Alaska Political Trivia Nov. 2010

Without finding an interior to paint for air fare to Orlando, I have little choice besides encountering the political condition of the state of Alaska. Since it been about 37 years since I first visited this place, its getting old. Prospects for painting are much better this time of year in Florida.

Well, the Governor that replaced Sarah Palin's vacated seat, Sean Parnell, formerly a Conoco employee, won the election. Five state commissioners resigned, so he must have asked them to before he fired them to pork up the perks Departments.

The Governor and Lt. Governor's compensation may go up 55,000 dollars and 35,000 dollars respectively and at least the Governor's should for living seasonally in the mansion in Juneau. It should be swapped out with the Wickersham mansion on the hill with a better view of the cruise ships in the harbor.

The state Senate race outcome is still a little in doubt. The very qualified Joe Miller is running behind Lisa Murkowski yet gaining a little ground still trailing, I believe, by about 6000 votes with a few weeks left in counting write in and absentee as well as contested ballots. As an outsider here, a veritable stranger in a strange land, I can learn something about how the state politicians relate to the secular Grail of building a New Gas Pipeline to forever assure prosperity to the state's insiders high on the trophic order of excellent slop and financial fixxins.

Senator Mark Begitch and Senator Lisa Murkowski each support additional gas and oil development in this state. One state political district is alone about the size of the state of Texas, yet just about 650,000 people live in Alaska. The Begkowski politically Republicrat oriented agenda may continue The Ted Stevens legacy of transferring as much wealth from D.C. as possible to Alaska insiders, who in turn are loyal to global corporate oil corporations and the military industrial complex.

I should make a note about Ted (dead) Stevens. Senator Stevens was an excellant guy, a world war two fighter pilot and all that, and a first rate cold warrior. When the cold war ended though he had prostate surgery and seemed soon thereafter to be kind of financially crazy. I believe that was a result of listening to all the Senate hearings raving lunatic speech testimoney in the Congress that developed during the 90's as well as hormonal imbalances. Senator Ted (also dead) Kennedy had a similar brain rot affliction that coincided with his political turn toward lunacy.

Ted Steven seemed to require a new kind of political philosophy or replace the cold war era concept of getting as much defense spending in Alaska as possible along with civilian spending. Stevens and Murkowski each supported lunatic heavy logging and gas industrial development and were on board the be friendly to Saddam Hussein before Iraq invaded Iran. When 1990-91 arrived Ted Stevens changed his political action to just spending in Alaska and screw the U.S. Treasury.

Vice President Cheney actually had a kind of screw the taxpayers and redistribute tax dollars to favorite corporations as a kind of political philosophy most of his political life. I don't think Ted Stevens ever rationalized that far, instead he just saw Alaska as benefiting from as much spending here as possible, and could of course never consider flakey 'alternative' energy development, civil construction or non-global oil infrastructure primacy in Alaskan economics as realistic possibilities. Senator Kennedy took his unlimited late career spree toward support of homosexual empowerment. I cannot imagine why-except that his concern for the finer issues of eliminating poverty seemed to have slipped away.

Ft. Richardson and Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage are a prime source of employment for the few hundred thousand living in Anchorage. In my opinion there are perennial feedback loops here assuring that few changes to the established globally dependent kickback loopers will find it easy going.

When the global oil and gas industry really wants to plunder Alaska's remaining natural oil and gas reserves, then the global loyalists will accomplish whatever they need politically, locally to get job number one done, and not before. They have Iraq to consume presently, and then perhaps Iran. There are far more contracting bonuses to affiliates in Muslim world adventures now than in Alaska. One should never misundersetimate the L.B.J./Brown and Root/Defense Contracting/Oil/Halliburton/Cheyney/Bush/Rumsfeld/Gates axis of oil.

Britain is also a malevolent factor in Alaskan history traditionally. From BP oil power in Alaska to the 2010 oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico their interest in globalism and homosexuality to break down national immunity exists in order to puff up the profits of the densely populated island nation and former colonial power. BP sold its control of the Alyeska pipeline corporation this year I think. The huge footprints of global oil are never easy to track through the political arena, should one wish to.

