Monthly Archives: July 2017

US government plans to plug implants into human brains to let us communicate telepathically – The Sun

Posted: July 12, 2017 at 11:47 am

Mind-reading tech could also allow us to communicate with computers and control machines using the power of thought

THE US government wants to implant tiny computers the size of a pound coin into peoples brains so they can communicate telepathically.

These devices could also allow us to operate machinery with our minds, treat brain injuries and let societies of the future send WhatsApp messages using the power of thought.

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The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) handed out $65million (50million) to six research teams, who have four years to come up with the terrifying new technology.

Scientists are expected to weave together a vast network of neurograins which can be worn as implants on top of the cerebral cortex or even embedded inside it.

Packed with sensors, the implants will detect how the brain processes and decode spoken language so it can be interpreted and understood by computers.

Some teams will be focused on improving sight whilst others concentrate on hearing and speech.

It will be no small task to design the brain-reading devices.

Darpa said the high resolution implants must record signals from one million neuronsat any given time.

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The headset or implant must be able to receive signals as well as transmit them and squeeze everything inside a device no larger than a pound coin.

Darpas Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) arm will fund five academic research groups and one small San Jose-based company to achieve this.

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Founding NESD manager Phillip Alvelda said: By increasing the capacity of advanced neural interfaces to engage more than one million neurons in parallel, NESD aims to enable rich two-way communication with the brain at a scale that will help deepen our understanding of that organs underlying biology, complexity, and function.

Its unclear how the brain implants will be tested.

But Darpa might not be the first to make telepathy a reality.

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg claim to be working on similar technology.

Zuckerberg has admitted that his firm is secretly developing a mind-reading brain interface designed to allow humans to communicate telepathically.

He later refused to deny whether this will be used to improve the way in which brands can flog their wares on the social network, which is funded purely by massive advertising campaigns.

Fellow billionaire Musk recently founded Neuralink, a firm which willdevelop "neural lace" capable of downloading thoughts and connecting our minds to the internet.

He hopes humans will be able to "download thoughts" and possibly even treat disorders such as epilepsy and depression using the tech.

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Trump’s defense of Western civilization is not alt-right – Washington Post

Posted: at 11:47 am

The president heaped praise on Poland as a country at the center of European civilization and warned that our shared Western civilization is threatened by totalitarian forces in the world who seek ... to further their barbarous assault on the human spirit. He called on the West to defend the great civilized ideas: individual liberty, representative government, and the rule of law under God and criticized the shyness of some of us in the West about standing for these ideals.

The president in question was not Donald Trump, whose recent speech in Warsaw calling on the West to summon the courage and the will to defend our civilization has drawn irrational criticism here at home. It was Ronald Reagan, in his famous 1982 Westminster address promising to leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history.

In fact, Trumps words could have been delivered by almost any American president of either party in the past century. They could have been delivered by Harry S. Truman, who in 1952 praised the United States for saving Western civilization from enslavement by a godless creed. They could have been spoken by John F. Kennedy, who in a 1963 speech in West Germany spoke of preserving Western culture, and Western religion, and Western civilization and defending our common heritage from those who would divide and destroy it. They could have been uttered by Lyndon B. Johnson, who warned in 1966 of ideologies ... that threaten the very roots of our common Western civilization. They could have been spoken by Bill Clinton, who declared in 1994 his belief that Western civilization was the greatest of all, and America was the best expression of Western civilization because of its commitment to ... the belief that the future could be better than the present and that we have an obligation to make it so.

Never mind all that, according to Sarah Wildman of Vox, Trumps call to defend Western civilization sounded like an alt-right manifesto, as the headline on her article described it. In the Atlantic, Peter Beinart complained that Trump referred 10 times to the West and five times to our civilization and that His white nationalist supporters will understand exactly what he means because The West is a racial and religious term.

