Life is short, and there is not enough room in this brief post to correct your many mistakes.
The easiest one, and the most appropriate one for Slashdot, is, "The government had very little to do with the Internet."
Fortunately, Wall Street Journal editorial writer Gordon Crovitz -- the same asshole who lives in Battery Park City and complained about Occupy Wall Street at the Community Board meeting -- also wrote an editorial debunking the "myth" that the government invented the Internet.
I don't know where your family came from, but I guess it wasn't the Soviet Bloc. The USSR had one of the best education systems in the world -- all free. Soviet emigres came here with their EE degrees and PhDs and were quickly hired up at good salaries. I know other Soviet emigres who came to this country with less marketable degrees who where shuttled off to free (welfare) housing, free (government-paid) job training, and often civil service (government) jobs. Immigrants from Communist countries got a better safety net here than most Americans, and they vote Republican and preach self-reliance from government.
I've heard all these self-made immigrant stories and I don't believe them. Every time somebody looks at the facts behind the self-made myth, you find government handouts.
He assigned Rita Levi-Montalcini to figure out how the brain developed. It was an impossible problem, so she did what scientists often do and attacked a simpler problem: How does a nerve cell develop? She finally found a factor that caused it to grow. Now we have more growth factors than you could cover in an hour's biology class.
Levi's second student, Salvador Luria, wound up studying bacteriophages, the viruses that attack bacteria. He (they, really -- these were collective efforts) found out that some bacteria was resistant to viruses. It turned out that the mechanism of resistance was restriction enzymes that would chop the DNA or RNA of viruses at particular sequences that were found in the viruses but not in the bacteria themselves. This turned out to be a fantastically useful tool for studying DNA and RNA. Grad students use it every day.
Levi's third student, Renato Dulbecco, discovered a virus that turned cells cancerous. It turned out that very few human cancers are caused by viruses, but the study of that one example of how cells become cancerous through viruses helped to unravel the whole mechanism of cancer. One of his contributions was to the technique of growing cells, and you can read medical reports today that cells were grown in Dulbecco's medium. During WWII, Dulbecco joined the Resistance against the Nazis.
Another Italian Nobel laureate in that group, but not a student of Levi's, was Mario Capecchi. Capecci had a hard childhood during WWII. His father was drafted to fight in North Africa as an anti-aircraft gunner, but he was lost in combat. His mother was an American, the daughter of an American artist and a German archaeologist, but like most of this bunch she was a Communist, and they sent her to Dachau. She had made provision for a peasant family to take care of Mario, but that fell apart and he wound up at the age of 4 on the streets, like in one of those post-war Italian movies. After the war, his mother got out of Dachau, and found him in a hospital. Finally, his mother's brother, who was a physicist at RCA, found them and brought them to America, where Mario finally got his education.
Mario Capecchi was playing around with the repair mechanisms of DNA, which are subverted by viruses, and figured out how to use them to knock out a single gene in mice (or any animals). If you know any biology, you understand how useful this was. Today, when a researcher finds a mutation responsible for a disease the routine thing he does is to create a knockout mouse to see what happens without that gene. It's like having an on/off switch to see what happens when you turn a gene on and off.
After Capecchi won the Nobel prize in 2008, his half-sister in Austria recognized him as her long-lost brother.
Those Italian biologists were an interesting bunch, and they lived in dramatic times.
That's the law in New York City, established by the contract between the City and the owners of Zucotti Park, the court rulings on the rights of demonstrators, and the decision of the Community Board on how to balance the rights of the demonstrators against the concerns of the community.
I doubt that you've discussed the right of assembly under First Amendment law with many lawyers.
I worked hard to get where I am today without taking a dime from the government.
You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
There were other places where demonstrators were arrested by the police even though they were there legally. At UC Davis, they held a demonstration on their own campus lawn -- at a place that was designated for such events. It's hard to get more legal than that. The university police pepper-sprayed them. As a result, the university settled a damage suit for $1 million http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81699.html
At any rate, the First Amendment overrides a lot. Gathering to protest the government is a pretty basic right in America.
Actually, there were surveys of the people at OWS, and about half were employed. (You can find references in the Wikipedia article on OWS.) Surprisingly, a lot of them were professionals who had fairly high incomes -- and thought they should pay more taxes themselves.
The issue is whether it was legal. The answer is yes. It was legal. Zucotti Park was in an unusual legal situation in that they had an agreement with the City to make the park available to the public 24 hours a day. There were also court decisions giving demonstrators the right to sleep in the streets.
