Botching Executions

I just saw a news article about a botched execution in Oklahoma (link below). That is inexcusable. There are many ways to kill someone painlessly. Many people will take that story as a reason why capital punishment should be banned, but it is just an example of people not knowing what they are doing. Personally, I think there are people who have lost any right to live through their crimes, so I believe that capital punishment is appropriate in many cases.

More than two hundred years ago, M. Guillotine thought that executions were inhumane, so he built his device. It is known that when blood pressure falls drastically the brain loses consciousness instantly. That is what Guillotine knew and is why his device worked well. A heavy, sharp blade falling several feet will cut through any neck, and the person will lose consciousness before the nerve impulse can get from the cut to the brain.  There might be twitching from ganglia firing, but death would actually be within a fraction of a second. There would be no need for medical tests to determine whether the victim was dead; the head would be in a basket a few feet from the neck.

If people want to avoid the necessity of cleaning up all that bloody then there are effective and reliable chemical methods that would be painless. An overdose of heroin would take a few minutes to kill, but the person would be feeling quite nice, especially if there had been earlier, lesser doses injected to get the person into a comfortable condition.

What is with the mixtures of a variety of chemicals? One is supposed to do one thing, then another to do something else, and so on. Massive overdoses of many drugs will result in unconsciousness and death.

I realize that humans are almost as hard to kill as cockroaches, but there are many ways to quickly and painlessly kill both. If the cost is a consideration, then the guillotine would be quite cost effective. There would be a few thousand dollars for construction costs, but they wouldn’t require specially trained people, just someone who could put the neck in the slot where the blade will hit it. Using injections of heroin or barbiturates would just require someone to fill an IV bag and put a needle into a vein; it wouldn’t even need to be a clean needle.

You’d think that a country that could get people onto the Moon could kill someone quickly and painlessly. There are many other methods that I haven’t mentioned but that are more effective and faster than that collection of drugs that some states are using.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2014/04/30/oklahoma-tries-stanch-execution-fallout/Zkx2AlsEbesZsscblgW9CI/story.html

Federal Reserve Folly

I don't bother with conspiracy theories when I can avoid them, but today I went into a coffee place and they had a question posted by a register for a get it right and save a whole ten cents. I usually know the correct answer, and I did today. The question was "Which branch is the Federal Reserve part of?" Obviously it is part of the Administrative branch. The clerk looked at the answer, and it said that is was privately owned. I was shocked that they would have that. I thought that foolishness was straightened out years ago. But apparently there still are people who don't know that the Fed is an independent agency of the federal government.

A simple search brings up a number of results that clearly explain that the Federal Reserve System belongs to the Federal government. The Fed even turns over its profits to the Treasury Department. But I was looking for the kind of morons who think that the Fed belongs to the Rothschilds and Rockefellers. Well a little farther down the page I found one (http://www.save-a-patriot.org/files/view/whofed.html) that claims that it is a collection of banks controlled by the Rothschilds, etc. Then there's this one: http://www.dailypaul.com/77899/the-p...serve-bank-are
Well, that's more than enough of that idiocy. The Federal Reserve System was established by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and amended a number of times. Those acts are incorporated in Title 12 of the U. S. Code (links below (The information at the Fed probably is easier to work with.). The Chairman of the Fed is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

The Federal Reserve System was established for two purposes: for the clearing of transfers (checks, etc.) and to keep the currency stable. This was a response to the Panic of 1907 during which most of the clearing banks went belly-up, and the banking system was all but insolvent, because there was no “lender of last resort”. If you find economic systems interesting reading, then read about that panic; it was horrific. Many people don’t realize that the Fed is the main clearing bank in the U.S., because it does such a good job that money transfers are almost invisible. I would prefer if checks were still checks, but they became EFT’s (Electronic Funds Transfers) several years ago to speed the system.

The Fed hasn’t been as good at stabilizing the currency. If it did, then there would be no inflation or deflation, but there is a good reason for the lack of stability. The Treasury Department issues bonds, bills, and notes of maturities from one month to thirty years. Thirty year bonds are repaid with dollars that are worth less than half of the initial price of the bond due to inflation. Treasury saves money, and the investors got their money through the interest payments over time, so they feel that they are compensated.

