German Healthcare Engineering

By any measure, the U.S. healthcare system is failing in its primary mission: to provide the overall population access to healthcare at a cost that does not bankrupt the nation.

We can argue about the details, but why, when an example of how a healthcare system should work already exists, in Germany?

Without going into too much detail, the German system is the best existing hybrid of public and private, without the rationing of care that exists in Canada and the UK, and at a reasonable cost. The efficient, German system costs the Germans 10.5% of their GDP, while our fractured, chaotic system cost the U.S. economy 17.9% of GDP in 2015, and is rising dramatically.

So, we should simply adapt the German system to the U.S. market with one primary interest in mind: the health and satisfaction of the U.S. healthcare consumer.

Russian Hackers?

The media has been making reference to alleged Russian hacking efforts as if advanced cyber weapons were used that only a State actor could possibly possess, thereby elevating this whole affair into something akin to an act of war. The truth, as far as I can tell, is something quite different.

Instead of cracking the encryption algorithm or deploying specialized malware bots, the hackers used a much more low-tech approach: they tricked the holders of the email accounts that were hacked into giving up their passwords. It really was that simple.

The technique, called phishing, involves sending out spoof emails that look, for all intents and purposes, like they are coming from a legitimate source. Typically, they warn you that your personal information is in danger and that you should log in immediately and change your password. However, the link that they provide is actually to a webpage that is owned by the hacker, not the host you think you are accessing. As soon as you provide a new password the hacker then logs in to the actual account with your old password, updates your password to the new string you selected, and begins to download your email archives in bulk. You, on the other hand, walk away feeling smug, thinking you have defeated a nefarious attempt to gain access to your email account.

We know that this is the way that John Podesta's email was hacked because the Clinton campaign has admitted as much, and I suspect that the other accounts were compromised in a similar fashion.

I know what you are thinking. "Wait, I get those fake emails all the time! I know better than to click on those!" And, yes, these sorts of exploits are all too common. Fortunately, they are very easy to detect and block using common security software and two-step verification procedures.

So, is this really a matter that deserves a court of inquiry and a global cyberwar? If this needs a court of inquiry it should be an inquiry into how Hillary Clinton, the State Department, and the Clinton Campaign could have all been so stupid as to let this happen.

Sorry, Hill.

She seems to be saying, "Sorry, Hillary!"

I find profound irony in Jill Stein's efforts to force a recount in key battleground states that went red in the last presidential election, particularly if you realize that votes that went to her were more than the margin of victory in both Wisconsin and Michigan.

If Jill Stein had simply made the announcement prior to the election that she was concerned about the possibility of a Trump presidency and that she was removing herself from consideration, and for her supporters to PLEASE hold their nose and vote for Clinton, Hillary would have won!

What was the point of her campaign? Did she intend to be a spoiler from the beginning? She wasn't even on the ballot in all 50 states. She certainly knew she had zero chance of winning the election.

Bernie Sanders could have easily done the same thing and run as a third party candidate, which would have tilted the outcome even further in favor of Trump, but he did not. He used the primary campaign as the vehicle for his platform, realizing that a third party run would split the Democratic vote.

Could Jill Stein really be so stupid to have not seen the possibility of this outcome? I find that hard to believe, which makes her disruptive actions all the more ironic.

Wait, I Won!

Some Predictions for Trump's First Term

Economy

Expect interest rates to rise and the dollar to fall, with inflation ticking up significantly by the mid-point of the first term. The U.S. will pressure China to stop selling the Yuan and allow it to float, which will mean that the Chinese will have to start selling the Treasury Notes that they have accumulated. Between a lower dollar and higher tariffs, prices for entire baskets of goods will increase. The stimulative effects of the lower dollar and higher import costs will not be instantaneous, and it will be rough sledding while U.S. manufacturing tries to gear back up. Meanwhile, the U.S. debt will explode, which will undermine confidence in the greenback, further pressuring the value of the dollar and driving interest rates even higher. The march back to a booming U.S. manufacturing sector could become quite a slog.

Geopolitics

Apart from some sort of grandiose show of force to crush ISIS (probably in cooperation with the Assad regime and the Russian military), I expect U.S. military spending to decline, not increase. U.S. support will tend to gravitate toward strong-arm leaders who can maintain regional order. The notion of the U.S. as 'global cop' is over with. Our allies should be ready to defend themselves, and we will gladly sell them the arms they need to do so. In other words, it will be a good time to be an authoritarian dictator, and concerns about violations of human rights will be largely ignored.