Gordon Crovitz, a former Wall Street Journal editorial writer, lives in Battery Park City and went to Community Board hearings to complain about OWS, as he wrote in the WSJ. They heard him out and voted him down. The OWS representatives heard the complaints, and made changes. The Community Board supported OWS. In a democracy, we follow the majority decision.
This is New York City. We have lots of big events. Mayor Giuliani used to declare public celebrations, which tied up the City and disrupted traffic, after his favorite sports team won a game. We put up with it. We have Fashion Week, in which clothing companies put up tents in Bryan Park, a little bigger than Zucotti Park, for a couple of weeks and deprive everyone else of the use of that popular park. We put up with it. The crime in Zucotti Park was no worse than other large events. (There were several reports that police encouraged troublemakers and mentally disturbed people to go to Zucotti park.)
Occupy Wall Street had some money and wanted to rent portable toilets, the way every other big event in New York City does (including Fashion Week). The City refused to issue them permits. So they used the toilets in MacDonald's down the street, and some of the other local bars and restaurants. So first you refuse permits for toilets, then you complain about inadequate sanitation.
Oh, yeah. Then there was the First Amendment to the Constitution. Zucotti Park was the best example I've seen in my life of people from everywhere assembling to discuss their complaints with the political system and decide what they were going to do about it. That's not only legal, it's one of our basic American rights that we were supposed to have been fighting those wars for. So it's legal. No question about it.
If you were a dictator, that's the way you'd do it. You don't understand how Communism worked. Even if you disagree with something, you should understand it.
At worst, this single-party state is taken over by self-interested individuals who use it to enrich their own lives at the expense of the people.
Sounds like the Bush Administration (and much of the Obama Administration). How many billions of dollars in no-bid contracts did the Bush Administration steer towards their campaign contributors during the Iraq war?
There has been a revival of ECT for severe, incurable depression, especially with the risk of suicide, and it's always with the consent of the patient. The problem is, it's always associated with memory loss. The recent treatments have less memory loss than the older treatments, but if you have ECT, you're going to lose long-term memories.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMct075234 Clinical Therapeutics Electroconvulsive Therapy for Depression Sarah H. Lisanby, M.D. N Engl J Med 2007; 357:1939-1945 November 8, 2007 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMct075234
1. Zucotti Park was open to the public 24 hours a day, according to a contract signed between the developers and the City. There was no "after hours."
2. Occupy Wall Street wanted to bring portable toilets like every other big event in New York City. The City denied them a permit. So they used the bathrooms in the MacDonald's across the street and the neighboring restaurants.
3. I was at Zucotti Park a couple of times during the demonstration. They organized a volunteer cleanup crew that cleaned every inch of the park continuously. If you threw a candy wrapper on the floor, somebody would sweep it up within 5 minutes.
4. The local Community Board voted to support the demonstration. So the local taxpayers approved.
5. There were surveys of demonstrators which found that most of them were employed, and their average income was probably higher than yours. So they pay more taxes than you do.
6. You find it offensive. Too fucking bad. That's how we do things in America. If you don't like it, go back where you came from. (If they'll have you.)
Zucotti park was a private park open to the public 24 hours a day, according to a legally binding agreement between the City and the original developer. The local Community Board voted to support the occupation. There were court decisions in the past allowing similar protests.
In addition, there's the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gives people the right to peacefully protest, as other people here have mentioned.
I could come down to Zucotti Park at all hours of the day and talk to people about politics. What better use could anyone make of a public space?
I went down there (Zucotti Park) and spoke to them too. Their message was pretty clear, so I'll repeat it:
The wealthiest 1% of Americans have most of the income, most of the wealth, and control the political system through their campaign contributions and power generally.
They're not running it very well. They've used health care, education, and housing as a way to make money, driven the costs up, and made them unaffordable to the rest of us.
There's more of us than there are of them. We can vote. We don't have to vote for politicians that will sell us out (50/50 divided on Obama). We can organize to teach people how they're being exploited by the 1%.
If you read that passage from Wikipedia that I posted, you'll see that Israel wasn't attacked by its neighbors. Israel attacked.
I'm not a lawyer. Theodor Meron is. He was the Israeli government's top international lawyer in 1967. The prime minister of Israel asked him whether it would be legal to occupy the territories, and he said it would be illegal. It doesn't get any clearer than that.
