2013 June
Bill Maher says the immigration bill will “make the Border Patrol bigger than the FBI — you could put one agent every 250 feet”
How hard can it be to physically prevent people from crossing a physical line on the ground? This is probably one of the simplest large scale problems around. If we start from the premise that no one should cross at any place other than an official crossing point, then it should be extremely easy to prevent people from crossing at other places. Following these proposals should effectively solve these problems.
First, we put up signs (in English and Spanish) that tell everyone about such a policy (as if they don’t already know or should know). Then we use all kinds of remote monitoring equipment like cameras on poles, on drones and where ever else we may find it useful and assign dedicated monitoring personnel to monitor ALL activities and movements near the border. When an illegal crossing occurs, these monitors call in Border Patrol agents evenly spread out across the border to intercept and catch them in a way that decreases their chances of escaping back into Mexico or Canada. We must also immediately inform our counterpart border patrols in Mexico or Canada of these illegal crossing, expecting them to rapidly come to that part of the border and capture either migrant who ran back across the border or their smugglers. The US should try to capture as many illegal immigrants as possible so that way we could successfully impose fines on them and actually require them to pay for this infraction.
This problem only continues because of a lack of political will, not because its hard in any other way.
2013 June 29
Putin’s Cheatin’ Heart: Russia Snubs ’87 Missile Pact
While development of this missile, clearly an offensive military weapon, should be frowned upon, this is clearly not as big a threat as the development of nuclear weapons themselves. The main goal of nuclear nonproliferation efforts is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Conventional warhead could be put on these missiles instead of nuclear ones and they would just be another conventional weapon.
Currently, unfortunately, countries have a right to build and deploy their own military weapons. While this development does violate the treaty, it is not so big an issue to be overly concerned. But this highlights yet again why we need an international military organization to collectively guarantee the security of all member states. Otherwise, this planet will always experience perpetual arms races that are ever more expensive. What a waste!
2013 June 28
Hot Rods
Poking around for uranium inside the world’s least secure nuclear reactor.
The international community should offer generous compensation (lots of money) to dismantle this reactor and remove the nuclear material to a location outside the Democratic Republic of the Congo to eliminate the threat of unsecured nuclear materials. If the Congolese government does not agree, sanctions or heavy, across-the-board trade tariffs should be imposed to encourage compliance with this request.
This country is involved on a long-term civil war. If any party to the war wanted to, they would be able to blow up the reactor and cause lots of environmental damage because of the fundamental design of the reactor. All reactors should be built with a requirement that a catastrophic destruction of the reactor core would not pose an insurmountable environmental cleanup task.
2013 June 27
How America Became a Third World Country 2013-2023
War is amazingly expensive. We need to create a treaty enabling the collective management of international security.
2013 June 26
Your Body Is a Corporate Test Tube
All new chemicals should be assumed dangerous until proven safe by the EPA.
2013 June 25
The New Triad
It’s time to found a U.S. Cyber Force.
In addition to the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard, we need an Information branch to deal with this hugely significant element in modern warfare.
However, the United States should refrain from installing ‘back doors’ or other access points into foreign adversaries networks during peacetime because that is not the right thing to do and we lose respect among the rest of the world if we engage in the same low level acts as they do. We should definitely engage in a very active defense of our networks and infrastructures, but we must not do more than that (during peacetime).
Many of the goals of information warfare (such as electric, transportation, financial, energy infrastructure disruptions) could all be accomplished almost as easily using conventional means through the use of conventional tipped ballistic missiles and other long rage weapon systems. We could use a missile mounted with multiple conventional warheads to destroy things like key transportation network nodes (like highway intersections), electrical power plants/grid, energy infrastructures, and so on.
I can’t believe that conventional tipped missiles have not been developed and deployed yet. I know such missiles are optimized for nuclear weapon deliveries, but how the heck did no one think about the utility of delivering a conventional warhead for a high-value precision strike in a location inaccessible by any other means? Somebody should really be disciplined for this. It does not take a lot of thinking or modification to design a mountable conventional warhead on an ICBM or IRBM.
2013 June 24
So You Want to Intervene in Syria Without Breaking the Law?
Good luck with that.
