Demo-Republican Congressional Health Care Debate Disregards the Poor and Veterans

U.S. veterans and the poor typically receive less than excellent medical care in the United States. Underfunding adequate medical care for the working poor and veterans prevent the poor and veterans from having good health for work in addition to sustaining pain and endangering their lives. It would be practical for the congress to create a unified national, public health care service exclusively for poor U.S. citizens, legal residents and veterans and leave them out of the ongoing health care debates of the wealthy, the middle class and corporation providing health care and/or insurance coverage.

Quality health care for the poor is not a luxury. Not yet age 60 I had to give up my home building lot to pay for hernia surgical repair incurred from an on the job roofing injury while self-employed. Obviously I had no insurance or worker’s compensation coverage. In a real world entrepreneurial contract laboring market to be able to afford bread, bike tires and notebook computers if not building materials, injuries happen. Risk is an implicit part of survival enterprise the comfortably corporate or government employed do not experience or comprehend. Neither do the working poor entrepreneurs have the established opportunity to bargain for good prices for work such as established, licensed contractors have.

There are innumerable ways the poor may incur uncovered, uninsured injuries. It is not realistic to expect the public to pay for a lifetime of insurance for the poor who may only have one or two injuries before reaching Medicare eligibility age. What would be useful would be the creation of a national referral and hospital system for the poor and for veterans able to treat at no cost common injuries and illnesses for the poor and complete coverage for veterans with any days of national service.

Citizens who have untreated substantive injuries and illnesses will need to collect food stamps, welfare, or some other forms of social sustenance if they cannot work. Citizens who are not productive because of ill health are not an economic theory but a national fact costly to the public and economically inefficient. The practical remedy is to repair these injuries and illnesses and return citizens to the eligible work force.

With a combined citizen-veterans worker’s comp like referral/screening and medical treatment program costs only as needed are required without perennial insurance deficits. The existence of a medical infrastructure capable of treating large numbers of veterans if needed in a future casualty intensive conflict would also create better preparedness for national emergency.

The wealthy and middle class may well haggle about neo-social, neo-corporatist national medical insurance policies. Neither the U.S. poor nor veterans benefit much from such inefficient and cost-redundant structures, yet the Congress doesn’t really understand why, and do not seem to care much if the nation ditches pragmatic and efficient medical service to create a healthier America and U.S. economy.

Jonathan Edwards; America's Theologian

The Great Theologians from time to time enabled Christians to better understand the relationship of God to humanity and the Universe as explained in the Bible. Edwards believed God to be wholly other than what human beings might perceive or comprehend drawing upon experience and the world. Yet God's holiness is also a kind of radiant beauty. His moral virtue or perfection is above anything fallen humanity might understand or apprehend intellectually or cognitively, and his moral perfection or supreme good is also beauty for-itself.

Edwards’s ideas about God as an absolute holiness differs a little from that of the neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus' thoughts about the emanations of The One. Plotinus placed aesthetics somewhat farther away from a description of the highest ranking qualitative characteristics of The Intelligence and virtue. Virtue for Plotinus is also beyond the implicit realm of the One from whom all created issues would be 'outside' or contingent and from which we humans might not discern anything not explicitly revealed by God about His nature.

Nevertheless we like Edward's idea that virtue and goodness in addition to love are essential attributes of the nature of the Creator's Holiness. In our mundane existence we only occasionally are given to perceive things actually Holy. Jesus Christ with his garments and appearance turned entirely white in conference with Abraham, Moses and Elijah, and Moses returning with the tablets in a wizened appearance; these experiences of the glory of God as beautiful Holiness in-itself and for-others may have been the kind of thing Edwards was referring to.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/edwards/

In the beauty of nature we may find inspiration leading in to an appreciation of the Holiness of God. In Jesus Christ we find the holiness of perfect moral example and of sacrifice as well as that of God.

Using a Deck of Cards for a Temporary Chess Set

An ordinary deck of playing cards is perfectly suitable for use as a temporary chess set.

Making a chess set from a deck of playing cards may be cost-effective if one is living in a Gulag, waiting in an airport because of a snowstorm cancellation of flights or stranded in Alaska without an outboard motor.

One has red and black cards to serve as red and black chess pieces. The king and queen choices are obvious, while the jacks may be bishops, aces serve as knights and tens act as rooks. Single digit cards are sufficient for pawns (with one spare).

