http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19056-death-revives-warnings-about-rogue-stem-cell-clinics.html?page=1

“It’s a dreadful reminder reinforcing the absolute necessity for robust safety data in animal models before entering regulated clinical trials,” says Chris Mason, director of regenerative medicine at University College London.

Shut, The Fuck, Up. If you assholes would actually accomplish something, by say allowing anyone who wants into dangerous clinical trials so long as there is money and they fit the study parameters, maybe we’d learn something from a virtually inexhaustible supply of volunteers that you currently tell to go home and die quietly. God forbid we should actually make a rank and file death MEAN something.

And then maybe if you’d put your fucking results in the public domain instead of sitting on them for another decade while the FDA drags its ass with approvals or bury them in arcane language in the middle of a journal server that I have pay 400$ a month to see, just so some fucking corporation can patent the shit out of every step making sure they can either charge 20k$ per kilogram when it finally is released or bury the shit altogether so that treatments can continue to be sold.

Until this shit no longer happens, expect people to seek out alternative medicine. After all, if mainstream medicine says you’re going to die anyway, and since there IS no place for people willing to risk their lives in a study, expect more deaths and countless more secret cures.

I say bring on the black market medical. You idiots actually think the likes of Monsanto or Halliburton would release a cure for something if they were profiting from treatment? You think for a SECOND the pharmaceutical companies don’t have off the books research facilities?

They outsource the fucking phones, what kind of idiot do you have to be to think they aren’t going to outsource clinical trials to countries where life is cheap? And what would they do if they found a cure under those conditions? Rush to tell the world what they found and how they found it? Would they innovate themselves out of a job out of the goodness of their hearts? Really?

I read about high tech solutions to problems every day that I know won’t hit the street for 50 years and I know for a fact it has fuck all to do with ability. Its about lawsuits and money and paranoia and most importantly flat out not giving a shit about sick people or progress generally.

If I’m allowed to jump out of a plane for fun, if I’m allowed to drink ethanol for fun, if I’m allowed to sign up to be shot at, if I’m allowed to climb into a car every day, if I’m allowed to pray instead of getting dialysis, then I should damn well be allowed to gamble with my life and my money when the mainstream tells me I’m fucked.

Seriously, what kind of moron tells someone NOT to gamble when a gamble is sometimes all you have left? A greedy heartless moron, that’s what kind. Lets see how silly you think all this shit is when your doctor tells you that you aren’t going to see christmas.

I think this woman is a hero. The data from her death will help people. And if you think this is the first time data from a crime has gone on to save lives, you’re not a big student of history and I suggest you look into it.

For the record: We need to legalize the treatment of patients by unlicensed professionals so long as that status is made clear prior to treatment.

There are countless medical procedures that are described as “routine.” I should be allowed to master one, and sell it. If my customers don’t feel they need a “real” doctor they can come to me. See what I mean? Then all of the sudden it doesn’t cost 400$ to get a cold in this country.

Greed kills people every second. Support Rogue Science. The truth answers to no committee.

He says some pretty dumbass things sometimes. (eg. “I tend to think of the assholes that live with 10 million a year income are worse than pedophiles.”)

So you disagree? Then you are either ignorant or callously obsessed with sex.

Either way I don’t see how being wrong, even if I am, reflects poorly on me personally. Shall I leave you a snide review as well just because I score better on intelligence tests or know more names and dates with regard to philosophy? Or perhaps just because I’m older.

If you would like to debate the point rationally I’ll make a blog post just for you and you may comment your displeasure or perhaps even come over to my side if I can be persuasive enough.

As a small sample simply consider which is more of a burden to society those who merely have a taboo sexual fetish or those who through the product of their society condition relegate thousands to poverty and death.

Perhaps you mistakenly equate pedophilia with child rape. There are hundreds of thousands of pedophiles in voluntary treatment who have never contributed in any way to child exploitation.

I wasn’t really looking for a debate, nor do I care if you write a nasty review about me. I didn’t really think there was a debate when it came to the ethics of pedophilia. Feel free to make that blog post if you want, but I’ve never seen anyone take the position you’re taking.

