Polling places are so close to where people live that buses aren't necessary.

Except when Republicans make them so far from Democrats that they are indeed too hard to reach. Like how you Republicans stole Ohio in 2004. Which is precisely why your Fox masters feed you BS like you just regurgitated: because that is your crime, that you blame on the victims.

Both the Drug War and all our foreign wars since December 1941 have violated the Constitution. The Constitution prevents the Federal government from running a military budget for longer than 2 years, requires Congress declares war, and even discourages a standing army in favor of a National Guard. We have never actually abided the Constitutional prescription for war. And we have been perpetually at war since we started the country with one. After a while we even gave up the formalities.

But we've been doing it so long now that the country might be running out of steam. Certainly the perpetual Drug War is harder every day to keep funding and fighting. The foreign wars too, since we've also lost every war we've started, minus a few exceptions that prove the rule, since we stopped declaring them.

We should insist on war declarations and a permanent end to civil wars like the Drug War. We should insist that deficits be voted only in the same terms that we declare war: to deal with a specific cause, as a last resort, and with a declared exit strategy before committing. Until we run the country like that, we'll stay screwed. These days seem like the best time to make that point enough that we actually act on it.

Madison's Constitutional system has lived for over 2 centuries, usually prospering more than any other contemporary or predecessor.

There's no other government system today that is older than Madison's Constitutional system, with the arguable exceptions of Egypt and China.

The US government is both closer to Madison's specified system and further from it in different ways, but overall this system is very long lived and stable. Even the features for modifying the system are remarkably rarely used.

The Diebold voting machines that Bush/Cheney used to steal 2000 and 2004 elections were supplied by Diebold, which was primarily an ATM supplier.

Both kinds of machines operated to protect Diebold's best interests. In the ATM case those interests coincided with the people using the machine. In the voting machine, not so much.

But the best part of democratic voting is securing the consent of the governed. Not because the polled public makes the best decisions, but because they had their say in the decision and the majority ruled. The rest of the system that gives people a chance to persuade the majority makes that consent a consensus.

Of course, that's the theory. In practice, so much bad government and politics has alienated a large minority of eligible voters, who don't vote. The rest are highly polarized when voting, even if not very polarized in disagreement about actual policies.

  The root of the problem with this system is the ease with which the powerful manipulate the voters through media that is bought and concocted to produce election results both specific in resulting policy, and general in overall ideology.

So yes, better communications among the people is the best solution to the real problems.

Our legislatures are designed to be re-publics: members of the public who represent the public at large. Representatives are supposed to be leaders who represent the people, but not necessarily their day to day whims. It's one reason why we don't have direct democracy, putting every vote to public ballot.

What would be good would be a poll before every vote, published before every vote. Then the rep voting however they best decided to represent the public's interest. Voting in the legislature against the result of the public poll would require explaining to the public how they were exercising leadership, and give undeniable facts to back their accountability in the next election. Political risks are all too rare, and the cowardice that avoids them in favor of "go along to get along" a strong root of why the public dislikes and distrusts politicians.

Nonbinding polls as a basis for comparison to the rep's track record would make for a very strong communication between the electorate and the elected. But I expect that if only one or a few reps do it, they'll be smothered in the herd mentality on the part of both the voters who reject their "disobeying the poll", and the other reps who don't poll so they can easily disobey their constituents and their best interests.

That's not a synthetic womb, it's an outsourced womb. The rest of the phases I itemized can all be automated. But the role of the womb seems to require a human for gestation.

No, not every aspect of their doctrine was fixated on eugenics and race. They killed millions of Catholics, homosexuals, communists, trade unionists and others, especially the extremely hybrid Gypsies, without regard to actual genetics. Hitler was not only not Aryan, but had Jewish ancestors - as did many if not most of the other Nazis pursuing genocide among other diabolical tyrannies.

Nazis cared about power. Race was a means to that end. Of course such means are part of the end, and Nazis did spend a lot of time on genocide and racist abuses and propaganda. But not because they actually cared about genetics as much as they cared about power.

Nationalism is properly defined simply as valuing one's nation extremely highly, typically devaluing any other nation to the extreme. A value that motivates competition with other nations that usually becomes violent, as there's no moral inhibition in harming "inferior" nations. The US is not at all alone in this, though its not usually as violent towards say France as it is towards say countries primarily inhabited by people who aren't White. You are correct in identifying some current US nationalism, but it goes even further: this week the Republican presidential candidate is embracing the rich idiot pushing the idea that the first Black president couldn't have been born in Hawaii, but must be a foreigner. Because that kind of racism is not just very popular in a large minority of Republicans, it's not rejected by the large majority of them. Obama must be Kenyan and inferior - nationalism in the service of racism. Not at all unique to the US.

Racism, nationalism and socialism are practiced more or less by many countries, and have been for centuries (and longer). They are not so simple as to be thrown around as if the Nazis define nationalism, racism, socialism, national socialism, or any other value system. The Nazis valued power above all, mainly the power to destroy as the power to control. They called themselves all kinds of things that they weren't, and all kinds of things they were that didn't really matter.

Most nationalist socialist governments have proven for generations they're not cataloging anyone for extermination. In fact they tend to be among the most accepting of diversity. And very specifically socialism is very different from fascism, even if they do have some configurations in common, like highly centralized government and economy . Nazis were the epitome of fascism, but called themselves socialists because socialism was popular and fascism wasn't.