Because one only needs one set of single digit pawns for each side there are enough left to serve as eight square markers across and down. If a pencil or piece of chalk is available then one may draw a grid from those cards.

Heat Shield of Plasma or Electro-magnetic Fields?

In asking this question, and researching it a little I discovered that electro-magnetic heat shields are under development. I will post the link to an article on that and the rest of my initial comment...

http://news.softpedia.com/news/New-Magnetic-Heat-Shields-Under-Development-128166.shtml

What about using a stream of plasma or an eletromagntic field from the leading end of a high speed space launch module to deflect particles that would cause friction and heat? That is, could a close plasma or electromagnetic field act as a heat shield instead of a heat resistant coating?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_(physics)

Others have considered the idea. There are numerous configurations making and shaping plasma as there are for making geometry models for calibi-yau manifolds.

http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-261559.html

If using an electro-magnetic accellerator to launch a space insertion module along a 30 mile launch tube in a vaccum, the spacecraft would have quite a lot of energy in it already some of which could be spent for use in a heat shield as well ass for exiting the Earth's atmosphere and gravitational field (so far as to achieve orbit).

Ablative heat shields create implicit limits on the design of space insertion modules that could be avoid with plasma or electro-magnetic shields.

http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Heat:shield.htm

Alaska's Chronic Right Wing Environmental Necrosis

Alaska Governor Sean Parnell formerly Sarah Palin’s Lt. Governor has made two economic proposals to advance energy production construction in the state. The first is a reduction of taxes on oil corporations in order to stimulate exploration and collaterally global warming and the second is to dam the Susitna River-one of the largest rivers per volume of flow in North America.

The Susitna River dam proposal is not just business as usual. It is a retrograde technical project environmentally from the right providing a good example of the disinterest of the right in learning fundamental lessons about environmental conservation from history. Alaska’s environment is chronically degraded on a number of fronts from mining, logging, oil production, over-hunting, over-fishing and damming.

Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage has a policy of shooting rather than relocating wolves callously degrading the gene pool of another threatened species. The right is a tool of global corporatism with a propensity for violence and procuring the loyalty of violent thugs. Reasoning like industrial introverts the right assumes that all opposition to global environmental destruction must be of the left. The concept that independents that are just smarter who support advanced low-entropy economic infrastructure development conducive to environmental recovery of health are in opposition. Such individuals may also have a better interpretation of the best application of capitalism to contemporary society with increased competition through a cap on the size of corporations.

Former Governor Sarah Palin advanced a good progressive taxation policy on Alaska oil producers setting higher taxes as the price per barrel increased. Governor Sean Parnell is seeking to role back that progressive oil tax in order to stimulate oil development. Obviously if the state can do more with less it could afford to be less reliant on federal handouts.

The once salmon rich Columbia and Willamette River drain that were the home for millions and millions of Chinook salmon now allow annual returns of fewer than a thousand per year on occasion as a consequence the history of northwest dam construction and insult to the waterways. The Federal government has spent public money for decades in a mostly failed effort to return health to the rivers.

The Parnell initiative to dam the Susitna River would radically alter in a deleterious way natural relations of water ecosystem interaction such that shoreline and aquatic ecosystems would be instantly degraded. Changes in water oxygen content, river flow patterns and of water temperatures in addition to the end of natural free flow with the ponderous obstruction to natural use would follow imposition of a large dam. River damming is equivalent to removing a human’s lungs and liver. Lung bypasses infusing oxygen directly into arteries may be technically possible, yet salmon and a number of other species may find changes in the ‘flavor’ of water harmful while the waters above the dam would experience substantial adverse affects.

Fundamentally the dam is a gross insult to Alaska ecology. It will accumulate and accelerate the concentration of pollutants behind the dam and of course provide destabilizing transformative environmental effects reducing quantity and quality of salmon fishing in Alaska.

The Yukon River drainage has already experienced an extreme reduction in number of salmon bring radical restructuring of human social use of the region.

Alaska is experiencing several other insults to its environmental quality from the right creating the need for more public spending to attempt to conserve the health of the region.

