What Your Favorite Flavor Says About You

by Diana Stanczak  

Maybe you really are what you eat. People who have sweet tooth's are more likely to lend a hand and be cooperative, finds new research in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Researchers had 55 college students answer questions about their personality and also rate how much they liked 50 different foods broken up into the five major flavor profiles: spicy, salty, bitter, sour, and sweet. Those who rated the sweet foods higher had a higher level of agreeableness.

In another study the same researchers found that when the students were given a sweet food like chocolate milk over a plain cracker or no food, they were more willing to volunteer their time for a professor.
It's not the first time scientists have found a link between flavor preferences and personality.

Can't keep your hand out of the cookie jar? Drool at the thought of a juicy ribeye? Here's what it all means:






In the new study, participants who ate something sweet were more willing to volunteer their time than their sugar-free counterparts.






Can't put down the sriracha? You may be a thrill-seeker, according to a study from Penn State. Students who scored high on a risk-taking behavior test also reported enjoying spicy flavors, while those who generally played it safe were more cautious about their food choices.






Foods composed of fat and protein spark your evolutionary craving for sustenance, but also trigger a social cue in your mind, according to researchers at Monell Chemical Senses Center. Since hearty meals are usually enjoyed with friends or family, the scent of bacon frying triggers memories of good times.






Water attracts salt, so those who crave it are literally more likely to "go with the flow," according to researchers at the University of Natural Medicine. Take this with a grain of salt, though; too much sodium is associated with high blood pressure levels.






Researchers at the City University of New York found that bitter tastes are linked with harsher judgement. When people were asked to give their opinions on certain scenarios after sipping either a bitter drink or water, the first group was 27 percent tougher in its assessment than those who had H2O. Skip the cranberry juice at your next happy hour to view your surroundings in a sweeter light.

Hanukkah and Thanksgiving Take Place at the Same Time This Year

So Celebrate Thanksgivukkah

In 167 B.C., Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the ruler of the Seleucid Empire, tried to compel the Jews in Judah to give up their religious customs and values. They rose up in rebellion for seven years in what became known as the Maccabean Revolt. Once they liberated Jerusalem, they set about purifying the Temple. This eight day event is marked by the Jewish festival of Hanukkah.
This year, Hanukkah lasts from November 27 to December 5. The American Christian (albeit secularized) holiday of Thanksgiving marks a 1621 feast celebrated by the colonists at Plymouth, Massachusetts. It falls on November 28 this year. For the first time since 1888, the two holidays overlap. Some Americans have taken to calling November 28 “Thanksgivukkah.” The event is inspiring creative responses among celebrants:

Not to be outdone is Asher Weintraub, a 9-year-old New Yorker who has created what he dubs the Menurkey—a menorah, the candelabrum that is the centerpiece of the holiday, in the shape of a turkey. With help from his filmmaker parents, Asher funded his project with a successful $25,000 campaign on Kickstarter, a fundraising website, over the summer (it netted $48,345). The family is now hoping to sell as many as 2,500 of his creation in versions both ceramic (for $150) and plaster ($50).
The Weintraubs are also expanding on the concept in other ways, from a Menurkey iPhone app to a Menurkey theme song. Sample lyric: "Thanksgiving and Hanukkah, come light the Menurkey. Once in a lifetime, the candles meet the turkey."
Part of what's driving the Thanksgivukkah fervor is that Hanukkah is a holiday "with room for creativity," says Jennie Rivlin Roberts, founder of ModernTribe.com, an online store that specializes in contemporary Jewish items. Ms. Roberts own contribution? A game called No Limit Texas Dreidel that she started marketing in 2007—it is a modern take on the holiday pastime of spinning the dreidel, a kind of Hanukkah-themed top. […]
Synagogues and Jewish organizations are also joining in the Thanksgivukkah chorus. In Boston, Combined Jewish Philanthropies, a local fundraising group, has created a website, ThanksgivukkahBoston.com, to promote the holiday and suggest ways to celebrate it (one example: making Hanukkah-themed corn-husk dolls). As project director Jeff Levy explains, the occasion is too significant to go unheeded. "This is like the new millennium," he says.
At Temple Beth Sholom in Santa Ana, Calif., synagogue member Hollis O'Brien, a caterer, is leading a Thanksgivukkah cooking class at the end of October, replete with recipe tips for such hybridized holiday dishes as sweet-potato latkes and a Jewish-style brisket with a cranberry glaze. And since doughnuts are also popular at Hanukkah as part of the holiday's emphasis on oil and fried foods, Ms. O'Brien has plans to showcase them as well. "Usually, I fill them with strawberry jelly, but this year, I'm going to use pumpkin cream," she says.

The Age of Internet Empires

Mark Graham (@geoplace) and Stefano De Sabbata (@maps4thought) of Information Geographies, a project to provide "mapping of contemporary geographies of knowledge" over at the Oxford Internet Institute has released a map of featuring the websites most frequently visited by different countries in the world.

The map, titled Age of Internet Empires, uses data from web analytics company Alexa. It is visualized in the style of an old colonial map and named after the popular computer game Age of Empire.

