Skip navigation

Tag Archives: Posting From Others

Water Works


Everyone has done it!



By Jordyn Taylor May 27, 2016

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Peeing in the shower is awesome. There’s no aiming! No wiping! No butt-cheek-toilet-seat contact! It’s so great, a survey once found that 61% of Americans admit to doing it.

Another benefit to peeing in the shower? It saves water.

This Is How Much Water You Save When You Pee in the Shower

Flushing the toilet accounts for around 27% of Americans’ water usage, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Standard toilets use 1.6 gallons of water per flush, while older toilets use between 3.5 and 7 gallons.

Those saved gallons of water add up over time — especially when everyone gets on board.

In 2014, students at England’s University of East Anglia campaigned for their school’s 15,000 pupils “to take their first wee of the day while having their morning shower,” according to the BBC. Over the course of a year, the school would save enough water to fill 26 Olympic-sized swimming pools, according to the students’ calculations.

This Is How Much Water You Save When You Pee in the Shower

Source: Wikimedia Commons

It’s not a perfect solution: Unless you’re washing your hair while you whiz, there’s a good chance you’re still wasting some water while you pee in the shower. Who among us, mid-shower pee, hasn’t stared off into oblivion as the hot water cascaded down our bodies?

All mammals pee for approximately 21 seconds, according to Discover. Meanwhile, a standard shower head uses 2.5 gallons of water per minute. If your pee exits your urethra at the standard mammalian rate, around 0.875 gallons of water will leave your shower head in the time it takes you to finish peeing. Still, it’s less than a standard toilet flush.

It saves paper, too… if you wipe after peeing on the toilet. Suppose you use 10 squares of toilet paper per pee-wipe, and your toilet paper roll contains 500 total squares. If you pee in the shower just once a day, you’ll save yourself a roll of toilet paper every 50 days. Hurray!

Please Donate

Please Donate

Friedman Says It Better.


I blogged about Paul Ryan and his strange semi endorsement of Donald Trump but this article from Michael Walsh covering  Mr. Friedman states it better.

Thomas Friedman calls GOP morally bankrupt, criticizes John McCain

Thomas Friedman is drawing attention for his blistering column about the state of the Republican Party, which he thinks should “declare moral bankruptcy” and start over.

The three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist said the United States needs a healthy two-party system but that the Grand Old Party is not doing its part, which traditionally has been to advocate for market-based solutions and sound fiscal policy. Instead, he said, it’s merely an empty shell willing to sell itself off to the highest bidders — untethered from principled, center-right conservatism.

On Tuesday, in an opinion piece for the New York Times, Friedman lambasted top Republican leaders — who had been willing to buck the party line in the past — for throwing their support behind Donald Trump despite his history of off-color comments.

He was perplexed that Ryan would still endorse Trump after the businessman questioned Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s ability to preside over the Trump University lawsuit without bias because of his Mexican heritage. Ryan called this a “textbook definition” of racism but said it’s worth backing Trump because he will sign off on a Republican agenda.

“Really? Mr. Speaker, your agenda is a mess, Trump will pay even less attention to you if he is president and, as Senator Lindsey Graham rightly put it, there has to be a time ‘when the love of country will trump hatred of Hillary,’” Friedman wrote. “Will it ever be that time with this version of the G.O.P.?”

Friedman also reprimanded Arizona Sen. John McCain and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

“Et tu, John McCain? You didn’t break under torture from the North Vietnamese, but your hunger for re-election is so great that you don’t dare raise your voice against Trump? I hope you lose. You deserve to. Marco Rubio? You called Trump ‘a con man,’ he insults your very being and you still endorse him? Good riddance.”

Trump sparked controversy back in July when he said McCain is not a war hero, even though he spent more than five years in a notorious North Vietnamese prison: “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured. OK, I hate to tell you.”

In an interview with “Morning Joe” Wednesday morning, Friedman admitted to being deeply disappointed in McCain because of how much he respects him. But, Friedman said, McCain wants to get reelected in Arizona, where the party’s base has backed Trump.

