Click below to go to the site for the sponsors to donate for you. http://www.theliteracysite.com

The Literacy Site is dedicated to funding free books for children. On average, over 70,000 individuals from around the world visit the site each day to click the "FREE" button.

To date, more than 55 million visitors have helped provide more than a million books to children who need them the most. Access to books is essential to reading development. Yet 61 percent of low-income families in the U.S. have no books for children in their homes. Over 80 percent of childcare centers serving low-income children lack age-appropriate books and other print materials. By providing children from low-income families with books that they can take home and keep, together we target the only variable that correlates significantly with reading scores: the number of books in the home. Worldwide, there are more than 770 million illiterate adults in the world, two-thirds of whom are women and girls. In addition, there are over 100 million children not currently enrolled in primary school and millions of others not currently in secondary school. Education is a lifelong gift that empowers people to ultimately improve socioeconomic conditions for their families, communities, countries, and future generations. Through the opportunities that only an education can provide, we can break the cycle of poverty, one child at a time.

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When it's your turn to clean out the break room fridge, does it make you gag? If you think that job is gross, take comfort. The "ick factor" for some professions is much, much worse.

Here, according to the Popular Science website, are the 10 worst jobs in science:

10. Whale-feces researcher

9. Forensic entomologist ("solving murders by studying maggots")

8. Olympics drug tester

7. Gravity research subject (where subjects lie in bed for 15 to 21 days at a time so researchers can study the effects of "restricted muscle use and increased blood flow to the head experienced in space")

6. Microsoft security grunt (people who read e-mails and fix kinks in Microsoft products)

5. Coursework carcass preparer ("They kill, pickle, and bottle the critters that schoolkids cut up.")

4. Garbologist (someone who sifts through hundreds of thousands of pounds of refuse to analyze modern consumption patterns and how quickly waste breaks down)

3. Elephant vasectomist

2. Oceanographer (This one doesn't seem so bad, though.)

And the No. 1 worst job in science: Hazmat diver ("Outfitted with fully encapsulating drysuits, these Jacques Cousteaus of the sewers swim into clouds of waste, inside nuclear reactors, and through toxic spills on America's coasts and inland waterways.")

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Obese girls are half as likely to attend college as non-obese girls, according to a new study from The University of Texas at Austin.

The study also shows obese girls are even less likely to enter college if they attend a high school where obesity is relatively uncommon. The findings appear in the July issue of the journal Sociology of Education.

The study tracked nearly 11,000 American adolescents, using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.

"Obesity has been identified as a serious public health issue, but these results indicate the harmful effects extend far beyond physical health," said Robert Crosnoe, author of the study and a sociologist at the university.

Crosnoe suggests a number of mental health and behavioral issues seem to play a significant role in keeping obese girls from enrolling in college. The study found obese girls were more likely to consider committing suicide, use alcohol and marijuana, and have negative self-images.

The disconnect between obesity and college enrollment was more pronounced among non-whites and among girls whose parents did not graduate from college. Obese boys did not differ from their non-obese peers in college enrollment.

"That girls are far more vulnerable to the non-health risks of obesity reinforces the notion that body image is more important to girls' self-concept and that social norms have greater effects on the education of girls than boys," Crosnoe noted.

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VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIW-BZ8oLrk

"Words do not describe heavily enough the pain in my heart. How can these treasonous Mexican politicians such as Fabian Nunez, Joe Baca, Antonio Villaraigosa, and Art Torres hold office in the United States. If anyone that was caucasian made statements anywhere close to the outright hatred these parasites spewed every media outlet in this conquered nation would be playing and replaying them by the minute, and would be run out of office and their reputation destroyed. Yet, they can proclaim the United States to be Aztlan with no repercussions. And call for the outright destruction of caucasins and not have a single qualm about it. My attitude to the invasion has totally changed, this is no less then a proclamation of war as I'm concerned.

More here: http://www.immigrationwatchdog.com/

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From Bill O'Reilly's "Talking Points"

The Senate completely blew this. They're at fault. The American people don't want an 800 page immigration bill loaded with a bunch of bullfeathers. The folks want clarity and a fair deal.

So it's no surprise the Senate's deal collapsed into chaos. And that is a bad thing for America, because now we'll have more of the same. Millions of people trying to sneak into the country and the feds having no idea who is here and what they're doing. 

