>> ^maximillian:

I liked the time (just 10 years ago) when college professors would say that people who use vulgarity are poor communicators. Now you're not taken seriously if you don't use the F-bomb.
Sorry, but seeing kids using vulgarity so liberally is terrible.
Way to go liberals for messing up this world.


This has to be the dumbest comment i've read in awhile.

I happen to agree that the language detracts from the message... but i also happen to think the message is 100% spot on... Way to just gloss over that fact by the way.

I think it's pretty comical how the language in one video, obviously intended to be over the top and shocking can really rattle you so much and go so far as to suggest it's the cause for the fall of our society... Not the conservative backed wars on social classes... races... religions... sexuality... or oh yeah actually shooting wars... no no... those are all good.... it's kids using foul language in a web-commercial thats really going to shatter our society.

I liked the time (just 10 years ago) when college professors would say that people who use vulgarity are poor communicators. Now you're not taken seriously if you don't use the F-bomb.

Sorry, but seeing kids using vulgarity so liberally is terrible.

Way to go liberals for messing up this world.

Hrmmmm. Another listen.

How was this not taken off the air, this would have to have been off air.

No producer would of allowed this to go out.

this must be the behind the scene stuff.

I think that Zakaria was trying to make the point that the media was more concerned about what the president appeared to be doing about the oil spill, and about how he appeared to feel about it, but maybe I'm wrong.

However, I pretty much agree with Carville on this one, and I can't claim to be a fan of his.

If we couldn't do more about the spill, I think that more could have been done to protect the shores, at the very least.

I hate to say it, because it gives the cons on the web very tight pants and palpitating heart rates, but Obama has not taken this seriously enough.

This thing has the potential to haunt us for generations, not just a few months.

This thing can create dead zones the size of a floating state of Texas in not only the gulf, but in the Atlantic as well.

This is a greater threat to our country and its welfare than 9/11.

There's more than one video floating around on this site talking about what the Exxon spill did to animals and people alike. What is said in this video is very similar to those, and all of them are from different people that I've seen. I think it's more likely that government is full of shit in anything they do to downplay it versus what these individuals are saying that are in the medical field and have been studying it trying to cure people since Exxon.

Because we already know that government and oil have not invested in new methods to clean up oil spills, so it's very unlikely they would also invest money into research on what exposure does to people during and after clean up from the Exxon.

If this oil leak is not taken of when they estimate it will be which from what I've read is late July and August for the relief wells to come online. If it keeps spilling out even with the additional wells, I don't see how anyone in this part of the world will be safe from it's effects given weather patterns and ocean currents. I saw on Craig Fergeson they had I believe his name is Jean Cousteau, son of Jacques Cousteau, who was talking about how the oil in the gulf would begin appearing in England due to the water currents and how saturated the water column is because of the disperants.

Lots of very disturbing videos out there regarding what the oil spill has done already. People on the water who were vomiting over the side because the fumes from the water was cutting off the oxygen and causing nausea. Fish so disoriented they were swimming into boats, swimming on their sides and upside down with their mouths sticking out of the water trying to breath. No sightings of dolphins in Florida for a long while, so they are either dead, dieing, or left the area. Kids breaking out in rashes who mysteriously recover shortly after leaving the areas in proximity to tainted zones. Fishermen who are aiding in the clean up, coming down with upper respiratory problems, going to their doctors and being told their lungs look like they've been smoking 3 packs a day when they are in fact non-smokers.

The same responders who at 911 telling people they should wear respirators for the clean up, who say that firemen who refused to wear them in 911 rescues came down with "the crud" from exposure to toxins. They say every person helping clean up the oil spill is offered a respirator, but BP took over distribution of them. And they won't allow people to have respirators without proper training in how to use them, which they will provide. But they won't begin the training until they feel people need the respirators. So you have the right to a respirator, they will give you one when you are trained, but they won't provide training until you need one. Makes perfect sense, like everything else associated with the handling of this.

Crops are diseased and dieing already from just the rain carrying the chemicals used to "clean up" the oil spill. I can't imagine that people out on the water aren't already severely exposed to these same chemicals if it can travel via water evaporation into the clouds to come down as rain...it has to be in the air for them all.

