Milton Friedman - Health Care In A Free Market

Posted: 7/31/2015

Just watched this video on YouTube Milton Friedman - Health Care in a Free Market apparently taped at an event at the famous Mayo Clinic.

This video should be required for all high school children to watch!

The only thing I would disagree with Milton Friedman is on his well known concept of Negative Income Tax.

How I miss Milton Friedman! Where is the Milton Friedman of our time?

Medicare At 50 Should Have Been Repealed 50 Years Ago

Posted: 7/30/2015

This piece of legislation should have never passed the U.S. Congress! It is pure socialism of the worst kind conceivable in a federalist democracy based on the pursuit of individual liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

Medicare is totally unconstitutional and a hallmark of what is wrong with an ever expanding and centralizing government in Washington DC.

I would bet that healthcare would be a whole lot cheaper if the monstrosity of medicare was not around and we did not have this massive government intervention into this sector of our economy.

I hope to expand on the topic of Medicare later.

Modern Lynch Mob In Action

Posted: 7/29/2015  Updated: 7/31/2015

Modern Witch Hunt Or Lynch Mob

The outcry and protest and even death wishes surrounding the Minnesota dentist Mr. Walter Palmer who allegedly killed the prominent lion Cecil of Zimbabwe is akin to a modern lynch mob. Without killing him his existence and livelihood is being destroyed by the lynch mob.

Was The Dentist Framed?

If it is true what Mr. Palmer said in his public statement published here by the Star Tribune, then it is possible that he was framed.

Why do the media keep repeating the sum of $50,000, the dentist allegedly paid for this hunting trip? Was this amount every verified? It appears to be awfully high.

Why would this dentist intentionally kill a famous, old lion? Would he not have anticipated the possible backlash or notoriety of his act. Would he have risked his business and family for this?

Reportedly, the first to allege that the dentist was the hunter was a NGO or conservation group called Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force. When you look at their About webpage it looks already fishy. It is all about one person.

Demand For Extradition

It is quite comical that so many people now demand the extradition of this dentist to Zimbabwe.

Reportedly, there is even an agreement between the U.S. and Zimbabwe that would make it possible to extradite the hunter. I kind of doubt that this agreement either exists or is so simple. Was this agreement closed before Zimbabwe’s independence?

Reportedly, Zimbabwe called on Interpol to arrest the dentist.

Zimbabwe has been a failed state almost since independence 30 years ago. It was ruled for most of the time since then by a nasty dictator (Mugabe).

Persecuted By So Called Animal Lovers Or Animal Activists

The extreme intolerance, self-righteousness, and fury displayed by these people opposed to the killing of this lion or trophy/big game hunting in general is breathtaking. It is the 21st century and so many people still act like we living in the medieval ages. It is truly shocking!

The naive romanticism or noble savage feelings towards this lion or all lions for that matter are shocking.

Cecil, the lion, was a predator or killer himself. Someone who has ever watched how big wild cats hunt and kill other animals should have no warm or fuzzy feelings. Simply said it is is brutal. This hunter did not kill a lamb or sheep!

It was almost comical to hear or read again and again that the next male lion taking over Cecil’s harem would first kill the offspring. How many offspring did Cecil kill in his 13 year long life?

Doctors Object to High Cancer-Drug Prices

Posted: 7/26/2015

Trigger

Just read this article in the Wall Street Journal “Doctors Object to High Cancer-Drug Prices More than 100 oncologists call for new regulations to control soaring patient costs in U.S.” We read “More than 100 oncologists from top cancer hospitals [e.g. Mayo Clinic, MD Anderson and so on] around the U.S. have issued a harsh rebuke over soaring cancer-drug prices and called for new regulations to control them.”

Here Are My Recommendations

1. Repeal mandatory prescriptions for most drugs and medications and let consumers decide how they want to treat their illness
2. Allow for most drugs to be sold over the counter
3. Allow for nurses and other medically trained individuals to take over to larger extent what doctors do
4. You catch my drift

Measures like this would save We The People lots of money! And doctors, please don’t think that consumers are too stupid to decide.

