Implications of the ‘bread and peace’ model for the 2008 US presidential election

Presidential election outcomes are well explained by just two objectively measured fundamental determinants: (1) weighted-average growth of per capita real personal disposable income over the term, and (2) cumulative US military fatalities owing to unprovoked, hostile deployments of American armed forces in foreign conflicts. The US economy weakened at the beginning of 2008 and average per capita real income growth probably will be only around 0.75% at Election Day. Moreover cumulative US military fatalities in Iraq will reach 4,300 or more. Given those fundamental conditions, the Bread and Peace model predicts a Republican two-party vote share centered on 48.2%.     

Assessing child maltreatment risk in the recently divorced parent-child relationship

Reports of single-parent-child relationships characterized by child maltreatment have increased in recent years. The present paper discusses Belsky's child maltreatment/parenting model concerning parenting and the etiology of this problem. The model may serve as a source of conceptual unification of this risk in single-parent homes. It is proposed that the model also may have heuristic value in identifying highest risk single-parent families who warrant intervention.     

The Injustice of Enforced Equal Access to Transplant Operations: Rethinking Reckless Claims of Fairness

The globalizing or totalizing imposition of a particular understanding of justice, fairness, or equality, as seen, for example, in Canada's single health care system, which forbids the sale of private insurance and the purchase of better basic health care, cannot be justified in general secular terms because of the following limitations: (1) the plurality of understandings of justice, fairness, and equality, and (2) the inability to establish one understanding as canonical. The secular state lacks plausible moral authority for the coercive imposition of one such account on peaceable, consenting adults. This state of affairs, with regard to the weakness of human moral epistemological powers, means that the secular state fails to have the moral authority to forbid coercively the sale and purchase of organs. It further lacks the secular, moral authority to impose equal access to organ transplantations. Assertions of such authority amount to reckless claims of fairness, and for this reason, health care policy must be set within the constraints of limited, constitutional regimes.