True, its mainly because the comparison has a very specific purpose.

My intention is to get society’s priorities straight. This may sound monstrously brutal but someone has to think this way, one kid being fondled is not worth 2 being shot, and that’s what poverty does, it gets people killed.

And the reason poverty exists is because there isn’t enough money floating around. The money exists, it is just overly concentrated in very few hands.

I mean really, would a million a year be enough for you? Some people make that a month. That money had to come from somewhere. A dollar can be viewed as a unit of work. So how many people worked their entire lives and have nothing to show for it per each millionaire? How many square miles of ghetto did each millionaire create?

We as a society are obsessed with sex crime, and while it is clearly a problem that needs work, there are bigger fish to fry.

American culture is saturated with the Horatio Alger mythology of pluck and determination, of which I have already written extensively. But there is a secondary stage of this myth that while utterly obvious to me I have realized may not be to others.

That is, the myth of philanthropy. The idea that one can be rich and good at the same time. While in our near infinitely variable universe I must grant that I can envision situation where this is possible it effectively becomes a myth when you think about just what it takes.

My thinking is thus: In order to have wealth, that is the product of surplus unpaid labor, or profit, someone or something must have loss. I say unpaid because if you paid the for full value there’s be not profit for the next step in the chain, or the system in order to function must trick people int selling things, ultimately their life, for less than its worth. That’s a scam and that’s theft. Normally the materials economy means that ultimately the planet is the loser in the deeply practical sense of permanent conversion of a potentially finite material supply, such as clean water, fuel, or trees.

The creation of wealth is simply the conversion of natural resources into human processed usable forms. This basic truth applies currently because in effect wealth is rendered a zero sum game. It could easily be argued that this loss is irrelevant because we’re talking about trees and rocks and other non-sentient entities. And I agree. These things are merely atomic patterns, masses of clock work operating at the behest of the physical constants(god?), but what does matter are the people that link the resting place of the wealth to it’s source, the body of the river so to speak, from rock to ring, the miners, the jewelers, the shipping clerk, the export officials, etc etc.

Each time a unit of material value changes hands someone takes a cut of the default planetary value. But the size of the cut each person takes is shaped by the power of the person who gets the larger share. Economic systems based on free enterprise tend to shrink the average size of this cut so to maximize with maximal effect the final arrival value of the unit while minimizing the pay out.

This is a well understood process, but at their core the arguments in favor of this behavior are about efficiency and depend on ethical assumptions about proper behavior with regard to property. Regarding efficiency, since paying more than you have to for something is wasteful from the perspective of the payer. But waste is a subjective idea, especially if you include non living process as agents with interest in events.

Get to the point right? Well the point is simple, in order for one person to be rich many others must be poor. The existence of the rich implies with certainty an inequitable distribution of product of earth, that unit of material wealth dug out of the ground and the like.

The ethically significant bit is that richness in turn creates conditions where this inequity is unavoidable, even natural or encouraged. As before this is based on the ideology of ownership. This ideology is what we agree constitutes property and a property right along with related abstractions.

The idea of a fair wage for example being defined by buying power, that is, relative economic worth or the “going rate.” This idea is vile to me because it includes a kind of hydraulic despotism. It rewards the lowest bidder who is almost always under valuing their own worth, but the reliability of this behavior in turn changes the nature of value, like rich toy salesmen blowing up the price of vintage toys on eBay.

Some would say that this seems unfair to blame the person who is under bidding since obviously they must be coerced in some way. And they are right, but often times it’s not as dire or cut and dry as the exploitation of wage slaves outside the United States ever is. The level of stress and work required of many poor people in the United States is equal to or greater than the stress of standing up, or sitting down for what some would call the cause. So I blame them to a degree. Find a way to opt out.

A great irony of this behavior is that 9 of ten times a child is blamed, as is planned. The working man slave has to provide for “his family.” But they aren’t. They are providing for themselves. The are sliding under the radar, avoiding a fight with their boss or land lord, living up to the image of a good man, this is all ego. If they actually gave a shit about their child on par with their doe eyes recycled rhetoric they lifted off action movies they’d fight to secure a better world for them.

