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mathboy ~ Yeah! I agree that idea sounds good on paper; but, in reality it might just need some tweekiing. If you give people an arbitrary day off to vote--especially in the middle of the week--I can guarantee that the vast majority of voters will use the day to party instead. I say mandate at least two days for voting and make them both on a Thursday and Friday so that it leads into a four day weekend. Also, in order to qualify for those two national paid days off you have to provide a voting receipt to your employer for tax purposes. (The employer will basically be reimbursed in taxes for your two days off. That way--at the end of the tax year--it costs employers nothing.)
Then, we vote on Thursday and get that out of the way. Friday we spend partying and celebrating the vote while the results come in. Saturday and Sunday are for rest; or, extended partying--depending upon the outcome of the election, and how you voted. We can even encourage block parties on that particular weekend. Close down everything in town. It may sound like a big thing; however, if you ever travel Mexico you'll find that most Pueblos down there have an older and bigger tradition of closing everything down for one entire month of the year during which they have parades, dances, and parties everywhere. It's very healthy for the people and the families to participate in such festivities together. I think it would be very healthy for our country to take a lesson from our neighbor's much older culture. Also, a voting holiday would really help bring this torn country back together again.
You know, mathboy, if election day were a federal holiday, maybe more people would vote. Good idea!
To show that we are a democracy, I think we should not only make election day a holiday, but we should also eliminate president's day.
If election day were made a national holiday (a mail holiday, at least), we could also use the post offices as polling places.
The eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not mail anything on Sunday! ;-} But then Moses sobered up and crossed that one off his tablets. But some people still take it literally.
In some states, they used to ban merchants from selling anything on Sunday. I think that up in one of the provinces in Canada, that still happens.
I read that the Post Office used to be open 7 days per week. Sundays were eliminated because the USPS was incidentally competing with churches for attendance, and the churches didn't like it.
Aliceinwonderland: Thanks but I can't take the credit for that term "presstitutes". I believe I got it from someone who frequently participates on the "Community" boards. My apologies for not remembering just who it was.
mathboy: thanks for that link!
I've seen the term before--I can't remember where.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/presstitute
So it sounds like Thom's idea is that the Post Office should be the clearing house for interactions between the government and its citizens: voter registration, welfare enrolment, etc.
I like it. When I moved the first time as an adult, I didn't know how to register to vote. If it hadn't been for the Internet, I don't know if I would have gotten it done. If my financial situation deteriorates further, it would be nice to have a place to go to get some direction on what to do. Yeah, I could search the Internet, if I already knew the name of what I needed or of what program I qualified for.
"Presstitutes".... Brilliant, Palin! Take a bow!! I bet Sandles would've given that one thumbs-up.
We can thank George W. Bush for ISIS, along with the Middle East's general malaise. Nothing would satisfy me more than to see that little toadie standing before a firing squad. He is personally responsible for every beheading ISIS has carried out, let alone the hundreds of thousands of other deaths in that region. (Thank you Thom, for pointing that out.)
Our war criminals continue to skate free, just like the banksters. Apparently the laws here in America were only written for us lackeys. Pot smokers have paid much harsher consequences for their "crime", amounting to no more than an affront to corporate monopoly. - AIW
Another kind of "inversion" is taking place right now over in Iraq. The bad old ISIS is being played up in our main stream media as being worse than Al Qaida because they are beheading people in Iraq who won't convert to the extremist's brand of religion right on the spot. They are also now using the "g" word...genocide. So now, they are sending in the bombs to hit "select" targets. Yeah, we know just how "select" bombing can be..don't we! But this isn't enough for people like Peter King, and other right-wing war mongers, who would be happy to see our boys fighting and dying and killing yet more innocent civilians in Iraq once again.
Problem with this is that, unless you have short memory, the US was/is aiding Al Qaida in Syria when Al Qaida was cutting off heads of those non-muslims in Syria who would not convert to Islam on the spot, as well. I didn't hear an uproar from the US presstitutes nor condemnation from our political leaders to the tune of sending in bombs to kill Al Qaida in Syria. They just kept on funding them and Al Qaida just kept on lopping off heads.
See how messy things can get when the US thinks it has the right and might to overturn other countries affairs. The High and Mighty greedy bastards who want to control all the oil and other resources just can't keep their peckers to themselves. They have to rape over the rest of the whole world before they are satisfied.
The US should have left Saddam in power when there was a fairly stable government. Everything bad that is happening in the world right now has been caused by US intervention and manipulations.
GreenThumb, I agree totally. Just a few points I’d like to add: (1) most “news” nowadays, in print as well as through the boob tube, amounts to little more than corporate drivel; (2) Many if not most Americans are feeling too disempowered (consciously or unconsciously) to plan for the future; and (3) If fossil fuel oligarchs continue having their way with us, safe drinking water in the developed world will soon be a thing of the past.
I think it’s mighty hypocritical (and ironic, and downright silly!) for a fossil fuel cheerleader like Kend to tag unprocessed water in our natural environment as “crap”, when the industry he’s so gung-ho about (along with human stupidity in general) is what has polluted so much of it. - Aliceindunderland
I agree with dianhow. Most Americans don't bother to tune in and don't have the time to if they wanted. And most Americans that do tune in are in separate camps that preach to their own choirs. It seems that most Americans only respond to crises. They do not like to think and plan for the future. Sorry to say that in America, change requires crisis. Too bad.
And I agree with this part of Kend's message: "engineers can produce enough safe drinking water to hundreds of millions of people..." We are truly lucky in the developed world.
