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Just as valid today as it was on 9-11-09
Taxes pay for worthy government services
September 11, 2009
The unionized government tax based aid firefighters came to save the day once again showing how government programs for essential security issues are a must and are there when we need them the most. Taxes are our dues for living within a civil society.
Health care is an essential security issue or right for all industrialized nations except the USA. In the USA, we pay twice as much as other countries do, but have shorter life expectancies and higher infant mortality rates. We also are rated 38th in the world in over all health care, behind Costa Rica.
Fifteen percent or 45 million of our population are uninsured and 1 million people will file for bankruptcy because of medical bills this year. Seven-hundred thousand of those bankruptcies will be people that have health insurance. In all other industrialized nations, those numbers are zero or close too it.
When did America become the country that can’t? We voted in the November ’08 elections for “Yes We Can.” The Republican party of “No” needs to sit down and let people who believe government can make a positive difference do their jobs. The Republican party had their chance the last eight years and really the last 30 years to prove their stuff and it is obvious that it has been a failure.
So, let’s thank those firefighters who put their life on the line for us all. Let’s thank the military, road crews, police/fire departments, teachers/schools, librarians/libraries, and all successful government-based programs that protect and secure our communities and country.
Ben Emery
Nevada City
Nice post, Ben! Thank you!
Thanks Ben as you’ve hit the nail on the head, but we’ve all forgotten that in the past nature’s way of controlling the forest included fires and now that we’ve had the Smokey the Bear telling us that “only you can prevent forest fires” we’re dealing with undergrowth that should have been gone years ago.
I saw a fire truck with Los Angeles County on the side of it when coming home from work on Friday.
Thanks to all fire fighters from all areas for coming to help us save our bit of heaven!
Brad,
The US fire suppression over the last century is one of the worst policies for the health of our open spaces and forests. It promotes unwanted growth at the same depresses good new growth.
Here is an excerpt from an article about Philip Conners book “Fire Season”
“What along with his voice weaves together Connors’s variations is the “story of fire,” told through the forester turned prophetic ecologist Aldo Leopold. It was Leopold who in 1924 hatched the notion, heretical at the time, of setting the Gila aside not for timber companies and ranchers but as wilderness whose value couldn’t be measured in dollars and yields. Even then, to Leopold and timber companies alike, wildfire seemed an adversary to be attacked wherever and whenever it arose. Only decades later did ecologists come to recognize that wildfire is a creative as well as destructive force. Summing up the Forest Service’s current thinking, Connors notes that if Smokey Bear were to give honest advice today, he’d say: “Remember — Only YOU Can Prevent Your Cigarette or Campfire From Starting a Wildfire We Are Forced by Longstanding Protocol to Suppress With Every Available Resource So as Not to Encourage Promiscuous Pyromaniacs; on the Other Hand Some Fires Started by Lightning Ought to Be Allowed to Run Their Course. . . . ”
I install a dish for an older man of about 80, who had several micro fires going at once several years ago in the morning hours. He kept his property free of brush by burning up less than 2 gallons of brush and twigs in each pile, with a hose nearby.
Tom,
What we could do is use that underbrush/ ground fuel for biomass energy plant and pellet production. Energy plant could power an electric train or just help the reduce work load of the local power plants bringing down cost while at the same time creating jobs and reducing the size/ intensity of wildfires in the region.
Ben,
with natural gas being as “cheap” as it is right now I don’t think that the biomass business will be able to survive financially as the payback just isn’t there yet.
Brad,
What we need to do as a society is start utilizing all forms of energy for many reasons. There isn’t any single answer to almost any issue. The more energy we could get from biomass, solar, wind, ect… the less of dirty energy we would need to use. The problem is we only see things in short term so we will drive 10 extra miles to get gas that is two cents cheaper but gobble up any kind of savings with the extra miles put on thus putting more toxins into the air. Just a real life example I experience all the time with family and friends.
BE wrote:
“we will drive 10 extra miles to get gas that is two cents cheaper but gobble up any kind of savings with the extra miles put on thus putting more toxins into the air.”
I think you just proved Brad’s point. How are we going to haul all this biomass around and to where? In trucks. And, what do trucks use? And, what are we going to use this biomass for? Are we going to burn it directly? The chemistry to turn it into fuel (alcohol) isn’t there.
Working in the fire camps aint a bad gig, at least for the mapping crew on the night shift. Its awesome being in the heart of the action on fires, I’ve been working the Mill Fire at the command center in the Stonyford rodeo grounds since Friday, hoping to get sent to the Robbers fire when they release us from here.
Lots of worn out looking fire crews after a week of hot days, hiking steep terrain, or working long nights, then trying to sleep in tents when its 95 – 100 outside. It’s bad enough for these guys with all the physical exertion in heat, add that and the lack of sleep, these folks around here certainly earn their pay.
Chris,
Oil is a finite resource that is becoming more and more expensive to extract, which increases the cost to purchase. At the moment a vast majority of our lives are dependent on oil, what is going to happen as it becomes more scarce? Check out this link about biomass and its uses.
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/renewable-energy/how-biomass-energy-works.html
Yes, but the “infrastructure” to pull this off is off the table as Brad suggests. It’s the same with electronic cars. There’s no “gas stations nation wide” for electronic cars.