I have never figured out why some people think that the Federal Reserve System is privately owned. It serves a public function, and it turns in its profits to the Treasury. It is an independent agency, but it has to be rather independent to carry out its functions. Many people (including me) disagree with how the Fed carries out some of its functions, and there probably will be more disagreements in the future, because the Fed has started regulating banks, and that may be a conflict of interest.

After a little more research I think that some people think the Fed is privately owned, because they never bothered to read the Federal Reserve Act (Title 12 of the U.S. Code). And they misunderstand the nature of the capitalization of the regional Federal Reserve Banks. Member banks are required to deposit as much as fourteen percent of their capital with the Fed, and the Fed is required to pay six percent annual interest on that money. (The Fed can and has varied the reserve requirement.) In some places that money is called “preferred stock”, because, like preferred stock, the interest is paid before other expenses, but this preferred stock does not carry any ownership interest with it, as is true of some preferred stock of businesses; this money is more of a debt obligation.

After reading the article “10 Things That Every American Should Know About the Fed” (link below) I understand that the origins of the conspiracy theories about the Fed are mostly results of ignorance, but that article had a valid point also. On the other hand, The Fed is supposed to stabilize the banking system, so it has bailed out some banks, and that can be spun so that they were helping their friends. If one holds the delusion that the Fed is privately owned, then many of its actions look different from how they look when one realizes that the Fed is an agency of the Federal government.

One of the valid complaints (complaints that I consider valid anyway) is that they have a revolving door with some of the large financial companies, so they are regulating companies that belong to their friends and that will hire them after they leave the Fed. I also disagree with the bailouts of large banks in 2008 and 2009; those companies should have been put through bankruptcy just like any other company. The excuse was that the economy would have been disrupted, but it was disrupted anyway, and it gave the appearance that the government favors large companies at the expense of small companies and individuals.

It is completely clear is that the Fed has not communicated effectively with the citizens. There is no reason why any sane person would think that the Fed is privately owned, and that fallacy should have been addressed and put to rest. Unfortunately, many of the people who think the Fed is privately owned have cognitive problems, so it may be impossible to completely end that idea.

It is my opinion that the Federal Reserve System should be different, but it isn’t easy to determine what the Fed should or should not do. For years Ron Paul tried to get a complete audit of the Fed, but that still hasn’t happened; although the Fed issues quarterly reports (link below) that give some idea of what is involved. The Fed has been assigned additional functions over the years, and not all of the functions are consistent with each other. It would be a good idea to think carefully about how the Monetary and banking systems should be organized and regulated. Someone should be trying to keep the currency stable, and someone should be regulating banks, and so on. Whether there should be one or several agencies is a question. The matter of what kind of currency and who would emit it is also a good question, and there are several valid answers.

What do you think? What should we do with the Fed? Sell it to the big banks or keep it as a government agency? Or something else?



Federal Reserve Act
http://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/fract.htm
Also in Title 12 U.S. Code
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/12/chapter-3

10 Things
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/a...ederal-reserve

March 2014 Quarterly Report
http://www.federalreserve.gov/moneta...ort_201403.pdf

The End of Evolution

Whether one believes that evolution is factual or that everything was created on October 23, 4004 BCE is of no consequence, because there has been evolutionary change since 4004 BCE, but that may have changed within the last couple of centuries. It is possible that human evolution has been brought to a stop. I suspect that this hiatus will fail in the end, but it may have some ill effects, or this hiatus may simply turn out to be a different step in evolution. The specific matter to which I refer is modern medicine, which effectively has eliminated some of the mechanisms through which evolution had been operating.

More specifically, some people, who could not have survived because of genetically caused medical problems, are now living to become adults and sometimes passing on their genes that cause their disease. In addition to those conditions in the list below and on the linked list, many cancers are caused by genetic disorders that are triggered by other stimuli. By keeping alive people who would not be viable without major ongoing (or even constant) medical intervention and allowing some of those people to reproduce some of the results of millions of years of evolutionary improvement is being reversed.

It has been said that evolution ended when people started heating their places of habitation, but that was insignificant and other animals heat or at least insulate their places of residence. Many of the things that humans use are simply outgrowths of their evolutionary development, and the invented devices simply became additional tools for evolution. For example, humans invented cooking a long time ago. Initially cooking probably was a method for making carrion a little less likely to cause sickness, but cooking also led to the reduction in tooth size and made it more nutritious.

