Articles Posted by Ralph E. Stone
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Drapetomania: A Disease Called Freedom
According to Dr. Cartwright, the disease of drapetomania — peculiar to Blacks — justified the enslavement as a therapeutic necessity for the slaves and as a medical and moral necessity for their White masters. He claimed that Blacks who fled slavery suffered from drapetomania. At the time pro-slavery advocates believed that Blacks benefited from slavery and any Black who tried to escape must be crazy. The cure was a sound beating.
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The Palestine Papers
The papers show Israel was intransigent in public and intransigent in private. This raises the question as to why Israel would concede anything when the Palestinians were willing to concede much. When the Palestinians people and the world see what the Palestinian negotiators were willing to concede, there should be an outcry forcing Palestine to give up the peace process and seek international recognition of a Palestinian state with 1967 borders.
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Why Did Baby Doc Duvalier Return to Haiti?
In 1991, five years after Baby Doc fled, Haitians elected a priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who resisted the IMF’s austerity dictates. Within months, the military, with a wink and a nod from George HW Bush, deposed him. In 2004, after Aristide was re-elected President, he was kidnapped and removed again with a wink and nod, this time, from George W. Bush. He is now in exile in South Africa. As a simple matter of justice, we owe Haiti billions, not just the $1.5 billion promised by President Obama. We helped break it, therefore we must fix it.
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Did Sarah Palin Play a Role
in Giffords Assassination Attempt?We have all no doubt heard that gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, 22, shot Congresswoman Giffords as she met with constituents outside a grocery store, killing Arizona’s chief federal judge John M. Roll, and five others including a five-year old, and leaving Ms. Giffords fighting for her life with a bullet through her brain.
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Time To Re-examine Proposition 13
Proposition 13 unfairly treats commercial property like residential property. In San Francisco, for example, according to Assessor Phil Ting, prior to Proposition 13, commercial property owners paid 59 percent of property tax revenues and residential property owners paid 41 percent. In 2008, commercial property owners paid just 43 percent of property taxes, while residential property owners paid 57 percent. I believe voters would approve reversing these 2008 ratios.
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Facebook: A Note of Caution
Should Facebook users be worried about personal privacy? Consider that early this year, Facebook announced that it was changing its privacy settings in order to make more user information public. This announcement caused an uproar in the media and the public. Facebook was urged to increase transparency about how user information is shared with third parties and encouraged to install more robust protections for this sharing.
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Palestinian Statehood to be Decided by UN?
The last thing Israel wants is for the issue to end up in the UN. But why not the UN? Consider that at the creation of Israel in 1947, the UN partitioned the land, allotting the Jews 55 percent of Palestine. The Arabs did not agree to this partition. The action of the UN conflicted with the basic principles for which the world organization was established, namely, to uphold the right of all peoples to self-determination.
The Hunger Site
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