The problem with technology visas is first of all countries don’t need this to record entries and exits. It’s the principle of the thing. If tourists were regularly traveling visa free to the US and committing terrorist attacks I would support ESTA. The problem is that has never been a thing. None of the 9/11 attackers were eligible for visa free entry, they all had tourist visas.

This trend gobbles up public resources while we ignore the problems which actually cause terrorism, particularly money laundering. Instead implementing these populist policies which target the wrong people.

Thanks Bush for making the world a more dangerous place!

This would make it seem that Canada is the proper country to source terrorists from. But there are as many Canadian tourists causing terrorist attacks in the last decade as there were citizens from all NATO countries in the 50 years prior to the implementation of ESTA.

None. Thats right. None. Not a single terrorist attack by a single citizen of any ESTA country against any other country in the world since 1949.

It’s just right wing populism.

And on that note, when we actually did take out bin Laden remember how we carpet bombed Abottabad? How we captured him via Real ID?

Nope. We didn’t even use a drone strike. All we needed to do to capture the most wanted terrorist in the world was standard military intelligence and sending in a strike team.

No drones, nukes, or carpet bombing necessary.

So when it comes to the carpet bombing of Gaza and increasing visa policies between democracies around the world, remember this is all just right wing populism and needs to be opposed.

Building walls and reducing communication only increases radicalization at home and abroad. This fuels violence.

The safest countries in the world are generally the most free.

We do not have to choose between freedom and security.

The choice is to have freedom and security or neither.

Today is the 23rd anniversary of the terrorist attack on the United States in Alexandria, Virginia, and New York City.

I will keep it simple: we did not respond to the attacks appropriately. The main thing we did right was remove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan following their attack on our country.

But what we needed to do was this:

• Embrace our allies and not lash out at them as the Bush administration did.
• Root out and destroy money laundering for terrorism around the world. Countries that do not participate will lose access to the economies and currencies of the United States and the European Union.
• Expand visas on countries from which the terrorists were from. Shorten the lengths of their stay.

But we didn’t.

Money laundering continues to finance terrorism to this day. We expanded visas on our allies as state sponsors of terrorism saw no repercussions. We infringed on our liberties.

“Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” is as true today as it was when legislators in Massachusetts were debating whether to sacrifice liberties they enjoyed under the crown in order to prevent war. It is the same debate America faced after 9/11.

It’s not just that you don’t deserve liberty or safety; it’s also that giving up liberty will not bring safety, as the temptation so often rings true.

The United States of America and every other country have laws that allow law enforcement to investigate and prosecute those who do wrong.

If your neighbor is caught selling cocaine to children, there is every reason to desire a drug investigation into their house to get evidence for the harm they are causing. That does not give the police the right to search my house for drugs unless there is probable cause I did something wrong.

If someone has committed a crime egregious enough to prevent them from crossing an international border, they should be in prison. Visas should be used on countries which have corrupt governments and countries which actively support terrorist organizations. They should not be the default for every country.

But unfortunately, that’s not how the 9/11 Commission approached this horrendous tragedy.

The goal of Islamist terrorism from the beginning has been to eradicate the free world and bring the entire world under a single Caliphate ruled by their leaders. The best way to fight this is to be as different from them as possible. Eradicting our own liberties to fight terrorism is counterproductive.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-put-temporary-controls-all-land-borders-source-says-2024-09-09/

Germany is tightening border controls in response to the Alternativ fur Deutschland “winning” state-level elections in Germany. At least, this is the narrative.

Alternativ fur Deutschland won only 30% of the vote in Sachsen and 32% of the vote in Thuringen. They won fewer votes than CDU in Sachsen but got the most votes in Thuringen, which doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is which parties can form a coalition.

Remember when English-language media was saying how the Nazis were going to form a government in Saxony?

The German equivalent of the British Labour Party is BSW, which is less of a party and more a boggle of spineless weasels. BSW refuses to form a coalition with Alternativ fur Deutschland, which means AfD has no way to form a government. At least that means, despite being Euroskeptic meatheads, they are still better than Labour.

