Ideas from Mark Stout

Everyone's Facebook stream in the US is now littered with friend's political posts.  I do not mind original, thoughtful, researched, fair, and coherent political posts even if they are for the party I do not lean towards.  In fact I'd welcome original, thoughtful, researched, fair, and coherent posts about the opposing point-of-view.  How else can I learn, and maybe even shift my position? Instead, what I mostly see are regurgitation from the propaganda machines on each side.  Posts are too often not sourced at all, or sourced from such a highly partisan site as to be utterly worthless. Too many political arguments can be blown out of the water with ten seconds of Googling.  That does not make me feel warm and fuzzy about the merits of that person's views. It saddens me to constantly be reminded to for too many Americans, they regard themselves as Patriots for supporting their party before their country.  And regard those in...

I grew up east of Lake Erie, in a town that received awesome amounts of lake effect snow.  Awesome at least to a six year old when you struggle through chest high snow. The one place you could walk safely on recently snowed upon side walks was in front of one storefront down town.  Its sidewalks were at most wet, never icy, and never with snow.  And no one ever shoveled them. The storefront was the corporate headquarters for a small local Natural Gas company.  When you can pass your energy costs to your customers, you can afford to have hot water pipes right below your sidewalk.  The warm sidewalks melted snow on contact. So many years later, I'm living in an area forecasted to received as much as 24 inches of snow tomorrow.  Today I was in Lowe's and people were snagging up shovels, salt and snow blowers. Why do we have the same snow removal solutions in my son's teen years we had in mine?  Think about it.  He has access to communications...