2016 June
2016 June 1
Trump taunts ‘sleazy’ media amid questions over donations to veterans
All these kinds of disputes over basic facts could be easily prevented, reduced and punished (if false) if there was a mechanism in place that would impose penalties for conveying factually false information. The question between $6 million and $3.1 million (or any number significantly different than $6 million) is a factual question. The parties to this debate should be required to produce documents proving their case. Some nonpartisan arbiter should rule and impose significant financial punishments on the guilty side.
2016 June 2
Judge ‘manipulated’ 9/11 attacks case, court document alleges
This, again, makes the case that fines should be placed on the disseminators of information that turns out to be false. Since none of us is God, everyone can only wait until history reveals the truth. This may take time and it will require continued pressure to release such info, but in the end, the purveyors of false information, including those who deliberately destroyed information, must be punished severely enough to dissuade such behavior by others.
2016 June 3
Mohamed Abdelaziz, leader of independence movement in the Western Sahara, dies
So much pain and suffering is caused by policies that are inherently unfair. Why don’t all people just abide by the principle that all significantly distinct groups of people be allowed their own sovereign territory? Yes, greed and pride get in the way of so many solutions, but that’s why civil governance is supposed to create rules and regulation, check and balances, that control for these annoying human traits.
However, in this particular case, while Morocco may have the greatest historical claim to the land and have stronger verifiable ties to the land, it very well may be the case that the artificial effects of the Cold War have so divided the populations enough, and for so long, to create enough of a distinction cultural and/or political distinction between the population of Western Morocco and its neighbors, that this may justify the creation of Western Morocco as a new country. Historians would need to decide this issue.
2016 June 4
U.S. death rate increases for first time in two decades, as overdoses, car crashes, gun deaths rise
An increase in death rates is usually not good, but sometimes it can be good, theoretically. The increase in death rates as reported in this article, was a result of drug overdoses, car crashes and gun-related deaths. However, if death rates were to have increased as a result of a decrease in end of life ‘heroic’ life-saving measures, then that would have been a good thing. Untold hundreds of thousands suffer during their last days (and months) of terminal decline due to medication after medication being given for various medical problems related to their body getting old and attempting to shut down.
2016 June 5
Former Texas official says he was told to drop Trump University probe
If it does turn out that this order was politically driven, severe financial penalties should befall the judge. If they were not politically motivated, significant penalties should befall this former Deputy Chief of Consumer Protection, John Owens. Everyone has an obligation to only tell the truth, in whatever environment they are in.
2016 June 6
Oregon: Fire Chief Hopes Derailment Will Be “Death Knell” for Oil by Rail
Oil transported by rail can be safe. However, in order for this to be a reality, proper regulations need to be made and enforced. This will naturally result in an increased transportation costs, thus leading to a reduction in demand, to some extent.
2016 June 7
Useless treatments common in young, terminal cancer patients
Here’s an article that mentions the useless treatments that are provided to people who should not be given such treatments because they are in the terminal phases of their disease. So much suffering, not to mention money and other resources, spent on such patients result in rising costs to all others needing health services. Palliative care should be much more common for these people as well as to the elderly who have been determined to be on their final decline.
2016 June 8
Afghanistan’s lapis lazuli seen as ‘conflict mineral’
People dealing with these lapiz lazuli mineral should be charged with the theft of an equivalent amount of money that they are worth, and should both return the stones and pay back their fines to the level of government that caught them.
2016 June 9
Questionable tactics used to profit from genetic testing boom
2016 June 10
Most antidepressants ineffective in teens, study finds
The effectiveness of medicines could be better known if all studies were required to be released. Furthermore, it is likely that more humans would be more balanced, biologically, if they were able to develop in a clean environment. The best way to ensure a ‘clean’ environment is to require all businesses to operate in as much of a closed system as possible.
2016 June 11
Watchdog: FDA recall process left consumers “at risk of illness or death”
The question of when to issue a recall can be difficult to answer objectively because of the types of variable that are often involved relating to the certainty of the direct linkage of the product to the illness and the severity of the risk. With 14 people confirmed ill over 11 states due to the nut butter product, that doesn’t seem like a whole lot of people. Now, I know that the number reported is usually far less than the number of people who actually got sick and perhaps the number of sick being reported could be used as a fairly accurate proxy to estimate the true number of sick people.
Generally, with more centralized production of foods, it become easier to monitor safety standards. So the tendency for some (like in these policy proposals) to advocate for a more distributed supply of foods, it is likely that the number of food born illnesses will rise as more and more smaller scale enterprises supply their various food products using their own smaller-scale production facilities.
