ESSAYS

Do We Stand in Outrage or Complicity

July 29, 2018 | Carvalko

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During a court hearing, Friday, July 27, a government attorney argued that the court-ordered reunification deadlines to reunite children with mothers and fathers did not apply to parents who have been deported. Thankfully, the judge ruled that deported parents are included in the order. Health and Human Services Secretary, Azar, indicated that of more than 11,800 children being held by HHS, fewer than 3,000 were separated from parents. The rest are unaccompanied minors—, or so they tell us. He said about 100 of the separated children are 5 or younger. I call them babies.     I ask ev..

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FATHER’S DAY

July 13, 2018 | Carvalko

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I couldn’t be in my wife’s skin when she carried our child for nine months. I couldn’t feel the embryo transform into a fetus that stretched her belly and burdened her body, but that day by day revealed more and more the marvel that would grant me fatherhood. When she gave birth, my bystander status ended, I had to learn much, but the one thing I knew instinctively was that for as long as I lived, I’d do whatever it took to keep my child safe. I’m sure this sense of responsibility comes to all parents, in the same way at about the same time. So it’s no surprise we see this commitment acting it..

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July Resonates

July 12, 2018 | Carvalko

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July resonates for lots of reasons, and, this year because I find it incredulous that President Trump praises Putin, expresses faith in Kim Jong-un’s willingness to denuclearize, while trashing our NATO allies. I’m left of center politically, yet, I believe all Americans should contribute to our democracy. For some, they choose get involved in the political process, others in civic activities, still others teaching their children the values we hold dear in a democratic way of governing. Still others choose military service. The past 4 generations of my family served, including my currently ser..

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Gross Misunderstanding About Immigrants

July 11, 2018 | Carvalko

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There seems to be a gross misunderstanding about the rights of the families being ripped apart along the border, so I thought I’d provide some definitions of whom it is we are referring to, that is the children we are now incarcerating and separating from their mothers. The word incarcerate seems harsh, but I’d spent too much time with men and women locked behind bars, not to know what a prison looks like. An asylum-seeker is someone who is seeking international protection abroad, but hasn’t yet been recognized as a refugee. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 14), of which the..

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AN EMPTY EXECUTIVE ORDER

July 11, 2018 | Carvalko

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President Trump signed an executive order today mandating for children to stay with their parents in detention while their asylum claims are processed. This executive order seeks to modify the Flores Agreement, which states that children should not be held in detention for more than 20 days. Denise Bell, refugee and migrant rights researcher at Amnesty International USA, issued this statement: “Over the last few weeks, we have seen an outcry from people around the world denouncing the cruel and unnecessary separation of more than 2,000 babies and children from their parents. In response, the T..

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HAPPY 4TH OF JULY

July 3, 2018 | Carvalko

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What the hell did the Patriots fight for anyway? To end up flushing social justice down the toilet? Every day 14 million kids, representing 19% nationwide, go to bed, and school, hungry; health insurers estimated $25 billion in profits, up 30 percent from 2016, while 35 million remain uninsured; 2.2. million incarcerated, many in for-profit prisons working for 20 cents an hour; children ripped from asylum seekers protected under international law, and put into prison as young as 1 year old; a fascist leaning leader who debases the presidency, enriching himself, and fawning over Russian and N...

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Defending Against Opaque Algorithmic Meddling in Free Elections

June 13, 2018 | Carvalko

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Democracies need both a free Internet and free speech, and judging from the election tampering that has occurred recently throughout Europe and the United States, time has come to consider instituting standards and global policies.This is the subject of my new paper in this Quarters Technology and Science. If you want to read more, click here to read the full essay "Defending Against Opaque Algorithmic Meddling in Free Elections"..

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Storms and Self-Evident Truths

January 18, 2018 | Carvalko

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Every day, Americans struggle against one or both natural and man-made disasters. President Trump personifies not one, but both--, natural in the pathological sense, because his behavior, presumably outside his control, defies normality, and in the man-made sense, because he chooses bigotry, offensive sexual behavior, and ignorance, as a way of life. If he chooses ignorance, it’s his prerogative. Choosing to accost women is not, it’s actionable. The “Me Too” movement may finally put a stop to what the law has long overlooked. Trump’s racist remarks during this past week’s belittling of Haitian..

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APPOINTMENT OF THE PLANET’S POLICY CUSTODIAN

December 14, 2017 | Carvalko

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APPOINTMENTOFTHEPLANETSCUSTODIAN..

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WHO SHOULD OWN IN-THE-BODY MEDICAL DATA IN THE AGE OF EHEALTH

January 16, 2017 | Carvalko

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Within the next decade, reactive medical practices will evolve into what has been popularly coined “P4” medicine – predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory – where examinations will take place at home, where devices connected to the body, externally and internally, will send medical data into the cloud, where expert systems will analyze and determine wellness and disease, as well as tweak, in real time, personalized electronic prescriptions for medical treatment and anatomical enhancement. Patients should own this data, and here is why. (more…)..

