2013 May
2013 May 31
To Drill or Not to Drill
The coming American oil boom is bad news for Saudi Arabia. How the kingdom responds could very well determine if it survives.
Raise the Price of a Resource to Conserve It
Saudi Arabia, the United States, and any other country should not be urged to develop their entire oil/natural gas resources. In stead, they should be urged to protect it for future generations by raising the cost of mining it.
Natural Environmental Harvest Tax
Lots of taxes that, in effect, work towards the reduction in the amount of fossil fuels use are listed in the Taxes chapter, but this particular one may be the most relevant.
2013 May 30
The EMPire Strikes Back: Electromagnetic pulse is the conservative fetish that just won’t die.
EMP weapons are a very real threat and we should work to take preventive measures against. Of course the best defense is prevention. We must work to create an international military organization that has teeth and would assure that member states are not able to produce or store such weapons.
2013 May 29
Pulp Liberation Army
Welcome to the strange — and terrifying — underground world of Chinese military fantasy novels.
Another powerful reason to create an international military organization. Emotional and sensational potential possibilities need to be removed from the realm of possibility as soon as possible to prevent such ideas from stewing and simmering for decades and growing or morphing into several different forms that together create a real or perceived threat. Such developments inevitable lead to increased military spending, political maneuvering and posturing, and ultimately to a huge waste of resources that could and should be used for far more productive means.
2013 May 28
War Scare
The real-life war game that almost led to nuclear armageddon.
Yes another reason for the need for an international military organization.
2013 May 27
Ship Storm
There may be valid reasons to question the wisdom of reforming U.S. food aid. But saving the Merchant Marine isn’t one of them.
Reducing the need for such food shipments is the obvious priority. Helping economic development is the natural long-term remedy that should be everybody’s goal. Here is one suggestion for creating a long-term economic framework that would better the situation.
2013 May 26
What the Hell Was That All About?
After scaring the world witless, has North Korea slunk back into its cave?
This is why we need an international military organization that would assume the responsibility of guaranteeing national security for all member states.
2013 May 25
No, They Can’t Why American presidents always disappoint us.
The following points should reduce the workload of Presidents and make their jobs a little more manageable and realistic:
Vice Presidents should be treated a little more like Presidents and should be given far more authority than they currently are given. Fortunately, that has been the trend recently.
Retirement Age & Social Security Entitlements
These things should not be a federal function. They should left to the states and local governments.
Same thing with this…it should not be a federal function.
Let time would be required to find and negotiate the money to pay for such mandates.
Bill Introduction/Procedures/Final Resolution in Congress
These proposals would likely reduce the amount of time and effort required of the president to weigh in and support or opposed legislation because it would reduce the total number of bills debated on the floor and would tend to encourage only those bills that have a realistic chance of passing to rise to the top of the agenda.
Presidents should have both traditional veto powers as well as the line item veto authority.
Reducing Congressional Time Off
Congress being in session for a greater portion of the year may tend to reduce the workload (at least the rushed nature of it) of the president by allowing more time for congressional business to be conducted before the close of a session.
Politician Socialization Restrictions
Reducing the ability for politicians to socialize with lobbyists and other stakeholders means that there is less of an opportunity for such stakeholders to skew the debate and actual decisions to the point where it takes a lot of effort to bring politicians back to the real world and get them to be logical again. Preventing socialization also allows for policymakers to spend more time actually reading bills and learning about how the world works.
2013 May 24
Hackers From China Resume Attacks on U.S. Targets
A pricing court (preferably an international one) should be given the authority to impose tariffs or other more direct sanctions against Chinese products or other activities in order to compensate the victims of such attacks. In addition, punitive penalties would need to be imposed as punishment.
Costs of a Crime & Punitive Penalties
Specific instances of a crime could be prosecuted and punishments determined on a case-by-case basis, as well.
2013 May 23
Death Wears Bunny Slippers Why America’s nuclear missileers are going soft.
Conventional warheads on most ICBMs are a good idea, but we should still keep perhaps 100 ICBMs with nuclear warheads. The ultimate solution is for no country to have such weapons, but they should only be under the control of an international military organization.
