Sunday, November 3, 2013
NSA-Gate: Journalist Glenn Greenwald; Very Significant Reports Coming
NSA-Gate: Journalist Glenn Greenwald; Very Significant Reports Coming
NSA-Gate: Journalist Glenn Greenwald; Very Significant Reports Coming; Obama Using Intimidation...
Says he's working on several stories that will be quite shocking to the public when they learn what's going on...
VIDEO EXCERPT HERE:
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Solar Eclipse Tomorrow Morning — Hybrid Solar Eclipse On Sunday, November 3 2013
Tomorrow morning, on November 3, 2013, those on the East Coast of the United States will get to witness a strange and relatively rare sight — the simultaneous occurrence of a sunrise and a solar eclipse. In order the witness the strange sight you’ll need to have a completely clear view of the eastern horizon though, so plan ahead and find a hill or tall building to watch from if you can.
While those in the US will certainly get a interesting show, it’s those in Africa that are really in for a treat — a total solar eclipse will be visible to those in the West/Central/East African nations of Gabon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Uganda, and Ethiopia, sometime around midday.
As we reported previously: “If you’re watching from the Americas, the eclipse will already be in progress as the sun rises — those in Africa, southern Europe, and the Middle East will experience the eclipse right around mid-day/early afternoon. When seen from Miami, maximum eclipse will see about 44% of the Sun’s disc covered by the Moon — in Boston maximum eclipse will see around 64% of the Sun’s disc covered. In Africa, the path of totality will move through Central Africa, from west to east, right around mid-day — bringing about a minute of temporary darkness.”
“The place of maximum eclipse will be a bit south of the Ivory Coast and Ghana, in the Atlantic Ocean, and at that place it will last for a full one minute and 39 seconds.”
A bit of background on what exactly a hybrid solar eclipse is — “a hybrid eclipse, also known as a annular/total eclipse, is a relatively rare type of solar eclipse that shifts over its progression between a total and annular eclipse. At some points appearing as a total eclipse and at others as an annular eclipse. So while it’s a somewhat rare event, it isn’t radically different than other solar eclipses.”
Read Full Article Source here
Author: Nathan
Part of Bill Maher's New Rules from last night's show.
I am totally in agreement with Maher's take on the fake hunting done by politicians.
It is just stupid and I really don't think it fools anybody.
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North Carolina candidate for Congress leaves GOP to become Democrat due to "fear and hate mongering" within his party.
A Republican congressional candidate is renouncing his party and switching his affiliation to Democrat.
Jason Thigpen, who is challenging Republican U.S. Rep. Walter Jones in the 3rd Congressional District, wrote a blistering assessment of his former party, saying his shift was precipitated by the tea party push for a government shutdown.
“I simply cannot stand with a party where its most extreme element promote hate and division amongst people,” Thigpen said in a statement posted to his campaign website Thursday. “Nothing about my platform has, nor will it change. The government shutdown was simply the straw that broke the camels back. I guess being an American just isn’t good enough anymore and I refuse to be part of an extremist movement in the GOP that only appears to thrive on fear and hate mongering of anyone and everyone who doesn’t walk their line.”
Thigpen is a six-year Army veteran who received a Purple Heart, according to his website. He graduated from UNC-Wilmington in May and started a nonprofit group called Student Veterans Advocacy Group. The 36-year-old lives in Holly Ridge with his wife and four children.
His statement is not the first time he’s bucked the Republican Party. Earlier this year, he earned a headline in the Fayetteville Observer for calling the GOP-drafted law to require a voter ID at the polls discriminatory and saying it would suppress the right to vote. At the time, he described himself as a “true Republican.”
"You can paint a turd and sell it as art, but it's still a turd,” he said at the time.
Good point.
There are strong indications that Mr. Thigpen may soon have company joining his exodus.
Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal:
October was clearly a cruel month for both President Barack Obama and the Republicans, both of whom saw their images slump to new lows in Wall Street Journal/NBC News polling.
