John Hinckley, Jr., the man who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981, will soon be freed from the psychiatric hospital where he has resided for 35 years.

Hinckley attacked Reagan outside a Washington, D.C., hotel on March 30, 1981. He shot Reagan in the chest, Press Secretary James Brady in the head, and wounded a policeman and a Secret Service agent. Hinckley was tackled and arrested at the scene, while Reagan was rushed to the hospital. The president survived, offering at the hospital the now-famous quip “I hope you’re all Republicans” to the doctors. The bullet missed his heart by an inch.

Brady was paralyzed from the waist down.

• He cannot speak with media. Any media contact by him or his family will constitute a violation of his release.
• No drugs, no weapons.
• No contact with the family members of his victims, which include the Reagan family, Brady family, Thomas Delahanty or Timothy McCarthy.
• He cannot travel to areas where current or former presidents, Congress or senior executives or “United States Secret Service protectees” are found.
• He can use the internet but cannot Google himself, research weapons, porn, or his victims.
• He may not set-up any social media accounts without unanimous permission from his treatment team.

Hinckley will be released as early as August 5, 2016.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.

On Tuesday morning, August 2, 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s speech in Loudoun County, Virginia, was continuously interrupted by a crying baby. Eventually, Trump could ignore it no longer.

“Don’t worry about that baby, I love babies,” Trump said, to the delight of the crowd.

“I love babies!” he repeated. “I hear that baby crying. I like it!”

“I LIKE IT!”

“What a baby!” he continued, a strange sort of grimace passing over his face.

“What a beautiful baby. Don’t worry about it… It’s young and beautiful and healthy.”

Trump then resumed talking of China, who has “ripped us to shreds” by devaluing its currency, but was forced to address the wailing once again. “Actually I was only kidding, you can get the baby out of here,” he said in a low voice, jabbing his thumb toward the door. The crowd laughed.

“That’s all right, don’t worry,” he said to the mother as she made an exit.

“I think she actually believed me that I loved having a baby crying while I’m speaking,” he joked. A smug, disconcerting smile appeared on his lips.

Then, randomly: “People don’t understand.”

Watch the entire video via CNN.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.

On Sunday, August 7, 2016, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote a response to critics of the idea that nations should “base policy on the weight of evidence” — and that citizens of Earth who support the idea should become members of a virtual nation, “Rationalia.” The thought of Rationalia was first conjured by Taylor Milsal, a marketing executive, in casual conversation with Tyson and other scientists like particle physicist Brian Cox.

Tyson tweeted about it in June: “Earth needs a virtual country, Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy should be based on the weight of evidence.”

Of course, around the web, some were quick to take this one sentence and attempt to tear it to shreds, jumping at the change to “educate” Tyson and let him know science — the gatekeeper of evidence — isn’t always accurate, and can result in terribly immoral policies.

Thus some brought up the eugenics of the Nazis, and of course other crimes against humanity like the pseudo-science that justified black slavery and Jim Crow, conclusions that homosexuality was a sickness, and so on. A contributor for U.S. News & World Report insisted the whole idea was nonsense because if you don’t “subdivide data” you can get the wrong conclusions (here he used batting averages and medical tests as examples), and a writer for New Scientist whined about how “nobody really knows what science means,” how “rationality is subjective,” and that “scientists can’t tell us if it’s right to kill a baby with a developmental disability, despite how well they might marshal evidence about the baby’s life prospects or her capacity to think or move on her own.”

Tyson’s response first pointed out the obvious:

A common critique was the question of where such a country would get its morals, and how other other ethical issues might be established or resolved. The last I reviewed the US Bill of Rights, there was no discussion of morals there either. Nowhere does it say “Thou Shalt Not Kill”. Meanwhile, there’s an entire Amendment — Number 3 — that prevents the military from bunking in your home without your permission.

Across time and culture, morals have evolved, typically by rational analysis of the effects and consequences of a previously held moral, in the light of emergent knowledge, wisdom, and insight.

Tyson explains that “in Rationalia, the Constitution stipulates that a body of convincing evidence needs to exist in support of an idea before any Policy can established based on it.” This does not mean checks and balances must be obliterated, that scientists and politicians will be allowed to implement any old policy that will kill, imprison, experiment on, or otherwise harm “lesser peoples” or “undesirables.” Literally all he is saying is this:

In Rationalia, for example, if you want to introduce capital punishment you’d need to propose a reason for it. If the reason is to deter murder, then an entire research machine would be put into place (if it did not already exist) to see whether, in fact, capital punishment deters murder. If it does not, then your proposed policy fails, and we move on to other proposals. In Rationalia, if you want to fund art in schools, you simply propose a reason why. Does it increase creativity in the citizenry? Is creativity good for culture and society at large? Is creativity good for everyone no matter your chosen profession? These are testable questions. They just require verifiable research to establish answers. And then, the debate ends quickly in the face of evidence, and we move on to other questions.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.