I'll bet that most people would vote neither Democrat or Republican, if given the option.
Both have made a serious mess of things and clearly, repeatedly, demonstrated that they care little for average Americans, favoring instead their wealthy donors and special interest groups.
On the horizon I see a new, powerful, special interest group emerging. Composed of Americans who share a true desire to realize The American Dream, for themselves and for their loved ones, they are beginning to gather together.
The American Dream is their dream. And, like their ancestors, they will have it.
The Republican and Democratic parties are in the way. It’s well past their retirement time.
Sen. John McCain stood tall once again last night. The man who refused to leave his comrades behind came through for the people of the United States.*
He is my hero.
Despite Donald Trump’s diatribes and ridicule. Despite the president’s minion’s continuous threats to withdraw federal funding from the people of Arizona, Sen. John McCain remained true to his love for his country, his wisdom, his own healthcare challenges and, yes, his honor.
Duty. Honor. Country. These words really do mean everything.
When it comes down to the hard times and our lives depend upon the man casting the vote. Thank God Sen. John McCain found the strength to endure.
He came back to Washington, D.C. He made his vote count.
No one left behind.
I wish John McCain were the President of the United States.
One more thing.
There were two other heroes last night. Sen Susan Collins of Maine and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska who joined with all 46 of the chamber’s Democrats and independents to defeat the Sen. McConnell’s repeated attempts to deny millions of Americans healthcare. Both senators endured Trumpian tweet tirades of scorn and ridicule, plus his minion’s threats to deny federal funds to the people of their states. Please go here for the whole story.
Photo above: John McCain lies in a hospital bed in Hanoi, North Vietnam, after being taken prisoner of war. (FRANCOIS CHALAIS)
*John McCain spent 5½ years in captivity as a POW in North Vietnam. His first-person account of that harrowing ordeal was published in U.S. News & World Report on in May 14, 1973. Shot down in his Skyhawk dive bomber on Oct. 26, 1967, Navy flier McCain was taken prisoner with fractures in his right leg and both arms. He received minimal care and was kept in wretched conditions that he describes vividly in this U.S. News special report.
Of the many personal accounts coming to light about the almost unbelievably cruel treatment accorded American prisoners of war in Vietnam, none is more dramatic than that of Lieut. Commander John S. McCain III—Navy flier, son of the admiral who commanded the war in the Pacific, and a prisoner who came in "for special attention" during 5½ years of captivity in North Vietnam. Please go here for more.
John McCain EPIC Senate Floor Speech After Health Care Vote - 25 July 2017
The grand strategy might Sen. Mitch McConnell has devised a new Republican strategy for eliminating health care for millions of Americans and giving a major tax windfall to his best buds.
It's best labeled Confusion, Lies and Misdirection. Or, more crassly, "baffle 'em with bull---t".
So, what is different from the past Republican strategies?
This one relies on keeping everything secret, even from the Republican senators, until just before voting. No committee meetings, no vetting by the medical or insurance people, let alone presenting the “bill” to the public for input.
The idea is no one knows what the heck is going on but they will be obligated to vote for it.
All this reminds me of the good old days when politicians knew which way they had to vote or they would be missing both kneecaps or looking upon the mutilated body of a loved one.
Way to go Mitch!
You’ve managed to find a deep, deep sewer to crawl through. That is an accomplishment you can brag about when you next visit with Mr. Trump. He might even smoke a big ceegar with you, share a nip of brandy at one of his hotels, and give you an “atta-boy” tweet!
Akronauts rocket team, University of Akron, First Spaceport American Cup.
After graduating high school, I
remember thinking I’d had enough of education. I had earned good grades, gotten
along with my fellow students and liked my teachers. Still, I wanted to move
along in life.
My parents convinced me to go to
college. So, I applied to the University of Akron because it offered an
immediate path to an on-air broadcasting slot. I liked the idea of being a
Walter Cronkite.
On my flip side, I also liked the
idea of science and engineering, but I didn’t go down that road. If the University had offered a chance to participate in a rocket
program like the one offered today, the story would have been different for me. Of course, nothing like it existed back in
the olden days.