Read more over at Information Geographies

See more featured images over at Spotlight

Random Photos

Amazon requires publishers to use Kindle DRM

A leaked Amazon ebook contract [PDF] shows that Amazon's default terms for ebook publishers is that they must use DRM, unless they can convince Amazon to leave it off.
Like most DRM vendors -- Apple and Google, for example -- Amazon spends a lot of time implying and flat-out stating that it only uses DRM because the big dumb media companies require it of them. The reality is that DRM's primary beneficiary is the DRM vendor. Once your book is sold with Amazon's DRM on it, only Amazon can give your readers permission to move them out of the Kindle jail and onto another device of your choosing. Of course Amazon wants to force copyright holders and creators to use its DRM -- it's a one-stop way of converting the writer's customer into Amazon's customer. Forever.
Remember: Any time someone puts a lock on something of yours and won't give you the key, that lock is not there for your benefit.

Please note that this is an Amazon contract and that Amazon is the one who is insisting on the DRM. That makes this an interesting contrast, IMO, with Bezos’ statements that “If the rights owner wants DRM, we do DRM. If the rights owner doesn’t want DRM, we don’t do DRM.”
The contract clause mentioned above is by no means agnostic on the topic of DRM. It unequivocally tells us that Amazon is the one who gets to decide whether the ebooks have DRM. It also tells us that Amazon _will_ be adding DRM to Kindle ebooks unless the other party can talk them out of it.
Amazon’s position (on DRM) in this contract is far from agnostic, and it is in fact much closer to their stated position for audiobook DRM.

A Leaked Contract Reveals that Amazon Insists on DRM

New York City's undercover cop problem is totally out of control

An Occupy Wall Street demonstrator marches in front of a group of police officers in riot gear in New York.

Reporting in the New York Times about the ever-expanding operations of undercover police in NYC, led in part by a former CIA agent, Jim Dwyer writes,

The unrestrained surveillance in New York public life is the physical embodiment of what has been taking place online over the last decade under operations of the National Security Agency revealed by Edward J. Snowden. To borrow the title of a 1918 novel about nosy Irish villagers, we have become The Valley of the Squinting Windows.  But it was all O.K. because the mayor and the police commissioner said so, though from the outside, no one could really say what they were up to.

Undercover Police, Just About Everywhere.

San Francisco City Hall hears horrifying tales of cops' hostility to cyclists

Dozens of cyclists attended a hearing on police hostility to cyclists at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors last week. They told stories of undercover cops threatening to beat them up after cutting them off on their bikes; of cops refusing to take action against drivers who had attempted or threatened vehicular homicide; and of a systematic refusal to investigate cases where cyclists were injured or killed by drivers.
Before the inevitable, victim-blaming round of "but cyclists are so aggressive and horrible," please read this (tl;dr: statistical analysis of cyclist behavior does not bear out the caricature of the lunatic rider, who is significantly less common -- and less dangerous -- than the lunatic driver cohort).

When Sarah Harling was hospitalized by a minivan driver who made a left turn into her at a stop sign intersection, she says the SFPD officer who filed the police report included a fabricated statement from her claiming that she “approached the stop sign without stopping.”
Harling said she tried to submit a response to the numerous “factual errors” in the police report, but an officer at SFPD’s Richmond Station “raised his voice to lecture me about how traffic laws apply to cyclists too, how he’d never let his children ride bikes in the city, and then told me repeatedly, ‘I’m not telling you you can’t leave this here, but you just need to understand that sometimes things get lost.’”
“I left the station in tears,” she said.
Harling later hired an attorney, who collected witness statements and a photo, which showed the driver to be at fault and led the driver’s insurance company to settle for his or her maximum amount of coverage available.

Victims Share Tales of SFPD Anti-Bike Bias and Hostility at City Hall

Man Sawed His Own Leg Off Because He Couldn't Afford Hospital's Amputation Bill

One day in 2012, farmer and factory worker Zheng Yanliang from a small Chinese village experienced some pain in his right leg. Doctors diagnosed it as an arterial embolism, of which there's no cure. His leg had to be amputated.
Problem was, Zheng had no money for the procedure. So he was sent home and given three months to live. The pain became so intense yet no doctor was willing to treat him.
That's when Zheng decided to take matters into his own hands:

Mr Zheng wrapped a piece of wood with a cloth and placed it in his mouth to bite on.
He then began to cut his leg using the saw and the knife.
His wife said that when she found him, his leg had been removed and the pain had resulted in three of Mr Zheng's teeth being forced out from his biting on the wood.

Read the rest over at Sky News 

Ohio Told Man That He Must Stay Legally Dead

When a dead man is found alive and well (and ahem, not a zombie), does he remain dead? He does, according to Ohio.
Here's the strange story of Donald Miller, who was declared dead, then found alive, then told by a judge that he has to stay legally dead. Confused? Read on.
The story, according to ABC News, began when Donald Miller of Ohio disappeared in 1986 after losing his job. He left behind his wife and two children. Years later, his wife sought to have him declared legally dead so she could collect his Social Security benefits for their two minors. In 1994, Miller was declared dead.
Fast forward to today, when Miller came back to Ohio and tried to re-establish his social security number. He went up to the judge, who said that according to Ohio legal statute, there could be no changes to death rulings after three years have passed.
So, according to the State of Ohio, Donald Miller is (legally) dead and must remain so, despite that the man is still walking around amongst the living.

Dieting 100 Years Ago

How about some diet tips from the early 20th century? The Week has some excerpts from various books on the subject of dieting and nutrition. Most of them basically tell you to exercise, go outside, and don't eat so much. But then there's some weird advice from Helen Follett Jameson in her 1899 book The Woman Beautiful.