“Truly a war hero. A great American patriot,” he said of McCain. “Imagine if John were out there right now talking the way you both have been talking this morning. Clear. Principled. I don’t think Trump would survive. I think this thing would be in a very different place right now. There are few people in that party whose voices count more than others, and his is certainly one of them.”

In the op-ed, Friedman also went after New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a man who famously (or infamously depending on which side you’re on) worked with President Obama in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy despite a fast-arriving general election. Now, according to Friedman, it seems that Christie is more interested in currying favor with the potential future president than defending his minority constituents against slander.

“Chris Christie, have you not an ounce of self-respect?” Friedman wrote. “You’re serving as the valet to a man who claimed, falsely, that on 9/11, in Jersey City, home to many Arab-Americans, ‘thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.’ Christie is backing a man who made up a baldfaced lie about residents of his own state so that maybe he can be his vice president. Contemptible.”

Please Donate

Please Donate

Paul Ryan


 

 

 

 

The article below is taken from the newspaper “The Hill” and the statement is from Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House. It appears that the Dupublican Party has put themselves in a hard to defend position with Mr. Trump as the 800 pound elephant in the room. Their inability to support the candidate they wanted and failure to stop Mr. Trump will be their ending as a force in the political arena. This is not a David and Goliath story , it is just a tragedy in the making of a political party that seems to be imploding with the help of a reality “star”. Even taking the point of Hillary being bad how will the “party” survive. Mr. Trump has garnered a lot of support but with some of the worst elements of our society. If we as a country are to continue as a respected world player, the Dupublican base  will have to break from strict party lines and insure “the Donald” does not gain the Oval office. This is not an endorsement of Scamocrats or Dupublicans, just a statement that Mr. Trump is too dangerous to be President.

Donald Trump’s comments criticizing a judge because of his ethnic background are “the textbook definition of racist comments,” Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Tuesday during an event on poverty in Washington D.C.

“I regret these comments that he made,” Ryan said. “Saying a person can’t do their job because of their race is sort of the textbook definition of racist comments. … I think that should be absolutely disavowed.”

Ryan, who also criticized Trump’s comments last week, was bombarded with questions about Trump at an event to highlight the House GOP’s policy agenda – beginning with poverty reform.

“I think they’re wrong. I don’t think they’re right-headed,” the Speaker, who endorsed Trump last week, said of the remarks.

He later called the comments “indefensible” but would not say he’s rescinding his endorsement.

The flurry of questions about the presumptive GOP nominee highlights the difficult challenge faced by Ryan and other GOP leaders, who are backing Trump as their nominee but seeing his controversies crowd out their efforts to talk policy.

Ryan conceded that Trump’s comments do “undercut” the House GOP’s efforts to put forth a policy agenda this election year.

“I’m not going to even pretend to defend them,” Ryan said. ” I’m going to defend our ideas. I’m going to defend our agenda. What matters to us most is our principles and the policies that come from those principles, and our ability to give the people of this country a better way forward.”

Ryan repeatedly said Tuesday that he was backing Trump because he believes the nation is far better off with the Republican nominee than Hillary Clinton as president.

Please Donate

Please Donate

Foot Health


This article supports my opinion of “Flip-Flops” which I believe are the worst type of footwear and should be banned which will save many visits to the E.R. for foot and ankle injuries. I have seen the huge summertime purchase of inexpensive “flip flops” for summer ware and not just for beachwear and showers. These “ankle breaking, foot injury producing ” pieces of foam rubber and other elastic products have captured the American foot as the summertime foot wear. There are more expensive models however the nature of the beast is not changed by better manufacturing and is just a better grade of foot injuring footwear.

Flip-flops are not your friend.
“When I was pregnant, I wore flip-flops often because they’re so easy to slip onto swollen feet. But they’re really not meant to be worn all the time: They offer no arch support. Plus, your leg, toe, and foot muscles have to work harder to keep them on, which could make tendons tight and lead to pain that will affect your lower back. I encourage my friends to wear more supportive shoes whenever they’re doing a lot of walking or standing – you don’t want to put on flip-flops for an all-day trip to the amusement park – and to do foot and leg stretches to counter any tightening. My favorite is a runner’s lunge: Stand with your hands against a wall and your feet about 12 inches from it. Step back with your right foot, then bend your left knee, keeping your back leg straight and your heel firmly on the ground. Hold for 20 seconds, and repeat on the other side.” – Suzanne Badillo, clinical program director of the Women’s Rehabilitation Program at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.