From other sources, they call exposure in Exxon and 911 "the crud" or "The Exxon crud". And people exposed to it have it for the rest of their life and eventually die because of it. I could see people in 911 being exposed just because it was a fast response situation and people were trying to do the right thing in a very short period of time. But there is no excuse for what is happening now, especially with the Exxon spill being there as evidence and proof of what can and will happen to people exposed to the oil and the chemicals used in it's clean up. A disaster caused by BP for money/time saving measures is one thing, but then allowing people trying to help contain a problem they had nothing to do with but bear all of the consequences of it to become ill and probably die from their efforts to help....that's something that can not stand.

Like @dgandhi said, the age of the universe and the time of the creation of the universe is observable. This is not disputed, it's not taken on faith, it is fact.

Therefore the "young earth hypothesis" proposed in the bible and believed by some people is demonstrably false.

It may be unprovable what happened before the universe came into existence as we know it, but after the initial big bang, we're pretty on the money, so to speak.

>> ^marinara:

>> ^dgandhi:
^bobknight33:
Science can not prove the creation of the universe/man but you would rather believe this theory but not the Bible. Both are taken on faith.
Wrong.
The universe is OBSERVABLY 13.7B years deep, and is OBSERVABLY expanding uniformly,
WTF this is stupid, how do you not know the difference between accepted and proven and accepted and unprovable?
hey i'll be the first to admit that there's tons of ignorance out there. Given. But how is taking things out of context helping out? I'm talking about this thread and the vid.

Diagnosing Benny Morris
The Mind of a European Settler
by Gabriel Ash


Israeli historian Benny Morris crossed a new line of shame when he put his academic credentials and respectability in the service of outlining the "moral" justification for a future genocide against Palestinians.

Benny Morris is the Israeli historian most responsible for the vindication of the Palestinian narrative of 1948. The lives of about 700,000 people were shattered as they were driven from their homes by the Jewish militia (and, later, the Israeli army) between December 1947 and early 1950. Morris went through Israeli archives and wrote the day by day account of this expulsion, documenting every "ethnically cleansed" village and every recorded act of violence, and placing each in the context of the military goals and perceptions of the cleansers.

Israel's apologists tried in vain to attack Morris' professional credibility. From the opposite direction, since he maintained that the expulsion was not "by design," he was also accused of drawing excessively narrow conclusions from the documents and of being too naive a reader of dissimulating statements. Despite these limitations, Morris' The Birth of the Palestinian Refugees Problem, 1947-1949 is an authoritative record of the expulsion.

In anticipation of the publication of the revised edition, Morris was interviewed in Ha'aretz. The major new findings in the revised book, based on fresh documents, further darken the picture.

The new archival material, Morris reveals, records routine execution of civilians, twenty-four massacres, including one in Jaffa, and at least twelve cases of rape by military units, which Morris acknowledges are probably "the tip of the iceberg." Morris also says he found documents confirming the broader conclusions favored by his critics: the expulsion was pre-meditated; concrete expulsion orders were given in writing, some traceable directly to Ben Gurion.

Morris also found documentations for Arab High Command calls for evacuating women and children from certain villages, evidence he oddly claims strengthen the Zionist propaganda claim that Palestinians left because they were told to leave by the invading Arab states. Morris had already documented two dozen such cases in the first edition. It is hard to see how attempts by Arab commanders to protect civilians from anticipated rape and murder strengthen the Zionist fairy tale. But that failed attempt at evenhandedness is the least of Morris' problems. As the interview progresses, it emerges with growing clarity that, while Morris the historian is a professional and cautious presenter of facts, Morris the intellectual is a very sick person.

His sickness is of the mental-political kind. He lives in a world populated not by fellow human beings, but by racist abstractions and stereotypes. There is an over-abundance of quasi-poetic images in the interview, as if the mind is haunted by the task of grasping what ails it: "The Palestinian citizens of Israel are a time bomb," not fellow citizens. Islam is "a world in which human lives don't have the same value as in the West." Arabs are "barbarians" at the gate of the Roman Empire. Palestinian society is "a serial killer" that ought to be executed, and "a wild animal" that must be caged.

Morris' disease was diagnosed over forty years ago, by Frantz Fanon. Based on his experience in subjugated Africa, Fanon observed that "the colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say, with the help of the army and the police, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation, the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil � The native is declared insensitive to ethics � the enemy of values. � He is a corrosive element, destroying all that comes near it � the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces" (from The Wretched of the Earth). And further down, "the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms" (let's not forget to place Morris' metaphors in the context of so many other Israeli appellations for Palestinians: Begin's "two-legged beasts", Eitan's "drugged cockroaches" and Barak's ultra-delicate "salmon"). Morris is a case history in the psychopathology of colonialism.

