This is what I wrote Mr. Wes Benedict of the Libertarian Party and his cryptic answer follows (I ask anyone who is Libertarian to clarify his response as he obviously can't be bothered to explain his position in language the average American can understand. The issue involves his party's disdain for coverage of pre-existing medical conditions).

Mr. Benedict,

If I have high blood pressure, I should be denied coverage from my next carrier because I had the misfortune of being diagnosed early by a company ordered physical while someone else who postponed his physical and gets diagnosed with HBP, gets covered? This hardly seems fair.

Also, consider the fact that, after all is said and done, the vast majority of medical conditions are pre-existing if you consider the role of genetics.

I know that not standing up to your principles just opens up a can of worms, sir, but life is just too complicated for dogma. If you can just throw in a little ‘but’ here and there, the LP party may one day triumph.

Respectfully,

Angel Jimenez

[response from Mr. Wes who is not even civil enough to address me by my name]

Does your auto insurance company cancel your insurance when your breaks [sic] need maintenance? Why not? Do you even call your insurance company when you need to replace your breaks? Are you aware of the differences between accident insurance, warranties, extended warranties, and regular maintenance?

Government policies have caused the mess we have today and driven up the cost of simple health maintenance to absurd levels--whether you pay for it through your insurance company or you pay for it through the government.

All the work that goes into calculating the value and risk for insurance is a huge dead-weight loss on society that insurance companies and the government have loaded onto us.

I prefer a free market alternative to the current situation. If I had my way, I'd allow you to join a Canadian-style system, with the caveat that those who adopt the Canadian-style system have to pay for it, those who don't adopt it, don't have to pay for it and get their health maintenance from a competitive marketplace.

Would you forgo your favorite "but" for a world of freedom, peace, and significantly more overall prosperity?
(That was a rhetorical question. I've got to go. Out of time. Please don't send a response. Best wishes to you.)


Wes Benedict, Executive Director
Libertarian National Committee, Inc.
2600 Virginia Ave. N.W., Suite 200
Washington, D.C. 20037
(202) 333-0008 ext. 222
(202) 333-0072 (fax)
wes.benedict@lp.org
Join the Libertarian Party at: http://lp.org/membership


What Mr. Benedict fails to grasp is that high costs come about from the not so free medical enterprises. Insurance companies, although they could charge less, take in about 3% of the total cost of medical care. If Mr. Benedict thinks for one moment that his insurance costs will be less with his free enterprise system, he is being delusional. The lavish lifestyles of those in the medical profession account for the high costs. What Mr. Benedict will get when he opts for the cheap MD and cheap hospital is merely a shortened lifespan.

One last note, I now understand the barbarian response of Ron Paul's son, Rand Paul to the news that one of his supporters had stepped on the head of a non-libertarian protester. Some Libertarians are no more than anarchists and I disavow myself of all connection to the Libertarian Party and will post any non-sequitur I may find coming from them. A party not open to civil discourse is fascist and has no role to play in our American society.

We owe our existence to predation.

First, there were the Blue-Green algae producing tons of oxygen as a result of the splitting of carbon dioxide and water mostly for their carbon and hydrogen content to make hydrocarbons. The excess oxygen can not exceed certain levels or else it would become toxic. At first, I thought that organisms would evolve that consumed decayed matter using up oxygen in the process but the problem I see here is that the decayed matter may have been too oxidized to have been of any real value. The best solution would have been the creation of a predator that kept the population of photosynthesizing organisms in check and, consequently, the oxygen levels.

After predation, multicellular organisms arose as a defense against the predator, and here we are. Organisms would have stayed unicellular because there is little advantage to grouping together and may be detrimental if your aim is to maximize exposure to light.

I've always wanted to calorie count but find the procedure tedious and error-prone. The reason is that manufacturers use the per-serving specifications to hind the true caloric content of their product. You know, they state 120 calories in a serving of 25 chips. Who wants to look at a label and then count out chips? Some use fractions: 95 calories in a third of a bar or a half of a cup. Really now! If I always bought the same products in the same quantity, it might be easier for me but I'm always buying different products or different sizes.