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APPOINTMENT OF THE PLANET’S NEXT POLICY CUSTODIAN

January 16, 2017 | Carvalko

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Scott Pruitt, President-elect Trump’s selection to run the Environmental Protection Agency by all accounts believes that global warming doesn’t involve human activity, such as coal burning, driving or deforestation. We should admire his skepticism. After all, for centuries scientists have proposed countless theories, widely accepted at the time, but later proven false. Perhaps he knows some newly discovered facts or explanations that would lead to a plausible theory that humankind isn’t the driving factor behind global warming. I look forward to his upcoming congressional confirmation hearings..

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How Trumpism Slipped into Our Political Zeitgeist

December 3, 2016 | Carvalko

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How did Trump, a man with so little substance, become the prospective leader of the free world. Why did sixty million Americans vote him in, in full view of the man’s expressed biases, prejudices (alt-right wing ideals) and false beliefs about the world (from climate change to ethical norms)? The answer is buried deep in the socio-psychological drivers of a nation’s dominant population, which on some level refuses to fully integrate, ethnically, religiously or racially, and on another level resents how life has turned out, economically at least.  When these two drivers converge, scapegoats app..

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REVISITING THE DIATRIBES OF THIS PAST ELECTION

November 23, 2016 | Carvalko

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I make it a practice to look back on what I write, especially when what I’d written takes a social or political stance. It helps me reflect on my arguments and emotions, and whether I would have expressed myself differently, had I known how the future unfolded. Today I revisited an open letter I posted seven weeks ago as the nation was in the throes of the presidential election. As one who remains unconvinced that President-elect Trump was this countries best choice, I am prepared to let the next few months play out, and then reconsider his administration’s achievements, for better or worse. I..

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WRITE LIKE IT’S YOUR CLOSING ARGUMENT

August 19, 2016 | Carvalko

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A recent ABA Journal article called to mind the similarity between writers of fiction, politicians and trial lawyers. Particularly,  our susceptibility to believing in a story, when told by a master narrator, even when we may have witnessed the event giving rise to the plot or when the underlying facts about an incident are abhorrent to our political ideology. This happens in part, because we remain open to alternative accounts.  In the matter of disputes giving rise to a trial, lawyers know that after observing an important event, witnesses will remember it based on its impact, and their actu..

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DÉJÀ VU Dateline: July 27, 2016, Redux

July 31, 2016 | Carvalko

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Last week I wrote an essay about why the date July 27, rang a bell. It was about why Trump’s nod to the Russian’s to infiltrate U.S. politics was barren of any sense of history or the sacrifices made by Cold War veterans. Then I listened to Khizr Kahn’s assertion that Trump “sacrificed nothing and no one,” and I saw how these two themes converged. This is a long-winded way of saying I decided to restate my case in summary form. For those of you that know me, I am left of center on the subject of the country’s militaristic bravado and Pentagon budget. Yet, I believe all American’s  should contr..

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DÉJÀ VU Dateline: July 27, 2016

July 28, 2016 | Carvalko

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  DÉJÀ VU Dateline: July 27, 2016   For some reason the date yesterday kept bouncing around in my head. Maybe because it was that one year ago I gave a keynote address at a local ceremony, in Las Vegas, New Mexico to honor Korean War veterans, on the 62nd anniversary of the Armistice. I have always had a special place in my heart for these veterans, for lot’s of reasons, first having been an impressionable paperboy during that war, where I read headlines every day about its brutality, or because I served with dozens of G.I.s, who had served in Korea. These guys, mostly my NCOs and Of..

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CHAIN LETTERS: WHETHER TO ANSWER, FORWARD OR DELETE

July 15, 2016 | Carvalko

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My dear friends, with whom I spent some of the greatest moments in childhood, we have long headed down different politically ideological paths over the last 60-odd years. Yes, 60-odd, since those dozen or so long New England summers and icy winters, before we had no real stake in the world, except one that made growing-up fun, before the war, the Vietnam war, when we scattered to the four compass points, before the neighborhood we loved let our parents sell the homes we grew up in to people that did not look like us, people of non-European ethnicities, of different hues shades and color.  Was..

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PHARMACO-ELECTRONICS

December 30, 2015 | Carvalko

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Future medical prescriptions will take the form of software algorithms and other computer mediated methods that instantiate in-the-body electronic prostheses. To prepare society for the effects of electronic medical prescription delivery, we need to consider improving regulation to insure our security and to engage in a dialogue regarding the apparent ethical implications.  As in-the-body and wearable processors become commonplace within the next decade, reactive medical practices will evolve into predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory medicine,  where devices send physiologic..

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