Please Donate

Please Donate

Memorial Day Reminder


So we don’t forget–forgetting about vets is a tradition. Here’s a Ted Rall article that’s over 9 years old but (unfortunately) still applies. Ted Rall 3/13/07 Abandonment of Vets is a Military Tradition

May 29 at 3:08 PM

White America-According to Pat Buchanan


America’s Moved On—But Many Still Live in a White Fantasy Land
By Sam Fulwood III On 5/22/16 at 11:00 AM
This article first appeared on the Center for American Progress site.
I’ve lived in many Americas.
As a child of the 1960s, I remember the racial segregation of separate bathrooms and drinking fountains in my North Carolina hometown. In the late ’70s, I was a beneficiary of affirmative action programs that provided both educational and occupational opportunities that my parents and grandparents were denied.
Through the ’80s, ’90s and early part of this century, I witnessed the rise, fall and rebound of our nation’s economy; the decimation of jobs and industries; a growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots; amazing advances in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, or LGBT, rights; and a persistently stubborn gap in wages between men and women.
In 2008—and again in 2012—I saw something I thought impossible: the election and re-election of an African-American as president of the United States.
For good and ill, waves of change makes the nation viable and strong. This is my understanding of the America I know and love. But not everyone shares my embrace of a changing America—least of all Pat Buchanan.
The 77-year-old right-wing syndicated columnist and talking head continues to opine in support of his vision of the good old days: the period of U.S. history when a select few white men were the unchallenged arbiters of our national life.
Appearing recently on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition,” Buchanan offered up an unvarnished perspective of what racists fear the United States is becoming. “So we’re about—what?—25 years away from the fact where Americans of European descent will be a minority in the United States,” he said, noting that the nation’s “changed for the worst from our standpoint.”
To get the full effect of how outrageously backward Buchanan’s views are, I’ll let the man speak for himself:
Well because I look at Europe. And I look all over the world, and I see people everywhere at each other’s throats over issues of ethnicity and identity. Again, the United States of America—we have a—we had an enormous success. We had high immigration from 1890 to 1920. Then we had a timeout, where all those folks from Eastern and Southern Europe were assimilated and Americanized.
They learned English. I went to school with the sons and daughters of these folks. And we created a really united country where 97 percent of us spoke English in 1960. Now in half the homes in California, people speak a language other than English in their own homes. Anybody that believes that a country can be maintained that has no ethnic core to it or no linguistic core to it, I believe is naive in the extreme.
Buchanan’s hazy and nostalgic Americana existed only inside the vacuous spaces in his mind and in the minds of those like him. For the rest of us, this nation was a different sort of place.
To be sure, Buchanan’s nostalgia for the Hollywood version of mid-20th century America shares equal billing with the themes of white resentment of modern-day realities. I’ve touched on this before, noting a growing body of social science that suggests a swelling contingent of white men who lament that life in the United States just isn’t as good as it was in, say, 1950 and who tend to blame people of color and immigrants.
I’ve seen this firsthand and watched Buchanan exploit it masterfully. As a national political reporter, I covered Buchanan’s failed run for the GOP’s 1992 and 1996 presidential nominations. I traveled in his campaign entourage, which drew crowds of anti-Semitic, militant nationalists and economically dispossessed white folks who cheered when he bragged about stopping immigrants at the border.
Before bowing out after the 1996 Super Tuesday primaries, Buchanan had great fun heaving a trident at rallies and declaring, “The peasants are comin’ with pitchforks.” But he was never a serious threat to become president with his raw and factually mistaken populist message.
Buchanan was then—and still is now—selling an outdated notion of America as a collection of Mayberry-like small towns filled with Christian, God-fearing white people and no people of color, immigrants, LGBT people, or—perhaps—political progressives. But that’s never been the case, least of all now.
Jed Kolko, an independent economist and a senior fellow at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, recently analyzed the demographic profile of the nation for FiveThirtyEight. In the provocatively titled web post “‘Normal America’ Is Not A Small Town Of White People,” Kolko concludes that New Haven, Connecticut, is the place with the greatest claim of being “normal America,” followed by Tampa, Florida, and Hartford, Connecticut. In Kolko’s analysis, “normal” is a place that most closely matches the nation’s demography.
I’d bet the farm that Buchanan wouldn’t think of any of those places as “normal America” because they’re not overwhelmingly white.
“We all, of course, have our own notions of what real America looks like,” Kolko wrote. “Those notions might be based on our own nostalgia or our hopes for the future. If your image of the real America is a small town, you might be thinking of an America that no longer exists.”
Well, good. That television-scripted version of America was never my reality. Nor do I want it to be. Everything that I’ve experienced in nearly six decades of living and working in this nation tells me that as the nation constantly changes, it improves.
Nothing about our country is static, immutable, or permanent. And I wouldn’t have it any other way—no matter what Pat Buchanan thinks.
Sam Fulwood III is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or ethnic majority by the year 2050.
Please Donate