I studied German (and European) history. Zionism had its origins in 19th century German nationalism. The same movement that led to Theodor Herzel produced Fichte, Jahn, Herder and ultimately the Nazis. The nationalist movements all wanted to go back to their "historical" borders when their nation was supposedly an empire. That's what the Nazis did and that's what the Israeli Likud is doing now.
That's the choice the Israelis made: Do they want to follow the law, and live in peace with their neighbors, or do they want to ressurect 19th century German nationalism and have wars of conquest, which are now illegal? You see their decision.
If you compare the accounts of Jews being driven out of their lands, and Palestinians being driven out of their lands, the similarity is remarkable. People in the Jewish peace movement say, "That sounds just like what my grandfather described."
There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.
Manhattan has actually been coming out of a weak real estate market. I live around the Times Square neighborhood. Several real estate construction projects were cancelled. There are empty stores. It's counter-intuitive, since the price of Manhattan real estate seemed infinite, but that's why we get real estate bubbles that finally burst.
For example, Mayor Bloomberg sold the Donnell library to a hotel company, but the market crashed so it is now a gutted building on 53rd St. between 5th and 6th Ave., one of the most expensive locations in the world.
There are stores in the neighborhood that have closed, and left vacant instead of being rented (even in the Christmas sales season).
Some buildings just stay vacant for reasons that I can't understand. For example, there is 400 W. 57th St., on the SW corner of 9th Ave., which is owned by a Korean investment syndicate, that has remained vacant for maybe 15 years. There was an article in the New York Times about how it was a prime location (3 blocks from Carnegie Hall, and 4 blocks from Lincoln Center) and how they were planning to do something with it, but last time I walked by it was still empty.
Sometimes a real estate company will have vacant property, so they'll throw up a cheap store just do something with it rather than let it sit vacant. I think a lot of the 99-cent stores are set up like that. Some of these stores, like the restaurants and tacky shops, have the landlord as a partner. They're waiting for the real estate market to come back, and then they'll tear down the block and build a new building.
It's strange to think that a building like the one on Times Square could have signs on the outside, but nobody exploiting the inside in eternally-hustling Manhattan. But it happens.
Here's another one: I was living in another building around that area. My super asked me to help him do something in the back yard. He took me through a non-public door, and into a big back yard, that nobody in the building was allowed to use. There was a line of buildings down the north and south street, with a string of back yards between them, and nobody was using the back yards. It was like a collection of secret gardens. There are lots of streets like that in Manhattan, with closed-off back yards, even though space is so precious.
The war began on June 5 with Israel launching surprise bombing raids against Egyptian air-fields after a period of high tension that included an Israeli raid into the Jordanian-controlled West Bank,[11][12] Israeli initiated aerial clashes over Syrian territory,[13] Syrian artillery attacks against Israeli settlements in the vicinity of the border followed by Israeli response against Syrian positions in the Golan Heights and encroachments of increasing intensity and frequency (initiated by Israel) into the demilitarized zones along the Syrian border[14] and culminating in the Egyptian imposition of a naval blockade on Eilat and ordering of the evacuation from the Sinai Peninsula of the U.N. buffer force.
After the Second World War and the Nurenberg trials, a bunch of international lawyers (many of them Jewish, I'm proud to say) got together and wrote a set of international laws and agreements, including the Geneva conventions, which most countries signed, which would prevent acquisition of territory by force from ever happening again.
So now it violates international law. And Israel is violating international law.
What Israel's right-wing government is doing also violates basic intelligence. If you want your country to be safe and secure, don't make enemies of everybody in the world. You saw how well that worked for Germany.
The entire international community, including the U.S., the U.N., and the International Court of Justice, consider the settlements to be illegal.
Not only that, but Theodor Meron, the legal counsel of Israel's own Foreign Ministry in September 1967, said so. The Prime Minister’s Office asked him for his opinion on the legality of civilian settlement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He wrote that it was clearly illegal: “civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”
So that was the Israeli government's own official legal opinion.
You believe that, in a Communist government, the individual only exists at the pleasure of the state. I don't know where you got that from. That's not what they believed.
Emma Goldman certainly didn't believe that. Neither did Andre Sakharov.
The Communists never talked about serving the state in anything I heard or saw. They talked about serving "the people."
You may have difficulty understanding why a Communist doctor would leave a profitable practice to serve "the people," where he was most needed, but that's what a lot of Communists, like Norman Bethune, did.
