http://friendsagainstcrueltytoanimals.weebly.com/                               

The question is not, "Can  they reason?" nor, "Can they
talk?" but rather, "Can they suffer?"
~Jeremy  Bentham

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore,  if
he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of  his
appetite. And to act so is immoral.
—Leo Tolstoy, Russian novelist (1828–1910)                                                                               

I love all the shows that  encourage people to love,
appreciate and help animals. There are more programs  about animals than ever,
and that pleases me.
-- Doris Day 

For decades, countless cats have been
imprisoned, cut into, and killed in cruel and useless "sound localization"
experiments at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW). 


http://www.peta.org/features/uw-madison-cruelty.aspx

As an American icon, the Statue of Liberty has been depicted on the country's
coinage and stamps. It appeared on commemorative coins issued to mark its 1986
centennial, and on New York's 2001 entry in the state quarters series. An
image of the statue was chosen for the American Eagle platinum bullion coins in 1997,
and it was placed on the reverse, or "tails", side of the Presidential
Dollar series of circulating coin Two
images of the statue's torch appear on the current ten-dollar bill. The
statue's intended photographic depiction on a 2010 forever stamp proved instead to be of the replica
at the Las Vegas


Depictions of the statue have been used by many regional institutions.
Between 1986 and 2000, New York State issued license plates featuring the statue.The
Women's National Basketball Association's New York Liberty use both the statue's name and
its image in their logo, in which the torch's flame doubles as a basketball.The
New York Rangers of the National
Hockey League depicted the statue's head on their third
jersey, beginning in 1997. The
National Collegiate Athletic Association's 1996 Men's Basketball Final Four, played at New
Jersey's Meadowlands Sports Complex, featured the statue
in its logo. The
Libertarian Party of the United States uses the
statue in its emblem.


The statue is a frequent subject in popular culture. In music, it has been
evoked to indicate support for American policies, as in Toby
Keith's song "Courtesy of the Red, White, & Blue (The Angry
American)", and in opposition, appearing on the cover of The Dead Kennedys' album Bedtime
for Democracy, which protested the Reagan administration. In
film, the torch is the setting for the climax of director Alfred Hitchcock's 1942 movie Saboteur. The
statue makes one of its most famous cinematic appearances in the 1968 picture
Planet of the Apes, in which it is seen
half-buried in sand. It
is destroyed in the science-fiction films Independence
Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and Cloverfield. In
Jack Finney's time-travel novel Time
and Again, the right arm of the statue, on display in the
early 1880s in Madison Square Park, plays a crucial role Robert Holdstock, consulting editor of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, wondered
in 1979,



Where would [science fiction] be without the Statue of Liberty? For decades
it has towered or crumbled above the wastelands of deserted [E]arth—giants have
uprooted it, aliens have found it curious ... the symbol of Liberty, of
optimism, has become a symbol of science fiction's pessimistic view of the
future."[

Design, style,
and symbolism



Detail from a fresco by Constantino Brumidi in the U.S.
Capitol in Washington, D.C., showing two early symbols of
America: Columbia (left) and the Indian
princess
Bartholdi and Laboulaye considered how best to express the idea of American
liberty. In
early American history, two female figures were frequently used as cultural
symbols of the nation.One,
Columbia, was seen as an embodiment of the United
States in the manner that Britannia was identified with the United Kingdom
and Marianne came to represent France. Columbia had
supplanted the earlier figure of an Indian princess, which had come to be regarded as
uncivilized and derogatory toward Americans. The
other significant female icon in American culture was a representation of
Liberty, derived from Libertas, the goddess of freedom widely worshipped in ancient Rome, especially among emancipated slaves. A Liberty figure adorned most
American coins of the time,and
representations of Liberty appeared in popular and civic art, including Thomas Crawford's Statue of Freedom (1863) atop the dome of the
United States Capitol Building.