The assholes that say this type of shit are the same people that hit their kids and send them to school and berate them for not living up to their “responsibilities” and try to sell them on the collection of truisms that aren’t true at all, such as hard work equals wealth, its ok to spend your entire life doing things you don’t want to do “that’s just the way it is” or “that’s life” or in the context of this essay, some rich people aren’t so bad.

A philanthropist is so because of the apparent good they do for people, the help they provide. Help that by and large they would not need if they were as rich as the philanthropist. It is the idea that using an excess of problem solving power to solve the problems of others is ethically valid, but this takes a narrow vision because the very existence of the philanthropist is what causes the distribution issues that produce these problems in the first place.

I say it all like that to illustrate that the follow sentence isn’t just angsty reactionary ignorant ranting.

Rich people are considered good when they help a small percentage of the poor people they created in becoming rich.

Thus a philanthropist by and large is a person who creates a problem, charges you to solve a quarter of it, solves another quarter for free and for good press, and leaves half of it for different poor people to deal with.

Not really a good thing on balance is it?

The only counter example is when wealth goes towards the production of disruptive technologies. Which it only ever does if the known effect is not caustic to the wealth of the agent. Or of course accidentally.

A look at history has convinced me that the biggest thing poor people have going for them in the face of industrial society is accidental discovery.

No rich person is going to spend his money on making sure that no one gets to be rich.

Think of that next time you see some nice rich guy in a movie or on TV.

A super popular example is Bruce Wayne, the classic example of a philanthropist. But really, if he wanted to end crime and help the helpless he’d use that brain and those resources of his to eliminate the root causes. Or he’d attack the government. Clearly he’s not on their side else why not share all that technology? Well, there are answers and counter answers that are outside the scope of this essay.

It’s all a lie. Rich people are the enemy because they are rich. They are ever rising damns forcing the rest of us to pay top dollar for water or die of thirst and then blame us for being lazy and laud themselves on their TV when they let a little spill over or they take a little less from us today than they did yesterday.

Bottom line: Philanthropy is a Myth.

Communication fosters innovation, therefor phone companies impair innovation by overcharging.

Satellite communications and distributed approaches could make communication nearly as cheap as GPS. Instead of exorbitant monthly fees. Less that 1% of which actually go towards infrastructure maintenance.

Invention builds on the past. Therefor intellectual property law retards progress.

Patent law was developed to ensure reasonable returns on investment in innovation, for the overall goal of fostering innovation. The assumption being that innovation comes via the search for profit, which is true.

But that is not the only motivation, and indeed it may not even be the primary one. Further if you confine profit to mean fiscal gains only then its importance as a motivator shrinks further still.

It has now evolved into a system where by the innovation of potential competitors is stifled, which obviously is good for those in a favorable position at the present.

The problem is innovation cant be predicted, which means it a stock holder’s bogeyman and they react with all the fervor of a paranoid schizophrenic, and in their quest to “protect their investment” that engage in wholesale slaughter of the means by which future innovation is brought about.

This stops being funny when the stakes are human suffering death and perhaps event the survival of the species.

It never fails to amaze me how people miss the basic point of economics when it comes to the medical reform debate. It’s just frustrating and hilarious how people will discuss controlling the “spiraling costs” of health care, but act as if those costs are dictated by the laws of physics and not the laws of greed.

Does it not occur to these people that cost is more a function of the business seeking profit? Business will always charge as much as it can, and “can” basically means anything it is allowed to get away with, which includes conditions created by monopoly, regulation, and collusion.

Of course it doesn’t occur to them. People don’t learn about how businesses actually operate, unless they are inside them, profiting from them.

Big business has always and will always depend on secrecy. When a representative of big business starts to talk like they have no need for secrets and their interests are one and the same with their customers that’s when you know something is up.

Like this business of nonprofit cooperatives. Of course insurance is going to preferred nonprofit cooperatives to an actual public option, they’d have to be brain-dead not to, and not because the public option would destroy their industry it would simply reduce the maddeningly high levels of profit that they get now. The insurance industry as it stands is in effect a massive extortion driven mafia enterprise where how much something costs is basically an answer to questions like, “well how much you got? How much is not dying worth to you?”