There are a lot of Cuban doctors who are happy to serve in Latin America or Africa where they are most needed, even though any of them could walk into the American embassy, defect, get automatic citizenship and become millionaires in the US. But there are a lot of doctors who don't want to work where they have to turn away patients who can't afford to pay.
I met an American doctor, who retired early from a profitable practice and re-joined the U.S. Marines during the recent misguided invasion of Iraq, because he wanted to go where he was needed. He was no different -- on the other side. What do you think those U.S. Marines are doing -- serving the state?
The American Communists realized that it was politically effective to support the black civil rights movement, but the people I knew certainly believed in equality as a principle as well. They went down south and sometimes got killed. Until Truman desegregated the U.S. military, the Communist Party was one of the most integrated institutions in America. A black person could join the Communist Party and be accepted as an equal. They ran black candidates for office. The Daily Worker was one of the few U;S. daily newspapers with an integrated staff. Communists would never use the word "nigger."
Slashdot Mirror
Life is short, and there is not enough room in this brief post to correct your many mistakes.
The easiest one, and the most appropriate one for Slashdot, is, "The government had very little to do with the Internet."
Fortunately, Wall Street Journal editorial writer Gordon Crovitz -- the same asshole who lives in Battery Park City and complained about Occupy Wall Street at the Community Board meeting -- also wrote an editorial debunking the "myth" that the government invented the Internet.
Crovitz has contributed to computer education and the history of technology by making an argument that is completely wrong, but has been the occasion for people who know far more about the Internet than Crovitz to explain it. Two of the better rebuttals are here http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/23/news/la-mo-who-invented-internet-20120723 and here http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/07/23/yes-government-researchers-really-did-invent-the-internet/ As Hiltzik points out, those "university researchers" you cite did their work on government contracts.
I don't know where your family came from, but I guess it wasn't the Soviet Bloc. The USSR had one of the best education systems in the world -- all free. Soviet emigres came here with their EE degrees and PhDs and were quickly hired up at good salaries. I know other Soviet emigres who came to this country with less marketable degrees who where shuttled off to free (welfare) housing, free (government-paid) job training, and often civil service (government) jobs. Immigrants from Communist countries got a better safety net here than most Americans, and they vote Republican and preach self-reliance from government.
I've heard all these self-made immigrant stories and I don't believe them. Every time somebody looks at the facts behind the self-made myth, you find government handouts.
Giuseppe Levi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Levi http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=it&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fit.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FGiuseppe_Levi had 3 students who went on to win Nobel prizes. Biologists had been studying gross anatomy from before human history. In Levi's time, they had really good microscopes for 100 years, so they had extended that study to the tissues and cells of the organs. Levi extended that to understand the physiological mechanisms of those tissues. He could see that brain cells were growing, but how were they growing and why were they growing?
He assigned Rita Levi-Montalcini to figure out how the brain developed. It was an impossible problem, so she did what scientists often do and attacked a simpler problem: How does a nerve cell develop? She finally found a factor that caused it to grow. Now we have more growth factors than you could cover in an hour's biology class.
Levi's second student, Salvador Luria, wound up studying bacteriophages, the viruses that attack bacteria. He (they, really -- these were collective efforts) found out that some bacteria was resistant to viruses. It turned out that the mechanism of resistance was restriction enzymes that would chop the DNA or RNA of viruses at particular sequences that were found in the viruses but not in the bacteria themselves. This turned out to be a fantastically useful tool for studying DNA and RNA. Grad students use it every day.
Levi's third student, Renato Dulbecco, discovered a virus that turned cells cancerous. It turned out that very few human cancers are caused by viruses, but the study of that one example of how cells become cancerous through viruses helped to unravel the whole mechanism of cancer. One of his contributions was to the technique of growing cells, and you can read medical reports today that cells were grown in Dulbecco's medium. During WWII, Dulbecco joined the Resistance against the Nazis.
Another Italian Nobel laureate in that group, but not a student of Levi's, was Mario Capecchi. Capecci had a hard childhood during WWII. His father was drafted to fight in North Africa as an anti-aircraft gunner, but he was lost in combat. His mother was an American, the daughter of an American artist and a German archaeologist, but like most of this bunch she was a Communist, and they sent her to Dachau. She had made provision for a peasant family to take care of Mario, but that fell apart and he wound up at the age of 4 on the streets, like in one of those post-war Italian movies. After the war, his mother got out of Dachau, and found him in a hospital. Finally, his mother's brother, who was a physicist at RCA, found them and brought them to America, where Mario finally got his education.