The point is that if you're going to point out that genome sequencing is highly abusable by a government like the Nazis, just say "Nazis". Saying "nationalist socialists" just confuses the issue.

Email is actually an excellent form of communication. It's so flexible that every realtime and async messaging system could be usefully transacted over email (and often is), at least every message could use the email data formats (Subject/To/From/Cc/Bcc/Attachment/Body fields, MIME headers, X-whatever arbitrary tuples, etc). In fact every message sent with at least one human endpoint should be transcribable into RFC822/etc emails as a test of its utility and completeness. I had a friend in the 1990s who firmly believed TCP/IP should be restandardized with every packet required to be formatted as a separate email. That's too far (unless packets were bigger), but not wholly wrongheaded.

I hope email never goes away. I do hope that email gets much better message databases and presentation UIs, better integration with non-email messaging (in the same, integrated messaging systems). For example I'd like my every Slashdot post (and other Web transactions) to be indexed in my own storage in email format, and I'd like my emails to be able to HTTP POST/GET/PUT from my MUA. I hope that email finally gets better standardized structure of message bodies, especially for quoting by pointer with attribution, and more nonlinear structures of message sequences. Especially branching and quoting multiple previous generation messages, as well as from separate threads, in a single reply, which maintain coherence among threads.

But that's just better email, not post-email. More and better email would make the world a better place. I hope it does.

Of course we redistribute wealth to the richest. The biggest tax expense is the military, which the richest suck up like oxygen, no matter how bad for security or our economy (to say nothing of health, life or limb). The second biggest tax expense is on medical care (which overlaps a lot with the military), which is spent on doctors who are among the richest (at $172K general, $275K specialist, they make 7-11x the median income), and pharmacos which are among the richest both as workers and as stockholders. Oil corps get $4 BILLION in tax expenses a year, which is a lot even when they're reporting $10B annual profits before the handout. Then there's the $TRILLIONS in handouts to the banks, their executives, top employees and shareholders, which are both by definition and in practice the richest of the rich.The $BILLIONS in US foreign aid is mostly spent on American products; they're sold abroad by the richest, who arrange that cozy loop.

The top 10% pay 70% of Federal income taxes, but state taxes are mostly regressive (so tax the rich less), and the other substantial taxes like Social Security and sales taxes are purely regressive, so tax the rich less. While the rich have all their income above about $107K (most of their total) protected from the approximately 10% SS tax. The top 10% of wage collectors got over $2.46 TRILLION in 2010, out of only about $6.01T total wages, almost 41%. But the amount of equity trade income that the other $10T in the US GDP pays out a year is vastly more paid to that top 10%, who pay something like half the tax rate on their capital gains than people do on regular income.

Taking less tax money from the rich is giving free government services to them. Apart from all the direct subsidies, the rich get far more government services, including security, the courts that are where they transact so much business, and all the R&D private labs have abandoned to the public to pay for instead that they immediately harness into products and even less tangible sources of wealth.

When you said "I prefer to hope to be one of them" you said it all. That motivation is what keeps most Americans who bother to think about the racket hoping it will continue. Of course the vast majority will never be anything but the victims of the racket.

We can sequence genes. We can edit the sequence of many genes we've identified to switch the phenotype they express among meaningful choices. We can edit retroviruses to make them edit genes from A to B in living cells. We can combine sperm and egg IVF to produce a blastocyst. We can even insert full cell nuclei into collected foreign eggs, which we can cultivate into a blastocyst in a lab. We can convert skin cells into egg cells for that purpose.

How close are we to a synthetic womb that can gestate a full blastocyst into a newborn baby?

"De-evolving" = evolving.

Evolution is only the change in a genome over time. The human genome increasingly contains genetic values that it had less of before, as they were less able to reproduce. That is evolution. It's "de-evolution" only according to your values, which don't count in measuring genetic change.

Nazis don't care about the genetics. They care about scapegoating people powerless to fight back. And then using their example to terrorize each and any other group they construct as the next target. None are spared.

BTW "nationalist socialist" countries are everywhere. The US has always offered "socialism" (government enforced wealth redistribution) mainly to its richest, and is about the most nationalist country behind N Korea. The UK, Norway, Switzerland and many other European countries are pretty socialist, though more equitable in the wealth redistribution source/destination, and are so nationalist they refuse to join the EU. Japan is pretty nationalist, and more socialist than the US.

If you're going to scare people with "nazi", just say "nazi". Stop trying to scare people about socialism, as if the Nazi socialism was representative of socialism any more than East Germany's "People's Republic" represented its people. Nazism was founded on propaganda, and sympathetic propaganda outlets continue to peddle its slanders today.

Even when a complete genome sequence run costs the lab $1000, it's going to cost the patient $100,000 on their bill. Because nothing exists in the medical industry to reduce the prices charged to patients. Even insurance corps' leveraging their own and their cartel's buying power to reduce prices paid to medical providers then slap their own extreme charges and fees (and waste) to raise the retail cost back up.

Though not as much in Europe. So Europeans will get to consume American medical exports like quick, cheap sequencing technology. Evolution in action.

No point exists for which curvature is zero in all reference frames. Since any reference frame in the Universe that has a mass in it exerts gravity on each point, there is no point at which there is 0 gravity. That's why I agree with that previous post. It might be reaching pretty far, but that is the point of having comprehensive theories of gravity - they reach as far as there is.