It's not hyperbole. There are cases like that. (There may be a few cases cited on the Wikipedia HIPAA or Electronic Medical Record pages.)
Law enforcement access is explicitly permitted by HIPAA. I don't think that a law enforcement officer needs a court order, warrant or subpoena to get access to medical records. If you know of any regulation or cases to the contrary, I'd like to see the citation.
Hospitals can impose stricter access than HIPAA , but they don't have to.
Why would the DEA waste their time and money on this? HIPAA thoroughly establishes prescription records as being contained within the scope of medical privacy.
That's not true, even though they mislead people to think it is.
Prescription records are covered by medical "privacy," which means that only people with a medical or administrative purpose can have access to those records.
But but law enforcement is one of those administrative purposes, and law enforcement has access to those records:
Covered entities may disclose protected health information to law enforcement officials for law enforcement purposes as required by law (including court orders, court-ordered warrants, subpoenas) and administrative requests; or to identify or locate a suspect, fugitive, material witness, or missing person. http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/understanding/summary/index.html
That deceitful, misleading hhs.gov page doesn't tell you that there are many exceptions to HIPAA, including law enforcement access, which is buried within links that are difficult to get to:
Covered entities may disclose protected health information to law enforcement officials for law enforcement purposes as required by law (including court orders, court-ordered warrants, subpoenas) and administrative requests; or to identify or locate a suspect, fugitive, material witness, or missing person. http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/understanding/summary/index.html Summary of the HIPAA Privacy Rule (emphasis added)
What that means is that a cop can go into a hospital, flash his badge, and copy all your medical records if he feels like it, without violating HIPAA. Individual hospitals may have different policies, but nothing in HIPAA prevents that.
There are also no penalties under HIPAA for releasing private health information to third parties like that. All those big fines that HHS is touting are for structural problems with their databases, not for improperly releasing information about specific individuals.
the U.S. was created very explicitly with the premise that [1] there is a God [2] that this God gave freedom and dignity to each individual (therefore the individual matters)
Boy, did you get your history wrong. Did they teach the First Amendment where you went to school?
and [3] those individuals LEND limited power to government .
Well, it's not the only problem: I distinctly remember as an elementary school student getting "lessons" about how awesome the latest war effort was, and being required to sing patriotic songs, and of course the reciting of the Pledge of Allegience which requires students to profess a belief in God.
I was in high school when they inserted "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. I refused to say it, and my home room teacher had a shit fit. (Stupid nationalistic gym teacher.)
I haven't said it since.
And I won't say it until we really do have liberty and justice for all -- which isn't the direction we're going in right now.
Its purpose is to give police officers overtime pay, for doing the easiest thing in the world, giving nonsensical lectures to kids who would rather be listening to a cop than doing real schoolwork.
The only easier way for a cop to make money is to sit on his ass behind a computer and pretend to be a precocious 12-year-old girl on chat.
"former Mossad director Shabtai Shavit told Reuters that the option of extrajudicial execution was considered in 1986, but rejected because "Jews don't do that to other Jews."
I said it was possible that Blacks attending segregated schools before WW2 were getting a better education than Blacks attending dysfunctinoal inner-city schools today.
...increase in test scores in math and...
Since you're actually taking it seriously I'll look it up. I can't find the chart that would have expressed it clearly but the data here shows that blacks improved significantly from 1970 until today. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2008/2009479.asp
When you talk about "dysfunctional" inner-city schools you're begging the question. If they're dysfunctional then by definition the functional segregated schools, to the extent that there were any, were better. There may have been some segregated schools that were better than inner-city schools, but I think this data shows that overall the segregated schools were worse than the center-city schools.
So you're on the record that test scores are the measure to use? I'm sure some people would argue against that, but that's beside the point.
