't a nameless engineer. He was the author of one of the reports, he was speaking on the record, and I quoted him for my own report, although my editor may have cut out the part about Ronald Reagan. I could probably find his name if he had to (although it might take a Nexis search).
I don't remember whether the report concluded that tools should come with GFCIs. What it did say was that employers could save lives if they taught their workers the importance of GFCIs and how to use them, and required them to use GFCIs. They said that if the manufacturers made power tools with GFCIs incorporated, that would solve the problem too without having to depend on workers to cooperate and get it right.
At that time (about 1980) there was a big debate between the manufacturers and a large coalition of government and private advocates who wanted them to include GFCIs in industrial and consumer products, such as electric hair dryers which electrocuted about 500 children a year. The manufacturers didn't want to do it because it would increase the cost of the products by about 25 cents. You can read the whole debate in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, which opposed the regulations. Finally, after I talked to the guy, the government agencies decided to require the manufacturers to incorporate GFCIs in the products.
Did it occur to you that the government found solution to the problem, mandated that solution, and then decided to devote its resources elsewhere? Should they have done more studies to justify mandatory GFCIs AFTER GFCIs were made mandatory?
No, that's not the way it happened. Everybody in the construction business sort of knew that workers were getting electrocuted, although a lot of business owners ignored it. This GFCI study found out exactly how and why workers were getting electrocuted, and found was to prevent it, and this was part of the evidence to mandate the GFCIs.
After the GFCI study, they didn't need to keep doing GFCI studies. They went on to other causes of workplace fatalities, such as workplace falls and trench collapses. CalOSHA was studying local problems specific to California that even the Federal OSHA hadn't gotten around to. It was very cost-efficient, because they could save a lot of lives for not very much money. But Reagan was cutting taxes, so he cut these studies out of the budget.
(especially since Ronald Reagan) the budget for workplace inspections, and the number of inspectors, has been cut throughout MSHA
In 1980, the year Reagan was elected, the United Mine Workers represented 160,000 miners. In 2005, that number was 16,000. Since there are 10 times fewer coal miners than when Reagan was elected, doesn't it stand to reason that they need fewer safety inspectors?
All industrial jobs have declined since 1980. I mentioned coal mining because that's an occupation in which, to quote a Wall Street Journal headline, mines can be safe if the employers really try. In other words, in the free market, especially with high unemployment, many mine owners will skip standard, recommended safety procedures in order to make more profits, and have fatal accidents as a result. There are a few mine owners that follow safety procedures rigorously, but they're going against their free market incentives.
The reason I mentioned Ronald Reagan was that I used to work in the electrical construction industry, and I followed occupational safety. I looked for the best safety studies around, and I found that California OSHA had done a series of really great workplace safety studies, based on their accident investigations in California. Two of them dealt with electrocutions in the workplace. They found a large increase in two types of workplace electrocutions.
The first was the introduction of a new, smaller boom truck. The truck distributors were taking regular flatbed trucks and mounting small cranes on them, which were very popular and convenient for loading and unloading construction supplies, etc. But the drivers of these new trucks weren't trained in using boom trucks, and there were several accidents in which the booms hit high-voltage wires and electrocuted the workers. Those problems could be solved first by telling truck drivers that it was a hazard, and second by redesigning the trucks with insulation and grounding to prevent electrocution (which I think federal regulations now require).
The second was ground fault circuit interrupters. GFCIs are like high-speed circuit breakers. They're circuits that monitor the electrical power going through an electrical device like a drill. If there's a sudden surge of power, which indicates a short circuit, it shuts off the power. There were two kinds of GFCIs. You could built the circuit into the device, or you could get a separate GFCI, that looks like an extension plug, and plug the device into the GFCI in series with the power. At that time, they were using plug-in GFCI. Construction workers routinely work in wet sites, and the insulation on their power tools gets worn out. They would get a short circuit in the mud, the GFCI would cut off the power, and the tool would stop working. They'd reset the GFCI, and go back to work. The GFCI would cut off the power again -- because it was protecting the worker from being electrocuted. Finally, the worker would get irritated, unplug the GFCI, plug the tool directly into the extension cord -- and get electrocuted. The federal agencies solved that problem by requiring worker education but more effectively by requiring the manufacturers to incorporate the GFCI circuits in the tools themselves (which raised the price of the tool by about 25 cents). The manufacturers were also encouraged by losing product liability lawsuits from the families of workers who were killed and would have gotten a pittance from Worker's Compensation.