No, it isnt. Quite the opposite, Western civilization is founded on ideas that transcend race and religion. As Yale historian Donald Kagan put it: Americans do not share a common ancestry and a common blood. What they have in common is a system of laws and beliefs that shaped the establishment of the country, a system developed within the context of Western civilization. He added that every student should study the philosophical, scientific, agricultural and industrial revolutions in the West which allowed human beings to produce and multiply the things needed for life so as to make survival and prosperity possible for ever-increasing numbers and gave birth to the theory and practice of the separation of church from state, protecting each from the other, and creating a free and safe place for the individual conscience.

These ideals are described as Western not because they are exclusive to the West, but because of the historical fact that they emanated from the West: the first democracy in Greece under Pericles (which predated Christianity by more than four centuries); to the principles enshrined in Magna Carta; the works of the Renaissance humanists; and the treatises of Enlightenment philosophers that inspired the authors of our Declaration of Independence.

Western values are universal values, and Trump affirmed their universality in Warsaw, declaring that we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom.

Since the 1980s, the left has been on a tireless crusade to drum the study of Western civilization out of universities in the name of fighting Eurocentrism. Now, apparently, they want to drum Western values out of presidential rhetoric. We must not let them do so.

Trump has said many objectionable things, but his eloquent defense of Western civilization in Warsaw was not one of them. It is ironic. The left likes to paint Trump as a threat to democracy. But the real threat to democracy is when the leader of the free world can no longer defend the ideals of the West which, Reagan told us, have done so much to ease the plight of man and the hardships of our imperfect world without being accused of bigotry.

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This Wearable MRI Device Could Help Us Read Minds – Futurism

Posted: at 11:46 am

In Brief Mary Lou Jepsen, former head of display technology at Oculus, has founded a startup called Openwater that hopes "to create a wearable to enable us to see the inner workings of the body and brain at high resolution." A Wearable MRI

What if you couldseedirectly into another persons brain? Theability to read minds, referred to as telepathy, is yet another concept thatsabundant in science fiction, but a former Facebook executive says that we could all be capable of at least seeing inside someone elsesmind provided that were equipped with the right technology.

Mary Lou Jepsen was the head of display technology at Oculus before founding her own startup called Openwater. The companys goal, while ambitious, is in theory quite simple: to create a wearable to enable us to see the inner workings of the body and brain at high resolution. In short, telepathy courtesy of a brain-computer interface (BCI) a wearable device that works like an Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine.

I dont think this is going to take decades, Jepsen said of the techs development, during an interview withCNBC. I think were talking about less than a decade, probably eight years until telepathy. Her company plans to make avery limited number of prototypes available to their early access partners by next year.

Wearable MRI technology could be quite an asset in terms ofdisease diagnosis and treatment. With just one quick look, a physician couldsee whats happening inside a persons brain, or elsewherein the body.Of course, this raises many questions and concerns about privacy, which Jepsen says the company is working on. Were trying to make the hat only work if the individual wants it to work, and then filtering out parts that the person wearing it doesnt feel its appropriate to share, she said.

Openwater isnt the only one working to give the human brain machine-like capabilities. In fact, Facebook is also developing a device similar to Jepsens. BCIs, which already haveapplications in prosthesis use, could also become apopular means to prepare humankind for future of intelligent machines.

This is whatTesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has in mind withhis mind/machine merging venture, Neuralink. The U.S. Department of Defenses research arm,DARPA, is also working on projects that would combinehumans with machines. Another company is Kernel, which has been working on a neuroprosthesis that can make the brains neural code programmable.

Disclosure: Bryan Johnson is an investor in Futurism; he does not hold a seat on our editorial board or have any editorial review privileges.

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Humanity Is About to Transition To Evolution by Intelligent Direction – Futurism

Posted: at 11:46 am

Disclaimer: Futurism only supports products that we trust and use. This post is in partnership with Abundance 360, and Futurism may get a small percentage of sales. Want to take a class with Peter Diamandis? Click here to learn more! Reinventing Humanity

As we close out 2016, if youll allow me, Id like to take a risk and venture into a topic Im personally compelled to think about, a topic that will seem far-out to most readers.

Todays extraordinary rate of exponential growth may do much more than just disrupt industries. It may actually give birth to a new species reinventing humanity over the next 30 years.

