Kashmir, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan & U.S. Foreign Policy

This is a brief article to describe some elements of the equilibrium of terrorist organization location, activity and relationship in the central Asian region, as I understand it. For an American citizen with interests besides those of foreign policy objectives and analysis there is quite a lot of time consuming reading required to get a meaningful idea of the relationships in this area.

The U.S. Defense budget is just about the largest expense annual in the U.S. federal budget. We as citizens are told by the military from year t year that the 'war' must go on for several years for national defense. We also wonder if the cost is worth the return. Since it is our federal budget, we have no necessity of signing carte blanche these checks too fund military, defense contractors and C.I.A. ventures abroad. National interest might be in making our own nation prosper rather than those of central Asia.

So we wonder; is the premise that installing a friendly government in Afghanistan will halt most al Qaeda terrorist attacks on the United States valid. Another point possible, desirable and so forth. We wonder how many years that will take, and what the opportunity for the United States will be?

The origin of terrorist training camps and organizations in Pakistan goes back to the early 19th century. Jihadist organizations sought to repel the noon-Muslim British occupiers. Yet we will skip over that to the more recent 1940's, 1970s and 1980's when two more recent political conflicts stimulated the formation of jihadist terrorist training organizations in Pakistan.
The first and most significant cause was the sectarian separation of India and Pakistan and their fight to control Kashmir. On one side is the Hindu Indian Government with the legal title to Kashmir and on the other is the majority population of Muslims with decades long support continuing to the present of training of jihadist Muslim guerilla fighters. The 1972 line of control roughly divided Kashmir and Jammu in half and is a good enough permanent boundary, yet neither nation (Pakistan or India) would be happy with that, and the additional problem of Kashmiri Muslim guerrillas fighting for Kashmiri national independence form both Pakistan and India also exists.

The Pakistan Intelligence Service and military have worked for decades in providing training and support for Kashmiri Muslim jhadist guerrilla fighters. Pakistani leaders have supported the constellation of terrorist training camps and have provided arms and munitions including some from the United States.

The Afghanistan war against the Soviets and the Afghan civil war following led to the Taliban taking control of most of the nation. The Taliban were formed in Pakistan and simply move south when American forces are present. It is possible that a natural selection of fundamentalist Muslim leaders are elevated to lead the Taliban and that to negotiate with the United States would be suicidal in effect, for the Taliban would be at the top of one jihadist pyramid and unlikely to receive broad popular support in the jihadist community if they fraternized with the infidels much. U.S. concepts of negotiating with theTaliban seem destine to just create a Hamas effect of shifting the violence to another terrorist organization and infrastructure supported at sometime by the Pakistani I.S.I. (intelligence service).

The United States to reduce the terrorist training in Pakistan would need to settle the Kashmir issue satisfactorily to all concerned parties first. That would reduce tensions between India and Pakistan. Pakistan does not want Indian involvement in Afghanistan and were probably happy when the Indian embassy in Kabul was blown up in 2008.

From my point of view it seems improbable that the Indian-Pakistani boundary, water rights and Kashmir control issues will be solved in the next year or two, and that means more pressure for Pakistan to support Muslim jihadist guerrillas to train in Northern Pakistan to establish terror structures and cells in Kashmir. Whenever Pakistan regulars go to fight in Kashmir as they have in the past against Indian forces it escalates the conflict--and that could lead to a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India potentially.

A comprehensive solution to the problems of Pakistan and Kashmir seems an essential element of a plan to have peace in Afghanistan. It is dubious that peace and stability in Afghanistan would itself eliminate the terrorist dangers to U.S. interests, for al Qa'eda and the Taliban merely moved south and east when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and are flourishing there today.
Perhaps Bin Ladin is in an alp near Nanga Parbat in Kashmir with a few wives enjoying the good, rural life-who can say? At six foot five Oz bin Ladin is a striking king of figure in some regards, and one unlikely to be followed by the paparazzi for some years. Because the U.S. Government does not say what its comprehensive India-Pakistan-Kashmir-Afghanistan policy is, we have no basis to determine if it is competent or not, or if there is not a need to formulate a better and more effective policy to reduce the development of terrorism in the region.

Collectivist Capitalism vs. Compassionate Capitalism

This is actually a fairly simple distinction. Capitalism that grows from an individual or family’s personal work building assets without exploiting other people is compassionate capitalism, while the impersonal stock investment, M.B.A. networking trans-national globalism business approach is collectivist. The collectivists are cold-blooded while the small time capitalist is compassionate and cares about his own work and building up of resources.