Do not drink much water. A little lemon juice added to it will make it less fattening.

There's this from Countess C, in the 1901 book Beauty's Aids: Or, How to Be Beautiful.

First and most important, drink very little, as little as possible, and only red or white wine, preferably Burgundy, or tea or coffee slightly alcoholized.

And from the 1892 book Beauty, Its Attainment and Preservation:

In America the number of fat people is growing larger every year and the suffering endured by this usually good-natured class of people is tremendous. As a matter of fact, a great deal of this discomfort might be avoided if people would not drink such an inordinate quantity of ice water and could be made to understand that thirst does not lie in the stomach and that it is not satisfied by pouring down water by the glassful.

The theory of water being fattening makes you wonder how much of what we "know" today will be laughed at in another 100 years. More at The Week.

Awesome Pictures

The desert strikes back

Coccidiomycosis ("Valley Fever") used to be a relatively exotic disease, familiar only to a few pulmonary disease specialists.  But now as more Americans move into desert ecosystems to live, more are becoming infected with this fungus, as reported in Vice:

The debilitating affliction has reached epidemic proportions in the Southwest, with infection rates rising at least tenfold in the last 15 years... 

Doctors in the West got their first inkling of the disease in the 1930s and 1940s, when thousands of new Californians settled in the Central Valley, driven west to escape drought-wrecked prairielands that had devolved into the infamous Dust Bowl. It’s also when World War II delivered soldiers, prisoners of war and interned Japanese Americans to some of the fungus's most fertile breeding grounds. Valley fever took hold among the unfortunate new arrivals.

But then the disease lolled and was largely ignored by the medical establishment, which came to regard the occasional infection as an exotic disease. Now it’s “reemerging,” to borrow from bureaucratic parlance, and its range appears to be growing. More than 22,000 cases were confirmed in the US in 2011—up from 1,200 in 1995. Between 1990 and 2008, 3,089 deaths linked to the disease were documented...

Research published last month in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases concluded that valley fever hospitalization rates more than doubled in California between 2000 and 2011, with medical costs exceeding $2 billion during that time. The CDC suspects that as many as 150,000 people who are infected annually don’t seek treatment or aren’t properly diagnosed...

Construction work, archeology, and farming are particularly dangerous trades in cocci-infected regions, which stretch from Mexico up through California; from Texas to Utah. Patches of Argentina are also affected. Anything that kicks up dust increases the hazards. Taylor said Californian dust storms in the 1970s blew spores north to infect Oregonians and west to San Francisco...

The growing rate of diagnoses does reflect a growing awareness among doctors of the disease and its symptoms. People are also increasingly moving out of cities and into dusty exurbs, migrating into regions that are rich with cocci. “There’s an influx of naïve hosts,” Taylor said. “They’re now putting homes outside the cities in more rural areas, where they’re disturbing the desert.”

New ideas for how Earth core formed

New ideas for how Earth core formed

Experiments on samples of iron and rock held at immense pressures have led to new ideas of how Earth's core formed.

• New idea tackles Earth core puzzle
• Earth's core far hotter than thought
• 'New metal type' at Earth's core
• Magnetic mysteries of Earth's Core

Huge Secret Tunnels Found Beneath the Ice of Antarctica

Popular Science reports that scientists from UK universities and the British Antarctic Survey have found enormous tunnels beneath the ice cap of Antarctica. Radar readings from aircraft indicate that these tunnels are up to 820 feet tall. As you can see from diagram above, that’s almost as tall as the Eiffel Tower.
What made these tunnels? Well, the Stargate series tells us that the Ancients maintained a substantial presence in Antarctica. Alternatively, it may have been escaped Nazis, given the long rumors of such activity. Perhaps Iron Sky, the 2012 movie about Nazis escaping to a moon base in 1945, was just a distraction from the real threat.

Bear Attacks Man, Man Grabs Bear's Tongue and Yanks on It

“It’s like…an extreme sport.” That’s how Gilles Cyr of Grand Falls, New Brunswick, Canada describes his fight against a wild brown bear.
Mr. Cyr had no warning. Suddenly, while tending to his woodlot, a bear attacked him from behind. The bear struck at him with his claws. Mr. Cyr saw the bear’s tongue lolling out of his mouth. He grabbed it and wouldn’t let go. He says that his reasoning was, “If you hurt me, I’m going to hurt you, too.”
Mr. Cyr fled behind a tree. The bear struck at him again, then lost interest the fight and left. Mr. Cyr was treated for minor injuries.

Midnight house intruder turned out to be huge kangaroo

A huge kangaroo kept police busy overnight after it broke into a home near Gin Gin, south-west of Bundaberg in southern Queensland, Australia. Sergeant Graham Bub says a family at Moolboolaman phoned about an intruder thumping around their home at about midnight on Friday. However when police arrived the kangaroo had escaped through a window. Sergeant Bub says it took the owners a while to work out who and what the trespasser was.
He says the family was shocked to find a large kangaroo thumping around their living room. "A couple of ladies with their children were at the residence and they'd seen these eyes glowing in the dark," he said. "Eventually they realized it was a kangaroo that had become trapped in their house. It was a fair size and they can be quite aggressive." The Gin Gin resident, who does not want to be named, says a huge kangaroo will not be welcome back in her home.