Cooking, building houses, mechanical transportation, and so on became tools for evolution and instruments for humans to do what they would have done anyway but a little more easily. Over the last couple million years humans have been slowly developing their tools and improving their methods for building houses. These things did not impede the biological systems, genes, etc. that are essential to evolution; they have been methods for evolution to operate or were until rather recently.

Humans had been altering their environment since the genus split from the other great apes, and humans are not the only species that alters its environment, so I don’t regard those changes as significant. Not even all medical practices do damage to the course of evolution. Chimps have been seen giving themselves medical treatments (see link below), and a variety of other animals eat foods that have specific medical benefits, but the extent of such treatments is rather limited (antibiotics and deworming mostly). Thus, it is perfectly reasonable to accept the medical industry as a natural outgrowth of the development of the human species, but I doubt the evolutionary value of treatments for various inherited genetic disorders that would cause death at an early age, if they were not treated. The outcome of such treatment is to help to perpetuate genetic characteristics that would not normally be passed on, because persons with those genes would not normally survive to reproduce. I am not suggesting eugenics, but I think that there has been too much medical care given to people who were not long for the world regardless of what might have been done for them. In addition, modern medicine has led to overpopulation.

I realize that there are people who think that the Earth could support even thirty billion people. But present evidence shows that it is difficult to have seven billion humans alive at once. The ability to produce adequate food for that many people is marginal at best, and, if the people who worry about climate change are right, then the resources to feed even the present population will not be available in the near future. A guess of how many humans the Earth could support effectively and with a safety cushion would be no more than two billion, roughly the Earth’s population in 1875. Although there were famines from time to time; there was adequate food production nearly all of the time. The places where there were famines had been developed and civilized for a long time and usually had local populations that pushed the local economy to its limit and any significant problem in food production resulted in a famine of some severity. Or famines were created by outside interference, as was the case in Ireland in the 1840’s. Famines were also created by invasions, and there have been periods of climate change in the past that led to crop failures; this happened during the period when the Little Ice Age was starting, resulting in cooler, wetter weather in some places, such as France where it cause crop failures. During the same era the American Southwest became dryer, and that led to the abandonment of the Anasazi cities.

During the period from 1725 (pop. 1 billion) to the present (pop. 7 billion) medicine has gone from unsanitary bleeding and other non-productive activities to being pretty darned advanced and effective, and I would contend that the improvements in medicine have been the principal cause for the increase in population. Infant and childhood mortality has gone from almost fifty percent to about ten percent, and people die in great numbers at ages greater than sixty now.

The term “sustainability” has become popular in the last few years, and I am proposing a way to make human life on Earth sustainable. The Green Revolution was wonderful in its way, but it wasn’t sustainable, and many of the agricultural practices and plants introduced as parts of that program have been abandoned in the last forty years. Intensive farming is not sustainable, and soil is deteriorating around the world; we have been eating that soil. The sustainable level of population probably is in the range of one to two billion. Returning population to that level quickly will be impossible, unless we do have a great pandemic, something on the scale of the Black Death of the Fourteenth Century worldwide. There isn’t a high probability of such an event, but it may happen. In the absence of such an event, or a major war, limiting the extent of medical activity would slowly reduce the population to a sustainable level.

The climate change alarmists worry about changes that may take place, but the problems that already exist are just as bad, and they are real, not theoretical. Thomas Malthus has consistently been shown wrong since he first came up with his theory (1798), and humanity may dodge the bullet again, and it is conceivable that something unexpected will come along, but animal populations are well known to crash when population density reaches a level that is unsustainable, and the crashes take a variety of forms from pandemics to mass migrations to the occasional mass insanity. We do not have the necessary perspective to be able to see whether there are effects at present that may be viewed as part of a population crash in several hundred years, after population has stabilized at one and a half billion.

Careful consideration as to what medical procedures ought to be used to keep who alive will almost certainly take place over the next few hundred years. We can expect that reasonable and valid decisions will eventually be made, and it is possible that repairing genes that produce disorders may become routine, not may but almost certainly will become routine, but until then we will be retaining genetic code that leads to the devolution of the human species, unless we make some hard and cruel decisions soon. If we don’t make those decisions, then there may not be people who will be capable in the future.