I do not agree with Kend that nature provides us crap. Drinking from an open water source (like lakes, rivers, pools and streams) is not safe because open water can always be polluted by whaterver falls, washes into it. But drinking from what nature provides - springs and groundwater SHOULD be safe, except that human activity/crap (over grazing, mining, fracking, list goes on and on...) can pollute an otherwise safe, natural water supply. Too bad.
Once again, the real problem is human overpopulation and the solution is depopulation. Too bad we can't do it rationally, but seem to require crises(drought, famine, wars, disease...) to handle the problem. Too bad
Really, Kend? Maybe it's time you do a little traveling abroad. Sounds like you can afford it. It also sounds like (as usual) you don't know what you're talking about. - AIW
What, exactly, would you scream at the White House and Congress to do? Global warming isn't terribly complex. We burn excessive amounts of fossil fuels. When you burn fossil fuels, soot particles and oil particles are released into the atmosphere. The oil particles magnify the heat of the sun, the soot particles absorb and trap the heat close to the earth, and global warming is the result. Our leading contribution to global warming (as well as lung disease and cancers) is our extrteme reliance on privately-owned motor vehicles, with the notion that we have the right to drive as much as we wish. Millions of cars, trucks and motorcycles hit the road every day, adding more soot and oil particles to the air. Americans are notorious for fighting against using tax dollars for a modern mass transportation system.
Frankly, your post is only marginally coherent. How would the Siberian Crater prove that climate science is fraudulent? Climatology is simply the study of weather data accumulated over a period of time. If you look at the data, you can conclude (for example) if there is a warming trend or a cooling trend, etc. From there, you can have theories about the causes of those trends, but need to do the research to prove or disprove the theories. (Pay attention to the difference between theories and scientific conclusions.) Think of the earth as a patient, the Siberian crater as a symptom, and scientists as the doctors. The doctors can form theories -- educated guesses -- based on the symptoms, but they need to run tests (the research) to determine the cause for certain. That said, I would love to hear how you conclude that your theories are correct while scientists and computers are incorrect.
First, dump the opinions that are driven by political ideology. Science has a habit of contradicting the best of politically-driven notions. At this point, we don't know the cause of the Siberian crater. We have theories, some good educated guesses. But to my knowledge, we don't yet have enough data to be certain of the cause. It will take more research, and that takes time.
I vote for the Ronald Wilson Reagan sewage Plant! Better yet, the Reagan-Bush raw sewage plant!
Something like that Marc. I am just saying we should appreciate our infrustuture a little more. We have it pretty good compared to the rest of the world.
Mr. Ford, if those conservative business owners were forced to drink, eat and/or breathe their own toxic crap, that would put an end to their bitching and whining in a hurry. Then maybe, just maybe, they might stop treating Mother Earth like a sewer. - AIW
Marc, thanks for a nice hefty dose of comic relief. That was great. Between that and George W. Sewage, I'd say you're on a roll, ole buddy! - AIW
You can't do anything about the google, Google has a monopoly. Today I have read that google gives rank to website who has SSL. Prostarjackets
The Siberian crater means Mama Earth is sick, and suffering from some kind of poisoning. She may be suffering from CO2 poisoning which will cause a fever, excess water retention, and methane ulcers which will cause methane poisoning, which will cause the fever to rise even more. This sickness is cureable but it involves the extermination of the pest that caused it. After the extermination of the pest Momma Earth will recover and be just fine. If the pest does not completley exterminate its self and it survives, it means that the pest has stopped making Mamma Earth sick and Mamma Earth has a chance to recover.
Protecting clean water sources with regulations just makes good sense. I know that conservitives say that regulations are bad, but regulations are laws that are put in place to protect us, all lof us, even conservitives. As a plumber I took a course on backflow prevention and was a licensed backflow preventer tester. Sometimes business owners would complain about having to pay to have their backflow preventers tested every year, saying it was just a way for somebody to make money. Many business owners including farm owners don't care who gets hurt by their business practices, All thy care about is making the most money they can make. These are the people who make regulations nessessary.
It means climatology is a pseudo science!
Recent satellite data reveals CO2 has no influence in global warming claims so they now focus on methane...
It was james croll in the late 19th century who constructed the global warming/cooling cycle. Revealing we are entering a cooling cycle! Later proven by the milankovitch cycle!
Academically acclaimed geologist and biologist are incompetent! Climate models constructed by super computers are just as inconsistent!
First CO2, CO drops out the troposphere the second heat from the molecule is cooled when there is an absence of solar radiation. Thermo dynamics!
kock bore hole revealed, and subsequent studies show the crust is not as solid as text books declare. The volume of water in the crust is vast. And the discovery of extreamophil at the deepest depth produce a variaty of commodities. Including methane. There is no consistent way to identify the age of stone!
The most abundant living organism in the past is an ansestor of coral. it feed off the carbon rich atmosphere and produced water as a by product. Sea levels globaly rise due to the biological production of water!
Saw a guest mention mass extinction 56 million years ago... Well that was due to an asteroid/comet the size of Everest impacting the earth in the southern Gulf of Mexico! The KT impact..
The most significant atmospheric study conducted during the 90s in Australia was the evaporation rates of surface water has increased. The only time the study was confirmed in the US was the only day flights where grounded.
More water in the atmosphere, greater density, greater density greater cloud cover... And a significant influence on the jet stream which has been shown to have a longer wavelength with lower amplitude...
But governments don't need concern themselves with facts... They have managed to impose taxis on commodities imposed on us by corporate lobbiests...