I read the news today, oh boy!

[Jerome]

Thx for the post CH - must have a read. This sort of stuff fascinates me. I don't understand half of it but it still fascinates me anyway.

[CRAZY-HORSE]

LOL

im the same Jerome, I just don't fully understand a lot of the science stories I come across but they always intrigue me anyway.

[CRAZY-HORSE]

im sure this next story has happened a thousand times all over the world, but whenever I read stories like this it is always so heartbreaking:

for those who only choose to read the post and not click on the link its about a 13yo gay boy who committed suicide after taking abuse and bullying
for so long he couldn't tolerate it no more,
and everytime I read these stories I think "how can people (children in this case) be so cruel to another child"

http://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/...li=AAgfYrC

[CRAZY-HORSE]

Pyramids in Antarctica:
http://www.msn.com/en-au/news/techandsci...li=AAgfLCP

[Oceansoul]

Fidel Castro, former leader of Cuba, passed away on November 25 at the age of 90. He lead the Cuban revolution to overthrow Batista's corrupt regime, became the political leader and installed a communist system of government and was a pretty oppressive leader himself.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...d25_story.html

I have read about the Cuban revolution, the Castro brothers, Batista, Che Guevara, etc. It's interesting to read about idealistic revolutions that don't always have a pleasant result.

[Jerome]

Cuba - almost zero crime - no homeless people - free education - free healthcare for life. A better system does not exist in the world. The only reason this system does not exist in any other country in the world? Money. Pure and simple. Now that Fidel is gone I guarantee they will **** it up.

[Oceansoul]

Cuba - almost zero crime - no homeless people - free education - free healthcare for life. A better system does not exist in the world. The only reason this system does not exist in any other country in the world? Money. Pure and simple. Now that Fidel is gone I guarantee they will **** it up.

I was under the impression that Cuba has a poverty problem. Also, the US placed a trade embargo on Cuba like over 50 years ago and has hurt some of the country's trade with sanctions. But I understand how the system is designed, it's a socialized, one party system.

[Jerome]

I hear you Oceansoul, and you are right, just like in every country, there is a poverty problem. But the fact that there is free education and healthcare tells me that they actually have a system that works. And they don't need corporate money to make it happen.

[Music Head]

editorial from Washington post

One of the most brutal dictators in modern history has just died. Oddly enough, some will mourn his passing, and many an obituary will praise him. Millions of Cubans who have been waiting impatiently for this moment for more than half a century will simply ponder his crimes and recall the pain and suffering he caused.

Why this discrepancy? Because deceit was one of Fidel Castro’s greatest talents, and gullibility is one of the world’s greatest frailties. A genius at myth-making, Castro relied on the human thirst for myths and heroes. His lies were beautiful, and so appealing. According to Castro and to his propagandists, the so-called revolution was not about creating a repressive totalitarian state and securing his rule as an absolute monarch, but rather about eliminating illiteracy, poverty, racism, class differences and every other ill known to humankind. This bold lie became believable, thanks largely to Castro’s incessant boasting about free schools and medical care, which made his myth of the benevolent utopian revolution irresistible to many of the world’s poor.

Many intellectuals, journalists and educated people in the First World fell for this myth, too — though they would have been among the first to be jailed or killed by Castro in his own realm — and their assumptions acquired an intensity similar to that of religious convictions. Pointing out to such believers that Castro imprisoned, tortured and murdered thousands more of his own people than any other Latin American dictator was usually futile. His well-documented cruelty made little difference, even when acknowledged, for he was judged according to some aberrant ethical code that defied logic.

This Kafkaesque moral disequilibrium had a touch of magical realism, for sure, as outrageously implausible as anything that Castro’s close friend Gabriel García Márquez could dream up. For instance, in 1998, around the same time that Chile’s ruler Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London for his crimes against humanity, Cuba’s self-anointed “maximum leader” visited Spain with ample fanfare, unmolested, even though his human rights abuses dwarfed those of Pinochet.

Even worse, whenever Castro traveled abroad, many swooned in his presence. In 1995, when he came to New York to speak at the United Nations, many of the leading lights of that city jostled so intently for a chance to meet with him at media mogul Mort Zuckerman’s triplex penthouse on Fifth Avenue that Time magazine declared “Fidel Takes Manhattan!” Not to be outdone, Newsweek called Castro “The Hottest Ticket in Manhattan.” None of the American elites who hobnobbed with Castro that day seemed to care that he had put nuclear weapons to their heads in 1962.

If this were a just world, 13 facts would be etched on Castro’s tombstone and highlighted in every obituary, as bullet points — a fitting metaphor for someone who used firing squads to murder thousands of his own people.

●He turned Cuba into a colony of the Soviet Union and nearly caused a nuclear holocaust.
●He sponsored terrorism wherever he could and allied himself with many of the worst dictators on earth.
●He was responsible for so many thousands of executions and disappearances in Cuba that a precise number is hard to reckon.
●He brooked no dissent and built concentration camps and prisons at an unprecedented rate, filling them to capacity, incarcerating a higher percentage of his own people than most other modern dictators, including Stalin.
●He condoned and encouraged torture and extrajudicial killings.
●He forced nearly 20 percent of his people into exile, and prompted thousands to meet their deaths at sea, unseen and uncounted, while fleeing from him in crude vessels.
●He claimed all property for himself and his henchmen, strangled food production and impoverished the vast majority of his people.
●He outlawed private enterprise and labor unions, wiped out Cuba’s large middle class and turned Cubans into slaves of the state.
●He persecuted gay people and tried to eradicate religion.
●He censored all means of expression and communication.
●He established a fraudulent school system that provided indoctrination rather than education, and created a two-tier health-care system, with inferior medical care for the majority of Cubans and superior care for himself and his oligarchy, and then claimed that all his repressive measures were absolutely necessary to ensure the survival of these two ostensibly “free” social welfare projects.
●He turned Cuba into a labyrinth of ruins and established an apartheid society in which millions of foreign visitors enjoyed rights and privileges forbidden to his people.
●He never apologized for any of his crimes and never stood trial for them.

In sum, Fidel Castro was the spitting image of Big Brother in George Orwell’s novel “1984.” So, adiós, Big Brother, king of all Cuban nightmares. And may your successor, Little Brother, soon slide off the bloody throne bequeathed to him.

[Oceansoul]

Yikes! Yeah, Fidel Castro was ruthless and a polarizing political figure. Some people hate him, some feared him, and some still see him as a revolutionary hero and an icon for the political left (Please, no). I know some people on the left do the same thing with Che Guevara and see him in a rosy light yet he was a murderer. I did read that Castro liked to create an image for himself. He even claimed to not be a Communist to the public during the Cuban revolution then made such a system as soon as he took office.

I've heard people boast about free healthcare and other stuff being there and it's sad that Cubans were given such an exploitative system contrary to those claims. I looked it up yesterday. I've heard about human rights violations and his attempts to suppress dissenters and people's free speech there before though. I understand why some Cubans have left.

I think it's horrible for someone to give people false hope under the guise of wanting to help the exploited little guy in society only to become an oppressor and turn their back on them like he did, he hurt many people and he got away with the crimes he committed. So much for justice. At least he is dead and can't hurt any more people. Now they have to manage with Raul Castro, somehow :/