The chickadees and Alaska crows with keratin birth defects making their beaks grow too large and curl could be a result of oil and gas development/pollution, the Exxon Valdez monstrous oil spill, or environmental change of global warming caused by fossil fuel emissions of oil and gas. It could be caused by something else of course, yet anthropogenic industrial causality is a good bet. The Senators would be for it and against ANWR, polar bears, fish for sports and subsistence fisherpersons and wildlife corridors in cities wit low entropy local economic accentuation for development.

Walking 15 miles on the Anchorage sidewalks I can say that generally they are cleared of snow reasonably well on main routes. Yet sometimes in clearing the plates/streets they pile the snow on the sidewalk after the sidewalks are scraped clean. The coordination could be better.

Also, the U.S. Army temperate weather boots are slippery as heck on snow covered icy snow. I fell seven times on that 15 mile walk. Using a different pair of boots today I had much better traction. I think its not only the sole design, but the material in the temperate weather boot (maybe the use a different boot now than a few years ago) that makes it have a kind of waxed-ski like relation to slippery surface.

Well, that enough for this comment on Alaska politics. It's not like a town down south where one can ride a bike across the nation and see something to paint, make a bid and perhaps get some temporary work using highest quality materials from Lowe's.

Cohokia and Homeless Ideas of Anchorage

With about a foot of new snow Sunday night the city of Anchorage has taken on it’s seasonal appearance of flakiness compounded as ground cover. Just three more months of winter to go on the homeless calendar; that is December, January and February followed by the warming up month of March when several minutes of daylight are added each day as the world’s precession on its axis tilts the northern areas more toward the sun.

It’s amazing how sensitive the planet’s surface temperature is to that annually tilt away in to the shadow, its cold and back to warmth and light. Just a few degrees annually of temperature range difference and most life on earth would be gone even before human developers kill off most of the species and ecological health.

So far this year there have been 15 deaths of homeless people outdoors in Anchorage. Cynics might wonder if the city government cars are putting homeless dead trophy stickers on like fighter aces of yore, yet we know that social government today is simply stupid and incapable of good governance. Even so,we doubt that we would find police cruisers or other city vehicles with 15 dead man or woman silhouettes on the driver’s doors.

Reading of the ancient American city of Cohokia (where St. Louis is today) I was a little inspired by the home and public building construction methods of the Cohokian culture. So much so in fact that I got the idea of building eco-friendly earth homes not only in single family units but in condominiums.

New Cohokia was a planned community of more than 10,000 people that suddenly appeared in 1050 a.d. The Cohokians built the third highest pyramid in the Americas; played an interesting game called chunky and constructed a Woodhenge circle of huge cypress logs 420 feet in diameter for measuring the sun’s cycles etc. I think it as likely that a few Albs or Vikings arrived to take a favored leadership role as much as a few Aztecs showing up with visionary schemes. New Cohokia and all these grand ideas appeared suddenly amidst a more agrarian, simpler society. Nothing like this is likely to occur in contemporary America to make a sudden transition to a new low entropy economy. No community wants to give up its present way of life without compelling reason. The powerful and privileged gaming on green and black networks of social control are least willing to work for social change directly ending poverty.

http://cahokiamounds.org/

Low-entropy condominiums of a post-developer high-entropy technology in regard to entropy concepts are not common in the United States today. Eighty percent of the income of Americans earning more than 10 million dollars annually is not from wages or salaries. The U.S. Housing market is fundamentally designed largely to enrich the non-working class investors. The Bush TARP program to bail out banks and mortgage lenders prevalently was an increase in the inefficiency of rational ho9using design. A practical tarp placed over a rope above a tent will help slide the snow off to the sides preventing collapse of the tent below. The Bush 2008 TARP policy administered by Mr. Paulson was another taxpayer transfusion of their future security to the globalists excluding rational national interest from U.S. Government thought.

