How To Support Occupy Wall Street. Stay informed. The mainstream media, which is run by many of the same corporations the occupiers are protesting against, is making every effort to portray the occupiers as lazy, disaffected, and uninformed rabble rousers. Police brutality against peaceful protesters has already occurred in New York and Boston. By staying informed about what is going on at the protests and spreading the word among your family and friends, you can help protect the occupiers against the efforts of the status quo to silence their voices. Watch livestreams and Twitter hashtags, read blogs and news articles from every side of the political spectrum, and keep your eyes open. Put your money where your mouth is. Most important of all, sit down and think of some ways that YOU can change YOUR life to support your goals of economic and social justice for all.
Buy local. 3000 Years of Peace: The Best Anti-War Poetry, Art, and More. World War I was the world's first real experience of the horrors of modern warfare, and it resulted in an outpouring of powerful anti-war statements. The most famous of these come from a group of young soliders known now as the "War Poets. " They included Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and many others. Wilfred Owen was arguably the best and most famous of these young War Poets. His brilliant poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" is one of the most vivid depictions of the horror of war. If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood/Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,/Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud/Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,/My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent for some desperate glory,/The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est/Pro patria mori.
Sweet and honorable it is, the ancient Romans wrote, to die for your country. Why the Tea Party's "Contract From America" is Stupid. 4. Enact Fundamental Tax Reform Adopt a simple and fair single-rate tax system by scrapping the internal revenue code and replacing it with one that is no longer than 4,543 words—the length of the original Constitution. (64.90%) I find this the single most revealing article of this 2010 Contract From America. Here is the ultimate end game of the super-wealthy businessmen and corporations funding the Tea Parties through front organizations such as Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity. What the 64.90% of rank-and-file Tea Partiers supporting this article apparently don't realize is that a single rate "flat" tax would amount to a massive tax hike on poor and middle class Americans.
Under the current system, 47% of Americans pay NO federal income tax. A single rate tax would also eliminate innumerable deductions, incentives, and other types of tax wrangling that are complicated, yes, but also genuinely helpful for many poor and middle class Americans trying to make ends meet. 5. 6. 1. Why America Needs High Speed Rail. Americans pride ourselves on our history of innovation and technological advancement. In one key area, however, we have fallen far behind Europeans and Asians: high speed rail. America once had one of the finest rail systems in the world.
However, after World War 2, while Europe and Japan poured their money into rebuilding rail infrastructure, the United States built interstates and airports. Although these transportation systems have served us well for decades, it is becoming increasingly clear as fuel costs continue to rise that rail is not a thing of the past, but rather the wave of the future. And I, for one, say it is time for America to reclaim its status as the world's great innovator and start putting our energy into building the world's best high speed rail system.
The Benefits of High Speed Rail For the passenger, trains offer virtually unparalleled comfort. Trains are also fast and convenient. High speed rail is safe. High speed rail offers many benefits to the environment. Infanticide. Modern Infanticide In the West, infanticide is now something shocking and appalling. Child abuse is still a serious problem, and results in high mortality rates for infant victims, but it is relatively rare for a mother or father to kill an infant in cold blood simply because he or she isn't wanted. In other countries, however, infanticide, particularly of female infants, is still a fact of life. In the 19th century, Indian families rarely had more than one daughter. Girl babies were routinely killed at birth by slitting their throats or drowning them in a pit of milk; many others were tossed into the Ganges for the sharks. These practices appalled the British rulers, but continued in secret after they were outlawed.
Female infanticide remains a serious problem in rural India today, while sex-selective abortion is common among the middle and upper classes in urban areas. Conclusions. Support Gay Marriage, Support Religious Freedom. One of the most common arguments against same sex marriage in the United States is that it will destroy religious freedoms and increase government interference in churches and other religious organizations by forcing churches to marry gay couples, even if they oppose gay marriage/ The problem is, the exact opposite is true. Religious freedom laws are completely separate from marriage laws in this country. The United States Constitution protects the right of churches and other religious organizations to refuse to marry same sex couples on religious grounds.
This is not going to change if same sex marriage becomes legal throughout the nation. In fact, it's written into the Bill of Rights itself, and you can't get much more set in stone in this country than that. Here's the funny thing, though. Strangely enough, I don't hear a lot of "religious freedom" advocates complaining about that! So, by legalizing gay marriage, you actually get the best of both worlds: Partitioning America: A Bioregional Approach. How many separate ways, though? Mr. Watkins proposed two, based on the Red State/Blue State divisions dictated by the electoral map, though he divided the country somewhat curiously according to the 2004 electoral map rather than the 2008 map.
Perhaps he doesn't like to be reminded how much of the country Mr. Bush's policies ended up alienating. Regardless, however, I consider such a simple division into red and blue to be rather inadequate. The United States may indeed be split into two increasingly divisive camps, politically, but it is not split neatly along state lines. Instead, in most parts of the country, liberals and conservatives are all mixed in together to create one giant purple vision of the United States of America: I think a more reasonable approach to dividing up the United States would be to take a bioregional approach to the matter. America is no exception. How To Help the People of Iran || #iranelection. The Future of Suburbia. When I saw the title of pgrundy's recent hub "What Kind of Doomer Are You? Pick Your End of America Scenario" I had to laugh. I've been a doomer since I was a teenager in the booming 90's.
Somehow the optimism of youth passed me by, though considering that the alternative to doomer in those days was "mall rat," I am okay with that. I've always hated shopping. One of the authors that I read was James Howard Kunstler, author of several books, including The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency. Kunstler believes that suburbia is "the greatest misallocation of resources the world has ever known" and that the end of the age of cheap oil will see the suburbs turn into slums.
I agree, unequivocally, that suburbia as it is presently understood represents a lifestyle that is not only unsustainable but doomed. I think in some areas, it is likely to come to pass. Is a 1/4 acre lot enough to sustain your average family of four? How to Enter the Diversity Visa Lottery. Every year, the United States Government makes 50,000 immigrant visas available to residents of countries who have sent fewer than 50,000 immigrants to the US in the previous year. This program is known as the Diversity Visa Lottery, or DV Lottery. The recipients of the 50,000 visas are chosen randomly from the submitted applications from each country that is eligible for the lottery.
The DV Lottery is free to enter. You must have a minimum of a high school degree, and be a citizen (or the spouse or child of a citizen) of one of the eligible countries. (See the sidebar on the right for a list of countries that are NOT eligible.) You are eligible to enter the DV Lottery even if you are already in the US on a nonimmigrant visa or if you have already applied for an immigrant visa under a different visa program. Applications for the DV Lottery are accepted only for a short period every year, usually from the beginning of October to the beginning of December. So You Want to Immigrate to the United States.
This might seem like a strange piece of advice, but there's a very practical reason behind it. If worst comes to worst, you can get a Green Card by marrying an American citizen. If you're already married, you won't have this option. Be warned, however, that there are scam artists who will take advantage of desperate would-be immigrants. I never advise marrying an American solely in order to get a Green Card. Yes, it's possible to get away with it, but if you get caught, the consequences aren't pretty. Dating can be difficult, especially for girls from conservative cultures, but Americans expect it. By the same token, foreign immigrants (especially men from conservative cultures) should not assume that just because an American girl smiles at you, talks to you, or makes eye contact with you that she wants to date you or have sex with you.
If You Must Get Married, Delay Your Trip to America For this reason, I recommend you wait at least one year after marrying before coming to America.