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social, health, political imagery through the lens of G J Huba PhD © 2012-2021

Posts tagged Human Rights

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I get in trouble when I make mind maps about Donald Trump. This is a mind map about processing repetitive TV cable news (on CNN and MSNBC and FOX) about the most televised story — Donald Tackles the USA and the World — at this point in late April 2017.

Mr Trump is just completing the first 100 days of his Presidency having accomplished less — according to the fact checkers from numerous news organizations — than any President since the index has been tracked from the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt’s Presidency in the 1930s. Mr Trump believes he has accomplished more than any president ever studied in his first 100 days.

I am a lover of news stories where the President gets bashed on TV. In the 1970s I watched (and read about) all the hearings focusing on Richard Nixon and Watergate. In the 1980s I watched huge amounts of TV about Reagan and Iran-Contragate. In the 1990s, I watched the hearings about Bill Clinton and the blue dress and impeachment and not inhaling. Nothing of a comparable nature occurred during either Bush presidency or that of Barack Obama. I almost didn’t know what to do with my spare time.

Now, I am watching numerous hours of TV/video on the major USA news channels (including CNN, MSNBC, Fox, CBS News online, New York Times, Washington Post, and of course the best news outlet for all news worldwide, BBC). And even ESPN has had a big Trump story about star players declining invitations to the White House to meet POTUS.

My dementia has been progressing at an ever increasing speed in a downward spiral during the past months. I remember (recall) less from current events and “work” and daily tasks. When I can retrieve information I do so very S—L—O—W—L—Y. Judgments are tougher, understanding sequences are harder, and writing down what I think is very slow as the length of my current journal entries (and al of the wurds nat spelled wrongly or too bigly) is increasing grately. Handwriting does not come with A spel chkr.

The current trend in cable TV news on MSNBC and CNN and others is to have one-hour shows where a moderator/commentator discusses all of the “important” news of the day with 2-5 different “self-styled” experts ranting from all political persuasions.

7 hours of liberal rantings about Trump is available on MSNBC and to a lesser degree on CNN; Fox News has 7 hours of conservative rantings about how terrible it is that the liberals are ranting about Trump.

I have repeatedly argued that inexpensive (or even free) visual thinking/mind modeling methods can help a person with dementia “rewrite the operating system” on that storage device we call the brain and think better, albeit in a different way.

As I was making the following mind model (AKA mind map) about Trump’s first 100 days yesterday, I was struck by how rapidly I could create this fairly complex model. I think it shows that the intrinsic interests and REPEATED exposures to structured, summary information can be well captured using visual thinking methods by a person who has lived with dementia for more than half a decade after diagnosis. While I understand that 40% of USA voters will find the content WRONG because it is very liberal rather than very conservative, I do propose the hypothesis that developing a fairly complex, fact-based mind map of current news shows the value of mind mapping for someone with dementia basing this conclusion only on my own experience. And it works no matter what you think about Trump.

I hope that as many conservatives as liberals will use these methods to study the facts of issues and their own conclusions and evaluate the completeness of what they know.

Examine your memories and conclusions in mind models. Political leanings and party do not matter because your mind model is for YOU as much as my mind model is for ME.

Should you find my political points to be in error, just use this as a template about what you would like to say about, for example, Hillary Clinton or a Democrat in Congress.

But remember that models like the one can be developed by a person living with dementia like me.

And most importantly, I hope that we — whether your political views are similar or dissimilar to mine — can come to an agreement that cognitive methods for supporting thinking for those with or at risk for dementia belong in the next version of ObamaCare or TrumpCare along with training, support, and respite services for unpaid dementia caregivers and especially COVERAGE OF COMPREHENSIVE HEALTHCARE FOR ALL AMERICANS.

Click on the image to expand it.

Oh … and let’s make sure that no President of any party ever uses the nuclear option. I hope we can all agree on that.

People who learn to take responsibility for their own actions could save me a lot of money.