2016 June 12
House orders Library of Congress to maintain ‘illegal alien’
Although this term has become more pejorative, ‘illegal immigrant’ would be the better term to use. The word ‘illegal’ needs to remain to make it clear that such activity is illegal. Using the term ‘unauthorized’ seems to be to soft of a term for the offense and may demote the offense to something akin to making an illegal or unauthorized left turn on a roadway–something that shouldn’t be done, but which may commonly be done. Immigrating illegally is a much higher offense and should be treated much more harshly than it currently is. The fact that the US has failed to continually enforce immigration laws for so long and has allowed so many immigrants to accumulate, that their base (friends and families) is so large, that they are now a well entrenched interest that has a very large political clout. Nevertheless, policies relating to immigration need to be enforced so that social evolutionary pressures are kept well below the threshold that give rise to dangerous social rifts.
2016 June 13
The AR-15 is the gun of choice for mass shootings and it’s easier to buy in Florida than a pistol
No guns should be banned outright. However, all guns should be registered with the proper authorities, buyers need to have comprehensive background checks before purchasing, and for the more powerful guns, as well as the automatic and semiautomatic varieties, they should be housed and used only in government-approved gun ranges.
2016 June 14
Man with weapons was headed to L.A. gay pride parade
Gun control regulations would have (theoretically) prevented this man from have 3 assault rifles in his car.
2016 June 15
Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump
This is why the internet needs to have more control points so that it is possible for individual packets of information to be traced so that people with mischievous intentions could be tracked and caught. At least traffic going to certain sites, such sites should have the authority to demand that whatever packets arrive must be able to accurately identify their point of origin, and perhaps other relevant information. It is the same principle as telephone callers being required to unblock their number in order for the call to be completed. The internet infrastructure needs to be designed to allow for this ability.
2016 June 16
TRUMP: ‘We have to maybe check, respectfully, the mosques’
We wouldn’t need any calls to ‘check’ up on mosques if we just had a standard, comprehensive understanding among the population that if they turn over any significant, relevant information about any crime, in any stage of its lifecycle, they would stand to gain a sizable rewards to compensate them for their efforts.
2016 June 17
EgyptAir crash: Wreckage found in Mediterranean
Airliners need to have live casting of their flight data recorder and location information so that their positions and data related to any incident can be reviewed much faster than currently possible.
2016 June 18
Maxus Energy Files for Bankruptcy Protection
The small amount of money the companies were allowed to pay to resolve its liability is truly remarkable. This effectively means that the EPA will pick up the bill for more than 90% of the total estimated cleanup costs. This is why it is so hard to make companies change their polluting or reckless behavior. If companies get high profile protection for their liabilities, they are not likely to voluntarily incur the costs involved with ensuring that their practices are safe.
2016 June 19
It is understandable that Israel wants to destroy the houses of the families of terrorist attackers, but this is not a policy that is good for the long-term simply because the increase pain and suffering that results will just drive more people into the recruitment arms of the terrorists. The better policy would be to, first give the Palestinians their own independent homeland, with whatever resources they are truly entitled to, then to act in ways that facilitate the education of the Palestinian population and the empowerment of women. Fair economic trade polices are also a must, of course.
2016 June 20
This is a very nice attempt at a government agency raising funds for itself. More agencies should be required to come up with novel ideas to raise part of their own funding, and should be rewarded for doing so, perhaps by keeping all additional funds raised on top of their current government funding.
2016 June 21
FBI Releases Partial Transcripts of Conversations with Orlando Shooter
In an ideal and mentally healthy world, the FBI should have release the full, uncensored version of the Orlando shooter’s statements and it is understandable why they wouldn’t want to contribute to the visibility/praise of terrorist group leaders. However, a sign of a healthy society is when such information could be divulged without any fear of anything bad happening as a result. But because a significantly large subset of society (nationally and globally) is so unhealthily susceptible to these terroristic tendencies and sympathies, such censoring must be considered. Nevertheless, it should be everyone’s goal to help create a healthy society that has a sufficient herd immunity to terroristic and subversive thoughts, as well as immunity to the continued propagation of false ideas and false facts. The best way to create such a society is to educate all members of the general population to a level of literacy that provides each individual with the tools necessary to identify and adequately respond to false information.
2016 June 22
Report: Attacks on Mosques in U.S. Reach Record High with 78 Last Year
Another sign of a population that is too ignorant to be civilized: people to attack mosques simply because they are mosques are ignorant, to say the least. They need to be punished severely, not just because of the actual crimes committed, but because of these crimes contributions to potentially larger social dynamics that have a significant likelihood of contributing to wider social problems, including fanning the flames of social division. While additional punishments due to crimes identified as ‘hate crimes’ should not allowed, punishments should be severe for every crime, regardless of motivation.
2016 June 23
Report: Demand for Abortion in Latin America Soars Amid Zika Virus
Absent accurate, practical, economical tests for fetuses infected with Zika, these abortion pills are a reasonable response. However, it should be allowed to abort even post-birth children who have been found to be infected with Zika and have significant negative physical developments as a result. Any birth defect that qualifies as significant enough to justify the abortion of a fetus (beyond a certain age) should be enough to justify the abortion of any other human life. Of course, emotional attachments would make abortions of older children much more difficult, but from a purely objective perspective, pre- and post-birth humans should have the same criteria applied when determining qualifications for abortion.