Five or ten giant companies agreeing on a policy and calling it industry-standard is exactly the same as price-fixing as collusion and in the end as monopoly. also satellite businesses will always also charge what they can get anything know for example insurance will cover everything because insurance takes half a person’s money then they’re going to charge ten bucks for a suture seven bucks for an aspirin and this works to the advantage of insurance companies too, because then they can turn around and say “well I’m just charging so high prices because aspirin and sutures are so much” When it’s the reverse, aspirin and sutures are so much because insurance companies charge so much and ancillary businesses see that there’s profit to be made off of this profiteering because they know that they can in turn blame insurance companies or hospitals or doctors. The more people in this little chain of woe the better works out for all those who seek to profit at the expense of the sick and dying.

Price hikes always always move towards the customer, this is basic economic fact.

Saying that nonprofit cooperatives can control businesses pricing makes no sense. I understand the idea. That you can negotiate from a position of numbers, collective bargaining like unions and things of that nature, I understand how that’s supposed to work but the problem is this, collective bargaining in this context is a group begging for a discount, that is not the same as competition by any stretch of the imagination.

Is a group negotiating a better price from Coke because they are buying a lot the same as Pepsi?

In the context of insurance boycott or seeking another provider is not an option, that’s exactly the point. It’s life and death we’re talking about and patronage of a single medical system.

Basically in order to negotiate you have to have some power. Simply grouping up a chunk of people to be exploited by the insurance system is not going to convey any kind of power to that group any more than prisoners taking a vote in prison would.

People also need to understand the medical system is a single entity. Insurance companies can complain that doctors and hospitals set prices and actually have a point because thanks to licensing and other de facto competition control systems a heart surgery regardless of it being unchanged for a given period of time is not going to fluctuate in terms of price, in fact its price will always sit nice and high because in order to be a licensed doctor you have to play by a licensed doctor rules which assure a specific price.

Take the cost of medical school for instance, medical school is expensive primarily because people know how much money there is to be made being a doctor and thus a medical school education is in extremely high demand. But of course part of the reason doctors makes so much money is because insurance companies will pay insane doctor fees because they know that they’re not the ones actually paying it they just pass the cost onto the patient’s. As far as the insurance company is concerned the fee can be for four foot geckos, just so long as the money keeps flowing for whatever reason.

People against the public option like to talk about competition and free market when the medical system hasn’t been a free market in the United States since the government got in on the act.

I think It should be legal to practice medicine in the United States without a license, that would be true competition. Caveat emptor. Some people would be more than willing to take the risk and the effect on medical pricing would be profound.

Currently doctors have the best of both worlds, their club is regulated by an outside group such that competition cannot exist unless it plays by the rules they want to play by which means they in effect have no competition and they can still claim that they are entrepreneurial small business people and explore premium care type pricing systems.

To me the fact that there is a debate about whether or not we should have a public option, about whether or not we should reform health care at all is just this huge blatant symbol of how our system of government has been co-opted by profit-seeking enterprise.

I’m okay with capitalism and all that sort of thing. Any student of history knows that innovation requires motivation and profit is an excellent motivator. Also on a genetic level, and a cognitive level, humans can’t approach their reality except from the standpoint of how it can serve them.

So I’m not trying to say that we need to be all charitable and selfless when these things are basically illusions. I’m just saying that we need to approach problems honestly. The insurance situation is a huge common goods problem and it needs to be dealt with appropriately. Health care should be free anyway, but if we agree that it shouldn’t be, pretending you can do anything to control pricing from insurance companies without introducing a true outside competitor, who’s not going to be corrupted by the opportunity to collude, is either ignorance or deception depending on which side of the line of profit from insurance companies you fall on.

I grow weary of condescending congressmen explaining to the camera about the nature of competition and how people need to earn what they get and socialism and all the other rhetoric that was obviously handed to them by insurance company lobbyists to justify whatever allows them to have 16K$ flatware on their private jet.

