Ecologically Renewing Old Building Like the Former Wrangell Hospital

 I have given some thought on what to do with the old Wrangell Hospital that is apparently costly for the city to keep in its inventory because of electrical and other costs. I ride a bike past the hospital sometimes when I am in town for shopping and hate to see the property’s neglect; it is aesthetically unsatisfying. It seems a fair item for a web blog. Sometimes repainting houses the exterior of the old building seems to be in pretty good shape considering that is might not have had any work on it since it was new. The fascia could be covered with marine plywood and some sort of metal because it seems to have worked like a drip edge ans is rusting away.

Environmentally speaking it is better to recondition and upgrade old buildings than build new ones generally. If a building is dangerous with unsound components it should be entirely replaced. Otherwise the manufacturing and transport costs of materials for something entirely new is greater than an upgrade. Refurbishing old buildings requires custom thought, innovation and design intelligence that isn’t necessary when building cookie cutter new units, so most people op for the later although it is environmentally and economically wasteful. The $50 per sheet. Building materials are quire expensive these days.

One can make old buildings very modern. The city might need to find some incentive for a party to become interested in investing in the old hospital when they presently haven’t a business revenue return model to do so. The Stikine River Wilderness, decline of fisheries and Old Growth forest might provide an incentive for some environmental non-profit to develop the property with ultra-modern green energy production and insulation technologies to convert the structure into a showpiece for green technology while providing a base for restoration of fishing and enhancement of forest and water quality. Maybe just getting someone like the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) of Amory Lovins to entirely convert the old hospital to green tech would require the property to be donated in exchange for fulfilling some contract to refurbish the structure.

The City need be cautious about selling the property at a discount to anyone that says if X then Y such as building N units for housing will follow Z conditions. Once the title is transferred, without some formal contract the owner needn’t do anything. For a city assembly the lure of dozens of new housing units could be an attractive bait. I Pink salmon are in the water presently.

Th 36,000 sq foot building out to have room for 15 apartments of a thousand sq feet each with ample leftover space for storage units. Maybe it could be the Jay Hammond Center for Environmental Research, or another Pioneer Home or a place to move Wrangell Law Enforcement, Fire Department and other government offices. The present Wrangell Police and Fire station is a better site for business or some kind of transportation hub and intermodal connectivity.

Vice President Harris said that if she were elected president she would build three million new homes to alleviate the ‘housing shortage’. That would employee hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens working as construction crews and drop quick proplits to Democrat party donors and building developers. Consider for a minute the environmental and economic consequences.

Rapid tract home expansion is an amazing thing to watch. While riding a bike 35,000 miles around the country looking for a job I repainted quite a few buildings. In a new suburb of Houston I rode each morning past a new home being built by a crew. After the concrete set it took just six days to put the building up, and it was a large home selling north of $300,000. From framing to setting down tresses with a cherry picker and roofing specialized crews completed a phase of construction. Its nothing like the way carpenters of old would build a home with an apprentice or two.

That style of housing is boom and bust. Refurbishing old homes is sustainable and done with local workers creating jobs in the U.S.A. to replace so many lost overseas. Millions of workers specializing in upgrading old homes is a different approach than expanding into near urban farmland with new housing tracts while leaving old homes to become new slums, ghettos and barrios closer toward urban cores.

Everything in an old home can be replaced by entirely new materials with the limit being the intelligence of the redesigner. Perfectly clear, transparent roofs could replace old ones and plug in to new support tresses wherein wiring for plug in solar voltaic roofing would go, Roofs could change color as if they were adaptive optics to let in or filter out light. Creating new materials that can upgrade old homes is a good way to sell environmentally rational materials for export to second and third world nations looking to upgrade to a western style quality of life. What cannot serve global interests at all well is the idea of using the old housing ways favored by the Biden-Harris people to clear-cut undeveloped foreign forests and build new tract homes with asphalt absorbing streets across Africa, South America and Asia.