After I read the studies, I called up the engineer who had done them. He was really enthusiastic about saving lives, and we had a nice conversation. He said that they had done ten studies and stopped. I asked him why they stopped and he said, "Ronald Reagan." As governor of California, Reagan cut the budget for the safety studies.
The point of this story is to show the limits of the free market and the value of government. It illustrates how, under deregulation and the free market, employers have a financial ince
Capitalism as ideology-in-practice is as fantastical as communism, with competition as philosophy being as religious an approach as one of complete harmonious cooperation, but mix them together and you have an advanced modern society.
That's because some of the leading theorists of modern American capitalism are ex-Communists who left the party, denounced their old friends to HUAC, found rich patrons, and used their old skills and doublethink to glorify the free market. The National Review was full of them.
If in your youth you could justify the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovokia, then your country needed your skills then to justify the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, Iran, etc. If you could defend Stalin, then you could easily turn your skills to defending segregation.
I agree with you that the best systems seem to take the best parts of capitalism and socialism. They also seem to have a more equal distribution of wealth.
As for the auditing of private business, I disagree that it should be permitted. The issue you're describing occurs as a result of a lack of competition, either through a monopoly that has arisen from acquisitions or competitors failing or a government-granted monopoly such as a utility. Competition is extremely effective at reducing prices for consumers, improving the quality of service, and eliminating waste by businesses. Deregulation of utilities is a better solution than audits. However, anti-trust laws must be strongly enforced to ensure a persistent state of competition, or else the market will move toward a monopoly that may not be in the interest of consumers.
Every private business that is large enough to have stockholders is audited. Otherwise, how do you know that the CEO of the business isn't pocketing cash, or putting his daughter in a do-nothing job? How do you know the bookkeeper isn't stealing?
Competition isn't as efficient as you think it is. The coal mining industry is or was a competitive industry. But a lot of coal mines regularly had accidents, workers regularly died, and the managers and owners didn't do anything about it.
The Wall Street Journal used to cover the coal industry, and did a lot of stories about coal mine accidents. When a worker got killed, inevitably it was because the mine owner wasn't following standard safety procedures, like ventilating shafts so they wouldn't have methane explosions.
Since worker's compensation is no-fault insurance, and employees (and their survivors) can't sue the employers in court, mine owners can make more money by skipping safety procedures and letting miners die. So free market competition among mines drives employers to let workers die. If you spend more money on worker safety, your competitor who doesn't will out-compete you.
The Mine Safety and Health Administration (which is part of the Department of Labor) keeps after employers to follow safety regulations, but (especially since Ronald Reagan) the budget for workplace inspections, and the number of inspectors, has been cut throughout MSHA and OSHA. That's one of the reasons unions are so popular among coal miners. If your supervisor tells you to work in an unsafe shaft, where the roof isn't supported properly, you can refuse and the union will back you up. Without a union, you'd get fired and replaced with somebody else who is willing to work until the roof caves in on him.
So why, exactly, does the DoL have 5-tray DVD burners in the first place?
The DoL publishes a shitload of documents. They used to publish it all on paper. Now they publish it on the Internet, but at one time they could presumably save a lot of money if they published it on DVDs. If you want a report of every workplace fatality in the US in 2005, that's a lot of paper that you could fit on 1 DVD. http://www.bls.gov/opub/ http://www.dol.gov/ebsa/public... https://www.osha.gov/
(But that's assuming the DoL did have 5-tray DVD burners. The article just says that the guy used 5-tray DVD burners. It doesn't say that he used the DoL's 5-tray DVD burners.)
