Paris' Behavior is None of Our Business

Be who you are Paris. I envy you. Be free; you’re in America. Do nothing with your life or do something great or find a place of accomplishment in-between. You have the privilege of opportunity unmatched by others except by a few on Earth and that also means opportunity to do nothing. Rescuing third world orphans or participating in a Hagen-Daz ice cream marathon on your couch every day is all your choice to make.

Do what you will, but harm no one. That’s a credo of Humanism and a damn good one for all of us to follow. Paris Hilton appears to be following that ethic, as far as I can see. She was caught driving a car drunk, twice, and needed to be reminded and that’s fine, and had to be punished, that’s the rules and that’s good. Still however she has hurt no one. She has no obligation to be anyone in particular besides herself, for anyone, no matter how wealthy she is, no matter what pedigree of privilege, so long as she harms no one.

Enter the pundits editorializing about who Paris should be, how she should act. Some pundits go as far as to suggest that she somehow owes society a different woman to be presented, that her position of wealth and celebrity dictates she have good behavior, be a role model, stay "on" whenever out. Bull. Says who? Would you tell a minority of color that he or she needs to be a role model, that he has to behave differently because of who he is and who he was on the day he was born? That’s counter to the spirit of freedom our founders had envisioned when writing the Bill of Rights. That all men are created equal. That the pursuit of happiness can only be accomplished by recognition of the individualism that is a man or woman in their own element, free, unhindered.

You go girl. Party on or volunteer. Whatever. Its your life and this writer remains jealous.

How to Stop Urban Sprawl

Urban sprawl is the condition of humankind and its associated ecological foot-print of asphalt, housing and pollution stomping all over nature as humankind itself requires more and more space. Urban sprawl usually occurs in concentric rings from a city center outward. Urban sprawl drives out wildlife, fauna, vistas. Trees which function to exchange oxygen are reduced numbers greatly, adding to the air pollution already increased exponentially by the presence of bio burning humans. In all urban sprawl situations, no matter how tough regulations, human waste usually finds its way to spill into waterways, lakes, oceans, underground aquifers. Nearly half of people reading this will be part of urban sprawl and relatively helpless to change their own role in urban sprawl, due to economics.
 

Stopping urban sprawl and shrinking the negative ecological foot-print is entirely possible. It will take first consensus and secondly courage. Consensus that all the ailments of urban sprawl exist and must be halted. Courage to vote in the majority for the changes needed to stop urban sprawl.

We must stop building outward to stop all urban sprawl. We must become a society of people living above one and other like stacked pancakes. We can begin in the suburbs where everyone dreams of owning their own home. Spacious, private, yours to do with what you will. We take that single family home concept and stack it. No more condominiums in the suburbs in which living is squeezed side by side with others in two bedroom compact “homes.” A nice alternative to the suburbia model would be to stack the 1500 – 2200 square feet, of a nice single family home, onto one and another five or ten high. A large community backyard fulfills the need to play in the grass, to stretch one’s legs, to lay in the sun and to have some trees.

We revitalize the age of the skyscraper as housing for the masses. Spiking the skies with glass towers that gleam and dance with the sunlight. The towers of housing will compete for grandeur and perfection, for efficiency and affordability. Thousands of individuals or a thousand more families can exist in one small ecological foot-print. Home Towers they might be called, with roof top airports, basement recreation centers, underground shopping malls, cities within cities that accommodate every need. No need to drive anywhere for the Home Tower dweller, no need for even a car. The Home Tower captures wind energy with propellers lining the exterior of the top 100 floors from all sides, it captures solar energy from a large array that encircles the rooftop and top 50 floors. The Home Tower is %98 off the grid.

Consensus must be reached that the change is necessary. Petition your government for a redress of grievances with phone calls and snail mail. 

Courage must be achieved among our legislators that the wishes of the wealthy few must be overcome for the sake of the planet and of the people, its stewards.