They

  • have less kids born into families that cannot support them saving me money on social programs
  • are less likely to contract STDs especially HIV thus saving me money on STD prevention and treatment programs
  • graduate from high school (and college and grad school) thus qualifying them to be in higher tax brackets and save me from higher tax rates and subsidizing their living costs
  • live longer because they forgo tobacco and drinking alcohol to excess thus saving the entire health care system from huge wasted services
  • pick up their garbage and put it in trash receptacles thus saving me having to pay someone to pick up after them
  • recycle thus cutting the bill for environmental cleanup

The USA should incentivize self responsibility by granting payments to

  • every student who ever graduates from high school
  • every student who ever graduates from college
  • every student who ever earns a graduate degree
  • every 18 year old who has never had an STD
  • every 18 year old woman who has never been pregnant
  • every 18 year old man who has never fathered a child
  • every 21 year old who has never been convicted of a DUI offense
  • every 21 year old who has never used tobacco
  • every 21 year old who has a “normal” weight and is neither obese nor dangerously underweight
  • every 40 year old who has a “normal” weight and is neither obese nor dangerously underweight
  • every 50 year old who has never been convicted of a DUI offense
  • every 60 year old who has a “normal” weight and is neither obese nor dangerously underweight

Incentives would be in the form of one-time tax credits for the individual or the individual’s family. This means that incentives are only paid to workers and their families.

Oh, the government would supply free voluntary services to all residents on birth control methods including condoms freely available to all children old enough to conceive, unlimited voluntary counseling on avoiding self destructive behaviors, unlimited voluntary counseling on leading a healthy life, and unlimited voluntary counseling for reasons of family instability, mental health, child rearing, and birth control. None of these free services would include any components related to any religion. And legitimate and effective education at all levels from preschool through college would be free to any American resident of any age and with support services to ensure anyone can graduate.

If the USA were to provide fairly significant incentives for learning and exercising self responsible behaviors we could produce a citizenry that creates less problems and is less dependent upon social network and support programs for themselves and their children. This will leave a lot of money to spend on those who truly cannot deal with their own medical and psychological problems no matter what they personally do and probably leave some over for lower tax rates.

Wow. Incentives for studying, working hard, becoming a productive member of society, and paying for needed and fully effective programs for all of those who have mental or physical or developmental disease and cannot legitimately assume full responsibility for all aspects of their lives.

I’d love to see a similar set of ways to incentivize healthcare and education workers. Small increases in productivity and job satisfaction among these critical citizens saves a lot of money and produces a much more healthy society.

Oh, I know, I am a dreamer. After all, my proposal could never make it through Congress. Even though it will save lots of money, promote better lives through self responsibility, and leave sufficient resources for those who truly need medical and mental health services because of factors beyond their control, this is truly an anti-American proposal that expects self responsibility and does not let big religion bully small religions, agnostics, or atheists around.

Every once in a while we need a little revolution.

Imagine.

[Musings of a very liberal, very capitalist, individual who believes in self responsibility and taking care of anyone who cannot take care of themselves with first-rate, state-of-the-art programs.]

This was originally posted on January 1, 2015. It was just as relevant on January 1, 2016. Still as relevant on January 1, 2017. And perhaps more relevant than ever on January 1, 2018.

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UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS 2015

Getting rid of deserts is a lot more important priority than making pushing away desserts. [Donate the money you would have spent at Starbuck’s on pastry to go with the 900 calorie latte to human rights groups.]

And think about how many hungry people you can feed for the cost of your nicotine addiction or $150 running shoes in this week’s colors.

When I started this blog at the end of 2012, one of the first mind maps I presented my values in a coherent way. Of course two years have passed, values evolve, and mind map programs get better as do my skills in using them. When I look back on it, I find it pretty surprising that I was able to put several hundred personally meaningful mind maps on my blog site in only two years. I think that the way that mind maps engaged me over the past two years and (in my humble opinion) allowed me to explore creatively many issues points to the great value of the method of visual thinking.

Here is return visit to a slightly revised, prettier mind map created from that first published two years ago.

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Some of My Beliefs Part 1 G J Huba

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I would not write about this topic were I not convinced that a number of government agencies, hackers, and 12 year olds have already thought of this.

Today I was looking at the Mac App Store and saw a new featured program that automatically translates from one language to another. The program reportedly translates 80 languages into 80 languages. Since I do not know 80 (or even 2) languages I have no way of verifying this claim. Nor do I think that there is any problem with this app or others of the type. But the App Store stimulated me to think about something.

