Daily Archives: June 18, 2017

Communities Voices and Insights – Washington Times

Posted: June 18, 2017 at 10:44 am

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As temperatures rise, millions upon millions throughout our nation respond to the call of sparkling bodies of water in our backyard or community swimming pools, lakes, beaches, ponds and waterparks, "to hop in, get wet, enjoy and cool down!"

Russian President Vladimir Putin today held his question-and-answer session with the Russian public, an annual tradition known as "The Direct Line."

Wednesday's shooting in Alexandria, Virginia - where Republican members of Congress had gathered to practice for an annual charity baseball game - is, sadly, the inevitable consequence of the vitriol currently spouted by political elites. But just how did it come to pass?

"Do you know where a lot of people hang out who are pro-life, pro-family, hard working, and business oriented? He asked, "Where?" I said, "At the churches. I would like to challenge your committee to reach out to the churches to have at least one time a month to register voters. You don't have to tell them 'Register Republican.' You can just lay out the party platforms."

Richard Watson's golf game and trophy fishing mounts might not stack up to other men in East Texas--but he has certainly done more than his share to lead and improve his local community.

"We are a nation that solves things by conversation. We disagree ...but we don't solve it this way. And we cannot." --Senator James Lankford

The first skirmishes of a second American civil war have begun. No, this is not a metaphorical analogy to that bloody conflict that killed approximately 620,000 Americans. It is an objective statement of the reality in America.

The mainstream media routinely mistakes the firefighter for the fire. Emblematic has been the frenzy over the consumer cost of Mylan's EpiPen(r) Auto-Injectors to treat life-threatening allergic reactions.

Col. Steven Chealander served as a military aide to President Reagan from 1986-88, including numerous historic trips abroad. He was in Berlin with Reagan on that historic day. But even more special for Chealander was that his own parents were in Berlin too, as special guests of the White House. You see, his father helped save the city as a pilot during the Berlin Airlift.

It's never been easy to be a man. Once upon a time men had to stand at the mouth of the cave, protecting their women and children from roving predatory beasts. (Come to think of it, some of that job still remains!)

As always, when I'm delivered a Volvo for my weekly drive I get giddy all over. This time was no different when the 2017 Volvo XC90 T6 AWD Inscription parked itself in my driveway.

Something is rotten in the Environmental Protection Agency's regulatory matrix governing the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) mandated by Energy Policy Act of 2005. The RFS was designed to diminish petroleum imports and carbon dioxide emissions. But it imposes a punishing and fraud-ridden burden on small fuel manufacturers.

Just about everyone reading this would agree that mobile phones continue to greatly impact our lives everyday: We connect easily with family, friends and business associates; gain insightful information; search new places and track key data - just to mention a very few ways.

Given that Mr. Gingrich is both a historian with an earned doctorate and also a former Speaker of the House, he brings a unique perspective on any topic he chooses to write on. Combining historical awareness with public policy wonkishness, his prose sounds just like he talks -- which is to say, both interesting and informative. You may disagree with his politics, but Mr. Gingrich won't bore you.

President Trump has made a big deal since his election about his new relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping, insisting Beijing is "working very hard" to pressure North Korea since the two leaders' meetings at Mar-a-Lago earlier in the year. Mr. Trump seems to be combining China's newfound sympathy to the U.S. position with a "big stick" three U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups, which rotate off the North Korean coast.

Tens of thousands of diehard country music fans will descend on downtown Nashville for the annual Country Music Association (CMA) Festival. The event offers a rare opportunity not just to see dozens of top-tier country music artists perform but also to meet and greet those stars, as well as some of the up-and-coming acts the various record labels situated on nearby Music Row aim to make it big.

Liberal hysteria over President Donald Trump's legally impeccable international disengagements has surpassed the hysteria that fueled the Salem Witch Trials. But there is no Arthur Miller among the contemporary glitterati to dramatize the frenzy.

As Senate Republicans hem and haw over their apparent inability to come to agreement on how to live up to their campaign promises to repeal ObamaCare, the voters who gave them their majority are, quite rightly, beginning to wonder if those promises are worth the paper they're printed on. Bewilderment reigns, and anger is not far off.

Christopher Drexler--born 20 years ago today--we remember you. May reflecting on your brief, snuffed out life lead us to national repentance.

If you were to ask Jane Q. Public, she would probably say, "All we want is to be left alone. We want to live in peace. But when evil is dedicated against us, we have no choice. We must act."