Bad Genocide, Good Genocide

When the settler encounters natives who refuse to cast down their eyes, his disease advances to the next stage -- murderous sociopathy.

Morris, who knows the exact scale of the terror unleashed against Palestinians in 1948, considers it justified. First he suggests that the terror was justified because the alternative would have been a genocide of Jews by Palestinians. Raising the idea of genocide in this context is pure, and cheap, hysteria. Indeed, Morris moves immediately to a more plausible explanation: the expulsion was a precondition for creating a Jewish state, i.e. the establishment of a specific political preference, not self-defense.

This political explanation, namely that the expulsion was necessary to create the demographic conditions, a large Jewish majority, favored by the Zionist leadership, is the consensus of historians. But as affirmative defense, it is unsatisfactory. So the idea that Jews were in danger of genocide is repeated later, in a more honest way, as merely another racist, baseless generalization: "if it can, [Islamic society] will commit genocide."

But Morris sees no evil. Accusing Ben Gurion of failing to achieve an Arabian Palestine, he recommends further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, including those who are Israeli citizens. Not now, but soon, "within five or ten years," under "apocalyptic conditions" such as a regional war with unconventional weapons, a potentially nuclear war, which "is likely to happen within twenty years." For Morris, and it is difficult to overstate his madness at this point, the likelihood of a nuclear war within the foreseeable future is not the sorry end of a road better not taken, but merely a milestone, whose aftermath is still imaginable, and imaginable within the banal continuity of Zionist centennial policies: he foresees the exchange of unconventional missiles between Israel and unidentified regional states as a legitimate excuse for "finishing the job" of 1948.

Morris speaks explicitly of another expulsion, but, in groping for a moral apology for the past and the future expulsion of Palestinians, he presents a more general argument, one that justifies not only expulsion but also genocide. That statement ought to be repeated, for here is a crossing of a terrible and shameful line.

Morris, a respectable, Jewish, Israeli academic, is out in print in the respectable daily, Haaretz, justifying genocide as a legitimate tool of statecraft. It should be shocking. Yet anybody who interacts with American and Israeli Zionists knows that Morris is merely saying for the record what many think and even say unofficially. Morris, like most of Israel, lives in a temporality apart, an intellectual Galapagos Islands, a political Jurassic Park, where bizarre cousins of ideas elsewhere shamed into extinction still roam the mindscape proudly.

Nor should one think the slippage between expulsion, "transfer," and genocide without practical consequences. It is not difficult to imagine a planned expulsion turn into genocide under the stress of circumstances: The genocides of both European Jews and Armenians began as an expulsion. The expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 was the product of decades of thinking and imagining "transfer." We ought to pay attention: with Morris's statement, Zionist thinking crossed another threshold; what is now discussed has the potential to be actualized, if "apocalyptic conditions" materialize.

The march of civilization and the corpses of the uncivilized

It is instructive to look closer at the manner in which Morris uses racist thinking to justify genocide. Morris' interview, precisely because of its shamelessness, is a particularly good introductory text to Zionist thought.

Morris' racism isn't limited to Arabs. Genocide, according to Morris, is justified as long as it is done for "the final good." But what kind of good is worth the "forced extinction" of a whole people? Certainly, not the good of the latter. (Morris uses the word "Haqkhada," a Hebrew word usually associated with the extinction of animal species. Someone ought to inform Morris about the fact that Native Americans aren't extinct.)

According to Morris, the establishment of a more advanced society justifies genocide: "Yes, even the great American democracy couldn't come to be without the forced extinction of Native Americans. There are times the overall, final good justifies terrible, cruel deeds." Such hopeful comparisons between the future awaiting Palestinians and the fate of Native Americans are common to Israeli apologists. One delegation of American students was shocked and disgusted when it heard this analogy made by a spokesperson at the Israeli embassy in Washington.