She says she moved to Moolboolaman from Cairns five days ago and has never had a kangaroo in her house before. "I was woken up to what sounded like something going through the rubbish outside and then I heard a crash through the window," she said. "I ran down the hallway and locked myself in my friend's bedroom. It did make quite a crash and it had some heavy thudding, so all we knew was it was something pretty big and yes, it was quite scary."

Sergeant Bub says the family did the right thing by hiding in other rooms while waiting for help. "They had concealed themselves in one room and were afraid for their own safety," he said. There was a child in another room. Kangaroos do have those large talons on their legs and if the animal is cornered and afraid, they're just defending themselves. There could have been injuries to people so the best thing to do is - if you can avoid them and go away. If you're trapped of course conceal yourself somewhere safe and call the police."

Deer spotted with basketball stuck in antlers

Andy Kovac spotted this buck roaming his backyard in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday.

“That was a classic, my wife called me down, I grabbed my camera, and luckily you can see he wasn’t in a big hurry,” Kovac said.

"Unbelievable! I can't understand how he got the ball caught in his antlers," he added.

YouTube link.

The Kovacs call their back yard a wildlife sanctuary and have many pictures of wild turkeys, deer, possum, groundhogs, skunks and racoons.

Animal Pictures

The Daily Drift

Idiot!

Carolina Naturally is read in 194 countries around the world daily.
 

Bald is beautiful ... !

Today is Be Bald and Be Free Day 

 

Don't forget to visit our sister blog: It Is What It Is

Some of our readers today have been in:

The Americas

Buenos Aires and Rosario, Argentina

San Juan, Puerto Rico

Santiago and Pucon, Chile

Managua, Nicaragua

Montreal, Sioux Lookout, Mississauga, Ottawa, Britannia, Kenora and Seaton Village, Canada

Mexico City, Mexico

Willemstad, Curacao

Rio De Janeiro and Conchas, Brazil

Bogota, Colombia

Mooresville, Cameron, Raleigh, Asheville, Wilmington, Charlotte, Greenville and Hickory, United States

Europe

Ivrea, Milan, Ravenna and Rome, Italy

Newport, Wales

Saint Petersburg, Chelyabinsk, Moscow and Vladivostok, Russia

Kiev and Zhovti Vody, Ukraine

Dublin, Ireland

Bradford, London and Nottingham, England

Niva, Denmark

Sarajevo and Hadzici, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Rouen and Laval, France

Athens, Greece

Zagreb and Split, Croatia

Santa Cruz De Tenerife and Madrid, Spain

Stockholm, Sweden

Ankara and Istanbul, Turkey

Espoo, Finland

Oslo, Norway

Sulzbach, Germany

Asia

Chetput, Mumbai, Bangalore, Gurgaon, New Delhi, Pondicherry, Kolkata, Kottayam and Chennai, India

Jakarta, Indonesia

Tehran, Gerash and Gorgan, Iran

Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Seoul, Korea

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Tunis, Tunisia

Puchong, Malaysia

Guangzhou, China

Dhaka, Bangladesh

Al Jubayhan, Jordan

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Africa

Cape Town, South Africa

Lagos, Nigeria

Pacific

Homebush and Lithgow, Australia

Pag-Asa, Philippines

Today in History

1066		William of Normandy defeats King Harold in the Battle of Hastings.
1651		Laws are passed in Massachusetts forbidding the poor to adopt excessive styles of dress.
1705		The English Navy captures Barcelona in Spain.
1773		Britain's East India Company tea ships' cargo is burned at Annapolis, Md.
1806		Napoleon Bonaparte crushes the Prussian army at Jena, Germany.
1832		Blackfeet Indians attack American Fur Company trappers near Montana's Jefferson River, killing one.
1884		Transparent paper-strip photographic film is patented by George Eastman.
1912		Former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt is shot and wounded in assassination attempt in Milwaukee. He was saved by the papers in his breast pocket and, though wounded, insisted on finishing his speech.
1917		Mata Hari, a Paris dancer, is executed by the French after being convicted of passing military secrets to the Germans.
1930		Singer Ethel Merman stuns the audience when she holds a high C for sixteen bars while singing "I Got Rhythm" during her Broadway debut in Gershwin's Girl Crazy.
1933		The Geneva disarmament conference breaks up as Germany proclaims withdrawal from the disarmament initiative, as well as from the League of Nations, effective October 23. This begins German policy of independent action in foreign affairs.
1944		German Field Marshal Rommel, suspected of complicity in the July 20th plot against Hitler, is visited at home by two of Hitler's staff and given the choice of public trial or suicide by poison. He chooses suicide and it is announced that he died of wounds.
1947		Test pilot Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier aboard a Bell X-1 rocket plane.
1950		Chinese Communist Forces begin to infiltrate the North Korean Army.
1962		Cuban Missile Crisis begins; USAF U-2 reconnaissance pilot photographs Cubans installing Soviet-made missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
1964		Rev. Martin Luther King is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for advocating a policy of non-violence.
1966		Montreal, Quebec, Canada, opens its underground Montreal Metro rapid-transit system.
1968		US Defense Department announces 24,000 soldiers and Marines will be sent back to Vietnam for involuntary second tours of duty.
1968		Jim Hines, USA, breaks the "ten-second barrier" in the 100-meter sprint at the Olympics in Mexico City; his time was 9.95.
1969		The British 50-pence coin enters the UK's currency, the first step toward covering to a decimal system, which was planned for 1971.
1983		Prime Minister of Grenada Maurice Bishop overthrown and later executed by a military coup.
1994		Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres for establishing the Oslo Accords and preparing for Palestinian Self Government.
1998		Eric Robert Rudolph charged with the 1996 bombing during the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia; It was one of several bombing incidents Rudolph carried out to protest legalized abortion in the US.
2012		Felix Baumgartner breaks the world record for highest manned balloon flight, highest parachute jump, and greatest free-fall velocity, parachuting from an altitude of approximately 24 miles (39km).