Knows No Internalization of Costs

The Health Care industry knows no internalization of costs. Rather, no internal company sacrifice to deduct from profits, like nearly all other businesses in the United States, save for the oil industry. Under U.S. style corporate regulation, basically, if you the consumer have to have it for life and lifestyle, then you can bet on it, they the corporation will pass every penny of every new cost on to you, nice. Where is the equilibrium between us and them? What balances out the vacuum machine that is these types of businesses sucking relentlessly on our precious dollars? The balance we dream of is non existent without controls by government, a.k.a. us, we the people.

Good capitalism places checks and out-right restrictions on industries. Why?

1. To ensure the continued growth of all industries by:

Curbing anti-competitive behavior by any one corporation.
Preventing monopolization of resources.
Enforcing ethical labor standards across industries.
Enforcing and ensuring a fair and equitable internalization of costs of businesses.

2. Ensuring that workers are able to provide for themselves.

Instituting a Living Wage nationally.
Providing a nationalized health plan for all.
Provide for workers accident compensation, Social Security, individual pensions.

In Venezuela the Chavez government has taken control of the oil industry and provided a methodology for all of the people to benefit from every dollar of proceeds. Because oil lies deep under the people’s ground, in pools stretching for tens of miles, it can not be measured to belong to one man or one corporation. This is the thinking for the people from the Chavez governments plan and it works just fine. In the united states, in the 1880s when this very condition was argued in court, the rich mining companies won because they already had the drilling equipment, the political clout, and the riches needed to get started exploiting the under-earth. They became the Robber Barrons and the inequity they wrought with their predatory and ex-ploitative, dis-compassionate behaviors, brought us into an era of widespread poverty unmatched in U.S. history.

Lots of good sounding ideas to solve our health care problem (too expensive, too inaccessible to the poor, too extravagant) have been tossed out. Most fail to meet permanence of solution, just curbing some costs for some time. A Republican politician recently proposed his ideas be enacted if he is elected: “We need to educate the people! People need to know about calories from fat, soda and red meats, damage from alcohol. We need to inform aggressively about the dangers of smoking and inactivity and the benefits of exercise. Why diabetes alone, if reduced, could save us a billion a year! I predict that our health care industry could save up to %10 per year if these aggressive instructional measures are enacted.” Ten percent? Is he nuts? This year alone the cost of health care in America will increase by %12-%16 over the year before. That has been the rate of rising expense since the late nineteen eighties. Remember: There is no internalization of costs in either the health care industry or big-oil, no absorbtion of unwanted expenses, everything can be passed on to someone. But, how is a %10 health education program supposed to begin to overcome that? It won’t. The politician is lost. He is paying lip service politically to the naive who may vote for him. But more importantly he is protecting an army of CEOs and lobbyists he has come to know during the course of his carrier.

How do we regulate the health care industry for the protection of the people and the continuation of healthy capitalism? We barely do now , that’s the problem, that’s why I write on this subject. Why not? Political solicitation of a caliber which exceeds by far any type of access you or I could get to our representatives. There are approximately 40,000 lobbyists in Washington D.C. waiting to pounce in front of your interests, to circumvent you for a purely corporate interest.

What to do about it all? Begin with absolute public financing of every campaign and no exceptions for the wealthy. Free Television advertisements, where a television station uses the publicly owned airwaves.

Everything else follows the accomplishment of public financing. All fixes. All reforms. National living wage. National Health Care, or Medicare for All, a National Pharmaceutical Association which belongs to the people. Tough controls on multiple ownership of media, of natural resources consuming industries, of overseas exploitation of cheap and child labor.

Visit SiCKOCure.org to learn more and become a part of the struggle for real universal health care.

He Has Become His Own Imagined Enemy

I was pumping gas and leaning on the side my car as my wife sat cooling in the car, on a Friday evening around six o'clock. As I watched the numbers rolling by on the pump's gauge a mumbling and low voice occurred behind me, I glanced back over my shoulder. It was a man in his mid-fifties reading my bumper stickers. "Keep Church and State Separate," and "I'm Too Poor to Vote Republican," my chrome plated Darwin fish and "One Nation Undereducated," and the clencher, much smaller, on the lower right of the bumper "Attack Iraq? NO!"

