Alphie’s Recollection of the Parnell Disaster of Sixty-One ©2011Gary C. Gibson (fiction)

Governor Parnell was successful in getting the legislature of the state of Alaska in the year of our Lord 2011 to appropriate sixty-five million dollars for the construction of a dam across the mighty Susitna River of Alaska. Premonitions of Earthquakes of unimaginable scale and filtered through the Governor’s thought even as he sign the papers making the project so, yet he disregarded the warnings.

In the original Tananina language the name of the river was spelled Sushitna. That name was changed in 1847 because of the problem of its superficial meaning in English, and the meaning of ‘Sandy River’ was lost. The Parnell disaster of 2061 when the Susitna River dam broke sending a tidal wave over the shifted land to drown Willow, Wasilla and Anchorage before rush down Cook Inlet sending bodies and other debris in the wave to overturn fleeing fishing vessels and destroy a few villages was a consequence of anti-ecospheric energy planning.

It was easy to foresee that a few sub-nuclear thermite bombs dropped in the glaciers of the Alaska Range that provide water for the Susitna River drainage could overwhelm the expected spill capacity of the dam. Airborne terrorist placing aircraft on auto-pilot with inflatable blond dummies with Viking helmets in the pilot and co-pilot seats infiltrated Alaskan airspace easily. With the annual flow of the Susitna River drainage increasing annually because of global warming of the glaciers the original flow processing capacity of the dam was estimated for the condition of the second half of the century.

The Governor’s desire to provide electrical power for the ‘rail belt’ along the Parks highway could have been met by construction of fuel cell power plants or thermal energy development, yet neither provided the potential for construction kickbacks from dam construction, lake front property or dam operations that the Susitna River dam presented. Hence it was reasonable to expect that the governor would set aside troubling concerns about the effect of the weight of the water of the new dam and lake on the stability of local plate tectonic arrays or the destruction of fish and wildlife habitat.

The Susitna River drainage and Alaska Range frequently experience earthquakes. The 1964 Alaska earthquake devastated Anchorage, and the city was overdue for another large earthquake in 2011.

The completion of the Susitna River Dam in 2020 provided several ominous portents of doom over the years. Continuous subsidence of the ground under the weight of the dam and the water of Lake Parnell made the dam subject to frequent high water capacity and over stressing. Unusually arm winters brought more low pressure systems and precipitation to the Alaska Range increasing spring runoff. Then one December night, with the pull of the gravity of the sun and moon, the thinkable disaster occurred; a magnitude 8.5 earthquake centered at the dam shifted the land mass forty feet ripping a giant gash in the middle of the dam that had already been burgeoning with snowmelt.

High on a hill 2500 feet above sea level, the former Alaskan Governor was up at 3am in his mansion drinking a comforting winter cup of hot chock and jack. Looking out at the sparkling city he loved he saw amidst the sparkling lights, moonlight and night the thinkable yet forgotten possible wave of doom appear crashing through the city tumbling homes and buildings before it.

Today, we of the Flatlands coalition seek to preserve the memory of the lost former fishing villages of the Susitna with a celebration and drum of recall.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susitna_River
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susitna_Hydroelectric_Project
http://www.pbs.org/harriman/explog/lectures/crossen1.html

Leaky U.S.-Mexico Border A Danger to U.S.A. & Mexico

Drug cartels and a vicious assortment of criminal enterprise gangs pile up against the border fence between the United States and Mexico because of the lucrative opportunities for smuggling drugs, guns, weapons of mass destruction and human beings into the United States through the porous border.

As many as 10,000 Mexicans are killed annually in gang wars for control of the best positions for smuggling. Until the border is made really secure-perhaps with three berms for electric patrol vehicles and three deep, concrete lined ditches in between, the value of smuggling over the border and the deaths and corrupt effects upon business will continue.

It is believed that the essential cause for a failure to secure the border is the constituency of U.S. federal politicos as millionaires like the cheap illegal Mexican labor that makes its way north to undermine wage negotiations for the poor in the United States. They care little about the tragedy that the unsecured border causes in Mexico.

The leaky border presents a danger to U.S. and Mexican security, even the legal ports of entry are unsecured allowing in vast quantities of illegal drugs and possibly weapons of mass destruction.

E-Gypped; Moo-Barrack and the Twitter Revolution

With the faint batteries drained sleeping outside in Alaska the Egyptian Twitter-revolution resembled a sort-of Super Bowl of Politics. It conconveniently fell into the break in football and baseball that leaves only basketball to listen to. Control of the main square of Cairo and political analysis of what that all means, Anderson Cooper being punched-these reports overshadowed the lead up to the superbowl best known for cheating 1200 fans out of tickets and giving them a paltry 300% mark up on the face price in compensation-nothing abouot free tickets for next year's game.