Mario Capecchi was playing around with the repair mechanisms of DNA, which are subverted by viruses, and figured out how to use them to knock out a single gene in mice (or any animals). If you know any biology, you understand how useful this was. Today, when a researcher finds a mutation responsible for a disease the routine thing he does is to create a knockout mouse to see what happens without that gene. It's like having an on/off switch to see what happens when you turn a gene on and off.
After Capecchi won the Nobel prize in 2008, his half-sister in Austria recognized him as her long-lost brother.
Those Italian biologists were an interesting bunch, and they lived in dramatic times.
That's the law in New York City, established by the contract between the City and the owners of Zucotti Park, the court rulings on the rights of demonstrators, and the decision of the Community Board on how to balance the rights of the demonstrators against the concerns of the community.
I doubt that you've discussed the right of assembly under First Amendment law with many lawyers.
I worked hard to get where I am today without taking a dime from the government.
You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
Im quite sure
Well, you're quite wrong.
I've talked to lawyers and I'm somewhat familiar with First Amendment law as it applies to New York City.
The Zucotti Park agreement said that the park was open to the public 24 hours a day.
Once it's open to the public, everyone has a right to exercise First Amendment activities, exactly as they were doing.
There was a court decision that also ruled that demonstrators have a right to sleep in the streets.
The City allows commercial operators to put up tents.
I knew that neighborhood from before the demonstrations. Zucotti Park is a lightly-used park.
The opponents were basically saying, "We want you to leave that park so that it can be empty and unused."
There were other places where demonstrators were arrested by the police even though they were there legally. At UC Davis, they held a demonstration on their own campus lawn -- at a place that was designated for such events. It's hard to get more legal than that. The university police pepper-sprayed them. As a result, the university settled a damage suit for $1 million http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81699.html
At any rate, the First Amendment overrides a lot. Gathering to protest the government is a pretty basic right in America.
Actually, there were surveys of the people at OWS, and about half were employed. (You can find references in the Wikipedia article on OWS.) Surprisingly, a lot of them were professionals who had fairly high incomes -- and thought they should pay more taxes themselves.
I'm not yet convinced that it's too late.
I agree with you otherwise.
The issue is whether it was legal. The answer is yes. It was legal. Zucotti Park was in an unusual legal situation in that they had an agreement with the City to make the park available to the public 24 hours a day. There were also court decisions giving demonstrators the right to sleep in the streets.
Gordon Crovitz, a former Wall Street Journal editorial writer, lives in Battery Park City and went to Community Board hearings to complain about OWS, as he wrote in the WSJ. They heard him out and voted him down. The OWS representatives heard the complaints, and made changes. The Community Board supported OWS. In a democracy, we follow the majority decision.
This is New York City. We have lots of big events. Mayor Giuliani used to declare public celebrations, which tied up the City and disrupted traffic, after his favorite sports team won a game. We put up with it. We have Fashion Week, in which clothing companies put up tents in Bryan Park, a little bigger than Zucotti Park, for a couple of weeks and deprive everyone else of the use of that popular park. We put up with it. The crime in Zucotti Park was no worse than other large events. (There were several reports that police encouraged troublemakers and mentally disturbed people to go to Zucotti park.)
Occupy Wall Street had some money and wanted to rent portable toilets, the way every other big event in New York City does (including Fashion Week). The City refused to issue them permits. So they used the toilets in MacDonald's down the street, and some of the other local bars and restaurants. So first you refuse permits for toilets, then you complain about inadequate sanitation.
Oh, yeah. Then there was the First Amendment to the Constitution. Zucotti Park was the best example I've seen in my life of people from everywhere assembling to discuss their complaints with the political system and decide what they were going to do about it. That's not only legal, it's one of our basic American rights that we were supposed to have been fighting those wars for. So it's legal. No question about it.
If you were a dictator, that's the way you'd do it. You don't understand how Communism worked. Even if you disagree with something, you should understand it.
At worst, this single-party state is taken over by self-interested individuals who use it to enrich their own lives at the expense of the people.
Sounds like the Bush Administration (and much of the Obama Administration). How many billions of dollars in no-bid contracts did the Bush Administration steer towards their campaign contributors during the Iraq war?