"Figures!" He then said loudly enough for me to hear, "A commie, pinko, liberal, bunch of liberal crap!" He then huffed off to his truck. I stayed silent – trying to stay cool – and letting him be. But he wasn't through yet. He backed up his truck to within inches of my front bumper and then leaned out to see me while he added more angry diatribe from the comfort zone of his own front seat. "See that tag I got! See that license plate! "I got that in combat fighting for you to have the right to put that communist crap on your car! "Asshole! Pinko!"

I nodded for him to show him I acknowledged his Purple Heart that was displayed on his commemorative license plate that the state of Georgia was kind enough to make available. But I stayed silent and he finally drove off while the sound of words of disdain for me grew quieter has he left the parking lot.

Was he saying that he fought for my freedom, more specifically my freedom to political speech? I think he was. It was a reach, a long reach for reason, teetering on excuse for disagreeing with someone who is disagreeing with the status quo. Kind of like "Jesus died for your sins!" Essentially disagreeing with the wing of the status quo that had supported you – or said they had, seemed they had.

The gas station, mouth wielding vigilante was Vietnam age and I'll assume his Purple Heart comes from that theatre. A war based on a lie that accomplished nothing. What incredible disappointment it must be, the type that weighs like a brick in the chest, like a feeling of pressure on the brain, to return from that invasion and occupation considering yourself a patriot. A patriot so long as the mind stays closed, the brain stays shallow, and selective acceptance of news and of hear-say. Another veteran of that occupation might be a disdainful dissenter when the truth is known, having to deal with his anger, his reality. One man realizes he fought and was wounded in Vietnam for nothing and eventually is cool with the geo-political of it. The other is stubbornly insistent that he did something about communism, that the world is better off for what he did. He is sick of being the minority, so he may become a recluse, hiding himself and his family from the dissenters for the rest of his life. When faced with a dissenter and his bumper stickers, a button is pushed, a rage boils up, reality is hitting him the face, an affront to so much that he personally exalts about god and country.
For the veteran, in confronting the dissenter, with hostility and belligerence, in the gas station parking lot, he has violated the civil rights of the dissenter with the harmless bumper-stickers. He has become the freedom grabbing enemy he imagined he was fighting against. His own personal imagined enemy.

Living with Heat In . . .We May Have to . .

There are billions of miles of black asphalt roadways on Earth, okay maybe 50 million miles. Would you believe 5 million? These roads of fossil fuel as tar and crushed rock both absorb the energy of light from the sun and retain and radiate that energy back upwards as heat, heating up our liveable lower atmosphere and that heat is also wasting a lot of energy as hot road beds, hot roadsides, and hot road kill. White Roads would make a significant difference if industrialized nations would just do it. But besides those evil roads, there are a lot of sources of heat where there wouldn’t not be if it were not for our human existence.

Problems in our control:

• Urban Heat Islands, From the FY 2003 Report on NASA's Earth Science Enterprise (ESE): “NASA’s Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) was successfully launched in January 2003. SORCE is studying the Sun’s influence on Earth and will measure how the Sun affects the Earth’s ozone layer, atmospheric circulation, clouds, and oceans . . . . New evidence from NASA Earth observation systems and Earth science models reveals how urban areas, with their asphalt, buildings, and aerosols, are impacting local and possibly global climate processes . . .”
• 5 million cattle walking around eating and mooing, maintaining a temperature while outdoors (you try doing that naked!), farting methane gas, crapping pies in the fields that stay nice and warm for about a half hour – hey its just a guess. The gas does not break down in the atmosphere to be recycled as carbon dioxide and so contributes to the dense layer of “undigested” complex gases we call “greenhouse.”
• Cars burning fossil fuels. Engine blocks reaching 300 degrees Fahrenheit on hot days or cold days. In America there are at least 2 motor vehicles registered for every driving aged person.
• Household heat: Everything from water heaters which inefficiently leak heat, to boilers which throw at least %70 of their heat into a chimney flu and up, to black asphalt roofing tiles, black tar driveways, plumbing vents which channel hot water steam and its associated heat up and out the roofs of each home, and channel methane gas from the human occupants upward and out as well.
• That darn NASA sending rockets into orbit all the time (it seems). Did you ever see the flames on those things? Man!

