Cheap Secret Service agents cause flap in Columbia while Obama is busy bullying Latin heads of state to continue failed drug war

Obama boys …what are you going to do when the public is through with you?

I love it.

I got a great insight into how cheap Secret Service members are. Really?Ripping off a prostitute over $50.00! You gotta be kidding me. With what those Secret Service guys get paid you’d think they’d be a little more fair-minded in their business transactions.

It’s downright embarrassing for President Obama, who was busy bullying Latin American heads of state (during the Summit of Americas meeting in Colombia) into sticking with his failed drug policy. He promised them more taxpayer money (more than $130 million in aid) as long as they were good puppets and followed his lead.

Obama was pressed to open up a debate on legalizing and regulating drugs by sitting Latin American presidents like Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia and Otto Perez Molina of Guatemala, but he brushed them off with distain. 

You know what? I hope Obama is more than just embarrassed by the antics of his watchdogs. I hope those Latin American countries finally wise up and tell him to back off. If they have to form a coalition of countries to stand up for real drug reform through legalization – that would be a good thing.

Meanwhile, the theme song above is in honor of those cheap horny agents….

So what do you do when your 4 year-old is smarter than you?

                      Good Day Humboldt County!

In this merry game of life we all start out as babies, and presumably are on an equal playing field, unless a physical or mental disability is involved.

So what happens when your four-year-old takes a standardized intelligence test and scores a mere point less than Albert Einstein and famed physicist Stephen Hawkins! How do you handle that?

Did you know that there’s 3-year olds that are members of Mensa (a worldwide organization of exceptionally smart people)? Membership is open to people who score in the top 2 percent of any standardized test of intelligence (the group offers its own test and accepts scores from the 200 or so intelligence tests out there).

I’ve only known one card-carrying member of Mensa. I met him in college and he was a Russian exchange student named Gregory Bratoff. We worked on the school newspaper together and when the staff got our first computer in 1977 (An Edit Writer 2000 – strictly for setting headlines mind you) it was Greg who figured everything out within hours and became  our official headline setter. The machine was so big you had a seat and worked on this monstrous display monitor nestled in a metal shell four feet high).

We spent many hours together and I was amazed at what little common sense Greg had. I have numerous examples and perhaps on another occasion I’ll bring them all up. But for now, let’s take a look at little Heidi Hankins of Winchester, England, who recently took an IQ test that nearly put her score on level with Einstein and Hawkins.

In a recent article she was mentioned along with other child prodigies:

“Victoria Liguez, the marketing coordinator for American Mensa, would not disclose numbers for how many children are members in the United States. But the youngest U.S. Mensa member, she said, is age 3.

"She joined when she was 2," Liguez told LiveScience. The youngest member worldwide, Oscar Wrigley, reportedly joined at age 2.5 with an IQ of 160. (Overall, about 110,000 individuals across 100 countries are Mensa members, including about 50,000 in the United States.)

Both Liguez and Lawlis said that despite the stereotypes of awkward geniuses, the Mensa children they'd interacted with had all been very normal. It's often not until testing that the depth of the children's knowledge becomes clear, Lawlis said. "A kid's intelligence is [often] invisible," Lawlis said. "You don't usually know what a kid knows unless you ask them. … It's more of a discovery of what a kid's brain is capable of responding to." (Source/resources for parents)  Here’s a link to the American Mensa chapter.

I guess I’m glad none of my three boys were Mensa members in diapers. It would have been tough dealing with a little smarty pants like that! And can you imagine when they hit their teens? At that age all teens think they know everything – except that yours would!

Time for me to walk on down the road…

‘Enclothed cognition’ - Is a writer who wears a fedora more creative?

         Good Day Humboldt County!

 I imagine we’ve all heard the phrase, “Clothes don’t make the man” in the course of our life experiences. In a slight twist to that old adage, researchers claim that people wearing white coats pay more attention to detail.

 The idea being that if you think you look like a scientist or doctor, you’ll act like them. No really. I’m not kidding. I can remember wearing a white sport jacket once and thinking I looked like Don Johnson in Miami Vice, but no one asked me for an autograph!

               Oh well, I’ll try to take this study seriously. You try your best too:  

“It's surprising how much simple movements of the body can affect the way we think. Using expansive gestures with open limbs makes us feel more powerful, crossing your arms makes you more persistent and lying down can bring more insights (read more here: 10 Simple Postures That Boost Performance).

So if moving the body can have these effects, what about the clothes we wear? We're all well aware of how dressing up in different ways can make us feel more attractive, sporty or professional, depending on the outfit, but can the clothes you wear actually change cognitive performance or is it just a feeling?