The right unfortunately have diminished competence in comprehension of America’s and one of the world’s best theologians- Jonathan Edwards ranking with Augustine, Athanasius, Barth and a few others. Edwards believed that aspects of God’s glory are revealed in nature. God is transcendently good, and beauty is good-hence the good and beauty if nature and environmental health may be regarded as a reveling of a quality of God rather than an old shoe to toss and purchase another one made of plastic. If we regard it as possible for human beings to perceive anything of God at all, t should be the good found in nature and in right relationship. Augustine and Calvin each believed that God is the author and sustainer of all things (hence the determinism); therefore humans should seek to let the providence of God develop low-entropy

Human relationships to and uses of the bounty of the environment instead of destroying it. Original sin including ecosystem wastage, despoliation and destruction is an inherent aspect of the fallen sin nature of mankind running like intemperate teen-agers over the ecology of the Earth. Catholics may believe that evil nature is reduced through a gradual becoming more Christ-like while Protestants tend to believe stress that the original sin nature is simultaneously present with grace following salvation by Jesus Christ and sin is only displaced through grace-yet the practical difference are not much if one regards the upstream source writings of Augustine, Calvin or Edwards.

Polar bear are an indicator species of the effects of global warming. As they have existed for quite a long time in Alaska and the northern littoral of the Arctic Ocean their extinction would definitely be an excellent indication that the environment had substantially changed. Obviously in the past human predation on polar bear nearly extirpated the species until they were given circumpolar protection from hunting. Now of course the basic problem to the survival of polar bear has expanded to include anthropogenic climate change. The pervasive increase of onshore and offshore trans-Arctic oil development contributes high latitude carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and additional greenhouse gases to the rarified air.

Another invidious development effort on Alaska’s Bristol Bay river drainage would put a large open pit mine named the Pebble Mine in a position to leach toxic mining and metals chemicals into the Bay as well as adversely impact countless small contributory streams that are the breeding areas for salmon. Sedimentation in waters draining into Bristol Bay and sedimentation, thermal and chemical composition pollutants following the proposed Susitna River Dam may be fiduciary externalities for politicians and developers seeking instant quick profits but they are assaults from the right on the environment they believe is inconsequential-as might those watching cartoons.

The federal government is considering restrictions on select S.E. Alaska fiords in order to protect the local seal population from being spilled from ice rafts on which they reside sometimes in summer in order to raise seal pups. Cruise ships by the thousands produce waves that spill the seal into the water. Surprisingly the body temperature of wildlife such as seals has environmentally adapted to particular conditions pre-existing changes brought on by human development of machines and the environmental changes of machines. Seals for example, if spilled into the water experience food-fuel, heating and energy changes in the season for which they are not adapted and the survival of those seals are endangered. There are other such species in Alaska that require a very narrow thermal habitation range seasonally in order to reproduce that anthropogenic environmental changes endanger.

S.E. Alaska’s fisheries bring in more than a billion dollars of revenue annually and are under assault from mining up rivers in Canada that flow into Alaska and reach waters of the Alexander Archipelago. Like the decrepit State of Washington, the prospects for long term environmental health in Alaska are grim as it shall likely die the death of thousands of cuts over time.

Japanese Whale Hunting, Origin of Chocolate, Tongass Forest Conservation, Exporting Alaska Fish Etc.

Federal efforts to move its Tongass National forest management policy in S.E. Alaska toward one of conservation and restoration rather than subsidizing plundering of old growth forest for loggers made progress. The bottoms 20% of Americans-those underemployed or unemployed need work and prosperity so life in the U.S.A. isn’t like living on a prison planet. If one gets a good job-maybe cooking- it’s necessary in these lean times to keep it until they need to pry one’s cold dead fingers off the spatula. The U.S. Government hasn’t had the same tenacity on border security and keeping foreign labor import supply down.

A productive river for salmon devastated from messy logging in the 1970s is being restored while the 2nd growth forests instead of old growth forests will increasingly be sacrificed to the logging industry for cellulose building materials. The old growth forest remaining in the Tongass is just a rump at about 10% of the original.

S.E. Alaska is also the summer home to many migratory whales. Some wonder if exports of Alaska fish to Japan processed in Japanese owned seafood processing facilities in Alaska should be allowed to continue while the Japanese continue to hunt world whales for ‘research’ dining (To answer the question; does tabasco or soy go better with whale?). The Japanese government values Alaska fish and if it wants to continue to snag vast numbers of high-quality protein from Alaska it should make peace with whales and vacate pursuit of the Antarctic and world whale population. Peace should not translate into Japanese as 'piece'.