Infrastructure

Think bridges, bridges and more bridges. Plus, airports. Pretty much everything Trump said he would do infrastructure-wise he will attempt to do, and he'll find little resistance in Congress to his appropriation bills.

Education

Say goodbye to the Dept. of Education and to Common Core. Say hello to taxpayer-funded school vouchers for private and parochial school students. Charter schools will also see a rise, but I expect the expansion of the voucher program to be the biggest change.

Obamacare

I don't expect that we will go back to a situation where we have as many Americans without health insurance as we did under George W. Bush, but I do expect rates to start to reflect risk, which will mean higher rates and higher deductibles for those who are obese or with preexisting conditions. At the same time, I don't expect the federal subsidy to keep pace with these higher rates, so many families will be adversely affected and, ultimately, driven off the insurance rolls. Or, fixing Obamacare could prove too messy and we could simply go back to what we had before.

The Environment

In a word: toast. I expect huge swathes of U.S. coastal real estate to be under water regularly before the end of Trump's second term. Who is going to pay for all that damage? I don't anticipate any major federally-funded civil engineering projects to ward off the inevitable sea rise, even though the social and economics impacts will be huge. Or, you could just move to higher ground.

Immigration

Apart from efforts to better secure the border with Mexico, a major effort will be undertaken to identify and vet all undocumented aliens residing in the U.S., and those who do not pass muster will be deported along with their families, including minor children who may have been born in this country. Those who can be shown to have no criminal history and who are gainfully employed will be given a path to legal residency. Simultaneously, I expect the Trump Administration to dramatically increase the number of H1B visas, subject to extensive background checks, to provide labor to those industries (particularly agriculture) where labor is scarce. How successful these efforts will be overall is questionable, as their implementation will be fraught with hazards and legal challenges. On one hand, I would expect many families to voluntarily return to their countries as they have been doing in large numbers since 2008. On the other hand, the deportations will be expensive, heart-wrenching and disruptive to families and communities.

Doctor Death

Almost half a million dead --
Assad and Putin have much to celebrate.

The Syrian Civil War is on its way to half a million war dead, nearly twice the death rate of the rebellion put down by Assad's father 35 years ago. I always thought of Bashar al-Assad as a mild-manner, pro-western gentleman. At least, that was the image that he projected. It is clear to me now that he is a psychopathic sadist who has little regard for the people of his country. I'm sorry, but if my beloved country was in the throes of one of the worst humanitarian crises in modern times I would NOT be caught smiling for a photo op.

How did the world allow Syria to get to this point? Was there anything anyone could have done to prevent this level of bloodshed? I believe that there is, and I believe that Syria could be peaceful today if certain things had been done years ago.

Quite early in the conflict the Obama Administration drew a red line in the sand: if Assad were to use chemical weapons against its citizens he would face consequences. On the 21st of August of 2013 that line was crossed, when rockets with sarin gas landed on the rebel-occupied city of Ghouta, Syria to devastating effect.

Some of the almost 1,500 victim of the nerve gas attack.

Unfortunately, neither the U.S. nor NATO acted, which left a gap into which Russia has stepped, thereby insuring that the Assad regime will retain control of Syria and that the conflict will continue with no end in sight.

So, what could have changed this outcome? What needed to happen as early on as possible was for Assad to feel enough pressure to force a negotiated outcome, and there were a few things the U.S. and NATO could have easily done in response to the gas attack to put strong pressure on Assad:

• Bomb the airstrips to prevent aircraft from taking off and landing.
• Create a naval blockade to control the flow of weapons into Syria.
• Use drones to target and destroy missile batteries whenever they are used to launch missiles.
• Use superior U.S. air power to keep Syrian aircraft grounded.

These actions would have leveled the playing field and would, in my opinion, have quickly forced brokered negotiations that would have led to a transition government with international support.

Unfortunately, President Obama, while making it clear he did not need Congress in order to take military action and acknowledging that failing to act in response to the chemical weapons attack would make a mockery of Western resolve, deferred to Congress who debated a 60 day war authorization but ultimately failed to pass anything.

Now, instead of a peaceful outcome, the Syrians are faced with a war that could easily go on for 10 years or more, costing over a million lives, displacing over 15 million people, creating regional instability and providing opportunities for Islamist groups to gain strength, all the time promising little hope that the despotic authoritarian regime whose abuses led to the rebellion will ever be deposed.

Nice work, World.