But hidden within the data is a more disturbing reality for the Republican Party. Put simply, Democrats are largely content with their own party, while distaste among Republicans for the GOP has grown exponentially this year.
The most recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, offers a stark window into widening divisions within the GOP over strategy and what kind of leaders Republicans want going forward. The Democratic Party, by comparison, is a picture of unity.
And the funny part is that the Teabagggers have convinced themselves that the key to the party's long term success is to become even MORE partisan and radical.
Methinks that the GOP civil war is definitely going to be a bloody one.
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George Zimmerman's message to his estranged wife probably means nothing. Right?
The soon-to-be ex-wife of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watchman acquitted in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin, discovered a used marksman target riddled with 17 bullet holes nailed to the wall of the home the estranged couple once shared, after he was forced to move out.
RadarOnline.com has exclusively obtained the menacing photo provided to police which shows what Shellie Zimmerman and her parents uncovered inside the study at their Lake Mary, Fla., home.
The last person inside the building was said to be 30-year-old sharpshooter George, who had been dramatically asked to collect his belongings and leave, RadarOnline.com has been told.
“This is the photo that Shellie sent to her lawyer and said, ‘Look at the subliminal message George left me,’ following their showdown in September,” a source with intimate knowledge of the situation revealed.
“What else could a bullet-riddled marksman’s target mean?”
Well it could mean..uh..but then it could also mean...um...and then there's...you know...yeah who are we kidding? This crazed asshole only knows one way to express his insecurity or frustrations, and that is through the barrel of a gun.
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The Republican plan to sabotage Obamacare. No seriously, there is one.
The opposition was strategic from the start: Derail President Barack Obama’s biggest ambition, and derail Obama himself. Party leaders enforced discipline, withholding any support for the new law — which passed with only Democratic votes, thus undermining its acceptance. Partisan divisions also meant that Democrats could not pass legislation smoothing out some rough language in the draft bill that passed the Senate. That left the administration forced to fill far more gaps through regulation than it otherwise would have had to do, because attempts — usually routine — to re-open the bill for small changes could have led to wholesale debate in the Senate all over again.
But the bitter fight over passage was only the beginning of the war to stop Obamacare. Most Republican governors declined to create their own state insurance exchanges — an option inserted in the bill in the Senate to appeal to the classic conservative preference for local control — forcing the federal government to take at least partial responsibility for creating marketplaces serving 36 states — far more than ever intended.
Then congressional Republicans refused repeatedly to appropriate dedicated funds to do all that extra work, leaving the Health and Human Services Department and other agencies to cobble together HealthCare.gov by redirecting funds from existing programs. On top of that, nearly half of the states declined to expand their Medicaid programs using federal funds, as the law envisioned.
Then, in the months leading up to the program’s debut, some states refused to do anything at all to educate the public about the law. And congressional Republicans sent so many burdensome queries to local hospitals and nonprofits gearing up to help consumers navigate the new system face-to-face that at least two such groups returned their federal grants and gave up the effort. When the White House let it be known last summer that it was in talks with the National Football League to enlist star athletes to help promote the law, the Senate’s top two Republicans sent the league an ominous letter wondering why it would “risk damaging its inclusive and apolitical brand.” The NFL backed off.
The drama culminated on the eve of the open enrollment date of Oct. 1. Congressional Republicans shut down the government, disrupting last-minute planning and limiting the administration’s political ability to prepare the public for the likelihood of potential problems, because it was in a last-ditch fight to defend the president’s biggest legislative accomplishment.
The Republicans have clearly known since the beginning that if the implementation of this law were successful that it would spell doom for their party. How else to explain the extremes to which they have good to stop it?
But is there even more that we don't know about?
Take a look at this from Buzzfeed:
Republicans’ new Obamacare attack line hinges on allegations that the contractor in charge of building the disastrous healthcare.gov website landed the gig through sweetheart deals from the Obama administration.
