Newark, U.S.A. – Today’s Presidential primary election is meaningless for citizens living in New Jersey, California, Montana, New Mexico and South Dakota. “This creates an alienated and cynical electorate that is becoming more disenfranchised with every election cycle,” says Jim Lynch, author of “The 2020 Players: A Futuristic View of the 2020 Presidential Election.”

Lynch asks, “Can you blame Americans for tuning out? This is not democracy; in fact, it just may be as bad as the backroom politics back in the old days of bosses and political machines.”

“As a result, millions of Americans had absolutely no voice in the Presidential selection process. Let’s face it; the primary system is broken,” says Lynch.

After today’s vote, which involves some 299 uncontested electoral votes, only Utah has yet to weigh in and they’ll hold off until June 26.

“Voting in America should be cherished as a sacred right, as a meaningful experience to every American. But voting has become totally meaningless for almost a third of the states participating in 2012 Republican primary balloting,” says Lynch.

“This flawed process is a ringing endorsement of the reform proposal to have a National One Day Primary on the same day in all 50 states for all presidential candidates. The single day primary would bring an end to local pandering to voters – like Newt Gingrich telling the people in Cape Canaveral ‘We should build a moon base’ – and to months of negative campaigning on TV and radio, one harmful and nauseating attack after another, without end.  And it would be far easier for both parties to unite behind the winners who emerge from the one day balloting,” says Lynch.

Lynch believes Americans must overhaul the political process and the insidious role that media advocacy plays in this process. “In my novel, The 2020 Players, I also advocate a viable three-party system, a single six-year term for President, and a ban on any political campaigning while in office.”

Jim Lynch is a native New Yorker, married with eight children and four grandchildren. His parents worked for the FBI. He spent eight years as an investigator and was an executive for AT&T. Lynch is a full time novelist.

Image Courtesy of  Jim Lynch

The article American Primary System is Broken, Novelist Says appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Fort Reno, U.S.A. - On June 1st, 2012, eight riders and a host of supporters are scheduled to set out from Fort Reno on a 1,391 mile journey in remembrance of the 1878 Cheyenne exodus.

The Ride Home was set in motion by Margaret Behan of the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers and Cheyenne Elders Council who will be joining the riders for prayers and healing ceremonies at key locations along the journey which spans seven states.

From Oklahoma through Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming, the ride culminates in Lame Deer, Montana on July 28, 2012 at the 11th gathering of the Grandmothers Council. 

At sacrifice sites along the route, Earth skill educators will share the lost wisdom of caring for the earth through storytelling, land stewardship and wilderness survival training for families.  They will offer hands-on teachings of traditional skills such as fire making, shelter building, animal tracking, flint knapping, and more.

Inspired by Cherokee rider Noqah Elisi who first envisioned the ride after receiving a message in a vision quest instructing her to follow in the footsteps of her grandmothers, Margaret asked Juan Villarreal to organize the ride.  Juan, a member of the Texas Lipan Apache and The Apache Language Preservation Committee, board member of the Tribal Native American Church and founder of Sacred Wind Earth Teachings, had never ridden a horse.

Juan immediately contacted Suzi Landolphi from Red Horse Nation, a Native American Horse program of Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue to begin his horse training.  Lifesaver is supplying all of the horses for the ride and is also the fiscal sponsor.

“My prayer is to bring spirit back to my people.  So much has been lost.  We need to bring our Cheyenne identity and pride back to the young people, teach them the traditional ceremonies and language,” says Grandmother Margaret Behan.

A film crew will be documenting the journey with acclaimed native filmmaker Chris Eyre acting as key advisor.  Colin and Livia Firth are also associated with the journey and film.

The article Remembering the Cheyenne Exodus of 1878 appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Twin NASA spacecraft that achieved orbit around the moon New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day have new names thanks to elementary students in Bozeman, Montana. Their winning entry, “Ebb and Flow,” was selected as part of a nation-wide school contest that began in October 2011.

The names were submitted by fourth graders from the Emily Dickinson Elementary School. Nearly 900 classrooms with more than 11,000 students from 45 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, participated in the contest. Previously named Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL A and B, the washing machine-sized spacecraft begin science operations in March.

“The 28 students of Nina DiMauro’s class at the Emily Dickinson Elementary School have really hit the nail on the head,” said Maria Zuber, GRAIL principal investigator from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We were really impressed that the students drew their inspiration by researching GRAIL and its goal of measuring gravity. Ebb and Flow truly capture the spirit and excitement of our mission.”

Zuber and Sally Ride, America’s first woman in space and CEO of Sally Ride Science in San Diego, selected the names following the contest, which attracted 890 proposals via the Internet and mail. The contest invited ideas from students ages 5 to 18 enrolled in U.S. schools. Although everything from spelling and grammar to creativity were considered, Zuber and Ride primarily took into account the quality of submitted essays.

“With submissions from all over the United States and even some from abroad, there were a lot of great entries to review,” Ride said. “This contest generated a great deal of excitement in classrooms across America, and along with it an opportunity to use that excitement to teach science.”

GRAIL is NASA’s first planetary mission carrying instruments fully dedicated to education and public outreach. Each spacecraft carries a small camera called GRAIL MoonKAM (Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students). Thousands of students in grades five through eight will select target areas on the lunar surface and send requests for study to the GRAIL MoonKAM Mission Operations Center in San Diego.

The winning prize for the Dickinson students is to choose the first camera images. Dickinson is one of nearly 2,000 schools registered for the MoonKAM program, which is led by Ride and her team at Sally Ride Science in collaboration with undergraduate students at the University of California in San Diego.

“These spacecraft represent not only great science but great inspiration for our future,” said Jim Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division in Washington. “As they study our lunar neighbor, Ebb and Flow will undergo nearly the same motion as the tides we feel here on Earth.”

Launched in September 2011, Ebb and Flow will be placed in a near-polar, near-circular orbit with an altitude of about 34 miles (55 kilometers). During their science mission, the duo will answer longstanding questions about the moon and give scientists a better understanding of how Earth and other rocky planets in the solar system formed.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the GRAIL mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The GRAIL mission is part of the Discovery Program managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft.

The article NASA Lunar Spacecraft Named by Winning Montana Students appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.