The Cohokian city of New Cohokia suddenly grew about 1050 a.d. on the Mississippi River flood plain. It had hundreds of clay-dirt pyramids with one reaching 130 feet high. The layout of the city was rigorous.

Setting building with floor level down about three feet in the Earth, and with earth embanked up against the walls of the smaller dwellings aloud use of natural summer heating and cooling of the Earth versus the atmosphere’s opposite tendencies. Though the Cohokians did not cover their roofs with dirt, they did use mats and sod for quality insulation. Larger 100 unit one level condominiums could use several of these forms at low cost as well.

The desirability of producing low maintenance cost, high quality, sound proof, secure housing structures en mass naturally directs the frugal toward adapting Cohokian culture construction paradigms of heating, cooling and cost effectiveness in modern forms of condominium. The Neolithic Irish Alban culture also constructed Earth mound ceremonial building over stone post and lintel infrastructure. Combing Cohokian and Irish Neolithic (e.g. Newgrange) building concepts could reduce construction cost significantly compared to modern mass-produced, high maintenance apartment-type dwellings.



I have felt that a good condominium unit should encompass the features of a peace rural home insinuated within a verdant ecosystem of minimal displacement. Cohokian-Alban post-modern condominiums with verdant community interior courtyard ‘designed wilderness’ with water and woods and a front side wilderness entry with stone walls fanning out to end with intersecting trail and opposite wood with residual fossil fuel auto parking beyond might be a very quite and enjoyable living environment. I imagine the walls between units would be reinforced concrete one foot thick. Such housing units should sell for fewer than $50,000 dollars in suitable climates and areas without many earthquakes. In locales with common earthquaking a Cohokian ‘sapling’ roof construction might replace the Earth mound.

Viewing the Cohokian saplings planted in the ground in post hoes and lashed together at the top to form a gabled roof structure, and hip roof form in some versions, stimulates the innovation of a variety of materials to readily assemble low-cost dwellings. Steel, aluminum or PVC pipes could be made into quick and ready forms approximating a Cohokian culture paradigm. Advanced composite carbon-fiber building elements with non-slip joining ends could enable nail free assembly of an easy hurricane-proof housing unit. Since the main problem of a hurricane for the poor is surviving the high wind, circular survival henges with or without a roof made by setting posts into the ground would be useful things to build for emergency wind retreat and ordinary gardening areas. The entry ways should be doorless yet protected by a small outer windbreak wall such as might a picador duck behind to screen out a charging bull after placing a sharp object in its shoulder.

For some reason the Cohokian culture and that of the Irish Alban people migrating to America ahead of the Vikings is a good source of practical housing concepts even here in Anchorage today.

Directions to Eternity 2010©GaryCGibson (poem)

An infinite number of entrances exist
unto eternity and its dimensions
limitless numbers in each moment
passing in successions of opportunity
adhering to shadows and silences
being and nothingness
intervals and substance
structures like counterpoints to sensibility
creation, evolution and change
flowing through stability as time and motion
murmuring like dreams of a beginning
ever when

While the world’s hourglass phenomenalizes
irreversibly set to contribute order
we manufacture at the narrows into product and disorder
inefficiently depleting the possible
time and mass slip away
badly used with temporal forms of artifice
when we have nothing remaining
except visions of eternity
with infinite entrances
and just one narrow path to salvation.

President Obama-Dancing in India

This U.S.A. Today video of the President dancing with the kids in a Hindu religious celebration makes one wonder why G.W. Bush never thought of that? A sure-fire way to get a few points up in the polls.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2010/11/obama-does-the-diplomatic-dance-in-india/1

India is being squeezed between Pakistani Muslim terrorists and Government Spook Op planners and potential terrorist troubles in Bangladesh too. Presidential gunboat economic business diplomacy (10 billion dollars worth so far) may be a wrong practice as foreign trade is best left to private enterprise instead of the heavy feet of government trampling out the vintage (per Adam Smith).