But according to Federal Election Commission records, that company’s PAC gave more to House Republicans than House Democrats during the 2012 cycle — including a $2,000 check for the GOP’s chief scandal investigator, Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa. What’s more, executives of CGI Federal personally gave more than twice as much to GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney than to President Obama. The contractor has also feasted on more than $2.4 billion worth of IT work dating back to the early Bush Administration.
So far, none of that has stopped the Republican National Congressional Committee from suggesting CGI netted hundreds of millions of dollars to create the dysfunctional website because of its ties to the White House.
Yet FEC records indicate executives for CGI gave $5,550 to GOP Romney and just $2,000 to Obama — not quite the behavior of a company indebted to the president for its contacting jackpots.
Also, the company’s PAC, CGI-AMS, gave $48,000 to 28 GOP members of the House including $5,000 to Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), $6,000 to Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), and $2,000 each to Issa, Appropriations Committee Chair Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.), now-Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Rep. Martha Roby (R-Ala.). Yoder, Wolf, and Cole also sit on the Appropriations Committee. Issa, Wolf and Cole also received contributions from the PAC during the 2010 cycle.
Attempts to reach Issa, Yoder, and Wolf were unsuccessful Thursday.
The PAC gave $32,000 to 13 Democratic House members. They also gave $29,500 to Democrats running for Senate and $19,000 to Republican Senate candidates, reflecting a savvy record of giving more to members of the parties in power in each chamber.
The bipartisan giving makes sense given that CGI’s first federal contract for IT work started in 2001 and, as a multibillion-dollar firm, has many lobbying interests in congress.
In fact, USASpending.gov, the federal site tracking government contracts, shows CGI has been the contractor of choice for a wide range of computer systems work throughout the Bush Administration, including hundreds of multimillion-dollar contracts for the Departments of Defense, Agriculture and Health and Human Services.
The contract under which CGI did the Obamacare website work, in fact, began in 2007 as a contract with HHS to handle Medicare and Medicaid IT.
When the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010 with all of its tentacles intersecting with those programs, there was almost no way CGI wasn’t going to get to expand the scope of their existing contract, contracting experts say. Federal contracting rules are strict — so as to avoid political meddling — and they favor entrenched, large companies with track records. And if the case of CGI’s shoddy work doesn’t appear to represent partisan favoritism, it does appear to underscore broader problems with the system.
You know there was once a time that I believed in coincidences in politics.
Those days are no more.
If you think there is a low to which the Republican would not go, then you don't know today's Republican party.
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Holocaust memorabilia found on eBay
Victims at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944.
U.K. newspaper The Mail on Sunday said its reporters found a range of items on the site over the past week, including clothes worn by concentration camp victims.
LONDON — EBay has removed from its listings around 30 items of memorabilia from the Nazi Holocaust, including clothes worn by concentration camp victims, after a newspaper investigation discovered they were on sale on the e-commerce website, Britain's Mail on Sunday said.
The newspaper said its reporters found a range of items on the site over the past week, including what was presented by the vendor as a complete Auschwitz uniform worn by a Polish baker who perished in the Nazi death camp.
The Mail on Sunday said it had alerted eBay and that the online auctioneer had removed 30 items from sale and offered to make a donation of $40,000 to a suitable charity.
In a statement, eBay said: "We are very sorry these items have been listed on eBay and we are removing them. We don't allow listings of this nature, and dedicate thousands of staff to policing our site and use the latest technology to detect items that shouldn't be for sale.
"We very much regret that we didn't live up to our own standards. We have made a donation to charity to reflect our concern," said the company, which receives a commission on items sold and charges vendors a listing fee.
Read Full Article Source here
Author:
By Estelle Shirbon of Reuters
Orcas circle ferry transporting tribal artifacts to Bainbridge Island
A large pod of orcas swam around a Washington state ferry in an impressive display as it happened to be carrying tribal artifacts to a new museum at the ancestral home of Chief Seattle.
A large pod of orcas swam around a Washington state ferry in an impressive display as it happened to be carrying tribal artifacts to a new museum at the ancestral home of Chief Seattle, and some people think it was more than a coincidence.
