1700 Billion Gigatons of Carbon in Soil of the North-Global Warming Permafrost Melt?

Scientists have made a revised forecast of the acellerated effect of global warming melting of permafrost and its release of greenhouse gases. Evidently its worse that was previously thought. Not as bad as all of the automobile exhaust and smokestacks, yet substantial.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111130161535.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Permafrost across the northern regions of the Earth may thaw and release methane and other greenhouse gases. I wrote a small article on that topic in 1988-89 or 90 in a Fairbank's paper on the possibilty of permafrost thawing and releasing toxic waste the city wanted to store deep underground thhereby polluting the aquifers-its not a new topic yet one that is not given enough political prioritization as part of a comprehensive effort to slow extraction industry assaults on the ecosphere.

Global corporate pursuit of proprietary interests could be redirected toward less harmful ventures with some intelligent political supervision. Medium sized corporations should be reinforced and large corporations phased out. Sustainable ecosphere use should be given tax support and non-sustainable extraction industries given a special ecosphere tax.

In Alaska though iit is the extraction industry globalists that determine much of the state's economy. I believe mining produced about 3.6 billion dollars worth of zinc, gold, silver and other materials last year. Global corporations in pursuit of profit own many of the ventures in Alaska. The Mayor of Anchorage Dan Sullivan shares the same name as the State's Commissioner of The Division of Natural Resources that includes mining and oil. The State gives hundreds of millions to expand the Port of Anchorage with shoddy construction work requiring reconstruction and wants more. The global fate is inn the hands of politicians with the insider's proximity to existing wealth and power and that includes the global mining concerns that seek to develop the Pebble Mine in the headwaters of salmon streams at Bristol Bay.

The globalists of Wall Street have far more invested in destroying the planetary ecospheric equilibrium than in sustaining it as a viable habitat for humanity.

N.Y.S.E. To Learn to Speak German? Deutsche Boerse AG Nears Takeover

Since Feb. 2011 a German firm-Deutsche Boerse AG- has sought to buy about 60% of the New York Stock Exchange. That makes for an interesting advance of globalism in the U.S.A. Also today the London Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange ownership merged. The corporate world's networks of power influence local business and politics substantially to the detriment of the poor and middle class at least in the U.S.A.

http://www.suntimes.com/business/3752109-420/story.htm

In Alaska there has been a political effort to sell natural gas for decades. Recently the state helped an Australian and a Singapore company with loans along with a Chinese Bank to buy a jack-up oil rig or two for natural gas prospecting in Cook Inlet. Some natural gas was found and more prospecting will go ahead next spring. Meanwhile the state is funding a plan to build a 'bullet' pipeline from the North Slope to Anchorage. The two projects seem to contradict one another to a certain extent,as the purpose is to provide a gas supply to Anchorage.

It has been said that liquified natural gas could be sold to overseas buyers though, and that could make the bullet pipeline feasable financially even if there is a supply of shale gas fracked in the 48 states that makes buildinng a pipeline from Alaska to the 48 state network via Canada unpprofitable.

The political process goes on ad infinitum annd the winners seem to be select extraction industry insiders and politicians. I would guess that Exxon-Mobil can influence prices by choosing what development to support at least as well as the Congress.

A Canadian Corporation has purchased a pipeline to transport U.S. oil from the Midwest for refining in Texas and/or Louisiana for sale to Latin America. Well heck, petrol only sells for $3.50 a gallon now and won't be 4 bucks until next summer. So who needs a non-fossil fuel transport infrastructure in the U.S.A. with global corporations buying everything in sight and concentrating wealth? The Congress just needs to have preferred seating at the trough.

On Moral & Space-time Relativism and the Pursuit of Right Directions

Moral relativism might be taken as comparable to space-time relativism. One might ask why anyone should have a direction or purpose if all locations exist in relation to other coordinates. Yet of course we might believe that it must be so of necessity if a completely deterministic ontology isn't to prevail a priori.