I wish news media would do follow-ups to such sensationalist headlines now that Scholz is doing Putin’s bidding by reintroducing border checks!

This is why, when it comes to important stories, it is very important to follow up.

My advice to Scholz is simple. Don’t give into far-right Russian fear-mongering, do not implement internal border checks, and send more weapons to Ukraine, which they can use to destroy the Russian military in Russia.

Don’t give in to hate.

This year, irregular arrivals to the EU were under 100,000 on every route, well within the normal range.

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/irregular-arrivals-since-2008/

The source for people claiming migration to Europe is at historic highs when indeed they are down is Voice of Europe, a far-right operation funded by the Russian government. It is nothing more than propaganda meant to destabilize the European Union.

Border checks are not going to solve any problem for Germany. They only strengthen the far right and Russia.

Slava Ukraine.

We live in a world where we can get information on so many different topics at the click of a button through search engines. Wikipedia is the largest collaborative project in the history of humanity. Scholarly articles are available to anyone with an internet connection. You can have food delivered to your house without picking up a phone. We carry faster and more powerful computers than the computers that send people to the moon in our pockets everywhere we go. In less than 24 hours, you can fly anywhere. High speed rail whisks people across the land in many countries at 300 km/h.

It is natural to expect that anything can be fixed quickly with how quickly so many things are improving.

But we still can’t go faster than the speed of light.

In a world of exponential growth and constantly increasing expectations, we still face the realities of scientific barriers. Unless our understanding of physics is fundamentally wrong, we will never travel faster than the speed of light.

It is good to envision a better world. It is what people are best at. However, poorly thought-out policies can end up hurting the people they intend to help. You can’t regulate your way out of economic fundamentals.

A classic example in economics is when politicians promise to help poor people by implementing a price cap on a good. What ends up happening is the amount of the good supplied by the market will be less than the amount demanded, which is a shortage. No company will produce a good at a loss, and the marginal cost curve, aka supply curve, will hit the cap at a lower level than the amount people want to buy.

In this classic example, you have only moved from price discrimination to time discrimination. You have not fixed the fundamentals! It does not solve the fundamental problem of economics.

We see this with the increasing housing prices in the United States and Canada. Politicians are going to every imaginable populist solution under the sun, but none of them solve the fundamental imbalance in the housing market. So they are not going to bring housing prices down.

New York City has the most low-income housing in the country, and it is one of the most unaffordable markets in the world. If these solutions worked, New York would have the cheapest housing in America.

Eventually, after all of these populist policies are tried, we will have to fall back on the fundamentals, and then prices will go down.

President Biden just issued an executive order requiring all space ships to include warp drives capable of traveling twice the speed of light tomorrow. We will now be in Alpha Centauri in two years.

Sounds absurd, right?

That’s America’s affordable housing policy in a nutshell.

It starts with Spanish and French colonialism.

Haiti

The Duvalier dynasty which ruined the country. He had a poor relationship with the US. The US was sending millions of dollars of aid to Haiti (in 1950s dollars) at the time, Duvalier stole it, so we stopped sending aid which was just making life worse for them. This is one of those cases where it really isn’t the fault of the US.

Avril was an ally of Duvalier.

Abraham was a military officer under Duvalier.

Aristide was overthrown in a coup by Duvalier supporters.

The US overthrew that dictatorship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Uphold_Democracy

His successor Martelly then worked hard to traffic cocaine to the US and Canada. He has been sanctioned by Canada. His country needs reform and all he did was work to be a drug kingpin and enrich himself.

Things were finally turning around when Rene Preval was President and then the earthquake fucked everything up. His successors have used the country as their personal piggy bank, and there has not been any major reform effort to deal with the endemic problems which keep Haiti poor.

The 2010s saw slow growth and then COVID made things worse again.

Corruption in Haiti is endemic, and it’s hard to spin the economy up when hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis aren’t slamming them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Haiti

Every single one of these people are native born Haitians. Haiti hasn’t had an election since 2016.

Dominican Republic

We can compare to the Dominican Republic which was occupied by the United States from 1916-1924.