Did You Know That Nicotine Is Addictive?

Posted: 7/26/2015

Trigger

The American Chemical Society thought it was important to tell people in a recent news release E-cigarettes may be as addictive as traditional ones "Free-base and Protonated Nicotine in Electronic Cigarette Liquids and Aerosols" Chemical Research in Toxicology. It reads e.g. “But because e-cig liquid also contains nicotine and emits carcinogens, ... One team now reports in the ACS journal Chemical Research in Toxicology that much of the nicotine in e-cigarettes is the addictive form of the compound. … Out of three forms, scientists believe “free-base” nicotine is the only one that gets absorbed by the body, making it the most addictive kind. … The researchers tested commercial samples of liquids made for the devices and found that, by and large, the nicotine was in the most addictive form. They also determined that the concentration of nicotine varied and often didn’t match the concentrations the labels claimed.”.

Here is the link to the above mentioned scientific paper “Free-Base and Protonated Nicotine in Electronic Cigarette Liquids and Aerosols” (subscription required)

Notes

1. The ACS news article appears to be a hit piece making insinuations not worthy of a scientific society
2. The article does not explain what the three forms of Nicotine are, but all of them appear addictive
3. The article uses the term “free base” nicotine, which does not appears to be a proper scientific term and further it appears to be mentioned in conjunction with tobacco smoke
4. The other, rather unsubstantiated claim by ACS is that e-cigs “emit carcinogens” (insinuating like traditional tobacco smoke)
5. Even if it is in the most addictive form, perhaps this is how customers like it and want it. :-)
6. Finally, ACS claims that the concentration of Nicotine does not match the one listed in label. Well, this can be easily fixed and may have happened accidentally or is this another insinuation? How did the manufacturers respond to these claims by ACS?

Common-Nonsense Gun Safety Laws

Posted: 7/26/2015

This week we were witness again of an apparently mentally man (John R. Houser) committing a mass shooting this time again in a movie theater in Lafayette, LA (see e.g. this Reuters article).

What has the fool in the White House to say about this tragic event. He insisted again on passing “common-sense gun safety laws”. If U.S. President Barack Obama had any common sense he would immediately spend an extra $1-10 billion dollar on research and treatment of mental illnesses.

Propaganda Cloaked As Science

Posted: 7/23/2015

Trigger

Just read once more one of those many popular science articles that have such alarming sounding headlines, i.e. Pesticides found in most pollen collected from foraging bees in Massachusetts.

Alarmism Exposed

This article does not mention a word about the exact level or quantity of toxins actually found. That is such an old, worn trick!

Hot Recent Science & Technology Articles (13)