One may not assume that with relativism in moral judgments that all judgments are of equal worth. Certainly that can not be the case subjectively unless one abnegates the value of one's own existence and fate. It is possible to do so subjectively of course, yet the self-deprecation is itself subjectively relative and of little consequence if a Supreme Being exists who donates worth to each individual soul for-himself.

Within a given moral context or moral set of values the navigational buoys are set to guide individuals toward particular empirical goals such as social reason considers valuable. Life, social harmony, education- such means and ends as reinforce individual education and pursuit of the aforementioned are indicated with moral values of a pragmatic application. Individuals may apply their own innovative style upon a course through social life and regard such moral beacons and guidelines as parameters for the ascent of aging and transitions-stages in life's way as Kierkeguaard might have said. Plainly the need to invent one’s own morality, own's own physical theory of causality and so forth entirely de novo for oneself in each individual life would be too time consuming as well as a perennial reinvention of moral primitivism. Social morality becomes a reinforcing pedagogical sketch of fundamental parameters allowing social passage through the shoals of chaos and conflict.

Moral concepts of right and wrong may evolve-they obviously have in many areas such as in the elimination of slavery as a basic human norm of captives not executed, yet morality tended to evolve in relation to the social structure of the time a posteriori rather than a priori. Besides the Lord Jesus Christ the ability to obviously set new social morals significantly differing from the prevailing social ethical and religious practices has been often insubstantial.

Morality it is said is what people actually do in a society rather than what is said about a theoretical moral environment optimized for efficiency. Moral procedures tend to cohere within a prevailing political and ethical system. The difference between an Aristotelian polity and that of a democracy would vary, as would that of an oligarchy and/or aristocracy in regards to the social permissiveness of behavior between classes socially.

Christians have a preferred direction ontologically in relation to a transcendent God and that is a kind of hyper-relativism. Human beings are mortal creatures each with a body and mind that fails like a plant withering under the frosts of fall. Regardless of one's moral positions eventually death overtakes each life and is completely triumphant. The cold, dark abyss of a universe without meaning or moral disposition arrives to reclaim its phenomenally upsurge conscious subjects and return them to nothingness.

That ontological phenomenality of human experience is a reason why mankind looks to Jesus Christ as a transcending Savior able to surpass the failings of moral relativism that is the common experience of mankind as a temporal creature. Being and nothingness of experience for-itself elicits a human response that is not morally relativistic. So far as the Universe and moral experience are real they are also finite for human purposes of experience. Moral relativism seems to require a kind of infinite set of possibilities without finite, not relativistic delimitations in order to be fully relativistic. One might expect such infinite relativism in a multiverse of infinite expanse yet within each universe boundary conditions of physics would exist bringing the human experience of infinite relativism down to finite lines.

Moral relativism may as a voyeuristic moral study of other cultures find that different navigational buoys for moral guidance may not be of equal effectiveness in sheparding the flocks toward its optimal actualization as temporal beings. One might assume that some systems of social governance and moral instructions produce better results than others. One might also assume reasonably that the design of particular moral guidelines must be adapted for each culture's challenges. We learn of somewhat different moral structures in the Mosaic laws and deuteronomical-Levitical applications than in the Gospel of Jesus Christ yet understand that rather than being an existential temporal moral intervention the teleology of God was in a process of actualizing a relationship with human beings and their history. The Phenomenology of Spirit that G.W.F. Hegel described has a corresponding individual experience for each life that might be discerned within the sequential incarnative processes of individuals mentioned in the Brahmanist tradition. Each individual should given enough opportunities realize himself as a part of God's creation. The moral changes from time to time or culture to culture are believed to build toward something greater-an encounter with the Creator.

Christians of course believe that can be accomplished in this one lifetime through a relationship with Jesus Christ. In that way the grace of God may reconcile the fallen human condition trough the atoning blood of the Savior.

On Capital Materiality; The Phenomenon of Hording in Scale

Popular political philosophy since the cold war ended has taken something of a beating and devolved through the media zeitgeist into an economic existentialism advocating an absolute pursuit of self-interest to the exclusion of belief in social reality except as self-interest. It is something of a juvenile way of abnegating social, political responsibility. Society does exist in a concatenated state even as the individuals of it pursue their own self-interest. Like a football team the populous must have a fundamental game plan to win prosperity and security a viable ecospheric habitat. Unlike a football team the populous can and should pursue its individual interests with liberty and non-militarized uniformity.