I believe were rapidly heading towards a human-scale transformation, the next evolutionary step into what I call a meta-intelligence, a future in which we are all highly connected brain to brain via the cloud sharing thoughts, knowledge, and actions.

In this blog, Im investigating the driving forces behind such an evolutionary step, the historical pattern we are about to repeat, and the implications thereof. Again, I acknowledge that this topic seems far-out, but the forces at play are huge and the implications are vast.

Lets dive in

About 4.6 billion years ago, our solar system, the Sun, and the Earth were formed. Four steps followed

Today, at a massively accelerated rate some 100 million times faster than the steps I outlined above life is undergoing a similar evolution. In this next stage of evolution, we are going from evolution by natural selection (Darwinism) to evolution by intelligent direction.

Allow me to draw the analogy for you:

Four primary driving forces are leading us towards our transformation of humanity into a meta-intelligence both on and off the Earth:

Lets take a look at each.

Today, there are 2.9 billion people connected online. Within the next six to eight years, that number is expected to increase to nearly 8 billion, with each individual on the planet having access to a megabit-per-second connection or better.

The wiring is taking place through the deployment of 5G on the ground, plus networks being deployed by Facebook, Google, Qualcomm, Samsung, Virgin, SpaceX, and many others.

Within a decade, every single human on the planet will have access to multimegabit connectivity, the worlds information, and massive computational power on the cloud.

A multitude of labs and entrepreneurs are working to create lasting, high-bandwidth connections between the digital world and the human neocortex (I wrote about that in detail).

Ray Kurzweil predicts well see human-cloud connection by the mid-2030s, just 18 years from now.

In addition, entrepreneurs like Bryan Johnson (and his company Kernel) are committing hundreds of millions of dollars towards this vision.

The end results of connecting your neocortex with the cloud are twofold: First, youll have the ability to increase your memory capacity and/or cognitive function millions of fold; second, via a global mesh network, youll have the ability to connect your brain to anyone elses brain and to emerging AIs, just like our cell phones, servers, watches, cars, and all devices are becoming connected via the Internet of Things (IoT).

Next, and perhaps most significantly, we are on the cusp of an AI revolution.

Artificial intelligence, powered by deep learning and funded by companies such as Google, Facebook, IBM, Samsung, and Alibaba, will continue to rapidly accelerate and drive breakthroughs.

Cumulative intelligence (both artificial and human) is the single greatest predictor of success for both a company or a nation. For this reason, beside the emerging AI arms race, we will soon see a race focused on increasing overall human intelligence.

Whatever challenges we might have in creating a vibrant brain-computer interface (e.g. designing long-term biocompatible sensors or nanobots that interface with your neocortex), those challenges will fall quickly over the next couple of decades as AI power tools give us every increasing problem-solving capability.

It is an exponential atop an exponential. More intelligence gives us the tools to solve connectivity and mesh problems and in turn create greater intelligence.

Finally, its important to note that the human race is on the verge of becoming a multiplanetary species.

Thousands of years from now, whatever weve evolved into, we will look back at these next few decades as the moment in time that the human race moved off Earth irreversibly.

Today, billions of dollars are being invested privately into the commercial space industry. Efforts led by SpaceX are targeting humans on Mars, while efforts by Blue Origin are looking at taking humanity back to the Moon and plans by my own company, Planetary Resources, strive to unlock near-infinite resources from the asteroids.

The rate of human evolution is accelerating as we transition from the slow and random process of Darwinian natural selection to a hyper-accelerated and precisely directed period of evolution by intelligent direction.

In this blog, I chose not to discuss the power being unleashed by such gene-editing techniques as CRISPR-Cas9. Consider this yet another tool able to accelerate evolution by our own hand.

The bottom line is that change is coming, faster than ever considered possible. All of us leaders, entrepreneurs, and parents have a huge responsibility to inspire and guide the transformation of humanity on and off the Earth.

What we do over the next 30 years the bridges we build to abundance will impact the future of the human race for millennia to come. We truly live during the most exciting time ever in human history.