For the record I'll say that well-designed, statistically valid test scores measure what they're intended to measure. The NAEP was designed to measure educational achievement to evaluate the educational system as a whole, and break it down by certain categories, including race. I think the NAEP data demonstrates that blacks had lower educational achievement in math and reading in 1970, and that their educational achievement increased dramatically from 1970 to 2008. This was contemporaneous with the desegregation of a lot of schools (and workplaces), and I think desegregation was a major cause of the increase.
The best data says that, overall, black educational achievement increased from 1970 to 2008. The schools that black kids went to in 1970, including a lot of segregated schools, were not doing better, overall, than the schools that black kids were going to in 2008.
To reiterate--there's no getting around the fact that Black schools in the South were underfunded, in run-down buildings, with old texts and worse teachers. The question is, is that any better than today's schools in the cities that are also underfunded, run-down, with iPads, tenured mediocrity, students whose parents are drug users vs. oppressed field workers, etc.?
A real answer to that question seems hard to come by. You're going to get anecdotes at best. I think the opportunities for Blacks are definitely better today than they were then; but if it were possible to chose a Georgia segregated school in 1935, or a Detroit inner-city public school in 2013, which would you pick? That's the question.
I don't know Detroit but I do know New York, and there is a wide range of quality among the public schools. There are millionaires who send their kids to the public schools. There may well have been a segregated school in Georgia whose teachers and parents were so dedicated that they gave a good education. All those black lawyers must have come from someplace. My Gunnar Myrdal books are packed away, so I can't look it up. There probably are teachers and parents in Detroit who are so dedicated that they're giving their kids a good education.
If you read Diane Ravitch, a former conservative Republican who nonetheless followed the data, you'll see that the main factor associated with educational achievement was family income. Lifting people out of poverty would do a lot of good. Just giving handouts to the poor does a lot of good. But giving handouts to computer consultants or following the latest education fads doesn't seem to do much good.
I read Charles Murray's articles when The Bell Curve came out. I used to read the Wall Street Journal editorial page and also Science, Scientific American and New Scientist, so I got both sides of the argument. I don't remember the details any more but I do remember that not many psychologists agreed with Murray.
The basic problem was this: If you want to compare the IQ of two "races," you have to get a group from each race that was brought up in the same environment and test them. (You also have to get a valid test in the native language of each group.)
How can you get a group of native Africans who were brought up in the same environment as whites? If you think it out, it can't be done. How do you get a representative sample of Africans? How do you correct for education? Blacks and white in Africa have different opportunities, occupations, education, income, etc.
How was education in black and minority communities pre-WWII?
The first thought that occurred to me was that education in pre-WW2 segregated schools might actually have been better than education in today's "integrated" inner-city schools.
No, there's data on that, and it was submitted in the Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education. The southerners claimed that their schools were "separate but equal," so the lawyers proved they weren't. The schools got far less money, the teachers were less qualified, and the textbooks were hand-me-downs from white schools (30-year-old science and history textbooks).
If you look up the NAEP data, you'll see that there's been a steady increase in test scores in math and English for black students from 1970 to today, when they're almost equal. http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012026/tables/table_12b.asp
It's also part of a system that cares more about the Democratic Party machine and re-electing politicians than it does educating.
I've got news for you. The Republican Party machine cares more about re-electing politicians than it does educating, or anything else. Grover Norquist said that he wanted to destroy the government, as long as he can cut his taxes.
You are deluded that education in prior decades was solely focused on rote memorization, as writing, speech making and speech, and solving problems from principles was also taught.
Yes, and to prove it, look up the Apology of Socrates or Euclid's Geometry on Project Gutenberg (I'm fine with online resources when they make sense).
When George W. Bush visited England, one of the British tabloids printed a map on the front page with a big arrow pointing to London, and the headline, "WE'RE HERE!"
We need an education major who knows all those statistics -- oops! We sent them all off to study hotel management instead.
Anecdotally, there was an article in I think Slate that looked up old prewar high school exams, and I couldn't pass them today. Some people got a very impressive education before WWII, other people didn't. I found my father's old prewar college math textbooks down the cellar, and his freshman math course was covering stuff I had done in high school, like basic algebra.