2016 June 24
Supreme Court Upholds Affirmative Action Program at University of Texas
The larger trend is to eliminate any race-based decisions, so this ruling that allows a decision on admissions based on a characteristics that no human has control of, will be one of the last major rulings on that side of the line. As people become more literate and civilized, it will be understood that only characteristics that can be changed by a person should be used as the variables by which they are to be judged.
2016 June 25
Split Supreme Court blocks Obama immigration plan
The claim that enforcing current immigration laws will lead to families being separated is as true as the claim that bad Mexican policies and criminal behaviors are leading to the separation of families. Yes, life here in the US is better than in Mexico (and most other places from which immigrants come), so it is understandable why more people would want to come here. But since it ‘takes two to Tango’, the ‘don’t separate families’ claim can be applied to both sides. However, when you look at it from a legal viewpoint, the US is justified in deporting illegal immigrants because there were not supposed to be here (often for years) in the first place. The proper response from those being deported should be ‘thank you for letting me stay until now’ rather than don’t separate me from my family. Illegal immigrants should have always known/assumed that they could be forced to go back at any moment. Their creation of facts on the ground (birthing children, getting married to citizens, etc,) should be viewed as irresponsible behavior given their illegal status in the country. Unfortunately, the US is at fault on another level for consistently being lax in the enforcement of immigration laws, leading to a widespread assumption that it will be OK for illegal immigrants to come, remain, establish families, and create their permanent lives here. This decades-long lax enforcement has resulted in the deepening establishment of numerous interest groups becoming permanently entrenched and geared to fight for the various interests of the ever-growing illegal immigrant population and their citizen children who have the strongest emotional connection with this group of people and who, because of this, can be counted as being unified towards these same goals.
2016 June 26
Cleveland: FBI & DHS Knocking on Activists’ Doors Ahead of RNC
Going door to door to inform about policy is not generally the best thing to do. The way to have handled this situation is to just make sure that the applicable policies on the books are just, and to simply enforce them. Naturally, during times if protests and riots, not enough enforcement personnel would be able to keep the general order and thus perpetrators would not all be caught. However, the police need to have the capability to document (namely, video record) absolutely everything that goes on so that later the tapes could be reviewed and the criminals brought to justice and the people who vandalize are able to be forced to pay for their damages. The cost of video recording equipment is so cheap that there is now no rational reason to not have cameras everywhere.
2016 June 27
After ‘Brexit’ Vote, Europe’s Leaders Debate Timing of U.K.’s Departure
When the will of the people are not adequately considered, things can break apart. More importantly, these super-national organizations (like, the EU, the UN, etc.) often attempt to do too much. This naturally results is too large a segment of the population that is too disenchanted because things are not going the way they would like. This is probably the biggest hurdle towards getting a permanent world order that works (namely, that ensures peace). However, instead of shifting gears to a speed that the world is not yet comfortable with, we (these super-national organizations) need to lower our standards a bit and agree to attack the more common problems first, leaving the rest to their own affairs and letting the chips fall where they may.
The EU is trying to unify so many countries at once (especially, with a unified currency and a unified immigration policy) that it is only natural large segments within these population would object. Furthermore, the goals to which many of these organizations aspire exceed, in the view of too many, the inherent rights that national groups are entitled to. For example, trying to impose a rule that requires that virtually any immigrant be allowed to cross borders without restrictions, violate the intrinsic rights of every distinct group of people, as the UK generally is.
The prevent this type of Balkanizing events, the identified common goals need to be more basic, such as national defense. Yes, it would be nice to have a unified policy on sidewalk widths across the entire world, but that’s just not worth the risk of triggering a party’s vote to leave the treaty. Since the main problems on the international scale is military threats, it is only reasonable that we focus ALL our efforts on ensuring that we’ve got this realm covered and secure before we go on to some other issues we’d like to standardize. This issue of defense alone, will easily consume one or two lifetimes before people are willing to attempt something else. Actually, attempting to tackle other issues may, indeed, be fruitless, in the long run because any issue other than military defense issue should rightly be within the spheres of national politics, not international politics.
Regardless, an international military organization should be created to tackle the fundamental threat to world’s pain and suffering and macro-level stability.
2016 June 28
Pope says Church should ask forgiveness from gays for past treatment
Treating anyone with disrespect always entitles that person to an apology.
2016 June 29
Supreme Court spurns abortion restrictions in two more states
These “admitting privileges” requirements do not significantly increase the safety of women who suffer a negative complication due to an abortion. A woman in need will generally be able to go to any hospital for treatment. Given the historical lack of will for many hospitals to engage in the abortion controversy, many will not willingly associate with an abortion doctor and will not give them “admitting privileges”. For a state to outlaw a procedure because the doctor does not have a specific relationship with a hospital, is an irrational technical obstacle that is irrelevant to any abortion procedure itself.
2016 June 30
Senate Passes Bill to Create Control Board to Run Puerto Rico Economy
Puerto Rico should be it’s own country. It has a population with a culture and language that is distinct from that the United States.