What if …

What if I an American security agency (NSA, CIA) wanted to slant American public opinion against the Arab World. It could (probably and extremely rapidly) change the translation dictionaries in a computer program to translate Arabic to English in a tone that subtly makes Arabic statements in public social media seem more aggressive and uncooperative than intended. Or conversely if I were an extremist organization that wished to slant opinion against the United States I might alter a translation dictionary to make English statements sound more negative or aggressive or dictatorial in Arabic. This can be done in any pair of languages in either direction.

I have looked for effective computerized translations to English (or more properly Americanish) for decades, primarily because I have no language skills (or abilities) but want to know what the writers in Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Hebrew, French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other languages are saying on social media. I try to follow many tweeters in the Arab World because I think that Americans are fairly oblivious to the intellectual and medical advances made there as they also are to the peaceful political and religious views of virtually every practitioner of Islam or resident of an Arab country.

In the era of Twitter and numerous other social media services which are starting to provide automatic translations between languages, who tests to make sure that the auto translations do not intentionally or unintentionally slant public or scientific opinion. Obviously, those most dependent upon those translations are least able to judge this!

Anytime I read something that seems odd from a speaker of another language, I wonder if this is the result of an auto translation program unintentionally or intentionally trying to sway my opinion.

This is perhaps a compelling argument for visual thinking using minimal words.

[On the other hand, there is this Photoshop thing …]

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JULY 4 THOUGHTS FOR A BETTER USA

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Harnessing the Power of the World-Wide Social Brain

 

Imagine what is happening as these billions of people discuss universal human rights, diversity, disparity, and the material versus the spiritual. Keep those servers running.

Back in 2012, I published a mind map on this blog suggesting that giving people one chance to learn (as in, you only get one taxpayer-subsidized educational opportunity) or to receive free treatment for drug abuse (as in, if you can’t quit the first time you are morally undeserving because you do not have the moral strength) or to receive specialized behaviorally-related healthcare (as in, you let yourself get fat or nicotine-dependent or out-of-shape so you pay the consequences) is an obscene abuse of other individuals,

It’s just as true now as it was then. I know more about mind mapping now and am even more irritated by those who want to balance the budget by not helping others enough, or even at all. So I thought I would revise my mind map and make this a post a lot more angry that we do not give people second (or even eighteenth chances).

Show me a drug abuse treatment  provider who says you can go through treatment one time and it will “stick” and I’ll show you a snake oil salesperson who is trying to sell services to 18 year old entertainment industry billionaires surrounded by a media feeding frenzy. Do you really want to deny additional free education to someone who realizes in their 30s or after going to prison or after achieving a stabilized life without drugs or while serving our country in the Armed Services that they need more education to get good jobs and be successful and much better citizens? Mental health services should not be denied or limited to tossing people pills because someone lost the genetic lottery and has a life-time disease or experienced trauma (like a rape victim or maybe somebody unlucky enough to have lived in an earthquake or hurricane zone or in a dangerous neighborhood or in an Armed Services encampment in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Vietmam).

Enough said. The picture will tell more than 100,000 words ever could. And if one fails after 18 chances?

Well, there’s always a 19th chance or a 36th chance waiting. [And a special ring in hell waiting for those who would only offer people one chance at happiness or productivity or health. Or the politicians who supported this position to get (re)elected.] Oh, and if you were one who denied others a second chance, you have a second chance to act in a more moral and supportive way and give others that second or 18th chance.

Click on the image to expand. Then think about whether we should invest in people and families or in creating the wealthiest uber-class in the history of the United States?

18th Chance 2014

 

 

There are more than 7,000 rare diseases in the world, almost all of which lack any type of medical treatment. Were every religious congregation in the world to “adopt” a disease and do what it can to help find and provide a cure for that one disease, it is quite possible that the hundreds of millions of people (in aggregate across all rare diseases) could be helped in small and large ways.

I think that it is very possible that organized religions can put away their ideological differences and work cooperatively through information sharing, advocating, raising monies, and demanding progress from governments and corporations to fight rare diseases. After all, most of these diseases are genetic in origin and more than 50% of those who suffer from rare diseases are children. And, central values in the organized religions are showing compassion, helping, and supporting those in need.

I am not naive enough to believe that religions, religious leaders, and religious congregations working together in small ways is enough to solve religious bigotry, the hot points in Jerusalem, or prevent future ethnic-religious cleansing by horrible people deceiving their own citizens. But let’s at least try to start in the small ways of learning about one or two rare diseases and pooling creativity, resources, and prayers for the energy and stamina to find cures. Religious congregations and their energy directed by the desire to help are almost unstoppable forces.