Artists of the 18th and 19th centuries striving to evoke republican
ideals commonly used representations of Liberty. A
figure of Liberty was also depicted on the Great Seal of France.
However, Bartholdi and Laboulaye avoided an image of revolutionary liberty such
as that depicted in Eugène Delacroix's famed Liberty
Leading the People (1830). In this painting, which
commemorates France's Revolution of 1830, a half-clothed Liberty leads
an armed mob over the bodies of the fallen.
Laboulaye had no sympathy for revolution, and so Bartholdi's figure would be
fully dressed in flowing robes.
Instead of the impression of violence in the Delacroix work, Bartholdi wished to
give the statue a peaceful appearance and chose a torch, representing progress,
for the figure to hold.


Crawford's statue was designed in the early 1850s. It was originally to be
crowned with a pileus, the cap given to emancipated slaves
in ancient Rome. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, a Southerner who would later
serve as president of the Confederate States of America, was concerned that
the pileus would be taken as an abolitionist symbol. He ordered that it be
changed to a helmet.
Delacroix's figure wears a pileus, and
Bartholdi at first considered placing one on his figure as well. Instead, he
used a diadem, or crown, to top its head. In so
doing, he avoided a reference to Marianne, who invariably wears a
pileus. The
seven rays form a halo or aureole. They
evoke the sun, the seven seas, and the seven continents,and
represent another means, besides the torch, whereby Liberty enlightens the
world.


Bartholdi's early models were all similar in concept: a female figure in
neoclassical style representing liberty, wearing a stola and pella (gown and cloak,
common in depictions of Roman goddesses) and holding a torch aloft. The face was
modeled after that of Charlotte Beysser Bartholdi, the sculptor's mother.He
designed the figure with a strong, uncomplicated silhouette, which would be set
off well by its dramatic harbor placement and allow passengers on vessels
entering New York Bay to experience a changing perspective
on the statue as they proceeded toward Manhattan. He gave it bold classical
contours and applied simplified modeling, reflecting the huge scale of the
project and its solemn purpose.
Bartholdi wrote of his technique:





Thomas Crawford's Statue of Freedom

The surfaces should be broad and simple, defined by a bold and clear design,
accentuated in the important places. The enlargement of the details or their
multiplicity is to be feared. By exaggerating the forms, in order to render them
more clearly visible, or by enriching them with details, we would destroy the
proportion of the work. Finally, the model, like the design, should have a
summarized character, such as one would give to a rapid sketch. Only it is
necessary that this character should be the product of volition and study, and
that the artist, concentrating his knowledge, should find the form and the line
in its greatest simplicity.


Bartholdi made alterations in the design as the project evolved. Bartholdi
considered having Liberty hold a broken chain, but decided this would be too
divisive in the days after the Civil War. The erected statue does rise over a
broken chain, half-hidden by her robes and difficult to see from the ground.
Bartholdi was initially uncertain of what to place in Liberty's left hand; he
settled on a tabula ansata, a keystone-shaped tablet used
to evoke the concept of law.
Though Bartholdi greatly admired the United States Constitution, he chose to inscribe
"JULY IV MDCCLXXVI" on the tablet, thus associating the date of the country's Declaration of Independence with the concept of
liberty.


Consultations with the metalwork foundry Gaget, Gauthier & Co. led
Bartholdi to conclude that the skin should be made of copper sheets, beaten to
shape by the repoussé method. An
advantage of this choice was that the entire statue would be light for its
volume—the copper need be only .094 inches (2.4 mm) thick. He decided on a
height of just over 151 feet (46 m) for the statue, double that of Italy's Colosso di San Carlo Borromeo and the
German statue of Arminius, both made with the same method.
Bartholdi interested a former teacher of his, architect Eugène
Viollet-le-Duc, in the project. Viollet-le-Duc planned to
construct a brick pier within the statue, to which the skin would
be anchored.