Benefits of White Road:

This is all a picture of a large footprint of impact on the planet, and the footprint can be made by one person in one day. But he might not eat a whole cow in one day, unless he’s American. He or she can reduce each part of this footprint, each day. And in many cases, the whole thing. Personally, I would prefer life in a jungle hut, with women, scratch that – one nice woman, and smoking dynamite weed, and having a very tiny ecological footprint.

But White Roads (WR) would be an excellent economic advancement. The scale of the projects in the industrialized world would employ, and re-employ tens of millions, much like the Eisenhower revitalization of the Roosevelt Highway initiative post World War II, had done for work starved veterans. Employment would be needed for the tire manufacturing as all new tires would have to be made of white rubber through and through as to not mark up the new roads. Motor oil would have to be clear or white to avoid those ugly stains.

For safety we’ll all realize that the roads should have been bright white to begin with. A WR would be more visible, as its sides, and its horizon image would jump out at a dreary driver, or a rain storm driver watching through windshield wipers. Exits two or three miles ahead would be visible to any driver with half a brain and eyeballs. Bumps absent of brightness would demarcate the center of every road. Gone are the expensive reflective ceramic roadway markers that have marked roads for so long, i.e. the Dobson’s Bumps of the California Transportation System.

Finally, not so much cooling. But an absence of intense heating via a product we can control and change by our own doing. Have you ever walked on a black-top barefoot? Hurts does it not? A normally 115 dg. road might be only 90 dg. midday.

From around the blogs on this subject:

At Half Baked.Com

“Ice also melts faster on black roads. Would white roads then require lots more rock salt, leading to faster car corrosion, big changes in local water chemistry, airborne pollution from rock salt manufacture/transport, &c.? Would the white roads themselves require more (or less) energy- intensive manufacturing and maintenance? How would they affect accident rates (daytime vs. night-time, of course)?”

“There's a stretch of I-40 in North Carolina that's very light gray with both black and white lane markings (black for day, white reflective for night). Kind of a prototype... croissant.”

“If we paint the roads white by using spray cans, does it all cancel out?”

“I'm voting against the idea because it's incredibly racist.”

“White roads would reflect light as light. Black roads reflect (re-emit) light as heat. (Infra red.) Greenhouse gases trap heat (IR), not light. White roads would cool Earth.”

“The light deflected off the planet would also make Earth quite a good space lighthouse when star-travel moves into full swing.”

“Black absorbs heat. Roads are black. Roads absorb heat. Lots of roads absorb lots of heat. Lots of roads criss-cross Earth.”

“White deflects heat. Roads are white. Roads deflect heat. Lots of roads deflect lots of heat. Lots of roads criss-cross Earth . . .”

“Also many people, more born every second. Hair scatters light--no good. Mandatory baldness, and heads painted white. Much better! Everyone squinting all the time. And writing in short sentences too.”

Health Care Delivery is No Place for Profits Above People - an Ethic

“Universal Healthcare,” are words on the table of national discussion again. Thank goodness. But with the words so come the multitudes of idiots who wish to push an agenda related to the issues, but whose sincerity is absent, as can be measured by the amazing illogical methodology they propose. Like George Bush’s proposal of taxing more the businesses that already can afford to contribute to the health insurance costs of their employees. Moron!

