Sage Advice from Walt Whitman about Listening to Your Conscience

by Nomad

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Toddlers and Handguns: America's Self-Inflicted Tragedies Are Not Just Freak Accidents

by Nomad

The number of children injured and dead from accidental shootings is a national disgrace. Clearly guns and children don't mix but that doesn't stop many parents from patriotically exercising their second amendment rights. Even if it costs them their children.

Last month, in Lunenburg County, Virginia, a two-year-old boy shot himself in the head. According to law enforcement, the boy found a loaded gun on the dresser and pulled the trigger. Days later, the boy died of his self-inflicted wounds. 

That same weekend in Montoursville, Pennsylvania, another two-year-old named Zackary also shot himself with a loaded gun that had been left out in plain sight.

Montoursville police say the loaded handgun was lying on the couple’s bed Thursday and the two year old grabbed it, walked downstairs, and accidentally shot himself. The bullet went through his leg and is lodged in his back.

On May 23, a three-year old Mississippi boy died after shooting himself in the face while playing with a gun. A few weeks earlier, a 2-year-old Arizona boy also shot himself in the face with his father's handgun. Having found the gun wrapped up in sheets on the man's bed, the boy fired one round which hit him in the face and exited through his head He is expected to survive the accident. The damage and disfigurement will no doubt be a tragic feature of his life.

Earlier that same month, in Peoria Illinois, yet another child, Christian, found a family gun while playing in his father's bedroom and shot himself in the face.

Friends of the family said in TV news interviews that normally the gun would have been locked up but this, they said, was a "freak accident."

However, there seems to be a distressingly large number of these so-called accidents to call them "freak." We are only talking about one month, after all.

Tea Party Candidate Ted Cruz Claims JFK Would be a Republican Today

by Nomad

Few can top Ted Cruz when it comes to bombast and misleading statements. And that's putting it mildly. However, his recent declaration on JFK was one of the biggest lies yet.

I am a little too jaded to roll my eyes every time I hear a politician say something ridiculous. We have all practically come to expect it. Gore Vidal pointed out that only by twisting words, warping the historical record and turning day into night is it possible to get some people to vote against their own interests. 

However, the other day I heard Ted Cruz declare that if John Kennedy were around today, he would be a Republican. In Massachusetts (of all places) he told a few hundred supporters"

JFK would be a Republican today. There is no room for John F. Kennedy in the modern Democratic Party.”

Cruz can get away with making statements like that because too many liberals and moderates are ignorant of history and too many on the Right are living in denial of facts. 

It's business as usual for Ted Cruz who is clearly an expert at disinformation. He has already demonstrated that when it comes to promoting Big Lies, the bigger, the better, However, attempting to convert John Kennedy into some kind of Reagan Republican is really asking the even most naive and ignorant voters to swallow a lot in one gulp.

Here's only one example- but an important one- in which Kennedy in no way resembles candidates like Cruz, or Huckabee or Santorum.

Oh God, Not Again!

by Nomad

The French Model: Will Climate Change Spark a World Wide Revolution?

by Nomad

Can we afford to ignore the growing impact of climate change on the stability of nations? Are we facing the potential of a global chaos that will make the French Revolution look like a playground squabble?

On the Brink

Scientists tell us that the world stands on the brink of a radical shifting of the global climate patterns.  From the data, we can at the very least assume, the effects will be unpredictable and it is very likely that there will be more losers than winners.

However, if you think that those dire predictions lay in the distant future, you would be incorrect. A report from the UN's climate science panel last year noted that climate change has already cut into the global food supply. What caught the attention of the government officials from 115 countries who reviewed the report was a blunt and categorical statement. 

Climate change, the report warned, could threaten all aspects of global food security. At this time there was enough evidence, the scientists said to say "for certain that climate change is affecting food production on land and sea." 

That is not based on projections but effects found in real-time.