Disclaimer: Futurism only supports products that we trust and use. This post is in partnership with Abundance 360, and Futurism may get a small percentage of sales. Want to take a class with Peter Diamandis?Click here to learn more!

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Obamacare’s systematic, legal euthanasia program that’s killing TENS OF THOUSANDS – Catholic Online

Posted: July 11, 2017 at 10:41 pm

Deadly scam costs billions, kills tens of thousands.

Delray, Florida is the addiction recovery capitol of the world. Over the past few decades, tens of thousands of people have come to the city on Florida's Atlantic coast to escape the ravages of addiction. However, lax regulatory laws and generous insurance mandates have turned heaven into hell for many people. Here's how.

Tens of thousands of people are dying each year under Obamacare's secret euthanasia programs.

LOS ANGELES, CA (California Network) -- The city of Delray, Florida is a beautiful coastal town just north of Boca Raton. The city boomed after World War II, and became a haven for surfers. It's still popular with the surfing crowd. However, as drugs became a problem in the U.S., Delray gained another reputation. The city became home to a number of addiction recovery centers, and became the recovery capital of the nation.

Addiction recovery is a new science. Researchers are still learning about addiction itself, and work on addiction recovery makes slow progress. Addiction is usually fueled by unhappiness, despair, and pain, and may also have a genetic component. The drugs themselves are often so powerful they create addiction in as little as a single use.

As experts struggle to discern what works and how best to implement it, addicts need to survive day-to-day. To facilitate this, many addicts move into sober homes, which are houses occupied by fellow addicts who are sober. Often, there is some form of supervision or aid, to ensure the house remains sober. However, there are no regulations or licensing for the home providers or the supervisors. Anyone can open a sober home, and anyone can supervise the addicts living there.

A perfect storm of non-regulation, mandated payments, and addiction have attracted scammers and criminals to Delray. Sober homes open their doors and pack in residents. These homes can be found in every neighborhood, even the most upscale. But housing in poorer neighborhoods gets less oversight since the locals tend not to complain about noise or other nuisances.

Patients living in these homes don't pay rent, their rent is paid by insurance companies which are also on the hook for testing and treatment. Drug testing can be frequent, even multiple times per week, and each test can be billed out for hundreds to thousands of dollars. By law, the insurers are required to pay.

When benefits run low, addicts need to relapse so they can restart the benefits cycle. Relapse is facilitated by the rehab centers, which have become unscrupulous. The patient is then moved to a new sober home to repeat the cycle. One patient can be worth millions of dollars. Rehab centers, or individuals often own more than one house, so they simply transfer a patient to all of their houses, one after another, cashing in at each stop.

Brokers also traffic patients between rehab facilities, trading patients back and forth like human trading cards.

When the benefits run out, patients are cast out on the streets where they become members of the city's fast-growing homeless population.

The addicts who return to drug abuse often become criminals, stealing what they can to pay for their drugs. Crime is surging, as well as deaths from overdoses. The city coroner, police, fire and ambulance services have been forced into a hiring spree.

But often, patients simply die. They overdose while in rehab. It's a known risk, so few people ask questions.

This perfect storm is created by Obamacare, and the state's relaxed regulatory laws. Low taxes and lax regulation are great for attracting business, but they have also attracted fraudsters and criminals.

There's not much relief in sight. The state is aware of the problem and has enacted a few measures to help. Gov. Rick Scott has freed up about $27 million in federal aid to assist with prevention, care, and addiction recovery. But that merely shares the burden of caring for these people with every taxpayer in the country. And the state has enacted tougher penalties for people who illegally recruit and traffic patients.

The entire scheme fits into a larger picture. Delray isn't the only community struggling under the weight of this problem. Cities across the U.S. face similar challenges. Obamacare established the system, ostensibly to clean up our streets by curing drug addicts, but the truth is far worse.