Slashdot Mirror
Are you old enough to remember the fighting between the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland?
To be more precise the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland that you make reference to are political handles more than
religious agenda driven activities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Quite a distraction for Americans that had no clue (past tense may be very wrong).
It is very necessary to look at political discussions with the eyes of a trained psychologist.
One interesting thing that seems to be happening is splitting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This all or nothing thinking is manipulated and abused by all manner of agenda driven
groups. It may explain swings in poll results and more.
I am aware that the division of Northern Ireland into Catholics and Protestants merely reflected underlying social and economic causes.
The division of the Mideast into Muslim and Jewish similarly reflects underlying social and economic causes.
For Israel, it's a European-style nationalistic land grab which often uses religion as a convenient and cynical justification.
I think modern social scientists have explained the reasons for religion pretty well. It's all very nice and communal until you get to the point where they decide to kill off the people outside their group.
But I'm dismayed and outraged at this anti-Muslim racism which is promoted by the Israeli government. It's clearly part of their justification for stealing land and killing Muslims. And yes, I can see some of those psychological mechanisms in operation.
You're wrong on the facts and wrong on the law. (I know you're not a lawyer.)
I used to work in Jewish public relations. I wrote press releases for the Israeli government, on their blue letterhead. I wrote official statements that appeared the next day in the New York Times. I wrote the kind of propaganda you're spouting now.
"You don't know what you're talking about" is an overused phrase. But it's true in your case. (Especially about the law.)
Facts, logic, and law won't work on you. Time for plan B: boycotts, divestments, sanctions.
Between 1940 when it was established and mid-1942 when the uprising started the 1,125 calories a day allocation caused over 1/5th of the population of the Warsaw Ghetto to starve to death. When the first uprising happened the Germans killed another 10% of the population within 3 months are exported the remaining population to death camps.
In Gaza the death toll from multiple uprisings is around 1/4%. The starvation is not remotely similar. It is an obscenity to compare the Warsaw Ghetto to If you are a Jew, you ought to be ashamed of yourself for saying something like that.
I read Emanuel Ringelblum's Warsaw Ghetto diaries, and I read the Amnesty International reports of Israeli human rights abuses. I read the accounts of how ambulances took pregnant Palestinian women to the border crossings, where the Israeli border guards forced them to get out and wait, until they delivered their babies at the crossing, where many of the children (and some of the mothers) died. I read a story of how a 50-year-old Palestinian man with a heart attack arrived at the border crossing, trying to get to an Israeli hospital, and the border guards wouldn't let him through, and he died. My father had a heart attack at the same age, he went to the hospital, and he lived another 20 years. I used to call the Israeli public relations office to verify these stories, and they simply lied. I saw many uncomfortable similarities between what I read in Ringelblum's diaries and what I read (and verified) in the Amnesty International report.
When I grew up, people used to say, "How could the world stand by silently when Jews were being killed?" Well, now you know. Palestinians are being killed, just as the world, including you, are standing by silently. I made a vow that if it ever happened again, I wouldn't stand by silently. That's why so many Jews led the opposition to the Vietnam war (and to every war).
If you are a Jew, or even if you're not, you should be ashamed to stand by silently while Palestinians are being killed.
Gaza has declared a state of war. The parent asserted that the Palestinians were interested in peace but the settlement enterprise prevented it. Gaza has no settlement enterprise.
I don't think Gaza declared a state of war, but I do know that immediately after -- at American and Israeli urging -- they had their elections, and Hamas won, the Israelis blockaded most of Gaza's imports and exports. There was no provocation. According to the Israelis themselves, they're deliberately keeping the Gazans in a state of "starvation." The doctors on the ground say that they're not getting enough food, medical supplies and other necessities. I remember Ringelblum saying that when the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto complained that they weren't allowed enough food, one of the arrogant Nazi officers said, "You Jews are very clever, you can smuggle in all the food you need." (The penalty for smuggling was death.) I saw the Israelis brag about the inadequate food they were supplying, and that's when the similarity to the Warsaw Ghetto became stark.