The only proper way to deal with international crisis is through an international organization. Unfortunately, The UN has no teeth, but that’s the only one we have now. It desperately needs to be abolished and replaced. But a successful organization, by necessity, must have a narrow purpose. Here’s a proposal for such an organization.
2013 June 23
After Bernanke
Yes, he saved the global economy. But will he leave behind a ticking time bomb?
Ben Bernanke did save the economy, but at the cost of future stability, as this article states. Ways (tricks gimmicks and other short-term manipulations) could very often be found to get out of an economic bind, but without structural changes that reduce the likelihood of a similar occurrence in the future, what benefit does it provide? When balancing out the longer-term potential for a greater economic crash versus the present day salvation (without structural reforms), it would have been prudent to prefer the present day crash versus a future day crash of a larger magnitude.
The Federal Reserve did not actually change anything or suggest any worthy changes that would have permanently helped us avert the potential for such crisis in the future. All it basically did was engage in debt spending. It decided to raise lots of fiat money out of thin air, sell it to the US government (AT INTEREST! like it always does), pushed the interest that banks charge each other to virtually zero, and then declare success (to a degree).
Here’s an even quicker summary: Go into debt by a huge amount, problem solved.
Over $200 billion still need to be returned out of the total of over $600 billion lent out to almost 1,000 separate entities.
What we should have done is let at least a few of these “too-big-to-fail” companies (banks, and even some automakers) fail and find redemption the conventional way that businesses try to do so. We could have let one automaker go out of business (maybe GM would be the best candidate because it was the most in debt), and helped the other two.
More banks and other financial institutions should have gone bankrupt and we should have dealt with the consequences. That’s how a free market is supposed to work. The government’s job is then to review the policies guiding the operation of the free market and determine what policies need to be changed to better ensure that such situations do not rise again.
The principles suggested in this Monetary Policy post would reduce the likelihood of anything near this economic crisis from ever happening again.
2013 June 22
Trade Secrets
The U.S.-EU free trade agreement could be a boon for the global economy, but confidential negotiations are a dangerous threat to democracy.
The increasing worldwide trends towards free trade is disheartening. Global free trade will inherently negatively affect the poor and less educated. Not that we would design a world that necessarily protects the poor and less educated, but policies like these benefit and favor large, super-efficient producers wherever they may be around the world while at the same time reducing the economic cushion that smaller mom-and-pop shops need for survival or that young or new entrepreneurs need to successfully get started in the market. People around the world need to to earn a living without having everyone being required to chase new, novel or ever increasing technological skills in order to remain employed and support their families. Taxing trade across political boundaries, especially international borders, would create an acceptable amount of economic inefficiency that would at least slightly favor the domestic producers in each country. Such tariffs would soften the inevitable blow that will continue to result from an ever more connected world.
2013 June 21
Medicare fraud rate is 8 to 10 percent, says Roskam of Illinois
Catastrophic Single-Payer: Mandatory Routine Visits
Requiring people to pay out-of-pocket for the first few thousand dollars of medical expenses would cut down on the amount of reimbursements required by this government insurance. People would automatically know how much services cost and would dispute false charges at the point of sale. For the next several thousand dollars of medical expenses for which the government insurer would pay only a percentage, consumers would still have a powerful economic incentive to ensure that costs accurately match the services rendered. Fraud rate would be dramatically lower.
2013 June 20
Big Brother Doesn’t Scare Me
Amazon on the other hand…
Coupling the fact that government has so much more bureaucratic regulations concerning private data usage with the fact that these recent revelations that the gathered data was anonymous in nature means that the government has not significantly crossed the line yet that should cause people much concern.
2013 June 19
Missing Mahmoud
Don’t snicker. Once President Ahmadinejad is gone, there’ll be no one left to stand up to Iran’s mullahs.
I’m beginning to miss him already. It takes time for societies to change. I would prefer a slow change rather than a rapid change because rapid changes have way too high a risk of going wrong, especially in extremist, religiously saturated countries with multitudes of people just praying to impose theocratic governments and tripping over each other trying to prove that they are more religious than the next person.
I hope the West (namely, the U.S.) doesn’t do anything stupid to encourage the population reverse its trend toward demanding a secular government. I know the nuclear issue will probably provoke some kind of Western (US, European – I doubt it, or maybe Israeli) interference.