2013 May 22
Tomgram: Andy Kroll, A Democracy of the Wealthy
Government Funding of Elections
Public funding of elections are the best way to ensure fairness among the candidates.
2013 May 21
Too Many Stakeholders Spoil the Soup
Broadening global governance of the Internet sounds like a reasonable aim, but it’s actually cover for some very undemocratic behavior.
The Internet should be managed by a representative group of internet operators and users (ISP operators, telecommunication firms, consumers, engineers, and anybody else designing and using the infrastructure).
Industry Congress Funds & Administers Their Own Infrastructures
2013 May 20
Rudderless in the Desert Five reasons Obama can’t will his way into fixing the Middle East — even if he wanted to.
The L Word: In Washington, “leadership” is the disease, not the cure.
These two articles highlight the importance of adopting the default position of staying out of other country’s business. People need to actually govern themselves as well as need to feel like they are governing themselves without some other country breathing down their neck. The only thing that countries should voluntarily relinquish is the mean to wage cross border warfare. Everything else (like trade, immigration, etc.,) should be determined by the sovereign governments of each country.
2013 May 19
A Liberal Case for Drones
Why human rights advocates should stop worrying about the phantom fear of autonomy.
Autonomous weapons are just another tool for warfare. Measures could be taken to increase their safety, but a total ban would be the wrong approach towards solving these technical programming challenges.
2013 May 18
This Alliance Is Brought to You by the Letter ‘M’: Introducing the world’s most unlikely political grouping Myanmar, Mozambique & Mongolia
There is no absolute need to create a coalition between these three countries in order to better counter the pressure of demand countries. These three countries are all independent states. They have the right to determine their own laws regarding anything, including how to hand out or sell mining licences, whether or not to impose export tariffs on mineral exports, or anything else. They could exchange ideas without the need for official trilateral relationships.
The best way for these countries to manage the growing mining industry and ensure a balanced and controlled economic expansion, protect the environment, conserve reserves for the future and reduce the social destabilizing impacts of immigrant workers would be to impose tariffs of mineral exports. Such taxes would reduce the flood of desire of foreign mining companies to set up shops there, and would conserve resources for as long as desired, depending on how high they set the tariffs. Moreover, the often turbulent economic expansion that is associated with extremely fast growth could be controlled in the same way. Slower development of resources would better ensure that the local population would have the time to develop the skills necessary to utilize these resources so that employment could be best assured for domestic workers.
Such a long-term strategy as this for their mining industries would help better ensure the survival and, in deed, a future increase in profit margins relative to the rest of the world. This is because everyone else around the world is focused on maximizing production, not necessarily on pacing production.
Following are proposals that would all have relevant positive impacts on sustainable production of mining and all other natural resources:
Tax Only Active Economic Activities
Taxes charged upon the actual exchange of goods and services act as a restraint on such transactions. All things being equal, if the tax revenue that are currently generated by passive economic activities were charged to active economic activities, the higher tax rates would act to further reduce the transaction of goods and services.
The larger the mining company/operation, the higher the tax rate. Reducing the size of the operation would reduce the tax rate, thus their is an incentive to remain small. This inherently acts to protect the environment and sustain the resource longer into the future.
Tax Trade Across Political Boundaries
The current political trend toward free trade is frustrating because it acts to increase economic output at the expense of smaller or more local producers. A tax at the border would help prevent the free rush of foreign, efficient producers at the expense of domestic long term health.
Distinct, Nested Entities Treated As One for Tax Purposes
This point is similar to the others in the sense that it encourages more local production by making it slightly more profitable to sustain a smaller operation in a world dominated by large, super efficient organizations and/or their subsidiaries that are often the entities that set up shop within such countries.
This one tax principle is the largest determinant for controlling the speed and scale of resource development. By adjusting this figure, governments could tailor developments according to their own, domestic liking.
Natural Environmental Harvest Tax
This is also another very important tax that could also help determine the rate of resource extraction.