If that's true, then logically, the Israeli government is responsible for the illegal land grabs and killings by the settlers [in the West Bank], for example
I don't know how something that the operating government permits can be "illegal"
After WWII, a movement of international lawyers -- led in large part by Jewish lawyers, motivated by the example of the Nazi crimes -- wrote a body of law to make these activities illegal. Those were codified in the Geneva Conventions and other international laws. Even the Israeli government's own lawyers, such as Theodor
There are 0 Israelis who live in Gaza. There are 0 settlements in Gaza. All the Gazan Israeli wars of the last 10 years wars have been Gaza attacking Israel.
They tried taking the high road, the Gazans still won't accept living in Gaza and not Israel.
Gaza is surrounded on all sides by a blockade which doesn't allow them to import or export any significant goods, or leave and come back to a university, for example. It reminds a lot of Jews, including me, of the Warsaw Ghetto.
A blockade is an act of war. A people have a right to defend themselves against an attack.
The people who are firing those missiles and making those attacks are usually not controlled by Hamas, but are smaller militant factions, which don't want peace with Israel and often sabotage the peace efforts.
Israel claims that those militant factions are the "responsibility" of Hamas. If that's true, then logically, the Israeli government is responsible for the illegal land grabs and killings by the settlers, for example, but I can't remember an Israeli prosecution of settlers for killing Palestinians.
Israel would also be responsible for the illegal killings of civilians during the Gaza wars, including the "white flag" incidents where Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians, including children, who came out carrying a white flag as ordered (documented in the Goldstone report), but Israel has never prosecuted a solider for killing a Palestinian, or even admitted that it happened.
by prof_robinson
You're not a real professor, right?
Your just one of those guys who gets called "professor" because you're always using big words, is that it?
Yeah....and if that's the ONLY example you can find....you've pretty much proved his point.
Did you ever take a course in world history? Did you show up for class?
Too what extremist christian sect are you referring....I am sick and tired of hearing this as an argument. Please, citation, what modern christian group has danced around in the streets because innocent civilians where killed? ....Im waiting....I really want to hear your response....
Are you old enough to remember the fighting between the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland?
When you studied history, did you learn about the Thirty Years War? The Crusades?
I dare you to try to identify another culture in the history of humanity that actually openly celebrates the murder of innocent civilians like way too many Muslims did on 9/11. Other cultures might kill innocents, but there's always reluctance to accept it and some sort of rationale used to justify it. But not Islam - Muslims were literally dancing in the streets on 9/11.
Well, let's start out with the Old Testament where the Israelis went around massacring the Caananites and other neighboring tribes, sometimes enslaving and raping the virgin girls, sometimes killing everyone.
I could also find lots of right-wing Israeli Jews who celebrated the murder of Palestinian children. Look up the "King's Torah."
Anybody who is familiar with world history can think of lots of examples in almost every culture. It's hard to find a century without a massacre.
Nor does Israel murder Iranians in Argentina.
Why?
Israel did a pretty good job of convincing the U.S. to wipe Iraq off the map. The American war hawks were people like Richard Perle, who were also right-wing Zionists. And Netanyahu was pushing us to attack Iraq.
Results: 3,000 Americans dead, 650,000 Iraqis dead, no Israelis dead.
Because Judaism doesn't have the concept of dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb, nor does Judaism demand death or conversion for all kafirs .
Modern liberal Jews, like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, don't have the concept of killing your rival Jews, massacring neighboring Jewish villages, starting wars with more powerful people and committing suicide rather than surrender.
The Israelis do. They celebrate Masada, where the Sicari, or "assassins," did all those things. You've heard of Zealots? The Sicari were the extremist wing of the Zealots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... They were a bunch of Jewish thugs and murderers who killed more Jews than Romans.
The Sicari committed suicide rather than surrender at the Roman siege of Masada.
The Israeli government brings American Jews to Masada on its Birthright tours, and they bring their army trainees to Masada as their "graduation." So what's the message: we want you to commit suicide for Zionism, rather than surrender, just as the Sicari did. The right wing Israelis celebrate Baruch Goldstein, who did just that, killing innocent Muslims at prayer in a suicide attack.