February 28 is Rare Disease Day.

It is also a day when the religious peoples of the world can unite to plan to make small and large steps to acknowledge and cure at least some of the rare diseases.

I pray that it will happen.

And should you not believe in organized religions, I hope you will nonetheless join in an organized search for effective treatments.

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RELIGIONS RARE DISEASE DAY FEB 28 2014

Sadly, today starts the first day of super-aggressive end-of-year (online) shopping sales in the USA. I salute the countries where the capitalists are “controlled” by the social norm that you don’t practice aggressive capitalism on a religious holiday (of any religion). The opposite is true in the USA.

I have very aggressive spam detection on my computer and iDevices. Nonetheless my inbox is flooded with X% off, an extra Y% off, Z% off the list price that the retailer does not charge on any of the 365.25 days of the year.

I defy anyone to find a retailer who “honestly” states the “percentage off” on their sale merchandise. Even on a day when the world’s largest religion (Christianity, about one-third of the population, and concentrated in the USA, Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, Europe, and China) is celebrating one of its holy days, folks of all backgrounds are out to swindle the adherents for the next two weeks.

Show some respect to both religion and mathematics.

And, I do not recognize “unbridled capitalism” as a religion although I recognize that some might believe their practice of it is a form of “Satanism.”

Big Data (in service to the NSA) wants to be able to document what you do and when and where and with whom. All of the current databases that companies and public agencies maintain can now be tightly linked to get a pretty good profile of any individual.

But, these models of what people will do when you ask them to buy a DVD of Thor 2 or a suit from Brooks Brothers, are actually fairly dumb brute force computer algorithms that break down when certain types of problematic data are fed into them.

Hhhhmmm. Some thoughts below in the mind map. Click the image twice for a full expansion.

SCREW UP BIG DATA BROTHER

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I put the first version of the mind map shown below on Twitter about 3 years ago. Several revised (evolving) versions have been posted on this blog site. The map is about the rights we all should be guaranteed no matter where we live, our color and gender, our sexual orientation, our religion, our beliefs, and our genetic gifts and challenges.

I keep working on this map because it might help at least 1 of the 90% of the world’s leaders who trample on human rights daily to at least start to realize what universal human rights are. [And I concede that the USA where I have lived my whole life has a very big foot and a heavy shoe and does a lot of stomping all around the world as well as in our 50 states.]

Is there some part of providing every world citizen with enough healthy food, clean water, healthcare, safety, education, shelter, basic freedom, and hope for a brighter future that is hard to understand? Do you really think a strong military presence so that you can plunder the human rights and resources of another country or your own population is acceptable?

Click on the mind map to expand it. The current version was developed in the new iMindMap 7 release.

UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS 2013

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https://twitter.com/kim4Commission/status/407296707928403968

https://twitter.com/nakedken/status/407278523666427904

The only way I see to develop effective medical treatments and care models for many of the thousands of rare diseases is to pool the RESEARCH resources that individual countries are spending and the data countries are collecting about individual rare diseases and put those research resources under international control for prioritizing research agenda and ensuring public access to ALL results and research data.

Yes, I know the USA (probably the largest resource contributor) Congress will go in front of the television cameras and say that the failure of the United Nations and the disproportionate contributions to a pooled resource fund will ensure failure. They will point to the failure of the world to effectively coordinate collaborative research on HIV/AIDS and point to politics, homophobia, disrespect, and the hatred of American politics by certain national and fundamentalist groups and say we would be wasting our money by letting Africans and Arabs and the Russians and Chinese and Indians and Asians and South Americans collaborate with the USA on research and ensuring that research leads to effective treatments for at least some rare diseases.

Enough already. Let’s rise to the occasion of solving resource limitations in studying rare diseases and get an effective mechanism in place for expanding the impact of admittedly small research efforts by individual countries through international cooperation. I trust the governments of the world to collaborate, contribute as they can, and help us start to get some of these diseases treatable. Disease knows no boundaries.

In the last century we collectively developed very advanced medical research techniques. In this century we need to use these methods to solve all of the medical problems possible by putting aside the nonsense politics and nationalism and individual egos and predatory profits and focus on solving many medical issues and ensuring access to effective treatment world wide.