This scheme results in tens of thousands of Americans dying annually from prescription and illegal drug overdosing. That overdosing is encouraged. Those who facilitate the abuse are well paid with federal funds. Why? The answer is simple. Obamacare is a legal euthanasia program. It's provisions deliberately allow people to get rich by slowly killing off drug addicts. For the powerful elites who run the country, it's a win-win. But for the rest of us, it is an expensive tragedy.

What Obamacare is worse than what Duterte is doing in the Philippines where thousands of drug dealers have been killed by vigilantes. Under Obamacare, tens of thousands die each year as money changes hands.

Obamacare, and the programs such as these it facilitates, need to come to an end. The people responsible for these programs, and the people cashing in on them need to be arrested and prosecuted. The Attorney General has started prosecuting some of the people who broker humans from rehab to rehab. But it's a small start on a very large problem. One that costs us billions of dollars, and tens of thousands of lives each year.

---

Pope Francis Prayer Intentions for JULY 2017 Lapsed Christians. That our brothers and sisters who have strayed from the faith, through our prayer and witness to the Gospel, may rediscover the merciful closeness of the Lord and the beauty of the Christian life.

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‘Shameful’ lead thieves target schools causing thousands of pounds worth of damage – WalesOnline

Posted: at 10:40 pm

Two schools in as many weeks have been targeted by lead thieves in crimes that have been dubbed shameful and destructive.

Large amounts of lead flashing was stripped off the roof at Penybont Primary in Bridgend.

But it is understood thieves were disturbed by the caretaker and dropped it before fleeing.

Less than a week earlier, the towns Oldcastle Primary School, which is just a few streets away, reported 200 of lead had been stolen from its roof, causing thousands of pounds worth of damage.

Town and county councillor Nicole Burnett, who is also the chairwoman of the Friends of Penybont, branded Saturdays incident an appalling crime and act of vandalism.

She said the money to pay the excess on the insurance claim would have to come out of school funds, meaning less money to be spent on the education of our children!

The lead was taken from a part of the roof which cannot be seen from ground level and if this crime had gone unnoticed, then the next time it rained the school would have suffered extreme water damage, which could have meant the closure of the school. This is not a victimless crime, she added.

Councillor Charles Smith, Bridgend council cabinet member for education and regeneration, said: This type of shameful, destructive crime can cause thousands of pounds worth of damage to a school and its resources, and leaves scores of children at a disadvantage.

A police investigation is underway and we would urge anyone who notices suspicious behaviour taking place on school premises to report it immediately.

A police spokeswoman said officers were called to Penybont Primary shortly before 2.15am on Saturday, and while there was little sign of a break-in, a large quantity of lead flashing was discovered abandoned in the school yard.

Inquiries are continuing to identify those involved, and anyone with any information that could help the investigation is urged to contact 101, quoting reference 1700264313.

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Queens Village man convicted of sex trafficking, prostitution: DA – TimesLedger

Posted: at 10:40 pm

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A Queens Village man was convicted of sex trafficking and forcing two teenage girls into prostitution, and faces up to 50 years behind bars.

By Mark Hallum

TimesLedger Newspapers

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A Queens Village man is facing up to 50 years in state prison after he was convicted last Friday of sex trafficking two teenage girls and promoting prostitution, the Queens district attorney said.

The two-week trial showed Ricardi Dirty Dumervil, 29, issued threats of violence to the young women, who were forced to comply with the defendants wishes over the course of about a year, according to DA Richard Brown.

The defendant has been convicted of inducing fear of physical harm into two young women so that he could treat them as chattel, commodities to be sold to others for cash, which he then pocketed for himself, Brown said. Sex trafficking is a violent, degrading and demeaning crime that will not be tolerated in Queens. The defendant will now be incarcerated for his crimes.

A jury found Dumervil guilty of sex trafficking and promoting prostitution. He was scheduled to be sentenced on July 27.

Brown said the jurys decision in the Queens Supreme Court trial, presided over by Justice Michael Aloise, marked 35 human trafficking convictions since 2007. That year saw the beginning of more extreme punishments for those guilty of exploiting human beings for profit. The last available year for statistics 2016 showed human trafficking convictions in Browns jurisdiction accounted for about one-third of all such convictions statewide.