You show me the most anti-semitic, anti-Israel rants by a muslim, and I'll show you an equally anti-muslim racist rant from the Old Testament or from some modern Rabbis who are as bad or worse.
I would start with Yitzhak Shapria, who published The King's Torah, which says "There is a reason to kill babies even if they have not transgressed the seven Noahide Laws because of the future danger they may present, since it is assumed that they will grow up to be evil like their parents."
You show me the most brutal attacks by Muslims on Jews, and I'll show you ten equally brutal attacks by Jews on Muslims. I'll just look them up in the Goldstone Report and the B'Tselem web site.
Muslims didn't assassinate the prime minister of Israel. Jewish nationalists did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Yes, well, you don't lie on security clearance paperwork.
Valerie Barr didn't lie on her security clearance. They asked her whether she was ever a member of an organization dedicated to the use of violence. She wasn't and she truthfully said no.
She was accused of lying by a special agent who thought that it was funny to post jokes on the Internet about liberal college professors getting beaten up, who interviewed her without a tape recorder and who destroyed his notes after summarizing what he thought she said, or what he wanted her to say.
There are many court cases in which an investigator or other cop claims that a defendant said something during an interview, the defense lawyer finds a tape recording of the interview, which demonstrates that the defendant didn't say that at all, and the investigator was lying. The cops are never prosecuted for lying.
That just happened with James Frascatore, the New York City cop who was caught on tape beating up James Blake for no reason. Frascatore knocked Blake to the ground and injured him, the cops made up a story to claim that Blake was resisting arrest, and the video showed the cops were lying.
In another case, he claimed that a woman was interfering with an arrest. Then her daughter's recording showed it wasn't true. http://www.nydailynews.com/new...
He was caught lying by a tape in another case. http://www.nydailynews.com/new...
This sounds like one of those stories I used to hear during the cold war, about how under Communism, people could be fired just because they knew somebody who was arrested. Now we're doing it.
And you sound like one of the Communists who used to defend the practice. Which you're doing now.
Similar to the Valerie Barr case too.
http://news.sciencemag.org/peo...
Researcher loses job at NSF after government questions her role as 1980s activist
By Jeffrey Mervis
10 September 2014
Valerie Barr was 22 and living in New York City in 1979 when she became politically active. A recent graduate of New York University with a master’s degree in computer science, Barr handed out leaflets, stood behind tables at rallies, and baked cookies to support two left-wing groups, the Women’s Committee Against Genocide and the New Movement in Solidarity with Puerto Rican Independence. Despite her passion for those issues, she had a full-time job as a software developer—with 50-plus-hour workweeks and frequent visits to clients around the country—that took precedence. ... By the late 1980s, she had resumed her pursuit of an academic career. A quarter-century later, she’s a tenured professor of computer science at Union College in Schenectady, New York, with a national reputation for her work improving computing education and attracting more women and minorities into the field. ... in August 2013 she took a leave from Union College to join the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a program director in its Division of Undergraduate Education. ...
Federal investigators say that Barr lied during a routine background check about her affiliations with a domestic terrorist group that had ties to the two organizations to which she had belonged in the early 1980s. On 27 August, NSF said that her “dishonest conduct” compelled them to cancel her temporary assignment immediately, at the end of the first of what was expected to be a 2-year stint.
I don't think they're talking about this http://www.amazon.com/Zippo-Wa...
People living hand to mouth don't need some teacher telling them they need to buy a damned computer.
This whole question smacks of someone who is a little clueless and out of touch with reality due to not enough real experience.
It looks like you never taught school.
Why do people hate teachers so much?
You are an English teacher.
There is absolutely zero need to have everything typed as a matter of fact you are doing the kids a disservice here because they need to learn how to write legibly.
There is zero need to have the papers turned in online.
If they need to research online then they can and should use the library.
The English/Literature classes are classes where paper should still rule.
