Militarization of police

Police all over the world tend to have issues with authority and respect.  It's a result of self-selection (those with such issues tend to want to be police) and experience dealing with low-lifes.  That they need civilian control and civilian review boards is obvious, but how to be sure those boards don't have their own agenda is hard, and there is always pressure from groups like police unions to extract such a board's teeth.  (To me the vary idea of a police union is outrageous and an abomination).

I think certain selected police squads should be given military equipment and training in using it -- at least in large cities -- since there are situations where they need it and one does not want to have to call in the army.  However their deployment should be from outside the force itself in civilian hands.

It looks like Putin is going to move Russia toward being economically isolated, "self reliant".

Of all the countries in the world Russia would probably be the best able to pull this off, but it would be bad for Russia and its people would be stuck.

I see where Putin is coming from though -- deny it or not (and all countries subject to embargo deny that there is any effect), the embargo must be biting, and he wants to be free of it.

Still, when a country adopts such a policy, the long-term effect is to gradually, and sometimes not so gradually, weaken the country's economy relative to the rest of the world.  The reason isn't hard to see -- if you can buy something cheaper elsewhere in the world, a country is better off doing so and using the money saved in other ways.

Of course almost everyone puts up trade barriers, and as such they harm themselves, but it is usually in response to special interest agitation.  Sometimes the excuse is to allow domestic industries time to get on their feet, sometimes the excuse is to protect local jobs, sometimes the excuse is to protect the local economy from better technology elsewhere.  Very often the excuse is fairness -- the other country is restricting the country's ability to sell things there.

All these excuses are really special (selfish) interest and in the end do harm.  Of course successes can be pointed to -- a given enterprise was rescued (from a destruction generally caused by bad management and unions that think they can forever get their members better wages than the value they add otherwise permits).  My thought there is that this weak firm will go on being a drain on the country's resources.

Nations are better off letting industries that can't compete internationally go, and concentrating on their unique special advantages.

I see where North Korea has the "most advantageous human rights system."  Advantageous to whom?

The Golden Rule needs qualification before it really works.  If I were on a criminal jury the Golden Rule says I should vote in all cases to acquit because if I were in the defendant's shoes I would want me to vote that way.

How does a company like Gilead get away with charging Americans all told over $100,000 for its hepatitis C treatment and through an agreement with a generic drug company (I presume a limited license agreement) make it possible for Vietnamese to get the same thing for around $6,000?

That the States permits this kind of obvious gouging indicates there is something seriously wrong with its patent and copyright monopoly approach.  A tenth the profit they are taking would still be enough to motivate the risk taking and study expenses.

Christian investment in Bible belief

It occurs to me that one reason some Christians hold on so irrationally to their belief is because they have invested a lot of time in Bible study and they are proud of what they know and they don't want to admit it is useless and they wasted a lot of time.

It's like a woman in an office I once worked in who fiercely resisted giving up her comptometer (an archaic machine with a huge learning curve that used up a third of her desk and was noisy and slow) in favor of one of the early Texas Instruments portable calculators.  She had spent a lot of time learning to use it and was proud of her skill and had thought it would give her job security.

More about America's high cost low quality health care

Insurance companies benefit from higher and higher prices for health care since that enables them to raise rates and profits generally follow as a portion of income.  This however is offset by the fact that they have to compete, so that if another insurance company does its underwriting job or its claim handling job at less cost they have a competitive advantage.  Hence the insurance companies tend to like Obamacare since it almost eliminates meaningful competition.  Rare there is a businessman who does not do everything he can to eliminate competition, which is why governments have to constantly force them to not do it.

I don't think, however, that we can blame anyone's greed for the American situation.  People are greedy everywhere.  No it's something about the system or about the institutions unique to America that is behind the problems, I think mainly the tort legal system, the guns, the fact that employers have traditionally provided insurance, creating a real problem for small businesses and the self employed, and of course the outrageous tax system (other countries pay more as a percent of GNP but without nearly the damage to the economy).  The partisanship is another factor, as well as a corrupt system of holding elections (political contributions and negative campaigns and television ads that are pure propaganda) as well as the gerrymandering and the ridiculous arrangement where every state has the same number of Senators.

I am not being critical or scornful, I am trying to be helpful.  When I'm in the States all I hear is that it is the best of the best, with the best systems and best government.  That this is patently not true is something Americans have to admit -- plus get rid of two thirds of the lawyers.

I fear our minds are isolated ships in the fog going past each other with only horns to let us know others are there.  We communicate but only superficially using words and gestures and expressions.  We are alone and cannot share our experience of life, and when we think we do it is an illusion.

We don't know what is real and what isn't.  In fact our whole experience of the world is an illusion created by our brain to enable us to understand an outside world that would bewilder us.  Colors and odors and sounds are created by the brain, to inform us about light waives hitting our eyes and chemicals in the air and sound waves hitting our ears.

People should not completely trust their senses -- no matter how sane we think we are -- they censor what we get, they alter it and often just outright lie to us.

American medical costs

I found this interesting, and while it doesn't address Obamacare directly it has to have been written with thoughts about it in the background.