It is important to put intention on present political actions toward present and future structural designs. Scaling up old housing patterns nationally and globally can have disastrous consequences environmentally as well as economically. Building new subdivisions requires substantial investment of public resources, probably with inefficient technologies such as flush toilets instead of solar-powered electric toilets installing miles of pipe, electrical wires, water flow management and so on. All of the new instant lawns placed by the square yard and the lawn mowers, weed eaters and chem lawn treatments are completely avoidable when old buildings are refurbished to better-than-new condition with advanced tech.

In September (poem)

 

In September the pole tilts away
from the sun receding in the distance
an empty space has negative curvature
the concavity of downhill gravity
is at the end of a refractor telescope
viewed from the wrong end
life fading away

  On the trail, the dei, gray feathers
strewn like warped snowflake clocks
the body of life is absent with the hawk
thermals somewhere Aztecs live
not here where God sets transparent images
like valleys and islands aircraft inhabit together
so colors run together like visions of tomorrow

  The smallest ripples on otherwise dead calm water
belying currents below and wind above
mountains and temperature changes
find it difficult to catch a breath
beyond the borders of a season
setting in the star growing smaller
from clouds in a forest dream

A seal risen above the noise
watches a boat approach
engine echoes in its realm
are noises for submersion ears
with cold, dark water and skies
reflecting the weight of something and nothing
vast content of melted glaciers flowing to night

  The blanket of life layers stony extrusions from the sea
humans too, push it aside with machines, drills and fire
even so rainwater flows
downhill with echoes of yesterday  In September the pole tilts away
from the sun receding in the distance
an empty space has negative curvature
the concavity of downhill gravity
is at the end of a refractor telescope
viewed from the wrong end
life fading away

  On the trail, the dei, gray feathers
strewn like warped snowflake clocks
the body of life is absent with the hawk
thermals somewhere Aztecs live
not here where God sets transparent images
like valleys and islands aircraft inhabit together
so colors run together like visions of tomorrow

  The smallest ripples on otherwise dead calm water
belying currents below and wind above
mountains and temperature changes
find it difficult to catch a breath
beyond the borders of a season
setting in the star growing smaller
from clouds in a forest dream

A seal risen above the noise
watches a boat approach
engine echoes in its realm
are noises for submersion ears
with cold, dark water and skies
reflecting the weight of something and nothing
vast content of melted glaciers flowing to night

  The blanket of life layers stony extrusions from the sea
humans too, push it aside with machines, drills and fire
even so rainwater flows
downhill with echoes of yesterday
and its fading leaves awaiting frosty reprieve
for continuity to break importunate convection
and try again next year.
and its fading leaves awaiting frosty reprieve
for continuity to break importunate convection
and try again next year.

A Poet's Uniform

 

 A roulette wheel with a rainbow of colors
spun with a moon around
reminding the poet of a timely notion
where oceans came to rest
politicians chorded sounds of the mess
where sand isn’t grit on polished halls
at the exact point of nowhere

Covered with aesthetic patterns
shoulder eponyms of iambic pentameters
lines inscribed ranked hexameter formations
battalions of airborne poets considering motions
existential descriptions of everywhere
transparent uniforms color over time
morphing to glorious algorithms

  A  poet’s uniform was standard issue
in past days training to war
a great opaque, corporate one
with battery bearers, Starlink’d antennae carriers
and splendid report-worthy deaths in store

  Poets in stock have special structures of words
where with to observe absurd
colors and smells in tire rut runes and guts of hells
splattered with smatterings of drone-speak shells
spelling exceptionally resonant words

Caduceus slathered with patriotic blood
pools of mud and ghouls of golden rules crud
newspeak curdles of hunches of lunches
where enemies could fork left and right
miles of spicy blue grueled tripe

Red, white and blue somethings flumped news
camouflaged culls changing dark brown to green
things inflated and crashed sour mashed grounds
hated so subtleties severed from ideas mean
nothing and nothing more for never

  End of days work apocalyptic rays
heralds revelation denied
fried programmed codes for loyalist nodes
leaders promoting  Armaggeddon's revival lied
riding thrones to crooked levers

  The poet’s crisp threads needed to honor the dead
manufacture of standardized lines of verse
each stanza and worst of horror stories terse
enabled with war widgeted political minds
birthed another contrapositive endeavor
with staccato drum beats of yore that tore
a cornucopia of tropes dropped from the sky.