Non Sequitur

Prehistoric human remains found in Wyoming

A father and daughter found human remains in the Killpecker Sand Dunes just south of Rock Springs on Friday. Experts say that the bones are prehistoric.

The Killpecker Sand Dunes [Credit: KSL]

Sweetwater County Sheriff Rich Haskell said John Vase and his daughter Linzy were pre-season scouting for deer about 3 1/2 miles west of Essex Mountain when they found two bones they believed to be human. They alerted Sweetwater County authorities who recovered the remains.

After seeing the bones, County Coroner Dal Majhanovich asked a retired anthropology and geology professor to also perform an examination.

Professor Charlie Love, formerly of Western Wyoming Community College, confirmed that the bones are prehistoric femur and pelvic bones from a male Native American.

The remains will be sent to the University of Wyoming for further study.

The area where the bones were found is run by the Bureau of Land Management, but they could not be notified of the find because their offices are closed due to the current government shutdown.

Cyclone Phailin hits in India with 200kmph winds

A massive cyclone has made landfall in India, with wind speeds of up to 200 kilometers per hour (about 125 mph). Live blogs to follow: Times of India and Zee News India. Up to 12 million people could be internally displaced by the disaster, which threatens to cause flooding throughout inland regions, as well as coastal devastation. Here's Weather Underground's Jeff Masters, and here's imaging from the US Navy.

'I got hired at a Bangladesh sweatshop. Meet my 9-year-old boss'

In the Toronto Star, writer Raveena Aulakh gets hired at a Bangladesh sweatshop and meets an extraordinary 9-year-old girl whose life, deprived of education and many basic rights, is all too common. Reading this amazing undercover account, one wonders what will now become of the child, her identity revealed. Perhaps the only thing worse than working in a sweatshop at age 9 is having that job taken away, if your life and that of your family depends on it. A compelling, sad read.

Did you know ...

That the suicide rate is falling in medical marijuana states

That quietly, Google joins ALEC

That bank contractors have broken into hundreds of wrong homes

That support for the repugican cabal jaw-droppingly low

The repugicans live in an alternate universe

Cognitive Dissonance and the repugican Denial of Reality
by Allen Clifton

There's not a day that goes by where I don't walk away from reading some of the comments I get on Forward Progressives  or Right Off A Cliff and wonder to myself, "What must reality be like on whatever planet repugicans seem to live on?"

[...]
These are the people who claim to be the cabal for "fiscal responsibility," yet haven't had a president from their own cabal balance the budget since President Eisenhower who served over a half-century ago.  Hell, Ronald Reagan (the man many of them champion as the epitome of wingnuttery) drastically grew our deficits and our national debt during his time in the White House.

Tell me again how that's being "fiscally responsible?"  I still don't get that.

These are also the people who call themselves "christians" while condemning the poor, vilifying the needy then supporting policies that perpetuate greed and selfishness.  All things which are direct contradictions to the values for which christians are supposed to stand for.  Yet millions of these people still continue to believe themselves to be "christians" basically because they oppose abortion, same-sex marriage and attend cult rites frequently.  Two things which jesus never even spoke about, and the cult being something he did warn people to be wary of as often times people speak of god to benefit their own selfish ambitions.

And don't even get me started on their stance as the cabal for "small government."  They love government.  They constantly support big government when it benefits something they support or oppose.  They only really oppose government when it goes against their ideological beliefs.

Now we have this government shutdown, where somewhere in the delusional minds of repugicans they believe they've been given some kind of mandate that allows them to shut down our government in a pointless attempt to stop "Obamacare."

[...]

But none of this really matters to repugicans, and there's an easy answer as to why.  See, most of them suffer from what's known as cognitive dissonance.  To put it simply, cognitive dissonance is the brain's inability to handle two conflicting realities, so it creates an alternate one which often defies actual reality.

[...]

What they want to be real doesn't correspond to what is real, therefore instead of facing the stark reality that their whole political ideology is wrong, they've simply concocted some alternate form of reality where facts, science and history don't matter.

How's this for repugican 'family values'

Faux News' Kilmeade Slams Navy SEALs For Aborting Mission Instead of Killing Children

Click here to view this media

Faux News host Brian Kilmeade suggested last Tuesday that the Navy SEALs from Seal Team 6 were wrong to abort a mission on an Al-Shabaab camp in Somalia over the weekend just because they thought children would die.

The repugicans are batshit crazy

Former tea party Candidate Against Government Healthcare Has 10 Kids on Medicaid

A former repugican anti-government tea party candidate for Congress from Idaho who opposes Obamacare because the “government should not be involved in health care” apparently excludes his Medicare-receiving kids from that sentiment.
Greg Collett ran for Idaho State Representative in both 2010 and 2012, losing handily both times.


In his repugican cabal Candidate Disclosure, his statements indicate that he wants to eliminate the Federal Reserve, dump the state income tax in Idaho, put a halt to property taxes in Idaho, and end government involvement in education, state universities. the Department of Commerce, unions, government welfare programs, the regulation of firearms and ammunition, membership in the UN, corporation tax, government retirement programs, etc

The repugicans are fucking lunatics

Michele Bachmann declares that we are in the End Times: 'His day is at hand.' 