Oh well. That’s what I get for expecting anything different, I mean rich people have always run this country. The founding fathers were the richest people in the colonies. Washington himself was the single richest man in the colonies. They didn’t settle revolt out of some duty towards human ethics, they set up a revolt because they were tired of kicking back a huge portion of their profits to a king that was thousands of miles away. Taxation without representation?

It all boils down to a pack of lies. So many of the things that we debate are based on lies that never get addressed and never get explored and certainly never get corrected and this insurance issue is just more of the same.

So here’s what’s going to happen, after a big long puppetshow the Senate and the House bills will merge and it will include the illusion of competition but only an illusion so that for the next 50 years, up until the singularity happens, insurance companies and the medical industry will be able to comfortably colluded and control prices and keep them unbelievably high and the cost will roll downhill to the poorest citizens like it always does and the only thing that will have changed is the fact that we no longer have a bargaining position, we no longer have the leverage to force change, we no longer have a rallying cry, because one thing that the bill will absolutely do is repair the economy just enough to keep things the same for rich folk because what “the economy” means in the American context is the continued growth of wealth for the wealthy, and debt for the impoverished.

The only thing that rich people want that we want also is for the system not to utterly collapse because that’s what allows them to stay rich, grow richer, and basically continue to live like kings of old plus iphones.

The answer is as it always has been, exit. In time technology will obviate a centralized medical system as it will obviate central power production and everything else that the government requires to justify its parasitic existence.

In time data mining and desktop manufacture will in effect allow people to download quality medical care. And until then you can continue to expect to be exploited by people with money. Health reform that doesn’t include a public option will do nothing except let the rich off the hook while gutting our chance for actually making government work for us for once.

In response to a line from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/opinion/20biden.html?_r=2

Those in our own party who would scuttle this bill because of what it doesn’t do seem not to appreciate the magnitude of what it has the potential to accomplish.

Wrong. Dead wrong.

It’s easy for you to think so short term because you plan to die one day soon.

The young do not. You think long term thinking is next election, you have to, it’s the nature of your species.

We do not.

Half assed healthcare reform, the kind that keeps the economy healthy but keeps the people sick is the worst thing we could do. And that’s why the corporations are letting it happen.

And make no mistake if they really wanted it stopped it would be stopped. Plutocracy doesn’t happen because people in suits complain.

It happens because a million dollars can buy a heart attack (drug and medicine industry, hello) or a car accident. And in a system where we elect leaders instead of laws, a heart attack can go a long way.

Half assed reform would allow us to patch when we should replace, and as any good maintenance technician, from a mechanic to an astronaut, knows, on balance, that costs lives in the long run.

This bill cuts the oil light instead of changing the oil. Biden and other fops would have us believe that’s better than nothing. Wrong. Letting the wound fester until we get the fucking picture or die is exactly what we need.

Let it fester until we get mad enough to take to the street and DEMAND that the government provide us with health care for the same reasons it provides us with artillery support, a power grid, and a highway system.

Don’t give us that change happens slowly in Washington condescending bullshit. The one and only reason we’re even contemplating a change at all is because the government has a shotgun in its mouth. And it has the audacity to haggle.

It knows what will happen when health care finally collapses, and its not the wide spread gradual pain and death that they fear. Its what happens when a whole generation gets upset enough to pick up a rock, that they fear.

They don’t give a shit about sick people or money unless it’s them being sick, and their money. That’s just how people and power work.

That’s why the H1N1 Vaccine is free but I have to make payments on a tooth extraction (if I have sufficient credit). Because a plague would wipe out the work force and maybe even get them sick. But an excruciating abscess is my problem.

If we pass half assed health reform we’ll be stuck with it for 50 years. Because the fact that all Americans who don’t get press ink know is that Congress isn’t about making life better for us. It’s about preventing a revolt while making sure the money flows upwards.

I’d rather have 5 years of seeing the train coming, then, keeping us alive and healthy would be in their best interest which is the ONLY reason they do anything, ever.

No public option? I hope the bill fails.

Why? Because when medical care grows so bloated that it actually destroys the economy and the first senator has to walk somewhere, do without medical treatment, or *gasp* take a pay cut, THEN something might get done.