The best data I know of offhand is from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tested a good national sample of students every year since 1970 for math and reading. http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012026/tables/table_12b.asp
According to those data, the test results were about level since 1970, with no more than 1-2% variation, not consistently up or down.
The impressive exception was among black students, who had very low scores in the 1970s (when many of them were attending segregated schools in the South, and even in the north). The scores steadily increased, and the gap steadily diminished, from 1970 to the latest data.
If you want more data, you can look up the Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education, which finally outlawed segregated schools, at least on paper. As I recall, they submitted lots of evidence that black students attending segregated schools did much worse than white students or black students attending integrated schools. They also showed that the "separate but equal" schools weren't equal.
I don't think people realize the extent of segregation and discrimination up to as late as the 1960s, when black people couldn't vote in much of the South, much less go to equal schools. The effects are still with us today.
Back to your original question, I think the good schools 100 years ago were very good. The bad schools were very bad. A a lot of people think that Catholic schools were very good, but Catholic schools too actually varied greatly in quality, some teaching by rote and some teaching critical thinking. I don't know if you can get valid test data from 100 years ago.
Jesus fucking Christ! Do you think there is one black person in America duplicated 10 million times? Black people are different. I had a black science teacher in high school, the best teacher I had, and she taught me stuff I use every day. I had another black teacher who was worthless. Some black people are really smart and some black people are really stupid. If you knew more than one black person, you'd know that.
Now let's have your 1930s-era stereotypes of Jews, Italians, Chinese and Irishmen.
(BTW, it's amazing what happens when a black person gets a job that pays well, with advancement in exchange for doing the job well.)
You are missing the point. In war you must do what you can to avoid civilian deaths. Destroying an entire city to kill a few soldiers is unacceptable, you must target the enemy directly and try to minimize civilian casualties. Otherwise, it's a war crime.
We do commit war crimes all the time.
The US attack on Fallujah was a war crime. I saw an eyewitness account by an AP photographer who described how a family, with a man, woman and several children, was trying to escape Fallujah by crossing a river. The Americans machine-gunned them to death. The US declared Fallujah an "open city," which meant that they told everybody to leave, assumed that anybody who remained was a combatant, and killed them. It's a war crime to declare an open city. Just because civilians won't or can't leave, that doesn't give you the right to kill them.
The Israelis did the same thing; they dropped leaflets on an area telling people that everyone should leave the area, and they killed anybody who remained. Where are they supposed to go? It's a war crime.
So in reality, they do destroy entire cities just to kill a few soldiers, in violation of international law.
We seldom enforce international law in combat. In Iraq, you had groups of armed combatants wandering around doing whatever they wanted. If one of them got killed or even shot at, and they decided to massacre a bunch of civilians in revenge (which they often did), there was nobody to stop them or even reprimand them.
The Israeli soldiers kill civilians all the time. That was documented in the Goldstone report. There were repeated cases of IDF soldiers machine-gunning down families, including children, who were coming out of their homes carrying a white flag, as they were instructed to do. They were never prosecuted.
If you go to war, you will inevitably kill as many civilians as combatants. When Bush or anyone claims that they have smart bombs or precision bombs that only hit military targets, they're lying.
Chemical weapons are indiscriminate and nearly impossible to control once deployed, so most countries have agreed to simply ban them.
When we bombed North Vietnam, our bombs were indiscriminate and nearly impossible to control once they left the bomb bay. On the ground, we massacred whole villages, like My Lai,and the only reason anyone back home knew about My Lai was that somebody took photos. Our own troops were indiscriminate and nearly impossible to control.
In Iraq, we posted soldiers at checkpoints who didn't speak the language, who would shoot anybody who didn't stop. They gave hand signals to the drivers, but the signals they used for "stop" were actually used in Iraq to mean "go." They machine-gunned down whole families.
Any time you go to war, you kill civilians, even when soldiers are trying to follow international law, and there's no way to make soldiers in the field follow international law.