Wanton destruction of the environment and whales is a consequence of primitive human characteristics inherited from the beginning of mankind’s development of society. It was just 4000 years ago that chocolate was first developed from fermented seeds in Meso-America eventually to become a royal beverage. Chaco Canyon’s Pueblo Bonito imported a chocolate drink in containers from Mexico about 1100 a.d. Royalty dominating quality food supply is not limited to chocolate in the savage era of human culture (no not The Second World War).

Human beings first arrived at Crete by boats or rafts between 130,000 and 700,000 years ago. It is reasonable to believe that if Homo erectus could make it to Crete across the Mediterranean Sea a few souls might have reached America by boat four or five thousand years ago. Whales have lived in the world’s oceans far longer obviously, yet the primitive urge to eat everything that is edible still drives mankind as much as fight or flight and the rituals of war. While the morality of eating creatures with the largest brains on the planet is debatable, the need to conserve a healthy world biodiversity is not. Genetic diversity is a requirement for non-inbred bio-diversity in populations of whales, snow leopards, North American wolves and countless other unique forms of biological creation. Mediterranean Sea

Alaska State Government Perennially Confused About Pipeline Options

The Alaska state government for several decades has vacillated in pursuit of various options to bring in oil or gas revenue to pay for the government operations as the North Slope oil fields are depleted. Even during the 1980s research and development studies for state or corporate financed construction of pipelines to bring more oil or natural gas to tidewater in south central Alaska or Chicago through Canada were main political interests. Nothing ever was constructed from those studies.

Former Governors from Wally Hickel to Tony Knowles and Sarah Palin along with countless candidates have made the construction of a natural gas pipeline a political plank. The simplest thing to build would be an LNG plant at Valdez or Anchorage and a pipeline to it, yet the practical is always set aside for the pursuit of ecological boondoogles.

Former Governor Sarah Palin ram-rodded through a half billion dollar state subsidy to a Canadian Corporation-Trans-Canada in an effort to get an oil corporation to build a pipeline and jobs for Canadians. With the discovery of new methods of fracturing natural gas from formations in the 48 states, the price of natural gas has decreased the interest in building a pipeline from the North Slope through Canadian pipeline infrastructure by special corporate interests. Environmentally that may be a collateral improvement.

The city of Anchorage also has a former state Governor-Bill Sheffield, in a powerful job as a Port Director implementing a construction project over cost, over time and budget. A Port of Anchorage expansion that is sputtering on with building errors reportedly could cost hundreds of millions of dollars too much for completion. The City must close libraries and forgo building warm pedestrian and bike transit malls for winter to finance construction errors.

The global price of gas and oil fluctuates as a regular instability adversely affecting U.S. economics. Building a pipeline and/or gas liquefaction plant at Valdez or Anchorage from the North Slope via Fairbanks flowing through the existing trans-Alaska pipeline corridor might at any given time bring in low or high revenues and royalties as empirical reciprocal values vary. The state and corporations wish to build when the price of natural is high or when supply is diminshed, yet of course the market is partly manipulated and supplies and applications are distorted to maximize corporate profit. The state might find an unreliable market price a reciprocol of political as well as geophysical supply factors. Yet as the state can afford to build the line itself and auction liquefied natural gas to world buyers generally at low or high prevailing market prices it has little reason to produce more rhetoric than gas.

Environmental effects for fracturing basement rock formations in the 48 states have already generated new pollution, toxic water reserves and flaming faucets. War in the Middle East can cut off oil supply and quickly drive up fossil fuel prices. A state government should build a pipeline infrastructure for gas carefully and in compliance with advanced ecological synergy concepts ahead of price fluctuations on the global market. A retarded construction rice changes in a volatile market has a good chance of being out of step at any rate. In a national emergency the pre-existence of a local gas pipeline and LNG plant would mitigate the supply issues. Needless to mention it is important to expect federal investment in lightweight car batteries without rare earth metals and a policy of electric cars without use of fossil fuels.

If Alaska has extra liquefied natural gas it can sell to China on the spot market perhaps a number of Chinese global warming gases producing coal fired power plants could be replaced with some burning cleaner natural gas. Natural gas spent in power plants instead of developing fuel cell generators, superconductors, wind and solar energy input) too quickly reduces national natural gas reserves.