A Poignant Picture for Two Nations

Photojournalism at its finest.

Despite my prior post...no this is not in the US.  This is a polling place in the Ukraine.  I certainly hope that is a toy weapon that innocent little girl is holding, and not an "adult" weapon carelessly put aside while voting.  Still -- it makes for a thought-provoking picture from several perspectives doesn't it?

Credit: Konstantin Chernichkin/Reuters

We Can't Do Anything About This?

Sometimes even the tongue-in-cheek publication The Onion hits a truthful nail square on the head.  Look at this about the epidemic of gun violence sweeping the US.

Pentagon Goofiness

The Pentagon sometimes gets caught feeding its part of the "military-industrial complex" that Eisenhower warned us about.  The A-10 "Wart Hog" retirement is one of them.  An ugly, but deadly warplane...if you were the bad guy in any ground wars in the last few decades, you did not want to see this thing popping up over the horizon.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/critics-accuse-air-force-manipulating-data-support-10-retirement/

Compare that to the F-35 which costs more (pre-deployment) than any other weapons system ever dreamed up by the Pentagon (even Reagan's Star Wars joke cost less).

It's all your money folks....

Six Amendments (Book Review)

I just read an interesting new book by retired Supreme Court Justice Stephens.  I may have mentioned elsewhere that the Supreme Court is interesting to me because no other nation has anything that equals it, and while it is maddening idiotic at time (read Dred Scott or Citizens United for examples), they also over time have been the steadying hand since we are working with what was supposed to be a "temporary" Constitution that is definitely showing major fissures in trying to deal with the real flat world. 

Here is my review from Goodreads:

Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution by John Paul Stevens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Excellent book and well-written. You should know something about Constitutional law and the Supreme Court (NOT what you read or see in the media which is nearly all wrong) in order to enjoy this book fully.

Justice Stevens' recommendations for amendments are not extremely radical, rather they mostly patch up some gaping holes or some colossally misguided Supreme Court decisions.

In either case the Founding Fathers would be aghast at the fact that more has not been done to fix their little "temporary starter" constitution - most of them expected it to last for a couple of decades at most and then be replaced by a more substantive and encompassing document based on experience to that point. Instead, the US has taken the band-aid approach -- using a crazy quilt of Supreme Court decisions and popular-at-the-time Congressional patches to hammer it into something that is at times unrecognizable in practice.

Justice Stevens recognizes the flaws, and makes some credible and interesting proposals to fix them.

View all my reviews

Real Climate Change Kinda Sucks, Don't It?

• There are those who think climate change is not real: they are called Republicans.
• The most idiotic of them seem to come from Oklahoma and Kentucky - two states that will vanish in a blaze before any ocean overtakes them such as Florida and Louisiana  needs to worry about. 
• There are those who think climate change doesn't hurt anything: they are called American citizens.
• There are those who think climate change is solvable politically: they are called Democrats.
• There are those who know climate change is not only factual, but serious and here right now: they are called scientists.
• There are those who are intelligent voters and vote according to facts and not ideology: they are called Independents.

Which group are you in?  How will you vote?
 
It is getting serious folks, I probably won't live to see the real outcome of all this but my daughter or her children will...when will we finally make a stand...for humankind?