A good website to look up your current officials and the future candidates. Type in your zip code on the left and it will show you the list of officials and candidates. Click on any one of them to see their profile. There’s lots of information from their background to their voting record.
Project Vote Smart – American Government, Elections, Candidates and Voting
Scientists can tell where your ancestors are from by examining your genes. (There’s a $400 test available to those interested.) Some of the consequences can be positive, medications can be tailored to racial background. Some can be negative, you can imagine discrimination of all types based on this knowledge. Others may be just plain confusing. If you’ve always thought you were black and your test results come back as Asian and American Indian and NO black genes … then what are you? Are you still black?
This Pakistani woman was “punished” for an alleged affair that her brother had. Because he supposedly had an affair, she was sentenced to be gang raped by the woman’s brothers. After the sentence was completed, and she walked home naked in front of the whole town, she was expected to commit suicide. Instead she charged the men with rape, won a settlement and built two schools. She still depends on round the clock police protection to keep her rapists’ families from killing her in revenge.
Talk about a strong woman!
I believe some day soon most of us will be paid by the job, the work we actually accomplish, rather than having a fixed salary. A new tool called eShift is bringing us one step closer. Hospitals needing nurses post the available shifts on the web with the maximum hourly amount they will pay. Nurses then bid on the shifts and the nurse that bids the lowest hourly amount gets the shift. Pretty cool as long as work is abundant. Work as little or as much as you need.
For those of you that have been speculating for some time that the weather has been changing over your lifetime, you are right. Attributed by some to global warming, the number of hurricanes, thunderstorms and tornados has been increasing. One statistic that caught my eye: “Iowa has already experienced a record high of 110 tornadoes this year, when its 30-year average is just 45.”
If you walk up to a stranger on the New York subway and say “Excuse me, may I have your seat?” what will they do? According to several studies, over 60% of people will stand up and give you their seat. However, that’s not the interesting point of the study. Amazingly, it was extremely difficult for the researchers to even ask somebody to give up their seat! Many couldn’t do it all, some froze and others felt sick to their stomachs! Breaking social norms may be a lot harder than you think!
Here’s an essay by Middlebury’s College last president about the things he would have liked to say as president, What Your College President Didn’t Tell You. One point that struck home to me was the drinking age. Having a drinking age of 21 does not make any sense and it does not solve any problems. By 18 you can drive, marry, have children, serve in the armed forces, and basically lead a completely independent life, except you can’t have a beer. So by the age of 21 (assuming you don’t drink before then), who’s going to teach you responsible drinking? And Federal government, by holding highway money hostage if the states don’t keep a drinking age of 21, is just reducing the democratic rights of its citizens. When’s the last time you got to vote on, or even got asked by your representatives, what you thought of the drinking age? Last week a young sophomore at Colorado State University, CSU, died of alcohol poisoning. Samatha Spady was a smart, pretty and popular young woman with a life ahead of her. In high school she was head varsity cheerleader, homecoming queen, National Honor Society scholar and class president. Because of one night of drinking in a college atmosphere where the party scene revolves around alcohol, all that is over. Student’s death at CSU rocks hometown College drinking is a problem. Whether or not you believe that the drinking age exacerbates the problem, the fact that it is illegal for most college kids to drink makes it that much harder for parents, professors and other professionals to have meaningful talks with their kids. Here’s a great essay from U.S. Senator John McCain on courage. He defines courage as more than just doing something you are afraid of. It’s doing something right in the face of fear. “Courage is that rare moment of unity between conscience, fear, and action, when something deep within us strikes the flint of love, of honor, of duty, to make the spark that fires our resolve.” He also points out that we are not asking our leaders to show courage and they are not asking us to show courage. So we are not seeing a lot of courage in government organizations nor in business corporations. Is the church trying to appear bureaucratic, unreasonable, inflexible and old fashioned? They are refusing to allow a young girl to use a wafer without wheat for her first communion. It’s no longer possible to travel anonymously within our own country – at least by airplane. John Gilmore filed suit against the government asking to see the law that requires ID to fly and he’s asked the courts to declare it unconstitutional.College Drinking
Courage
Church Bureaucracy
Traveling Anonymously