Killer whales have been thrilling whale watchers this week in Puget Sound, according to the Orca Network, which tracks sightings.
But they were especially exciting Tuesday when nearly three dozen orcas surrounded the ferry from Seattle as it approached the terminal on Bainbridge Island. On board were officials from The Burke Museum in Seattle who were moving ancient artifacts to the Suquamish Museum.
The artifacts were dug up nearly 60 years ago from the site of the Old Man House in Kitsap County, the winter village for the Suquamish tribe and home of Chief Sealth, also known as Chief Seattle. The Burke, a natural-history museum on the University of Washington campus, is known for Northwest Coast and Alaska Native art.
Also on board the state ferry was Suquamish Tribal Chairman Leonard Forsman, who happened to be returning from an unrelated event. As the ferry slowed near the terminal, it was surrounded by the orcas, Forsman said Wednesday.
“They were pretty happily splashing around, flipping their tails in the water,” he said. “We believe they were welcoming the artifacts home as they made their way back from Seattle, back to the reservation.”
The killer whales have been in Puget Sound feeding on a large run of chum salmon, he said.
“We believe the orcas took a little break from their fishing to swim by the ferry, to basically put a blessing on what we were on that day,” he said.
Read Full Article Source here
Author: By DOUG ESSER
Have scientists worked out why hot water freezes faster than cold water?
It is a phenomenon that has baffled the world’s brightest minds since the time of Aristotle.
Now a team of physicists believe they may have solved the centuries old mystery of why hot water freezes faster than cold water.
Known as the Mpemba effect, water behaves unlike most other liquids by freezing into a solid more rapidly from a heated state than from room temperature.
Scientists have suggested dozens of theories for why this may occur, but none have been able to satisfactorily explain this strange physical property.
A team of physicists at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have now published what they believe may be the solution.
They claim that the explanation lies in the unusual interaction between the molecules of water.
Each water molecule is bound to its neighbour through a highly charged electromagnetic bond known as a “hydrogen bond”.
It is this that produces surface tension in water and also gives it a higher than expected boiling point compared to other liquids.
However, Dr Sun Changqing and Dr Xi Zhang from Nanyang Technological University, argue this also determines the way water molecules store and release energy.
They argue that the rate at which energy is released varies with the initial state of the water and so calculate that hot water is able to release energy faster when it is placed into a freezer.
Dr Changqing said: “The processes and the rate of energy release from water vary intrinsically with the initial energy state of the sources.”
The Mpemba effect is named after a Tanzanian student called Erasto Mpemba, who observed that hot ice cream mix froze before the cold mix.
Together with a physics professor at University College at Dar es Salaam, he published a paper in 1969 that showed equal volumes of boiling water and cold in similar containers would freeze at different times, with the hot water freezing first.
Similar observations have been described in the past, however, by Aristotle, Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes.
The effect can also have some real world implications, such as whether to use boiling water to defrost the windscreen of your car on a winters day and whether hot water pipes are more prone to freezing than cold ones.
Some people deny that the effect exists at all and is in fact an artefact of experimental procedure, but others claim to have shown it using carefully controlled experiments.
Read Full Article Source here
Author: By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent
The biggest obstacle to Chris Christie's nomination for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination may come from the classroom.
Well, I was in a crowd of all Christie supporters with my sign. They were all eyeing me apprehensively. A few tried to stare me down. Some of them even blocked me from the crowd. When his bus arrived one of his henchmen went on the bus to speak to him. I was right at the door. It was like he was told to deliberately turn away from me when he got off of the bus.
I went to listen to him speak. I stood in the front of the crowd that was standing towards the back. I know he caught sight of me. He stared at me a few times during his speech. I left right as his speech was over to position myself right at the door of the bus. He came out, shaking everyone's hands as he was getting on the bus.
I asked him my question, expecting him to ignore me but he suddenly turned and went off. I asked him: "Why do you portray our schools as failure factories?" His reply: "Because they are!" He said: "I am tired of you people. What do you want?"