Trial testimony alleged that Dumervil had forced two women, ages 18 and 19, into prostitution between April 2014 and March 2015, according to Brown. The defendant was accused of threatening violence upon the victims if they refused to obey, forcing them to engage in sexual activity with clients in exchange for money, and then pocketing the profit for himself.

In June, a different Queens man was charged by the Queens DA for alleged human trafficking and pimping out a 14-year-old runaway girl. Reagan Flex Conception, 28, faced a 76-count indictment for kidnapping, rape and other charges on the criminal complaint when he returned to court this week. He could be sentenced to 25 years to life behind bars if convicted, Brown said.

I want to stress that prostitution is not a victimless crime and that sex trafficking is an incessant act of brutality and degradation. This teenage girl was finally freed, but she will have to live with this horrible experience for the rest of her life, Brown said in response to the charges against Conception.

Reach reporter Mark Hallum by e-mail at mhallum@cnglocal.com or by phone at (718) 2604564.

Posted 12:00 am, July 11, 2017

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City Commits Civil Disobedience Against Feds By Painting Blue Line Down Marlboro St. – Free Keene

Posted: at 10:40 pm

Keene Signals its Support for Secession by its Recent Peaceful Civil Disobedience

In a recent Keene Sentinel piece about multiple city councilors gushing over their recent decision to paint a horribly garish blue line down the middle of Marlboro St, local commenter Johnson Rice points out that the city is actually committing civil disobedience against the federal government:

This doesnt look like the kind of thing a peace officer should be sporting.

Interesting that the city decided to violate the law outlined by the USDOT & FHA when they clearly warned a few towns in New Jersey that this practice is illegal in that it creates unsafe road conditions because motorists dont know what this line means. It could result in lawsuits for the city if the unsafe condition results in any legitimate accidents or even accidents involving less scrupulous people.

Good for the City of Keene though for adopting that rebellious Free Keene spirit and willfully violating federal law.

I think the bright blue paint is ugly, distracting, and possibly dangerous to clueless drivers. The police get far too much worship as-is, for the job of a supposed servant and dont need any more blind obeisance. (They arent all saints. Heres a story about a local NH police chief who also was a child rapist for several years at least.)

All that said, while I dont agree with the issue they chose, I do appreciate the city governments embracing of peaceful civil disobedience. Maybe theyll see the light that the federal government is a controlling, abusive spouse and start openly supporting secession next?

Doubtful, but this does point out that the law means nothing to the state & city when they wish to ignore it. Who can blame them? Statutes and codes are just words on paper written by strangers. They are opinions backed by guns. Thanks to their thin blue line of police, the political class is protected from having to follow their own rules, yet the rest of us are jailed for victimless crimes in ever-growing numbers.

It might make you wonder who the police are really there to protect and serve, hmm?

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The Republican healthcare plan has a formidable foe: economics – The Guardian

Posted: at 10:39 pm

Insurance works because not everybody gets sick at the same time. Photograph: Erik Mc G/PacificPress/Barcroft

Having sworn for six years to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, Senate Republicans, unable to pass a plan before their summer recess, recently got their first taste of how the folks at home feel about it. While many ducked those messy town-hall meetings, they couldnt avoid hearing the angry voices during Fourth of July parades, picnics and fireworks.

Why are regular people so angry, even in deep red states? Because voters instinctively understand the irreconcilable conflict between political rhetoric, conservative dogma and the hard reality of economics.

On one hand, the devotees of Ayn Rand (Paul Ryan, Rand Paul etc) are on the talk shows explaining that laissez faire capitalism and free-market competition are the answers for better care and lower costs plus tax cuts for the rich, of course.

On the other hand, Republican moderates recognize the disastrous impact of kicking tens of millions of Americans off their health insurance and rightly fear voters backlash. But both camps have chosen to ignore some pretty basic facts they should have learned in economics 101.