Posted: 7/20/2015

1. Super-Magnetic Stars Forged in High-Energy Blasts Scientists find that the biggest, brightest bursts of light herald the creation of the universe’s most magnetic objects (“Magnetars ... A recent study suggests that these highly magnetized stars make their cosmic debut amid the brightest flares of radiation in the universe, called ultra long-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs).”)
2. 'Speed cells' in brain track how fast animals run (Amazing stuff! After place cells, grid cells, now they discovered speed cells in our brain. “To search for such cells, the Mosers and their team delved into the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC), a slim arc of deep brain tissue where they had discovered the grid cells in 2005. They implanted the rats with electrodes that could record from thousands of MEC neurons, then put the rodents on a moveable treadmill ...  In all three tests, 13% to 15% of the recorded cells showed firing patterns that were significantly correlated with the animals' speed, the scientists report online today in Nature.”)
3. Why screams are so scary (“Few people have studied human or animal screams of terror in the past. … Poeppel and his colleagues decided to explore screams in more detail, turning to a third level of analysis that has only recently been applied to sounds. Called a modulation power spectrum, it charts how quickly the volume of a sound changes over tiny amounts of time. The scientists applied the analysis to both normal speech and screams of fear or terror collected from movies, YouTube videos, and volunteers in the lab. Whereas typical speech changes less than 5 hertz per second—meaning it stays around the same volume—the loudness of screams quickly fluctuates by anywhere from 30 to 150 hertz per second, Poeppel’s group discovered. The fluctuations give the sound a quality dubbed “roughness” that isn’t found in any other human speech—whether male, female, or child. … Furthermore, when the team observed the brains of 16 participants with functional MRI as they listened to vocalizations, screams that were rougher more effectively activated the amygdala, where the brain’s fear circuits live. Most other sounds, by comparison, initially activate only the auditory cortex of the brain.”)
4. Ancient owl vomit may show 'dramatic' human impact on ecosystem (The cave containing layers of owl vomit collected over several millennia is phenomenal, but the conclusions drawn by scientists based on some energy measure appear dubious and preconceived. Is it not possible that the owls just moved on as an explanation instead of harping on human impact etc..)
5. Antineutrino Detectors Could Be Key to Monitoring Iran's Nuclear Program (“The technology, which has been in the works since the early 2000s, has improved tremendously in the past five years, and it is now almost ready for practical use, says Patrick Huber, a physics professor at the Center of Neutrino Physics at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg … By measuring the number of antineutrinos produced and their energy spectrum, researchers can calculate reactor power and the amount of uranium and plutonium isotopes in the core. So an antineutrino detector would reveal if plutonium was removed or more uranium was added, even if the monitoring was interrupted for a period and then restarted.”)
6. First Transistor Fabricated From Black-Arsenic Phosphorus (“An international team of researchers from Germany and the US have fabricated for the first time a field effect transistor made of black-arsenic phosphorus. ... have developed a new method for synthesizing black-arsenic phosphorous that doesn’t require the high pressure typically needed, lowering energy requirements for the process and thereby costs. ...  but recently it has been synthesized as a two-dimensional material—dubbed phosphorene in reference to its two-dimensional cousin, graphene. Black phosphorus is quite attractive for electronic applications like field-effect transistors because of its inherent band gap and it is one of the few 2-D materials to be a natively p-type semiconductor.”)
7. Buckyballs in Space Solve 100-Year-Old Riddle The spheres of carbon-60 have been found to be responsible for mysterious cosmic-light features; http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2015/07/buckyballs-milky-way
8. First snapshot of elusive intermediate supplies surprise (“But a team at IBM’s research laboratories in Ruschlikon, near Zurich in Switzerland, has been able to take a single-molecule snapshot of such an intermediate in a common class of organic reactions, simply by binding the flat molecules to a solid surface and using a specially prepared atomic force microscope (AFM) to reveal the stick-like molecular framework.”)
9. Boeing Patents Laser Nuclear Fusion Jet Engine (Can you believe it! “Boeing is not* actively developing a laser-triggered fusion powered jet engine. … the fact that we have tested nuclear powered jet aircraft before. Sort of. The Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Program ran from 1946 to 1951, and a Convair B-36 spent a total of 89 hours in the air with a fully operational nuclear reactor chugging along in the back. ”)
10. Surfing a wake of light: Researchers observe and control light wakes for the first time
11. Ultra-thin membranes for solute separation (“Now, a team led by Andrew Livingston at Imperial College London, UK, have developed novel membranes that they say are strong and effective at molecular separations. The polyamide nanofilms they made are less than 10nm thick – almost as thin as biological cell membranes – but are rigid and strong enough to act as effective filters.To fabricate them, the team used an interfacial polymerization process, creating gel-like polymer networks at the interface between layers of diamine and an acid chloride.”)
12. Ultra-bright x-rays film molecular reaction (“To watch it happen, the researchers used a classic ‘pump-probe’ approach. After initiating the ring-opening in a vapour of cyclohexadiene with a blast of UV laser light (the pump pulse), they fired a series of x-ray probe pulses into the reaction chamber, each lasting just 30 femtoseconds (10-15 s) and containing about a trillion x-ray photons. Changes in the shape of the molecule as the ring opens and unravels are reflected in the pattern of scattered x-rays.”)
13. http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2015/06/glowing-diamonds-make-great-thermometers
14. Live Streaming: Social Control from Afar Apps like Periscope will create a complex new relationship between broadcaster and audience. (The future of media? “These applications are revolutionary because they shift the role of the audience from passive observers of distant events to active participants in them. ”)
15. http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2015/jun/30/bringing-the-human-eye-into-focus
16. http://news.sciencemag.org/sifter/2015/07/tiny-plankton-has-humanlike-eye (“Scientists have discovered a tiny, humanlike eye in single-celled plankton called warnowiids, The Telegraph reports. With its collection of subcellular organelles that resemble the lens, cornea, iris, and retina, the eyelike structure is startlingly similar to multicellular eyes found in humans and other animals”)
17. http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2015/jun/26/could-lasers-guide-and-control-the-path-of-lightning (What an upgrade to Benjamin Franklin's lightning rod!)