Here’s a way to start. Any yes, this is a test of our humanity and commitment to universal human rights of which medical treatment is but one. But let’s start somewhere that should be relatively easy to agree on (and let a few hundred angry politicians in the USA know that the world considers them bratty children and cannot tolerate their obstructionist and oppositional behavior).

Click on the image to expand. And let’s start the process of collaboration.

rare diseases time for effective international cooperation

EU rare disease rare disease

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I was sitting in the office of an individual designated as an “essential” federal employee at mid-morning on November 14, 1995. We were meeting at the US Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration main offices in the Parklawn Building in Rockville, MD.

My federally funded Evaluation and Technical Support Center for a HRSA Initiative on Implementing the zidovudine protocol for preventing HIV transmission from HIV-positive mother to her child during birth was meeting with 10 federal grantees the next day in Baltimore. The meeting was mandated by the HRSA funding agreements.

Each project had at least three staff in transit to Baltimore (most by air) for the meeting the next day. At least one representative of each project was a woman living with HIV/AIDS; this was mandated.

The bell rang at noon in the Parklawn Building. The loudspeakers had started squawking earlier reminding all non-essential employees that they must exit the building by noon. Guards came through the building reminding people to leave. It was eerie to be in the second-largest US federal office building with almost no other people around.

I met with the essential employee, the head of a very large program on HIV/AIDS treatment. She could not tell me whether to have the meeting the next day. While she could guarantee that the representatives from the projects would have their travel reimbursed she could not tell me whether the scheduled meeting rooms, scheduled food service, and other costs would be covered although she would allow me to pay for costs already agreed to through contracts with the hotel. She did note that we could not use use the meeting room we had paid for nor eat any of the food we had pre-paid. The meeting would no longer be a federal meeting. Everybody there was just a private citizen meeting because they wanted to be there after being stranded by having flown to a mandatory federal meeting that was cancelled without notice. No federal employee, however, could be at the meeting because they were not working and they were not allowed to go to any activity that could be construed as federal “work” since they might then demand payment for their time.

I had to tell this to about 50 attendees at 9 am on Wednesday morning. The Maryland Dept of Health agreed to let the group use space at their offices 15 or so blocks away. Everyone walked over there in freezing rain. Maryland made available a conference room that could seat about 12 comfortably, about 25 uncomfortably, and the rest squeezed in and stood. The State Director (part of the group) lent us her personal 10 cup Mr Coffee to brew coffee. In trying to make enough coffee for 50, I broke it, and when I returned to California, I sent her another one by FedEx because I was a little annoyed that she got very upset that I had dropped the $20 machine and had announced to 50 people that I was the reason there was no coffee.

After about an hour or so of chaos and having everybody totally upset — as they should have been — about having about 15 women with HIV (many with advanced stage AIDS) in an overheated claustrophobic facility along with another 35 people in an overheated claustrophobic facility, I decided that the company I owned would personally guarantee the costs for the meeting facilities and food that had already been paid — if the government asked for the money back from anyone because I had decided that those who had come to Baltimore in good faith could meet in the rooms already paid for and eat prepaid food that was going to be thrown out. As I recall this was probably close to $5,000 or more. Fortunately no one ever asked me for the money back and since I over-ran our budget by far more than $20,000 (which we never billed) in part because the feds had totally screwed up the process, that we were even. And, no woman with HIV had fainted or otherwise hurt herself during the meeting because we did not have healthy conditions.

The grantees were — as would be expected — totally pissed off. The initiative ran for several more years, but in a fairly “inefficient” way. Chaos. The feds went back to work after Thanksgiving, but then went out again for more than a month starting in mid-December when Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton still would not do their jobs. When the budget was settled in mid-January, the government announced it would pay all of the federal employees for all days they had been sitting at home in Maryland and Virginia and the District playing in the snow and worrying about their personal finances.

A demotivated, angry workforce went back to work to deal with a number of demotivated, angry contractors and grantees. It wasn’t the same for another two years.

Obamacare was passed by a majority of the US Congress, all of whom had been elected by the majority of their constituents. It was signed into law by a President elected by the majority of the US electoral voters as specified in the Constitution. When the Constitutionality of Obamacare was challenged by those who did not like it, the majority of the Supreme Court Justices, each confirmed when appointed by a majority of the US Senate, decided that Obamacare was constitutional.

