Truth, Justice, Monsanto, and the American Way: It never hurts to be reminded.

"They can see that there is hope and things get better."

Songs of Freedom

Redemption Song.

How To Stop An Oil And Gas Pipeline: The Unist'ot'en Camp Resistance

"When girls say 'No,' they don't really mean 'no." So I was sitting with a group of

seven or eight high school junior and senior boys today when one of them came out with that gem.

I immediately piped up with, "That kind of thinking will get you five to ten or ten to twenty. When a girl says "No," you'd better act like she means "no" even if you don't believe it. If she doen't mean "no," she will let you know."

"Oh we were only joking, ma'am."

"Don't even joke about it because it is not funny!" I mentioned the Rolling Stone article about the Unversity of Virginia in the latest issue and told them to be careful that they didn't do something now that they would come to regret later.

I don't know if I made any real impression or not, but I hope I at least gave them something to think about.

Part of the problem of the rape culture is that boys really seem to believe that "girls don't really mean "no."

Grandmas smoking weed for the first time...

No Grandmas were harmed during the filming of this video...

"If I was homeless and I was hungry and someone brought me a sandwich

I'd say, 'Thank you!'"

Once in a while, I play a game in my mind about what I would change in US history if I could...

What would you change in history, if you could?

There is always some reason NOT to change history... Maybe if only because someone pivotal to the future of that time learned a very a important lesson (or lessons) from the event(s) of the time/incident I would change.

However, I think I've finally identified the point I would change if I could.

The writers of our Constitution did a terrific job. Here we are 227 years later still a nation that can still have a terrific future for however long we allow it. Did they miss here and there? Yes, of course. These men lived in a time when travel, even to visit ten miles away took hours rather than minutes.

I had breakfast in Virginia yesterday morning and was home, four states away, in Florida in time for lunch. In the time it took for me to fly home yesterday, those early Americans would have been just nearing their ten mile away destination. How could the writers possibly have written a Constitution that covered every possiblilty? Yet, for the most part, they did.

But for all of their incredible prescience, they made one huge, fabulously, horribly dreadful mistake.

They allowed slavery to stand.

I realize that the Carolinas and Georgia were adamantly opposed to ending slavery. Their way of life would be ended and they feared what would happen without slavery. But gathered in that Convention Hall were the greatest minds of their time, and perhaps their century (at least in what became the United States). Given the motivation and the willingness to work a change, they could have come up with a solution.

The decision to let slavery stand was, in my opinion, the greatest mistake of our county. It lead to a division in our country from which ensued the Civil War which killed tens of thousands of people, some of them their grand and great grand-children. We are still feeling the fall out from that decision 227 years later.

Other than the Patriot/Tory divide, I believe that this divide is a big part of what is wrong with our country today... We are split down the middle and have been since before the Constitution was written.

The sorry saga of a Texan locked in a London bookstore - Kept Twitter on the edge of its seat

One stitch closer: The Empowerment Program