Morris's supremacist view of "Western Civilization," that civilization values human life more than Islam, has its basis in the moral acceptance of genocide for the sake of "progress." Morris establishes the superiority of the West on both the universal respect for human life and the readiness to exterminate inferior races. The illogicalness of the cohabitation of a right to commit genocide together with a higher level of respect for human lives escapes him, and baffles us, at least until we grasp that the full weight of the concept of "human" is restricted, in the classic manner of Eurocentric racism, to dwellers of civilized (i.e. Western) nations.

This is the same logic that allowed early Zionists to describe Palestine as an empty land, despite the presence of a million inhabitants. In the end, it comes down to this: killing Arabs -- one dozen Arabs or one million Arabs, the difference is merely technical -- is acceptable if it is necessary in order to defend the political preferences of Jews because Jews belong to the superior West and Arabs are inferior. We must be thankful to Professor Morris for clarifying the core logic of Zionism so well.

The color of Jews

Morris assures us that his values are those of the civilized West, the values of universal morality, progress, etc. But then he also claims to hold the primacy of particular loyalties, a position for which he draws on Albert Camus. But to reconcile Morris' double loyalty to both Western universalism and to Jewish particularism, one must forget that these two identities were not always on the best of terms.

How can one explain Morris' knowledge that the ethnic Darwinism that was used to justify the murder of millions of non-whites, including Black African slaves, Native Americans, Arabs, and others, was also used to justify the attempt to exterminate Jews? How can Morris endorse the "civilizational" justification of genocide, which includes the genocide of Jews, even as he claims the holocaust as another justification for Zionism? Perhaps Morris' disjointed mind doesn't see the connection. Perhaps he thinks that there are "right" assertions of racist supremacy and "wrong" assertions of racist supremacy. Or perhaps Morris displays another facet of the psychopathologies of oppression, the victim's identification with the oppressor.

Perhaps in Morris' mind, one half tribalist and one half universalist, the Jews were murdered to make way for a superior, more purely Aryan, European civilization, and the Jews who are today serving in the Israeli army, both belong and do not belong to the same group. They belong when Morris invokes the totems of the tribe to justify loyalty. But when his attention turns to the universal principle of "superior civilization," these Jews are effaced, like poor relations one is ashamed to be associated with, sent back to the limbo they share with the great non-white mass of the dehumanized. In contrast, the Jews of Israel, self-identified as European, have turned white, dry-cleaned and bleached by Zionism, and with their whiteness they claim the privilege that Whites always had, the privilege to massacre members of "less advanced" races.

False testimony

It would be marvelous if Morris the historian could preserve his objective detachment while Morris the Zionist dances with the demons of Eurocentric racism. But the wall of professionalism -- and it is a very thick and impressive wall in Morris' case -- cannot hold against the torrent of hate.

For example, Morris lies about his understanding of the 2000 Camp David summit. In Ha'aretz, Morris says that, "when the Palestinians rejected Barak's proposal of July 2000 and Clinton's proposal of December 2000, I understood that they were not ready to accept a two state solution. They wanted everything. Lydda, and Akka and Jaffa."

But in his book Righteous Victims, Morris explains the failure of the negotiations thus: "the PLO leadership had gradually accepted, or seemed to�Israel...keeping 78 percent of historical Palestine. But the PLO wanted the remaining 22 percent. � At Camp David, Barak had endorsed the establishment of a Palestinian state�[on only] 84-90 percent of that 22 percent. � Israel was also to control the territory between a greatly enlarged Jerusalem and Jericho, effectively cutting the core of the future Palestinian state into two�" Morris' chapter of "Righteous Victims" that deals with the '90s leaves a lot to be desired, but it still strives for some detached analysis. In contrast, in Ha'aretz Morris offers baseless claims he knows to be false.

If Morris lies about recent history, and even grossly misrepresents the danger Jews faced in Palestine in 1948, a period he is an expert on, his treatment of more general historical matters is all but ridiculous, an astounding mix of insinuations and clich�s. For example, Morris reminds us that "the Arab nation won a big chunk of the Earth, not because of its intrinsic virtues and skills, but by conquering and murdering and forcing the conquered to convert." (What is Morris' point? Is the cleansing of Palestine attributable to Jewish virtues and skills, rather than to conquering and murdering?)