Each step of passing Obamacare into law was done according to the specifics of the US Constitution.

Those attempting to derail Obamacare by using certain procedural technicalities in ways never intended and just plain silly, are acting in opposition to the approved Affordable Care Act passed by the Congress and approved by the President and the Supreme Court according to the procedures specified in the US Constitution.

Are those in Congressional representatives holding the budget hostage Congressional “Leaders” or (in words attributed to Al Gore) “terrorists?”

Today, I hope that the US government will decide to “feed” those sitting around waiting for their US Congress and Executive Branch to meet their Constitutionally assigned responsibilities that the elected officials of the United States have sworn to uphold. Fortunately World War II vets in wheel chairs were allowed to look at the barricaded World War II memorial on the federal mall today (the barriers were lifted by Congress members in front of TV cameras); my further hope is that all of the veterans in VA hospitals get fed dinner tonight whether or not the TV crews are parked in front of the facilities.

Those elected officials who claim that their Tea Party is as much against “taxation without representation” as the founders were in 1776, obviously have not read the Constitution resulting from the actions in 1776.  Thankfully, a majority of the Supreme Court justices and the President were in school that day.

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ELIMINATING AIDS FROM THE PLANET G J HUBA PHD JULY 2012

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One of the huge changes in the USA during my 62 years of life is that our country made great strides in recognizing the legal rights of all to be treated the same and fairly.

The decision of the US Supreme Court yesterday that the Defense of Marriage Act (defining marriage as a heterosexual couple) was unconstitutional is another giant step ahead for the USA.

I watched my own profession of psychology go from antiquated views of homosexuality (as a mental disorder-disease) to taking official stances that homosexuality was not associated with mental illness, LGBT marriages were as “healthy” as heterosexual ones, and that LGBT couples could raise children who were as healthy as those raised by heterosexual couples.

Why did psychologists take those official positions? The answer is very simple: well-designed and executed empirical research made it clear that LGBT couples (married or not) were stable, healthy pairings of mutually attracted adults.

I congratulate my LGBT friends and colleagues for persisting in the long, difficult, and expensive fight for equality in the USA. Their achievement moves America much further ahead.

I await the day when all remaining discrimination is eliminated in the USA.

No, I haven’t lost “it” and this is not a science fiction story.

With the unleashing of big data, big computing, big temptations, and big greed, it is going to be real tempting to develop a George Huba (and also perhaps a Bill Smith or Mary Doe or heaven forbid, a Donald Trump) computer model that can fairly accurately predict from my lifetime experiences whether one will buy a new car next year (and what type and in which cost range and maybe from which car dealer), purchase or sell a home, shift from converse to adidas sneakers, become emotionally distressed if no chocolate is available, and purchase Apple stock to invest or trade. Or run a simulation of one as the CEO of a particular company to determine who gets the job. Or look at one’s medical history and determine whether it is likely thatgrandchildren will have each of 20 expensive diseases that no insurer wants to touch.

Already the IRS runs programs to estimate the likelihood I cheated on my income taxes, Amazon runs programs to estimate the likelihood I will purchase certain books and socks before or after the December holidays, and my credit card company runs models to determine whether it is likely or not that I purchased shoes while on a business trip (yup, they once froze my credit card while I was in DC on business because their computer model says I only buy sneakers).

OK, so the accuracy of the big data scientists is only something like 20-50% now. What do you think it will be when your book purchasing history is fully integrated with your job history, income, ice cream purchases, pharmaceutical purchases, video watching history, total hamburger purchases, and BMI? And then fine tuned with the grade you got in college English, chemistry, or psychology; whether you had a hiking or a beach vacation and if you purchased (used) sunscreen and had a history of purchasing sun hats; the diseases that all four of your grandparents and parents had at different times in their lifetimes. And whether your car is more than 3 years old. And what do you think it will be when we create a generation of data scientists willing to capitalize on huge data to build such models for salaries that will approach those of professional athletes and rock stars? Most of the world’s richest people are already individuals who are promoting and benefitting from big data to predict what you will do.

Ten years from now, the computer models produced of selected individuals will make Mark Zuckerberg, the Google guys, Apple, and Jeff Bezos look like rank amateurs in profiling. The Russians and Chinese, of course, are already well advanced and a threat every time we vote.

