: re: New York Police Officers Are Quick to Resort to Chokeholds, Inspector General Finds

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 7:52 AM
Subject: re: New York Police Officers Are Quick to Resort to Chokeholds, Inspector General Finds
To: "letters@nytimes.com"


To the Editor:
   Of course, the police review board must take seriously each
violation of the police code of conduct. But this is not purely a
police matter. If an officer used a chokehold that he cannot use as an
officer, he used it as a private citizen. It is for the
prosecutor--preferably a special prosecutor--to determine whether
that's "assault and battery" or "attempted murder".
Barry Haskell Levine



http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/nyregion/new-york-police-officers-are-quick-to-resort-to-chokeholds-inspector-general-finds.html

: re: In New Era of Terrorism, Voice From Yemen Echoes

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 8:18 AM
Subject: re: In New Era of Terrorism, Voice From Yemen Echoes
To: "letters@nytimes.com"


To the Editor:
    It is now reported that an American citizen,  Anwar al-Awlaki,
offered material aid to terrorists including the Charlie Hebdo gunmen,
funding their travel and training in direct violation of U.S. statute.
Yet he was neither charged nor tried. He and his son were killed
without due process of Law.  That presents us four options:
1-Cherif Kouatchi is lying
2-Cherif Kouatchi was deceived
3-our vaunted CIA/NSA spy machine is incompetent
4-president Obama preferred to assert a novel power of extra-judicial
slaying rather than let duly constituted courts do the work of
Justice.
   Cherif Kouatchi is dead and we may never get to evaluate the first
two options. But the fourth one should keep Americans awake at night.
If our president can have the al-Awlakis killed without charge or
trial, he can have any one--or all--of us killed without charge or
trial. That's not how the Rule of Law is supposed to work. While we
mourn the victims at Charlie Hebdo as martyrs to Free Speech, we need
to remember that the al-Awlakis were killed for noxious political
speech.
Barry Haskell Levine



http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/world/middleeast/paris-attacks-anwar-al-awlaki.html

: re: Missing Its Own Goals, Germany Renews Effort to Cut Carbon Emissions

Thursday, December 4, 2014

: re: Missing Its Own Goals, Germany Renews Effort to Cut Carbon Emissions

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 8:50 AM
Subject: re: Missing Its Own Goals, Germany Renews Effort to Cut Carbon Emissions
To: "letters@nytimes.com" 

To the Editor:

    Germany has set a high bar for herself in the 21st century, leading the world away from the carbon-based economy of the 19th century and forgoing the fission power that seemed so promising in the 20th.   Faced with the prospect of Putin using natural gas exports as a weapon, however, she has fallen back on some coal-fired capacity that might otherwise have been shut down. That's an exigency of history, not a failure of vision. The rest of the world--much of which has more solar and more wind potential than Germany--would do well to follow where she leads into the future.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/world/europe/germany-carbon-emissions-environment.html?_r=0

: re: Voodoo Time Machine

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 10:26 AM
Subject: re: Voodoo Time Machine
To: "letters@nytimes.com"


To the Editor:
   If Economics were a science like physics is a science, disproven
ideas (like trickle-down) would stay as dead as the luminiferous
aether.  But Economics occupies a space that is neither wholly science
nor wholly not. When professor Krugman writes "it’s a symptom of
[Mitch McConnell's] party’s epistemic closure. Republicans know many
things that aren’t so, and no amount of contrary evidence will get
them to change their minds...we’re looking at a political subculture
in which ideological tenets are simply not to be questioned, no matter
what. Supply-side economics is valid no matter what actually happens
to the economy, guaranteed health insurance must be a failure even if
it’s working, and anyone who points out the troubling facts is ipso
facto an enemy" he describes a religious war, not an academic dispute.
Barry Haskell Levine



http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/opinion/paul-krugman-voodoo-time-machine.html

: re: From a Pile of Dirt, Hope for a Powerful New Antibiotic

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 8:39 AM
Subject: re: From a Pile of Dirt, Hope for a Powerful New Antibiotic
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:
     The argument that resistance won't develop against teixobactin isn't new. The same argument was offered (and fervently believed!) when vancomycin was introduced. Yet mere years after vancomycin entered clinical practice, resistant pathogens were encountered and resistance has spread across several genera now.

    The world needs novel antibiotics, in no small part because we have abused the earlier ones. Teixobactin has huge promise. But if it were the antibiotic to end all antibiotics, the organism producing it would long since have taken over the world. Instead, it lives cheek by jowl with organisms that have long since learned to cope with it.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/health/from-a-pile-of-dirt-hope-for-a-powerful-new-antibiotic.html

: re: Stop Giving Palestinians a Pass

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 10:48 AM
Subject: re: Stop Giving Palestinians a Pass
To: "letters@nytimes.com"


To the Editor:
   Dennis Ross asks "Why not wait"; the Talmud responds "The sword
comes into the world because of justice delayed and justice denied".
The Palestinians have a right to national self-determination no less
than any other People. To be sure, there will be tactical reasons that
one hour is more auspicious than another. But it is not for the U.S.
or for anyone else to tell the Palestinians that what is their right
can't be honored now.
Barry Haskell Levine



http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/05/opinion/stop-giving-palestinians-a-pass.html?_r=0

: re: The Palestinians’ Desperation Move

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Jan 1, 2015 at 8:20 AM
Subject: re: The Palestinians’ Desperation Move
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   While the U.S. continues to claim to support a Palestinian State, our tangible actions keep pushing that off into an indefinite future. The Palestinians have a right--as enunciated in the U.N. charter--to national self-determination here in the tangible present. Just as ben Gurion didn't need to see the approval of the Egyptians, Iraqis and Jordanians in '48, Abbas shouldn't need to go hat-in-hand to anyone to secure his People's right.

    But in trying to please the Russians (who fear Chechen separatists) and the Chinese (who fear Uighur and Tibetan separatists) and the Spanish (who fear Basque separatists)...the U.S. has made itself the guarantor of a the current world map, even--as here--in defiance of peoples' rights.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/01/opinion/the-palestinians-desperation-move.html?ref=opinion&_r=0