This is not a new problem. Were in this mess because politicians historically kick the can down the road. In 1986, Ronald Reagan signed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (Emtala), mandating emergency services regardless of the ability to pay. Back then, Republicans and Democrats overwhelming agreed that nobody should be left to die because they couldnt afford to go to the doctor but unsurprisingly, no one ever dealt with how to pay for it.

Ever since there has been a bitter, ongoing political fight about who deserves what care and who pays. Progressives and Democrats think healthcare should be a basic human right. Republicans and Atlas Shrugged conservatives say everybody should pay their own way. We all want better care and lower prices. But the Republicans now controlling our entire government cant craft a workable plan because they ignore at least four immutable economic principles.

First, healthcare markets dont obey Adam Smiths invisible hand of supply and demand. As any economist will tell you, certain sectors of a capitalist economy, such as agriculture and healthcare, are price inelastic. Inelasticity is just a fancy term meaning the demand for a good or service does not go down when the price goes up.

Why is this so? Because everybody wants their sick child to get well, and they expect modern medicine to do whatever it takes and damn the expense. This price inelasticity of demand is what makes healthcare costs so hard to control.

To deal with the effects of price inelasticity in our everyday lives, we use health insurance. Insurance works because not everybody gets sick at the same time. So if everyone buys insurance policies, the risk and the costs are spread out over time, and the price is affordable for everybody.

Heres where Republicans ignore the concept of homo economicus, or economic man. By definition, homo economicus makes consistently rational and self-interested decisions. Millions of working families choose to pay for food, shelter, clothing, school and transportation before they pay for health insurance. They reason that the risk is worth the savings. For many young and healthy folks, this makes good economic sense.

Behavioral economists call this the free rider phenomenon, and its the third economic principal conservatives tend to misinterpret. But when free riders inevitably get sick or old, the law (and simple decency) demand we take care of them. So who gets stuck with their bills? You do. When hospitals and doctors cant collect from the free riders, they pass those costs along to the rest of us, and our insurance premiums go up.

Conservatives say its wrong to force people to pay for something they dont want, and thats a compelling argument. But the flip-side of that coin is: why should I have to pay for the free riders? Im homo economicus too!

Finally, healthcare isnt even a true free market. On the supply side there are huge barriers to entry exhaustive educational requirements and strict state and federal exams and license regulations, as there should be.

Who wants an ignorant, negligent doctor? On the demand side, most consumers dont have the medical knowledge or judgment to make the kind of free and informed decisions required in a truly free market. Besides, when you get sick, you dont really have a choice. Going to the hospital is not like deciding to buy a new smartphone, is it?

The ACA (aka Obamacare) was designed to deal with all these economic realities. The law addresses price inelasticity by paying doctors for making you feel better, not just for doing a lot of stuff. Thats called outcome-based pricing.

The ACA covers annual physicals and preventive care, so the need for exorbitantly expensive emergency room visits is dramatically reduced. The law requires that doctors and hospitals publish outcome statistics so consumers have quality-of-care information for comparison shopping.

Taking a carrot-and-stick approach to homo economicus, the law gives subsidies to working families who cant afford expensive individual premiums and levies penalties on free riders.

All these are pretty solid, conservative, market-based, Republican ideas. In fact, the plan which became the ACA was conceived by economists at the conservative Heritage Foundation. It was a free-market response to the Democrats proposals for a universal single-payer system, or Medicare for all.

Obama may have co-opted the plan, but its chock-full of traditional conservative dogma. The only reason I can think of that Republicans didnt embrace their own plan was because Obama proposed it.

But now, having campaigned for six years on repeal and replace, Republicans find themselves hoisted by their own petard. To disguise their lack of a workable plan, they willfully ignore the laws of economics and pontificate on the virtues of free market capitalism as the cure for all ills.

Paeans to American capitalism might sound great in political speeches, but 20 million-plus people will lose their health insurance in order to give the 1% another big tax cut. Real people will die. Homo economicus understands this all too well and thats why Republican lawmakers will continue getting an earful from the folks back home, including Republican base voters.