I told him I want money for my students. He fought back with the amount that he has spent on education. My response was along the lines of the fact his amount was not actually an increase from the previous years, given the rate of inflation and other factors.
The crowd started arguing with me. He screamed at me to just do my job. The crowd cheered for him. I just looked at them and told them: "Hey, this is my life. I had to do this." I tried to follow him to Atlantic City to continue the conversation but the roads were blocked by police when I got there.
"I am tired of you people. What do you want?"
How about a Governor and presidential candidate who respects education and supports the teachers who provide it?
As we know Christie has kind of made yelling at teachers "his thing." However I have to imagine that the majority of voters do NOT see them as the whiny, over privileged parasites that he does.
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NatGeo Shocker: Prof Dershowitz NBC Fail; Ann Coulter Talks Birther Shut Down
Ann Coulter Brags Conservative Media Shut Down Birther Issue... Professor Dershowitz Fails Big Time...
Ann Coulter appeared on CNN's Piers Morgan Live and was asked about Papa Cruz's Obama Kenya comment...
VIDEO HERE:
( Video via Truth Revolt. )
Ann Coulter: You know who brought up the Birther thing? Oh another reason I think he wasn’t picking Hillary. It was Hillary Clinton who first brought up, “Was he born in Kenya?” Who shot it down? My newspaper, Human Events, American Spectator. It was never talked about on Fox News. I discuss this in my three books back, Demonic. You heard about it every night on MSNBC, there may have been a few nuts out there. The conservative media shut it down. And point three, JFK's father was a Nazi sympathizer. Nobody cares about what somebody's father thinks. -
Obama was the first Birther:
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| - Details - |
Fox News Panel Talk Natural Born Citizen. Or, according to "professor" Dershowitz, "natural citizen"...
Professor Dershowitz is clearly clueless about constitutional eligibility. Aside from mispronouncing the term NBC he drops this whopper: "...We have had several American presidents that were born outside of the United States..."
This man teaches at Harvard! He then starts speaking some gibberish. Ann Coulter sucked it up and regurgitated her birther talking points ignoring the simple facts that most THIRD GRADERS are taught.
Another Harvard alumni and professor Herb Titus disagrees with Dershowitz. Watch his short presentation here.
Professor Dershowitz is clearly clueless about constitutional eligibility. Aside from mispronouncing the term NBC he drops this whopper: "...We have had several American presidents that were born outside of the United States..."
This man teaches at Harvard! He then starts speaking some gibberish. Ann Coulter sucked it up and regurgitated her birther talking points ignoring the simple facts that most THIRD GRADERS are taught.
VIDEO HERE:
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EDUCATION WEBSITE:
Grades 3-5
Grades 3-5
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| >>> The U.S. Constitution requires that the President be born in the United States. <<< |
Another Harvard alumni and professor Herb Titus disagrees with Dershowitz. Watch his short presentation here.
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Well sex workers like Obamacare. So there!
A burlesque dancer dressed as a nurse taunts her co-performer with a toy syringe, dangling the medicine seductively in an act that's meant to reflect the cat-and-mouse game of U.S. healthcare. They shimmy and eventually end up topless.
The risqué performance was part of an Obamacare registration drive last week in San Francisco, dubbed the "Healthy Ho's Party."
Organized by "Siouxsie Q," a Bay Area sex worker, the event was meant to encourage other sex workers to enroll in the new insurance exchanges. It was a rousing success: Nearly 40 men and women attended and almost all of them filed enrollment paperwork.
In the all-cash, off-the-books sex industry, workers can be particularly high risk and insurance is often out of reach. Many sex workers -- a broad term that can refer to a number of services, including sexual massage, prostitution, and escort and dominatrix work -- consider themselves self-employed entrepreneurs who can't afford to purchase healthcare. But that could all change with the Affordable Care Act.
Siouxsie, 28, has shopped for plans countless times since 2008, coming up empty each time. She and her partner recently reviewed their healthcare options and found that a joint plan would have cost between $400 and $500 a month -- an unaffordably large chunk of their incomes.