Tennessee Shooter Reportedly Was Mentally Ill

Posted: 7/19/2015  Updated: 7/27/2015, 7/21/2015

Update 7/27/2015

Just read What You Don't Understand about Suicide Attacks Whether in Chattanooga or Afghanistan, the attacks are driven more by psychological problems than ideology—which hints at a solution. The author makes the case that contrary to conventional wisdom many suicide attackers are mentally ill are seeking death. To quote: “According to the conventional wisdom, suicide terrorists are not mentally ill or suicidal—they are psychologically stable individuals who sacrifice themselves for altruistic reasons. As a 2009 article in Psychiatry concluded, “Stressing the importance of social psychology, [our research] emphasizes the ‘normality’ and absence of individual psychopathology of the suicide bombers.” From this perspective, those who carry out “martyrdom operations” in service of radical Islamic ideologies are the product of their contexts. They become the psychological equivalent of the American Marines who were killed in Chattanooga: both sides are willing to risk their lives—and die, if necessary—for a cause they passionately believe in. … However, a growing number of scholars are now challenging these assumptions. Ariel Merari’s research team conducted psychological tests of preemptively arrested suicide bombers and found evidence of suicidal tendencies, depressive tendencies, and previous (non-terrorist) suicide attempts. David Lester found that many female suicide bombers seem driven, at least in part, by post-traumatic stress disorder, hopelessness, and despair. And in several recent articles, I summarize evidence of psychological similarities between suicide terrorists and people who commit nonviolent suicides, coerced suicides, and mass-murder-suicides. … And far from being psychologically healthy, he [Mr. Abdulazeez] reportedly struggled with bipolar disorder, depression, and substance abuse, and expressed suicidal thoughts in his writings.”

Update As Of 7/21/2015

Just read this New York Times article “In Chattanooga, a Young Man in a Downward Spiral”. Quotes from the article (emphasis added): “Mr. Abdulazeez had suffered for years from depression and possibly from bipolar disorder, the family representative said, adding that he had abused alcohol and possibly prescription painkillers and had gained and lost jobs. In his last months, he faced the prospect of both bankruptcy and jail time on a drunken-driving charge.

“I think he knew he was going downhill, and he intended to go downhill, but I don’t think he knew where he’d end up at the bottom,” the representative, who insisted on anonymity to protect the family, said of Mr. Abdulazeez’s final days alive. … Mr. Abdulazeez received a diagnosis of mental illness when he was in his early teens. He was treated with medication in high school and college, but “he wasn’t always good about taking them,” the family representative said. Law enforcement officials confirmed that they too had learned that he had serious psychological problems. … He turned to drugs and alcohol, and family members tried to get him into a rehab program. Despite their fears for his future, they never thought he would become violent, the representative said. … After college, he was “a guy who was sort of bouncing around,” the representative said, at times disappearing for a few days, on a binge with friends. “He was able to get jobs, but never keep them.””