The whole world must understand that we cannot keep the nuclear bomb technology away from well-funded governments that really want it. The ONLY solution is too have some kind of narrow purpose international military organization to guarantee international security to all member states.
2013 June 18
Rush Limbaugh says HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was the “one person” to determine fate of 10-year-old lung patient Sarah Murnaghan
This is a good example of why we need to publicly police everything in the mass media. People shouldn’t be allowed to say things that are clearly, factually false, and not be required to pay a fine and apologize for it. There is no excuse for misinformation on a mass medium going unchecked.
2013 June 17
How to Protect Yourself from the Online Axis of Evil
What has happened to the notion of cyberdefense?
The United States needs to focus on having the best cyber defense in the world. However, we should be careful not to infringe on other countries’ sovereignty by conducting unwarranted intrusive cyber warfare. An acceptable means is to conduct the necessary cyber surveillance research to document illegal behavior, then either actively punish such violation through the open courts or notify the offending country of such violations, requiring them to take the appropriate actions within a reasonable amount of time. Then if corrective action has still not been satisfactory, then tariffs or other punitive measures would be taken to compensate the offended country in accordance with logical principles of compensation for crime victims.
2013 June 16
Inside the NSA’s Ultra-Secret China Hacking Group
Deep within the National Security Agency, an elite, rarely discussed team of hackers and spies is targeting America’s enemies abroad.
If the Chinese claims of “having mountains of data” concerning our espionage activities successfully frightened and prevented President Obama from raising the issue of Chinese espionage against US military and commercial secrets, how will we ever deescalate the situation. The US, if it is not already, should always ensure that it has the smaller splinter in its eye, while ensuring that its opponent should have the beam in theirs.
The US is justified to some degree in spying against the Chinese who have proven themselves as being untruthful and more willing to play under the table–more so than the United States. However, I don’t think that we should engage in all out cyber espionage against the Chinese just for the sake of information. If there is something specific, then fine, but we shouldn’t dredge their whole communications network to hopefully get something juicy. Countries should respect each other and play fairly. The US should take the lead in this respect, taking appropriate precautions, of course.
Look at it this way, Costa Rica isn’t involved in large scale counter surveillance, and its people have been shown to be consistently the ‘happiest” people on the planet. Even Vietnam is currently in second place. We don’t need to spy on everyone in order to be or even to feel secure. Let people be. If we get attacked by someone, then the world will rally to our aid. But if we use secretly gathered intelligence information to preempt an attack, the world will not come to our aid as readily. I would like to know of an attack involving nuclear or any other weapon of mass destruction ahead of time, but the chances of our finding that information is very low, and the chances of finding it in time is even lower. Furthermore, meddling in other people business, covertly and overtly does more to increase such a risk than in does to reduce it. We need to get out of other people’s business, unless we have a real national security interest to do so. Obviously, ‘national security interests’ needs to be defined in narrower terms.
People need to be able to exert control and true rule over their own country without foreign interference. Covert and improper overt foreign interference generally does more harm than good, in the long run.
2013 June 15
Tomgram: Victoria Brittain, Miscarriages of Justice
It is hard to describe, but reading these accounts seem surreal, knowing that they have occurred just within the past decade or so, in the United States. I could understand if these types of thing would have occurred in China or Russia. I thought we, as a society, were past these illogical injustices. How could it be that policies as unjust as these continue. I mean, it’s not just a couple of individuals who have been held without proper charging or representation, it is several, even into the hundreds worldwide, who are under this American form of injustice. And it’s not for a year or two, but for what is now going to be decades in many cases. It is just unbelievable, to say the least, that the American government, and that the American people themselves have not stood up more firmly against this injustice.
America stands for justice. I, like everyone else, want terrorists to be punished harshly, but it must be a fair and just punishment. We can’t hold people for a heck of a long time without charging them or actually doing something to advance the case. And while they are in prison, they are still human and deserve humane treatment.
While incarcerated, I would propose that all prisoners (whether found guilty or having not been tried yet) be educated according to the facts of their religion (focusing on its errors), on religion in general, on human psychology, and heavy doses on all relevant areas of science. They should be educated at least to the point of being able to reason effectively, question themselves, and learn to think for themselves.