There has been a revival of ECT for severe, incurable depression, especially with the risk of suicide, and it's always with the consent of the patient. The problem is, it's always associated with memory loss. The recent treatments have less memory loss than the older treatments, but if you have ECT, you're going to lose long-term memories.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMct075234
Clinical Therapeutics
Electroconvulsive Therapy for Depression
Sarah H. Lisanby, M.D.
N Engl J Med 2007; 357:1939-1945
November 8, 2007
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMct075234
1. Zucotti Park was open to the public 24 hours a day, according to a contract signed between the developers and the City. There was no "after hours."
2. Occupy Wall Street wanted to bring portable toilets like every other big event in New York City. The City denied them a permit. So they used the bathrooms in the MacDonald's across the street and the neighboring restaurants.
3. I was at Zucotti Park a couple of times during the demonstration. They organized a volunteer cleanup crew that cleaned every inch of the park continuously. If you threw a candy wrapper on the floor, somebody would sweep it up within 5 minutes.
4. The local Community Board voted to support the demonstration. So the local taxpayers approved.
5. There were surveys of demonstrators which found that most of them were employed, and their average income was probably higher than yours. So they pay more taxes than you do.
6. You find it offensive. Too fucking bad. That's how we do things in America. If you don't like it, go back where you came from. (If they'll have you.)
There was nothing illegal about it.
Zucotti park was a private park open to the public 24 hours a day, according to a legally binding agreement between the City and the original developer. The local Community Board voted to support the occupation. There were court decisions in the past allowing similar protests.
In addition, there's the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gives people the right to peacefully protest, as other people here have mentioned.
I could come down to Zucotti Park at all hours of the day and talk to people about politics. What better use could anyone make of a public space?
I went down there (Zucotti Park) and spoke to them too. Their message was pretty clear, so I'll repeat it:
The wealthiest 1% of Americans have most of the income, most of the wealth, and control the political system through their campaign contributions and power generally.
They're not running it very well. They've used health care, education, and housing as a way to make money, driven the costs up, and made them unaffordable to the rest of us.
There's more of us than there are of them. We can vote. We don't have to vote for politicians that will sell us out (50/50 divided on Obama). We can organize to teach people how they're being exploited by the 1%.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119393867164279313.html
This Japanese student had trouble understanding the meaning of the American expression, "The shit hits the fan."
What could it mean, he thought -- is it the contrast between a delicate beautiful fan, compared to a lowly earthy excretion?
Then he got it -- an electric fan.
Perhaps my post was inappropriately insulting. Do a Google search for the article headline, and click on the cache.
If you can't figure out how to get around the WSJ paywall you don't belong on Slashdot.
If you read that passage from Wikipedia that I posted, you'll see that Israel wasn't attacked by its neighbors. Israel attacked.
I'm not a lawyer. Theodor Meron is. He was the Israeli government's top international lawyer in 1967. The prime minister of Israel asked him whether it would be legal to occupy the territories, and he said it would be illegal. It doesn't get any clearer than that.
I studied German (and European) history. Zionism had its origins in 19th century German nationalism. The same movement that led to Theodor Herzel produced Fichte, Jahn, Herder and ultimately the Nazis. The nationalist movements all wanted to go back to their "historical" borders when their nation was supposedly an empire. That's what the Nazis did and that's what the Israeli Likud is doing now.
That's the choice the Israelis made: Do they want to follow the law, and live in peace with their neighbors, or do they want to ressurect 19th century German nationalism and have wars of conquest, which are now illegal? You see their decision.
If you compare the accounts of Jews being driven out of their lands, and Palestinians being driven out of their lands, the similarity is remarkable. People in the Jewish peace movement say, "That sounds just like what my grandfather described."
I can't explain it to you. Here's somebody who can. This is from the Jewish Daily Forward. http://www.evcomics.com/2011/11/20/never-miss-an-opportunity/
here's your citation and stfu.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_To_Serfdom
There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.
Manhattan has actually been coming out of a weak real estate market. I live around the Times Square neighborhood. Several real estate construction projects were cancelled. There are empty stores. It's counter-intuitive, since the price of Manhattan real estate seemed infinite, but that's why we get real estate bubbles that finally burst.
For example, Mayor Bloomberg sold the Donnell library to a hotel company, but the market crashed so it is now a gutted building on 53rd St. between 5th and 6th Ave., one of the most expensive locations in the world.
There are stores in the neighborhood that have closed, and left vacant instead of being rented (even in the Christmas sales season).
