Comments of the day

At Truthout, "Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson has compared people with pre-existing health conditions to cars that have been in accidents.":

Life is a pre-existing condition; it always precedes death. According to GOP reasoning, the pre-existing condition of life makes all living persons ineligible for medical insurance. It would seem we must die to become eligible.
/s

At Truthout, Corporate Agricultural Dumping: Growing the Wealth Gap:

Pressure to increase yields due to agricultural dumping also promotes greenhouse gas release and pollution through fossil fuel powered mechanization, transport & production as well as ever increasing use of agricultural chemicals.

At C&L, Trump's 'Pardons' Are A Threat To Democracy:

There is a big problem shared by Antonin Scalia's concept of Constitutional originalism and biblical literalism... language is symbolic. It is not possible for any language to be literally 'literal'. Written and spoken words are *always* subject to interpretation. 

The U.S. Constitution has a literal component in setting the framework of the U.S. government but it is also has an equally important aspiration component, just read the preamble. If DJT or any other politician is permitted to reduce the Constitution to only its literal elements (as would be the case if he pardons his family, cohort and himself), they would negate the founding values and precepts which have forged a collection of disparate individuals, ethnicities, languages and cultures into this country. We would turn in what Margaret Thatcher once said, "There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families."

At TRNN, Data, Algorithms & Artificial Intelligence: Where is AI Innovation Taking Society?:

"...intellectual property rights cover a lot of things like patents, trademark, copyright, industrial designs, so basically everything that we touch, at one point or the other, has been impacted by intellectual property." 

Intellectual property is the DNA of economies; just as change in DNA evolves new species, change of information/intellectual property evolves economies. Regulation of intellectual property (patents, trademark, copyright, industrial designs, etc.) determines who controls economies. Corporations and their executives derive their power from control of massive amounts of information (examples: Microsoft, big pharma). Issues of income, wealth and power inequality all derive directly and indirectly from the concentration of power through control of information. True reform requires much greater transparency.