So right now, I'm going to give you the No Spin immigration solution. It is simple because, as you know, I am a simple man. There are just four components:

1) secure the southern border with 700, not 300 miles of barrier, double the border patrol and back them up with 10,000 National Guards people. That would effectively shut down human and drug smuggling from Mexico.

2) require all illegal aliens in the country right now to register at the post office with Homeland Security. After registering, they would be given a tamper proof ID card, designating their status and their right to work temporarily in the USA. If the illegal aliens do not register, it's a criminal felony. Right now sneaking across the border is a civil action. Remember that. Subjecting the person to immediate deportation or jail time. The criminal penalty goes way up.

3) Any business that hires an illegal worker who doesn't have a tamper proof ID card faces draconian fines and possible prison time for the executives.

4) Each illegal alien would have his case reviewed by federal authorities. And they would decide who would receive a Z-visa to stay and who would not. That takes the blanket amnesty, something many American hate, off the table. It also allows the feds to make rational decisions about who's helping America and who isn't.

Under that banner, no illegal alien who commits a crime while here would be allowed to stay. Also under that program, no welfare of any kind would be paid to folks here illegally. They'd have to work for their living.

Now that is a fair immigration plan that I believe would be acceptable to most Americans. It would also allow the feds to quickly build a database, so Homeland Security would know the extent of the alien intrusion, which we don't know now.

Again, any illegal alien who didn't cooperate with the new law would immediately become an outlaw. And immediate action could be taken against that non-citizen who doesn't comply. That would end the sanctuary city madness and give the federal government more tools to regain control over this out of control situation.

So there you have it — a fair plan to give good people a chance to stay here and earn citizenship down the road -- but a plan that also protects Americans. The No Spin immigration plan is, again, one page and not 800 pages. And it would work.

And that's "The Memo."

Or maybe this take which is enviornmentally correct but maybe not politically correct:

1) Dig a 700 mile trench between America and Mexico. This would take way less time than building a fence. Re-direct the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean to keep it full.

2) Bring alligators from Florida where there is an overcrowing problem with them. Use off season farm laborers to do this. Also our prison populations could do this labor also.

3) All the money saved from not having to use 10,000 National Guard troops would pay for this. Also money saved by our government for not publishing anything in the Mexican language anymore would also defray the costs.

4) All of age teens that were not born here are required to serve in the military. Anyone already here that commits a crime has to swim back to Mexico.

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Once upon a time there was a very mean witch who lived in a sunny and prosperous country which she called Amerika (I don't know why she always spelled it with a 'k', but that's another story...)

She was very angry and very depressed because the vast majority of the citizens of this fair country seemed to be quite happy. And happy is to a wicked witch what oil is to water. (Two other favourite topics we'll return to at a later time...)

To continue.  The people lived happy lives with loving families (about 2.3 children on average) in comfortable large houses on leafy green streets in peaceful low-crime neighborhoods that they called suburbs.  (Clearly they didn’t live in Europe.) 

They commuted to work in large safe vehicles (she pejoratively labelled them ‘gas guzzlers’).  They took vacations by flying all over the place in big shiny jet planes.  And they seemed to be having so much fun that just about everyone else in the world wanted to come live with them -- either legally or illegally. 

The more these innocent free-loving people seemed to be having fun, the madder the wicked witch became.

Then one day, the wicked witch had a marvellous idea!  She could stop these happy souls from having so much fun almost overnight.  Why, she could make their lives downright miserable.  And better still, she could make them even feel guilty over how they were living their lives.  Wow.

She called this great idea “global cooling.”  Unfortunately, the era was 1975, and the people just laughed her silly thoughts away.  Except for Time Magazine, of course.  Years went by and she was very depressed indeed.  Then, one chilly winter day, she came upon an even better idea to kill off the people’s joy.  She called her new idea “global warming.”  And it stuck.

Soon, every wacky politician and populist journalist were knocking on her…

Opps.  Wait a minute.  I forgot.  This article is supposed to be a fair and balanced analysis of the phenomena known as “global warming”, and it’s economic impact on society. Hmmm…

OK.  Here goes. 

First, the definitions on how we play this game.  The debate over global-warming is done by majority rule.  Everyone who believes in global warming caused by humans (it’s our fault, folks), raise your hands.  OK, as Chairman, I count 110% hands up.  Now, comrades, what should we do about it?  I know.  Let’s create a treaty among friends.  Majority rules.