[Oh, and by the way while writing this post Google knows that I looked up Mark Zuckerberg’s name and the spelling of adidas.]

I want to tell anyone that wants to develop a mathematical, computer model of me (or my behavior, beliefs, attitudes, skills, history, and future intentions) to cease and desist. Or [more indelicately] fuck off.

Which raises the questions … Do I own the copyright (patent, trademark) to my own life? [And if I do, what are the limits and will violations of those laws by a number of countries and companies be ignored?]

This is not so far-fetched. I spent my whole life becoming the person I am. Does anybody have the right to take all of the big data about me and distill my life down to formulae and algorithms that will explain my past and current behavior and predict what I will do in the future? Should people be allowed to model individuals, I fear that the suicide rate will go up dramatically as people find out how much these models can be used to control them and when they are predicting you will die.

As a psychologist, I spent my career studying people so that we might better understand their fears and concerns, help them better use their full potential, become happier, control their own aggressive or violent tendencies, and generally become the people THEY WANTED to be. And I, nor other ethical psychologist, struck out with the intent to model the behaviors of others so well that the resulting models could be sold to governments and corporations.

Big and huge data, data scientists, companies, and governments need to be prohibited from violating the rights of individuals to “own” their individual lives. If we ever let others “own” our individual identities, we will have crossed into new territory from which there is no return. The technology is almost there to create such individual mathematical models. Russia, for instance, seems to have a pretty good Trump model they are licensing to the Saudis and others.

I was endowed by my creator to own the copyright, patents, and trademarks of my own life… and to answer for what I chose to do with that intellectual property (free will). I choose not to sell my soul to the devil, it’s data scientists, psychologists, and hackers.

A few more thoughts are in the mind map below.

Click on the diagram to zoom.

copyright patent my life

A key part of the television science fiction series Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek are the machine “races” Cylons (“toasters” or robots in BSG who develop “human” bodies to house the electronics) and Borg (androids who assimilate new species and technology into their race in Star Trek series starting with New Generation).

People who want to be part machines (like the guy at the next table in the restaurant who can’t put the iPhone down from his ear long enough to acknowledge that his kids exist) are pretty common these days. Does the iPhone want to be partly human? By iPhone 9 it undoubtedly will be.

I write this as I get ready to hook up a blood pressure cuff and fitbit to my iPhone 5.

Veal in machine oil sauce. A cuisine whose time is coming.

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There are a number of things that can be done to cut the cost of healthcare while, at the same time, freeing doctors and others to do their jobs better. These improvements cost almost nothing to implement [if all of the constituencies and politicians do not compete to be King Kong].

Visiting legislator who stumbled across this web page? Here’s your chance to act like a grown-up and represent the people of the world, not drug companies nor major research universities nor individual “researcher” egos and retirement funds.

Click on images to expand.[almost free] strategies to improve healthcare

Cartoon Rabbit - Giving A Thumbs Up

I was 10 years old when the Berlin Wall went up. 11 when JFK butchered the German language. 38 when the wall came down. 39 when they started selling the pieces. 62 when I finally saw some of the panels in person.

berlin wall time map

In person the panels proclaim desperation, depression, denial of freedom, hope, strength of the human spirit, persistence, creativity, and victory. Kind of puts most of my life in context. ACT UP.

The panels are part of the permanent collection at the Newseum in Washington, DC. Individual panels are 12 feet high and weigh several tons. The collection is the largest held by a public institution outside of Germany.

And, yes, the painted sides were on the western side. The backs are unpainted, blemished gray concrete.

Berlin Wall panels 355Berlin Wall panels 357Berlin Wall panels 358Berlin Wall panels 359Berlin Wall panels 361