Height 151 feet 1 inch (46 meters)  Ground to torch: 305 feet 1 inch (93 meters)

Fundraising, criticism, and construction in the United StatesFrank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, June 1885, showing woodcuts of the completed statue in Paris, Bartholdi, and the statue's interior structureThe committees in the United States faced great difficulties in obtaining funds. The Panic of 1873 had led to an economic depression that persisted through much of the decade. The Liberty statue project was not the only such undertaking that had difficulty raising money: construction of the obelisk later known as the Washington Monument sometimes stalled for years; it would ultimately take over three-and-a-half decades to complete. There was criticism both of Bartholdi's statue and of the fact that the gift required Americans to foot the bill for the pedestal. In the years following the Civil War, most Americans preferred realistic artworks depicting heroes and events from the nation's history, rather than allegorical works like the Liberty statue. There was also a feeling that Americans should design American public works—the selection of Italian-born Constantino Brumidi to decorate the Capitol had provoked intense criticism, even though he was a naturalized U.S. citizen. Harper's Weekly declared its wish that "M. Bartholdi and our French cousins had 'gone the whole figure' while they were about it, and given us statue and pedestal at once. The New York Times stated that "no true patriot can countenance any such expenditures for bronze females in the present state of our finances." Faced with these criticisms, the American committees took little action for several years.

The foundation of Bartholdi's statue was to be laid inside Fort Wood, a disused army base on Bedloe's Island constructed between 1807 and 1811. Since 1823, it had rarely been used, though during the Civil War, it had served as a recruiting station.The fortifications of the structure were in the shape of an eleven-point star. The statue's foundation and pedestal were aligned so that it would face southeast, greeting ships entering the harbor from the Atlantic Ocean.In 1881, the New York committee commissioned Richard Morris Hunt to design the pedestal. Within months, Hunt submitted a detailed plan, indicating that he expected construction to take about nine months. He proposed a pedestal 114 feet (35 m) in height; faced with money problems, the committee reduced that to 89 feet (27 m).




[
[
Hunt's pedestal design contains elements of classical architecture, including Doric  portals, and the large mass is fragmented with architectural detail to focus attention on the statue. In form, it is a truncated pyramid, 62 feet (19 m) square at the base and 39.4 feet (12.0 m) at the top. The four sides are identical in appearance. Above the door on each side, there are ten disks upon which Bartholdi proposed to place the coats of arms of the states (between 1876 and 1889, there were 40 U.S. states), although this was not done. Above that, a balcony was placed on each side, framed by pillars. Bartholdi placed an observation platform near the top of the pedestal, above which the statue itself rise According to author Louis Aurchinloss, the pedestal "craggily evokes the power of an ancient Europe over which rises the dominating figure of the Statue of Liberty". The committee hired former army General Charles Pomeroy Stone to oversee the construction work. Construction on the 15-foot (4.6 m) deep foundation began in 1883, and the pedestal's cornerstone was laid in 1884. In Hunt's original conception, the pedestal was to have been made of solid granite . Financial concerns again forced him to revise his plans; the final design called for poured concrete walls, up to 20 feet (6.1 m) thick, faced with granite blocks. The concrete mass was the largest poured to that time.

Fundraising for the statue had begun in 1882. The committee organized a large number of money-raising events. As part of one such effort, an auction of art and manuscripts, poet Emma Lazarus was asked to donate an original work. She initially declined, stating she could not write a poem about a statue. At the time, she was also involved in aiding refugees to New York who had fled anti-Semitic pogroms in eastern Europe. These refugees were forced to live in conditions that the wealthy Lazarus had never experienced. She saw a way to express her empathy for these refugees in terms of the statue.The resulting sonnet, "The New Colossus'', including the iconic lines "Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free", is uniquely identified with the Statue of Liberty and is inscribed on a plaque in the museum in the base.