The solution is to have the manufactures add up the total caloric content and state that on the label. Here's how it might work. Let's say you are a family of four. Before you go shopping, you add up the caloric requirements of your family based on weight. You then buy a quantity of product equal to that total. Now, the family members share the products according to their needs. They might, for instance, set aside x cups of ice cream into individualized plastic container. Of course, if everyone can be trusted to take no more than their share, there would be no need to apportion. Active teenagers may even be given an entire package of their own.

There are a few problems. One is that a product may not be consumed within a shopping cycle (jar of olives, gallon of oil, sack of rice). This is where a computer program would come in handy. Having input the total calories of a product, the computer would then calculate how long it should last before the next purchase.

If you are single or living with one other person, then the scheme is even easier because you essentially half everything you consume or you split it 1/3 to 2/3 with the larger portion going to the more active or larger member of the pair.

The next time you get a burn on the back of your hand, it will afford you an opportunity to see cytokines at work. After the burn heals, you will notice that surrounding the burn, the skin begins to form a dark ring of melanin around the burn area.

The reason the ring is darker than normal is because the burned skin is sending out cytokines asking melanocytes to produce melanin for UV protection. However, the only functioning melanoytes are on the periphery of the burn, hence, the ring.

I have always been one to seek the better way but, paradoxically, not burning fossil fuels may be detrimental to our future.

What if an asteroid hit Earth and just happened to hit in the Middle East or other site where oil is found in large amount? The debris from an asteroid hit while harmful in that it would block the sun for a while is nothing compared to the ensuing massive burning of oil that would not only pollute but greatly diminish the oxygen in our atmosphere.

It would be better, I think, if we were to continue consuming fossil fuels even when we develop alternative energies. The fact that fossil fuels exist means that the Earth is incapable of handling the biomass created over time. The problem is, of course, that there is little oxygen at the bottom of the ocean and oxygen is needed by organisms in order to utilize organic matter--the matter just sits there under the high pressure of the oceans and converts into fossil fuels. Burning it as we do now is better than a massive one-time burning at the hands of an asteroid (or terrorist?).

Alternative energy should be continued because, if anything, we could use it to help us handle the increased CO2 by separating the carbon from the Oxygen. Carbon could be used to create carbon fiber while oxygen could be used for contained home atmospheres where it would be very therapeutic.

[It's so sad to be an armchair cosmologist without a degree in physics but I'll not let that stop me]

If gravity is manifested in the wave that we're presently trying to find, it must travel [it is said that the Earth would still orbit for a period of time if, hypothetically, the Sun were to suddenly be removed]. If it travels, it must expend energy. If it expends energy, it must diminish in strength over time [the moon is increasing its orbit presumably on account of diminished gravity]. If it diminishes in strength, the arms of a spiral galaxy must be the stars there being "let loose" and beginning to travel in a straight line [Newton's law of inertia].

This diminution over time, could explain the expanding Universe. As you radiate more energy, you lose mass and, canonically, when you lose mass, gravity diminishes in strength.

caveats:

a. the moon may be expanding its orbit because of other orbiting bodies "pull" on the moon.
b. diminution in gravity may be just the loss of mass through radiation, but this would also explain the arms of a spiral galaxy but only if black holes also lost sufficient energy over time.

I emailed a host on WBAI about how I thought the government should do all the hiring (at least for most well-defined jobs). I never heard from him but I suspect that, like most, he might feel that Blacks should be educated first. I disagree with that stand because, regardless of your education, if minority competes with a White man, he would need better education than the White man and even then the employer would favor his own kind. That much we know. It is as inescapable as the prevalence of deviant catholic priests. So the solution is to ensure non-discriminatory practices first or simultaneously with education. Alone, education will not do the trick.

