Animal Rights is a real issue in this country. Haven't we always, as a nation, had problems with defining life and what life entails?
It started with slavery; we, as a nation, couldn't figure out whether different humans were the same-we finally figured that one out and all humans were given the same basic right to live.
Then came women's rights to vote and own property and black's rights to do the same; we fixed that problem to and now everyone has the same rights under the law no matter who you are.
More recently, we had some problems with (and are still having problems with) rights in wartime and prisoner's rights; we are getting closer to figuring that one out-Guantanamo bay getting closed down and all.
Now, apparently, we are having troubles with animal's rights. If you are an evolutionist, the question is a mere question of survival and morals really don't have anything to do with the matter unless you have a personal preference for moral equality. If you are a Christian (see http://christianpoliticalscience.blogspot.com/2012/03/devolution-part-of-gods-design.html) the question becomes more of a matter of moral standard. What is the Godly thing to do? Becomes the question. So long as you are managing what God has given you, you have done good. The animal's rights issue is simple to determine the answer to. Simply find a way to manage the animals without waste and you will have succeeded.

Insurance: Creating a New System

Part 1: Introduction

The world of today is full of things that just do not work the way they should. From old cars to new cars; from voting systems to government policies; from management practices to ethics, name almost anything and it can be improved on.

This paper is about one of those things that just don't work as well as they should. Insurance, specifically health and car insurance, is what this paper is about. Insurance companies and the whole system of insurance as we know it are a drag on our country, one of many which should not continue.

Part 2: Initial Assumptions

Someone once said to me that people have been looking for a better way of doing it for thousands of years. Of doing what? It doesn't matter. What matters is what looking for a better way of doing something—in our case insurance—implies. To do something better means you are fulfilling certain criteria better than you were before. So looking for a better way of doing something implies that you do, in fact, have certain criteria you want fulfilled—you have an opinion. The problem is people often have a certain lack of imagination or are too set in their ways to really know what will fulfill their criteria best.

To find what you are looking for you must know what you really are. If you are a vegan, you wont find a steak for supper. If you are a mechanic looking for a lost screw, you wont satisfy yourself with a nail; a screw is what you are looking for so a screw is what you will get. Right now, we are looking for a better way {a cheaper way} of getting insurance. So better insurance is what we will get.

Part 3: How Insurance Should Work According To Our Criteria

Insurance is not a tangible thing to be bought and sold like a car or guitar; insurance is a guarantee which will replace something when it breaks—like your back or your car or the resort on the beach front that was smashed to pieces by hurricane season—or, to look at it a different way, you are hiring somebody to fix whatever is insured whenever it breaks.

For hundreds of years businesses and individuals have used insurance as a fall back in case of disaster—our current system is not a forgiving maid or helping hand, it is a hungry wolf that tears into the flesh of its victims. How is this so? Insurance companies, as they work now, are not efficient at all. An insurance company has two bills, the money they use to fix the stuff they insure and the money every company has to spend to maintain offices, employees, and other things. Who ends up paying for all these gigantic companies to operate? The masses. They not only have to pay the insurance company so the insurance company can fix their car or house or whatever, they also have to pay for all these buildings and employees that the insurance company owns and pays a salary to! It is just like gambling; the casino gets most of the money, the players are only given enough to maintain their intrest.

Insurance companies do not provide us with the cheapest insurance possible, obviously—just like it is cheaper for your group to play poker at home than it is to go to the casino. So maybe we should get rid of insurance companies and stop going to casinos.

{Wow, I hope I'm not actually saying we should get ride of insurance companies, because that would be sacreligious... or something. But you must remember our criteria! Insurance companies aren't part of our criteria}

“But insurance companies employ people, if you get ride of insurance companies then people will lose jobs.”

Quite right.

Let us just remember that this is only one problem of many. We could easily be fixing the job crisis with this paper but that is not what we decided to do. If this paper were made a reality people woud lose jobs, but if the job crisis was fixed just like this insurance crisis is being fixed then we would have no problems except world peace, the space race to mars, and global warming.

Insurance is a very necessary part of business though, so how do you get insurance without an insurance company to provide it for you?

Take health insurance. Right now, all the people in our country pay so much in health insurance and get so much back in the form of hospital care, pills, casts, whatever. The amount we get back just so happens to be less than we put into it. That is like buying when the stock went high and selling when the stock dropped low. You lose money because insurance companies, not only have to provide insurance, but also have to pay employees and pay bills with your money.

What Then? How do we get health insurance without paying for these health insurance companies to operate? {If an insurance company insures 100 people at $100 a month and the company has to pay $1000 in bills and whatnot then those 100 people are only receiving $9,000 in insurance instead of the $10,000 that they put into the system.} How about get rid of the insurance companies! Instead of paying an insurance company to pay your hospital bills you could just pay the hospital for your hospital bills. Get rid of the middle man! Lower costs!