You are not an English teacher. You have no idea of the motivation that it gives kids to print out a neatly-typed page that they have written themselves.
Typed could be done with a typewriter.
Where are you going to get 20 manual typewriters today?
When you add the cost of shipping, and the cost of a typing desk, they would cost you more than a Chromebook.
Are any of my assumptions wrong? Are there any other options I'm not considering?
Yes, you shouldn't design your curriculum assuming students will have limitless access to a computer and internet. Don't have paper turned in online, print out resources to pass out to the student, show the videos in class, and make the amount of typing such that it can be done on school/library computers without excessive burden. There is nothing about learning the English language that requires a computer.
I write for a living. I taught a couple of writing classes. Writing on a computer is not a luxury or a convenience, it's not just easier than writing by hand, it's qualitatively different.
Writing teachers used to teach that the best way to improve a document is to rewrite it through several drafts. I used to retype a 10- or 15-page paper 5, 10 or more times on a manual typewriter.
Now on a computer I can write continuous new drafts with no effort.
As a result, I spend more time organizing my work, and get better-organized documents. I move paragraphs around, see how they look, and arrange them in a logical order.
Spelling used to be an enormous chore, but now spelling correction not only corrects your mistakes but makes it much easier to learn correct spelling in the first place.
Maybe the best value of computers is that the teacher can say, "I don't like this essay, it's wrong for this reason, change it," and you can change it with almost no effort.
You could teach auto mechanics with 1950s cars and learn how to replace spark plugs and repair carburetors. You could teach science courses with 19th century equipment and repeat Faraday's experiments.
But any kid that gets an education without the latest technology, that all his or her competitors grew up with, is getting a worse education and kept at a disadvantage.
Suppose that instead of being born into wealthy families, Steve Jobs or Bill Gates were born into simply lower-income middle-class families where they didn't have access to the latest technology like the new hobbyist computers. How far would they have gotten?
We have unfair economic discrimination in this country, wealthy kids have advantages that poor kids don't have, and there's no way to gloss over that by saying that it doesn't make any difference.
The two major activities of the Department of Labor are supporting unions regardless of merit, and attacking businesses regardless of merit. The 3rd and 4th activities are forcing employers to post silly notices and generating paperwork.
There's a story about a woman who sued her husband for divorce, on grounds of impotence.
They had a trial before a jury.
The man testified that not only was he not impotent, but he described his extravagant sexual prowess in detail.
The jury didn't believe him, and gave his wife a divorce.
They said he obviously knew nothing about the subject at all.
You remind me of that story, because you obviously know nothing about the subject at all.
After I read the studies, I called up the engineer who had done them. He was really enthusiastic about saving lives, and we had a nice conversation. He said that they had done ten studies and stopped. I asked him why they stopped and he said, "Ronald Reagan." As governor of California, Reagan cut the budget for the safety studies.
Wait, hang on. As you tell the story, "the California OSHA" did 10 studies, which all concluded that tools should come with built in GFCIs. Then, the government mandated built in GFCIs in power tools. Then, you talked to some nameless engineer who blamed Ronald Reagan for cutting off the studies..
No, there were 10 studies.
These engineers were investigating accidents and writing reports. They looked over all the reports to identify the most common categories of workplace fatalities, and then did individual studies of each of those categories to see why they were happening and whether there was any way to prevent them. They wrote a total of 10 reports. 2 of them were about electrocutions. One was about electrocutions in boom trucks, and the other was about electrocutions involving GFCIs. After they published 10 reports, Reagan, who was governor of California, used his budget authority to stop paying for the reports. He wasn't a nameless engineer. He was the author of one of the reports, he was speaking on the record, and I quoted him for my own report, although my editor may have cut out the part about Ronald Reagan. I could probably find his name if he had to (although it might take a Nexis search).
I don't remember whether the report concluded that tools should come with GFCIs. What it did say was that employers could save lives if they taught their workers the importance of GFCIs and how to use them, and required them to use GFCIs. They said that if the manufacturers made power tools with GFCIs incorporated, that would solve the problem too without having to depend on workers to cooperate and get it right.