While I do favor limiting the use of medical procedures, I have a distinct feeling that this post will look completely silly in a couple hundred years, or sooner, because we will have simple and easy genetic repair, interstellar travel, and a few other of those things that futurists have predicted, but the “Singularity” will never happen. I am working on another post regarding probability; that doesn’t apply well to pure speculation, but it suggests that past records are the only standard that we can quantify with much confidence. And that suggests that humanity will continue to make Thomas Malthus wrong.


Links
Why Chimps Eat Dead Wood and Other Plants
http://news.discovery.com/animals/wh...ith-111129.htm
Other animals taking natural medicines
http://www.cracked.com/article_19686...-medicine.html

List of Genetic disorders
http://www.genome.gov/10001204
More common disorders
22q11.2 deletion syndrome
Angelman syndrome
Canavan disease
Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease
Color blindness
Cri du chat
Cystic fibrosis
Down syndrome
Duchenne muscular dystrophy
Haemochromatosis
Haemophilia
Klinefelter syndrome
Neurofibromatosis
Phenylketonuria
Polycystic kidney disease
Prader–Willi syndrome
Sickle-cell disease
Tay–Sachs disease
Turner syndrome
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genetic_disorders
The End of Evolution
http://vega.org.uk/video/programme/13

Reversing the North Caucasian Diaspora

The current unpleasantness in Ukraine has caught my attention to a slight degree, especially in light of the Winter Olympics having been held nearby. The location of the Olympics gave me a hint as to the best way to handle the matter. As I am sure you know, Sochi was the principal city of Circassia before the Russians conquered that country to go along with the rest of their conquests South and East of Russia proper. I can understand the conquest of the Crimean Peninsula, which the Russians took over in the 1700's. And we all know that the origin of Russia was in Kiev, when the position of Grand Duke was given to Rurik in 862 CE. What is called Russia these days was just a lightly populated wilderness mostly populated by Finns (or a related people) back when Kiev was the founding city of Russia.

Since Russia is big on putting things that way they should be, instead of leaving things as they are, we should do that with a few parts of the Russian empire. Let's start by giving the North Caucus independence again. Chechnya, Ingushetia, North Ossetia, Circassia, Dagestan, and so on were only conquered in the 18th and 19th centuries; the Caucasian War only ended in 1864, when the Circassians were finally defeated after resisting Russian aggression for more than a century and never having accepted defeat. We can let the Cossacks have the Southern stretch on Russia; they've been the ones living there for several hundred years now, since the Mongols left, and the boundary between the Cossacks and the Circassians is still the Kuban River well up into the interior, and to the East the boundary between Russia and Dagestan and Chechnya and Ingushetia is the Terek River.

The people of the North Caucasus are worthy of consideration, and they have recent and current grievances against the Russians. If only one of the nations there were rebelling, then we could call them savages, and that’s how the Russians tried to paint the Chechens, but the Circassians have a long history of being cultured and respectable people, and the Circassian women are said to be the most beautiful in the world. But the Russians made war against women and children throughout the North Caucasus but especially in Circassia.

It is easy to find ancient examples of ethnic cleansing, but there have been only a few examples in modern times, and what was done in Circassia is one of the most extreme examples. "A Russian detachment having captured the village of Toobah on the Soobashi river, inhabited by about a hundred Abadzekh [a tribe of Circassians], and after these had surrendered themselves prisoners, they were all massacred by the Russian Troops. Among the victims were two women in an advanced state of pregnancy and five children. The detachment in question belongs to Count Evdokimoff's Army, and is said to have advanced from the Pshish valley. As the Russian troops gain ground on the [Black Sea] Coast, the natives are not allowed to remain there on any terms, but are compelled either to transfer themselves to the plains of the Kouban or emigrate to Turkey." (McCarthy, Justin. 1995. Death and exile: the ethnic cleansing of Ottoman Muslims 1821–1922. Princeton, NJ: Darwin. Chapter 2: Eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus)