But wait a minute... What if I get a bill for $100,000? I can't pay that. So it seems the idea insurance companies used {having everyone pay into a pool and take out of a pool—essentially have other people pay your hospital bills} has to be used otherwise everyone who really needs to use the hospital would not be able to afford hospital care. Well then, how do we use the idea of the insurance company without paying for an insurance company to operate? What if we still used the idea of paying the hospitals directly, but we payed them in the way we would pay an insurance company? You would pay the hospital a monthly amount and the hospital would heal you of your ills for free. Taking both ideas and combining them.

Example:

100 people pay $100 a month. The hospital has a monthly income of $10,000. The hospital has $1,000 in bills so the hospital has $9,000 left over to give surgeries, pills, casts, etc. to the 100 people.

If you look up above between the two brackets where it is described that with insurance companies people don't receive as much as they pay, you will see that the example just stated and example between the brackets is exactly the same. At a first glance.

{If an insurance company insures 100 people at $100 a month and the company has to pay $1000 in bills and whatnot then those 100 people are only receiving $9,000 in insurance instead of the $10,000 that they put into the system.}

At a second glance we see that something is missing. The hospital is never payed! After the hospital is payed to operate—heating and lighting bills and employee salaries, which you are paying for anyway—the 100 people only receive $8,000 in insurance whereas in the second example they receive $9,000. {This is not how it would really work, in both examples everybody would be cured of their ailments no matter what, the $8,000 and $9,000 translates into cost, so, in the first example, people are paying more for their insurance than they are in the second example.}

That's it then, the only other question is if hospitals, car mechanics, and disaster relief centers have the facility to take care of everybody's insurance instead of the insurance companies. The answer is, they do. Those places are already getting payed, by insurance companies and yourself, to operate and they already keep books and deal with money. Since they would be payed no more than they are now being payed, very little about their system would have to change. The only thing that would change is that we would not have to pay for insurance companies to operate. 

It is funny. There are so many problems in this world. From old cars to new cars; from voting systems to government policies; from management practices to ethics, name almost anything and it can be improved on. Most of the time, what these systems really need to become better is someone to work the change. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but, if you have no sword to carry out the pen's actions, all your words are futile.

Spending Facts?

I found this while surfing the net. Of all the ludicrous things that are out there this one definitely takes the cake.
For each point I have written a short refutation.

Point 1. Obama is not raising anyone's taxes. So you mean when Obama promised to increase taxes on the rich to relieve the burden on the poor he was lying? I know Wikipedia isn't always trustworthy, but please go visit this link here and you will see how obvious it is that Obama is not raising taxes.

Point 2. First World Country Third World Healthcare. Baloney! The private healthcare system in this country is one of the best in the world.

Point 3. Defense is 20% of our yearly spending. Right, but would you rather have terrorists and who knows who else bombing our country and stealing our oil?

Point 4. Democrats are not the spenders. And the fact that Obama has spent more than any other president in the history of the country has nothing to do with this?

Point 5. Punishing the poor and elderly is not the answer. the problem here is that the poor and elderly are to expensive. They are not being punished, they are being scammed. Social Security, HealthCare, and social programs in general are politician's ways of raising money so that they can borrow it to spend on other things like wars and fancy airplanes...

Point 6. Inmate Costs. This one I actually agree with.

Point 7. Billions in Foreign aid? Wow Two in a row that make sense.

Point 8. Corperate Tax Loopholes. Sure, letting Big Business get away with not paying their taxes isn't right, but, on the flip side, if Big Business was forced to pay those taxes then most of those Big Businesses would go out of business (then our government would have to bail them out thus putting our country further into debt).

Civilians With Guns

The idea that one person can lift in their arms a metal machine and spray death upon another came with the dawn of the 12th century and the invention of the firearm. Along with those firearms came laws to govern their use and ownership. Many think, under the belief that crime and gun related violence will go down, that those laws should be expanded so that guns are banned from civilian use. This is faulty thinking. Guns should not be banned. 

 

One pro-control advocate, Molly Ivins, states the well known argument in “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of Guns” that the Second Amendment does not support the individual right to own guns. How pro-controlists interpret words of the Second Amendment is that “the Amendment is most naturally read to secure to the people a right to use and possess arms in conjunction with service in a well-regulated militia.” (Stevens). Taking the amendment into the context of the time it was written, pro-control interpretation of the second amendment does seem to hold true. In the time of the writing of the second amendment, a militia was necessary. A militia is no longer necessary, so therefore guns are no longer necessary in the minds of the pro-controlists. Assuming the pro-control interpretation is true, just because the second amendment doesn't protect the individual right to own guns doesn't mean guns should be banned, it only means they can be banned. This is a far cry from being evidence that guns should be banned. 