What great fun learning is when you
have a challenging, hands-on, team-building program that both entices and
stimulates your mind. I couldn’t have resisted.
Here’s the pre-launch story…
the real story in my eyes
Instead of following Trump’s son-in-law or Trump, Junior’s latest escapade behind closed doors or straining to understand the latest Twitter babbelings of our unhinged president, let’s do something of value.
Here are a few ideas:
Give your loved one a hug.
Take your dog for a walk.
Call your mom and dad and tell them you love them.
Give a donation to your favorite charity.
And, or, join The Movement… or any other resistance movement and take 12 steps toward recovering from TD (Trump Disease):
1. Reforming our election system. Everyone knows the U.S. system is broken and something must be done to make it actually represent the will of the people. Here are three must reforms: (a) Eliminate “winner-take-all” elections and replace them with “fair representation voting methods” such as “Ranked Choice Voting“ (RCV) (b) National Popular Vote: “Every vote equal in the election of the United States president” and (c) Universal Voter Registration. Go to FairVote.org for why and how election reform must be implemented.
2.Reversing Citizen's United vs. Federal Election Commission.
3. Repealing three, Bill of Rights busting laws: (a) the USA PATRIOT Act (Yes, Congress “repealed” the Patriot Act. But it was in name only. Now we must work to revise the Freedom Act.) (b) the Military Commission Act and (c) section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012.
4. Establish a “Constitution Protection Zone” in your city or town.
5. Re-establishing the Glass-Steagall Act.
6. Establishing a national public works program to maintain our infrastructure.
7. Adopting a Robin Hood tax. (I now call it the Life-Affirming Tax.)
8. Creating local, sustainable, distributed energy systems throughout the nation.
9. Retrieving the trillions of dollars now being expended through the "Deep Black Ops Budget" and put it to use serving the needs of the people by creating decent paying employment and returning the billions of dollars stolen from the 99.9% during Depression.2.
10. Creating a state bank in every state, e.g. North Dakota State Bank, and using “crowdfunding” resources rather than international banks.
11. Adopting local Anti-Corruption Act Laws.
12. Making mainstream media do its job as "Guardian of our Democratic Republic" by re-instituting the Fairness Doctrine and repealing Title 3 of the Telecommunications Act (1996).
A collection of Clovis point replicas and casts in the archaeology lab at Kent State University. Credit: Kent State University
This story is about our societal hubris.
For some unknown reason, we humans need to feel that we are currently at the highest state of intelligence, productivity, creativity, etc. And, that those who came before were, at least, less than we. That they were not as advanced. That they knew less about our world and our universe. After all, we have cars, TVs, the Internet, rockets, weapons of mass destruction, and the Kardashians. They didn’t.
We have “progressed”.
There is a professor at Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, who asks, “why”, and then goes about uncovering, “how”, too. His is a specialist in “experimental archaeology”.
“Dr. Metin Eren's experiments focus on making sense of ancient weapons littered across the Americas, illustrating how humans first settled the Western Hemisphere: through careful preparation, long-term planning, and refined technology.”
Refined technology? Yes.
Those olden people weren’t as dumb as we tend to think. And, we, obviously, are not as smart, either.
“Already he has cracked one longtime mystery. In the early 1900s, archaeologists found unusually shaped arrowheads in North America, with grooves carved from the base halfway to the head's tip. They first appeared over 13,000 years ago and spread rapidly across the continent, but existed nowhere else. Researchers were puzzled why the grooves were carved, with speculation running from religious rituals to mere decoration.”
“That's where experimental archaeology came in. By testing the pressure at which the arrowheads would crack using a $30,000 crusher and computer models, Eren discovered the grooves act as a shock absorber. It allows the arrowhead's thinned base to crumple slightly and absorb energy upon the arrow's impact, making the head less likely to break.”
“Archaeologists call it the ‘first truly American invention.’”