Gaming on the Internet and gaming in politics have some similarities for planners, yet of course in reality actual injuries and loss of property occurs that are irreversable. One hopes that politicans would be more intelligent and work better to plan for the real public good and not let things get out of hand, yet...

Twitter, Facebook and the democratization of e-media communications have sent up the first wave of e-populism’s potential revolutions to Egypt and elsewhere. Leftist tend to accentuate leftist revolutions of history, yet rightist revolutions occur too with different commentary treatment post hoc. In Egypt an instant populist revolution without roots appeared to knock down the straw man President Hosni Mubarak-yet so far he is still in office. One wonders if twitter revolutionaries need more education in classical revolutionary planning or economic.

If President Obama supplied any leadership, it has not surfaced. The President’s atheist, homosexual agenda for a global corporatist empire may touch upon the North African shore in an effort to fan the flames of twittendom across the Red Sea and upward to Iran. The receptivity of Africa and the Middle East to an encroaching militant, homosexual atheist Weimarization of politics possible in 3rd world strife may support collective authoritarianism of ignorance or evil elites-that’s difficult to anticipate from the outside.

The revolution could be a shill for global concentration of wealth and the corporatist agenda at any rate, as we regard President Obama himself.

Egypt’s problems with neo-revolutionary sentiment might develop within similar historical parameters as an upsurge of class consciousness (twittish organizers) stimulates public action by loosely organized mobs.

We might view the globalization of networks, raves and youth Facebook consciousness as another entry of the dragon of change into the playbook of political tools for power. President Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech may have set the match to local Egyptian political will to revolutionary power. In declaring his name; Barak Hussein Obama during the speech, gave a latent, subtle tone denouncing the inimical moo-barack. He may be perceived as throwing down a gauntlet to youth expected to run with the bone of support. President Obama would not tolerate a bovine antipodal mockery in the name of a foreign leader in this public relations age. President Mubarak may have unintentionally born the inimical name, yet he is not guiltless as a neo-dictocrat persecuting some of his countrypersons. When he leaves office he deserves to have his own modest retirement ranch in the Australian desert. Globalism presents many faces of change and subterfuge with levels of stygian construction.

E-gypt is said to lack political parties to field candidates in the September Presidential election. The U.S.A. also lacks at least candor in political party names. Honest names for parties for youth, the rich, homosexuals, women, non-white and so etc. Honest names should not trick voters or reinforce broadcast media dissimulation and support for concentrating wealth.

People want power and prosperity and freedom and not to be publicly twitted by adversaries, tortured or killed; the questions of contention are about how the power is allocate as well as of the best way of producing wealth for all and saving ecological health.

How to Unify Space-Time With Quantum Mechanics (a non-scientific comment)

Einstein’s generally theory of relativity unified time and space creating a new paradigm for viewing the composition of the Universe. New ways of considering the nature of the Universe arise now and then. Einstein provided a revolutionary perspective creating a new basis from which to speculate on cosmological topics.

Einstein’s sought to unify his general theory with the developing paradigm of quantum mechanics. Traditionally the philosophical view of matter has considered things to be made of progressively smaller pieces. Large dirt clods are made up of lots of smaller ones. After a Mars size chunk of mass slammed into the Earth early in its history debris cast into orbit around the Earth consolidated to form the moon. The same reduction of things to smaller sizes and a search for ‘fundamental particles’ gave us a theory of atoms, fermions and bosons (the particles that carry force), strings, rings and membranes.

What if Einstein’s theory of general relativity could be extended to the quantum mechanical realm? Perhaps mass does not actual exist as particles, waves, strings or membranes but is instead a phenomenon of space-time curvature at a very small scale.

Energy might be transferred not between sub-atomic particles such as quarks with a strong nuclear force. Instead the orbital states of particles might be curvature of space-time in particular states that might resemble particles in orbital states. Flattening out of orbital energy levels might be the equivalent of a wave passing through the ocean to another location, or upon a river arriving in places to form a stable, standing wave.

If energy is equivalent to space-time curvature in some way, and if the most compact curvature of space time has the most energy, it is consistent with space time singularities in black holes and perhaps the acceleration of the expansion of the space-time of the Universe.

The notion that a space-time media pre-existing the Universe was given an initial waveform pattern to initiate general and local distortions that would appear to be matter eventually to human observers is just one possible way of regarding the comoposition and/or construction of this Universe. Though the fundamental or proximal paradigm does not require theo-relativity to elaborate, considering logical principles in an Aquinian methodical way would not find necessary contradictio with that approach.