2013 May 17
David Vine: Baseworld Profiteering; Military Outsourcing
There is nothing inherently wrong with outsourcing the purchase of military goods and services to private companies, as this story seems to suggest. Yes, there must be proper oversight, but outsourcing provides part of the flexibility the military needs in this modern era.
This proposal for a Consumer Research Database would go a long way towards transparency and would help the free market produce better quality goods at a lower price. This would also help reduce a myriad of other diverse problems accross all realms of society.
2013 May 16
Beijing’s ‘Bitskrieg’
How China is revolutionizing warfare
Yet another reason for an international military organization. Warfare’s arms race is a waste of time, effort and money, especially when you understand that it could all be dramatically slowed and mitigated.
2013 May 15
How Do You Say ‘Quagmire’ in Farsi?
Why Syria could turn out to be Iran’s Vietnam — not America’s
So much complexity of relations/hate could be avoided by just making sure that every distinct people group have their own country. Every war seems to create new hatreds. Every iteration of warfare unavoidably create ’emotional interest’, meaning new hatreds or deeper hatreds that last for generations. How sad.
2013 May 14
The Trust Deficit
How the U.S. ‘pivot’ to Asia looks from Beijing.
Again, no individual country should take such a large lead for supposedly assuring peace and stability through military power. We need an international military organization.
2013 May 13
Nick Turse, Israel, Iran, and the Nuclear Freight Train
This is why we need a functional international military organization. Without it, nations will continue to skirt the law because it would only be up to other nations to volunteer to help.
2013 May 12
The ‘Go Slow’ Caucus:
As pressure builds for a military option in Syria, can the White House afford to keep quiet?
It seems that when revolutionary chaos arises within an Arab country, fundamental Islamic fighters are attracted to the fight, causing the whole revolution to acquire a far more Islamic fundamentalist flavor than would likely have arisen given a slower, more internally determined political change. We’ve had bad experiences with Iraq virtually every Arab country that has undergone a revolution within the last 3 years. The people are poorer, less happy, fear more crime, and are generally far more stressed in their current situation than when they were under the previous governments.
If the United States were to help the Syrian rebels with arms, a clear parallel could be drawn with our help of the Afghanistan fundamentalist fighters during their war with the Soviets. These rebels ended up fighting us. I understand that we were choosing between the lesser of two evils at the time. But the Syrian government is not a major threat to any external country. The US helping one side or the other will inevitably lead to resentment, currently by the other side, and in the future even by the same side that we helped because they would say that they would have eventually won anyway without US help, or that the US is still responsible for their problems in someway.
In short, the United States should stay out completely of the Syrian conflict. The only intervention would should ever consider should only be as part of a United Nations approved operation. But even then, I would say we should stay out because the Arabs hate us so much that any intervention would be used by some side in the conflict to blame us for more than they already do.
Again, as stated so many times in the Solutions Daily, the most important foundational solution to the vast majority of these large scale civil wars is to ensure that every distinct people group have their own country. Sunnis an Shiites are different enough (they hate each other enough) that they should be entitled to their own countries.
2013 May 11
Out With It: Americans deserve to hear the dirty secrets of the CIA’s war on terror. We’ll all be better off with the truth.
As a general rule, everyone would agree, that the fewer secrets the better. Of course, there are legitimate secrets that governments must keep, the schematics to highly developed nuclear weapons, for example. However, this country is doing too many things that interfere with the normal development of event around the world. There seem to be too many covert operations, military interventions and diplomatic pressures that tend to either enforce policies that are resisted by the local population or tend to patch over underlying problems which will only result in greater long term problems.
The proper mechanism for dealing with national problems in another country is through the agency of an international organization, somewhat like the United Nations, but one which must have binding teeth, which the United Nations definitely does not have. Apart from this instrument, nations should not interfere in the affairs of others unless there are extreme violations of human rights or immediate threats to national security.
Basically, every significantly distinct people group should be entitled to govern themselves. This is detailed in Defense & Sovereignty.
2013 May 10
Woman found after 17 days in Bangladesh rubble
Tax Trade Across Political Boundaries
The extreme economic pressure to produce low-cost clothing would be reduced somewhat if taxes were imposed across international borders.