“In their most recent article published online in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Eren and his co-authors from Southern Methodist University (Brett A. Story, David J. Meltzer and Kaitlyn A. Thomas), University of Tulsa (Briggs Buchanan), Rogers State University (Brian N. Andrews), Texas A&M University and the University of Missouri (Michael J. O'Brien) explain the flint knapping technique of "fluting" the Clovis points, which could be considered the first truly American invention. This singular technological attribute, the flake removal or "flute," is absent from the stone-tool repertoire of Pleistocene Northeast Asia, where the Clovis ancestors came from.”
All Americans know that we pay more for a lot less healthcare than any other Western nation and the quality of our healthcare is rated the worst compared to other “developed” nations.*
However, as Mark Twain observed, “We have the best government that money can buy.”
Now that I’ve gotten all that off my chest, it’s still true that our universities, researchers and scientists are somehow managing to make astounding discoveries… even in the face of the outright sabotage perpetrated by a slew of maniacal, Luddite Trump appointees.
Hopefully, our universities, researchers and scientists will somehow find a way to continue their exception work when the Republican regressionists further attempt to erase all human knowledge by defunding science-related federal programs under the Trump budget.
In the meantime, despite the Republican Party's contempt for knowledge (the non-alternative "fact" kind) the rest of the world is leaping forward and not looking backward.
So, for us in the USA, I respectfully make this request of the Republican leadership... President Trump included... "Fellas Get Out of the Way!" (Please.)
Just to bring the point home... below are three recent breakthroughs from the brilliant minds of researchers located elsewhere in our world. And, a great little song, too.
Cancer researchers in the UK may have stumbled across a solution to reverse antibiotic drug resistance and stop infections like MRSA.
Experts warn we are decades behind in the race against superbugs having already exploited naturally occurring antibiotics, with the creation of new ones requiring time, money and ingenuity.
But a team of scientists at the University of Salford say they may have found a very simple way forward – even though they weren't even looking for antibiotics.
And they have created and validated several new antibiotics already – many of which are as potent, or more so, than standard antibiotics, such as amoxicillin.
"A little like Alexander Fleming, we weren't even looking for antibiotics rather researching into new compounds that might be effective against cancer stem cells," explains Michael P. Lisanti, Chair of Translational Medicine at the University's Biomedical Research Centre.
"I think we've accidentally invented a systemic way of creating new antibiotics which is simple, cheap and could be very significant in the fight against superbugs," added Dr Federica Sotgia, a co-author on the study.
The Salford group specialise in stem cells and specifically methods of inhibiting energy production in mitochondria, the "powerhouse" of cells which fuels the growth of fatal tumours.
Epigenetics between the generations: Researchers prove that we inherit more than just genes
From The Max Planck Society, Munich, Bavaria, Germany;
Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, Germany
We are more than the sum of our genes. Epigenetic mechanisms modulated by environmental cues such as diet, disease or lifestyle take a major role in regulating the DNA by switching genes on and off. It has been long debated if epigenetic modifications accumulated throughout the entire life can cross the border of generations and be inherited to children or even grand children. Now researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg show robust evidence that not only the inherited DNA itself but also the inherited epigenetic instructions contribute in regulating gene expression in the offspring. Moreover, the new insights by the Lab of Nicola Iovino describe for the first time biological consequences of this inherited information. The study proves that mother's epigenetic memory is essential for the development and survival of the new generation.
Scientists at Monash University in Australia have found another piece of the lab-grown organ puzzle: the team has discovered that a protein called Meox1 is pivotal in promoting the growth of muscles. They came across the protein while studying zebrafish, which are ideal candidates for the research due to their rapid rate of growth and biological similarities with humans. We share 70 percent of our DNA with the species, and they have many of the same internal organs that we do.
This research is pivotal because it doesn’t just show is what the stem cells do — it shows us how. Researchers have known for quite some time that stem cells produce living tissue in the body, but up until this point we haven’t understood the mechanism behind how they do it.
As well as providing organs that will save lives, stem cells are also increasingly being recognized as an integral tool for treating — and even curing — a number debilitating diseases. Everything from blindness to paralysis to neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s disease and Huntington’s disease have already seen breakthroughs with the help of stem cells. For the whole story, please go here.