When I was a child we used to have the drills you have seen in those odd videos where kids dove under their desks when the nuclear alarm sounded. The Berlin Wall made the fears of the time much worse. My elementary school also had a basement with a sign on the stairs that said fall-out shelter and had the big radioactive sign that led you to believe that the basement would protect you against direct radiation and fall-out. Good thing there were no nuclear attacks and the public at large never realized that a desk or basement was not going to protect you at all. [At the time, my own father was one of the first nuclear engineers in the USA and never told us or anyone else that it was a big government scam; it probably was a result of his high-level security clearance for reactor design.] And in case you wonder about profits from the fake bomb shelters, the US  government subsidized the peanut farmers and put hundreds of gallons of peanut butter in large cans inside of the bomb shelters. When they did tile ceiling tile repairs in my office at UCLA in the early 1980s, the maintenance crew used the peanut butter as glue, and apparently that was a common construction practice at the time! Who knows what else the owners of the buildings with the fake bomb shelters did with this stuff as it passed its expiration date. The 40-year “Cold” War was a pretty nasty one that scared me until the day the Wall came down. The end to the Cold War was a singular achievement of the Reagan Administration, the UK, and our European allies who proved to the Soviet Union that they could not keep up with the western coalition in sustained military spending without totally pissing off their citizens by making them accept sub-standard lifestyles.

And yes, later President Jimmy Carter benefited from both ends of the Cold War radiation industry serving in the navy as a very early nuclear officer [at the time my father was designing submarine reactors and training nuclear officers] on a submarine and later selling subsidized peanuts. Perhaps this has something to do with Carter’s ascendance as a peace advocate after his presidency.

Every day, the Newseum in Washington, DC, receives electronic copies of many of the world’s newspapers. They print them and post at least one from each US state/territory and many from throughout the world.

The next day they start all over again.

It is amazing to see all of these front pages for one day adjacent to one another. The common and the local; the political and the social-entertainment.

3.16.2013. A smattering of those available inside and outside the museum.

Click on images to zoom.

March 16 2013 350 March 16 2013 349 March 16 2013 348 March 16 2013 347 March 16 2013 346 March 16 2013 345 March 16 2013 344 March 16 2013 343 March 16 2013 342 March 16 2013 341 March 16 2013 338 March 16 2013 337 March 16 2013 336 March 16 2013 335 March 16 2013 334 March 16 2013 333 March 16 2013 332March 16 2013 351

On exhibit at the Newseum in Washington, DC — hundreds of front pages from the world’s newspapers.

The reaction of the world after 9.11.2001 says it all.

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The central exhibit is the twisted remains of the television-radio broadcasting antenna at the top of one of the towers.

We have sequestration and a US Congress that refuses to develop a realistic compromise US federal budget and long-term economic plan. Never one at loss for ideas, I propose that the US Congress initiate the following silent auction. As absurd as my proposal is, it seems no more absurd than the ideas expressed on cable news each night by our “striking” employees (the US Congress). Before starting this auction, I prefer that the Members of Congress and POTUS sit down once and for all and do their jobs in managing the economic future of the USA. Otherwise, they are going to have to conduct something like this auction (currently going on in a limited and inefficient manner through lobbyists and Cabinet Level administrators).

Click image to expand.

USA Auction

My lack of admiration for the inability of the US Congress and the President to resolve budget issues in a way that will preserve the economic recovery, provide needed services, and balance the budget should be fairly obvious.

What the current sequestration comes down to is that 535 individuals in Congress who make between $180,000 and $240,000 per year, have exceptional health and pension plans, and have $4,000,000 (tax-free) expense accounts that can be used as needed without audit, are simply not giving the tax payer a very going return for their generous salaries and perks.

This needs to stop. If these folks cannot do their job and pass a compromise budget that meets the goals of long-term economic recovery, high priority services, and debt reduction, we should fire and replace them in 2014. After all, the fact that discussions seem to have ended means that 535 well-compensated public employees have decided to thumb their nose as those who employ them and spend their energy appearing on cable news channels or working on their memoirs or using their expense accounts to get into trouble. No business would tolerate such behavior.

If Congress refuses to work on a compromise they should feel the pain. After all, 10s of millions of Americans are currently feeling it. Every day.

sequestration pain

Why would 536 (POTUS + Congress) people (mostly white men) play Russian Roulette with world’s health-education-welfare-economy? [circle all that apply]

a) they are arrogant (specify “they” ____________)

b) they are stoopid (specify “they” ____________)

c) they are mean (specify “they” ____________)

d) they have no ability to imagine a harmonious future (specify “they” ____________)

e) they love their face time on cable TV news (specify “they” ____________)

f) John Boehner made them do it (specify “them” ____________)

g) POTUS made them do it (specify “them” ____________)

h) Palpatine made them do it (specify “them” ____________)

g) all of the above

h) what is sequestration?

i) other comments:___________________________________________________

*****

Or as Yoda would say — Jedi not are they

Palpatine