What the President might have suggested to the Hindu crowd is that they start a Reformed Church of Brahma to get in step with the more monotheistic leaning suicide bombers on both sides. The Chinese atheist nuclear war preppies to the north also might better appreciate a Reformed Church of Brahma. God recycling the Universe every 50 billion years is a more plausible explanation to some others than a Vlahala group tossing snowballs on the planet Kolob. One must have a Universe before stars and planets and pagan neo-dities.

For 200 million dollars a day,with two aircraft carrier battle groups in the Indian Ocean, the taxpayers at least deserved taps on the President's shoes.

A Comment on 'The Farfarers' by Farley Mowatt ( entered at wikipedia-probably temporarily)

I wrote a science fiction novella with an ancient Irish voyage to and across America myself in 1994. Published in 1995 as 'Just Search for the Spirit', I used ideas motivated by my trip to Newgrange Ireland and the Earth-mound there at 54 degrees north latitude. I read of the curraigh and St. Brendan too. Living at 54 degrees north latitude at Wrangell Alaska later the obvious likeness of the petroglyphs at Wrangell and at Newgrange, along with the similarity of stone penance huts of Ireland with the small stone shelters on hills above the Stikine River debauching at Wrangell suggested the obvious conclusion; that ancient Irish had made the voyage.

I enjoyed reading Mowatt's book and learned quite a bit from it. It has the sound of truth to it. It has some very interesting historical reconstruction of the sociology of the Vikings at Iceland. We know that the Vikings plundered and killed the Irish monks that had discovered and settled the Island or at least followed up on the earlier Albs, what we did not know is that even the rugged, randy row-about Vikings of Iceland outlawed Eric the Red because of a murder he committed there. He had little recourse besides going a-Viking (these are the bad Vikings that search for plunder prospects and give water wings of lungs excised sometime to those they unfairly biased toward).

If the 900 a.d. time frame of the rise of Cahokia and Earth mounds at East St. Louis is right, it is possible that Albs traveling across America in that time period encountered or coordinated the construction. Certainly Vikings at Kiev became the first kings of the Rus. There is a precedent for ancient peoples accepting a foreigner or exotic for leadership such as the Democratic Party today). This is of course controversial for conservative historians, and entertaining for others

On Mysticism & philosophical Language

The point of mystical experience might be to be more than we are, or more than one is as an uncertain self. The Steppenwolf song 'Rock Me Baby' has the feminine wisdom of 'if all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know' and the further expression that there may be a promised land to hang on until then as best as one can. We intuitively know Jesus Christ as the atemporal Lord of transcendence whereof all other foundations are built, comparatively, on sand.

So we appreciate the sentiment and purpose of discovery of mystical experience. One could suffer from chocolate intoxication and experience the withdrawal of mind and brain/balance unity perhaps-so don't overdo eating chocolate bars or donuts and stay away from that sort of sea-sickness and nausea of the phenomenal experience of mind in brain so disturbing of the normal placid unity.

There may be good paranormal mystical experiences in which one is extracted from one's environ while driving a car to be in another perceptible and more pure universe beyond space and time just to drop back into the driving-the-car along the Interstate experience of being. Well, nothing ever last forever and one must find a good paying job to have the mystical experience of a fully stocked refrigerator.

The effort to intentionally discover a mystical experience, such as described in 'The Cloud of Unknowing', might be a grace kind of thing at various points. It might be the proverbial aesthetic regard for God in nature, the Universe as the sublime and beautiful, though obviously the author meant more than that.

The difficulties of finding a solid ground to stand upon and describe mystical experience ought to exist in the same respect as making a quantum computer requires sampling the state of the particle-waves, collapsing them thereby into the classical realm and spoling the quantum super-positioning function of the waveforms.

I am not certain yet I think this is like making a quantum computer that can make every possible calculation yet if one looks inside the result box it makes the answers disappear. Possibly mysticism may be like that.