Richard  Morris Hunt's pedestal under construction in June 1885Even with these efforts, fundraising lagged.Grover Claveland, the govermor of New York, vetoed a bill to provide $50,000 for the statue project in 1884. An attempt the next year to have Congress provide $100,000, sufficient to complete the project, failed when Democratic representatives would not agree to the appropriation. The New York committee, with only $3,000 in the bank, suspended work on the pedestal. With the project in jeopardy, groups from other American cities, including Boston and Philadelphia, offered to pay the full cost of erecting the statue in return for relocating it

Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the World, a New York newspaper, announced a drive to raise $100,000 (the equivalent of $2.3 million today). Pulitzer pledged to print the name of every contributor, no matter how small the amount given. The drive captured the imagination of New Yorkers, especially when Pulitzer began publishing the notes he received from contributors. "A young girl alone in the world" donated "60 cents, the result of self denial." One donor gave "five cents as a poor office boy's mite toward the Pedestal Fund." A group of children sent a dollar as "the money we saved to go to the circus with." Another dollar was given by a "lonely and very aged woman." Residents of a home for alcoholics in New York's rival city of Brooklyn (the cities would not merge until 1898) donated $15; other drinkers helped out through donation boxes in bars and saloons.A kindergarten class in Davenpor lowa, mailed the World a gift of $1.35.

As the donations flooded in, the committee resumed work on the pedestal. In June, New Yorkers displayed their new-found enthusiasm for the statue, as the French vessel Isère arrived with the crates holding the disassembled statue on board. Two hundred thousand people lined the docks and hundreds of boats put to sea to welcome the Isère. After five months of daily calls to donate to the statue fund, on August 11, 1885, the World announced that $102,000 had been raised from 120,000 donors, and that 80 percent of the total had been received in sums of less than one dollar.

Even with the success of the fund drive, the pedestal was not completed until April 1886. Immediately thereafter, reassembly of the statue began. Eiffel's iron framework was anchored to steel l-beams within the concrete pedestal and assembled. Once this was done, the sections of skin were carefully attached. Due to the width of the pedestal, it was not possible to erect scaffolding, and workers dangled from the armature by ropes while installing the skin sections. Nevertheless, no one died during the construction work. Bartholdi had planned to put floodlights on the torch's balcony to illuminate it; a week before the dedication, the Army Corps of Enqineers   vetoed the proposal, fearing that ships' pilots passing the statue would be blinded. Instead, Bartholdi cut portholes in the torch (which was covered with gold leaf and placed the lights inside them.A power plant was installed on the island to light the torch and for other electrical needs. After the skin was completed, renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsteaad, designer of New York's Central Park  and Brooklyn's Prospect Park, supervised a cleanup of Bedloe's Island in anticipation of the dedication


Shortly after the dedication, the Cleveland Gazette, an African American  newspaper, suggested that the statue's torch not be lit until the United States became a free nation "in
reality".

In 1939, a group of Hungarian scientists that included emigre physicist Leó
Szilárd attempted to alert Washington of ongoing Nazi atomic bomb
research. The group's warnings were discounted. 
Einstein and Szilárd, along with other refugees such as Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, "regarded it as their
responsibility to alert Americans to the possibility that German scientists
might win the race to build an atomic bomb, and to warn that
Hitler would be more than willing to resort to such a weapon. In
the summer of 1939, a few months before the beginning of World War II in Europe,
Einstein was persuaded to lend his prestige by writing a letter with Szilárd to President Franklin
D. Roosevelt to alert him of the possibility. The letter also
recommended that the U.S. government pay attention to and become directly
involved in uranium research and associated chain reaction research.


The letter is believed to be "arguably the key stimulus for the U.S. adoption
of serious investigations into nuclear weapons on the eve of the U.S. entry into
World War II".
President Roosevelt could not take the risk of allowing Hitler to possess atomic
bombs first. As a result of Einstein's letter and his meetings with Roosevelt,
the U.S. entered the "race" to develop the bomb, drawing on its "immense
material, financial, and scientific resources" to initiate the Manhattan Project. It became the only country to
successfully develop an atomic bomb during World War II.