The Circassians were not known as criminals or raiders. They had a settled culture for many centuries in that region, but they were in the way of Russian desire for empire, so they were slaughtered and driven out as much as possible. The commonly used number of Circassians driven out was 500,000, which was thought to be a little more than half of the total population. The Circassians were the most numerous of the nations of the North Caucasus, so the numbers of the people slaughtered among the other nations look tiny in comparison, but the Chechens, Ingushetians, Ossetians ( or Alans), and few even smaller nations were treated similarly. The Chechens have been the most violent in their recent resistance against Russian aggression, but Ingustia has been in civil war for several years, and the Circassians have been slowly filtering back to their homeland to fight for it. Most people would be better off, if they were peaceful, but the Russians have tried to crush a few too many others, and it might be a good idea, if there were some payback. To put it in proportion, the ethnic cleansing of Circassia is similar in nature to the theft of Kosovo, but many, many, many more people were killed or displaced in Circassia.

I think that the world would be a better place, if there were fewer people insisting that their tribe should have something, land freedom or whatever, and the easiest way to have fewer tribes and nations whining is to give them what they want, especially when all they want are some steep mountain valleys in an out of the way corner of the world. Let’s encourage Russia to negotiate the independence of the North Caucasus countries, and let us encourage the UN to oversee the peace in that region for some time.

Over the centuries Russia has subjugated other nations, but let’s start with an area where a single campaign can do a great deal of good. If you are interested in the issue, then searching for information about the North Caucasus peoples, the principle nations are the Adyghe (or Circassians), Chechens, Ingushetians, Ossetians (or Alans), and there are numerous smaller peoples in Dagestan. If you are interested in other nations subjugated by the Russians, then look into the Bashkirs, Crim Tatars, Mari, Finns, and some of the peoples mentioned in the pages linked below. Borders have moved over the centuries, so some groups that were subjugated centuries ago now live in other countries; only the Circassians (Adyghe) emigrated in great numbers.

http://www.euratlas.net/history/europe/1200/
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...1200,_1127.svg
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/russia/ru01.html
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...56_%28A%29.jpg

http://www.rferl.org/content/circass.../24674280.html

The Caucasian War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_War

Russian - Circassian War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian...Circassian_War

Pricing Marijuana

I’m not in Colorado or Washington or Uruguay or any other place where marijuana is legal, but I expect to be in not too long a time, because the legalization movement will be spreading. With that in mind, I looked at process in Colorado, and I was shocked. The prices look like they still have a premium of risk in there, even though most of the risk has been removed by legalization. It’s not easy to estimate how large the risk premium is, but we should be able to make a reasonable estimate by comparing marijuana with other crops that require similar inputs, similar soils, etc. After getting a general idea from a direct comparison, we can make adjustments to reflect differences.

Hemp, whether for fiber or smoking requires good quality soil and some additional nutrients. The soil requirements are similar to corn or tobacco, but hemp does not require the special soils that some tobacco requires. Per acre labor costs are said to be comparable with specialty grains and oilseeds.

Processing costs would be similar to industrial hemp. Although different parts of the plants are taken for industrial hemp; the kind of handling would be similar. There probably be additional handling costs that would cover drying and packing in small quantities, but that is a simple kind of adjustment to make, especially since we know the time and equipment that would be necessary.
To start off.
Corn (ave.) 495.00
Canola (SK) 375.00
Canola (AB) 390.00
Flaxseed (SK) 450.00
Flaxseed (AB) 400.00

These are recent spot prices stated in cents per pound in different markets. Considering that this is a small and speculative market it would be reasonable to start with the high price ($4.95) that is for corn. This is only a starting point, because the harvesting and handling of smoking hemp is more labor intensive than is the case of crops that are loaded in huge quantities. The exact cost of the handling can’t be determined in detail until the actual market will exist. A reasonable estimate is that it will take less than a quarter of a person hour and the handler probably will make about $20 per hour. Handling facilities will eventually be rather specialized, but that will be mostly for drying and controlling dust.

It is difficult to estimate costs beforehand, so it is better to estimate on the high side, but thinking of a grading and drying facility for tobacco and assuming that a plant for hemp would be similar in type, size, etc. The handling time would also be similar to tobacco, so let’s look at the costs of that commodity also. Dried tobacco leaf sells for $5 to $20 per pound depending on type and quantity. Considering that smoking hemp would be a smaller crop, it would be reasonable to say that wholesale smoking hemp prices should be about $20 per pound. Tobacco is somewhat easier to work with, because the leaves are thick and less likely to crumble (which also suggests that a moisture controlled facility would be a good idea). The retail price of cigarettes without the taxes is about $2.50 per pack of twenty cigarettes, which has a weight of about one ounce.