Punishment Must Include Education
We, in the United States, need to hold ourselves to a higher standard. We need to treat all prisoners with respect and dignity. We should carry out death sentences and torture in a humane manner. The ultimate goal for everyone involved should be to win the hearts and minds of criminals so that they would understand and agree with the values of justice and fairness for all. That’s the only true way to win the deep, long-term and proper respect and authority from the rest of the world that we should desire. Doing what’s right when it’s hardest to do what’s right should be what being an American is all about. Leading or dominating the world through fear and/or surreptitious means should not be what we are known for. Let’s take the high road.
2013 June 14
China’s New Backyard
Does Washington realize how deeply Beijing has planted a flag in Latin America?
These Latin American countries obviously have the right to accept gifts and loans from China. Naturally, this is one way which China is gaining favor among these countries. But another reason China is gaining favor is because it doesn’t press these other countries to enforce decent codes of conduct, such as ones that are not conducive to a responsive government. Such Chinese behavior will inevitably come to bite these countries on the rear because they will be on the short end of the stick at time while dealing with Chinese companies and its government.
While it is good for countries to diversify their trading partners, the US could help reverse our fortunes by sticking to fair and transparent dealings with everyone on the planet. We must improve out reputation everywhere–and be consistent–so that everyone else knows that we are fair. After a time spent proving this to the world, then customers will naturally want to return to doing business with American. But we need to stop having these ulterior motives everywhere we go.
2013 June 13
Welcome to the Syrian Jihad
The Arab world’s most popular theologian stokes the flames of a Sunni-Shia war.
Another reason to permanently separate Sunni and Shiite populations in countries where they have proven to not be able to get along.
2013 June 12
Mission: Assassination
The CIA’s a lot better at targeted killing now than it used to be.
Assassinations should not be performed by any civilian organization. Ideally, nobody should be killed without a trial, but if anyone kills, it should be under the umbrella of the military.
Assassination of Foreign Leaders
2013 June 11
We’re Not Going to Need a Bigger Boat
The problem with the Navy and Air Force’s belief that they can do it all.
There is so much talk about keeping the edge in warfare. That’s essentially what this article is about. It seems that articles are always focused on the next military technology, the next generation fighter aircraft, surveillance breakthroughs, etc. This cycle will never stop and will forever get more and more expensive. How many article have you ever seen that focus on the root cause of so many conflicts and the potential for conflicts? Not many, I know. It is very frustrating because everybody who lives on this planet has the desire to take humanity to the next level of development, meaning eradicating poverty, providing better health care for people, improving opportunities, etc. We want to get past this nonsense of fighting about stuff that, in the end, few wars have ever really resolved, permanently. In addition, wars just take people affected by it often back decades in terms of health, development and the other measures of life that everyone wants to be improved. But it is the ridiculous amounts of human pain and suffering that ate the longest lasting effects of warfare. It seems like the new generation of leaders, not only don’t seem to have learned many of the lessons of the past, but it seems that they are forced to spend their time and energy trying to fix problems that the past generation of leaders created.
Take, for example, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. We went into Afghanistan because of the Taliban attacks on 9/11. But that was more of a crime than a military attack. Nevertheless, we were justified in removing the Taliban. But was it worth it? If our mission had not changed, we would have been out before 2002 ended. Instead, inept military leaders wanted to rebuild the nation. Everybody knew that Americans are not welcomed in Arab lands and that the longer we are there, the more we will be targeted–both there and here.
Iraq was a totally and completely unnecessary war, even though we, as part of a coalition, were legally justified due to Saddam’s behavior and actions preventing verification of compliance. Nevertheless, it was definitely not a wide use of resources given the other needs that world faced at the time–Afghanistan was a huge need at the time–but there were others.
We are now over a decade later, and we successfully have more Arabs that hate out guts now than we ever did before. And we are further into debt than we have ever been before, except for a few years near the end of WWII. But in about 5 years we’ll probably top that record, too.