Aristotle might have been more concerned with real politik and the prevention of the polity decaying into pure democracy and mob rule, or the more evil prospect of Aristocracy trickling upward into being oligarchy than today's economic existentialists of conservative bent, yet Americans today have exacerbated their historical trend against intelligent philosophical thought and just moved into a popular philosophy of super-sizing material things and capital in general.

From a pragmatist's point of view one needs material things to serve particular functions. Housing must be adequate to provide secure shelter and serve personal and social economic efficiency. Lifetime is limited so one doesn't want to tangentialize material possessions and become encumbered with maintaining a mansion or even a bureaucracy as the primary life experience. There are many experiences possible in life that are of equal or greater worth than just a few super-sized material items.

So one looks for other reasons why one must super-size possessions such as homes or SUVs and might discover than social equality or keep a defense parity against the advantage and opinions of other citizens is one of the basic causes for escalating personal investments in standard and predictable ways. Socially the opportunity cost for seeming to be living counter to a prevailing popular opinion may be financially significant. Social economic inertia drives the masses under the influence of concentrated power and wealth superiors along unsustainable social ends.

Value theory is a philosophical activity cognizant of the real value of goods or things, situations or circumstances, relationships and so forth for an individual and a society. Value seems to cohere within utility even if when utility is satisfied values for inessential items may arise to dominate a society. When societies compel individuals by circumstance and opportunity cost to buy very much oversized housing at high cost it has over valued non-utility and may create social dysfunction that spreads like waves outwards through the economic value exchanges into social regions unable to afford the luxury of investing in non-utility. If Americans were to build concrete dome homes with secure interiors, exteriors and adequate privacy and ecospheric integrity in the yard for a fraction of today's cost of quarter million dollar middle class homes perhaps Americans could save more for surfing, biking, sailing, skydiving or composing a poem. Some Americans could become inventors at home or learn a new field of science. The trouble generally is in developing more efficient and better quality housing at a lower cost as a fundamental effort and value of society.

If one could afford a decade's worth of food supply for one's home it still might be unreasonable to get more than a month supply. If a home is far larger than is useful within the context of one's life shelter and living needs it is as much a wasteful hording venture consuming one's time as if one buys far too large a boat to get to the other side of the river and spends years paying for it.

Aristotle and Polity; Moderate Government for the Advantage of the Poor/Pres. Obama's Tax Cuts for the Rich

I am re-posting some comments that I wrote in January 2011 on the President's failure to reasonably negotiate in the interests of demos of the United States. I would also like to point out a good article on Aristotle summarizing some of the main points of his descriptions of politics and especially democracy.

Ordinarily people have a misunderstanding of Aristotle. This 13 page article of summary is worth reading even if only to learn the difference between a polity and a democracy, or how Aristotle believed that Aristocracy transitioned destructively into oligharchy.

http://www.stoa.org/projects/demos/article_aristotle_democracy?page=7&greekEncoding=UnicodeC

In this article Aristotle is found to have the opinion that polity-s sort of representative democracy, is the most moderate and therefor, I would think, best.

Fork in the Political Road-President Obama Advocated Regan Quality Tax Cut Extensions

January 28, 2011 04:13 PM EST

The public debt of the United States is about 14 trillion dollars today. If the tax cut extensions had been allowed to expire the budget would have naturally balanced in two years. Since the tax cuts the President anticipates federal budget deficit the next decade at which time it might be reduced to 50% of todays.

By 2015 the public debt will be out twenty trillion, and interest on that debt will be more than a trillion dollars annually. Right now interest on the public debt is about 3/4s of a trillion annually.

http://www.federalbudget.com/

President Obama, in order to be responsible needed to be a Harry Truman kind of 'the buck stops here' guy and veto any tax cuts. With additional federal budget cuts the public debt could have started dropping in 2013. With the tax cuts and a balanced budget, any budget cuts would have enabled direct reduction payments on the debt principle reducing interest payments as well.