That's why these complaints about Assad's poison gas are hypocritical. If you kill everyone in a city with bombs or napalm, as we did in Fallujah, that's OK, but if Assad kills everyone in a village with sarin gas, that's a war crime. I don't see the difference.
Are you saying that you wouldn't mind being burned to death with napalm (and dying slowly and painfully over a week), but you would mind being killed with sarin gas (and dying quickly and painfully in 60 seconds)?
Well, you can't argue with a comic book. That's the law.
But the law is wrong. It goes against my sense of fairness. If you wouldn't have broken the law, but for the cops encouraging and facilitating your lawbreaking, that's entrapment.
There were a lot of recent cases where undercover agents found somebody who couldn't change a tire, much less build a bomb, and set him up in a whole bomb plot, together with fake explosives. Cops are very manipulative, and they have a track record of finding people who are mentally subnormal or desperate and manipulating them.
Or people who had never been involved in terrorist activities, who were offered enormous amounts of money, or tricked into getting into a plot that they didn't think they could get out of. I'm thinking of a couple of stories I heard on NPR, one of them an elderly man who was tricked and led into buying anti-aircraft missiles in a supposed plot to down a passenger plane, the other who was running a pizzaria in upstate New York who had financial problems and was offered a large amount of money by an undercover agent. Did I say they were arabs?
As the Illustrated Guide to Law points out, duress is a defense. A lot of those cases seemed to involve duress and manipulation, but the jury just convicted them anyway. One juror admitted that she agreed it was entrapment, but she just went along with the rest of the jury so that she could go home.
Entrapment isn't a defense when you have a predisposition to commit a crime. But a lot of these people had no predisposition to commit a crime until a manipulative undercover agent talked them into it.
Sarin kills in about 1 minute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin It has the same effect as some of the paralytic drugs used for execution by lethal injection in the U.S.
I've read papers in the medical journals, including *.mil, about injuries from conventional weapons of the kind we used in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Napalm-type weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_77_bomb can cause burns over 50% of your body that will kill you painfully over a week. Sarin is more horrific than that? I don't get it.
Sometimes bullets or bombs will kill immediately, but often they don't. People without access to advanced medical care, especially civilians in a war zone, will die slowly and painfully. Bombs produce burn injuries, with results similar to napalm. People have arms and legs blown off and die from blood loss and shock. Penetrating wounds get infected, and they die over a week. When buildings are destroyed, the people in them are crushed, and with compartment syndrome they die in a few days. War is horrific. Sarin is more horrific than the rest of it? I don't get it.
The key difference is that chemical weapons are indiscriminate and tend to mame rather than kill.
Targeting civilians is a war crime. Bombs can be directed at military targets, then explode and that's the end of it.
I heard a lecture by an Israeli professor who was a consultant to the IDF, who was tasked with finding out how many civilian deaths were acceptable. He looked it up in U.S. military research and found out that about half of all deaths in U.S. combat were civilians. So he figured that was acceptable.
Whenever you have a war, half the people you kill are civilians. Anybody who claims otherwise is lying.
But the question that still hasn't been properly answered (at least in my opinion) is why the use of these weapons on a small number of victims relative to the total number killed in the conflict should suddenly lead the international community to "need to act".
Apparently somebody is looking for an excuse to attack Assad and help the rebels, which would turn Syria into the kind of chaos we're seeing in Iraq (and just wait until the American forces leave Iraq).
There have always been a lot of hawks who wanted to overthrow various mideast dictatorships (or mideast democracies when they had them).
Slashdot Mirror
It's not hyperbole. There are cases like that. (There may be a few cases cited on the Wikipedia HIPAA or Electronic Medical Record pages.)
Law enforcement access is explicitly permitted by HIPAA. I don't think that a law enforcement officer needs a court order, warrant or subpoena to get access to medical records. If you know of any regulation or cases to the contrary, I'd like to see the citation.
Hospitals can impose stricter access than HIPAA , but they don't have to.