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Communities Voices and Insights - Washington Times

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Ron Paul confirms ‘deep state’ exists in United States – Press TV

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Ron Paul expresses strong belief in "deep state".

Former US Congressman Ron Paul has voiced his strong belief in a secret network known as the"deep state" which runs the affairs in the United States.

"I strongly believe there is the existence of a deep state" in the US, the senior statesman said in an interview on Friday.

"Deep state" refers to powerful economic and intelligence organizations thatcontrol the country's affairs.

The former Representative for Texas' 14th and 22nd congressional districts who sought the presidency of the United States in 1988, 2008 and 2012, said that despite the fierce opposition among members of the Senate, the huge majority, 97 to 2, agreed on Thursday to slap fresh sanctions against Iran and Russia.

Easily passingagreement on such affairs is ample proof of a deep state runningthe US, he said.

'Deep state'

The former speaker of the US House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, claimed a shadowy network of powerful organizations were attempting to destabilize the administration.

Of course, the deep state exists, said Gingrich.

This is what the deep state does: They create a lie, spread a lie, fail to check the lie and then deny that they were behind the lie, he added.

The term deep state, or derin devlet in Turkish, originated in 1950s Turkey, refers to a secretive network of influential members of government agencies or the military that operates outside the democratic system. The group is believed to be involved in the secret manipulation or control of government policy.

According to American scholar Dr. Kevin Barrett, Peter Dale Scott, professor from the University of California, is probably the researcher who has done the most to popularize this term.

Scott developed the deep state concept out of his analysis of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

White phosphorous

In addition, in the same interview, Paul confirmed the use of white phosphorous by the US military.

Thechemical, which is used in incendiary munitions, is banned by international law.

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‘Democracy In Chains’ Traces The Rise Of American Libertarianism – NPR Illinois | 91.9 UIS

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Obscuring census data to give "conservative districts more than their fair share of representation." Preventing access to the vote. Decrying "socialized medicine." Trying to end Social Security using dishonest vocabulary like "strengthened." Lionizing Lenin. Attempting to institute voucher programs to "get out of the business of public education." Increasing corporatization of higher education. Harboring a desire, at heart, to change the Constitution itself.

This unsettling list could be 2017 Bingo. In fact, it's from half a century earlier, when economist James Buchanan an early herald of libertarianism began to cultivate a group of like-minded thinkers with the goal of changing government. This ideology eventually reached the billionaire Charles Koch; the rest is, well, 2017 Bingo.

This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. It's grim going; this isn't the first time Nancy MacLean has investigated the dark side of the American conservative movement (she also wrote Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan), but it's the one that feels like it was written with a clock ticking down.

Still, it takes the time to meticulously trace how we got here from there. Charles and his brother David Koch have been pushing the libertarian agenda for more than 20 years. A generation before them, Buchanan founded a series of enclaves to study ways to make government bend. Before that, critic and historian Donald Davidson coined the term "Leviathan" in the 1930s for the federal government, and blamed northeasterners for "pushing workers' rights and federal regulations. Such ideas could never arise from American soil, Davidson insisted. They were 'alien' European imports brought by baleful characters." And going back another century, the book locates the movement's center in the fundamentalism of Vice President John C. Calhoun, for whom the ideas of capital and self-worth were inextricably intertwined. (Spoilers: It was about slavery.)

Buchanan headed a group of radical thinkers (he told his allies "conspiratorial secrecy is at all times essential"), who worked to centralize power in states like Virginia. They eschewed empirical research. They termed taxes "slavery." They tried repeatedly to strike down progressive action school integration, Social Security claiming it wasn't economically sound. And they had the patience and the money to weather failures in their quest to win.

As MacLean lays out in their own words, these men developed a strategy of misinformation and lying about outcomes until they had enough power that the public couldn't retaliate against policies libertarians knew were destructive. (Look no further than Flint, MacLean says, where the Koch-funded Mackinac Center was behind policies that led to the water crisis.) And it's painstakingly laid out. This is a book written for the skeptic; MacLean's dedicated to connecting the dots.

She gives full due to the men's intellectual rigor; Buchanan won the Nobel for economics, and it's hard to deny that he and the Koch brothers have had some success. (Alongside players like Dick Armey and Tyler Cowen, there are cameos from Newt Gingrich, John Kasich, Mitt Romney, and Antonin Scalia.) But this isn't a biography. Besides occasional asides, MacLean's much more concerned with ideology and policy. By the time we reach Buchanan's role in the rise of Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet (which backfired so badly on the people of Chile that Buchanan remained silent about it for the rest of his life), that's all you need to know about who Buchanan was.