Adam Smith, the modern spiritual founder of capitalism, wrote largely in support of compassionate capitalism inclusive of trade. There weren't the sort of large-scale networked corporations in existence in his day that built up huge global capital advantages and leveraging monetary sophistication. It is quite a stretch to transmogrify The Wealth of Nations into a support for absolute abstract modern business practices and monetary policy. One must be disingenuous to extend Smith's Wealth of Nations so far as that.

Adam Smith was a pragmatic economist and held the welfare of the people of England of his day-of the ordinary people, as being of first concern. He sought for methods to understand, improve and describe more ideal forms of economic methods. One of the fundamental challenges of his day was to liberalize trade and business from the corrupting control of concentrated wealth in the form of royal power or taxation that was not spent to advance the interests of the people of England.

Thus in the United States today compassionate capitalists may rightly oppose foreign military spending in badly thought out ventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We know that jihad by the U.S. Government in Afghanistan is opposed by jihadists from Kashmir, Pakistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Our jihad is an economic one, for the military industrial complex makes a vast fortune on the enterprises, while the goal of preventing terrorist attacks through the installation of a toady regime in Kabul is unlikely to stop the sources of jihad in Pakistan, Kashmir and elsewhere. Better policy is required. What does the expense do to increase the standard of living of the poor and middle class in the U.S.A.?

Compassionate capitalist support a general increase of wealth in the United States for all citizens and of a healthy ecosystem. They have their eyes open and look at the real world and not just abstract profit and loss statements or throughput concepts and expanding networked, corporate power and market control.

Compassionate capitalist support practical limits on the opportunity for individual citizens to control other through the acquisition of monetary wealth and leveraged investments. Social capital may be perceived as differing from compassionate capital and should be limited. A democracy has the freedom to choose to limit the power that collective business enterprises may gain because of their capacity to oppress the citizenry and harm the security of the nation's ecological environment. It is reasonable that a maximum percent of the gross national product held by any legally individual entity such as a corporation or individual might be set in order to prevent tyranny.

Compassionate capitalists would be concerned that the poor would all have free health care and that the environment is getting better and recovering toward a more natural condition of health viable for centuries ahead rather than in decline perennially. Compassionate capitalists would be aware that all citizens require life-long secure housing and would reverse the legislation that eliminated Glass-Steagle protections on home mortgages. A home should not be a financial chip for of interest to global collective capitalist acquisition.

Instead of the duplicitous policy of building quarter million dollar homes for entry level workers to buy with dubious prospect for three decades of job security ahead the Government rightly should encourage a generation of low cost affordable ecologically no net loss of biota energy generating homes. Compassionate capitalists could readily support low-cost affordable housing that is beneficial to the environment comparatively and realistically is a base for self-sufficiency, home gardening and so forth.

While the collectivist capitalist trait is product disposability, through-put for profit and impersonal conformity if citizen reasoning the compassionate capitalist endeavors to assure that all citizens are secure in their home and possessions and that a conservation principle of ecological husbandry overtakes and corrects the wastage of collectivist capitalism.

Bike Ideas & The Kashmir Concept©2010 Gary Clifford Gibson

Recently I broke several spokes simultaneously on a bicycle. With winter approaching and the prospect of riding becoming more dangerous with an increased chance of crashing on asphalt or hard packed snow I thought it might be good to change the usual structure of bike wheels and tires to a more snow and ice friendly format.

It can be challenging to fix a flat tire in the snow, and larger rubber tires weigh more than thin tires yet a wider tire offers a better surface for riding on snow and icy surfaces. Why not increase the tire size and reduce the weight while eliminating the possibility of getting a flat tire?

There are several no-flat tire systems in existence that tend to weigh a lot or be fairly costly. It could be best to change the shape of bike wheels and tires together.

Of course I think a three wheel trike with two wheels and a cargo boot aft would be safer than a two-wheel bike for riding on ice and snow, yet the new wheels and tires should work equally wheel for either and the tires and wheels should work well in warm environments as well.

The new wheels would be of a convex shape something like a half-moon with the curved surface facing outward and a few thick spokes meeting the hub. The tires would be half moon shaped also and not inflated with air at all. For shock absorbing they would be a little like those running shoes popular nowadays with a little built in pseudo spring or shock absorber-yet not made of steel.