Why would the DEA waste their time and money on this? HIPAA thoroughly establishes prescription records as being contained within the scope of medical privacy.
That's not true, even though they mislead people to think it is.
Prescription records are covered by medical "privacy," which means that only people with a medical or administrative purpose can have access to those records.
But but law enforcement is one of those administrative purposes, and law enforcement has access to those records:
Covered entities may disclose protected health information to law enforcement officials for law enforcement purposes as required by law (including court orders, court-ordered warrants, subpoenas) and administrative requests; or to identify or locate a suspect, fugitive, material witness, or missing person. http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/understanding/summary/index.html
That deceitful, misleading hhs.gov page doesn't tell you that there are many exceptions to HIPAA, including law enforcement access, which is buried within links that are difficult to get to:
Covered entities may disclose protected health information to law enforcement officials for law enforcement purposes as required by law (including court orders, court-ordered warrants, subpoenas) and administrative requests; or to identify or locate a suspect, fugitive, material witness, or missing person. http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/understanding/summary/index.html Summary of the HIPAA Privacy Rule (emphasis added)
What that means is that a cop can go into a hospital, flash his badge, and copy all your medical records if he feels like it, without violating HIPAA. Individual hospitals may have different policies, but nothing in HIPAA prevents that.
There are also no penalties under HIPAA for releasing private health information to third parties like that. All those big fines that HHS is touting are for structural problems with their databases, not for improperly releasing information about specific individuals.
the U.S. was created very explicitly with the premise that [1] there is a God [2] that this God gave freedom and dignity to each individual (therefore the individual matters)
Boy, did you get your history wrong. Did they teach the First Amendment where you went to school?
and [3] those individuals LEND limited power to government .
Which is it, Christ or Ayn Rand? Can't have both.
So do the Sony Youth get a special knife?
If they turn in their parents.
Well, it's not the only problem: I distinctly remember as an elementary school student getting "lessons" about how awesome the latest war effort was, and being required to sing patriotic songs, and of course the reciting of the Pledge of Allegience which requires students to profess a belief in God.
I was in high school when they inserted "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. I refused to say it, and my home room teacher had a shit fit. (Stupid nationalistic gym teacher.)
I haven't said it since.
And I won't say it until we really do have liberty and justice for all -- which isn't the direction we're going in right now.
DARE is a very effective program.
Its purpose is to give police officers overtime pay, for doing the easiest thing in the world, giving nonsensical lectures to kids who would rather be listening to a cop than doing real schoolwork.
The only easier way for a cop to make money is to sit on his ass behind a computer and pretend to be a precocious 12-year-old girl on chat.
Why don't parents read Grimm's fairy tales to their children the way we used to do?
The similarity is they both did something to oppose nuclear weapons.
"former Mossad director Shabtai Shavit told Reuters that the option of extrajudicial execution was considered in 1986, but rejected because "Jews don't do that to other Jews."
Unless they try to make peace with the Palestinians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitzhak_Rabin
They happily arrest lots of drug dealers, while rapists, murderers, burglars, muggers, etc. are not getting caught.
I said it was possible that Blacks attending segregated schools before WW2 were getting a better education than Blacks attending dysfunctinoal inner-city schools today.
Since you're actually taking it seriously I'll look it up. I can't find the chart that would have expressed it clearly but the data here shows that blacks improved significantly from 1970 until today. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2008/2009479.asp
When you talk about "dysfunctional" inner-city schools you're begging the question. If they're dysfunctional then by definition the functional segregated schools, to the extent that there were any, were better. There may have been some segregated schools that were better than inner-city schools, but I think this data shows that overall the segregated schools were worse than the center-city schools.
So you're on the record that test scores are the measure to use? I'm sure some people would argue against that, but that's beside the point.