Adam and Galinsky (2012) tested the effect of simply wearing a white lab coat on people's powers of attention. The idea is that white coats are associated with scientists, who are in turn thought to have close attention to detail. What they found was that people wearing white coats outperformed those who weren't. Indeed they made only half as many errors as those wearing their own clothes on the Stroop Test (one way of measuring attention).

The authors dub the effect 'enclothed cognition', suggesting that all manner of different clothes probably affect our cognition in many different ways. This opens the way for all sorts of clothes-based experiments. Is the writer who wears a fedora more creative? Is the psychologist wearing little round glasses and smoking a cigar more insightful. Does a chef's hat make the resultant food taste better?”   (Source)

Time for me to walk on down the road…

AS IT STANDS: Our violent society is a breeding ground for bullies

                                                                                             By Dave Stancliff/For The Times-Standard
   Back in the 1950s, when I was a kid, we had our share of bullies. They didn’t go unchallenged and sometimes found themselves on the receiving end of a good thumping. Normally, after the fight both parties went their way and that was the end of it.
   The crude education bullies got back then involved running into someone tougher than they were. When they met that person their attitude was adjusted and they took up other pursuits.
    That was the end of it. They didn’t come back with rifles and pistols and shoot their peers and school staff. Growing up, I never heard of a kid committing suicide because of bullies. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen back then, but it certainly wasn’t a common occurrence in the headlines like now.
    Bullying leads to death nowadays. Tragic stories of students committing suicide are too common. Two weeks ago, a Corpus Christa, Texas high school freshman, Teddy Molina, took his own life after he couldn’t stand being bullied any longer. Molina was mercilessly taunted because he was part Korean and part Hispanic.
    Authorities at Flour Bluff High School don’t think they have a bullying problem. A lot of parents with students there do. As controversy swirls about the school district, which says it has bullying information and programs for all ages, Molina’s parent’s and sister mourn his loss.

   At some point, and I honestly can’t say when it was, bullying became a major problem in American schools. Statistics show that bullying continues to increase with each decade. The current statistics on bullying in the classrooms of America are scary and sobering.  
                According to the National Education Association:
- It’s estimated that 160,000 children miss school every day due to fear of attack or intimidation by other students.
- Sixty-one percent of students said students shoot others because they have been victims of physical abuse at home.
- A bully is five times more likely to have a serious criminal record when he/she grows up.
- Two-thirds of students who are targets become bullies.
- Twenty percent of all children say they have been bullied.

- Twenty percent of high school students say they have seriously considered suicide within the last year.
- Twenty-five percent of students say teachers intervened in bullying incidents while seventy-one percent of the students say they intervened.
- The average child has watched 8,000 televised murders and 100,000 acts of violence before finishing elementary school.
  American schools harbor approximately 2.1 million bullies and 2.7 million of their victims, according to Dan Olweus, of the National School Safety Center.

Other statistics from the National School Safety Center:
- Fifty-six percent of students have personally witnessed some type of bullying at school.
- Fifteen percent of all school absenteeism is directly related to fears of being bullied at school.
- Seventy-one percent of students report incidents of bullying as a problem at their school.
- One out of twenty students has seen a student with a gun at school.
- 282,000 students are physically attacked in secondary schools each month.
 Suicide is the third-leading cause of death among people between the ages of 10 and 24, with males making up 84 percent of the approximate 4,400 victims reported a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Hispanic and Native American teens and young adults have the highest rates of suicide-related fatalities.

  I could go on but you see my point. Something has to reverse the trend. If anyone believes that bullying doesn’t take it’s toll on families, schools, and society take another look at the statistics above. 
  There’s a lot of good information out there for parents dealing with bullies. For example check out Nickelodeon- Parents Connect at http://www.parentsconnect.com/parenting-your-kids/parenting-kids/bullying/
  There’s a non-profit group that offers alternative support for bullies and people being bullied called Make Beats Not Beat Downs ( mbnbd@hotmail.com ) that partners with some of the most talented musicians nationwide.
   The resources are out there, and have been for some time, but the problem continues to plague our schools despite anti-bullying programs. Those programs do help some schools  cut bullying down as much as fifty percent. Bullying will never totally go away. How could it in a society that reveres a good smackdown?
   As It Stands, now more than ever parents must provide moral guidance and the confidence to deal with bullies, to help their children face the reality of our violent culture.

WEBSITES CARRYING THIS COLUMN:

1) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

2) Zero Bully

3) Wall Street Journal Headlines

4) Cloud Surfing

5) PAIRSonnalités | EN

'Swastika on the ballot': American Nazi Party gets its first lobbyist

It seems that our prolonged recession has brought out hate groups in droves. Racism is on the rise, and intolerance is the word for the day.

These hate groups are getting bolder every year, and their message of intolerance is spreading like wildfire. When we have hate mongers like the American Nazi Party lobbying on capitol hill, you have to wonder where it will all end?