Harris-Cheyney and Deep State War

When former Vice President Dick Cheney threw his support to the Harris presidential campaign recently that notable marker indicated the power of the deep state unified with the military industrial complex to transfer public money to the corporate private sector was fully functioning. Cheney and the late Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had a political philosophy and an opportunity to use it that private interests should soak the public sector for as much money as they could. Plainly the Iraq war was an example of the transference of vast sums of cash via no bid contracts to corporations like Halliburton that Cheney once was chairman of. The Ukraine war has so far seen Congress send more than 3/4s of a trillion dollars to prop up the regime that is the leading edge of the theft of all of Ukraine from Russia at the conclusion of the Cold War 1.0. Even President Biden’s son Hunter was a recipient of pork kick backs from the endeavor via sumptuous salaries for being appointed to the board of a Ukrainian corporation.

The Ukraine was has produced something like a quarter million casualties so far and has ramped up the risk of nuclear war. Instead of pursuing a rational course to peace the deep state has pursued its self interests in fueling the war for weapons sales and other cash payments to insiders. V.P. Harris has vowed to continue the policies of the Biden administration and is recognized as the best way to keep the money and blood flowing to elements of the corporate sector supplying Ukraine with weapons to attack Russia and profits to politicians allied with the deep state war party. Donald Trump is in this election the peace candidate and therefor not a candidate that Deep State Dick  Cheney could support.

Following the Kursk area invasion of Russia recently, something Defense Secretary Austin apparently referred to as Ukraine “taking the initiative” Russia relocated its nuclear command center to Crimea. Though the Kursk invasion route was a failure in its goal to force Russia to redistribute troops from the Eastern front where they are taking land at a steady rate to the northern area Ukraine invaded, and the negotiating position of the west is degrading further the armed forces of Russia advance toward what probably would be the final rational line of combat along the Dnepr River, the deep state people of the Biden-Harris administration and their Defense Secretary tool have no intention of stopping the war machine and financing the reconstruction of Ukraine anytime soon.

The Soviet Union returned all of the land they had garrisoned during the second world war by withdrawing their military forces after about a half century of occupation. President Clinton levered Ukraine away from its historical ownership by Russia until the communists took over in the Soviet Revolution leaving Russia as the sole country that lost land at the end of communism when the Soviet Union collapsed. A war of reconquest was forced upon Russia and political leadership f the west was only too happy to build up conflict and rhetoric to justify war. Even the far right in Germany has gained more support as the west has resumed the Nazi outlook of military expansion to the east. The fundamental deep state policy direction has short term profit for select government insiders and corporations yet is quite harmful to U.S. national security as well as that of the planet.

The Biden-Cheney-Harris deep state military-industrial complex has roots going back further even than the Vietnam conflict when Brown and Root were given contracts to build military bases in Vietnam by Lyndon Baines Johnson, whom had received financial support from the Texas oil people Brown and Root during his initial run for the U.S. Congress. Halliburton eventually bought Kellogg Brown and Root and bailed them out of bankruptcy during the Bush-Cheney war in Iraq- another conflict initiated with a false premise. The military industrial complex deep state axis of interests developed its persistent form during the Cold War when rival nuclear powers faced off around the globe. The deep state would not be well disposed to tolerate a permanent end to the Cold War posture that had brought such great profits to so many.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have fully invested in the blood and treasure axis of conflict with military violence as a way of life instead of peace, prosperity and a healthy environment. Kamala Harris is the new face of the deep state, albeit possibly an ineffective one. However competence in executive political management is not required for a Presidential deep state operative.  