Human beings exist in classical solid state physics and would like to have the quantum super-positioning state of all possible worlds sorts of transcendence. Maybe that is a reaching to a confusing for the finite bounds of language for several kinds of infinity, yet perhaps not.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. We can say for sure that Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that, yet we cannot be certain what he was thinking about when he wrote it.

Name Change ©2010GaryCGibson fiction

I awoke in the night before daylight savings time ended. It occurred to me that if it's impossible to find work, perhaps one must find a new identity. I have had a damaging slump with my own name; Carbon Story.

Finding a new name isn’t a simple matter. One can look over the most common entries in a phone book and consider taking one of those. Maybe after changing it some problems one hadn’t thought of arise that are associated with it, or some of the actual families with that name have issues one isn’t aware of either.

I think I might wait to change my name until after I can afford to purchase a used sailboat in order to leave the land of mythic and legendary dreams. My dream is not of the collective marketed sort, so it marginally actualizes just at the periphery of the new world order.

The Antilles islands where ants lived along with legendary free women of color seemed a basic attraction. To leave one’s identity behind in Corporatopia as expropriated seems good enough to be a plan.

If I were to skip the Smiths and Jones, Powers and Freeburgs maybe I could select something from the elements or gems. My is a good enough first name, and maybe Hydrogen or Zircon for a last. Something that would have the placid commonness of Steve Smith or Tom Jones—just another of the unit labels that don’t attract notice. Something not associated with my career and soon to be former life as a writer of a famous religious poem targeted for obsolescence by Corporatopianists.

It would be a cruel thing to set someone up for reverse identity theft-before I go- making him assume the identity of a somewhat obscure famous soul journeying on to another life away from that of the world of authors and establishment opinions. The dupe taking the persona upon himself would discover some of the liabilities of the identity soon enough. No, I will move on to the windward isles without pasting that name upon an opportunistic foreign invader on the way out of the country.

Mike Diamond is a good name. For the rest of this story Mike Diamond will be my name. You may think of me as Mike, and call me that too if we should happen to meet at some writers conference in a joint somewhere south of Havana. Also you should know that like my coffee very hot and with two sugars.

This name changing decision was brought about for several reasons mostly for convenience though. One wants to survive without being a target of expropriating authority stoking up power and revenue streams with one’s work. There are too many causes to move on to blame any one though.

Consider the problem of the church. It isn’t the body of Christ when it is not a priesthood of believers. With a one-level church all believers are priests and share with the regular service operations. Reinforcement of the well being of every Christian is ordinary rather than exceptional when there is no hierarchical priesthood to usurp the leadership of Christ as high priest over the egalitarianist priesthood of believers. This is a reason to change one’s name too as strange as it may seem. God will give a new name to each Christian one day, one that no one else besides God knows. For the time being, a name to leave behind- one’s identity as a writer and the triangulation of high-caste co-ops, is my own concern.

As I consider these issues the snow is still falling outside the tent. Another winter in America’s Siberia this time in a cold camp. Another drink of ice coffee making me more cold then falling into the Chena River in January-because the chill lasts and the river immersion shock that sets in fades away after the iced clothes thaw and some days of torpor pass.

I will probably go ahead and buy a passport and change my name on it later- not trying to hide my identity, simply creating a new one to make it difficult for the social zeitgeist to have the same lem to lean on. Maybe Paul Zircon isn’t too bad a name either, there can’t be many zircons out there and everyone probably likes them if they think of them at all.

Being self employed most of the time when I have work times not stranded in this northern globalist resource colony, I have no concern about losing the use of my college degrees in applying for work. They were never worth anything anyway. Only the actual learning had a value for entertainment.

A short list of things to do before setting sailing eventually (sure I know the 1000 sailing things and won’t mention them here); talk to attorney about effects of name changes at copyright office registrations of my written works. Discovery how one updates a birth certificate regarding name changes in order that one has a birth certificate. Is it easy to change one’s name on and I.D. card or Driver’s license to the new name?

Naming a new sailing boat, or renaming an old one is nearly a sacred thing… It is probably a fun thing to do for oneself as well.