For the record I'll say that well-designed, statistically valid test scores measure what they're intended to measure. The NAEP was designed to measure educational achievement to evaluate the educational system as a whole, and break it down by certain categories, including race. I think the NAEP data demonstrates that blacks had lower educational achievement in math and reading in 1970, and that their educational achievement increased dramatically from 1970 to 2008. This was contemporaneous with the desegregation of a lot of schools (and workplaces), and I think desegregation was a major cause of the increase.
The best data says that, overall, black educational achievement increased from 1970 to 2008. The schools that black kids went to in 1970, including a lot of segregated schools, were not doing better, overall, than the schools that black kids were going to in 2008.
To reiterate--there's no getting around the fact that Black schools in the South were underfunded, in run-down buildings, with old texts and worse teachers. The question is, is that any better than today's schools in the cities that are also underfunded, run-down, with iPads, tenured mediocrity, students whose parents are drug users vs. oppressed field workers, etc.?
A real answer to that question seems hard to come by. You're going to get anecdotes at best. I think the opportunities for Blacks are definitely better today than they were then; but if it were possible to chose a Georgia segregated school in 1935, or a Detroit inner-city public school in 2013, which would you pick? That's the question.
I don't know Detroit but I do know New York, and there is a wide range of quality among the public schools. There are millionaires who send their kids to the public schools. There may well have been a segregated school in Georgia whose teachers and parents were so dedicated that they gave a good education. All those black lawyers must have come from someplace. My Gunnar Myrdal books are packed away, so I can't look it up. There probably are teachers and parents in Detroit who are so dedicated that they're giving their kids a good education.
If you read Diane Ravitch, a former conservative Republican who nonetheless followed the data, you'll see that the main factor associated with educational achievement was family income. Lifting people out of poverty would do a lot of good. Just giving handouts to the poor does a lot of good. But giving handouts to computer consultants or following the latest education fads doesn't seem to do much good.
I read Charles Murray's articles when The Bell Curve came out. I used to read the Wall Street Journal editorial page and also Science, Scientific American and New Scientist, so I got both sides of the argument. I don't remember the details any more but I do remember that not many psychologists agreed with Murray.
The basic problem was this: If you want to compare the IQ of two "races," you have to get a group from each race that was brought up in the same environment and test them. (You also have to get a valid test in the native language of each group.)
How can you get a group of native Africans who were brought up in the same environment as whites? If you think it out, it can't be done. How do you get a representative sample of Africans? How do you correct for education? Blacks and white in Africa have different opportunities, occupations, education, income, etc.
How was education in black and minority communities pre-WWII?
The first thought that occurred to me was that education in pre-WW2 segregated schools might actually have been better than education in today's "integrated" inner-city schools.
No, there's data on that, and it was submitted in the Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education. The southerners claimed that their schools were "separate but equal," so the lawyers proved they weren't. The schools got far less money, the teachers were less qualified, and the textbooks were hand-me-downs from white schools (30-year-old science and history textbooks).
If you look up the NAEP data, you'll see that there's been a steady increase in test scores in math and English for black students from 1970 to today, when they're almost equal. http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012026/tables/table_12b.asp
It's also part of a system that cares more about the Democratic Party machine and re-electing politicians than it does educating.
I've got news for you. The Republican Party machine cares more about re-electing politicians than it does educating, or anything else. Grover Norquist said that he wanted to destroy the government, as long as he can cut his taxes.
You are deluded that education in prior decades was solely focused on rote memorization, as writing, speech making and speech, and solving problems from principles was also taught.
Yes, and to prove it, look up the Apology of Socrates or Euclid's Geometry on Project Gutenberg (I'm fine with online resources when they make sense).
When George W. Bush visited England, one of the British tabloids printed a map on the front page with a big arrow pointing to London, and the headline, "WE'RE HERE!"
We need an education major who knows all those statistics -- oops! We sent them all off to study hotel management instead.
Anecdotally, there was an article in I think Slate that looked up old prewar high school exams, and I couldn't pass them today. Some people got a very impressive education before WWII, other people didn't. I found my father's old prewar college math textbooks down the cellar, and his freshman math course was covering stuff I had done in high school, like basic algebra.