Back in the 1980s the Dominican Republic and Haiti started at the same spot under military dictatorships.

The Dominican Republic on the other hand after removing Balaguer out of office in 1996 has had reliable elections and stable growth leading them to be one of the best places to live in the Caribbean. They focused on building a strong economic system, rooting out corruption, and building macroeconomic stability.

Today, the Dominican Republic has a significantly better GDP per capita, longevity, and overall quality of life, but with the exact same geographic challenges.
The Dominican Republic scores 35 , on par with Ukraine and Bosnia and Herzegovina, so not great, not terrible. Haiti scores 17 next to North Korea and Nicaragua. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

The Dominican Republic has a GDP per capita 7x that of Haiti today, and Dominicans live a decade longer than Haitians. Haiti is a tragedy.

But the Dominican Republic goes to prove Haiti did not have to be this way.

Things can change.

It starts with building a good quality of government and a high trust society.

Overall, I think Biden will be remembered as being on par with Jimmy Carter. He’s had a good domestic policy, and if that were all we were ranking on, he would easily be in the top 10, but his foreign policy has been a continuation of Trump’s failed policies.

I generally agree with most of the Siena poll’s findings from this year regarding presidents’ rankings, but I think some presidents have been significantly underrated or overrated.

LBJ is underrated, though still rated well. His domestic policy was the best we have ever had and his economic policy was very successful. His foreign policy gets him dinged regularly, but we know now from Ukraine the consequences of not defending our allies, which should lead Americans to reevaluate the Vietnam War. War is always hell, but we must look at the bigger picture. He is underrated.

John Quincy Adams is an underrated president. He was the first president to push for public universities and other programs we take for granted today. He opposed slavery and was a good man. He was a great president but is usually rated as average.

Harding was not a bad president; he pushed for civil rights unsuccessfully and was definitely not on par with Millard Fillmore. I think his ranking is the most inaccurate.

Benjamin Harrison was an early president who pushed for civil rights, albeit unsuccessfully. Comparing him to George W. Bush is silly.

Theodore Roosevelt was a good president, but it’s hard for me to argue that he was better than LBJ or Obama. He was still a great president, but I rank him at number 14 instead of number 4. His foreign policy was atrocious. The competition is rough. He was not our fourth greatest president, though he was still one of the good ones.

Zachary Taylor was an average president. It’s unfair to put him next to Mallard Fillmore. Rankings in that tier are reserved for presidents pushing our country backward. Taylor was just average.

Chester Alan Arthur was not a bad president. He vetoed the Chinese Exclusion Act and signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. It’s inaccurate to put him on par with Bush and Nixon.

Clinton was not a good president. He was average. He deregulated Wall Street and set up the modern Ukraine conflict, but he also did some good things, such as the Violence Against Women Act. Not great, but not terrible.

Wilson was an average president, not in the top 20 for reasons which many people put him as. He would be ranked lower if we didn’t have so many truly awful presidents.

Andrew Jackson is severely overrated and should not be on our money. He was a genocidal, drunk, maniacal slaver obsessed with dueling who committed genocide and ruined our economy.

I do not know why Reagan is rated so highly. The economy performed terribly during his first term, with the highest unemployment in the last half of the 20th century, and his foreign policy was trash. On social policy, he allowed AIDS to spread because he was homophobic. Reagan was trash.

George Walker Bush was the worst president in history. His foreign policy was a disaster; instead of focusing on rooting out the Taliban and building Afghanistan to be a safe society, he invaded Iraq. A homophobic forced birther. He led our economy into a great recession. His Supreme Court picks abolished abortion. A Jesus freak with no respect for our Constitution. He implemented visas on our allies as he coddled state sponsors of terrorism. He did not push hard enough for Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO, directly causing two wars. He is white trash who belongs in the Hague for his war crimes and, in my opinion, was the worst President in our nation’s history.

It is unfair to rank Garfield and William Henry Harrison because they didn’t serve for a full year. So, I do not rank them.