Putting all this together a reasonable price for an ounce of marijuana, smoking hemp, is about $2.50 plus a reasonable tax. The federal excise on cigarettes is just over a dollar a pack, and the average state taxes are $1.91 per pack. This level of taxation is silly, but it doesn’t look like it will rationalized soon, so let’s live with it and make the taxes on marijuana equal to tobacco taxes. If the feds and the states decided that taxation based on the THC content would be preferable, then the total price probably would end up in the same range, from $4.50 to $10.10, but the way to get there would be different.

Pricing marijuana like this would allow the participants in the industry to make good money, and government could make an obscene amount of money, and consumers could get a good product at a reasonable price without paying the criminal risk premium. The reason why I wrote this was that I looked at pricing in Colorado and found prices per ounces ranging from $90 per ounce to more than $300 per ounce. That level of pricing is theft. Perhaps prices will come down when the markets learn the economics, or when the owners of markets become so rich that they won’t need any more money, but it is possible the economies of scale are not coming into play, yet. Until that happens I think that most people should scream, unless they grow their own, in which case they should smile.

Public Policy Lies

Today I was reminded, yet again, how much of the information that the general news media provide is wrong. I would prefer to use a milder word for the incorrectness, because reporters often just report things that they don’t understand, and many facts are dropped, because they don’t fit, or the reporter doesn’t understand what is being said. Then there are the things that are deliberately misreported; much deliberate misreporting is done, because public policy or editorial policy says that certain things are facts regardless of actual fact.

And there I was, talking to a young woman, and tobacco prohibition came up as an aside. And as a further aside I mentioned what good stuff nicotine is and how tobacco got a bad rap, because the way that the matter of tobacco and lung cancer was reported didn’t mention that defective genes were the actual cause of the cancer, and tobacco, or some other irritant, was just a trigger.

Unjustified condemnation of tobacco isn’t the only way that a prejudice against tobacco is shown. There is also the matter of nicotine being an effective anti-depressant and brain stimulant; these characteristics have been ignored by the press, and major investigators only recently started to look into these characteristics. Nicotine fills acetylcholine receptors, and this causes dopamine, endorphins, and glutamate to be released. Dopamine and endorphins act as anti-depressants, and glutamate is a memory enhancer. Nicotine is now being studied as a treatment for Parkinson’s Disease and treatment for Alzheimer’s Disease. It has been said that nicotine cures Parkinson’s, but the results with Alzheimer’s are not as complete, but it has been shown to slow the onset. The federal government, which has led the effort to demonize tobacco, is involved in research on nicotine against Parkinson’s. So there is a sign that the public policy condemning tobacco may start to crumble. All of this was completely new that person I was talking to, and she may not have believed a word of it.


Tobacco isn’t the only thing that gets a bad rap that way. Sunlight is commonly called the cause of melanoma, but that isn’t what the evidence shows. Melanoma is caused by any of several genetic defects that appear to cause, but it is not certain that all such defects have been recognized, and some people without genetic defects do acquire melanoma. But exposure is only a small part of the whole, and there are other advantages to exposure to sunlight. If we have a few more years of evidence that will show that sunlight is a trigger, at most, in causing melanoma, then public policy might again favor the Sun, not that it needs our approval.

The funniest example of policy opposing something causing reporting problems was in regard to a study that had found that alcohol was good for health in all quantities; that is, that moderation was not necessary. I was listening to the radio fairly early one morning when that report was read. The reader made some surprised comment after reading it. I expected to hear more about it later in the day, but there were no more reports about alcohol that day. Apparently the reader let his prejudice get the better of him, so he ignored new evidence. Oh well.