Post 9/11 Lessons We Can Learn

Fifteen years after the 9/11 attacks there definitely are some lessons we can learn.

The 9/11 attacks were decidedly low tech and inexpensive to execute. Our response, on the other hand, was anything but, and in this fact lies the crux of the problem.

Groups like Al-Qaeda can never hope to conquer us directly, but like a bee sting or virus, our reaction can have the desired effect. Like the immune response to the influenza virus, or the allergic response to a bee sting, it is the organism's own defenses that are its undoing.

The best that Al-Qaeda ever hoped to achieve was to send a powerful message and hope that the injury and economic dislocation would create enough upheaval to force us to alter our routines, lose productivity, and sacrifice the personal freedoms that make our Republic great.

On those counts, the 9/11 attacks probably exceeded Al-Qaeda's expectations. A small band of radicals with box cutter knives triggered over $4 trillion in war spending (and counting), all of which was financed by issuing debt instruments. The Patriot Act, as well as a series of additional pieces of legislation and executive orders, have resulted in massive domestic surveillance by our own government, and the economic measures implemented to help stimulate the economy (such as a relaxing the bank reserve requirements) led directly to the mortgage crisis and the economic crash of 2008.

Once the shock had resided, we should have acknowledged that we left ourselves vulnerable by not anticipating that a hijacker might use a plane as a weapon. And, it's not like that possibility wasn't discussed, it just wasn't something that we took seriously. By comparison, Israel has had reinforced cockpit doors and a no-negotiation policy for hijackers for decades ... we simply should have known better. So, one logical response would be to tighten up airline security.

Additionally, we should have used the massive goodwill and sympathy felt for the U.S. around the globe to increase world peace and form coalitions of sympathetic nations to act to interdict Al-Qaeda and their supporters/financiers wherever they may be. Similar to President George H. Bush's successful organization of a coalition that enabled us to push the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait and back to Baghdad and have all our expenses covered along the way, we could have formed a similar coalition to move against Al-Qaeda in an effective way that helped distribute the costs. Finally, our decision to use the nation's predisposition for war to invade Iraq was the biggest mistake of all. The deposed Iraqi Army leadership is now the secret to ISIS's success.

Also, there was no reason to believe at the time that a massive domestic surveillance machine, including a data warehouse that stores virtually all emails, texts and voice communications that ALL of us send and receive, would have interfered with the planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks. Perhaps if the FBI had paid attention to calls from instructors in Florida who reported having foreign students in their classes who only had interest in learning how to fly an airliner, but not how to take off or land. Instead, our legislators have granted the government powers that can easily be used in the future to intimidate and silence dissent.

Bottom line -- just take it easy. Never let anger, hatred or a desire for revenge distort your thinking. The higher the stress level, the more methodical and deliberate your decision-making must be. And, never, ever overreact.

The Martian Has Gone Insane

How do we intend to colonize another planet if we can't even transition
away from fossil fuels here at home?

Frankly, it is time to take a good, long, hard look at NASA and the future of space exploration.

The most common argument I've heard as to the reason we are pushing for a Mars colony is to preserve the human race in the event that life becomes impossible here on Earth. Are you kidding me? Is that even a remote possibility? And, if that possibility exists, WHY AREN'T WE PUTTING EVERY POSSIBLE EFFORT INTO PREVENTING IT FROM OCCURRING?

From my way of looking at it, as goes the Earth, so goes the human race. We are inextricably linked to our home planet, as we should be. I consider notions of moving the human race to another planet to be fundamentally heretical and insulting to a world that has provided us so with much.

There are still parts of the NASA program that are valuable and necessary, in particular the program to track objects in Space that might be on a collision course with us, and the program to monitor the Sun. The programs to sent orbiters to other planets to explore their composition are clearly fascinating, but of limited utility to us at home. The programs that have enabled us to look back billions of years and time and see some of the first clouds of gas condensing and forming stars is amazing stuff that helps us better comprehend our place in the Universe, but is, in practical terms, of limited use to us at home.

Casting a shadow over all of this is one difficult to refute fact: we are altering our climate in ways that could cause global temperature and weather to spin out of control. It's like we are standing in the middle of the road, peering upwards into the stars, while a tractor trailer is bearing down on us.

I would like to see the vast majority of NASA's budget repurposed to focus on climate change and renewable energy source development. We need to train those powerful telescopes back on Earth and work to get us weaned off of fossil fuels. Let's make that the new "moon shot".