The best data I know of offhand is from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tested a good national sample of students every year since 1970 for math and reading. http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012026/tables/table_12b.asp
According to those data, the test results were about level since 1970, with no more than 1-2% variation, not consistently up or down.
The impressive exception was among black students, who had very low scores in the 1970s (when many of them were attending segregated schools in the South, and even in the north). The scores steadily increased, and the gap steadily diminished, from 1970 to the latest data.
If you want more data, you can look up the Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education, which finally outlawed segregated schools, at least on paper. As I recall, they submitted lots of evidence that black students attending segregated schools did much worse than white students or black students attending integrated schools. They also showed that the "separate but equal" schools weren't equal.
I don't think people realize the extent of segregation and discrimination up to as late as the 1960s, when black people couldn't vote in much of the South, much less go to equal schools. The effects are still with us today.
Back to your original question, I think the good schools 100 years ago were very good. The bad schools were very bad. A a lot of people think that Catholic schools were very good, but Catholic schools too actually varied greatly in quality, some teaching by rote and some teaching critical thinking. I don't know if you can get valid test data from 100 years ago.
Jesus fucking Christ! Do you think there is one black person in America duplicated 10 million times? Black people are different. I had a black science teacher in high school, the best teacher I had, and she taught me stuff I use every day. I had another black teacher who was worthless. Some black people are really smart and some black people are really stupid. If you knew more than one black person, you'd know that.
Now let's have your 1930s-era stereotypes of Jews, Italians, Chinese and Irishmen.
(BTW, it's amazing what happens when a black person gets a job that pays well, with advancement in exchange for doing the job well.)
OK, you're a racist.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/wp-content/blogs.dir/470/files/2012/04/i-56483a6e9716d73ba0369eb27a275548-sci_racism.jpg
You are missing the point. In war you must do what you can to avoid civilian deaths. Destroying an entire city to kill a few soldiers is unacceptable, you must target the enemy directly and try to minimize civilian casualties. Otherwise, it's a war crime.
We do commit war crimes all the time.
The US attack on Fallujah was a war crime. I saw an eyewitness account by an AP photographer who described how a family, with a man, woman and several children, was trying to escape Fallujah by crossing a river. The Americans machine-gunned them to death. The US declared Fallujah an "open city," which meant that they told everybody to leave, assumed that anybody who remained was a combatant, and killed them. It's a war crime to declare an open city. Just because civilians won't or can't leave, that doesn't give you the right to kill them.
The Israelis did the same thing; they dropped leaflets on an area telling people that everyone should leave the area, and they killed anybody who remained. Where are they supposed to go? It's a war crime.
So in reality, they do destroy entire cities just to kill a few soldiers, in violation of international law.
We seldom enforce international law in combat. In Iraq, you had groups of armed combatants wandering around doing whatever they wanted. If one of them got killed or even shot at, and they decided to massacre a bunch of civilians in revenge (which they often did), there was nobody to stop them or even reprimand them.
The Israeli soldiers kill civilians all the time. That was documented in the Goldstone report. There were repeated cases of IDF soldiers machine-gunning down families, including children, who were coming out of their homes carrying a white flag, as they were instructed to do. They were never prosecuted.
If you go to war, you will inevitably kill as many civilians as combatants. When Bush or anyone claims that they have smart bombs or precision bombs that only hit military targets, they're lying.
Chemical weapons are indiscriminate and nearly impossible to control once deployed, so most countries have agreed to simply ban them.
When we bombed North Vietnam, our bombs were indiscriminate and nearly impossible to control once they left the bomb bay. On the ground, we massacred whole villages, like My Lai,and the only reason anyone back home knew about My Lai was that somebody took photos. Our own troops were indiscriminate and nearly impossible to control.
In Iraq, we posted soldiers at checkpoints who didn't speak the language, who would shoot anybody who didn't stop. They gave hand signals to the drivers, but the signals they used for "stop" were actually used in Iraq to mean "go." They machine-gunned down whole families.
