For which they need massive desalination facilities. For which they need nuclear.

I mean, it's a win-win as far as I'm concerned, but the local eco-hippies might not see it that way.

Er... are you implying that what Israel should do is fire its own Qassam-style rockets back at Gaza, using the same targeting principle (i.e. aim where the concentration of people is highest)?

The problem with this is that no-one seems to be able to coherently explain what a proportional response should look like. Every time I ask people, they immediately go into rant mode about "Israeli fascist" and "they've had that coming" etc. But no-one is willing to actually lay out the proper response to the rockets step-by-step.

They're still aimed, it's just that the target area is very wide. But in most cases, those target areas are city centers.

Not for the lack of trying. It's one of the reasons why I consider Hamas leadership basically insane - it's clear that what they're doing is just plainly not working, and is only making things worse for them, but they're doing it anyway.

What Congressional hearings? We've already had the whole NSA thing blow up, and half of Congress was frothing at the mouth at any suggestion of legislative action to restrict the surveillance, because "we need it for teh terrorists!".

Soviet doctrine (and the broader Marxist doctrine) distinguishes between "personal property" and "private property". Things like furniture or car would be considered personal property, and hence okay. Land, means of (large-scale) production like workshops and factories etc, would be considered private property if owned, and that was banned. Houses and other things that straddled the line could be treated differently depending on the country and the era.

After the first revolution in February, 1917 (the one that saw the tsar abdicate), Russia became a capitalist republic. That lasted for 8 months.

After the second revolution in October, 1917, the power was in the hands of the soviets (councils) of workers and peasants, most of which were under Bolshevik control already.

In 1918, the power was very briefly (and largely nominally) exercised by the Constituent Assembly. It lasted for 13 hours before the Bolsheviks dissolved it.

By the end of 1918, Bolsheviks have purged the only remaining minority party that shared the power with them in the soviets, the left esers.

So, where do the "few years after the Russian revolution" come from?

They didn't call themselves communist. They had communist parties, which were ostensibly dedicated to the goal of achieving communism - eventually, sometime in the future.

As Soviet joke went, a party lecturer holding a class on dialectic materialism in a remote village said to the audience: "Cheer up, comrades! Communism is on the horizon!"

One of the peasants in the audience raises his hand and asks a question, "Comrade, what is a horizon?"

The lecturer answered, "A horizon is an imaginary line where the sky and the earth seems to meet, which always remains the same distance from us as we walk towards it."

None of those countries actually called themselves "communist", they were all "socialist". Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, for example. Communism, just as you say, was a label for a hypothetical future society that was just around the corner, kinda like fusion.

The one place where you'd see actual communist countries mentioned was in Soviet sci-fi. E.g. in Strugatsky brothers' Noon Universe, its early stages see an economic and scientific competition before the remainder of the Western world, headed by the USA, and the USCR - Union of Soviet Communist Republics - a result of the merger of all socialist states, with USSR and China as two cores, once communism was achieved in them.

Yup. The supreme irony is that capitalism did create the conditions for its own demise, as Marx predicted. Where he was wrong is the conditions themselves - he thought that communism would come first, and post-scarcity would only become feasible later. Turned out it's the other way around. Wait and see.

These guys don't need smallpox, because they're doing just fine with plain old JDAMs and Tomahawks.

OTOH, when you're equally insane but don't have billions of dollars to piss off on making things go boom, you might start considering extreme but cheap options.

The company's H1B quota in 2009 was significantly affected by the layoffs. It will likely happen again next year.

It will also affect the ability to sponsor green cards.

There's no shortage of people who are literally insane in politics. Consider what happens if the "Caliphate" gets their hands on some samples.

I've re-read the article, and I couldn't find the part where she's talking about anything like that. Can you cite the relevant part?

Yeah - what I meant is that if there was no corresponding capital gains hike, then the uber-rich would hardly even notice, since that's what most of their income tends to be.

Was it a personal income tax, or a capital gains tax?

I suspect the latter, which would explain why the very richest were not actually bothered all that much.