At that time (about 1980) there was a big debate between the manufacturers and a large coalition of government and private advocates who wanted them to include GFCIs in industrial and consumer products, such as electric hair dryers which electrocuted about 500 children a year. The manufacturers didn't want to do it because it would increase the cost of the products by about 25 cents. You can read the whole debate in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, which opposed the regulations. Finally, after I talked to the guy, the government agencies decided to require the manufacturers to incorporate GFCIs in the products.
Did it occur to you that the government found solution to the problem, mandated that solution, and then decided to devote its resources elsewhere? Should they have done more studies to justify mandatory GFCIs AFTER GFCIs were made mandatory?
No, that's not the way it happened. Everybody in the construction business sort of knew that workers were getting electrocuted, although a lot of business owners ignored it. This GFCI study found out exactly how and why workers were getting electrocuted, and found was to prevent it, and this was part of the evidence to mandate the GFCIs.
After the GFCI study, they didn't need to keep doing GFCI studies. They went on to other causes of workplace fatalities, such as workplace falls and trench collapses. CalOSHA was studying local problems specific to California that even the Federal OSHA hadn't gotten around to. It was very cost-efficient, because they could save a lot of lives for not very much money. But Reagan was cutting taxes, so he cut these studies out of the budget.
(especially since Ronald Reagan) the budget for workplace inspections, and the number of inspectors, has been cut throughout MSHA
In 1980, the year Reagan was elected, the United Mine Workers represented 160,000 miners. In 2005, that number was 16,000. Since there are 10 times fewer coal miners than when Reagan was elected, doesn't it stand to reason that they need fewer safety inspectors?
All industrial jobs have declined since 1980. I mentioned coal mining because that's an occupation in which, to quote a Wall Street Journal headline, mines can be safe if the employers really try. In other words, in the free market, especially with high unemployment, many mine owners will skip standard, recommended safety procedures in order to make more profits, and have fatal accidents as a result. There are a few mine owners that follow safety procedures rigorously, but they're going against their free market incentives.
The reason I mentioned Ronald Reagan was that I used to work in the electrical construction industry, and I followed occupational safety. I looked for the best safety studies around, and I found that California OSHA had done a series of really great workplace safety studies, based on their accident investigations in California. Two of them dealt with electrocutions in the workplace. They found a large increase in two types of workplace electrocutions.
The first was the introduction of a new, smaller boom truck. The truck distributors were taking regular flatbed trucks and mounting small cranes on them, which were very popular and convenient for loading and unloading construction supplies, etc. But the drivers of these new trucks weren't trained in using boom trucks, and there were several accidents in which the booms hit high-voltage wires and electrocuted the workers. Those problems could be solved first by telling truck drivers that it was a hazard, and second by redesigning the trucks with insulation and grounding to prevent electrocution (which I think federal regulations now require).
The second was ground fault circuit interrupters. GFCIs are like high-speed circuit breakers. They're circuits that monitor the electrical power going through an electrical device like a drill. If there's a sudden surge of power, which indicates a short circuit, it shuts off the power. There were two kinds of GFCIs. You could built the circuit into the device, or you could get a separate GFCI, that looks like an extension plug, and plug the device into the GFCI in series with the power. At that time, they were using plug-in GFCI. Construction workers routinely work in wet sites, and the insulation on their power tools gets worn out. They would get a short circuit in the mud, the GFCI would cut off the power, and the tool would stop working. They'd reset the GFCI, and go back to work. The GFCI would cut off the power again -- because it was protecting the worker from being electrocuted. Finally, the worker would get irritated, unplug the GFCI, plug the tool directly into the extension cord -- and get electrocuted. The federal agencies solved that problem by requiring worker education but more effectively by requiring the manufacturers to incorporate the GFCI circuits in the tools themselves (which raised the price of the tool by about 25 cents). The manufacturers were also encouraged by losing product liability lawsuits from the families of workers who were killed and would have gotten a pittance from Worker's Compensation.