 

One reason guns should not be banned is because animals must be controlled else we be overrun with them. Hunting season keeps the population of deer down. Without guns to hunt the deer during hunting season, deer will grow so numerous that it will increase the number of auto accidents caused by deer. Already, there are an estimated 1.5 million annual collisions with deer, resulting in 1.1 billion dollars in vehicle damages every year according to CNNMoney. Those numbers can only go up if the population of deer grows. 

One thing that will not grow is our towns. Banning guns will affect the health of our towns measured in growth and safety. Compare Kennesaw, Georgia, to Morton Grove, Illinois. Kennesaw, in 1982, enacted an ordinance stating that all citizens were required to own a gun. Morton Grove enacted a ban on guns for everybody except police officers shortly before that. Since the ordinance's birth in Kennesaw “not a single resident has been involved in a fatal shooting—as victim, attacker, or defender.” (25 Years) Before the ordinance, Kennisaw (29,783 citizens in 2010) had a population of approximately 5,000 citizens. By the amount Kennisaw has grown compared to Morton Grove (Morton Grove's population has actually dropped slightly since 1982 and stands at 22,202 citizens in 2005) and the fact that Kennisaw's crime rate is half the national average (Morton Grove's crime rate has gone up 15.7% even though the county it is located in has only increased its crime rate by 3% according to WorldNetDaily), Kennisaw is doing well with its mandatory gun ordinance while Morton Grove is not doing so well. While these statistics are not definitive, they are certainly intriguing. 

 The principal that explains why Morton Grove has not done as well as Kennesaw is probably the most important argument in the arsenal of the pro-gun group. It is the argument that, if all the guns are taken away from the law-abiders, then there will be little means of defense from armed law-breakers. With a ban on civilian guns, the police using their guns could be considered to be the only defense from armed law-breakers. Since guns protect citizens from the law-breakers it is obvious that guns do have positive and necessary social value. 

Just to show how negative for our country banning guns would be, if guns were banned tomorrow, some difficult questions would have to be answered. How should banning guns be implemented? One estimate by the National Institute of Justice is that there are 190 million privately owned guns in America. To even begin thinking about collecting and destroying all those guns is mind boggling, and that doesn't even include the ammunition, but that would be the easy part. It would be figuring out where to get enough money to pay for it that would be difficult, since, almost certainly, a whole new federal bureau for gun eradication would need to be set up costing taxpayers millions, perhaps even billions of dollars. Not only would banning guns cost an exorbitant amount because of the new regulation implementation, it would also cost the government a lot more (and thus us taxpayers a lot more) because the prison system would have to be expanded. Some people will refuse to give up their guns and those people will go to jail for their refusal. Kind of like illegal drugs nowadays illegal guns will, without a doubt, become prevalent.

Handling an overpopulation of deer, expanding the prison system, and

having to deal with more crime are mountains in the way of gun control. Neither Molly Ivins nor anyone else has yet found a way around them. Should these mountains ever be overcome, that would make room for the possibility of our government banning guns. Until then, the idea of banning guns will remain a distant wish ardently voted for in the minds of those individuals and groups who support gun control.

Work Cited

"25 Years Murder-free in 'Gun Town USA'" WorldNetDaily. 17 Apr. 2007. Web. 12 Nov. 2011. Web. <http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=41196>.

Cook, Philip J. and Ludwig, Jens. “Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms” United States. National Institute of Justice. TSCM. May 1997. Access Web. Nov. 15. Web. <http://www.tscm.com/165476.pdf>.

Molly Ivins "Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of Guns." 1993. The Norton Reader: an Anthology of Nonfiction. Shorter Twelfth Edition ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. 198-99. Print.

Stevens, John Paul and Berlatsky, Noah. "The Expansion of Gun Rights Is a Dangerous Example of Judicial Activism." Greenhaven Press, 2012. Web. http://ezproxy.eastcentral.Edu:2221/i/ovic/ViewpointsDetailsPage/ ViewpointsDetailsWindow?

"Top 10 States for Auto-deer Collisions." CNNMoney. 04 Nov. 2005. Access. Web. 13 Nov. 2011. Web. <http://money.cnn.com/2005/11/04/news/newsmakers/deer/index.htm>.