This is racist slander, not history. As an example, take Spain, which was conquered in essentially one battle in 711 A.D. by a small band of North African Berbers who had just converted to Islam. Spain was completely Islamized and Arabized within two centuries with very little religious coercion, and certainly no ethnic cleansing. But after the last Islamic rulers were kicked out of Spain by the Christian army of Ferdinand and Isabel in 1492, a large section of the very same Spanish population that willingly adopted Islam centuries earlier refused to accept Christianity despite a century of persecution by the Spanish Inquisition. 600,000 Spanish Muslims were eventually expelled in 1608.

Obviously, Islamic civilization had its share of war and violence. But, as the above example hints, compared to the West, compared to the religious killing frenzy of sixteenth century Europe, compared to the serial genocides in Africa and America, and finally to the flesh-churning wars of the twentieth century, Islamic civilization looks positively benign. So why all this hatred? Where is all this fire and brimstone Islamophobia coming from?

Being elsewhere

From Europe, of course, but with a twist. Europe has always looked upon the East with condescension. In periods of tension, that condescension would escalate to fear and hate. But it was also mixed and tempered with a large dose of fascination and curiosity. The settler, however, does not have the luxury to be curious. The settler leaves the metropolis hoping to overcome his own marginal, often oppressed, status in metropolitan society. He goes to the colony motivated by the desire to recreate the metropolis with himself at the top.

For the settler, going to the colony is not a rejection of the metropolis, but a way to claim his due as a member. Therefore, the settler is always trying to be more metropolitan than the metropolis. When the people of the metropolis baulk at the bloodbath the settler wants to usher in the name of their values, the settler accuses them of "growing soft," and declares himself "the true metropolis." That is also why there is one crime of which the settler can never forgive the land he colonized -- its alien climate and geography, its recalcitrant otherness, the oddness of its inhabitants, in sum, the harsh truth of its being elsewhere. In the consciousness of the settler, condescension thus turns into loathing.

Israeli settler society, especially its European, Ashkenazi part, especially that Israel which calls itself "the peace camp," "the Zionist Left," etc., is predicated on the loathing of all things Eastern and Arab. (Now, of course, we have in addition the religious, post-1967 settlers who relate to the Zionist Left the way the Zionist Left stands in relation to Europe, i.e. as settlers.) "Arab" is a term of abuse, one that can be applied to everything and everyone, including Jews. This loathing is a unifying theme. It connects Morris' latest interview in Ha'aretz with Ben Gurion's first impression of Jaffa in 1905; he found it filthy and depressing.

In another article, published in Tikkun Magazine, Morris blames the "ultra-nationalism, provincialism, fundamentalism and obscurantism" of Arab Jews in Israel for the sorry state of the country (although Begin, Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak, Sharon, and most of Israel's generals, leaders, and opinion makers of the last two decades are European Jews). For Morris, everything Eastern is corrupt and every corruption has an Eastern origin.

One shouldn't, therefore, doubt Morris when he proclaims himself a traditional Left Zionist. There is hardly anything he says that hasn't been said already by David Ben Gurion or Moshe Dayan. Loathing of the East and the decision to subdue it by unlimited force is the essence of Zionism.

Understanding the psycho-political sources of this loathing leads to some interesting observations about truisms that recur in Morris' (and much of Israel's) discourse. Morris blames Arafat for thinking that Israel is a "crusader state," a foreign element that will eventually be sent back to its port of departure. This is a common refrain of Israeli propaganda. It is also probably true. But it isn't Arafat's fault that Morris is a foreigner in the Middle East. Why shouldn't Arafat believe Israel is a crusader state when Morris himself says so? "We are the vulnerable extension of Europe in this place, exactly as the crusaders."

It is Morris -- like the greater part of Israel's elite -- who insists on being a foreigner, on loathing the Middle East and dreaming about mist-covered Europe, purified and deified by distance. If Israel is a crusader state, and therefore a state with shallow roots, likely to pack up and disappear, it is not the fault of those who make that observation. It is the fault of those Israelis, like Morris, who want to have nothing to do with the Middle East.

Morris is deeply pessimistic about Israel's future; this feeling is very attractive in Israel. The end of Israel is always felt to be one step away, hiding beneath every development, from the birthrate of Bedouins to the establishment of the International Court of Justice.

