The left-wing is crazy and the right-wing scares the shit out of me!
Allan's Perspective is NOT recommended for the politically correct, or the overly religious. Some people have opinions. Some people have convictions......... What we offer is PERSPECTIVE!
There is a U.S. blog called "DAILY KOS" that I enjoy reading because they reflect a lot of my own views on things. A couple of weeks ago the came out with THIS article, which I think puts the whole U.S. election thing into "Perspective!" (God I love that word.)
Just in case ya didn't see it the first time around, we are reproducing it here for your perusal .........!
The Two Doctors I will get right to the point and begin assertion with an analogy.
Let’s say you are exhibiting symptoms for an illness and you have a
choice of two doctors. You go to the first doctor, conducts and
examination and notes that you have a fever, cough, runny nose and a
headache. The doctor acknowledges that you “feel” ill and prescribes
treatments for your symptoms…and ice pack for your fever, cough medicine
for your cough, tissues for your nose and aspirin for your headache. You go to the second doctor. The doctor also notes your symptoms.
However, the second doctor tells you straight out that you have viral
pneumonia. Instead of recommending treatments for your symptoms, the
doctor prescribes you anti-viral medication to treat the root-cause of your illness. Which doctor would you more likely recommend and trust in the future to treat your illnesses? I bring you to what I believe is the fundamental illness in our
nation: corruption of our system of government due to the influence of
big money. No matter what your personal issue is, be it gun violence,
health care, climate change, security etc, the government’s inability to
effectively deal with these issues is due to the influence of big money
in our political system.
The best choices...
The Two Candidates Here’s where the analogy comes in. Several times in the Democratic
debates, our current Democratic candidates were asked a simple question:
“Neither party has the guts to take on Wall Street. Is the System
Rigged?” When Secretary Clinton is asked this question, her original response
is to not directly answer. She’ll respond and say that she went after
Wall Street, not just the big banks, originally even suggesting that
support for financial institutions as a “rebuke” to the terrorists who
struck on 9/11. She falls short, however, of admitting that Wall Street
commits fraud. Sen Sanders, on the other hand, calls out Wall Street for what it
is. He clearly says that the “business model of Wall Street is fraud”. In my analogy, Secretary Clinton is the doctor who wants to treat the
symptoms. Sen Sanders is the doctor who wants to treat the root cause
of the illness. To cure an illness, you have to recognize and treat
what’s causing it in the first place. Secretary Clinton is slow to call
out the corruption for what it is. To publicly recognize that Wall
Street commits fraud is a declaration that you are willing to hold those
guilty criminally accountable for those crimes. And holding those
criminally accountable is the most effective step to treat the illness. To be fair, after Sen Sanders’ victory in NH, Secretary Clinton began
to adopt Sen Sanders rhetoric, now saying that the economy is rigged in
favor of those at the top. This is somewhat better than what Pres
Obama will say, wording his commentary on the issue to say that “the
average person feels their voice doesn't matter, that the system is
rigged in favor of the rich or the powerful”. This statement is
carefully worded, to match the current administration’s failure to hold
anyone on Wall Street criminally accountable for our nation’s economic
collapse in 2008. A rigged system will continue unless you send a message.A Corrupt Political System I’ve been a Progressive all my life…but I am not sure I would call
myself a Democrat. Here’s why: I feel that both political parties are
corrupt, at least in the fact that they want to hold political and
economic power by any means necessary. The main difference is that
Democrats at least will try and pass legislation to help the people, so
long as it does not go against the will of the 1% and their economic
interests. If this is not true, why has not one Bankster gone to prison
for fraud in the past 7 years? Why the support of TPP? Republicans do not even acknowledge the symptoms. They protest that
whatever is good for business is good for the country and wealth gives
the right to wield power over others, no matter how it is earned.