Trigger

Just read “Tenn. gunman used drugs, struggled with clash of faith”. This Washington Post article does not delve deeper into the mental illness of this mass killer. The long article mentions only (emphasis added): “In a statement, his family said Abdulazeez’s mental illness had contributed to the crime. “For many years, our son suffered from depression. ... Abdulazeez had been in and out of treatment for his depression and frequently stopped taking his medication, despite his parents’ pleas for him to continue, said a person close to the family.”

This is unfortunately all we learn from the Washington Post about perhaps the most crucial aspect of why he became a murderer. The WP failed to follow up as usual.

We also learn that this young man was smoking pot, lived at home with his parents and had all these guns at home.

Notes

1. Again and again it is a severely mentally young man who commits these mass shootings. I have blogged here about it several times.
2. Perhaps, the greatest deniers of his mental illness were his parents
3. Mental health care in this country is a total disaster and needs to be urgently improved.
4. One hopes that this young man’s brain will be researched etc. as well as the brains of the other, still living recent mass shooters
5. Why e.g. is it so easily  possible for severely mentally ill people to stop taking their medication? Can this medication not be deposited for long term, gradual release etc.
6. It is totally disturbing that the media almost completely neglect to investigate the mental illness nexus of these killers. It’s a huge disgrace for any media like e.g. Washington Post or New York Times, CNN and so on.
7. To clamor for more gun control whenever these killings happen is such a waste of time and a red herring of enormous proportions! To ignore or turn a blind eye on mental illness is a grand delusion of many!

Please find more, related blog posts here, here, here

Time To End Male-Only Draft Registration

Posted: 7/18/2015

Trigger

Just read “Girl Sues Draft for Only Registering Males The suit challenges the constitutionality of the sex-based discrimination”. The opening sentence reads “A recent lawsuit filed by a teenage girl in New Jersey (in conjunction with her mother) challenges the constitutionality of male-only draft registration, arguing that it violates the Constitution because it discriminates on the basis of sexA recent lawsuit filed by a teenage girl in New Jersey (in conjunction with her mother) challenges the constitutionality of male-only draft registration, arguing that it violates the Constitution because it discriminates on the basis of sex”.

The Meaning of Equal Rights

Rights usually come with duties to. If women are to enjoy equal rights, they also need to share the burden to defend these rights when necessary.

For decades it has puzzled me that prominent feminists or women’s rights activists have been quite mum about military service for women like cherry pickers.

Yes, male-only draft registration in the U.S. is undoubtedly unconstitutional. The German constitution also used to contain (and I believe it still does) a clause excluding women from any war related military service.

Why The Nuclear Deal With Iran Is Bad

Posted: 7/15/2015 Updated: 7/16/2015

1. There were at least two morons were involved in negotiating this deal, i.e. Obama & Kerry. Former is even an obstinate moron. Today (7/16/15), I learnt more about another chief U.S. negotiator, i.e. Ms. Wendy Sherman, who stated that a 24 day notice period of inspection was very long. What a moron is she?
2. The German foreign minister Steinmeier is not the sharpest knife in the drawer either
3. When several morons negotiate a treaty what do you expect the outcome to be?
4. I compare Iran’s regime with Hitler’s regime. Would the U.S. President have negotiated with Hitler like that?
5. How many U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq due to the involvement of Iranian agents?
6. This is the appeasement of 1938 all over again!
7. Who trusts a regime that has over decades cheated and violated international agreements especially non proliferation?
8. Why was Iran not asked to sign a peace treaty with Israel first before anything?
9. Why was Iran not asked to cease all support for terrorism in the Middle East before anything?