I happened upon Larry King Live two nights ago and the topc of the evening was “Should You Let Your Man Cheat?” When the author of Sugarbabe and some other woman (who apparently used to be Gordon Ramsey’s mistress for seven years as she oh-so-proudly stated) were asked if they thought that every man cheats, their response was that 100% of men are mentally promiscuous. What the heck is that? And, more importantly, if fantasizing about others equals cheating or promiscuity, then 100% of women are that too. It’s not a purely male phenomenon. So, next time you’re watching Twilight and trying to figure out if you’re on Team Edward or Team Jacob or when you’re going over your top five freebies list and trying to decide if Brendan Fraser, Clive Owen, or Anthony Bourdain is your number one or number two for the day, that you are currently being mentally promiscuous.
Oh yeah, you big mental slut, you.
Please! Even the thought of mental promiscuisty to me is absolutely ridiculous! That’s all Thought Police garbage.
A group of teens was jaywalking in Seattle, WA and were called over by a police officer who had just cited another man for jaywalking in the same area. I don’t have an issue with this at all. If it’s unlawful in a particular city to be jaywalking, then you shouldn’t be doing it. Although, I don’t have any problem with jaywalking itself, I can see how it can be dangerous especially in overly trafficked streets where drivers aren’t expecting pedestrians outside of designated crosswalks.
HOWEVER, I do take issue with a punch to the face that seems to be what I would consider use of excessive force. While the teen (who was 17 yrs old) isn’t completely faultless (I mean, really, even if you don’t agree you need to cooperate with the police so that you have more of a leg to stand on to fight whatever it is) I really can’t see how it would qualify as needing to be punched in the face.
See for yourself-
Here is a link to the story on KOMO news (A local Seattle News site). A follow up to the story reports that the police department has “concerns” about the event stating:
Seattle police officials said Tuesday that their officers are trained to throw a punch in certain situations, but said they have a “number of concerns” regarding the tactics an officer used in dealing with a 17-year-old girl he punched in the face while trying to cite a group of women for jaywalking.
“The issue we have to investigate is whether the force he used is reasonable given the combative resistance he was facing… and we’re not going to pass judgment on that until the matter has been thoroughly investigated,” said Assistant Seattle Police Chief Nick Metz.
So, who wants to bet that the officer will be found not at fault?
I was sitting down and drinking my coffee this morning while reading SELF magazine today. Reading health/fitness magazines always makes me feel like doing something physical so I usually find it a good thing to do in the morning. Start the day off right, sort of speak.
So, anyways, there I was drinking my coffee with just a teaspoon of sugar (a tiny amount if you knew how much sugar I used to put in) and fat free half and half, (BTW, Can someone explain to me how you get FAT FREE Half and Half since isn’t half and half, well, half cream and how do you get fat free cream?) when I come across an article that just about made me spit out said coffee.
It was an article about snacking and how your brain doesn’t really help your fight against snacking. To top it all off, there was this sidebar:
The Anatomy of a Craving
It’s not your imagination—you’re wired to crave. Consider what happens when you pass by the Cinnabon stand at your local mall.
1. The scent of the cinnamon bun enters your nose, and your brain can tell the confection is high in sugar and fat. Your brain releases dopamine, so you expect to experience pleasure and feel desire if you eat it. “Although you had lunch and don’t want to gain weight, you start salivating, and it’s a strong urge,” says Nora Volkow, M.D., an addiction researcher and director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Maryland.
2. The smell activates areas of your gray matter associated with memory and emotion. You probably had your first Cinnabon with a friend as you shopped and gossiped together. Your brain taps into the fun memories you associate with the bun, which make you want it on an emotional level as well as a physical one.
3. Stressed? You step right up. Tension makes you even more likely to be lured to the counter, because the dopamine and serotonin surge you get from eating lifts your mood. You’re also conditioned to associate comfort foods with feeling better.
4. You feast your eyes on a big bun. “The sight and smell together get you to place an order,” says Roy Wise, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. When you see how cheap it is to supersize, you’ll do it, research shows.
5. You taste the gooey goodness. As you take your first, sweet bite, your body begins to absorb and process the sugar, which increases dopamine in the brain, prompting you to take another bite. And another. Your plan to eat only half evaporates.
6. You start feeling stuffed and sick to your stomach. For most people, the signal to stop noshing arrives too late: Your stomach begins to feel uncomfortably full and pumps out more leptin to let you know you’re satiated. Massive sugar consumption prompts your body to release insulin, further squelching the impulse to eat.