Any difference between this batshit crazy repglican and the doomsayers who gather people at their homes, waiting for the last-gasps of a dying earth? Or the cartoons of the homeless wandering the streets with sandwich boards strung over their shoulders proclaiming, "The end is nigh?"

Gargoyle on top of pub is scaring residents

A gargoyle atop a pub in Sydney, Australia, is scaring local residents and causing them to avoid the area. The 1920s-style design feature sits on the roof above the main entrance to 456 The Avenue, a new pub on Sydney's north shore.

But the stone creature has caused ruffles among local shoppers and workers on the busy strip in Chatswood, an area popular with those of Asian descent. Locals have been walking around the pub's entrance - so as not to walk directly underneath the gargoyle - or simply avoiding the area.

Amy Chan, 38, who works in community service and is of Chinese descent, walks past the gargoyle almost every day. "I don't actually avoid walking past it, because it's a short cut to walk to the station from my office in Help St, but I tend to not to look at it," she said.

"I don't think the Chinese culture has anything against the gargoyle. To me, I just find it quite scary and intimidating to look at, especially when its getting dark. I remembered one of my colleagues looked up and saw the monster, she was scared and said 'This is not a normal place to have lunch'."

Bus driver dies after being found with head stuck in vehicle door

A bus driver who was found with his head caught in the door of the vehicle has died, the ambulance service said. Emergency services were called to Lockett Road in Ashton-in-Makerfield, Wigan, at 7:00pm on Wednesday.
Police said the 50-year-old man, who had just finished his shift, was pronounced dead at the scene. It is understood the bus was parked in a lay-by close to a Stagecoach bus depot. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has been informed.

A Stagecoach spokesman said: "We can confirm one of our drivers was found in a bus near our Wigan depot and it has subsequently been confirmed that he has died.

"Our first thoughts are with the driver's family and loved ones. We are also assisting Greater Manchester Police and the HSE in any way that we can with their investigation."

Police officer loses job after shooting squirrel inside store

Following a call to local animal control with reference to a squirrely intruder causing a ruckus inside the the Dollar General Store in Mountain City, Tennessee, on Friday, September 27, Animal Control Officer Gary Phillips was unavailable so Town of Mountain City Police Officer Jody Putnam was dispatched.

According to an eyewitness at the scene of the incident, when Officer Putnam arrived, the squirrel was still inside the store and becoming increasingly hostile, presumably due to the stress of the incident. In order to apprehend the perpetrator, Officer Putnam made the decision to mace the squirrel.  At the time Officer Putnam deployed the mace, customers were allegedly still in the store but the smell and subsequent burn caused a mass evacuation.

Unfortunately for Officer Putnam and the squirrel, the mace was not enough to apprehend the squirrel so Putnam reached for his next line of defense – his service weapon. It is unknown exactly how many shots Officer Putnam fired at the squirrel.  One eyewitness said they didn’t hear a gunshot at all but rather heard the sudden “scream of the squirrel.”

When the bystander re-entered the store, Officer Putnam had the squirrel pinned beneath his shoe and the animal was obviously dead. Another bystander said that Officer Putnam fired three shots. As a result of this incident, a unanimous decision was made by the City Council to terminate Officer Putnam’s employment. Mountain City Mayor Lawrence Keeble said, “The decision the City Council made on this incident speaks for itself.” It is not clear whether or not any charges will be filed against Putnam.

Woman too drunk to get out of car called 911 for help

A Billings, Montana, woman accused of calling police and saying she was "just too damn drunk" to get out of her vehicle was charged on Wednesday with her fourth drunken-driving offence. Carol Frances Omeara, 55, appeared in Yellowstone County Justice Court by video from the county jail on a felony DUI charge.

Judge Larry Herman set bond at $3,000 after a prosecutor said Omeara has three prior DUI convictions in California. Omeara was arrested on Tuesday at about 10:40pm after a police dispatcher received a call from a woman who said she could not get out of her vehicle, which was parked outside her residence.

"When asked if she was having a medical or mechanical issue, the caller said, `No, I'm just too damn drunk,'" court records state. An officer said he found Omeara inside the vehicle, which was parked about two feet from the kerb. The woman reportedly told the officer she had been at a Billings bar for about five hours, had driven home but had been sitting in her car in front of her home for about four hours.

Prosecutors said Omeara told the officer she had consumed a pint of vodka. The keys to the vehicle were in her pocket. Omeara agreed to provide a breath sample, and the result of the preliminary test showed she had a blood-alcohol level of 0.311 percent, nearly four times the state legal limit of 0.08.

Exploding toilet has left man wounded and afraid to flush

A Brooklyn man injured by an exploding toilet in his home remains so traumatized that he now uses a rope to flush from a safe distance outside the bathroom. Michel Pierre was injured on Oct. 2 at the Caton Tower development in Flatbush by a powerful blast from the bowl. “I’m afraid to flush the toilet right now,” said Pierre, 58, who needed 30 stitches to close shrapnel wounds on his head, arm and legs.

“It sounds silly but I’m still scared,” he said. “Maybe someday it goes away but right now I’m in pain.” Pierre says his peace of mind has been shattered. The water had been turned off that day in his ninth-floor flat at the 19-storey building while a plumbing contractor installed a backflow prevention valve. At around 11pm Pierre checked if the pressurised flush-valve toilet was working and pulled the handle.