Abortion

 Today our country has problems. We owe more dollars in debt than steps it would take to get to the sun and back nine times. As a country, we have about the same number of jobs as Indonesia has citizens. The call of national defense has led us into wars we never should have entered. Social programs that were supposed to be providing for the backbone of our country have not done what they were supposed to do and have cost us trillions.
     While all these things can be boiled down to one word-money-there is one problem we have that cannot be put in such hard and definite terms, that is, human life.
     Abortion, for that is what I am writing about, is an unsolved problem in our nation's legislature. Is abortion the murder of innocent human life? Or isn't it? If it isn't, when isn't it? Is it after six weeks, six months, or anytime before the mother leaves the hospital? What if the mother doesn't make it to the hospital and has the baby at home? The real question is, how do you quantify this problem? How can we put a price on human life?
     The real answer is, we can't put a price on human life. I know that health insurance can put a number down for the worth of your life when you are dead, but that is when you are dead, death has no bearing on life. The truth here is that there is no measure for a human who has life; there is no quantity which have could be put down that would accurately reflect the value of a life because that would be saying that you would know the future of that life and what that life will produce in the future. It then follows with the most basic of reasoning that any process which would stop the growth of something that is or will become human is murderous in a moral sense. Thus, abortion should be illegal in every manner.
    I do not claim that government should be entirely in place to uphold moral principals-it is more the protection of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness that abortion should be made illegal and equal to the premeditated murder of a person at gunpoint.
  

Devolution Part of God's Design?

    The idea of Devolution is not one that is commonly explored by Christians today. Wikipedia has an article that explains a good deal about the history and several major figures in the development of Devolution here. The main thing about Devolution that I find interesting is that it is not the opposite of evolution, like its name suggests, but it is sort of like a degenerating evolution; and evolution where organisms can only lose genetic information-in a natural environment-to change their physical traits. Evolution states that an organism can develop genetic traits through natural means (like a fish developing legs) where as Devolution states that organisms can only lose genetic traits through natural means (like the cave wolf spider losing its eyes from genetic mutation).




     The thing is here, both evolution and creationism support Devolution. Evolution states that organisms can lose genetic information to 'evolve,' but organisms can also gain genetic information 'somehow,' I personally have not yet figured out how evolution is supposed to make an organism gain genetic information. Then creationism (wiki article on creationism here) also supports Devolution in that creationism states that man, because of original sin is failing genetically and getting less sophisticated genetically as time moves further from Adam and Eve. While creationism does not support the idea of substantial changes in genetic structure but does, like Devolution, make provision for the loss of genetic information-Devolution just takes it one step further and says that the loss of genetic information can result in larger changes that affect the entire species.

     The logical evidence for Devolution is astounding. Devolution takes the physical absurdities out of evolution and the logical inconsistencies out of creationism then puts what is left over together into one theory. the physical absurdities of evolution are the fact that there has never been an observed time in history when an organism has gained genetic information that was not already present in their environment. (There have been cases where parasitic organisms have injected their own genetic information into their hosts-this has been observed to happen in animals and humans-there are cases where laboratory experiments have or processes have injected genetic information into an organism as seen in the case of the Japanese scientists who injected certain genetic information into goldfish and made them glow in the dark, and there are cases where organ transplants have transferred small amounts of DNA or genetic information.) The logical inconsistencies of are that they believe that microevolution, but not macroevolution; small changes but not big changes, can happen. What creationists fail to consider is that a change, no matter how small, is still a change and that these changes will build up until the organism is noticeably different. This logical inconsistency of creationism is the reason why most evolutionists find creationism to be a joke.

     Once the physical absurdities of evolution and the logical inconsistencies of creationism have been removed from the picture the rest of those two theories can be combined to make Devolution. Devolution, in basic explanatory language, says:

     1. Organisms can only gain genetic information by having that genetic information injected into them by some process. At the time of this writing only laboratory science, parasitic organisms, and bodily fluids/material transfer has been observed to inject genetic information into organisms.

     2. Organisms lose genetic information by some process which physically removes that information from them, some process which transfers that information away, or some process which suppress or corrupts that information making it so that the organism can no longer use that specific piece of genetic information.

     3. Organism change physically as a loss of or gain of genetic information is compounded into a buildup. this may take several generations.

     Devolution explains the history of the biological world so well not only because it does not contradict the Bible like evolution does, but because the bible actually supports it. When God created Adam and Eve He created them with perfect or near perfect genes. Perfect genes would mean no genetic breakdown. Because man sinned and lost his perfect genes a state of genetic breakdown has begun. This is why Adam was able to live 930 years but only ten generations later people such as Shem, Noah's son, were only living to be 400 years old and today the average lifespan is somewhere around 70. We, as a human race, are Devolving and that is God's Design, not part of His original design-we have already corrupted the Garden of Eden-but it is His plan nevertheless.