So long as congress has gold plated care (and everything else) it can shut the fuck up about compromise and fiscal responsibility, because it’s not They who will be doing the compromising.

Democrats should be damned for allowing closet Republicans into the fold since clearly we have no closet democrats on their side.

It’s sad that Democrats have the first real majority ever, and have it in name only.

George Washington’s fears of the formation of political parties seems to have come true. I think voter turn out clearly demonstrates the fact that by and large Americans know in their heart of hearts that the parties are colluding and that real opposition does not exist.

It’s like Ferrarians and Porscheiscans in a place where half the country rides a bike.

it isn’t up to the government to provide heathcare

Healthcare is not some guy in an office doing a job, its about a national, if not a global, central system of research and technology, I can’t afford to pay for a highway to my great aunt’s house in California, but many other people would use such a thing, the same is true of an MRI machine. Medicine is not a for profit enterprise, if it were they would never develop cures. Treating the disease is far more profitable than curing it.

The point of government is to pay for common goods. I don’t buy a street light but I can use a street light. Therefore while it may not have always been the government’s job to keep its citizens healthy. (which makes one wonder where firemen, soldiers, and police came from) it sure is now.

Update: See? What did I tell you? Less work means more time for other things and since we all share common goals 90% of the things people do on their days off end up helping society in some form or another.

Update: http://deoxy.org/endwork.htm Check this out.

—–

Why all this social focus on jobs? It seems to me that we have forgotten the point, generally.

A job is a means to an end, and that end is the provision of basic needs and hope. That is the point of society, to accomplish together what we cannot accomplish alone. To provide for the individual. We are not ants, society is not an end in and of itself, nor indeed is life.

Only pleasure and life combined provide purpose. Beyond that basic truth the decision rests with each individual to determine his or her place, level of participation, and goal.

The concept of work as a way of life was required as a function of agriculture since farming was inescapably labor intensive and presented a common goods problem where in the sedentary profited most. In order to motivate everyone to work who needed to work deception had to be used.

But now escape is clearly possible. Our productivity per hour of labor is growing exponentially as a result of technology.

Eventually it will be a matter of code and material scarcity, nothing more. We should admit this and speed up the process.

We as a society need to admit that no part of society exists without any other. If a job is worth paying for it is needed by someone, and that someone is needed by someone else, and so on. We all deserve a share of the profit of our nation and society, not merely what we can squeeze out of others directly for ourselves, but in general from the profit of the state. They deserve it for being the children of our ancestors and our distant cousins. They deserve it for simply being human.

The social credit economics systems is a great example of the intention I share, but debating its validity specifically is not the focus of this document.

So too should they share in the debt, and the responsibility.

We need to scrap the idea that you must earn your right to exist from the social lexicon, because everyone except some suicides feel worthy of living.

Further, forcing everyone to participate in society is as destructive as forcing everyone to be president. A person’s absence can be as helpful as their presence, sometimes more so. If we truly embrace democracy, the idea that everyone is fundamentally worth the same thing, then why do we force everyone to try and “earn” their right to exist?

The provision for those who simply wish to live quiet lives, and reap the rewards of one hundred thousand years of human progress currently is wage slavery at best and abject poverty at worst. This is unacceptable. What good is all this technology if we don’t let everyone enjoy it?

I’m glad some of us are driven to contribute, that will always be a part of our psychological landscape, but if everyone is required to be type A personalities then all of our achievements become meaningless because each advance will merely be used as a tool for another advance.

Essentially our society is pathologically OCD and workaholic.

Some of us don’t aspire to owning 400 gold plated Escalades. Many of us don’t even vote. I mention the vote because many people are content to be kept. This has been a valid, even encouraged, choice for women for a long long time, and now I say we extend it to everyone. What’s wrong with wanting to be taken care of? The technology allows it now. Some of our greatest minds had patrons, not employers. Patrons. The closest modern analog are grant holders and privately funded general researchers. I say since we have the technology we make contribution strictly voluntary.

I think you’d find that things across the board will improve.