He’ll never forget what happened next. “I remember there was a ‘boom’ and the thing exploded in my face,” Pierre said. “I was blinded and pieces flew all over the place.” Pierre was briefly unconscious and awoke covered with blood. Firefighters from nearby FDNY engine and ladder companies responded to a “utility emergency” in the building. Pierre’s cuts were treated at Methodist Hospital.

“Toilets are supposed to flush, not explode,” said Pierre’s lawyer Sanford Rubenstein who is preparing a lawsuit against Century Management, which runs the building. “This victim is entitled to damages for the serious injuries he sustained through no fault of his own.” Experts said a build-up of air pressure in the pipes during the repairs is the likely culprit. Pierre, an information technology specialist for a government agency, said he doesn’t know when he can go to the bathroom in peace again. “I can’t stop thinking about it every time I look at the bowl,” Pierre said, who was relieved that he wasn’t sitting down during the fateful flush.

Daily Comic Relief

What Does the Average American Man Look Like Compared To Other Countries?

What if you took the average American man and made him stand next to the average man from other countries? For his 'Body Measurement Project' graphic artist Nickolay Lamm made some 3D models from the average man in the USA, Japan, the Netherlands, and France.

The models were produced using the average waist, height, and BMI (body mass index) measurements of the average middle aged male.

Sexualized avatars affect the real world

Researchers at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab are delving into questions posed by sexualized depictions of women in video games. Specifically, do female players who use provocatively dressed avatars begin

More

Sticks and stone

Brain releases natural painkillers during social rejection

 

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” goes the playground rhyme that’s supposed to help children endure taunts from classmates. But a new study

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Herbal products full of unlabeled junk

Consumers of natural health products beware. The majority of herbal products on the market contain ingredients not listed on the label, with most companies substituting cheaper alternatives and using fillers,

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Minor Traumatic Brain Injury

A Silent Epidemic

In the United States, approximately 1.4 million people suffer a traumatic brain injury (TBI) each year. Of those injuries, three out of four are minor TBI (mTBI)—a head injury that

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Researchers find rust can power up artificial photosynthesis

Chemists at Boston College have achieved a series of breakthroughs in their efforts to develop an economical means of harnessing artificial photosynthesis by narrowing the voltage gap between the two

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The tundra — a dark horse in planet Earth’s greenhouse gas budget

Vast areas on the Northern Hemisphere are covered by tundra. Here, dwarf shrubs, sedges, mosses etc. thrive on top of permafrost in areas where only the uppermost soil layer thaws

More

Upping the Cute Factor

Ants more closely related to bees than to most wasps

Ants and bees are surprisingly more genetically related to each other than they are to social wasps such as yellow jackets and paper wasps, a team of University of California, Davis, scientists has discovered. The groundbreaking research is available online and will be published Oct. 21 in the print version of the journal Current Biology.

Bull ant showing the powerful mandibles and the relatively large compound eyes
that provide excellent vision [Credit: WikiCommons]

Using state-of-the-art genome sequencing and bioinformatics, the researchers resolved a long-standing, unanswered evolutionary question. Scientists previously thought that ants and bees were more distantly related, with ants being closer to certain parasitoid wasps.

Ants, bees and stinging wasps all belong to the aculeate (stinging) Hymenoptera clade — the insect group in which social behavior is most extensively developed, said senior author and ant specialist Phil Ward, professor of entomology at UC Davis.

“Despite great interest in the ecology and behavior of these insects, their evolutionary relationships have never been fully clarified. In particular, it has been uncertain how ants — the world’s most successful social insects — are related to bees and wasps,” Ward said. “We were able to resolve this question by employing next-generation sequencing technology and advances in bioinformatics. This phylogeny, or evolutionary tree, provides a new framework for understanding the evolution of nesting, feeding and social behavior in Hymenoptera.”

The collaborators included Ward, Assistant Professor Joanna Chiu, Assistant Professor Brian Johnson, graduate student Marek Borowiec and postdoctoral researcher Joel Atallah, all with the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology; and visiting scientist Ernest K. Lee of the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics, American Museum of Natural History.

“With a phylogeny or evolutionary progression that we think is reliable and robust, we can now start to understand how various morphological and/or behavioral traits evolved in these groups of insects, and even examine the genetic basis of these phenotypic changes,” Chiu said.

Johnson, whose lab studies the genetics, behavior, evolution and health of honeybees, noted that the study showed that ants and bees are more closely related than previously thought.

“This result should be important for future studies focused on eusocial evolution, as it suggests that morphology may not be a good indicator of evolutionary relatedness in these groups of organisms,” he said. Eusocial behavior is characterized by cooperative brood care, overlapping adult generations and division of labor.

The scientists combined data from the transcriptome — showing which genes are active and being transcribed from DNA into RNA — and genomic (DNA) data from a number of species of ants, bees and wasps, including bradynobaenid wasps, a cuckoo wasp, a spider wasp, a scoliid wasp, a mud dauber wasp, a tiphiid wasp, a paper wasp and a pollen wasp; a velvet ant (wasp); a dracula ant; and a sweat bee, Lasioglossum albipes.

Of particular interest was the finding that ants are a sister group to the Apoidea, a major group within Hymenoptera that includes bees and sphecid wasps (a family of wasps that includes digger wasps and mud daubers).