Now, we’ll go beyond the fact that Cinnabon is ALWAYS, much like pancakes, better in theory than it is is practice. You always think it’s going to be really tasty, but instead you’re left with overly sweet disappointment. And I do actually understand the correlation between the brain and stomach and the power of the brain, etc. But, and it’s a huge butt but, this seems to be just another way to put the blame on something “that I can’t control.” It’s not my fault that I ate that entire gallon of ice cream smothered in hard chocolate shell, I am just wired that way. This can quickly turn into I’m just wired to insert-whatever-here…. and I would be 300 lbs by the time I was done.
I’m not going to say that my view here is fairly simplistic, but I know how much hard work it takes to lose pounds and I really don’t need yet another excuse to cheat myself on how I eat. I can do it all by myself without relying on feel-good memories and blaming my mind for eating like poop on a stick. Seriously SELF.
What’s the biggest news from Greece, you might ask.
Has the economy gotten any better? Are people done protesting and back to work? Is Antichrist up to her old antics again and in need of being struck down?
Only one of these questions gets a resounding YES as the answer. And it’s nothing to do with money…well really it has all to do with money, but not the way you might think.
The AP was all aflutter today with a torrent of amphibians hopping through the streets of Greece. Well… one street.
Greek officials say a horde of frogs has forced the closure of a key northern highway for two hours.
Thessaloniki traffic police chief Giorgos Thanoglou says “millions” of the amphibians covered the tarmac Wednesday near the town of Langadas, some 12 miles east of Thessaloniki.
“There was a carpet of frogs,” he said.
Authorities closed the highway after three car drivers skidded off the road trying to dodge the frogs. No human injuries were reported.
Thanoglou said the amphibians probably left a nearby lake to look for food.
We’ll get past the fact that the officer’s name is Giorgos. Every Greek man has that name.. or Nicolas… or Kostas… or Alex. All of their male children will bear these same names, even if they are first cousins, so that the only differentiations between said cousins is an “aki” (little) tacked onto the end of the younger cousin’s name, even if the cousin is only a millisecond younger.
Yes, folks, thousands of frogs. Isn’t frogs one of the ten plagues that signals God is angry? Why, yes it is…
8:2 And if thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite all thy borders with frogs:8:3 And the river shall bring forth frogs abundantly, which shall go up and come into thine house, and into thy bedchamber, and upon thy bed, and into the house of thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thine ovens, and into thy kneading troughs:
8:4 And the frogs shall come up both on thee, and upon thy people, and upon all thy servants.
So it comes to this, does it? I knew that, in time, things would come to pass to declare my outrage with Antichrist as just. This comes from more than just the attempted pilfering of my keyboard when I was young. It’s even from more than the jacking of a chunk of my inheritance. It’s Karma. And to think that it was just off by 12 miles. Where is the GPS when it’s needed?
As reported by MSNBC, Tony Hayward, Chief Executive of BP, stated to NBC’s TODAY Show that
“We have let people down in our defense of the shore and we are going to redouble our efforts,”
This was part of a response to being asked why last week he said the environmental impacts seemed “very, very modest.”
Really? In what world does all the oil that has been spewing out of the Event Horizon Deepwater Horizon result in a modest environmental impact? Thousands and thousands of gallons being leaked into the Gulf every single day for over a month is apparently a blip in BP’s environmental screen. Nice. Awesome, Dude.
And to state that the people have been “let down” might just be the understatement of the year thus far. You did not let the people down, Mr. Hayward, you have let down the world. As for your non-existent “defense of the shore,” I wonder exactly how much planning for said defense was ever done, or if it the extent was some little guy in a board meeting asking “Um, what if we have a spill? What should we do? It might kill animals and destroy ecosystems” to which the response was simply, “Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Let’s break for lunch.”
From the Columbia Daily Tribune, here’s the outcome of the “investigation” into the SWAT raid in Missouri. No surprise here that a police inquiry into the validity of the raid and the events that happened within didn’t find any real fault in the way things were handled. Although, new departmental policy is supposed to make these kinds of raids “plummet.”