"We just couldn't swing [insurance] in the Bay Area -- we're lower middle class, recent college graduates, in Startup Land trying to make our way," she said.
But come January 1, when the new law goes into effect, she and her partner will be looking at a monthly bill of between $175 and $200. They're deciding between two plans on the California exchange and will receive a tax credit of about $275 a month (without the credit it would have cost nearly $500).
Okay I think I might just have come up with a marketing plan that would get people to sign up for the Affordable Care Act in droves.
We should just have YouPorn or RedTube run the site, and while people are signing up they can be talked through the process by a hot young porn star facilitator volunteering their time in exchange for access to free health care of their own. Sounds like a win win to me.
It might not be legal in every state but it will probably be just that much more popular in the Bible Belt where largest population of Americans watch porn.
And let's face it who knows more about how to set up and run an efficient website than porn companies? Almost all of the recent online technological breakthroughs have been the result of people looking for naked pictures on the internet.
Sure it may piss off the Religious Right, but then again when are they NOT pissed off?
Just an idea.
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PandE Exclusive: Cody Judy Responds To “Hoax” Claim On Impeachment Hearing
Exclusive: Cody Robert Judy Responds
to “Hoax” Claim on Impeachment Hearing
“NO EVIDENCE?”
By Sharon Rondeau | The Post & Email
(Nov. 1, 2013) — On October 31, The Post & Email published an article in which we cited presidential candidate Cody Robert Judy‘s report that a hearing on the possible impeachment and constitutional eligibility of Barack Hussein Obama will be held by the House Judiciary Committee sometime in January.
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| Cody Robert Judy reports that a hearing will take place in the House Judiciary Committee in January regarding Obama’s eligibility which may also involve discussion of impeachment |
On Friday, several readers informed The Post & Email that Atty. Orly Taitz stated that Mr. Judy’s report is “a hoax.” When we asked Judy for comment regarding the allegation, he responded:
Hi Sharon,
RE: Question on : http://www.orlytaitzesq.com/?p=438923
I would have to simply state that “most of the time” statistically speaking there is no “evidence” of hearings in Congress until they are put on the schedule and often the schedule of Congress can fluctuate according to the public necessity and demand. That said, I don’t think what Orly said is out of line and or extraordinary.
I don’t believe it effects anything I’ve said. Orly certainly had not contacted me personally, or been involved with anything I’m doing with regards to my testimony as a Presidential Candidate. The sensitive nature of the “debt ceiling” argument in Congress and the fact Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Mike Lee are shifting the balances of power, even within the Republican Party and shaking things up, probably wasn’t expected by Congress or the public either. I’m sure you do recall I ran against Sen. Mike Lee as an Independent in the 2010 Senate Election and I’m pretty proud of him for doing what he has done so far as it has taken a lot of courage.
Cody Robert Judy
www.codyjudy.us
Source link. © 2013, The Post & Email. All rights reserved.
PandE Exclusive: Cody Judy Responds To “Hoax” Claim On Impeachment Hearing
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Racism linked to gun ownership.
A new study finds higher levels of racism in white Americans is associated with having a gun in the home and greater opposition to gun control policies.
After accounting for numerous other factors such as income, education, and political ideology, the researchers found that for each one point increase (on a scale from one to five) in symbolic racism there was a 50 percent increase in the odds of having a gun in the home and a 28 percent increase in support for policies allowing people to carry concealed guns.
Each one point increase in symbolic racism (a modern measure of anti-black racism) was also associated with a 27 percent increase in the odds of opposing bans on hand guns in the home. After accounting for those who already had a gun in the home, the odds were reduced to a non-significant 17 percent increase. However, the authors note that this reduction is unsurprising as opposition to bans on guns equates to self interest on behalf of those who already own a gun and do not wish to give it up.
And racism was already strongly associated with having a gun in the home.
Cannot say I am surprised by this one.
Considering this is it any wonder that gun sales spiked as soon as an African American moved into the White House?