Please Donate

Ted Cruz’ Logo


Posted in the daily Koz by Hlinko

You know that “TrusTed” logo?   The one with TRUS and TED merged, yet separated via different colors?

Turns out that when you Google “TRUS”, the logo at once becomes hilarious and hilariously appropriate:

“A transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) is an ultrasound technique that is used to view a man’s prostate and surrounding tissues. The ultrasound transducer (probe) sends sound waves through the wall of the rectum into the prostate gland, which is located directly in front of the rectum.”

Yup, that’s the very top Google result.   Basically, it’s an anal probe.  Which makes us even more certain that he’s actually an alien.

Well done, Ted!

Please Donate

Please Donate

Joseph Heller Said It


Posted from the Daily Kos

Never one to hold back, Bette Midler recently tweeted a quote she found which compared GOP racist, sexist, bigoted warmongering presidential candidate Donald Trump, to a characterization out of the American classic novel Catch-22. The book was written by Joseph Heller over fifty years ago.

“…Catch-22 remains “a cornerstone of American literature and one of the funniest—and most celebrated—books of all time.”

After reading the quote and comparison, some folks can also see Republican lawmaker Ted Cruz and other GOP extremists in Heller’s words below. In any case, the critically acclaimed author who passed away in 1999 seemed to describe the worst of some in the Republican Party—on their best days. See what you think.

Here is  the quote from Midler’s tweet

“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.” — Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Midler found the quote via Slaughterhouse 90210 Maris Kreizman, who was quite happy with the mention.

Catch-22 had been called one of the most significant American novels of the 20th century. Cheers to both Midler and Kreizman for bringing to light the words of a great author, which bring to light what’s wrong with the Republican Party and American politics today.

Please Donate

Please Donate

 

Ted Cruz and Dildos


Getting attention today: The court case in which Republican now-presidential candidate Ted Cruz, then the Texas solicitor general, ferociously defended the state’s law barring the sale of dildos.

The brief insisted that Texas in order to protect “public morals” had  “police-power interests” in “discouraging prurient interests in sexual gratification, combating the commercial sale of sex, and protecting minors.” There was a  “government” interest, it maintained, in “discouraging…autonomous sex.” The brief compared the use of sex toys with “hiring a willing prostitute or engaging in consensual bigamy,” and it equated advertising these products with the commercial promotion of prostitution. In perhaps the most noticeable line of the brief, Cruz’s office declared, “There is no substantive-due-process right to stimulate one’s genitals for non-medical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship.”

Cruz lost, with a federal appeals court opining that the state had no legal business telling people what they could and couldn’t do in their own bedrooms. (And no, Cruz’s stance that using a dildo was like hiring a prostitute did not fly, though it is a damn fascinating opinion that hopefully Ted Cruz will elaborate on at some future point in the presidential race.)