Any time you go to war, you kill civilians, even when soldiers are trying to follow international law, and there's no way to make soldiers in the field follow international law.
That's why these complaints about Assad's poison gas are hypocritical. If you kill everyone in a city with bombs or napalm, as we did in Fallujah, that's OK, but if Assad kills everyone in a village with sarin gas, that's a war crime. I don't see the difference.
Are you saying that you wouldn't mind being burned to death with napalm (and dying slowly and painfully over a week), but you would mind being killed with sarin gas (and dying quickly and painfully in 60 seconds)?
Well, you can't argue with a comic book. That's the law.
But the law is wrong. It goes against my sense of fairness. If you wouldn't have broken the law, but for the cops encouraging and facilitating your lawbreaking, that's entrapment.
There were a lot of recent cases where undercover agents found somebody who couldn't change a tire, much less build a bomb, and set him up in a whole bomb plot, together with fake explosives. Cops are very manipulative, and they have a track record of finding people who are mentally subnormal or desperate and manipulating them.
Or people who had never been involved in terrorist activities, who were offered enormous amounts of money, or tricked into getting into a plot that they didn't think they could get out of. I'm thinking of a couple of stories I heard on NPR, one of them an elderly man who was tricked and led into buying anti-aircraft missiles in a supposed plot to down a passenger plane, the other who was running a pizzaria in upstate New York who had financial problems and was offered a large amount of money by an undercover agent. Did I say they were arabs?
As the Illustrated Guide to Law points out, duress is a defense. A lot of those cases seemed to involve duress and manipulation, but the jury just convicted them anyway. One juror admitted that she agreed it was entrapment, but she just went along with the rest of the jury so that she could go home.
Entrapment isn't a defense when you have a predisposition to commit a crime. But a lot of these people had no predisposition to commit a crime until a manipulative undercover agent talked them into it.
Godwin aside, I can't recall a major war that our country has been involved in since Korea that made things any better.
Unless, like Henry Kissinger, you believe that democracy is evil and an affront to human dignity.
Sarin kills in about 1 minute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin It has the same effect as some of the paralytic drugs used for execution by lethal injection in the U.S.
I've read papers in the medical journals, including *.mil, about injuries from conventional weapons of the kind we used in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Napalm-type weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_77_bomb can cause burns over 50% of your body that will kill you painfully over a week. Sarin is more horrific than that? I don't get it.
Sometimes bullets or bombs will kill immediately, but often they don't. People without access to advanced medical care, especially civilians in a war zone, will die slowly and painfully. Bombs produce burn injuries, with results similar to napalm. People have arms and legs blown off and die from blood loss and shock. Penetrating wounds get infected, and they die over a week. When buildings are destroyed, the people in them are crushed, and with compartment syndrome they die in a few days. War is horrific. Sarin is more horrific than the rest of it? I don't get it.
And Fritz Haber didn't get it either.
The key difference is that chemical weapons are indiscriminate and tend to mame rather than kill.
Targeting civilians is a war crime. Bombs can be directed at military targets, then explode and that's the end of it.
I heard a lecture by an Israeli professor who was a consultant to the IDF, who was tasked with finding out how many civilian deaths were acceptable. He looked it up in U.S. military research and found out that about half of all deaths in U.S. combat were civilians. So he figured that was acceptable.
Whenever you have a war, half the people you kill are civilians. Anybody who claims otherwise is lying.
But the question that still hasn't been properly answered (at least in my opinion) is why the use of these weapons on a small number of victims relative to the total number killed in the conflict should suddenly lead the international community to "need to act".
Apparently somebody is looking for an excuse to attack Assad and help the rebels, which would turn Syria into the kind of chaos we're seeing in Iraq (and just wait until the American forces leave Iraq).
There have always been a lot of hawks who wanted to overthrow various mideast dictatorships (or mideast democracies when they had them).