The half-moon tires might be of double thickness with a little air space and a lot of small half-inch or so shock absorbers. The tire could be in curved sections instead of in a completely round shape since they are not inflated and are lightweight. It would be possible for these pseudo-tire riding surface to just bolt on to the wheel in various sections-perhaps quarter wheel sections in order to permit alternate bolting on of studded tires for winter riding on ice.

The back of these tire sections could have a curved backing of fiberglass, aluminum or some suitable material to contact the wheel-actually there are innumerable methods of attaching the tire halves to the wheel.

It might be possible to make some sort of a film for-profit about a bicycle designer who goes to live in Kashmir in order to design the fastest bicycle wheel and bike design for competitive road racing. Perhaps he could be a former world champion bike rider who was injured after winning his first race and lost his medal because of a false doping charge later.

The fortyish bike designer could still be in excellent shape and meet some woman who has a father that was involved in some local political movement and killed unjustly by either partisans or government forces or foreign agents.

The designer and the Indian woman could together survive numerous efforts by foreign agents to steal the new bike in order to allow a sectarian rider to win the tour de France and provide a platform for rebellion and a coup d’etat of Jammu and Kashmir to form a terrorist training base.

Of course the bike designer could ride his new bike at high speed across the Himalayan and over the Indus River headwaters on a bridge while being pursued by terrorist jihadists firing full metal jacket AK-47 bullets at the bike designer. I won’t give the ending of the story away. Let’s just say. The bike-riding champion also enjoys skydiving.

Federal Over-Regulation of Select Labor Concerns May Reduce National Competetiveness

The United States is a republic at the Federal level and a democracy at the state’s level. The Federal government foisted media rule of wealth on the nation, and it is a pervasive force for aristocracy and evil. It is important to remember that the United States had an implicit competitive factor amidst them that can be defeated by federal uniformity requirements. For example, if the minimum wage is standard the states can have no regional wage labor competition advantage over others and employers that exploit cheap labor must relocate to Mexico or destroy wage labor values by making the Mexican border transparent to illegal workers and jihadists.

It does not require communism to be politically in opposition to rule by the rich, the few and the aristocratic--remember the American revolution? it also had land reform in it-a concept that would make today's toadying conservative tremble with rage that their master's share could be diminished.

It is a common error of sycophants to mistake one form of totalitarianism or tyranny for another--if not on column A then it must be from column B. The logic is faulty. Such people tend to believe that democracy and equal access are in some way 'communist' and they are completely wrong.

The broadcast media control by the rich is plain political corruption. Today's politicians are incapable of political reform that would better defend national interests,; they are runts of a sort bought and paid for by the rich.

A Rush Limbaugh will come out swinging in support of tax cuts for the top two percent, while a Billionaire Buffet of Berkshire Hathaway comes out in t against the tax cuts because the rich can afford it and the nation is in financial crisis. He is a patriot while Rush Limbaugh is a kiss up.

I am a supporter of free speech equal opportunity to the broadcast wavelengths for myself and all other citizens on a realistic basis. If I advocate for my own interests it is not therefore 'communism'. I am not a commune myself.

Sometime I will write about the differences between Collective Capitalism vs. Compassionate Capitalism. Perhaps the nation has forgotten that boundaries and real concern for neighbors and nation are at the core of the American Dream.

U.S. Foreign Policy Challenges; Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Lashkar-i-Taiba

U.S. Foreign policy is presently engaged in the midst of a political quagmire with Pakistan. Since that nation formed in 1947 in a divorce form India as the British gave independence, each nation has fought over turf and water. Kashmir and Jumma-a former princely kingdom has the headwaters of several important rivers that flow south and west useful for irrigation and drinking. Perhaps the fight over a divided Kashmir and Jumma is fundamentally about water rights as much as real estate.

The allocation of Kashmir and Jumma was made by a British administrator drawing a line on a map and neither India or Pakistan has been able to reconcile to the difficult boundary apportionment. Pakistan trained as many as a half a million terrorists or guerillas to fight Indian forces in Kashmir the last 30 years. One of the essential terrorist training entities is Lashkar-I-Taiba.

Pakistan’s main intelligence service named the I.S.I. worked closely with establishing several lashkars (tribal militias) in the Northern Territories of Pakistan to trained jihadists to fight the hated Hindu military in Kashmir. The American C.I.A. also got involved in supplying and encouraging terrorist-guerilla fighters to battle the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The constellation of jihadist training camps has also supported the Taliban of Pakistan and the Taliban of Afghanistan in addition to Al-Qa’eda. The I.S.I. haven’t much interest in ‘turning off’ these Sunni terrorist training facilities much because of Pakistan political concerns.