The bottom line is that wars hardly ever solve the underlying problems. Why can’t people just see that every distinct group of people need to have a truly independent territory to call home? We should focus all our effort on overcoming the resistance (national pride, etc.) people have about giving up some of their territory to these people who rightly deserve it. Then after that’s all done, and people still launch unjustified attacks at others, then we would be able to see more clearly and identify the correct problems and correct them, even by military means, if necessary. Investing energy into convincing people that they should give up their independent control of offensive military weapons in favor of control by an international organization of which they send representatives would be far more profitable than investing energy into warfare.
2013 June 10
On Your Left, the Decline and Fall
Visiting Brussels soon? A new museum offers a peek into the future to see how the European dream died.
The possibility for a balkanization of Europe is a very real possibility because integration is proceeding at too fast a pace. It takes at least a century or more of dramatically high migration rates back and forth to dilute the genetic variability in various pockets to the point where a sense of ethnic national identity is lost to the point of not being a significant enough factor to fuel a fight between various others from different ethnic backgrounds.
But who ever said that such migration patterns should be the ideal for humanity? Why are people so bent on eliminating national identities for the sake of unifying ever larger groups of people? There is nothing inherently wrong with people retaining their ethnic/national identity. Sure we need people to respect others to the point where everybody understands that their are no inherently inferior people. Yes, the best way to accomplish this is to mix humanity around so that people get first-hand experience by getting to know people who are different from themselves. But in this modern world of educated masses and very low cost communications, there are other more preferable, albeit less effective ways to accomplish this goal.
First, we need to understand that migrations will never be completely stopped–and they shouldn’t be. But they should be slowed so that cultures are not forced to endure changes at a rate that may exceed a safe ‘speed limit’. That is, cultures that change too quickly are more likely to generate backlash responses by a sizable portion of that population. Such reactions back and forth among the parties may very well escalate into civil unrest or civil wars.
Second, what we need for peaceful, long-term living, are policies that enforce the rights of every distinct people group to have their own independent territory and have true independent rule over all aspects of it, except for the area of possessing weapons which would enable it to fight across its borders. This would be the responsibility of an international military organization.
In short, I believe that the European Union experiment will eventually fail because it attempts unification of way too much, too soon. It should first have started with some kind of international military unification arrangement for several decades and see how that would progress. Then they could start some forms of economic unification or language simplification ideas to gradually wear down the differences between the groups. One of the last steps should be the wide opening of borders to allow/encourage the free flow of people from one country to another for settlement. Though this last step would be the quickest form of assimilation, it is also the most risky.
2013 June 9
Cristinanomics
Argentina’s crazy plan to save the economy through money laundering.
Argentina should be warned of the potential liability of allowing money laundering to take place in that country. With the ideal implementation and enforcement of this proposal, Argentina would likely not have chosen this course of action.
2013 June 8
Have It Your Way: Yes, the U.S. health-care system is plagued by distorted prices and incentives. But American consumers are part of the problem.
The best way to solve most health care problems is by having a catastrophic single-payer health insurance system and requiring everyone to purchase from it.
2013 June 7
How to Negotiate Like a Pashtun: A field guide to dealing with the Taliban.
We could have avoided this whole concept of (or at least greatly minimized the need to) having to negotiate with groups (like the Taliban) so far removed from logic by just making sure that every distinct people group have their own independent country and are able to rule it without undue foreign interference. The Taliban arose because of the great injustices of superpower maneuvering. The Soviets were trying to gain control of Afghanistan, but because of their severe conventional military advantage, the most effective resistance was provided by asymmetrical warfare using perhaps the most powerful motivating philosophy on the planet–religious fervor.
With more stable states, countries are more likely to be more developed and with better educated population that are far less susceptible to extreme and violent religious views.
2013 June 6
Reforming the Democracy Bureaucracy
Washington’s democracy promotion community is a mess. Here’s how to fix it.
The better way to help foreign countries encourage a government that actually holds the people’s best interest at heart and which is more responsive to the people would be have a “hands-off” policy and intervene only when sufficiently negative events transpire that severely threaten further progress. And even this intervention should be done by the international community and only if the majority of the population wishes this help.
This article is correct by advocating removing international democratization efforts (for a subset of nations in need) to organization that are not based domestically. I would argue that governments should not intervene directly to promote (force) democratic change. The people of the country themselves need to provide the effort and foreign governments should intervene if something goes really wrong, such as a military coup. Such a policy would result in less backlash against foreign involvement, something which often-time has long-term negative consequences for the aiding countries.