Tax Only Active Economic Activity
Taxing only the sale of goods and services would also have helped reduce the demand for such consumer goods, like clothing.
This would be a very powerful incentive for any foreign market to better its living and working standard…because the price of the product depends on it. Bangladeshi factories have been cited several time for not complying with various rules, especially regarding to safety and the environment. Had such business owners been punished by being forced to pay a higher export fees, perhaps such shoddy building practices would have been less pervasive, and this tragic building collapse might not have happened.
2013 May 9
Peter Van Buren, If the Government Does It, It’s “Legal”
This article talks about transparency in government generally and protection for government officials when acting as “whistle blowers”.
Reducing Privacy for Public Elected/Appointed Public Figures & Intelligence Personnel
The proposal above would help enhance transparency in government by helping prevent the formation of hidden environments that are conducive to corruption.
These are virtually always the best weapons against any crime, whether committed by people inside or outside the government.
2013 May 8
Mississippi to Execute Willie Manning Tonight After RejectingDNA Tests & FBI’s Admission of Error
It is ridiculous to decide not to examine evidence that may potentially reveal the accused’s guilt or innocence. All reasonable and even extraordinary means should be exhausted to ensure that any person sentenced to death has deserved a just sentence. Obviously, we cannot reverse such a decision and issue an apology to the falsely accused afterwards.
2013 May 7
Nick Turse, The Pentagon’s Planet of Bases
There should be no national bases located in foreign countries. All military bases (within states who are members of this treaty) should be run by an international military organization. Having national military bases will inevitably lead to resentment over the long term.
2013 May 6
Warren Buffett: ‘Tough to Watch’ Washington Gridlock
Increasing Election Fairness/Legitimacy
This subchapter referenced above contains several points that would result in fairer elections and inherently more trust due to a government composition that is more in line with voter wishes.
2013 May 5
“Common Core” And The All-Too-Common Tendencies Of Heavy-Handed Government
The federal government should have the right to set bare minimum federal standards for education, and compliance should be mandatory. States should have the right to set their own, preferably higher standards.
Teacher Decides Teaching Method
Teachers should be freer to decide their own teaching methods. This freedom coupled with Performance-based Teacher Pay would allow teachers the possibility to excel with potentially great rewards.
2013 May 4
Ellen Cantarow, Big Energy Means Big Pollution
Business Relationship to the Environment
Requiring all externalities to be internalized would naturally result in virgin energy prices to rise because of the significant amounts of externalizations that are taking place. A price rise would cause a demand decline.
Causing the price of disposal to rise would both reduce the quantity of trash (reducing energy) as well as create a stronger public demand for products that last longer, thus requiring less disposal costs.
2013 May 3
Michael Klare, The Coming Global Explosion
Raise the Price of a Resource to Conserve It
A fundamental law of economic is that the higher the price, the lower its rate of consumption.
Nobody could argue with the fact that if disposal costs were higher, the incentive would also be higher to recycle trash.
Natural Environmental Harvest Tax
Making it more expensive for harvest from the virgin environment would naturally make it more appealing to utilize other resources (namely, trash) to satisfy our needs.
2013 May 2
How to Defeat Cyber Jihad: Taking the war on terrorism to the Internet.
Mass Media Access Restrictions
It is crucial in all aspects of civilized society that information that is unarguably false not be allowed to be disseminated without penalty across any mass medium. Many would feel that such a policy would be too much of an infringement of fundamental free speech rights, but we currently have similar laws which prohibit the conveyance of blatant lies (such as slander and libel) and these apply not just to mass media but in any form.
2013 May 1
1 Pentagon Weapons System That Was on Time and Under Budget
The cost of such a weapon system could have been spread out among many more nations if this treaty arrangement were in place. Furthermore, external (outside treaty members) threats would be relatively weaker, resulting in a greater ‘bang for the buck’.
Having an ‘on-budget’ credit rating system could be one additional way to encourage contractors to try even harder to keep to initial contract requirements.