It may be that the time period cycles  between war crests and peace troughs is decreasing since the deep state depression of peace during the Reagan administration.  President Reagan secured peace by diverting present war outlays to building a military for future conflicts. A five hundred ship navy and the Star Wars developments fed the deep state beast for a time even though peace broke out with the Soviet Union too. The Balkans war of the Clinton era  N.A.T.O was a quick way to discharge some of the weapons build up of the Cold War instead of just leaving it hanging yet it was the 9-11 attacks on the U.S.A. that engaged the Deep State military-industrial-political complex in perennial war and a need to find a continuum of opponents to attack in order for federal dollars to continue to flow.

It is entirely possible that the time between wars will continue to decrease from the former 20 years through the common ten years to the new normal five years right up to a stage of constant conflict and perennial wars financed with deficit spending, tax and government spending on the civilian sector cuts. Since there isn’t presently a draft and military personnel needs are filled with a professional army Democrat voters tend not to care at all about engaging in unjust and counterproductive foreign military conflicts by supplying weapons to proxy armies that is good for deep state business.

Checking Out at Future-Mart

In the effort to imagine what a future massive grocery store would look like I imagined Future-Mart. Instead of picking items from store shelves a customer would wave a charge card over an item's shelf display scanner for instant purchase that a self-driving grocery cart would pick up. Items purchased could be gathered and delivered to a check stand with a robot arm with a scanner in the hand (distant cousin to the Canadian Arm from space shuttle times) for redundant checking or for those without a charge card and deliver them to the front of the store or electric car in the parking lot.

Rather than self-check out registers an alternative would be for a register robot arm with bar code scanner built into its hand to place items into a cart while tallying the costs  simultaneously.

Future-mart might be more practical though and simply let a customer place everything into a cart and at the register all of the items would be tally’d in the car instantly  because each item has a radio frequency transmitter or another form of very  short distance neo-RFT identifier that the register recognizes. A customer would initiate the process with a charge card and a receipt would print out with a list of all of the items purchased before the cart drove itself off to follow a customer outside. The cart would be made to have a box set in it that would lift up or slide out with the goods at delivery point.

For Sale; Decommissioned Wrangell Alaska Hospital

 For the price of a used home a 36,000 sq foot former city hospital with a great location just a mile from the airport and a half mile from a salt-water port may be had for purchase (if the price agreed to with the last developer who wanted additional properties free and let it fall through when he didn't get them still holds). I would think a non-profit could refurbish the building with a great metal roof and not pay property taxes. An estimate of the cost to build a new one like it is 14 million dollars U.S.

Apparently the city wants to sell the building in order not to pay for utilities annually. It is not a bad looking building at all though the city has let the grass go un-mowed and the exterior needs to be maintained. The inside could be gutted and just lad bearing elements retained so one could make numerous small condo units and a few stores within it, and outside on the grounds. There is adequate parking space and garages for storage.

Instead of heating the building while empty several quality dehumidifiers might have been place to keep the humid environment dry for less cost. I specialized at repainting buildings so I am completely amazed at the unwillingness to maintain it or convert it into some other purposed public structure.

https://www.wrangell.com/community/sale-old-wrangell-medical-center-and-property-over-counter

Od hospital buyers might not see the throughput of customer volume sufficient to support commercial purposes. Wrangell has fewer than 2000 people although the cruise ship industry is rising annually while fisheries are in decline. The site might be a good place for a remote small resource based technical college annex, executive retreat two hours from Seattle etc. A Large wind generator could supply off grid power occasionally (it should turn slow enough to not bother common bald eagles and ravens flying past.