Naturally, every Palestinian demand is such a doomsday threat. This sense of existential precariousness can be traced back to 1948; it was encouraged by Israel's successive governments because it justified the continuous violence of the state and the hegemony of the military complex. It may eventually become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But this existential fear goes deeper. It is rooted in the repressed understanding (which Morris both articulates and tries to displace) of the inherent illegitimacy of the Israeli political system and identity. "Israel" is brute force. In Morris' words: "The bottom line is that force is the only thing that will make them accept us." But brute force is precarious. Time gnaws at it. Fatigue corrodes it. And the more it is used, the more it destroys the very acceptance and legitimacy it seeks.

For Israel, the fundamental question of the future is, therefore, whether Israelis can transcend colonialism. The prognosis is far from positive. In a related article in The Guardian, Morris explains that accepting the right of return of the Palestinian refugees would mean forcing Israeli Jews into exile. But why would Jews have to leave Israel if Israel becomes a bi-national, democratic state? One cannot understand this without attention to the colonial loathing of the Middle East which Morris so eloquently expresses.

But taking that into account, I'm afraid Morris is right. Many Israeli Jews, especially European Jews who tend to possess alternative passports, would rather emigrate than live on equal terms with Palestine's natives in a bi-national state. It is to Frantz Fanon again that we turn for observing this first. "The settler, from the moment the colonial context disappears, has no longer an interest in remaining or in co-existing."

Related Articles:

* The Education of Benny the Barbarian by Ahmed Amr
* Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion by Adi Ophir

Gabriel Ash was born in Romania and grew up in Israel. He is a regular contributor to Yellow Times.org, where this article first appeared (www.yellowtimes.org). Gabriel encourages your comments: gash@YellowTimes.org

>> ^mxxcon:
so did Sagan respond to him because DeGrasse was something special even back them or that just happened that The Carl Sagan responded to The Neil DeGrasse?


What a very valid question. I'd love to think that even though DeGrasse might have appeared to be on his way to scientific success Sagan would still have contacted him. Those kinds of experiences shape a life and could very well represent a turning point in DeGrasse's life; one that might have turned out differently had the meeting not taken place. Shame we don't hear more of that.

He is right and wrong, this looks at actions after and not actions before that lead to a crisis like this.

Hudson claims fault with the government bailouts, yes a bailout by the US government is always a bad idea, but one must understand the root cause of why such an action took place, CDOs and subprime exposures were intertwined in complex financial instruments that exposed all the banks, Lehman had so much debt that no one wanted to touch it neither the US nor the UK government, Barclay's walked on buying it because no government wanted to under write it. After Lehman collapsed it spiraled confidence downwards in all sectors of the financial market. Government money and bailout was then needed to reignite confidence and loosen money and start allow interbank loaning to take place. If this didn't happen we would have been in a far worse position, is there problems with other incentives the government took? yes but one must understand the pressure induced by both the populace and economic interests to take all and any action, most of which was to shore up confidence in the financial sector.

How did this come about? the financial sector and believers like Alan Greenspan always believed that the financial market could always self regulate themselves to not taken actions that would lead to their own demise, CDOS and subprime packages actually evolved from greed and abnormal profits. This lead to a whole slew of deregulated financial instruments like NINJA loans, which allowed firms to give loans to people no have No Income No Job or Assets. Who would have prevented this? the SEC and Fed which were both pushed into taking more lenient positions with regards to financial markets (same thing happened before with junk bonds and derivatives).

But great sift indeed, I totally agree with his views on dissuading borrowing and creation of more debt. Financial markets do not produce wealth. They only transfer it. Old school investment doesn't occur, as its multinational and money doesn't have incentive to invest in the US then say China.

Alright, people. One of my best friends goes to the University of Pittsburgh and he was in the middle of the whole thing. Most of the "protesters" were just students curious about what was going on. He wrote this about it all:

"This note is for my friends who are not in Pittsburgh and have not yet been given a fairly comprehensive version of what has been going on here. If you have been seeing my wall posts, you'll know that something bad happened in Pittsburgh, but if you want my story, here it is...

On Thursday and Friday September 24-25, the G-20 World Leader's Summit occurred in Pittsburgh. The summit involved the leaders of the United States, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Russia, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. The purpose of the summit is to have a forum for the major world leaders about the global economic crisis. Pittsburgh was chosen to be the location for the summit in order to highlight its economic recovery after the city's manufacturing industry collapsed about 40 years ago.