Pakistan has a perennial concern about renewed war with India. Neither does Pakistan want Afghanistan to become influenced much by Hindus of India. Pakistan is a poor nation with an officially Sharia based constitution and like the U.S. Congress avoids intelligent policy decisions because extremists in each major party compel extremism.

Pakistan has a weak civilian government and education system. It is under funded and not very powerful. Often the military is called in to rule for a time, and the military is paradoxically the most secular of the major political forces in Pakistan. The Intelligence service is rifled with fundamentalist sympathizers, as increasingly is the military. When the United States alerted Pakistan that it was sending cruise missiles to hit Osama Bin Ladin in 1996 (I believe it was), he was alerted within minutes and departed the scene in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has a protracted and difficult to manage internal political economic and an ambiguous relationship with India regarding stability. The Kashmir status is unsettled and has hundreds of thousands if not millions of economically and socially challenged people with allegiance as much to fundamentalist concepts including jihad as much as to any particular government ruling entity. Many rural people would prefer to simply live well, yet the nature of western capitalism precludes the good neighborliness approach any way from being a practical economic development paradigm. Even in the U.S.A. corruption in economic networking can lead to vicious repression.

The United States spends hundreds of billions to finance a military in Afghanistan and only moderately effective economic assistance to construct a stable, de-volatilized society. Yet Pakistan has a long-range interest of controlling the Afghan government through a sponsored Taliban or other proxy organization. Pakistan is happy enough with a friendly jihadist Sunni government in Afghanistan as a way to secure its northern border.

Kashmir and Jammu might be a direct route to connect with India in some hypothetical future and that would not be to Pakistan’s liking. Afghanistan could also connect to India via far western China if mountain routes can be transcended with engineering, and that could change relationships too.

The United States sends billions of dollars in military aid packages to Pakistan for who knows what reason-ostensibly to buy assistance in sending predator missiles to hit Taleban human targets as well as al Qa’eda targets in Northern Pakistan, and also to allow the U.S.A. to offload military supplies from ships and drive overland from Karachi to Afghanistan. Payments are made by the United States to Taleban and Al Qa’eda connected neo-terrorist gangs on the route for ‘protection’ so the convoys won’t be attacked.

Even if the United States can attain a kind of low level of violence in Afghanistan in a couple of years, the longer range prospects for eliminating the constellation of jihadist training facilities and support in Pakistan seems a kind of ‘out there in the distance’ prospect. AN interesting point regarding Afghanistan security is that the Sunni terrorists can always relocate too another nation in the area for training purposes. It is also somewhat unusual that Al Qa’eda prefers the para-military form of terrorism requisite for war in Kashmir in attacking western targets rather than conventional tradecraft of espionage and clandestine saboteurs engaging in economic war.

The U.S.A. does not face a real convential military threat from Muslim fundamentalists at all. Good intelligence and border security work could halt terrorists from reaching the United States at far lower cost. Newer and more effective economic engagement relationships founded in low entropy environmentalism could be innovated simultaneously with newer and more cost effective defense strategies. A better long-range policy for Pakistan should be developed that would allow Internal Pakistani economic development and political actualization for a populist regime that does not require bilateral antagonism with India.

The United States for decades has been one of Pakistan’s major foreign aid contributors and our policies have in part helped shape the present situation. Our policies definitely seem to require correction and more of an intelligent design considering all of the elements involved. Afghanistan also shares a border with Iran and Uzbekistan and each have real concerns. Iran is of course also a neighbor of Iraq, and Turkey and the Kurds have issues as well. Our policy cannot be simply isolated in its applications for the displacement of various political parties and shifting of relationships occurs whenever change is brought to any portion of the region. It is not simple yet not terribly difficult either. It is an obvious multi-year project to attain regional economic stability along low-entropy principles of ecological economics and respect for religious beliefs and humanitarianism together. The U.S. administrations of the present and future should be aware that the defense budget is a little larger than the interest on the national debt annually and contributes to its increase.

The U.S. national economy is ill founded on to axes. One is its high-entropy anti-nationalistic globalist approach concentrating wealth and increasing poverty and harm to the environment—even Pollock in Alaska are over-fished and may lead to a crash of the fishery health similar to the problems with Atlantic cod- Fishing should largely be restricted to sports fishing and subsistence use the next decade to give the fisheries time to recover robust health. Soybeans are an excellent source of vitamin D.