Here is my ranking compared to APSA:

President/winner of all Electoral in row	Order	My ranking	APSA 2024	Difference
Lyndon Baines Johnson	36	1	9	8
George Washington	1	2	3	1
Abraham Lincoln	16	3	1	-2
Franklin Delano Roosevelt	32	4	2	-2
John Fitzgerald Kennedy	35	5	10	5
Barack Hussein Obama	44	6	7	1
Thomas Jefferson	3	10	5	-5
John Quincy Adams	6	7	20	13
Dwight David Eisenhower	34	8	8	0
Harry S. Truman	33	9	6	-3
Warren Gamaliel Harding	29	11	40	29
Benjamin Harrison	23	12	31	19
Ulysses Simpson Grant	18	13	17	4
Theodore Roosevelt	26	14	4	-10
William McKinley	25	15	24	9
James Earl “Jimmy” Carter Junior	39	16	22	6
Joseph Robinette Biden	46	17	14	-3
James Madison	4	18	11	-7
Zachary Taylor	12	19	38	19
James Monroe	5	20	18	-2
Chester Alan Arthur	21	21	33	12
John Adams	2	22	13	-9
William Jefferson Blythe “Bill” Clinton	42	23	12	-11
George Herbert Walker Bush	41	24	19	-5
James Knox Polk	11	25	25	0
Woodrow Wilson	28	26	15	-11
Gerald Ford	38	27	27	0
Martin Van Buren	8	29	28	-1
Grover Cleveland	22	28	26	-2
Herbert Hoover	31	30	36	6
Calvin Coolidge	30	31	34	3
William Howard Taft	27	32	23	-9
Richard Milhous Nixon	37	33	35	2
John Tyler	10	34	37	3
Franklin Pierce	14	35	42	7
Rutherford Birchard Hayes	19	36	29	-7
Andrew Johnson	17	37	43	6
Millard Fillmore	13	38	39	1
James Buchanan	15	39	44	5
Andrew Jackson	7	41	21	-20
Ronald Wilson Reagan	40	42	16	-26
Donald Trump	45	43	45	2
George Walker Bush	43	44	32	-12
James Abram Garfield	20		30	30
William Henry Harrison	9		41	41

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_presidents_of_the_United_States

The War in Ukraine shocked people who have not been observing Russia for quite some time and showed how misguided the foreign policy of the United States has been for at least a decade.

It pains me to say so, but Mitt Romney was right in 2012 when he said Russia is our main adversary. It is extremely unfortunate Obama did not do enough to prevent the War in Ukraine.

To predict an invasion, we are going to need a few things to be true:

• The invader country needs to be significantly larger than the target.
• The invader country is likely to be undemocratic.
• The invader country needs to be able to support its military economically.

The Iraq War was an exception to the rule.

So, we need a combination of a large population, a large economy, and a corrupt, kleptocratic dictatorship.

In other words, Russia.

There are only a few major aggressor countries that have these attributes.

The only dictatorships with a population over 100 million are China and Russia.

If we expand to a democracy score under 4, Ethiopia and Pakistan have the population and authoritarian systems to be suspect, but their economies are terrible. So they will be unable to support their militaries. So, China and Russia remain the biggest threats in the world.

However, China is restricted in its aggression by trade.

If we reduce our threshold to 10 million people and have a GDP per capita threshold of $5000, Cuba, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela will appear on the list.

Cuba is an island nation, and if they attack any of their neighbors, the United States Navy will land in Havana. They cannot do anything. Jamaica is not part of the Rio Pact, but this would be of little value to Cuba.

Iran talks about invading Israel, so this is a possibility, but it is unlikely to succeed. Even though Israel is not part of any military alliance, if they were attacked, they would be defended by the US military.

Saudi Arabia is a major state sponsor of terrorism, as this model predicts.

Venezuela talks about invading Guyana, and since Guyana is not a member of the Rio Pact, Venezuela would succeed. However, Venezuela’s economy is in free fall.

Suppose you have fewer than 10 million people. In that case, it is hard to project influence abroad, and according to my model, only Bahrain has the economy and authoritarian government to be a threat. But their population is only 1.5 million, so they are limited in their evil.

