Medicare For All

I watch the Daily Kos poll (http://www.dailykos.com/ ) on Obama and he’s dropped almost 15% in favorable ratings since he took office a little over one-half year ago. Wow! Radical conservatives may gloat over this, but it’s been liberal progressives who have contributed the most to this decline. He never did have the radical conservatives’ approval.

And that got me thinking: why is the Democratic Party willing to alienate liberal progressives while the Republican Party constantly panders to its wacky wing?

And it came to me today: because liberal progressives would upend capitalism if it impeded social goals while the wacky right have capitalism bred in the bone.

And in unfettered capitalism, the oligarchy rules. They may throw out tempting bait to lure in us, poor suckers in occasionally; but they always control the reel and rod. And neither major political party, especially with our current campaign finance laws, is ever going to forget that.

Website Wednesday

Since the human condition has always fascinated me, what better website pick than Becoming Human:

http://www.becominghuman.org/

The About Us page is pretty impressive with this statement: The Institute of Human Origins (IHO) conducts, interprets and publicizes scientific research on the human career. IHO's unique approach brings together scientists from diverse disciplines to develop integrated, bio-behavioral investigations of human evolution. Through research, education, and the sponsorship of scholarly interaction, IHO advances scientific understanding of our origins and its contemporary relevance. Combining interdisciplinary expertise and targeted funding, IHO fosters the pursuit of integrated solutions to the most important questions regarding the course, cause and timing of events in human evolution.

Wow! (Note: I did a Flesch-Kincaid grade level for this site and found that the classroom material is Grade 9; the regular features are Grades 8 to 11, but the About Us page is Grade 17 or “best understood by university graduates.”)

The site features a documentary (with 19 page transcripts in English, Spanish and Italian) tracing human development with an emphasis on archaeological findings. It looks similar to National Geographics documentaries (which are far superior to the History Channel’s let's-have-actors-recreate-history-documentaries) and it is narrated by Donald C. Johanson, whose team discovered “Lucy.”

Their Learning Center features, among other topics, interactive chromosome problems and while we obviously can’t follow the directions in the Student Activity Packet of: Remove the mixed set of 12 transperancy film anatomical illustrations in envelope #1., there is still a lot of information here for the web viewer to learn. Additionally, there are worksheets to print for more activities.

In the Games and Activities section, you get to build a chimp and human skeleton. Boy, did I mix that up!

I know it’s chic in some U.S. circles to believe that dinosaurs walked with man (and had him as a menu selection probably), but take a look at this site for some true evolutionary science.

Kudos to them for making even “dry’ science interesting.