This is an interesting enough little glimpse into how a Ted Cruz administration might play out, but in the movie version of the case I’m writing in my own head Ted has a tragic backstory that makes his attack on dildos far more personal and compelling. Ted Cruz was raised by dildos, in my version. As a toddler Ted Cruz survived a Texas plane crash, but was left orphaned and alone in Texas Hill Country until he was taken in, starving and bedraggled, by a pack of wild dildos. He soon came to believe he was one of them, and romped happily over the Texas hills with the other dildos until his teenage years, when he was discovered by hunters and, against his own will, torn from his dildo family and slowly reintroduced to human society. All of this leading up to the tragic courtroom scene with a grown-up, suit-wearing Ted railing against dildos and calling on the state to ban them. Behind him as he gives his arguments, his dildo mother and father weep: Why, son, why?

Even now, when he is alone at night, Ted Cruz can still hear their quiet sobs. Exhausted from long days campaigning for the presidency, he looks out the window of his latest hotel room, past the anonymous city lights and into the darkness beyond. He can still hear the call of the Texas hills, and thinks back to those carefree young days leaping through the tall grass with all the other dildos. Why, indeed.

Please Donate

Please Donate

x

Believe In The Constitution?


 

It is unfortunate that we have to filter what we hear and read. It is also unfortunate that the media doesn’t. The most unsettling issue is our lack of will to look beyond the headlines. We all believe in something, that belief is what drives our motivation  to do or not do. In our beliefs there are subsets that apply to religious, work and home activities. It is stated in the U.S. Constitution there is a separation of Church and State. The attached article spells that out. This is all about the recent state laws supporting the religious right to discriminate against LBGT Americans.

Yes There Is a Constitutional Separation of Church and State

Perhaps nothing is more important to American politics than a well-reasoned debate. Unfortunately, far too many people are ill-informed to make such discussions possible.

An excellent example of this comes from the responses to an article I wrote examining the concerns of conservative Christians over Tennessee schools’ teaching the five pillars of Islam. While there were a number of topics that readers could have discussed, by far the most outrage centered on my statements regarding the separation of church and state. Comments included “Clearly, someone hasn’t read the Constitution, because there is no such thing as “separation of church and state” in the US Constitution.” “Where exactly in the U.S. Constitution does it address “separation of church and state?” and “Simply put, nowhere in the First Amendment does the phrase ‘separation of church and state’ exist.”

It seems that to some people, if the words don’t explicitly appear in the constitution then the idea they refer to isn’t constitutionally guaranteed. Viewing it in these simplistic terms is meant to dismiss the entire argument; as if every decision based on the separation of church and state is somehow invalid because the term separation of church and state doesn’t appear in the constitution.

Of course the problems with this assertion are many. First and most basic is the fact that the Supreme Court is the ultimate interpreter of federal constitutional law. This means that while the term “separation of Church and State” may never appear in the constitution itself, the Court ruling in the case of Everson v. Board of Education stated “the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect ‘a wall of separation between Church and State.’”

A quarter century later, the case of Lemon v. Kurtzman further defined this separation when it established the Lemon Test to determine if a law violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Every ruling since has confirmed that, in the view of the highest court in the land the Constitution created a separation of church and state.

Having said that, the separation of church and state is hardly the first unwritten concept that is protected by the constitution. In the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court established a women’s constitutional right to have an abortion despite the word abortion never appearing in the constitution. In the 2015 case of Obergefell v. Hodges the Supreme Court established that laws against same-sex marriage were unconstitutional despite the word marriage never appearing in the constitution. In the 1963 case of Gideon v. Wainwright the Supreme Court established that the constitution guarantees the right to an attorney despite the words public defender never appearing in the constitution. In the 2010 case of McDonald v. Chicago the Supreme Court established that the second amendment right to bear arms included the right to bear arms for self-defense despite the words self-defense never appearing in the constitution.

It should also be noted that of the 112 Supreme Court Justices, none of them has been an atheist. In fact 92 percent of them were Christian. What rationale would these justices have for making laws that would create a legal prejudice towards their system of beliefs, especially if the separation of Church and State is a misinterpretation?

The reality is that the constitution was never meant to be a stagnant document that was rigidly adherent to the words on the page. As Thomas Jefferson said “The constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist, and shape into any form they please.” Over the past 200 years the Supreme Court has shaped the constitution to contain a clear separation of church and state that protects every religion equally. If only those who argue against this separation could see how they benefit from it instead of inappropriately interpreting it as an attack on Christianity.

 

Follow Dale Hansen