The former Wrangell Hospital is at any rate an excellent place for a retirement project to make a few stores and condo spaces. With the passing on of the boomer generation there will be millions of existing buildings that will become vacant that need be refurbished rather than destroyed so new homes can be built. Getting rid of perfectly fine structures to build new ones is quite a bit costlier and wasteful of human and material resources.

On Ukraine-If You are in a Hole Stop Digging it Deeper

The Biden administration has proven the truth of the axiom of the First Law of Holes that says; “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging it deeper.” Digging a vast economic and political hole in Ukraine through several Democrat administration in order to conquer land historically belonging to Russia was a feat of historically illiterate, bureaucratically minded union leadership quality personal egoist sociopaths.

The pathetic cost in human lives physically, injuries of war physically and psychologically is vast and the numbers keep compiling. There never was a reasonable chance of the west defeating Russia militarily to keep all of Ukraine for itself. Russians tend to be tough fighting on their home turf, and if they were actually to have lost the conflict would probably swiftly escalate to battlefield nukes to defrappe western military forces. The west would have to accept that or upgrade to M.A.D. retaliation basically.

President Biden is the worst reasoning war mongering President in U.S. history. He again moved to provide Ukraine’s government with up to 72,000 artillery shells per month for the rest of 2024 assuring more deaths, more property destruction and more impossibility of developing or investing in peace for the remainder of his term of office. A Harris or Trump administration would have hard choices to make about where to go with that conflict. Trump has said he would move toward peace and Harris has said she would go for the Biden approach she has supported for several years. Voters would be happier if she would just stipulate that she would accept President Putin’s reasonable peace plan or just go for the Russia gets the east bank of the Dnepr River and West Ukraine the western side.

The costs of rebuilding Ukraine will be great- in the trillions, and Ukraine will probable expect Europe and the U.S. to pay for it. I am somewhat offended by the idea of paying trillions to rebuild a nation that could have had war avoided with a practical peace plan a priori to adjust the wrong settlement of the Cold War boundary of Russia and Ukraine.

The Biden-Harris war lunacy has done great harm to world opinion about the United States since many perceive it as the school yard bully that could intimidate small nations and overstepped its power with Russian Ukraine. Democrat leadership about Ukraine is like maladroit engineering that mistakes its estimates of how easy it would be to build a dam across the Bering Strait bud decided to invest a trillion dollars to get something started anyway just to discover that tide and currents wash away the work.

The Biden-Harris war plan has restored the unity of the remaining communist block and strengthened it by forcing Russia to turn to a much closer relationship with that mixed economy state and neglect developing free enterprise capitalism. The negative effects of the conflict for the United States are great and will contribute to future economic issues for Americans. The astounding stupidity of the approach is what is breathtaking. How did the United States fall to such a low level of leadership after Ronald Reagan for twenty years of Democrats?

I should make a disclaimer here concerning Ayn Rand Republicans. Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ followers don’t recognize that she wrote in favor of the 1% CEO and shareholder people and was in a sense against the 99% of the public that aren’t CEO and owners of big businesses. She should have written a sequel for labor that isn’t union and demonstrated why hard individual work counts, or should count if there was an actual meritocracy in the U.S.A. Piece work of an objective nature is the only way to have real meritocratic labor and that doesn’t form the primary structure of what labor works on.

In the U.S.A. the six guys leaning on their shovels chatting will go farther and get better pay than the individual who thinks working better than others competitively will win out. Life does not recognize that kind of individual effort. That kind of worker burns out while being ignored.

There are so many unfair labor values empirically that union labor does have a way of getting a substantial chunk of change for numerous workers, although obviously union labor does have an element of a pyramid scheme structure to it- not all workers could be in unions without the wages paid becoming nonsensical and uniform while business would be inflexible and maladaptive. One would develop a Soviet Union or sovereign union sort of structure with the main difference being that government leaders might be CEOs instead of Union executives. In short a Hitler-Mussolini corporatism rather than a Soviet corporatism.