We’ll hold an expensive meeting of all the rich honest countries and poor corrupt countries on some wealthy overcrowded island where food and oil is imported.  We’ll meet in Kyoto, Japan.  Then, we’ll all agree that global warming is our collective fault and the biggest countries causing global warming will have to slash their economies to cut back their emissions of carbon dioxide. 

We’ll also agree never ever to mention the dirty phrase “global cooling” and the fact that we were all dead wrong 25 years ago.  We’re right this time for sure.  Since God is dead, it’s totally our responsibility to manipulate the environment on this planet.  We’ve done a good job in water conservation, ocean fish preservation, elimination of malaria and helping the poor people in Africa break out of poverty.  We’ll simply use the same tried-and-true collectivist tactics to handle global warming.  Damn it. We broke it and we’re gonna fix it!

Since the majority of us believe in the slogan “to each according to his needs”, we’ll create a way of allowing those good countries which don’t pollute to sell their spare air to those bad countries which do.  We’ll exempt the biggest polluters – they’re dirt poor you know-- (China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Brazil), and we’ll blame the most aggressive supporter of clean air & clean water, that shifty fat cat Uncle Sam.  Then, we’ll spend lots of money on hiring out-of-work scientists to write us made-as-instructed reports proving that global warming is happening -- and that people are the prime cause. 

Next, we’ll enlist the media -- they don’t know anything about science anyway – and we’ll use them to smear the tens of thousands of other honest scientists who might object to the questionable science being produced on demand.  If we chant the mantra “global warming, global warming” long enough, soon everyone will have read about it in the papers – and you know the papers never lie. 

Eventually, if we’re really lucky, we’ll convert our cause into a cult religion.  “Global Warming is the Opiate of the People”.  You can work wonders with guilt.

We’ll pass lots of non-binding resolutions (so the EU countries and our other friends don’t have to met their reduction goals). Then we’ll call on the United Nations -- where we are solidly in control, brother -- to create an upright honest, respectable Intergovernmental Panel to produce a series of action-item reports, just like we did with the food-for-oil program that worked so well in Iraq.

Finally, we’ll make up long-range 50 and 100-year weather forecasts on which to base all our new laws and spending, putting aside the fact that we can’t even do accurate 7-day weather forecasts anywhere on the planet yet.

Then we can get filthy rich off of all the wasted human energy, junk science, and corrupt politicians, by creating artificial markets in “emissions trading”.  We’ll have power, prestige, rock music, and guilt-ridden masses obeying our every rule. 

Of course, we’ll still be flying around in our private jets going to important global warming meetings and using our chauffer-driven limousines to transport us on the diamond lanes (2 people or more, please), and producing pseudo-scientific emotional-manipulating movies showing monster tidal waves and parched deserts.  If we play our cards right, we might even get an award or two along the way, maybe even a Noble Peace Prize…

Meanwhile, we’ll be able to ignore or suppress the growing number of climatologists, astrophysicists and meteorologists who are saying pesky things like global warming is mostly caused by the sun’s periodic heating up, that lots of other planets and moons are getting hotter too, and that the earth has gone through over 30 cold-hot cycles with some much hotter than today.

Since it will take at least a decade -- maybe two or three if we’re lucky – to prove us wrong, we can make lots of cash in the meantime. 

So, now is the time to stock up on alternative-energy fuels that don’t burn carbon.  Solar panel technology looks good.  And nuclear energy looks great (damn, who let the nukes in here to play?). 

For a while we can make money on ethanol -- until we take up so much of it for fuel that our food prices go through the roof and the country gets wise to the fact that it takes more energy to make ethanol that you can get from it.  So ethanol production plants, ethanol pipelines, ethanol storage tanks look like good get-rich-quick investments.

And since we have over 1000 years of coal left, investments in new expensive coal burning plants that bury their exhaust gases back underground look promising.  As long as oil stays above $60 per barrel.  New $3 per gallon gasoline taxes should make sure that the high prices are here to stay.  We’ll need lots new laws of course.  And lots more jails to hold the new global warming criminals.