“The use of the department’s SWAT team in conducting a drug raid will now:
Require the approval of a captain in the department in charge of the area where the raid is to take place
Require that a location be under constant surveillance once the warrant has been issued
Not take place when children are present except “under the most extreme circumstances”
One of the new procedures is to conduct surveillance. Imagine that! What a novel concept it is to make sure that your information is actually correct! Wow! Bravo Columbia Police Dept! Such innovative ideas!
I just hope that Police Chief Burton isn’t just blowing smoke up everyone’s patootey to appease the angry crowd not just in Columbia, but all over the country, if not the world. Unfortunately, the wording of these new policies just seem like rhetoric to me. What exactly constitutes a “most extreme circumstance”? For all we know, it could be just because there might be a piece of tape with some lint on it.
Apparently, the informants that were used were paid. Great. Depending on how much I would get, I could tell a good story, too. It doesn’t replace the need for actual detective work. The story has also been changed to the team knowing that there was a child in the house and SWAT went in that way anyway, etc. It just keeps getting more convoluted. I guess that we should all be happy that it didn’t result in the child’s death, unlike this current case in Detroit.
This article is about a week old. I have been involved in discussions about it and thought I would share this here too in case anyone has not heard about it yet. The whole thing made me so angry and I am still reeling from it a week after I saw it.
*Note* Do NOT watch the video if there are kids around. It’s hard to watch and totally not suitable for kids…or even really adults.
Radley Balko of Reason.com sums up the scene: (full article in link)
“Cops dressed like soldiers, barreling through the front door middle of the night, slaughtering the family pets, filling the house with bullets in the presence of children, then having the audacity to charge the parents with endangering their own kid.”
So, basically the SWAT team came in and shot up their house, endangered their child, and killed one dog and shot the other one, all for a bong and a coffee grinder. This was all based on an anonymous tip and nothing else.
I don’t care if that guy had a mountain of drugs that he has to tunnel through just to get from room to room, a couple of officers with some backup knocking at the door and handing a search warrant would have been more than enough, like they do a lot on Law & Order. SWAT is overkill, and that’s an understatement.
Also, why go through all this when they could have just arrested the guy when he was leaving the house or pretty much any other way than what was done? There are so many more ways that this could have been handled is a much better way.
Child endangerment? How about them shooting round after round inside the house in front of the kid? Having him watch as these men in full gear kill his dog and yell at his father. Then even when the father says he wants a lawyer, they still ask him questions before Miranda-ing him. Yes, one of the questions is his name. Shouldn’t they know it? Oh yeah, no research was done! No investigation. Just force. That’s more endangering than having a joint inside the house, that’s for sure. Excessive force is all I see.
The idea that things like this can happen everyday in our “civilized” society disgusts me.
I wish I could say that this was an isolated incident, but it’ s not. The average number is between 100-150 per day. The only difference is that this one was videotaped. There are many many cases of SWAT teams being sent forth for various small infractions (even to a charity poker game put on by military vets) and we can’t forget how often they go to the wrong house, such as to the house of a small town mayor, and tear up the place (again, killing any animals in the area) and leave the people to pick up the pieces of their violated lives.
The Columbia Missourian, the local paper, has been covering the story which has resulted in some review of department policies that include
A captain in charge of the area where the raid is to take place has to approve the operation.
The location has to be under constant surveillance once the warrant has been issued.
A raid is not to take place when children are present except “under the most extreme circumstances,” Burton said.
“We will always police with common sense,” he said.
The article also includes links to downloads of some of the official paperwork from the arrest.
It seems to me that very little (if anything) is actually being changed in how the dept and unit is run. There is always that little caveat of extenuating circumstances that can be put in there as a blanket for future bad behavior.
I took a look at the incident reports and found it interesting that apparently, depending on who you ask, there was only 1 pit bull, or two, in the kitchen the dog either was or wasn’t “acting aggressively”, and that six shots needed to be fired at this dog that was already hurt and scared and trying to protect his family because he was so much of a threat against officers in full swat gear that is supposed to protect them from freaking bombs.
Also, be careful if you have duffel bags or suitcases in your garage. I guess that means that you are trafficking drugs. Oh, and also every police officer made a big deal about cleaning up the dead dog somewhat. Great. Thanks.
It seems that the wife and child were held in a locked police car for four hours after the raid.
So, next time you’re watching Twilight and trying to figure out if you’re on Team Edward or Team Jacob or when you’re going over your top five freebies list and trying to decide if Brendan Fraser, Clive Owen, or Anthony Bourdain is your number one or number two for the day, that you are currently being mentally promiscuous.