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Judge upholds law stifling Libertarian ballot presence – Verde Independent

Posted: at 10:39 pm

PHOENIX -- A federal judge has rebuffed a bid by the Libertarian Party to kill an Arizona law even its sponsors concede was designed to make it harder for minor party candidates to get on the general election ballot.

Judge David Campbell acknowledged Monday the 2015 law sharply increases the number of signatures that Libertarian candidates need to qualify for ballot status. In some cases, the difference is more than 20 times the old requirement.

The result was that only one Libertarian candidate qualified for the ballot in 2016, and none made it to the general election. By contrast, there were 25 in 2004, 19 in 2008 and 18 in 2012.

But Campbell said the new hurdle is not unconstitutionally burdensome. And the judge accepted the arguments that the higher signature requirements ensure that candidates who reach the November ballot have some threshold of support.

But Libertarian Party Chairman Michael Kielsky said the judge ignored not just the higher burden but the games that the Republican-controlled legislature played in making 2015 the change for their own political purposes.

The Republicans set out to get the Libertarians off the ballot and the Republicans succeeded, Kielsky said. And now, Judge Campbell has said, Thats OK.

Kielsky is not just spouting party rhetoric.

In pushing for the change, GOP lawmakers made no secret they do not want Libertarian Party candidates in the race, contending that a vote for a Libertarian is a vote that would otherwise go to a Republican. As proof, some cited the 2012 congressional race.

Republican Jonathan Paton lost the CD 1 race to Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick by 9,180 votes. But Libertarian Kim Allen picked up 15,227 votes -- votes that Rep. J.D. Mesnard, R-Chandler, argued during floor debate likely would have gone to Paton.

And in CD 9, Democrats Kyrsten Sinema defeated Republican Vernon Parker by 10,251 votes, with Libertarian Powell Gammill tallying 16,620.

And if the point was lost, Mesnard made the issue more personal for colleagues, warning them that they, too, could find themselves aced out of a seat if they dont change the signature requirements.

I cant believe we wouldnt see the benefit of this, he said during a floor speech.

The way the legislature accomplished this was to change the rules.

Prior to 2015, would-be candidates qualified for the ballot by getting the signatures of one-half of one percent of all party members within a given area. So for a Republican seeking statewide office, that translated out to 5,660 signatures.

The new formula changed that to one-quarter of a percent -- but for all people who could sign a candidates petition. That adds political independents, who outnumber Democrats and are running neck-in-neck with Republicans, to the equation.

Under the new formula, a Republican statewide candidate in 2016 needed 5,790 signatures.

But the effect on minor parties is more profound,

Using that pre-2016 formula, a Libertarian could run for statewide office with petitions bearing just 134 names, one-half percent of all those registered with the party. But the new formula, which takes into account all the independents, required a Libertarian trying to get on a statewide ballot to get 3,023 signatures.

To put that in perspective that is closed to 12 percent of all registered Libertarians. By contrast, the statewide burden for a GOP candidate, based on the number of registered Republicans, remains close to that one-half of one percent of all adherents.

Its B.S., Kielsky said. Its completely perverse.

But Campbell said there is nothing unconstitutional about the higher requirement to limit the field to bona fide candidates who had some chance of actually winning.

If a candidate was not required to show any threshold of support through votes or petition signatures, she could win her primary and reach the general ballot with no significant modicum of support at all, Campbell continued. And in the case of Libertarians, who often run unopposed in their partys primary, a candidate could win a spot on the general election ballot with only one vote in such a primary.

Anyway, the judge said, Libertarian candidates can now seek out support to get on the ballot from independents, a pool totaling more than one million voters in Arizona.

Kielsky said that misses the point.

That means we have to appeal to things that the independents care about -- but not necessarily the Libertarians care about -- to be a Libertarian candidate, he said. The distinction of being a Libertarian is diluted, if not lost.

And Kielsky called the requirement for a modicum of support a red herring. He said if Libertarians were not picking up significant votes, the GOP-controlled legislature would not have changed the law to keep them off the ballot.

On Twitter: @azcapmedia

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Judge upholds law stifling Libertarian ballot presence - Verde Independent

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