The bottom line:  Global Warming is going to take one heck of a whack out of our economy.  It’s going to line the pockets of those insiders who can figure out how to play the game, or force other people (us) to pay for it.  It’s going to drive inflation up and decrease the economy’s efficiency the way taxes always do.   Global Warming will put America in its place, and bring back that old-time religion of fear and guilt.  (But will it save the planet?)

Isn’t it all just wonderful, comrade? 

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  1. You have to be against capital punishment, but support abortion on demand.
  
  2. You have to believe that businesses create oppression and governments create prosperity.
  
  3. You have to believe that guns in the hands of law-abiding Americans are more of a threat than U.S. nuclear weapons technology in the hands of Chinese and North Korean communists.
  
  4. You have to believe that there was no art before Federal funding.
  
  5. You have to believe that global temperatures are less affected by cyclical documented changes in the earth's climate and more affected by soccer moms driving SUV's.
  
  6. You have to believe that gender roles are artificial but being homosexual is natural.
  
  7. You have to believe that the AIDS virus is spread by a lack of federal funding.
  
  8. You have to believe that the same teacher who can't teach 4th-graders how to read is somehow qualified to teach those same kids about sex.
  
  9. You have to believe that hunters don't care about nature, but loony activists who have never been outside of San Francisco do.
  
  10. You have to believe that self-esteem is more important than actually doing something to earn it.
  
  11. You have to believe that Mel Gibson spent $25 million of his own money to make The Passion of the Christ for financial gain only.
  
  12. You have to believe the NRA is bad because it supports certain parts of the Constitution, while the ACLU is good because it supports certain parts of the Constitution.
  
  13. You have to believe that taxes are too low, but ATM fees are too high.
  
  14. You have to believe that Margaret Sanger and Gloria Steinem are more important to American history than Thomas Jefferson, Gen. Robert E. Lee, and Thomas Edison & A.G. Bell.
  
  15. You have to believe that standardized tests are racist, but racial quotas and set-asides are not.
  
  16. You have to believe that Hillary Clinton is normal and is a very nice person.
  
  17. You have to believe that the only reason socialism hasn't worked anywhere it's been tried is because the right people haven't been in charge.
  
  18. You have to believe conservatives telling the truth belong in jail, but a liar and a sex offender belong(ed) in the White House.
  
  19. You have to believe that homosexual parades displaying drag, transvestites, and bestiality should be constitutionally protected, and manger scenes at Christmas should be illegal.
  
  20. You have to believe that illegal Democratic Party funding by the Chinese Government is somehow in the best interest to the United States.
  
  21. You have to believe that this message is a part of a vast, right wing conspiracy.
  
  22. You have to believe that it's okay to give Federal workers off on Christmas Day but it's not okay to say "Merry Christmas."

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Most people have had deja vu - that eerie sense of having experienced something before - but U.S. researchers have identified the part of the brain responsible for this sensation, and they think it may lead to new treatments for memory-related problems.

They said neurons in a memory center of the brain called the hippocampus make a mental map of new places and experiences, then store them away for future use.

But when two experiences begin to seem very much alike, these mental maps overlap and start to blur.

"Deja vu occurs when this ability is challenged," said Susumu Tonegawa, a professor of biology and neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, whose work appears in the journal Science.

It is really just a malfunction in the brain 's ability to sort through new information, something called episodic memory.

"This is very important for an intelligent animal like human beings so you know what's going on around you and you can recall it later," said Tonegawa in a telephone interview.

He and colleagues studied mice that were genetically altered to lack a gene in a specific part of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus, which they found to be critical in forming the ability to sort through similar experiences.

Mice who lacked this ability were moved from one cage to a second, similar cage and then back to the first cage. In one cage, they got a mild electrical shock to the foot. In the other, they did not.

The mutant mice associated both cages with danger and began to freeze when placed in either cage - they could not determine in which cage they got shocked.

Healthy mice quickly learned the difference and only froze in the dangerous cage.

When the researchers tested the animals' brain activity, the mutant mice reacted similarly in both cages, but the brain activity of the healthy mice was different in each.

Tonegawa said the type of memory that allows people to quickly distinguish different faces and places fades with age.

"Since we know the molecular and cellular pathway based on our results, there is a possibility to use those molecular targets to develop a drug to improve this connection," he said.

That is especially the case for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.

He said the study settles 35 years of debate over how the brain can distinguish between similar places and experiences.

"One big question about the memory is now taken care of," he said.

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