For Einstein, "war was a disease . . . [and] he called for resistance to
war." But in 1933, after Hitler assumed full power in Germany, "he renounced
pacifism altogether . . . In fact, he urged the Western powers to prepare
themselves against another German onslaught.
In 1954, a year before his death, Einstein said to his old friend, Linus
Pauling, "I made one great mistake in my life — when I signed the
letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there
was some justification — the danger that the Germans would make them.
[
[
Einstein became an American citizen in 1940. Not long after settling
into his career at Princeton, he expressed his appreciation of the "meritocracy" in American culture when compared to
Europe. According to Isaacson, he recognized the "right of individuals to say
and think what they pleased", without social barriers, and as result, the
individual was "encouraged" to be more creative, a trait he valued from his own
early education. Einstein writes:



What makes the new arrival devoted to this country is the democratic trait
among the people. No one humbles himself before another person or class. . .
American youth has the good fortune not to have its outlook troubled by outworn
traditions.


As a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) at Princeton who campaigned for the civil rights of African Americans, Einstein
corresponded with civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, and in 1946 Einstein called
racism America's "worst disease". He
later stated, "Race prejudice has unfortunately become an American tradition
which is uncritically handed down from one generation to the next. The only
remedies are enlightenment and education".


During the final stage of his life Einstein transitioned to a vegetarian
lifestyle,
arguing that "the vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on
the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind".


After the death of Israel's first president, Chaim Weizmann, in November 1952, Prime Minister
David Ben-Gurion offered Einstein the position of
President of Israel, a mostly ceremonial
post.The
offer was presented by Israel's ambassador in Washington, Abba
Eban, who explained that the offer "embodies the deepest respect
which the Jewish people can repose in any of its sons".
However, Einstein declined, and wrote in his response that he was "deeply
moved", and "at once saddened and ashamed" that he could not accept it:



All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the
natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise
official function. I am the more distressed over these circumstances because my
relationship with the Jewish people became my strongest human tie once I
achieved complete clarity about our precarious position among the nations of the
world.

 In early 1902, Einstein and Marić had a daughter they named Lieserl in their correspondence, who was born in
Novi
Sad where Marić's parents lived. Her
full name is not known, and her fate is uncertain after 1903.


Einstein and Marić married in January 1903. In May 1904, the couple's first
son, Hans Albert Einstein, was born in Bern, Switzerland. Their second son, Eduard, was born in Zurich in July 1910. In 1914,
Einstein moved to Berlin, while his wife remained in Zurich with their sons.
They divorced on 14 February 1919, having lived apart for five years.


Einstein married Elsa Löwenthal (née Einstein) on 2 June 1919,
after having had a relationship with her since 1912. She was his first cousin
maternally and his second cousin paternally. In 1933, they emigrated to the
United States. In 1935, Elsa Einstein was diagnosed with heart and kidney
problems and died in December 1936

On 17 April 1955, Albert Einstein experienced internal bleeding caused by the
rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm, which had previously
been reinforced surgically by Dr. Rudolph Nissen in 1948. He
took the draft of a speech he was preparing for a television appearance
commemorating the State of Israel's seventh anniversary with him to the
hospital, but he did not live long enough to complete it.
Einstein refused surgery, saying: "I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to
prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it
elegantly. He
died in Princeton Hospital early the next morning at the
age of 76, having continued to work until near the end.


During the autopsy, the pathologist of Princeton Hospital, Thomas
Stoltz Harvey, removed Einstein's brain for preservation without the
permission of his family, in the hope that the neuroscience of the future would be able to
discover what made Einstein so intelligent.
Einstein's remains were cremated and his ashes were scattered at an undisclosed
location.


In his lecture at Einstein's memorial, nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer summarized his impression of
him as a person: "He was almost wholly without sophistication and wholly without
worldliness . . . There was always with him a wonderful purity at once childlike
and profoundly stubborn