If you're worried about what all this means for America's future, you should be. The clear and present danger is hard to ignore. When nearly every radical belief the Buchanan school ever floated is held by a member of the current administration, it's bad news.

But it's worth noting that the primary practice outlined in this book is the leveraging of money to protect money and the counter-practice is the vocal and sustained will of the people. We are, Democracy in Chains is clear, at a precipice. At the moment, the first practice is winning. If you don't like it, now's the time to try the second. And if someone you know isn't convinced, you have just the book to hand them.

Genevieve Valentine's latest novel is Icon.

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The Ethical Dilemmas of Immortality

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Misao Okawa of Japan, who died April 1, 2015, was the world's oldest woman at 117.

For John Harris, saving a life and delaying its end is one and the same. Using this logic, Harris, a bioethicist at the University of Manchester, England, figures that scientists have a moral duty to extend the human life span as far as it will go, even if it means creating beings that live forever.

"When you save a life, you are simply postponing death to another point," Harris told LiveScience. "Thus, we are committed to extending life indefinitely if we can, for the same reasons that we are committed to life-saving."

But the loss of a child and the passing of an elderly person are not the same thing at all, says Daniel Callahan, a bioethicist at the Hastings Center in New York. The first is premature, while the latter comes, hopefully, at the end of a well-lived life.

"The death of an elderly person is sad, because we lose them and they lose us, but it's not tragic," Callahan said. "One can't say this is a deranged universe to live in because people die of old age."

This is just one of several ethical and moral arguments that have cropped up in recent years as labs around the world aim at the dream of immortality, or at least to extend lives well beyond the century mark. Among other debates:

A world of 112-year-olds

The life expectancy for the average American is 77.6 years. Extending life spans will be an incremental process, most experts say. But there is great promise.

A 1990 study by University of Chicago biodemographer Jay Olshansky and colleagues calculated that even if the risk of death from cancer in the United States were reduced to zero, average life expectancy would increase by only 2.7 years. If the risks from heart disease, stroke and diabetes were also eliminated, life expectancy would increase by another 14 years, the researchers found.

In contrast, repeated experiments have shown rodents fed 40 percent fewer calories live about 40 percent longer. For reasons that are unclear, this "caloric restriction" regimen also postpones the onset of many degenerative diseases normally associated with aging.

If these effects can be replicated in humans, the average person could live to be 112 years old and our maximum life span could be extended to 140 years, says Richard Miller, a pathologist who does aging research at the University of Michigan.

The moral imperative

Furthermore, if rodent experiments are any guide, the future's elderly will be fitter, Miller said, with the average 90-year-old resembling todays 50-year-olds in mind and body.

For these reasons, Miller believes aging research could have a far greater impact on improving public health than trying to cure diseases individually.

If youre really interested in increasing healthy lifespan, aging research is more likely to get you there in a quick and cost-efficient way than trying to conquer one disease at a time," Miller told Live Science.

If extending life also prolongs health, as animal studies suggest, then the argument for anti-aging research being a moral imperative is strengthened, says Harris, the University of Manchester bioethicist.

"It is one thing to ask, 'Should we make people immortal?' and answer in the negative. It is quite another to ask whether we should make people immune toheart disease , cancer, dementia, and many other diseases and decide that we should not, Harris contends.

But even if humanity decides to green-light anti-aging research on moral grounds, other thorny ethical issues remain, ethicists say. Uppermost among these is the problem of social injustice.

Who will have access?

Most scientists and ethicists agree that life-extension technology will likely be very expensive when first developed, so only a small number of wealthy individuals will be able to afford it. Existing social disparities between rich and poor could become even more pronounced.

The fortunate few who could afford the therapy would not only have significantly longer lives, but more opportunities to amass wealth or political power and to gain control of economic or even cultural institutions, critics say.

Harris points out, however, that the modern world is already rife with similar injustices. The average life expectancy of people in the United States, for example, is about 78 years, but only 34 years in Botswana, which has one of the highest rates of HIV infection in Africa. In Ethiopia, where HIV infection is much less prevalent, life expectancy is 49 years.

Developed nations also have access to medicines and life-saving procedures, such as organ transplants, that are beyond the reach of poor nations. Yet Americans dont typically consider themselves wicked because they have access to things like kidney transplants while people in other countries dont.

Similarly, Harris says, the fact that only the rich would have access to life extension technology is not a good enough reason to ban it. For one thing, denying life-treatments to one group of people will not save another. Secondly, new technologies often start off expensive but become cheaper and more widely available with time.