The UC Davis results also provide a new perspective on lower Cretaceous fossil Cariridris bipetiolata, originally claimed to be the oldest fossil ant. Scientists later reinterpreted it to be a spheciform wasp.

“Our discovery that ants and apoids are sister taxa helps to explain difficulty in the placement of Cariridris,” the authors wrote in the paper, “and suggests that it is best treated as a lineage close to the root of the ant-apoid tree, perhaps not assignable with certainty to either branch.”

The scientists discovered that the ancestral aculeate wasp was likely an ectoparasitoid, which attacks and paralyzes a host insect and leaves its offspring nearby where they can attach to the outside of the host and feed from it.

Elephant Pictues

Elephants are intelligent beings, full of emotion and with a great memory. They love their offspring, mourn their dead and cry when mistreated. How not to be touched by these marvelous beings? Here are some amazing, heartwarming photographs featuring elephants.

Owner fined for walking wheelchair-bound cat without a leash

Pooh Bear the cat's front legs work fine, but his back legs don't work at all. His owner Yvonne Steel from Melbourne, Florida, has replaced those back legs with wheels. She got the little device on eBay and she calls it a wheelchair.

She takes Pooh Bear for a walk every day in a grassy area next to Wells Park. He needs the exercise for his back legs. On Tuesday Brevard County Animal Services issued her with $230 in tickets for failing to have Pooh Bear and McKenzie, a Chihuahua, on a leash, and for a rabies shot violation.

"She had been warned it was not legal. Basically, we have someone that just is not getting the fact that you have to be in control of your animal when it's off your property," said Capt. Bob Brown with Brevard County Animal Services. "That was my very first knowledge that cats could not be allowed off the leash. I wouldn't even know where to put the leash to be quite honest," said Steel.

YouTube link.

Animal services said there are no exceptions to the leash law, even for disabled animals. "Your animal could be injured. It could be hurt. It could run out in the street. It could be attacked by another animal. It's just the law that we have to follow," said Brown. "The fact there's so much crime here, they should have been looking into pedophiles, people with knives," said Steel.

Japanese monkey attack victims to be given compensation

Victims of an ill-tempered monkey which terrorized a town in western Japan are to be offered compensation. As many as 2,500 licensed hunters, firefighters and police officers were mobilized to snare the primate after it set upon 18 people during a 13-day rampage through Hyuga.

The wild macaque was finally cornered in a vacant house on September 9. The monkey was put down shortly thereafter. The municipal assembly of Hyuga, in Miyazaki prefecture, unanimously approved a bill to offer 20,000 yen (£120, $205) to each person the male monkey had attacked.

“Considering the seriousness of the situation, in which the residents were consecutively menaced and many of whom suffered injuries, we have decided to provide compensation money for this incident,” a municipal official explained. Patrols were continuing around the streets in case of further danger, the official said.

"But we have not found any other monkeys threatening our people," city official Kenji Yoshida said. "The city has now returned to calm and normal." Macaque monkeys are common in the wild throughout Japan, where the densely-wooded hillsides provide a habitat.

Animal Pictures

The Daily Drift

Don't stand by while the repugicans destroy the United States!

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Today in History

54		Nero succeeds his great uncle Claudius, who was murdered by his wife, as the new emperor of Rome.
1307		Members of the Knights of Templar are arrested throughout France, imprisoned and tortured by the order of King Philip the Fair of France.
1399		Henry IV of England is crowned.
1670		Virginia passes a law that blacks arriving in the colonies as Christians cannot be used as slaves.
1775		The Continental Congress authorizes construction of two warships, thus instituting an American naval force.
1776		Benedict Arnold is defeated at Lake Champlain.
1792		President George Washington lays the cornerstone for the White House.
1812		At the Battle of Queenston Heights, a Canadian and British army defeats the American who have tried to invade Canada.
1849		The California state constitution, which prohibits slavery, is signed in Monterey.
1903		Boston defeats Pittsburgh in baseball's first World Series.
1904		Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams is published.
1942		In the first of four attacks, two Japanese battleships sail down the slot and shell Henderson field on Guadalcanal, in an unsuccessful effort to destroy the American Cactus Air Force.
1943		Italy declares war on Germany.
1944		Troops of the advancing Soviet Army occupy Riga, capital of Latvia.
1946		The Fourth Republic begins in France; will continue to 1958.
1958		First appearance of Paddington Bear, now a beloved icon of children's literature.
1967		First game of the fledgling American Basketball Association; Oakland Oaks beat Anaheim Amigos 134-129 in Oakland, Cal.
1972		Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashes in the Andes Mountains, near the Argentina-Chile border; only 16 survivors (out of 45 people aboard) are rescued on Dec. 23.
1976		Dr. F.A. Murphy at Center for Disease Control obtains the first electron micrograph of an Ebola viral particle.
1983		The Space Shuttle Challenger, carrying seven, the largest crew to date, lands safely at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
1990		The Lebanese Civil War ends when a Syrian attack removes Gen. Michel Aoun from power.
2010		After being underground for a record 69 days, all 33 miners trapped in a Copiapo, Chile, mine are rescued.

Non Sequitur

Did you know ...

That banks are still discriminating against minorities in the foreclosure crisis

That the NYC opera is to file for bankruptcy

About this new technique to save threatened sea-grass meadows

And RIP astronaut Scott Carpenter