After I read the studies, I called up the engineer who had done them. He was really enthusiastic about saving lives, and we had a nice conversation. He said that they had done ten studies and stopped. I asked him why they stopped and he said, "Ronald Reagan." As governor of California, Reagan cut the budget for the safety studies.
The point of this story is to show the limits of the free market and the value of government. It illustrates how, under deregulation and the free market, employers have a financial ince
They now have pretty much all their publications on line.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/
Don't forget, Gordon Crovitz notwithstanding, the government really did invent the Internet. http://articles.latimes.com/20...
Capitalism as ideology-in-practice is as fantastical as communism, with competition as philosophy being as religious an approach as one of complete harmonious cooperation, but mix them together and you have an advanced modern society.
That's because some of the leading theorists of modern American capitalism are ex-Communists who left the party, denounced their old friends to HUAC, found rich patrons, and used their old skills and doublethink to glorify the free market. The National Review was full of them.
If in your youth you could justify the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovokia, then your country needed your skills then to justify the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, Iran, etc. If you could defend Stalin, then you could easily turn your skills to defending segregation.
I agree with you that the best systems seem to take the best parts of capitalism and socialism. They also seem to have a more equal distribution of wealth.
As for the auditing of private business, I disagree that it should be permitted. The issue you're describing occurs as a result of a lack of competition, either through a monopoly that has arisen from acquisitions or competitors failing or a government-granted monopoly such as a utility. Competition is extremely effective at reducing prices for consumers, improving the quality of service, and eliminating waste by businesses. Deregulation of utilities is a better solution than audits. However, anti-trust laws must be strongly enforced to ensure a persistent state of competition, or else the market will move toward a monopoly that may not be in the interest of consumers.
Every private business that is large enough to have stockholders is audited. Otherwise, how do you know that the CEO of the business isn't pocketing cash, or putting his daughter in a do-nothing job? How do you know the bookkeeper isn't stealing?
Competition isn't as efficient as you think it is. The coal mining industry is or was a competitive industry. But a lot of coal mines regularly had accidents, workers regularly died, and the managers and owners didn't do anything about it.
The Wall Street Journal used to cover the coal industry, and did a lot of stories about coal mine accidents. When a worker got killed, inevitably it was because the mine owner wasn't following standard safety procedures, like ventilating shafts so they wouldn't have methane explosions.
Since worker's compensation is no-fault insurance, and employees (and their survivors) can't sue the employers in court, mine owners can make more money by skipping safety procedures and letting miners die. So free market competition among mines drives employers to let workers die. If you spend more money on worker safety, your competitor who doesn't will out-compete you.
The Mine Safety and Health Administration (which is part of the Department of Labor) keeps after employers to follow safety regulations, but (especially since Ronald Reagan) the budget for workplace inspections, and the number of inspectors, has been cut throughout MSHA and OSHA. That's one of the reasons unions are so popular among coal miners. If your supervisor tells you to work in an unsafe shaft, where the roof isn't supported properly, you can refuse and the union will back you up. Without a union, you'd get fired and replaced with somebody else who is willing to work until the roof caves in on him.
This is the Department of Labor. You don't think anyone there actually does any useful work do you? Get real.
I think telling employers how to stop their employees from getting injured and killed on the job is useful.
So why, exactly, does the DoL have 5-tray DVD burners in the first place?
The DoL publishes a shitload of documents. They used to publish it all on paper. Now they publish it on the Internet, but at one time they could presumably save a lot of money if they published it on DVDs. If you want a report of every workplace fatality in the US in 2005, that's a lot of paper that you could fit on 1 DVD.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/
http://www.dol.gov/ebsa/public...
https://www.osha.gov/
(But that's assuming the DoL did have 5-tray DVD burners. The article just says that the guy used 5-tray DVD burners. It doesn't say that he used the DoL's 5-tray DVD burners.)
Ohio should feel free to ask Obama to rename the highest mountain in Ohio to "Mt. McKinley."
Right next to Mt. Czolgosz.