I’m taking a blog break and will be back with your morning coffee and stories on Tuesday Nov. 8

Time for me to walk on down the road…

my latest path will take me through the hinterlands of America where I’ll be associating with a lot of 99 %ers!!!

Peace out!

They said it – Quotes ripped from stories in the headlines today

Students in Shanghai, a booming Chinese city, shocked the world last year when they beat every other country on international exams. After reading the article one commentator (Celtic Curmudgeon) said;

“Welcome to the third world, America. By the time the teahadists and GOP get done with dismantling the U.S. educational system, we'll all be living in single-wides watching NASCAR, and wondering what happened.”

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On Oct. 22, Ms. Zucker, 21, and her friend Alex Fischer, also 21, were stopped by the police in Riverside Park and given tickets for trespassing. Mr. Fischer was permitted to leave after he produced his driver’s license. But Ms. Zucker, on a visit to New York City with a group of Carnegie Mellon University seniors looking for jobs in design industries, had left her wallet in a hotel two blocks away.

She was handcuffed. For the next 36 hours, she was moved from a cell in the 26th Precinct station house on West 126th Street to central booking in Lower Manhattan and then — she was brought back to Harlem. The judge proceeded to dismiss the ticket in less than a minute. Zucker summed the experience up;

“While it may have been one out-of-control officer that began the process,” she said, “no other officer had the courage to stand up against what they knew was a poor decision.”

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What do you think? Do animals really know right from wrong?

My pug Millie certainly knows when she’s done something wrong. Like Tank (the dog on the left) she cowers and looks at you with her big pleading eyes…

which usually works!

This is an interesting article on the subject and well worth your time to read. Enjoy, it might give you some insights into your pet.

“In a famous YouTube video, Tank the dog sure does look guilty when his owner comes home to find trash scattered everywhere, and the trash can lid incriminatingly stuck on Tank's head. But does the dog really know he misbehaved, or is he just trying to look submissive because his owner is yelling at him?

In another new video from the BBC "Frozen Planet" series, Adelie penguins are seen gathering stones to build their nests. One penguin stealthily steals a stone from his neighbor's nest every time the neighbor goes a-gathering. Does the penguin thief know its covert actions are wrong?”     Read the rest here.

Warlock and witches enlisted in drug wars, City lights could point the way for aliens, and Trump accuses Jon Stewart of being racist

  Good Morning Humboldt County!

It’s another day in paradise and I’ve got the coffee on. C’mon in and join me for a cup. I’ve selected a trio of stories that’ll get your gray matter going today:

Warlocks, witches enlisted in Mexico drug wars

CATEMACO, Mexico — In the dimly lighted back room of a modest house in this tourist city now largely devoid of tourists, Luis Tomás Marthen Torres, a warlock with 50 years of experience, closes his eyes and chants as he briskly rubs a stark white egg over the arms, chest and neck of a worried customer.

The ritual is old and common here in Mexico’s dominant hub for masters of the occult — where wizardry is passed from generation to generation — but like so many things in Mexico, the requests for help have changed.“People ask us for assistance because they’re scared of threats, of extortion. They’re full of negative energy,” says Mr. Marthen Torres. Visitors to this middle-class town of around 67,000 people, which attributes its mysticism to the region’s ancient Olmec roots, had for decades sought wizards to cast love spells and cure physical ailments.

    City lights could point to E.T.

Astronomers suggest that artificial illumination creates a signature that could point to the existence of civilizations on other worlds — and they say we should get started on a survey of the edges of our own solar system, just in case.The suggestion comes from Harvard's Abraham Loeb and Princeton's Edwin Turner, in a research paper submitted to the journal Astrobiology. A version of the paper appears on the arXiv.org preprint server and sparked a write-up today on Technology Review's Physics arXiv Blog.

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Trump accuses Jon Stewart of 'racist rant'

Let's face it, Donald Trump feuding with someone is hardly shocking.

But that doesn't stop the Republican supporter from pointing the finger at somebody when duty calls. So who's the entrepreneur yellin' at now?

Jon Stewart is facing the real estate mogul's wrath after making what Trump calls a "racist rant" about Herman Cain on "The Daily Show."

The comedian commented on the Republican presidential candidate's confusing reply to reports that he faced sexual harassment charges during the 1990s, joking that it was like responding to the question, "Have you ever kidnapped a baby?" with the response, "No. Well, other than the Lindbergh baby."

Time to walk on down the road…

The Backlash: Propaganda Posters of the 1% …

 

posters via Visual News

Humboldt County Story: dog stays with deceased owner for 8 days

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Roxy is a true friend of the Millsap family…

This is a bittersweet story that tells of the untimely death of Humboldt County resident, Corkey Millsap, and how his loyal boxer stayed at his side after the fatal accident for eight days.

When daughter Delana and others found Corkey, who had gone over a 200 ft. cliff in a car off of Hwy. 299, Roxy the boxer was next to the car. She had survived the fatal plunge.

Dangerous baby shampoo & wash, more weather disasters ahead, and if you want to live longer – get happy!

             Good Morning Humboldt County!

It’s a chilly morning and I have a pot of streaming hot coffee on, so c’mon in and grab a cup. I have a few stories to start your day. You might call them the “Good, Bad, and the Ugly!”

Activists call for boycott of Johnson & Johnson over chemicals in baby shampoo

Two chemicals considered harmful to babies remain in Johnson & Johnson's baby shampoo sold in the U.S. and some other countries, even though the company already makes versions without them, according to an international coalition of health and environmental groups. Now the coalition is urging consumers to boycott Johnson & Johnson baby products until the company agrees to remove the chemicals from its baby products sold around the world.

The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics has unsuccessfully been urging the world's largest health care company for 2 1/2 years to remove the trace amounts of potentially cancer-causing chemicals — dioxane and a substance called quaternium-15 that releases formaldehyde — from Johnson's Baby Shampoo, one of its signature products.

More weather disasters ahead, climate experts report

Freakish weather disasters — from the sudden October snowstorm in the Northeast U.S. to the record floods in Thailand — are striking more often. And global warming is likely to spawn more similar weather extremes at a huge cost, says a draft summary of an international climate report obtained by The Associated Press.

Want to live longer? Get happy, study says

If you’re happy and you know it, maybe you really should clap your hands. That’s because being happy might make you live longer. In a study published today in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from University College, London found that happy people reduced their risk of premature death by as much 35 percent.

Unlike other “happiness” studies that rely on a participant’s long-term recall of emotional states, the researchers used a technique called Ecological Momentary Assessment, which gives a quick picture of what a person is feeling in real time. In this study, the nearly 4,000 participants, ages 52 to 79, were asked to rate their feelings of happiness or anxiety on a sliding scale four times over the course of one day, beginning when they woke up in the morning. The scientists then followed them for five years, recording the number of deaths during that time.

Time to walk on down the road…