Republican voters 1) are either rubes that believe in trickle-down
economics despite a complete lack of historical evidence as proof, 2)
back candidates that profess support for their conservative social or
wedge issues, 3) believe in a zero-sum system, that providing anything
to support another group of people will take away something that they
already have, 4) some combination thereof. Final Thoughts to Consider The reward for speaking truth to power...Bernie Sanders is a unique candidate. He is able to call out the
corruption for what it is because 1) for most of his career he has
called himself an Independent, not reliant on a corrupt political system
and 2) he has based his political career in a state where he didn’t
have to rely on a national party who would never back him, specifically
because he wants to fix the corrupt system that supports them. A candidate like Bernie Sanders is not likely to come again in our generation, because neither political party would ever support such a candidate. As I write this, Secretary Clinton has a substantial lead in the
Democratic Primary and is likely to win the nomination. To be sure,
while far better than a vote for any Republican to subdue our nation's
symptoms, unfortunately a vote for her sends a message to both parties
that it's okay to continue business as usual, and not deal with a cure
head-on. As voting citizens, we have the opportunity to send a message that
the government is supposed to be for, by and of the people, and those
criminally liable for its illness must be held accountable accordingly.
Please consider this when you cast your vote.
I just saw a couple of headlines in the Huffington Post that gave me pause to wonder!
The first was: "Average home price in Canada now half a million dollars!"
And right underneath that: "Are millennials choosing to rent, or just not buying?"
Am I missing something here?
----------------------------------
One second she’s there, the next she’s gone.
A woman appeared to vanish during a live news report on Danish TV. But did she really? (Video going viral shows the blonde woman standing in the background of the shot as a man is being interviewed at an airport’s baggage claim for TV2’s Sports Center show.)
Another woman walks past her, pushing a trolley, and then she seemingly disappears.
But if you look closer — and we’re talking really close — you can actually see what happens. The woman just coincidentally happens to move off at exactly the same time as the trolley-pusher.
It looks spooky, but it’s not down to paranormal activity.
The clip’s garnered more than 4 million views since it was posted to Reddit on Thursday — and freaked out half the Internet in the process.
--------------------------------------------
Here's a headline that says a lot: "Police say criminals love iPhones and call the encryption feature a ‘gift from God.’"
As the feud between Apple and the FBI over a locked iPhone has grownincreasingly heated,
both sides have sought to convince the public — and, next week, will
try to do the same with a California judge — about their stances on
encryption, safety and security. Tucked into the reams and reams of legal filings
submitted earlier this month in the fight between Apple and the FBI was
an argument from law enforcement officers saying that the technology
giant’s efforts to strengthen encryption — something the company, other
technology firms and security experts call essential to protecting
privacy in a digital age — have also been a blessing for criminals.
Since September 2014, Apple has issued iPhones with operating systems —
first iOS 8 that month, now iOS 9 — that do not let the company extract
data because the information is encrypted with a key using a password
set by the phone’s owner or user.
I'm sure that by now everyone has heard about the mixing of Neanderthal DNA with human DNA in our recent past, but they are not the only branch of the human race that contributed to Homo Sapiens eventual ascendancy to being the B.M.O.C. (Big Man on Campus)
We were also helped along in our evolutionary development by a group called the "Denisovans!" (If you're an avowed 'creationist' ya might as well stop reading right now!)
Very little is known about the Denisovans. The first evidence of them was discovered in Denisova Cave in Siberia in 2008, and DNA from their fossils suggests they shared an origin with Neanderthals but were nearly as genetically distinct from Neanderthals as Neanderthals were from modern humans.
The researchers also discovered that Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA was not scattered evenly in the modern human genome. Rather, it was concentrated more heavily in some regions than others, they said. This may be because, in certain sections of the DNA, mixing sequences from Neanderthals or Denisovans with those of modern humans was detrimental in some way to the individuals who had those mixtures, the researchers said. Thus, over time, evolution purged those deleterious mixes from the modern genome, they added.