The G-20 is always met with protesters for various causes, including global warming awareness, socialism, peoples' rights in other countries, anti-free-trade, and anti-war, and anarchy. The city of Pittsburgh was required to bring in police forces from all regions of the state of Pennsylvania and other nearby states.

On the evening of the 24th, the summit began with a dinner in the Phipps Conservatory, a plant exhibition hall (really quite a nice place) just under a mile from my dorm in the borough of Oakland. The University cancelled classes after 4:00 PM that day in order to ensure that students did not have to be outside if they did not wish to. During the day of the 24th, several protests had been broken up by riot police. At about 7:00 PM a small protest began at the Schenley Plaza. (from this point on, I will be referring to locations on campus, please refer to the map I posted at:< http://photos-b.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs209.snc1/7620_178174626232_559501232_4081545_8066324_n.jpg>)

I went there to investigate myself at about 8:00 PM. The protest itself was fairly small, only about a hundred or so people total, with only a handful of protesters. There was some live music and dancing, courtesy of the Hare Krishna. Despite the fact that the protest was fairly small and peaceful, there were several hundred police forming a perimeter around the plaza, which is under a quarter-mile from the Conservatory. All of the Police were in riot gear, which covered any form of identification they may have had; they were also all armed with lethal and non-lethal weapons.

Around 9:00, I decided to return to my dorm. At 10:15, I overheard someone saying that they saw fire on Forbes Avenue. I decided to go out and investigate. At this point, the street had been flooded by curious students, and would remain that way until the police removed them. Several dumpsters had been pushed into the intersection of Forbes and Atwood by anarchist protesters. The next intersection had a overturned dumpster with flaming garbage spilled on the street. Several shop windows had been broken by a protester from California, however the media initially implicated that it had been students who were responsible.

I reached the lawn of the Pitt Union, and at about 10:45 the police began to multiply rapidly. They also brought in several scary-looking trucks with large dish-shaped things on them. This turned out to be a Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), which emits a loud, scary noise which is physically disabling within a certain radius. At 11:00 PM, the trucks began playing a pre-recorded message declaring that the people in the streets had become an "illegal gathering" and that the crowd was to disperse, or they could be subject to arrest or attack with "less lethal" weaponry (does that mean you're less dead when you get hit?)

At this, I decided to retreat to Forbes Hall. Other people were not fortunate enough to get out of there as quickly as I did, and became exposed to a hail of "OC" gas, rubber bullets, mace, LRAD blasts, and nightsticks. The University unfortunately decided to lock down the residence halls as the police approached, giving the retreating students nowhere to go to escape from the police. One of my friends was arrested while holding open the doors to the Litchfield Towers residence hall lobby so that escaping students had somewhere to go. She was dragged outside of the doorway, beaten to the ground, not given any rights, held for five hours, and released without any charge as of yet.

At the time, I was unaware of this, but I watched the police advance through the lower campus (residential area, mainly between Forbes and Fifth avenues) via the live feed on the local news. When I noticed that they were three blocks away from Forbes Hall, I went to the patio on the second floor of the hall (out of reach of anyone who didn't live there or have a friend there). At about midnight, the cops were in front of the hall, still chasing a small group of protesters despite being nearly a mile from the original protest ground and being practically at the end of the campus. Without any real warning, they threw several canisters of "OC" gas onto the patio. Unknown to me at the time, several also entered the lobby and threatened to mace several students who were unable to enter the hall due to the lockdown.

OC gas is for all intents and purposes the same as tear gas. When you inhale it, your lungs and throat itch and you can't do anything but cough. If it gets in your eyes, you become partially blind and it feels like your eyes are melting. I was several feet away from a grenade and was directly exposed to it for several seconds as my fellow students and I tried to escape. I ran to my bathroom on the sixth floor and flushed my eyes and choked for five minutes. The third floor had window open out of which the students had been looking, it was filled with gas, and the students living on the third floor became refugees for several hours while it cleared.

Shortly after passing Forbes hall, the police attack ended. They left Oakland with 42 arrests (most were let go that morning), and a large number of unfairly treated, assaulted, and pissed students. The university itself has yet to make any statement regarding Thursday night, but the Mayor of Pittsburgh and Chief of Police have stated that they are "proud of how well the police handled the situation". They are apparently not fans of students either.