“The American Nazi Party has its first lobbyist in Washington, according to reports.

The Hill newspaper, which covers Congress when it is in session, said John Bowles had registered with House and Senate offices as a representative of the “ANP,” according to disclosure records.

The records said that he planned to lobby on “political rights and ballot access laws,” and other issues such as civil rights, healthcare and immigration.

“You know, congressmen and congresswomen have always been telling the American public that they were open to other viewpoints,” Bowles told The Hill. “I’m going to see if they were sincere about that, or I’m going to call their bluff.”

Bowles was a presidential candidate in 2008 for the National Socialist Movement, according to US News and World Report. Nazi comes from the German words for National Socialist.

He told The Hill that people in America did not understand the term socialism, but knew what Nazism was.

“So [we] decided: Why don’t we just say what we are?” he added. “In the future, when we get people on the ballot, when people see the swastika on the ballot, they’ll know what they’re getting."

There’s Two America’s…the wealthy live in one, and the rest of us in the other

Good Day Humboldt County!

Today we’re looking at two roads traveled by Americans.

One is paved with privileges, while the other is riddled with pot holes.

When you’re rich in America you can steal millions and get less time in jail than a homeless man for stealing $100 for food.

The wealthy have the resources to live lives of luxury most Americans can only dream about. With those charmed lives comes a sense of entitlement.

It’s sad to say, but the wealthy rule by default. Everyone else is too busy trying to stay alive in a depressed economy.

With their wealth, these leaders of industry and government, are immune to other’s real life plights.

The rich spew ideology in order to further control the masses. They talk about the Constitution a lot, while violating most of it’s real tenets and reducing it to a partisan interpretation. The majority of Americans live somewhere between poverty and an uneasy middle class. Yet, we call our system a democracy and accuse other nations of having caste systems and limited forms of government ruled by strongmen, and dictators. Kinda makes you wonder doesn’t it?

Time for me to walk on down the road…

Do you like simple illusions? Here’s one that’s fun…

 

Can You Pick Out the Tallest Soldier?

Be careful…

Did You Find Him? Hmmmm...

if you did there’s something you should know…

They are all the same height

Source

It’s Friday the 13th…are you ready to do a bit of exploring?

     Good Day Humboldt County!

I’ve got six paths for you to travel on today. Some are strange, some are violent, some are sad, some are silly. Each a road to somewhere you haven’t been to before. Time to explore:

Why Friday the 13th Is Unlucky – have you ever wondered why this day got such a bad rap?

Three Friday the 13ths, 13 weeks apart, a rarity - It's a bad year for people who suffer from paraskevidekatriaphobia — the fear of Friday the 13th.

• Gun Sales Booming: Doomsday, Obama or Zombies? – Buyers in record numbers are flooding into gun stores, retailers say. Ammo, too, is flying off the shelves.
• Gravy-wrestling model hit in the face with monkey wrench after finding friend having sex on her sofa – A model who became a champion gravy wrestler suffered serious eye damage after being hit in the face with a monkey wrench.
• Homelessness Becomes A Crime In Hungary – Hungary's new anti-vagrancy laws — the toughest in Europe — now mean that homeless people sleeping on the street can face police fines or even the possibility of jail time.
• Man builds World’s tallest tree house – THE world's tallest tree house towers into the sky on a heavenly mission that puts most childhood hideaways to shame.

Time for me to walk on down the road…

Space Scotch? Distillery sends malt ingredients into space

I’m a Scotch drinker. Whenever I decide to have something stronger than wine or beer, I reach for (at least) a 20 year-old single malt Scotch whiskey. Pure bliss. As smooth as silk. A hint of peat. Nectar of the Gods.

So when I heard about a possible space matured Scotch whiskey, my thoughts went otherworldly. I imagined a drink even smoother (while still keeping it’s smoky taste) than a 40 year-old single malt Scotch. Oh heavens! Just think of the possibility, and if you’re a Scotch drinker like me, dream that someday you’ll sip a “wee drop.” 

“Ardbeg Distillery, headquartered on the Scottish island of Islay, announced this week that it sent up vials containing unmatured malt ingredients as well as particles of charred oak to the space station, on an unmanned cargo flight that blasted off from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan last October. The experiment was facilitated by Houston-based NanoRacks, a company that arranges to send experiments (and the occasional iPhone) to the station for a fee.

Ardbeg's researchers want to find out whether the zero-G environment has an effect on terpenes, chemicals that play a role in giving whisky and other spirits their flavor and aroma. "This is believed to be the first time anyone has ever studied terpenes and other molecules in near zero-gravity," the distillery said in a statement.” (source)

Love is about dealing with your partner’s annoying habits and quirks

                Good Day Humboldt County!