Nicotine isn’t the only psychoactive drug that has been condemned by the government, etc. Pretty much all psychoactive drugs are condemned by public officials. Marijuana is now getting a lighter treatment, because it is very common and very, very safe in addition to having therapeutic value. Apparently public policy has decided that the good that marijuana can do outweighs the calm and relaxation that it can provide people. It also helps that it was completely unregulated until a few decades ago. I haven’t been able to figure out why legalization didn’t become public policy after the Prohibition Era. As with alcohol, drugs are not as harmful as the battle to stamp them out became, and the experience with the prohibition of alcohol should have shown how things would work. Marijuana wasn’t criminalized until after alcohol was legalized again, which makes no sense at all. Anyone who has known any drug addicts or users of any illegal drugs knows that the problems are not with the drugs; the problems involve the illegality of the materials.

A few years ago it became public policy to desire government intervention in the medical industry after decades of it being public policy to keep government out of people’s lives. The government intervention was supposed to make medical care available to everyone, even though it had been available to anyone who wanted it. And there started to be more pushes to sell more medical services to more people and to make payments for the services through insurance companies, which would do nothing except put money into the insurance companies. But all this was supposed to make medicine cheaper. Even without all of the changes in place it has become clear that this activity is making medical care more expensive and limiting how much care some people can get. The changes were supposed to be paid for by getting more healthy people covered by medical insurance, but it turned out that the healthy people already had medical insurance, so the new people were starting to demand more services. Anyway, the public policy was wrong; healthcare reform has not made medical care more accessible for anyone, and it has not reduced the costs of medical care, and it has not provided care for more people, because many people who had medical insurance have lost it. We don’t know how things will end up, but it will be uglier than it already is.

Through history there have been times and places where public policy was on the right side of an issue, but that hasn’t been in the United States recently.

Don’t forget to tell me how wrong I am in clear and accurate terms.


http://skincancer.about.com/od/riskf...noma_genes.htm
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/p...essional/page4

More Inequality

 

I was just reading the news. There were two stories (links below) that got my attention for the same reason, and eliminating the issues would be very easy. (Actually, there was a third story that interested me, but for a very different reason.)  One had the headline “Judge rules Texas same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional”, and the other bore the headline “Dim prospects for House Republican plan to overhaul tax code.”  You would have to read the article to know the details, but both relate to some people getting privileges that not everyone gets. That means that there are violations of the Fourteenth Amendment in both.

I may have written something before about the problem with the brouhaha about marriage between homosexuals, but the heart of the matter is that married people get privileges that are not given to unmarried people, and that is wrong. Everyone should get the same privileges. There is a side issue in that; to wit, marriage is a matter of state regulation, and the feds have no business getting involved. It is perfectly valid for one state to have no regulation of marriage and another state allowing it only between third cousins. But the easy way to eliminate the problem is to eliminate governmental regulation of marriage. I don’t believe that it is any concern of government who is interacting with whom. If they produce children, then they should be held to account, but that should not give them move privileges.

The dim prospects for overhauling the tax code involve which pieces of extra privilege they will be able to get to whom. If they were to simplify the tax code so that there were no special breaks, then it would work better for everyone, but nothing passes congress unless everyone gets special treatment. That suggests that congress should eliminate more special deals, so that things could get passed. I fail to understand why there are any unequal taxes. It seems obvious that if everyone paid an equal rate on everything, then it would be fairer and easier to determine whether anyone was cheating. It would be so easy, that some people who avoid taxes as much as they can would start paying, because it would be so easy. It could be worded so that it would seem like you, and I were being treated better than those others, but those others would interpret ate it that they were getting a deal that you and I weren’t getting, too simple for words.

The other article was about a court ordering Youtube to remove trailers for the movie “Innocence of Muslims”, which is a poorly done broad attack on Islam and Mohammed. Apparently it was made by Christian Egyptians, so there are some real problems that underlie the movie, but the movie is amateurish and not well thought out, see link below. It is my opinion that reinterpretation has turned Islam from an excellent answer to Christianity into something that is foreign to the Koran, just as a beginning. I don’t like censorship, but that movie is bad in pretty much every way that I can imagine. When we get a working time machine we will be able to make a much better movie about the birth of Islam. If the link doesn’t work, when you try it, then wait a while, and it may return. If that doesn’t work, then try google to see if there are any new locations for it.

Gay marriage
http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/02/26/usa-gaymarriage-texas-idINDEEA1P0GI20140226

Tax code
http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/politicsnow/la-pn-house-republican-tax-overhaul-20140226,0,7213293.story#axzz2uTXFNXvx

“Innocence of Muslims”
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=cda_1347507079