I will save my personal commentary and descriptions of the aftermath for another note. However, here are a few links that you will find interesting.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNeD4rHUF4A> a compilation of student-made videos from 9/24.
The videos are of varying quality and contain some harsh language and violence. These will give you an idea of what the students here experienced (I know the person being dragged away at 2:35)
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6aRrQz7224> This video was not taken by me, but it was taken from my vantage point when Forbes Hall was attacked
<http://www.pittnews.com/> Pitt's student newspaper, featuring independent coverage of the G-20 (and some rather good photography, the ones I took came out terribly)
<http://www.pittbriefly.com/> A blog on which many videos of the G-20 'riot' have been posted. Some of these cannot be found on Youtube.

Thank you for reading this,
......."

>> ^HadouKen24:

However, he's not just stating the way things are. He's also pointing out that the caller has a positive moral obligation to pay taxes for healthcare, etc., given the numerous benefits he's received from society.

>> ^NetRunner: ...

Same old "in society we help each other" argument. What you're missing is that helping each other in a society is supposed to be voluntary. When govt is doing the helping, it immediately becomes compulsory.

Why does the issue of voluntary x compulsory matters?

When people help each other voluntarily, those who help are not taken advantage of because help can be withdrawn. Help can adapt faster to new needs. Those who get help don't take it for granted, because they can't obligate others to help them.

When you make people help each other compulsorily, the potential for abuse is enormous, specially when govt is the middle man choosing who gets help from whom with other people's money. Help doesn't adapt fast enough because there is no interest in profit, no competition, and those who help can't deny help. So you end up not helping those who need help as efficiently, those who are helping get taken advantage of and the govt handling all this money helps itself in the process, hurting society.

For long we've been stuck in a cycle where government gets bigger -> it spends more of society's wealth -> people get poorer and something (like healthcare) become too costly or scarce -> government takes upon itself the job of providing it -> government gets bigger...

There are people that have miraculous recoveries and no one disputes that, but I'm using the term miracle loosely because you cant really define what a miracle is. If the only thing administered was prayer I would argue perhaps the initial diagnosis was incorrect or there was data that was not accounted for (since this isnt exactly a controlled experiment where we know EVERYTHING that happened to the girl)

That being said I dont think the arguments here are petty. It was stupid for the parents of this girl to have not taken her to a doctor and their religion led them to make that choice. People make similar, ill informed, choices regularly because of their faith.

Also I dont agree with your idea that wisdom is learned from faith. Wisdom is defined as an understanding of all available choices and an ability to pick the best one in a situation. Faith seems to hinder your wisdom; or at least it did to these poor people who let their daughter die needlessly.

In reply to this comment by Nithern:
Seems to be quite a few religious haters in the crowd here. Alot of 'religious doesnt do anything, but science does'. In this case, the father and mother, should have gone to the doctor's office (since believe it or not, there are alot of medical doctors, who are Christian), to help treat their child. They decided to go the unwise and unrational method. So, alot of you, whom claim are rational, thinkers of science, fall in to the same trap. What would you have said, if the daughter was healed, and the only thing that was administered, was deep prayer? You would fall in to the same trap, and try to justify your own petty arguements.

The main problem with science, is, that its extremely cold. Tell someone who will suffer for years and die, using only science that all of that suffering is worth enduring? The concept of 'Hope', is not a scientific thought. Hope, is pure faith, and it is what drives so many right now, to endure illnesses and conditions, that some medical cure or process is discovered to help them lead better lives.

THAT, is wisdom. Another concept we learned from faith.

^Nithern

There are people that have miraculous recoveries and no one disputes that, but I'm using the term miracle loosely because you cant really define what a miracle is. If the only thing administered was prayer I would argue perhaps the initial diagnosis was incorrect or there was data that was not accounted for (since this isnt exactly a controlled experiment where we know EVERYTHING that happened to the girl)

That being said I dont think the arguments here are petty. It was stupid for the parents of this girl to have not taken her to a doctor and their religion led them to make that choice. People make similar, ill informed, choices regularly because of their faith.

Also I dont agree with your idea that wisdom is learned from faith. Wisdom is defined as an understanding of all available choices and an ability to pick the best one in a situation. Faith seems to hinder your wisdom; or at least it did to these poor people who let their daughter die needlessly.

>> ^flechette:
I know a lot of people who would have not taken that as well as she did.


No use crying over spilt milk....ba-dum-dum-ch!

I know a lot of people who would have not taken that as well as she did.