Some buildings just stay vacant for reasons that I can't understand. For example, there is 400 W. 57th St., on the SW corner of 9th Ave., which is owned by a Korean investment syndicate, that has remained vacant for maybe 15 years. There was an article in the New York Times about how it was a prime location (3 blocks from Carnegie Hall, and 4 blocks from Lincoln Center) and how they were planning to do something with it, but last time I walked by it was still empty.
Sometimes a real estate company will have vacant property, so they'll throw up a cheap store just do something with it rather than let it sit vacant. I think a lot of the 99-cent stores are set up like that. Some of these stores, like the restaurants and tacky shops, have the landlord as a partner. They're waiting for the real estate market to come back, and then they'll tear down the block and build a new building.
It's strange to think that a building like the one on Times Square could have signs on the outside, but nobody exploiting the inside in eternally-hustling Manhattan. But it happens.
Here's another one: I was living in another building around that area. My super asked me to help him do something in the back yard. He took me through a non-public door, and into a big back yard, that nobody in the building was allowed to use. There was a line of buildings down the north and south street, with a string of back yards between them, and nobody was using the back yards. It was like a collection of secret gardens. There are lots of streets like that in Manhattan, with closed-off back yards, even though space is so precious.
Take it to the International Criminal Court.
I don't think it's a newsflash that the countries that attacked Israel and then lost territory are upset about it.
Newsflash: Israel attacked.
The war began on June 5 with Israel launching surprise bombing raids against Egyptian air-fields after a period of high tension that included an Israeli raid into the Jordanian-controlled West Bank,[11][12] Israeli initiated aerial clashes over Syrian territory,[13] Syrian artillery attacks against Israeli settlements in the vicinity of the border followed by Israeli response against Syrian positions in the Golan Heights and encroachments of increasing intensity and frequency (initiated by Israel) into the demilitarized zones along the Syrian border[14] and culminating in the Egyptian imposition of a naval blockade on Eilat and ordering of the evacuation from the Sinai Peninsula of the U.N. buffer force.
That was then, this is now.
After the Second World War and the Nurenberg trials, a bunch of international lawyers (many of them Jewish, I'm proud to say) got together and wrote a set of international laws and agreements, including the Geneva conventions, which most countries signed, which would prevent acquisition of territory by force from ever happening again.
So now it violates international law. And Israel is violating international law.
What Israel's right-wing government is doing also violates basic intelligence. If you want your country to be safe and secure, don't make enemies of everybody in the world. You saw how well that worked for Germany.
The entire international community, including the U.S., the U.N., and the International Court of Justice, consider the settlements to be illegal.
Not only that, but Theodor Meron, the legal counsel of Israel's own Foreign Ministry in September 1967, said so. The Prime Minister’s Office asked him for his opinion on the legality of civilian settlement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He wrote that it was clearly illegal: “civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”
So that was the Israeli government's own official legal opinion.
Gershom Gorenberg, an Israeli historian, found a copy of the memo when he was doing research in the archives. http://southjerusalem.com/settlement-and-occupation-historical-documents/
You believe that, in a Communist government, the individual only exists at the pleasure of the state. I don't know where you got that from. That's not what they believed.
Emma Goldman certainly didn't believe that. Neither did Andre Sakharov.
The Communists never talked about serving the state in anything I heard or saw. They talked about serving "the people."
You may have difficulty understanding why a Communist doctor would leave a profitable practice to serve "the people," where he was most needed, but that's what a lot of Communists, like Norman Bethune, did.
There are a lot of Cuban doctors who are happy to serve in Latin America or Africa where they are most needed, even though any of them could walk into the American embassy, defect, get automatic citizenship and become millionaires in the US. But there are a lot of doctors who don't want to work where they have to turn away patients who can't afford to pay.
I met an American doctor, who retired early from a profitable practice and re-joined the U.S. Marines during the recent misguided invasion of Iraq, because he wanted to go where he was needed. He was no different -- on the other side. What do you think those U.S. Marines are doing -- serving the state?
The American Communists realized that it was politically effective to support the black civil rights movement, but the people I knew certainly believed in equality as a principle as well. They went down south and sometimes got killed. Until Truman desegregated the U.S. military, the Communist Party was one of the most integrated institutions in America. A black person could join the Communist Party and be accepted as an equal. They ran black candidates for office. The Daily Worker was one of the few U;S. daily newspapers with an integrated staff. Communists would never use the word "nigger."