: re: A Warning on China Seems Prescient

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 8:46 AM
Subject: re: A Warning on China Seems Prescient
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  If we are to lionize professor Rogoff when one of his warnings  hits the mark, we must keep track of his record, and when he was wrong. We learned years ago (http://www.peri.umass.edu/236/hash/31e2ff374b6377b2ddec04deaa6388b1/publication/566/)
that professor Rogoff always diagnoses "excessive debt", even when his own data don't support it.  To a reader who keeps track, professor Rogoff looks less like a prophet and more like the little boy who cried "wolf".

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/business/dealbook/a-warning-on-china-seems-prescient.html

: re: One Palestinian’s Refusal to Eat Puts Israel in a Bind

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 1:39 PM
Subject: re: One Palestinian’s Refusal to Eat Puts Israel in a Bind
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:
  John Locke--who, more than any other individual, inspired America's Founding Fathers--found the Right to Die to be fundamental. Without it, the State has  no legitimate power to imprison offenders.  The U.S. has long divorced our policy of incarceration from this basis. And of course Israeli practice is in no way bound by our laws or by our constitution.  But if the U.S. and Israel are to obey the Rule of Laws, and not of men, we need to ask soberly by what right we would shove a hose up a detainee's (or a prisoner's) nose. If it is only to spare the State the embarrassment of of a death in custody, maybe that custody was never legitimate.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/world/middleeast/one-palestinians-refusal-to-eat-puts-israel-in-a-bind.html

: re: Robot Weapons: What’s the Harm? II

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 4:05 PM
Subject: re: Robot Weapons: What’s the Harm?
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  Professor Kaplan envisions a battlefield on which human combatants are increasingly replaced by intelligent killing machines. In such a scenario, victory belongs not to the side fielding the greater force, but to the side that is able to corrupt/co-opt the targeting of the enemy's weapons.

  Such a development may be inevitable. It is not comforting.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/opinion/robot-weapons-whats-the-harm.html?_r=0

: re: Robot Weapons: What’s the Harm?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 3:18 PM
Subject: re: Robot Weapons: What’s the Harm?
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

    Throughout human history to date, a leader contemplating war had to overcome natural hesitance if not to leading troops himself, to sending his children, or his neighbors' children or his constituents' children into battle. And he was likely to be overthrown if too many of those troops died. Professor Kaplan envisions a world in which this restraint is lifted. Only replaceable intelligent war machine assets are risked. It seems clear to some of us that that is a world in which war is more likely, if not actually perpetual.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/opinion/robot-weapons-whats-the-harm.html?_r=0

: re: The Affluent Ante Up for the Presidency

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 5:19 PM
Subject: re: The Affluent Ante Up for the Presidency
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   

    In a campaign for the Republican nomination that has been full of posturing and personality but weak on substance, we are indebted--as are many of his own political rivals--to Donald Trump. In the first debate, he attested to exactly the tangible quid-pro-quo corruption that our Supreme Court opined would be needed to rule differently in re "Citizens United".
   Now that that's established, it does not require an amendment to fix our campaign finance system; SCOTUS need only acknowledge that "Citizens United" was wrongly decided based on ignorance of political reality.
   I'm not holding my breath. We should work on that amendment while we wait for our Supreme Court to wake up.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/15/opinion/the-affluent-ante-up-for-the-presidency.html?_r=0

tools

:

useful idiots

shouted down Sanders' challenge

to the plutocrats

: re: How the Republican Candidates Fared in the First Debate

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Sat, Aug 8, 2015 at 6:00 PM
Subject: re: How the Republican Candidates Fared in the First Debate
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  Perhaps this paper's analysts saw a different debate than I did on Thursday. I watched Donald Trump attest to exactly the quid-pro-quo corruption that our Supreme Court opined didn't exist in re Citizen's United. While Trump's testimony may, years hence, move our republic back away from plutocracy and towards legitimacy, it will rank as the worst moment of his campaign--to date--years after his tiff with senator Paul is forgotten.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/08/07/us/politics/republican-candidates-debate.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

: re: Israeli Justice in West Bank Is Seen as Often Uneven

From: barry levine <levinebar@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Aug 3, 2015 at 1:37 PM
Subject: re: Israeli Justice in West Bank Is Seen as Often Uneven
To: "letters@nytimes.com" <letters@nytimes.com>


To the Editor:
  That the Knesset would need to enact new statutes to treat a Jewish
terrorist like any other shows that--67 years into the project--Israel
still struggles to create  a Jewish State. It can't ever achieve that
until it has and enforces "one law for the stranger as for the
homeborn".
Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/03/world/middleeast/israeli-justice-is-seen-to-be-often-uneven-among-palestinian-cases.html?_r=0