The second ill-foundation of the U.S. economy is the Clinton-Obamonics of Wall Street and Financial sector skimming of wealth instead of low-entropy economic manufacturing being the foundation of the economy. Protracted foreign wars and foreign economic and military engagements are harmful to U.S. national interests and should be rolled up and stowed in the bad policies of the past bin.

Life Sciences, Evolution, Theoria of Determinism and Fundamental Cosmological Questions

Evolution indoctrinated life scientists do not generally have a cosmological perspective on determinism and chance from what I encounter reading their works. They tend to make a randomized natural selection paradigm assumption without a general awareness of the determinism/indeterminism theory issues and how they pertain to bioscience and the evolution criterion.

I believe that much of the somewhat myopic bias for indeterminism in evolution arose in the dialectical political and intellectual argument with ecclesiastical authorities of the enlightenment era. Their natural assumption is that random chance and natural selection is a necessary contradiction of the sole opposite opinion found within a particular kind of religious, sectarianist opinion upon genesis matters.

As intellectual discovery advances and enlightens humanity so far as the relative veracity of knowledge permits, it is useful to increase the social, historical, philosophical an Biblical data base in light of scientific concerns as well as science. Scientists may labor under mistaken ideas about intellectual areas beyond their window on the world that is a biological Weltanschauung.

In reading the New Testament of the Bible there is virtually nothing that directly contradicts scientific data, and the Old Testament-which is the Old Testament after all, itself may be interpreted in several ways such that it is neither in contradiction move to particular evolutionary concepts. The knowledge of the Old Testament is very special, and must be treated with respect and regarded as truth if one wishes to relate it to what is known through careful scientific thought about the world, of life and of the cosmos.

A point I recently drew from comparing Old Testament paradigmata to that of life sciences is that of the ages of the ante-diluvian patriarchs. First, Eve succumbed to the temptations and misdirection of Satan in the Garden of Utopian environmental health and recommended to Adam that they alter the nature of the environment through development—that is they ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Mankind today continues to mess with what was a healthy natural ecosystem and affect it badly exterminating countless life forms. To move beyond the original sin of not leaving the environment alone when everything was absolutely perfect.

Adam and Eve in the Garden were assumed to have infinite life spans without aging or even the phenomena of birth. Cast out of that metaphysical Eden and pre-determined to alter the ecosystem and in fact become a natural part of it, Adam and Eve and their descendents had increasingly shorter life spans. Leaving a virus and stress free environment they were reduced from multi-thousand year life spans to just a hundred or so, then of course the average life span of humanity would in the non-Biblical world be reduced to just 20 to 30 years.

Modern man has increased his average life span four fold in the last two hundred years nearly reaching age 80 in developed countries. Like Robert Heinlein’s character Lazarus Long, he has his sights set on two or three thousand years. The fiction write Khouri in the Sanctuary offered an opinion that some believe human life span isn’t pre-set to an end, but achieves death mostly through stress and illness.

Perhaps nature may not have had time to evolve a necessary end to human life, but instead specialized upon achieving reproduction instead, yet at any rate the Biblical and the contemporary scientific paradigms on aging have a kind of interesting symmetry.

There are numerous other symmetries of paradigm between the Biblical world and the scientifically created worldview, and it is also known that the scientific worldview is incomplete and just a slice of the possible philosophical pieces of the facts of universal existence for itself.

Life scientists tend not to factor in even gravity theory into their ideas about evolution. It isn’t that evolution is wrong; it is simply that it presents a limited set of data. One may consider quantum cosmology simultaneously with all of the life science’s evolution criteria for example and find determinism rather that random evolution in virtually everything living.

Given the boundary conditions of the early Universe that may be known only proximally (in the last 13.7 billion years), it is easy to regard everything material that followed the inflation of the Universe (or whatever process actually occurred) as determined from those initial allocations of resources. It is popular enough to say that their was no design in evolution, yet the structure of everything in the beginning inevitably pre-determined the nature of everything later including the development of life on Earth and perhaps elsewhere.

The emergence of matter over anti-matter by the smallest fraction provided a Universe of matter in the particular locations it has. The clumping of matter is generally associated with the WMAP imaging of early universe structure. Where galaxies would form, how gravity would condense mass, was determined in the beginning. In fact all of life forming on planets is a continuing necessary evolution of the original design or allocation of resources.