The corporate world is already having record profits in many areas. The rich are getting richer. Jobs are being outsourced. Illegal aliens still come and go by the millions. High unemployment will continue for several years. Fundamental national political accountability has been breached with global corporate interests taking precedence. The federal government in 2008 and 2009 bailed out the corrupt rich with trillions of dollars of financial help and left the jobless to twist slowly in the wind.

The employed are making good money and can afford to pay taxes; the unemployed don't have to pay taxes except from leftover earnings for which they might receive amnesty. The rich need to be taxed at pre-Reagan cut rates.

I write about this issue with pragmatic concern. In Anchorage Alaska there were created 500 jobs net growth in 2010, 1000 new jobs are anticipated in 2011.

A reform of American capitalism is needed as a general an oligarchy, anti-financial monopoly action, low entropy ecological economic are required too, and full employment rather than making America another Mexico or India ruled by elite financial globalists needs to be the goals of a 4th political party in the United States of America.

The Existential Drift of U.S. Conservatives/Union-Leader Endorsement of Newt

Though Mitt Romney is a better candidate, the Union Leader could not endorse him perhaps because most of their subscribers aren't Mormons. Perhaps they were thinking of their income bottom line more so than of whom the best candidate would be in 2012.

There are few real conservatives these days-they are generally globalists in some form or other and inimical to U.S. national interests. Even if they are morally conservative, politics is preponderantly more about economics than morals (all things being equal and excluding the Ghengis Khans, Mengeles and so forth) which should be something more of a personal area that flows upward to the people collectively.

One may wonder if conservativism in the United States has evolved to mean economic existentialism and collapse of social realism as a political concern. With leaders that believe their are no consequence to group behavior economically, environmentally or politically the consequence is sound bite talk show quality candidates with no comprehension of the world today or America's role in it. Newt Gingrich is sort of a co-founder of the 90's economic infrastructure corruption that is paying off now. He did of course have a lot of support.

Obamacare is a Costly Trick for Corporatism

Obamacare requirements that all citizens purchase health insurance is a fundamental corruption of the role and relationship of government too the citizens. The U.S. Government may serve to provide free health services as a safety net for the people yet it cannot decree that the citizens should pay money for services to other citizens, groups of citizens such as businesses through law.

U.S. courts may of course find in civil suits between individuals on monetary issues as the case may be. The creation of health insurance exchanges that poor individuals are required to use to buy insurance from, or from any other source is simply a trespass by the federal government on the fundamental rights of the citizens to be free from bills of attainder and control in their empirical lives. It is more of a violation of privacy than any abortion theorist might ever advance in its support.

The notion has been advanced that expanding the insurance risk pool would lower health care costs for the middle class. That may be true, yet that is a financial context the government has zero right to engage in. If the middle class wants lower health care costs or emergency medical services for those that have used up their insurance benefits it should reasonably create a free public health service for the poor, veterans and those that have no other recourse for their medical condition. Removing the incidentalcosts of providing health coverage for the unisured would in itself lower the overall health care costs of the United States if all other economic factors were favorable.

If the middle class want to have a million dollars worth of health care insurance apeice and want to pay for it by conscripting the healthy, uninsured youth of the nation into a mandatory insurance risk pool creating thereby greater profits for the corporate insurers they would still have no assurance that the corporate profits would not just flow up to CEO's taking tens of millions of dollars of stock options. Neither would the youth having a significant chunk of their paychecks (if they are employed someday) for services they don't use be very happy.

As a matter of logic it makes little sense to remove capital from the poor and the middle class and make them pay corporations thereby eroding the potential for business development and savings, investments and so forth in the long run. When the corporate world began to eliminate employee health insurance it began the progression toward the day when all American citizens would instead be required to pay them for insurance by law instead. As the leadership of the Democratic Party has vacated its traditional concerns for health coverage universally for the poor and failed to make rigorous income standards for social security that would not pay those in retirement more than the average working American it has become fiscally irresponsible in general rather than exceptionally.