How do I know this? Well, I am educated and I have tons of experience (more education); but when I reached 50 years of age, I encountered ageism and I now know firsthand how discrimination works even against the White Hispanic man. When I was younger, my Spanish surname was never a big issue as I always found employment but now, I don't get an interview unless I lie about my age or cover it up.

The way to level the playing field is to make the hiring process blind to the employer. He should specify what he needs and the government should test for the necessary skills and select, at random, an employee that the government guarantees will do the job. The employer may even benefit because, now, we've eliminated unemployment expenses and may decide to replace them with employment subsidies or free training.

Fora.tv had a Dawkins talk. I didn't listen to him because I know what's always on his mind. I did read the comments to see how far along the evolution/religion debate had evolved. It's all as stagnant as ever.

I was going to post the following but with those people (on both sides) it would have gotten lost among the indecipherable comments that plague online comments.

I had wanted to ask all those who bask in Dawkins' and their own intellect that, if evolution is true, why do they not defend the child molester, the rapist, the terrorist, the serial killer, the homosexual, the thief? Was it because cowardice is also ingrained along with arrogance or is it because religion (in the U.S., at least) is an easy target?

Those who profess to know evolution should stop state capital punishment, incarcerations, and sundry other penalties, along with prejudice and bigotry born of societal ignorance. For the time being, leave people to the philosophies they were taught and, who knows, they may come around to your way of thinking if you can show them that the perversions that afflict them are not satanic spells but godly manifestations in the form of His grand evolutionary scheme.

The cynic might say that punishment is something that, surely, evolution created. Yes, it is true. But what is stopping us from finding the humane solution? We know that punishment doesn't deter anyone. Yet we spend untold billions on inflicting pain on our fellow man who, I can bet you any eternity in heaven that I might be blessed with, is behaving under forces outside his control. That's right, the mafioso who runs the New Jersey town; the Jews and the Muslims who, like the Christians (let's be fair), reads the bible like a lawyer reads the law; the President who promises this or that and falls victim to lobbyists of one ilk or another; the female teacher who seduces a student; the Catholic priest who stupidly is ordained to follow the edict of some eunuch pope of days gone by and fails; the capitalist who grows richer while passing off societies ills to, of course, society; all these are, in the grand scheme, faultless.

So what is the solution? The solution is one of education. The evolutionists spend all their time condemning the creationists as if all the ills of man are their doing or as if all the impediments to progress are their doing. NO. The fault lies with the man who has knowledge and knows not how to instill it in his neighbor. It may be because he would be forced to defend the child molestor--who would want to do that? But no one is being asked to send their children over to the deviant in order to appease the god of evolution--that would be ludicrous. But if we can agree--and teach--that perversion is outside the individual's control, we can treat the man or woman or child, organically, through surgery, chemistry, or genes. The solution is out there. Rather than the anachronistic call to incarceration and the crimson letter, let us collectively seek more humane treatment. The fiction of A Clockwork Orange was unfortunate in how it affected us. It may have single-handedly set us back decades for it showed how through our best intentions, man can not interfere successfully with nature; but the thinking man should have been aware that without man's intervention, we are stuck with the snail's pace of evolution to, hopefully, make a better man. But we should heed the lesson of the ant who has outlived us by eons and yet is, according to E.O. Wilson, one of the most warlike of species. Evolution has given us smarts. Let us not continue to be philistines.

This is a prediction:

Saturn's red spot will turn out to be a "moon" orbiting just below its surface.

In trying to solve Goldbach's conjecture, I came up with the following:

1. Primes are known to thin out to infinity.
2. Of the two primes that make up an even number, one is found between zero and 1/2N, the other is found between 1/2N and N, where N is the even number being tested.
3. At some point, we should expect to find a gap equal to 1/2N and occupying the region from 1/2N to N.
4. Goldbach's conjecture is disproved because no prime will reside between 1/2N and N.