The international community has an obligation to ensure that the proper people have their own countries, but then, they should mainly be left to themselves to figure out how to govern themselves.
2013 June 5
Spies Like Them:
How Robert Mueller transformed — for better and for worse — the FBI into a counterterrorism agency.
There should be one federal investigative and intelligence service. The FBI and CIA should be merged into one organization. There should naturally be several departments within such a unified organization, but the sharing of vital information between these two realms would improve if they were unified. Turf wars would likely also diminish. These are both intelligence gathering organizations, even though one is more domestic and the other more political.
2013 June 4
Automatic for the People:
How to end Obama’s culture of secrecy in just a few lines of code.
Classification & Declassification of Information
Documents are being classified at an astounding and ever increasing rate. Often many documents are improperly classified because it is easier to classify them then to actually determine if they need to be classified. It is better safe than sorry seems to be the guiding principle. However, in a democracy, the public has a right to know. Things can’t be kept secret unjustifiably because that eventually harms everybody. It does so by preventing the proper history from being learned, preventing policymakers from learning from mistakes and allowing conspiracy or wild theories to form and spread. These solutions would change the current classification culture to one that is in greater harmony with the principles of a free society.
2013 June 3
The FBI’s New Wiretapping Plan Is Great News for Criminals
But bad news for the rest of us.
Perhaps the first step towards satisfying the needs for security and governments ability to wiretap would be require all electronic communication devices to enable all their communications to be traceable. For example, an e-mail, a phone call, or any other communication should be traceable back to the original sender. This would make it easier to prosecute the authors of some computer viruses, for example. It should be illegal to hide the identity of any sender of information.
Though the above suggestion may do little, if anything, to make it easier to wiretap communications on a real-time basis, it would help law enforcement whenever they get access to the information sent.
2013 June 2
New Asia, Old Europe:
Does one obscure Austrian philosopher have the blueprint for the U.S. pivot to Asia?
In the end, what real power do some states have over others? It seems like whatever power or influence one state exerts could be either accepted, rejected or regulated in some form by the receiving state. All this talk about the US pivoting to Asia and about what China’s rise will have on its neighbors seems to be a bit irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
Though this may be an over simplification of the matter, and perhaps a little utopian, it is true that legal authority rests with independent states. In other words, each independent state has the absolute right to determine its own policies, especially when it comes to dealing with the external world. Sure, things like treaties and agreements with other nations take away some of that sovereignty, but keep in mind that such arrangements are voluntary and countries could withdraw from such treaties and agreements virtually at any time.
Herein lies the problem. Too much time and effort is spent discussing issues which really have no legal importance (pivot to Asia, China’s rising influence on neighbors, etc.) and not enough attention is spent trying to develop an international framework that has teeth and whose purpose is to reinforce and defend such sovereignty principles which belong to independent nations. Furthermore, more efforts should be made to accurately determine which people groups should be independent.
Once we are addressing these basic foundations of international relations, the immediate next thing to be done is to negotiate the orderly consolidation of some elements of sovereignty (namely, defense) so that an international organization will have the teeth and the military power to ensure each member state of physical safety from any other state when it chooses to exercise its sovereign rights.
This way, China wouldn’t have so worry at all about the US pivot to Asia or any other country wouldn’t have to worry at all about the ‘influence’ that a neighboring country exerts. A small state like Singapore, would have just as much power as China when it come to sovereignty issues. Of course, cultural dominance is a different issue, but even in these cases, it is well within any country’s right to limit trade, migration, communication, etc. with any other country.
2013 June 1
Revenge Landmines of the Arab Spring
Yemen was a signatory of the Mine Ban Treaty, yet it not only laid mines but laid mines that it did not disclose it had when it signed the Treaty. This is why it is imperative that international treaties be enforced with rules that guarantee adequate verification. An international representative team of inspectors should have surprise unrestricted access to absolutely any place in a country who is a member of the treaty. All information not related to compliance verification of any international treaty would be kept secret, under penalty of death to the inspectors. This is the only way to assure member states that enforcement will not be politicized.