America has long history of being a strange mix. Most clearly between communism and capitalism. The country has long grappled with, and miserably tried to reconcile the drive to let (make?) everyone live in a Laissez-faire economy, and securing our style of life with regulation and subsidy to the point of a homogenizing commune.

I think there needs to be a middle ground. The country agrees, but only practically, only subconsciously. It agrees as a manifestation of the war between them. To continue the metaphor I say we decide the borders by treaty rather than rifle fire.

Clearly as a nation we have accepted a few things that logically support my assertions. Specifically, a basic national compromise, composed of two primary concessions that keep the country from tearing itself apart and descending into a second civil war.

1. That money will be spent to help the poor, no matter how badly the right wing wants to enforce a lethally detached amoral social Darwinism.

2. That money will be allowed to accumulate, no matter how badly the left wing wants to feed a million homeless crack addicts on what Bill Gates gets in interest every month.

How this has manifested has been the right seeking to unbound business regulation in search of a setting that will make the Horatio Alger myth a reality, and the left trying to tax the rich to the point of not being painfully wealthy anymore, to make their vision of a social utopia a reality.Obviously we both want the same things. Health and happiness all around.

The problem is they are competing, and their compromises are not articulated. Sure occasionally congressmen will work together in a limited “both sides of the isle” way for specific purposes, but that’s not what we need.

We need a systemic admission from both sides that neither side can ever be allowed to “win.” We all know that is the case, no matter what party has a majority clearly no side is actually trying to eliminate the other. It’s like how you never see Coke trying to hostile take over Pepsi. If Coke bought Pepsi Coke would be in anti trust land, so its best that they maintain the oligopoly, and keep us paying 1$ a can for what costs four cents to make(and rots our bones).

They of course would never admit that, and we all lose out. That’s (arguably) trivial when it comes to soda choice, after all I can say screw them and drink water or tea(I do). But its not so trivial when you have a country to run and use the same logic.

Letting the right and the left fight each other in this endless Orwellian pseudo war is sucking up resources at a phenomenal rate. And this is where we get back to jobs.

Think of money as water in the middle of a vast desert, which can be converted into every element of technology. Is it ethical to force people to compete for it? Is it ethical to let some choice few collect millions of gallons knowing full well that this collection means distant unseen people will die or worse?

The right and the left are arguing about how to fix the American economy, putting water here and taking it from there, making sure certain pumping stations close and certain ones stay open, desperately trying to keep the flow the same, despite the fact that there is only so much water, and only so much can be extracted from pre-existing sources.

The system funnels money to a select few places. That flow of money is called the economy. Specifically the materials economy. Natural resources are converted into wealth and as it flows through the system changing hands and forms, the illusion of a cyclic system is created.

It’s like eddies in a stream. Sure there may be a whirl pool or two, you may even live in one, but if the water ends up in a cistern at the end and is never allowed to evaporate, eventually the rain will stop and that whirlpool is going to dry up.

The whirlpool is the economy, the cistern is the government and the rich, and the water is the money. The solution isn’t to talk the government and corporations into dumping some of their cistern water back at the beginning because they can and will not dump ALL of it.

The solution is to let the water cycle happen. To put a percentage of the top back into the hands of the bottom, directly. We need rain. Not just rivers streams and aqueducts coupled to a giant hydraulic despotism, but free for everyone, rain.

That’s probably hard to understand. It’s a hugely complex topic. And I can’t possibly explain every aspect of it concisely . I’m just trying to reveal the fundamental illusion that is causing a doomed effort.

This desire to “create jobs” which are just people with hand pumps, is futile. The money originally has to come from somewhere and the fact is the earth is running out of money precursors.

The right wing has it wrong in that the free market won’t solve anything because a fundamental fact of economics is that, dollar for util, it’s cheaper to be rich. Which means that even in a completely deregulated setting the economy would collapse or solidify into total aristocratic stagnation, where in the poor and the rich never switch places. Which is arguably as bad for the rich as it is for the poor.

The left wing has it wrong in thinking that if you make a government program for all those in need eventually everyone will be able to work and thus their product will offset the spending. But again, the money will end up in fewer and fewer hands, only this time instead of the rich owning the money it will be government officials controlling the money.