"The Commonwealth Fund recently published a report on how the U.S. health care system compares with the industrialized nations of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. Despite having the most expensive health care system, the United States ranked last in measures of quality, efficiency, access to care, equity and healthy lives. The U.S. ranks last on all three indicators of healthy lives — mortality amenable to medical care, infant mortality, and healthy life expectancy at age 60. The data from 2011 also shows that the U.S. spent $8,508 per person on health care, compared with $3,406 in the United Kingdom, which ranked first overall."

http://www.news-lead...nsive/15542343/

Why?  Why is the same true of schools, the military, the postal services, and so on and on and on.  Americans need to get a grip and recognize there is something at root seriously wrong here, and not go off dealing with the symptom (large numbers of people who can't afford insurance) and deal with the real problem.

I think both the political system and the legal system need drastic reworking, or things will continue to get worse.

Vietnam market economy

You don't understand (at least really understand in your gut) what is wrong with socialism until you've been there.  The regime can be benign, as Vietnam's was after the first couple years, or like Castro's Cuba is, and things still slowly deteriorate.  The reason is pretty obvious -- when you fine people for doing business outside the official businesses, there is no entrepreneurship.   Everyone just concentrates on working the system rather than actually taking risks and working hard.  The economy loses the benefit of the incentives to get rich and to see to it one's offspring are better off than you are.

Of course capitalism suffers from greed and exploitation and periodic panics (not that socialist societies don't have that too in different ways) and so the horses have to have reigns and blinders and so on.

When "new thinking" came to Vietnam about twenty years ago (following what had happened in China), there was a sudden boost in agricultural production and everyone (typical Asian mind set) went into business for themselves.  All that the government did then was stop prohibiting small family and neighborhood enterprises -- the big things stayed government owned.  Since then even this has relaxed, especially to draw foreign investment, and a few large enterprises have been spun off to private hand and there is now a Saigon stock exchange.  (Foreigners have no business being in it except maybe through a fund, and even then I would say be very wary).

The present government does seem to be on a course of emulating places like Sweden rather than Cuba (an obvious failure -- in his honest moments when he sheds his massive ego, even Fidel admits this).  The problem of course is what to do with the Party and its favored position -- as of course the ranks of the Party don't want to give this up, and having a selected group of vetted people run things avoids partisanship and elective corruption and stupid voters and even stupider politicians.

I worked with AI back in the '80s, and back then several start-ups were peddling "Inference engines" for $500 or so a copy -- software that you could feed "rules" and it would give you answers.  They didn't really work -- demonstrations looked great so long as the domain was very limited and artificial -- and they soon disappeared.

We still have materialist-type neurologists insisting computers are capable of great feats of logic, and that is true, and they are wonderful for mass data storage and sorting and fact calculation and modeling, but they don't "experience" the world the way they do and everything is of a reflexive nature, without real sentience.  The problem is we just don't know how the human brain (and many animal brains) produces sentience, and until we do we will not be able to do it in machines.

Of course the efforts should still be carried out.  Maybe they will succeed and thereby we will better understand our brains, but I'm not optimistic and think most of it is hype to get funding or tenure.

I like the idea of "scripture" -- writings we can depend on to give us hope and counsel and so on, but the Old Testament just doesn't qualify.  (A couple of books in it, like Ecclesiastes, might).  Most of the OT is just the writings of nationalistic Jews trying to set themselves above the rest of mankind.  All cultures like to try to do this some way.

What we need is some sort of world council to set a better canon -- one less narrow and with better moral standards.

Sigh.  Of course this will only lead to ten times as much assistance to the Peshmerga forces, and to all their other enemies, if not a public outcry for direct British involvement.  How stupid they are.

Phycalist materialism

I think the widely imagined scientific materialism is not so.  Most scientists avoid the issues involved, and are rather unsettled about it.  Materialism of course (there is nothing but matter and the void) went out the window at the beginning of the twentieth century when physics taught us that matter is nothing but a kind of compressed energy.  It tended then to be replaced by "physicalism," but that is much harder to define -- there is nothing but energy and the void just doesn't make it, since we also now know that there is no void, at least in our cosmos.

We use to have a sense of what "matter" is.  This has been destroyed and there is no good way to define "energy."  It has properties and can usually be measured, but it can also be "potential."  It is more a case of balancing the books than have a real "thing."

A problem for the physicalist is what to do about consciousness and sentience and all that.  Of course it is brain activity, and brains are physical, but that is about all we can say, and we suspect there are things going on in our heads of which the neurologist will never know.  Things we feel and experience seem inescapably outside science.

Still, that is not a license to go off into the wilderness believing that we have mental feeds from our toaster.  All we have the right to say without evidence is that we don't know.

Vietnam now, it seems, is officially a market economy with socialist orientation.

I wonder what "socialist orient market economy" means.

I suspect it means the party plans to privatize a lot more businesses, but out of respect for the past, it will still use the word "socialist" somewhere -- just oriented, you understand, in a market economy.  For those not attuned to these subtleties, "market" means "capitalist," but that word is rarely used in polite Vietnamese society.

Bombing Japan

The Japanese bombings are difficult to be rational about, or even to think about.  I know my parents and grand parents told me that at the time they were delighted, considering the difficulties and hardships brought about by the war, but they later had misgivings and ended up thinking some other way to end the war would have been better and that probably Japan would have surrendered anyway once Russia entered the war, but we will never know.