Life tends to form from the smaller stages to the large on planets. Matter also formed from the most simple, hot and basic structures toward the larger, cooler and more complex, yet none of that is by random chance, but instead follows the laws of physics with inexorable logic. Though it may be difficult to imagine, the evolution of each living thing was determined by the environment and interaction as the boundary conditions permitted. Only Eve in the Garden had the opportunity to do anything different and to alter nature against the inexorable function of the laws of physics through the supervention of human intelligence.

Not to accentuate the power of human thought over much, although God said in the Garden that Adam and Eve had become as little goods and must be subject too temporal conditions in order to limit their power, comprehending the freedom of though within a determined physical cosmos is one of the interesting contemporary scientific as well as classical philosophical and religious questions.

Mayor Sullivan Of Anchorage Budgets Library Closure

This is a post written in dissent to the Mayor's plan to close down a small branch library located at a mall in Anchorage. I ride a bike and walk rather than drive a car. I am not cntributing significantly to greenhouse gas global warming. I read a lot of books from the library on cosmology, history, environment and so forth and plan to continue reading in my tent even when the temperature drops below zero this winter.

In Anchorage one can be stranded and unable to leave the state. S.E. Alaska is a much warmer yet one needs a passport too get in to Canada basically and return to the U.S.A. south in Juneau. Living in Fairbanks and going broke one winter I hitchhiked south to Georgia just ahead of an Arctic high pressure front dropping temperatures in the Yukon nearly to minus 50 F. The two libraries in Anchorage that will remain open are several miles away from the southern part of the city and practicallly beyond safe winter walking or bike riding distance.

While taking a college course on Siberian history at the University of Alaska Fairbanks a fellow student got to classes by riding a bike all winter. They ride bikes in the snow in Finland in the winter too. Good clothing is required.

Libraries and education help support economic development. You wouldn't believe how many road construction projects they spent on this year in Anchorage. Intelligent people would have high quality elevated electric people movers in a city like Anchorage with regional lots to get those SUVs off the roads and to reduce highways maint. costs. Greed and crass materialism with an idiotic corrupted Adam Smith invisible hand rationale for economic development status quo kickbacking to excuse intelligent development prioritizes pouring asphalt and concrete over libraries, advancing education, Internet access and radical new mass transit structures. The daft equate better social physical infrastructure with socialism and inefficiency and global corporatism with the call of the wild.

Mayor Sullivan's plan to cut the library at the Diamond Mall before building a new library seems a normal progression of global corporatism to silence dissent and isolate the city and state's excluded from prosperity members of the community. Cutting off public Internet access is equivalent to closing down the free press in the modern high-tech world.

The City of Anchorage is the larges population center north west of Vancouver British Columbia and is amongst those with the least number of library branches per capita in the United States. Internet access and the opportunity to read new quality books are important modern avenues for economic opportunity especially for those not privileged to simply attend Harvard and have loads of dumped economic opportunity to purchase books.

Libraries help support economic development. Without adequate libraries and library access investors from outside tend to look at Anchorage as a rather primitive resource based economy run by and for the benefit of large global corporations. Libraries and Internet access are as important of public service for many as highways. Until being banned from writing at Helium.com for using politically incorrect terminology for the homosexual political agenda I earned as much as 200 dollars a month posting essays there. While highways provided a traditional kind of farm to market highway, the Internet is also a kind of producer to market highway.

I have used the Diamond Library quite a bit this year since arriving from Juneau to look for a job in April with no luck. I ride a bike all over town and will find it improbable to get downtown or too N.W. Anchorage to get library access after the snow flies and temperatures drop.

A good modern library plan would instead keep the Diamond library open until a new library in S.E. Anchorage can be constructed. IT should be a monolithic dome of concrete that has an effective r-value for insulation of 100. They have a low cost per square foot area (see monolithicdomes.com) and are earthquake resistant.

Building a new library on city land should be a goal of the Sullivan administration in order to keep Anchorage from slipping further into the dark side of the force of ignorance and anti-ecological economics. It should be a national economic and ecological efficiency use example leader and bring Anchorage up to compete with cities as advanced as Albuquerque New Mexico.

The Mayor should go back to the drawing board and find a budget that will not censor Internet access to the poor. As a University of Alaska S.E. graduate (associate degree) unable find work and stranded here for the winter, with the last chance to get a job at Kodiak processing Pollock gone without being hired, living in a stone age kind of tenting environment already, I do not look forward to having the Mayor close down the Diamond Library and Internet access in the December's darkness.