"Injustice may be justifiable in the short term because that is the only way to move to a position where greater justice can be done," Harris told LiveScience. "Thats true of all technologies.

Centuries of torment

Another thing to consider is the effect longer lifetimes will have on some of our cherished values, ethicists say. For example, in the United States, the right to life is considered something that every person is entitled to, and both suicide and euthanasia are considered culturally and socially unacceptable.

But in a world where human lives are measured not in decades, but in centuries, or millennia, these values might need to be re-examined. One reason: Immortality will not mean invincibility. Diseases and wars will still kill, strokes will still maim and depression will still be around to blunt the joys of living.

The question of when, if ever, is it okay for someone to end their own life or to have someone else end it for them is already a topic of fierce debate. An answer will become even more essential if by telling someone they must live, we condemn them to not just years, but decades or centuries of torment.

Generational cleansing

Also,Earth can support only so many people . If everyone lived longer, generations would have to be born farther apart to avoid overcrowding.

To ensure ample generational turnover, Harris says, society might need to resort to some kind of "generational cleansing, which would be difficult to justify. This would involve people collectively deciding what length is reasonable for a generation to live and then ensuring individuals died once they reached the end of their term.

Such actions would require radical shifts in our attitudes about suicide and euthanasia, Harris said. People would either have to stop thinking that saving lives is important, or theyll have to stop thinking that there is something wrong with deliberately bringing about death at a certain point.

We've grown up with a certain set of expectations about life and death, and if those expectations change, a lot of other things will have to change as well, Harris said.

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Robot judges and related pseudo-futurist musings – Vail Daily News

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As is customary, the courtroom's occupants rise when the judge enters. But that ritual is a vestige of a different age: This particular jurist does not require such ceremony. Being an amalgamation of metal and silicon, JusticeBot4000 needs no genuflection and is concerned solely with the ruthlessly efficient resolution of disputes.

Having just processed the parties' respective, figurative mountains of paperwork in mere seconds, she (the robot was given a remarkably lifelike female appearance) uses her sensors to scan the vitals of the litigants, looking for any last-minute data that may skew her ruling.

Two minutes after first being assigned the case, JusticeBot4000 renders her verdict: The defendant owes the plaintiff $68,242.82. Both judge and collection agent, she wheels herself over to the defendant's table and scans the payment dongle embedded in the skin of his forearm. Case closed, plaintiff paid; an outcome that would have taken three years if sought in 2017 took a scant three minutes.

This perhaps inevitable progression terrifies and titillates me in equal measure. Besides the fact that I have heretofore been something of a Luddite, the former emotion is a fear borne out of sentimentality and solidarity with my species. My immediate reaction to the scenario is that only a person has the requisite combination of intellectual and emotional intelligence to be able to decide the fate of another human.

This perspective is foolish because we are no match for the analytical capabilities of a smartphone, let alone a specifically programmed robot judge. And, as I am fond of repeating, emotions are the kink in the works of an efficient mode of conflict resolution. Just because I do not choose to date a cyborg does not mean that I would be opposed to having one sit on the bench.

I like the idea of an automated justice system for the same reason that I welcome the arrival of autonomous automobiles. An occasional GPS malfunction and accompanying fender bender is a fair trade for a network of distracted, potentially drunken idiots plying our highways piloting half-ton hunks of steel.

Similarly, no matter the issues that may arise on a micro-level with JusticeBot4000 and her ilk, they pale in comparison to the ones that we humans have created. We had our shot and blew it by fomenting a system with ludicrous costs, massive delays, inconsistent outcomes and high levels of dissatisfaction.

I am not merely picking on judges: Lawyers could be replaced fairly easily, as well. As full as my head is with legal principles and strategy, I could never compete with a purpose-built Matloq or PRYMSN on that front. Though I suppose I am not totally useless: I have compassion, I am fueled mostly by rotisserie chicken instead of expensive batteries and I flatter myself by thinking I would look better in a bowtie.

Of course, a shift in this direction would require a fundamental restructuring of our sociopolitical system and of the Constitution that governs it. JusticeBot4000 will have a fresh Constitution on our collective desks within the hour, just before she turns to the task of building electronic replacements for the denizens of our statehouses and Congress. You heard it here first: JusticeBot4000 for President in 2024.

T.J. Voboril is a partner at Reynolds, Kalamaya & Voboril LLC, a local law firm, and the owner-mediator at Voice of Reason Dispute Resolution. For more information, contact Voboril at 970-306-6456 or tj@rkvlaw.com or visit http://www.rkvlaw.com.

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