Future research can investigate the imprints of Denisovan ancestry in other modern human populations, Akey said. "We want to understand what it means to be a modern human," Akey said — and, by that light, what it might have meant to be a Neanderthal or a Denisovan.
Modern Denisoyan male! -->
NOW, to add even more confusion into the mix, this is a picture of a Denisovan cave and it makes your humble reporter curious as to why they didn't have more of an impact as a distinct group since they were apparently very good toolmakers ........., as we can see from these stairs they built at the entrance to their cave!
The
ancestors of modern humans interbred with Neanderthals and another
extinct line of humans known as the Denisovans at least four times in
the course of prehistory, according to an analysis of global genomes published Thursday in the journal Science.
The interbreeding may have given modern humans genes that bolstered immunity to pathogens, the authors concluded.
“This
is yet another genetic nail in the coffin of our oversimplistic models
of human evolution,” said Carles Lalueza-Fox, a research scientist at
the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain, who was not
involved in the study.
The
new study expands on a series of findings in recent years showing that
the ancestors of modern humans once shared the planet with a surprising
number of near relatives — lineages like the Neanderthals and Denisovans
that became extinct tens of thousands of years ago.
Before
disappearing, however, they interbred with our forebears on at least
several occasions. Today, we carry DNA from these encounters.
Later studies showed that the forebears of modern humans first encountered Neanderthals after expanding out of Africa more than 50,000 years ago.
But
the Neanderthals were not the only extinct humans that our own
ancestors found. A finger bone discovered in a Siberian cave, called
Denisova, yielded DNA from yet another group of humans.
Research
later indicated that all three groups — modern humans, Neanderthals and
Denisovans — shared a common ancestor who lived roughly 600,000 years
ago. And, perhaps no surprise, some ancestors of modern humans also
interbred with Denisovans.
Some
of their DNA has survived in people in Melanesia, a region of the
Pacific that includes New Guinea and the islands around it.
Those
initial discoveries left major questions unanswered, such as how often
our ancestors interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans. Scientists
have developed new ways to study the DNA of living people to tackle
these mysteries.
Joshua
M. Akey, a geneticist at the University of Washington, and his
colleagues analyzed a database of 1,488 genomes from people around the
world. The scientists added 35 genomes from people in New Britain and
other Melanesian islands in an effort to learn more about Denisovans in
particular.
The
researchers found that all of the non-Africans in their study had
Neanderthal DNA, while the Africans had very little or none. That
finding supported previous studies.
But
when Dr. Akey and his colleagues compared DNA from modern Europeans,
East Asians and Melanesians, they found that each population carried its
own distinctive mix of Neanderthal genes.
The first encounter happened when the common ancestor of all non-Africans interbred with Neanderthals.
The
second occurred among the ancestors of East Asians and Europeans, after
the ancestors of Melanesians split off. Later, the ancestors of East
Asians — but not Europeans — interbred a third time with Neanderthals.
Earlier
studies had hinted at the possibility that the forebears of modern
humans had multiple encounters with Neanderthals, but hard data had been
lacking.
“A
lot of people have been arguing for that, but now they’re really
providing the evidence for it,” said Rasmus Nielsen, a geneticist at the
University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new
study.
To be fair, after Sen Sanders’ victory in NH, Secretary Clinton began to adopt Sen Sanders rhetoric, now saying that the economy is rigged in favor of those at the top. This is somewhat better than what Pres Obama will say, wording his commentary on the issue to say that “the average person feels their voice doesn't matter, that the system is rigged in favor of the rich or the powerful”. This statement is carefully worded, to match the current administration’s failure to hold anyone on Wall Street criminally accountable for our nation’s economic collapse in 2008.
Bernie Sanders is a unique candidate. He is able to call out the corruption for what it is because 1) for most of his career he has called himself an Independent, not reliant on a corrupt political system and 2) he has based his political career in a state where he didn’t have to rely on a national party who would never back him, specifically because he wants to fix the corrupt system that supports them.
