Wayne Lapierre's gun deaths

Comment at C&L where father of murder victim fights Wayne Lapierre and the NRA:

According to everytownresearch.org, there are approximately 12,000 gun homicides per year in this country (when suicides are included, gun deaths exceed 32,000 per year). Wayne Lapierre has been head of the NRA since 1991. A gun death wall in the style of the Vietnam Memorial Wall (a little over 58,000 names) for the period of Lapierre's reign would run 5-15 times the size of the Vietnam War Memorial; it would take 40-115 hours to read all the names. The policies promoted and advocated by Mr. Lapierre doesn't put guns in the hands of 'good guys' who disarm 'bad guys'; they put guns in the hands of gun enthusiasts, criminals and terrorists who committed those and future deaths. Under the Patriot Act, Wayne Lapierre is guilty of providing aid and material support to terrorist; under many local jurisdictions, he is an accomplice to arming criminals... he should be prosecuted as such. 

I stand with Alison Parker's father in his efforts to demote Wayne Lapierre.

Economics of pollution

Comment at TRNN where economist Bill Black discusses the economic drivers of pollution:

Excellent piece. Economic considerations rule many if not all areas of public life; therefore it is important to understand and inform the public of the effects and outcomes of economic drivers. 

Bill Black answered the question of why pollution occurs... polluters profit from pollution... and how to prevent pollution... don't let polluters profit (by way of regulation). 

A similar prevention is a better definition of economies: self-organizing and self-sustaining systems of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services that promote the well-being of all participants... Anyone/any institution whose activity is not self-sustaining (in larger context of entire economy) is anti-economic and not allowed to persist.

TRNN: Pollution Kills 9 Million People a Year

Guns are anti-democratic

I written a lot about how the concentration of power is the underlying systemic imbalance in many of today's problems and how the over-sized influence of the powerful skews all policy in their economic favor. Based on my preferred definition of economy (economies are self-organizing and self-sustaining systems of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services that promote the well-being of all participants), I've argued that guns, the military industrial complex and war are all anti-economic...

On that note, guns, the military industrial complex and war are also anti-democratic because they impose the power of the wielders onto those of the oppressed. At the smallest level, a person holding a gun can intimidate everyone in their range from any number of actions including speech and movement. This is the opposite of society where everyone is free to express themselves.

Government anti-transparency

Reality Winner has been denied bail for 'allegedly passed[ing] a top-secret document to The Intercept that claimed that Russian military intelligence conducted a cyber attack on at least one U.S. voting software company just days before the 2016 election.'

This is part of an interview of Amy Goodman with Julian Assange. I have written positively about Julian Assange in the past. His actions during the 2016 presidential election brings up lots of questions about his motives. I don't know nor do I have sufficient information to form a reasonably informed opinion. But aside from his motives, releasing information for public perusal is an important mechanism of empowerment. Legitimate decisions can only be made by informed people. 

On that note, Reality Winner is a hero for informing the public of an event that was kept under wraps. She should not be imprisoned for enabling democracy.

Wisdom of Democracy

A functioning democracy relies on the Wisdom of Crowds to elect good representatives. The Wikipedia article describes four attributes of crowd intelligence: (1) Diversity of opinion, (2) Independence, (3) Decentralization and (4) Aggregation. In the past, these were all reasonable emblematic of the Democratic Party. But today's Democrat Party is very much under the control of the business establishment and closed to alternative views.

The election of 'POTUS' DJT was a failure of crowd intelligence. The intelligence of Trump voters have been under direct assault by the right wing media for decades. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Breitbart and InfoWars are only a small selection of media which deliberately deceive their audience with slights of reason, misdirection and outright lies. The election of 'POTUS' DJT was their highest achievement.