So with the parade begun, George W. Bush begins the politician show at the hospital, gathered in a small conference room with a chosen few white coats. He spouted his illogical proposals that favored protecting the tax dollars of his base (the rich). The anxious doctors and nurses, probably compelled to sit there while their children are held by Secret Service agents in an undisclosed location, pointed their ears, noses, and throats at the idiot with the clearly defined Fetal Alcohol Syndrome eye sockets and beady little dishonest rapidly dodging eyeballs.
Why in the hell do we (the mainstream public) have the impression that health care professionals, i.e. doctors and nurses, diagnosticians and so on, are qualified to give us a worthy opinion? Why especially do we rely on their perspectives on creating a social infrastructure change, so vast as initiating a universal health care system? I spent five years in Nursing. I worked in the one of the most elaborate for profit hospitals on the West Coast. I have spent hundreds of hours getting to know other Nurses, aides, doctors, and administrative staff. Their knowledge of health care politics and what is needed, or what is not, is so vastly deficient it can only be compared to knowledge by a recluse in a trailer home somewhere of Hollywood celebrity comings and goings. Next time you see a politician standing in front of a bunch of white coats with stethoscopes, keep this fact in mind, they are not the experts in health care reform! Far from it! They have filled their studious minds with important knowledge, but for them to begin to study for a solution to our deficient health care system would result in vastly bias answers.
Who are the real experts? The mother and father who lost their child a decade or more ago due to an insurance company that refused to pay for the procedure, a test, a piece of equipment. Or their child is lost due to a hospital or a surgical unit, that refused to begin the procedure without a guarantee of payment. That mother and father became experts on health care reform by little choice of their own. They studied with passion and determination to learn what went wrong, how to prevent it, how to permanently solve the problem for thousands of parents like them. The result of their study would result in bias too. But it would be the kind of bias we all would want, bias study that would result in solutions for all of us, doctors and nurses, politicians and tycoons.
If the republicans are going to take the health insurance issue and make it their own, you can bet that for profit insurance companies will be front and center in the plan, and capitation of services charges will be a taboo aspect that won’t even reach committee. The republicans will do anything to protect the cruel and capitalistic branch of human waste called the Insurance Company. States where for-profit h.m.o.’s have spread like a virus across the entire region, monopolizing all care but government funded clinics for the poor, will be protected by the republicans who will naturally decry “states rights!” Rather than allow a federal program to buy out facilities and infrastructure existing.

The new national health care plan must be fully socialized, treating all, disallowing the purchase of frills and extras or expedited service by the rich and impatient that live on the hill.
One of the first things that we the people need to get straight is some of the language. In the quest for a solution to the inadequate health services in our country, we must recognize the problem is money, not services, not technology, not research, not parking, not access other than the money. Money would solve all our health care problems. But not money alone. Money with caveats, and money with capitation, money that flows with ease and money that does not have to be seen or handled by the patient or patient’s family.
Instead of asking for “Universal healthcare.” We must be asking for Single Payer Healthcare. This describes the problem to be solved. The condition of favor (Universal Healthcare) is beside the point, a goal to aspire to, the ultimate status that may or may not ever happen. But “Single Payer . . “ describes the simplicity of the solution, and reminds us of the major problem of the past, i.e. multiple payers and multiple payees, cost sharing, employer contributions, and etcetera. The later, all conditions of confusion. A sticky web of payments and collection that allowed the consumer to get caught, without the ability to get free. With no middle man between you and your provider, there is but a “single payer,” needed to be your wallet, your health care bank. One organization to watch after, to be frequently audited, to report back to you, the citizenry. “A Single-payer.” 

Instead of a discussion of “Health Insurance,” i.e. what to do about it, how to pay for it, how to dispense it, who gets a cut of it, we must only discuss “Health Care.” That is the problem, not insurance. Insurance is a profit scam, not a solution towards better health. Insurance costs, it’s a general negative, it invokes a concern in most, it invokes fear in others. Others who may be unable to pay for it, as 44 million Americans have been, or unable to pay for a proper amount to remain healthy, unable to receive a specific treatment because “Insurance,” says that you can not. “Health Care,” is what the entire reform movement is about and the insurance was one of the symptoms of the disease. Health care is what Americans only want, just good, care. Its affordability does not have to be a matter of concern for the great many citizens. Health Care is all that matters. The saying rings true in the quest for real reform: “If you’ve got your health, you’ve got everything.”
Expand Medicare to all U.S. citizens and foreign visitors. Outlaw the sale of health insurance by all insurance companies that are not the Medicare National Fund / the Peoples’ Insurance. Create an enforcement wing of Medicare to reign in over billing, over treatment, equipment scams, and pharmaceutical profit gouging.
Shift all for profit health insurance employees into the employment of the new expanded Medicare system. Any officer of a company or CEO, who earned more than a reasonable amount of annual salary and or bonus on the backs of the sick and desperate, can hit the highway, and perhaps sell Amway. We won’t want their kind in a new inclusive people run system.

Visit SiCKOCure.org to learn more and become a part of the struggle for real universal health care.