Every now and then, someone asks how my wife and I have managed to live together for 37 years without driving each other nuts. Nuts is such a subjective term. There are ways to make your life journey with your partner go smoother.

I wish I could just write out a laundry list of survival tactics ways to get along, but it isn’t that easily explained. It’s been a gradual process, as you may have surmised. The fact that we’re still friends is key. There are experts who offer tips for making life easier for cohabitants. For instance:

“We all have annoying habits, which, curiously, we don’t find annoying in ourselves. But when they come from someone living with you, such habits can definitely get on your nerves. The trouble begins when you enter a vicious cycle of resentment -- when you're fed up with your partner's irritating habits, or you're tired of getting picked on for your own.

Nagging, disdain and contempt can all end relationships. That annoying habit may appear to be the source, but it’s not the habit that is the problem; it’s how you deal with it.” (source)

Does any of this sound familiar to you? Do you want to know some ways to exist peacefully with your partner? For example, does your partner have some body quirks?

“Body quirks includes non-clandestine nose picking, passing gas, burping, picking teeth and anytime when one releases things from orifices that no one else wants to smell, witness or be around. Of course everyone must do so at times, but how about in the bathroom or other private place? Explain to your partner you are inclined to feel more sexually attracted to them when not subjected to foul odors and the like. If you did this in front of him (it usually is the guy, sorry) he would not really like it or find it sexually alluring. Request he do it in private.” (source)

I can’t vouch for any of this, but some of it touches a cord now and then. Here’s another good example:

“Selective listening: You are trying to talk and he or she is tuned out, staring at the TV, computer or phone. Agree upon a benign code word (like "banana") for when you really would like full attention. It lets your partner know that paying attention now is important to you, which avoids the mystery of when to be fully attentive.” (source)

Here’s a real fight-starter – bad manners. It seems like us guys have a chronic problem that women have to learn to live with – we’re slobs at heart!

“Bad manners: Scratching his back with a fork, leaving the toilet seat up, rearranging private parts in public -- things that never happened early on in the relationship are now a daily affair that makes you feel like you married a Neanderthal. But for him (or her!), being able to relax and not feel like he married Emily Post is important. The solution lies somewhere in the middle, a relaxed state of getting to be yourself, with a dose of courtesy for your partner. Have a conversation about what constitutes reasonable manners to both of you. You may have different standards because you grew up in different homes. The things that are most egregious to the other are things you should step away and do in private. The “note reminder” technique helps for some. So a Post-It on the toilet for two weeks that says "Please put down the seat” can help to change a long-time habit.”

Well, I could go on, but I think you have the idea. People have to learn to compromise. It’s not always easily done, and we often have to break bad habits, but the end result is a serene lifestyle. Who could ask for anything more than that?

Time for me to walk on down the road…

The Rings of Saturn Will Be On Display This Weekend

Time to pull out your telescopes and binoculars folks.

On April 15, Saturn reaches opposition — the point when it is directly opposite the sun in the sky. When it reaches opposition, Saturn will appear in the midnight sky to observers on Earth. The sky maps and illustration of Saturn accompanying this guide shows where to see the planet in the southern sky on April 15 and how it may appear seen through a good telescope.

The most important thing about this for skywatchers is that Saturn moves from being a "morning object" to being visible all night. For all of April, Saturn rises at sunset, and sets at sunrise.

All the outer planets have rings, but with the exception of Saturn, they are only visible in long exposure photographs made from space. Saturn's rings are totally in your face, as bright as the planet itself. They are made up of many thousands of small pieces of rock and ice, with enough space in between for starlight to shine through. [ Photos: Spectacular Views of Saturn's Rings ]

From a distance they look substantial and solid, yet in reality they are gossamer thin: thousands of kilometers wide, yet only a few kilometers thick. Through a good telescope, the rings are seen to have a complex structure.

Here’s a list of the brightest moons and their brightness on April 15, the night of Saturn's opposition:

• Titan: 8.4
• Rhea: 9.7
• Tethys: 10.2
• Dione: 10.4
• Iapetus: 11.1
• Enceladus: 11.7

Astronomers use an upside down magnitude scale: the larger the number, the fainter the object. At magnitude 8.4, Titan is easily visible in binoculars. One of the two largest moons in the solar system, it is the only moon with a substantial atmosphere, mostly methane gas. It was visited by the Huygens lander on Jan. 14, 2005. [ Amazing Photos: Titan, Saturn's Largest Moon ]

With so many moons visible in a telescope, how do you tell which is which? The easiest way is to run a planetarium program on your computer: it will plot accurately the positions of all of Saturn’s moons as they circle the planet, neatly labeled for you.

This article (edited for length) was originally provided to Space.com by Starry Night Education, the leader in space science curriculum solutions.