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The Scientifically Best Time to Drink Your Coffee
Many coffee drinkers roll out of bed and get their daily dose of java as soon as possible. Because of the way coffee affects our bodies, though, there may be more ideal times to drink it.
Neuroscience PhD student Steven Miller explains that in the mornings (between the hours of 8 am and 9 am) our cortisol levels are at their highest. Cortisol isn't just the "stress hormone"—it's also correlated with our alertness levels.
So if we drink coffee at the same time our alertness is already at its peak, we're wasting the potential alertness boost we get from the caffeine:
One of the key principles of pharmacology is use a drug when it is needed (although I’m sure some scientists might argue that caffeine is always needed). Otherwise, we can develop tolerance to a drug administered at the same dose. In other words, the same cup of morning coffee will become less effective
The most effective time to have a cup of joe, Miller says, is between 9:30 am and 11:30 am. (Between noon and 1 pm and between 5:30 pm and 6:30 pm are other times cortisol levels rise, so you might want to avoid drinking coffee during those hours.)
If you're going to drink more than one cup of coffee, though, a cup or less every hourwill also give you the best bang for your caffeinated buck.
Author: MELANIE PINOLA
Nice way to look at it.
Oh well, time favors the water, not the rock.
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Google's mystery barges revealed as luxury showrooms
Mysterious structure built on floating barge is seen in San Francisco Bay
The structures will feature a top-floor "party deck," complete with "bars, lanais and other comforts," according to the report, which cited unnamed sources.
SAN FRANCISCO - Google Inc's mysterious barges, which prompted fevered speculation about everything from offshore data centers to floating research labs, may serve a more prosaic role as upscale party venues and showrooms.
The multi-story vessels made out of stacked shipping containers, one moored in the San Francisco Bay and the other at the Portland, Maine harbor, are invitation-only luxury showrooms for Google's Glass wearable computers and other gadgets, according to local San Francisco TV station KPIX.
The structures will feature a top-floor "party deck," complete with "bars, lanais and other comforts," according to the report, which cited unnamed sources.
The existence of the floating barges surfaced last week, when technology website CNET theorized that the San Francisco vessel might be a floating data center that would house banks of computers. Google was granted a patent for a water-based data center in 2009.
Google has declined to comment on the matter, refusing even to acknowledge its affiliation with the vessels. But the executive director of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, Larry Goldzband, told Reuters his agency has had several meetings with Google officials about the barge in recent months.
Read Full Article Source here
Author:
By Alexei Oreskovic of Reuters
Apple launches the iPad Air
Eager technology fans braved lines at Apple stores around the world to snag the company's latest iPad tablet.
The iPad Air launched in 42 countries including the U.S. on Friday, the latest gadget to enter an increasingly heated tablet market.
Videos from several store launches including Sydney, Tokyo and Amsterdam have been popping up on YouTube, as CNN notes.
According to Apple's website, it appears consumers will have little trouble securing an iPad Air. Both the silver and space gray models in all storage sizes are available to ship by Monday.
The 9.7-inch iPad Air is 20% thinner than the previous model, and weighs only one pound. It features the zippier A7 processing chip as well as the M7 coprocessor, both of which are found in Apple's iPhone 5s.
Stakes are high for Apple, as the company continues to lose market share in the crowded tablet space. During the third quarter, Apple commanded a 29.6% market share for global tablet shipments, down from more than 40% last year, says IDC. Meanwhile, rival Samsung is gaining ground, boosting its share in the third quarter from 12% to 20%.
TSA identifies officer slain in LAX ‘chaos’
A rifle-wielding gunman killed a Transportation Security Administration officer, injured two others and fired a barrage of shots Friday morning inside a terminal at Los Angeles International Airport before police shot him and took him into custody.
The shooting caused chaos in the world’s sixth-busiest airport, interrupted air traffic and gave the nation yet another burst of gun-fueled violence in a place where people least expected it. It came less than a year after the mass shootings at a school in Newtown, Conn., and a month and a half after the shootings at the Washington Navy Yard.