Russia has two obvious targets across the land, Ukraine and Georgia, and they have attacked both of them. Mongolia is another potential target.

China’s potential targets are Mongolia, Bhutan, and Nepal. Bhutan and Nepal are tiny, and India will likely defend them.

However, Mongolia cooperates with the United States in military matters and is also a global partner of NATO.

Every other country is either too democratic, too poor, or too small to be a threat on the global stage.

This map makes the Ukraine war obvious, and also the War in Yemen as why it is seeing so much violence from Saudi Arabia. Africa has a lot of conflicts, but they are regional or usually connected to terrorism.

I think it is likely that the invasion of Ukraine will be the last interstate conflict for a while.

There is a disturbing trend in many circles over the last ten years to not trust the police due to lynching of Black people, primarily but not exclusively men. It is right to be disturbed by this. Police who shoot unarmed civilians should be tried for murder.

They then take things to an extreme and do not report actual abuse, which makes these locations extremely dangerous. They create parallel justice systems designed by well-meaning fools who do not understand the American legal system or any legal system for that matter. They throw away everything required by modern democratic legal systems, which ends up creating systems similar to the legal systems our ancestors revolted against in the 1770s, which was a major reason for the United States seeking independence.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

The obstructions of justice by the crown were so egregious that they needed two lines of the Declaration of Independence to cover how awful the system was.

America had already seen systems where an abundance of caution was the law in Puritan New England with the Salem Witch Trials. I do not need to go into detail about what happened there; it is why my family left New England. It was a horrible time.

In response to the abuses of the crown and with the memory of what happened in the Salem Witch Trials, the anti-Federalists pushed to ensure the federal government had less power to prevent a repeat of either situation. The result was the Bill of Rights, which includes many important liberties that protect our rights in courts of law.

The legal protections in the Bill of Rights are good and we know what happens today when they are not followed. If you study modern examples of Russia, the treatment of Palestinians, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, or North Korea, it becomes obvious why laws such as the right to face your accuser, due process, the right to a public jury, habeas corpus, and the right to a lawyer among others are essential to a fair legal system.

The problem with many “alternative methods” of justice is they still enforce a parallel justice system that is as brutal as possible in terms of punishment but without the protections of the American legal system. What inevitably is created is a system that is easily exploited by nefarious actors who seek to control others.

The solution to ending injustice is not to abolish the legal protections created to reduce abuses of power but to ensure that such legal rights are protected for all people.

We must remember where we came from as we seek a more just world.

It’s a fluke of history that Apple turned into the world’s most profitable company. It didn’t have to be this way.

PDAs have been around since the 1980s, but they were clunky and had small screens until the Apple Newton in 1993. The Apple Newton lasted until 1998 and was replaced with the far inferior iPod in 2002. This gave Palm time to build on the strength of the Apple Newton and grow a highly successful business, which lasted until the iPhone was released. If Steve Jobs had built on the Newton instead of shelving it when he was brought back as CEO, Palm would not have had the opportunity to grow like it did in the 2000s.

With Apple out of the picture, Palm became the dominant player in PDAs, and Blackberry became the dominant smartphone player.

iPods before the iPod touch were good, but they were not significantly better than other MP3 players of the era. Apple did not have a significant edge.

Palm had everything it needed to become a trillion-dollar company in the 2000s. It had smartphones and PDAs, but it did not combine them into one device. So, while Palm was busy working on their PDA devices, they did not see the now obvious opportunity to combine them. The last few Palm devices released had a full touchscreen, but they didn’t add phone functionality.

Blackberry had its standard setup at the time, with the full tactile keyboard. But they did not innovate past their original design until it was too late.

I believe that in 2005 Palm was the company best set to become the dominant smartphone manufacturer. Apple was out of the PDA market until the iPod touch was released, Microsoft was busy releasing Windows Vista, and the opportunity was there.

But Palm missed it.

It’s easy to imagine Palm releasing a version of the Palm TX with phone functionality in 2005 and changing the world.

But they just didn’t do it.

So today iPhone is the most popular phone in the world.