It is interesting that Thomas Acquinus lived to be just 49 years of age. He died in a riding accident hitting his head on a tree. That occurred just three months after he completed his Summa contra Gentiles and said that everything he had written so far was simply chaff. Some of the most deep human contempletive thinkers have discovered transcending paradigms in their investigations. It is difficult to believe that the possibilities for human understanding have approached any sort of conclusion.

Einstein's cosmological development was a sublime innovation for human knowledge. Perhaps it could be applied farther, in the quantum mechanical realm.

If there are a trillion, or a hundred trillion galaxies in the observable Universe, there are also 100 trillion connection in the human brain that support the creation of thought. There may be repeatable patterns at several levels in the Universe, and phase transitions too effectively creating more than the sum of the parts.

That last point seems evident when the Universe produces pluralism from a generally more monistic original condition at nominal Time equaled zero. One might describe an original monistic unified field of space time in various states of curvature and local distortion with string theory or particle-waves, perhaps distortion of space-time into mass occurs more readily in areas with increased gravitatational distortion.

New Federal Unemployment Policy Needed

A philosophy of triaging the unemployed for priority hire should develop a way to provide service to all of the chronically and rarely unemployed equally. It individually rate citizens with an unemployment misery index that gives tax credits to employers equivalent to the rating of each unemployed citizen.

Unemployment may be clustered in disadvantaged communities, yet disadvantaged individuals may exist within prosperous communities too, and they also need to benefit from a federal hiring policy and rating structure equally with those clustered together in community misery.

There is no reason in this computer rich era of U.S. history to fail to provide individual unemployment misery scores that accurately reflect the poverty of each individuals personal experience. Yet if a married couple is unemployed the average wealth or poverty of that couple should be considered. If a housewife or husband is married to a spouse making a million a year, she or he ought not get a high score for being unemployed and earning nothing laying by the pool drinking pina coladas and watching NFL Football the previous five years.

Such a fair policy might be exemplified;

1) Total the five year earnings history of a citizen and total days of unemployment in the past five years together to create an unemployed misery rating. Those with the highest misery scores would have the most value in tax credits for employers.

Areas with congregations of high value ratings would be good places to locate new business with low cost workers (with good tax credit value). Individuals isolated as the very poor amidst the decadent prosperous might also benefit as the wealthy sometimes enjoy getting a bargain too.

Create a national Medical Service for the Poor and Save Money

The concept that all American citizens rightly ought to have access to necessary medical treatment is broadly accepted. The problem is in delivery the lowest cost competent medical service to the poor. Just as public defenders are appointed to those that cannot afford them, free medical service is needed for the poor unable to afford it. The Republican notion that health care should be made ‘more affordable’ is nonsense regarding those that are broke or well below the poverty line-they need no cost health services.

Honest politicians (not really an oxymoron) would recognize that buying insurance for all poor Americans- 35 to 50 million citizens- would be far costlier to taxpayers than a plain and simple national medical service for those that make less than $ 10,000 annually. In a realistic political environment politicians would actually seek to get the most bang for the buck on medical coverage for the poor.

Creating a national medical service for the poor (perhaps also for Veterans in the same hospital service) would not compete with private enterprise (that includes the vast global corporate medical insurers too). Poor people given food stamps would not go spend money at Denny’s for dinner or Pepe’s Elegant Taco Universe if the government did not provide the food stamps-they would go hungry like as not. Neither would poor people with injuries or illnesses go to Dr. Rolls Hilton the III’s medical suite for treatment as an alternative to a national medical service. Instead, they would go to emergency rooms and everyone else from government to corporate and taxpayers and shareholders soak up the cost with a little work going to bankruptcy court as well.

The least expensive and acceptable way to lower national medical costs is first to create a national medical service for the poor. An effective safety net covering the majority of ordinary medical problems for that class would reduce the expense for everyone else. Buying insurance coverage each month for life for the poor is a terribly wasteful concept financially likely to cost far more than a national medical service.

The Colors of Very Small Waves © 2011 GaryCGibson (a poem)

Looking at the waves in colors
of waters clear and silent moving with surges
disbelief of sound is suspended
coinciding with motion
the sight of cold merged form
grains of sand dissolving
shadows of opportunity stricken
seaweed star ribbon of life
broken clouds change meaning less
rain passing with sunshine
flying horizontally like highway headlights
beads of icy time phenomenalized
blue sky patches receding in darkness
where water solid as substance awaits
in atomic weight of hydrogen and oxygen
Earth instead of spaced
nebulae of never reasoned society
neutralized with thought fragment echoes
design of nothingness placed
the colors of very small waves.