The officer who died was the first TSA employee to perish in the line of the duty. The TSA identified him late Friday as Gerardo I. Hernandez, 39.
Two other TSA employees were wounded, Administrator John Pistole wrote in a note to workers, while some of the other victims possibly suffered “evasion injuries, where they may have injured themselves trying to get away,” FBI agent David Bowdich told reporters during a news conference as parts of the airport began to reopen.
Bowdich confirmed that the suspect is 23-year-old Los Angeles resident Paul Anthony Ciancia, whom The Associated Press described as a “man from New Jersey who wrote a rant about killing Transportation Safety Administration workers.” The news service said he wore fatigues and had a bag containing a hand-written note that said he “wanted to kill TSA and pigs,” and had talked about suicide in a text to a relative.
Authorities offered no details about the gunman’s motives, including whether he may have hoped to get on board a plane.
“We are still trying to determine how he got here,” Bowdich said after a reporter asked whether Ciancia had driven himself to the airport. The FBI agent said he didn’t know the suspect’s medical condition but that he was receiving treatment in a hospital.
Ciancia had earlier sent a text message to a sibling “in reference to him taking his own life,” Pennsville, N.J., police Chief Allen Cummings told the AP. The chief said Ciancia’s father called him early Friday afternoon asking for help locating his son. Cummings said he called Los Angeles police, who sent a patrol car to Ciancia’s apartment, where two roommates said they had seen him Thursday and that he was fine.
Read Full Article Source here
Author: By KEVIN ROBILLARD
The 60 Minutes "expose" on Benghazi may destroy the last of CBS's journalistic credibility.
The Benghazi "witness" featured in a CBS 60 Minutes report that galvanized new discussion of the administration's response to the attack previously said he never got near the diplomatic compound on the night of the attack, according to a report from The Washington Post.
The revelation comes just days after Fox News reported that they had previously been using the same man as a source, but broke contact after he asked the network for money. Two days after the CBS report aired, Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon and Schuster that "specializes in conservative non-fiction," published the supposed witness' book, The Embassy House: The Explosive Eyewitness Account of the Libyan Embassy Siege by the Soldier Who Was There. According to the Post, the book "largely comports with the 60 Minutes account."
Together, these details paint a damning picture of the credibility of the supposed eyewitness -- and that of the CBS report which promoted his story.
During the October 27 report, which was based on a year-long investigation by correspondent Lara Logan and producer Max McCellan, Logan described the man, identified as "Morgan Jones, a pseuodonym he's using for his own safety," as "a security officer who witnessed the attack." She explained that during the attack, "Jones scaled the twelve-foot high wall of the compound that was still overrun with al Qaeda fighters"; during an interview, he told her he had personally struck one of those terrorists in the face with his rifle butt. After the attack, "Jones" claimed in the report that he went to the Benghazi hospital and saw Ambassador Chris Stevens' body.
"Jones" also told CBS' audience that he had been worried about the compound coming under attack, and that Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith, who died in the assault, had shared similar concerns with him.
But according to the Post, "Jones," whose real name was confirmed as Dylan Davies, revealed none of those details in the incident report to his security contractor employer that he wrote following the attack. Instead, he wrote that he never got near the compound that night and learned of Stevens' death from a colleague. From the Post:
In Davies's 21 / 2-page incident report to Blue Mountain, the Britain-based contractor hired by the State Department to handle perimeter security at the compound, he wrote that he spent most of that night at his Benghazi beach-side villa. Although he attempted to get to the compound, he wrote in the report, "we could not get anywhere near . . . as roadblocks had been set up." He learned of Stevens's death, Davies wrote, when a Libyan colleague who had been at the hospital came to the villa to show him a cellphone picture of the ambassador's blackened corpse. Davies wrote that he visited the still-smoking compound the next day to view and photograph the destruction.
Okay can we finally be done with this Benghazi thing now?
I mean even the most ardent Right Wingers must be smelling the decaying of the dead horse's corpse by now, don't you think?
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