Both sides ignore the fundamental nature of money, the one trait it has that makes all these stopgaps just that. Money has it’s own gravity. Money is attracted to money. Money is a unit of effort, we all require an effort be made to live. Predation is the system of exploiting the effort of lesser beings, and we are predators. I say we exploit the lesser beings we have made, machines, and allow ourselves to enjoy being the top of the food-chain.

Even the ultra rich never stop. I mean really, once you have 10 million in the bank, why get up for work? Because we are convinced that we must constantly take more. Of course we don’t call it take, we call it “make” as if we’re actually creating something when the precise opposite is true.

This is why the cold war boiled down to the USSR and USA. Both systems are extremely good at getting the people to work/pay without killing the bosses/officials. A great break down of that whole idea can be found in The Sovereign Individual (ISBN-13: 978-0684832722)

The left wing thinks that everyone who calls for a free market is secretly corrupt and actually just wants a get out of jail free card for being a plundering jackass, and the right wing thinks that everyone who calls for plentiful unemployment benefits and medical marijuana secretly wants a pot clouded tie dyed commune.

Of course, neither is true.

That’s all well and good you say but can you do any better? Frankly. Yes. I can.

I think a systemic compromise can be reached, and here is what I propose in the broad strokes.

Good news and bad news for both sides.

Step one: Eliminate all government assistance programs, state, federal, and local. No food stamps, no unemployment, no disability, even. And the right wingers in the crowd go wild right? And the left winger wish they had felt differently about gun law and were packing right now.

But wait, step two is for you guys. We put a cap on personal wealth and a much larger cap on Corporate wealth. We then flat tax everyone, 90% of the gross tax going to the government to spend as they see fit as per the current system. And 10% going into “The Fund.” Any money a person receives over the cap, goes straight into the fund.

What is done with this huge pile of money? It gets divvied up. Among everyone, evenly. Like rain. Every American citizen gets a monthly check based on the fund’s current value.

This way, everyone gets enough to live on, and the market is totally freed of regulation. Rampant greed can be safely indulged because no Corporation will be able to wreck the system. Between the flat tax and the cap, everything gets paid for.

As a long term bonus this would allow the society to convert efficiency into freedom. As technology advances and jobs are innovated out of existence naturally profit in other sectors will expand. Money typically doesn’t dry up, its a bit like energy in that respect, it just gets converted and flows around mostly.

Eventually you would end up with one of two key businesses, such as fusion facilities and robot manufacturers, and such a whopping monthly check that everyone gets to live in luxury.

Making money will become a game and an art form, rather than a cutthroat world destroying endeavor that threatens to reduce 99% of the world to abject poverty and radioactive glass. With all our needs met, and a sense of security we’ll go back to being the bastion of education, justice, and compassion we once were.

But hey, no one ever listens to me, why start now.

“Gee lets spend 100bn$ on tang and velcro, d’hur d’hur d’hur.”

Why does someone always say that?

Every dollar invested in NASA generates a 1000% indirect return for the economy, and an immeasurable return to society. Knowledge has infinite shelf life, is almost always useful at some point, takes up virtually no space, and is infinitely reproducible. You’d think greed alone would ensure glowing support for every scientific endeavor.

Virtually every aspect of the physical sciences benefit from research only those in space are in a position to do, from climatology and meteorology, to biology and physics, communications technology, materials science, geology, etc etc

Oh yeah and then there is the (slim given their under funded nature) chance that their orbital diagnostic equipment could save all of our lives by giving us a century of warning of a celestial impact, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Seriously, people that don’t want to fund space exploration and study are ignorant, plain and simple. Educate yourself.

I mean really, come on people. What part of having WHOLE OTHER PLANETS to exploit for resources does not compute as profitable? Greedy bastards don’t care unless they’ll get a piece. “for your children” just isn’t good enough if it means a slightly smaller SUV today.

I don’t need them to be earth like to be valuable. I mean shit, the Japanese found uranium on the MOON.

Research is profitable, that’s why private organizations pay for it.