Category Archives: Politics

Bring Back The ‘Madman’

In the world today, Obama’s a jester and Putin’s the king who’s grasp in Eurasia is unchallenged. In fact, one could even say Putin’s favorite hobby (apart from kicking ass in Judo) is making the Obama administration the laughing stock of the international community.

On February 28th, Obama issued one of his usual empty threats towards Russia saying “there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine”…the next day, Russia annexed Crimea. (x) Everything the West does in an attempt to contain Russia is met with Putin laughing in the faces of NATO leaders and doing the opposite. Arms buildups. Weapons Transfers. You name it.

Hell, it’s gotten so bad that even The Onion ran an article “written by” Putin entitled, “Thanks For Being So Cool About Everything” which included this beautiful piece of satire:

To be honest, I was really dreading a whole big fight over this thing. When you first condemned the seizure of Crimea as patently illegal and in breach of the Ukrainian constitution—which it absolutely was, by the way—I feared for the worst. But then everybody stopped short of doing anything to actually prevent what was essentially a state-sponsored landgrab, and I just thought, “Wow, these guys are a pretty laid-back and easygoing bunch!” It really was a huge load off when you let everything slide like that.

But all kidding aside, it’s clear that if Russia really is the enemy and needs to be stopped[1], empty threats from Obama and NATO leaders or faux pivot attempts with no tangible backing are not the way to deter further aggression. A new strategy is needed.

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The Case Against The Legalization of Marijuana

Update 1/8/16: I no longer entirely agree with my position in this post. While I think decriminalization is a good first step, I now think that widespread federal descheduling of Marijuana is a better policy. See my most recent post entitled Legalizing Marijuana: The Road to Security South of the Border.

 

Back in 2010 I wrote a post, which is formatted horribly on my current theme, entitled Drugs Legal? Yes! wherein I argued for the complete legalization of all drugs. While I still think the argument I made is valid and impacts of illegality are real, I have changed my position. I think, at best, marijuana should be decriminalized, not legalized (I don’t know my political opinion on other drugs).

Thus in this post, I will make my case against legalization in favor of decriminalization.

Before beginning, however, it is important to establish working definitions (I quote from Auburn University and The Free Dictionary, respectively) and set up one assumption:

Legalization: a general policy orientation involves the lifting of all criminal and civil proscriptions and sanctions (x);
Decriminalization: the repeal or amendment (undoing) of statutes which made certain acts criminal, so that those acts no longer are crimes or subject to prosecution (x);
The United States federal government will not legalize all drugs anytime soon, if ever, but there is a real chance and a push for the overall legalization of marijuana. Thus the assumption that the rest of this post will work off of is that the only currently illicit drug that will be legalized (or have a serious attempt made at legalizing) in the near future would be marijuana.

So, I’ll see you after the jump!

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Why Climate Change Really Is Our Most Urgent, Number One Priority Right Now

A little over a week ago Bill Nye (the Science Guy) was on CNN’s “Crossfire” segment where he “debated”, and I hesitate to use this word when describing the following people, pundit S. E. Cupp and the Heritage Foundation‘s Nicolas Loris on the impact that climate change has on our lives. Amidst Bill’s clearly superior understanding of climate science and Loris’ “>muh federalism” cries, Cupp stepped up and did make one interesting point when she said

[Y]ou can look at entitlement reform which will bankrupt this country long before climate change destroys us, heart disease kills 7 million a year worldwide, 870 million suffer from hunger; I want you to look me in the eye and tell me in good conscience that climate change is our most urgent, number one priority right now.

While I loved Bill’s response and her reaction, I feel like he could have run with it more. Specifically, climate change directly affects the root cause of each of those issues and solving climate change is a prerequisite to solving any of the issues Cupp brought up. You see, climate change really is our most urgent, number one priority because it will not only be a huge blow to the economies of the world due to flooding and relocation issues, but it will disrupt global food supplies due to crop failures and ocean acidification, and the increased temperatures will create higher outbreak rates for diseases. All these, which will be fleshed out below, are reasons why climate change is a prior question and answers the impacts of Cupp’s claims.

My aim in writing this is not to provide a comprehensive list of the impacts of climate change, rather to point out that climate change comes before every issues that Cupp claims is more important.

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Attempting the Impossible – Calculating Capitalism’s Death Toll

Update 8/10/18

Given the popularity of this post (and its recent resurgence), I figured I ought to write an update. The following post was written back when I was a senior in high school and still rather idealistic and polemical. Given that, this post clearly has rhetorical oomph that is not found in my current writings. Additionally, I no longer strictly endorse the number of deaths laid out in the following post for a few reasons. First, I think structural issues that cause violence can rarely be subsumed to simple fiscal policy and as such, saying Capitalism killed X or Communism killed Y masks violence perpetrated by larger institutions. Second, and more importantly, while ideology is certainly a driving factor in violence, individuals are just as much to blame and thus I worry that saying a given ideology as such is responsible for a given number of deaths is a convenient way to let individuals off the hook. And third, there are so many deaths that go unaccounted for in our world that it would be foolish to assume that I can provide an accurate account while living in a first world country. Indeed, I think it’s foolish to assume that anyone could provide an accurate number. Given that, take everything with a grain of salt. I leave this post up as it is part of my intellectual heritage. If need be, a longer and more in-depth preface may be written.

To anyone still reading, I do think overall argument / analysis holds, but I do not currently stick to any hard-and-fast number. I suggest that everyone do their own research and use this post as a starting point.

INTRODUCTION:

While there have been other attempts to count up the number of deaths that can be attributed to Capitalism (to counter the figures presented in The Black Book of Communism as well other places), most noteably, determinatenegation’s list and The Castroists’ list, neither critique the methodology used by the the supporters of the “OMG Communism killed 70 trillion people!!1!” nor do they provide easy to verify sources. So while I think both lists are fabulous (and I may use parts), this post will be not only a critique of the methodology used by the other side, but also a more user friendly list.

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Climate Denial and the Death of Rationality

Unfortunately, despite all our scientific advances and supposed advances in rationality, there is still one lingering and debated issue…whether climate change is anthropogenic or not. If you’re a person who enjoys the Kochs or believes everything the CATO Institute tells you, this is directed towards you. In 2013 a study was completed by and authored by nine different scientists ranging from climate scientists at the University of Queensland to geological scientists at Memorial University of Newfoundland. The article, titled, “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature”, apart from being one of the best articles on climate science I have ever seen, without a doubt proves the human influence on the environment. Specifically, the authors, Cook et al., took over 10,000 peer-reviewed scientific articles published in journals examining climate science over the past 20 years and found that “papers rejecting the consensus on AGW[1]…[make up]…a vanishingly small proportion of the published research” (Cook et al.). Specifically, the study found that literally less than 1%[2] of all the papers published and studied rejected the anthropogenic thesis. When one churns the math (.007 * 11,944 papers = 83.6, rounded to 84), 84 out of the over 10,000 papers rejected the thesis that climate change is anthropogenic and, as per the study, that already amazingly small percentage is shrinking (Cook et al.).

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