It’s been widely speculated for a longtime that the feelings and emotions connected with “falling in love” are really just a product of chemicals being produced inside the human brain and other parts of the nervous system. Now scientists have performed research that seems to support this idea. According to science, the chemicals and neurotransmitters that are released in the human body when people believe they are in love are actually more addicting in nature than heroin and cocaine.
We’re going to take a short break. But don’t worry because we’ll be back after October 15 with more informative articles. Be sure to read through our large catalog of archived posts that date back to February, 2012.
In a very short period of time it seems as if Russia has uncovered the real terrorists in the world. According to Preston James, PhD, “…as a result of some of the most brilliant geopolitical maneuvering in history, Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin has created a complete checkmate in Syria. This checkmate has completely exposed the USA, CIA, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey for creating, training, financing and supporting ISIS, ISIL, Daesh, Al Qaeda and the rest of these Mideast Terrorist groups.”
What Preston writes about on his blog has been widely echoed by many alternative news writers for a very longtime. It’s obvious to those that have removed the blinders from their eyes that the bankers are calling the shots, financing wars and using powerful governments to acquire natural resources and other precious assets from around the world.
Now that the Catalan people have officially made their decision, I wonder if the Spanish government will stop pretending there’s not a problem? Will Spain respect the democratic decision of the people?
Does anybody really believe that the mass bombing of Syria by the United States, Russia and others has anything to do with the oppression of the Syrian people? Is there something else that is really in play here? Are we in fact watching the beginning of a third world war that has intentionally been planned well in advance?
For more details, watch the latest David Icke video-cast trailer below:
A dozen years ago, in his New York Times review of the best-selling British novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Jay McInerney (of Bright Lights, Big City fame) called it “stark, funny and original.” Told from the perspective of a 15-year-old autistic savant, the book is now a Tony Award-winning play.
But what’s hot on Broadway is sometimes too hot for Florida Panhandle high schools.
This past summer, the novel was pulled from the assigned summer reading list at Lincoln High School in Tallahassee, Florida. As reported by the Tallahassee Democrat, “the move was made to accommodate offended parents,” who apparently took offense to the dozens of instances of profanity in the text.
Whether it’s challenging Harry Potter books for promoting Satanism and the occult or wiping Fifty Shades of Grey from the shelves for depicting “mommy porn,”, it’s become all too common for books to be challenged – and sometimes banished – from local libraries and schools.
The American Library Association’s annual Banned Books Week, currently in its 23rd year, officially celebrates and promotes “the freedom to read” by raising awareness of books that are most frequently challenged across the nation.
Perhaps more significantly, however, Banned Books Week also provides both a rudimentary barometer of contemporary cultural concerns – the flashpoint topics, ideas and words that push our censorial buttons – and a test of our core commitment to the First Amendment.
Beware the parental penguins
The challenged books let us take the pulse of American squeamishness and, more bluntly, intolerance. They reveal the concerns of the day that rub some people the wrong way, so much so that they take the time and effort to file complaints rather just averting their eyes or cautioning their own children.
Not surprisingly, sex and sexuality, along with religion, are hot-button topics. Number three, for instance, on OIF’s list of most challenged books for 2014 is And Tango Makes Three. The children’s book, which was inspired by actual events in New York’s Central Park Zoo, tells the story of two male penguins who hatch and raise a female penguin named Tango. Publishers Weekly called it a “heartwarming tale.”
Those challenging it, however, find it anything but heartwarming. Instead, it is “anti-family” and “promotes the homosexual agenda.” Then again, at least the book was not the most challenged this past year, as it was in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2010 (the 2014 honor goes to Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian).
Culturally, the wrath heaped upon And Tango Makes Three suggests that one recent Supreme Court ruling aside, we are still conflicted when it comes to same-sex marriage (apparently for both humans and penguins).
Into the courtroom
Cultural questions, of course, sometimes spill into courtrooms. While the First Amendment explicitly protects freedom of speech, it also implicitly safeguards our right to receive speech.
As Justice William O Douglas wrote for the US Supreme Court fifty years ago in Griswold v Connecticut, “the right of freedom of speech and press includes not only the right to utter or to print, but the right to distribute, the right to receive, the right to read and freedom of inquiry.”
Griswold’s logic leads to convoluted case law surrounding public schools’ ability to regulate and ban books in their libraries.
In a 1982 case called Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v Pico, a New York school district sought to remove a number of books from library shelves, including Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and a Langston Hughes-edited collection called Best Short Stories of Negro Writers.
According to the school board, the titles removed were “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-[Semitic], and just plain filthy.”
A fractured Supreme Court wrote that “the discretion of the States and local school boards in matters of education must be exercised in a manner that comports with the transcendent imperatives of the First Amendment.”
In other words, school boards have discretion to pick and choose books, but that discretion is confined by minors’ rights to receive a wide swath of ideas and information, not just conformist doctrine.
US Supreme Court Justice William Brennan wrote that schools couldn’t ban books ‘in a narrowly partison or political manner.’ Library of Congress
The court added that “just as access to ideas makes it possible for citizens generally to exercise their rights of free speech and press in a meaningful manner, such access prepares students for active and effective participation in the pluralistic, often contentious society.”
Lofty rhetoric aside, Justice William Brennan cobbled together a few rules that remain in place today: schools may not exercise their discretion “in a narrowly partisan or political manner,” and they “may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books.”
The court concluded there was enough evidence to suggest the school district’s reasons for removal violated the principles noted above, and it denied the board’s motion to have the case tossed out.
Indeed, the ALA makes it clear that despite a constant drumbeat to pull books from the shelves, “most challenges are unsuccessful and most materials are retained in the school curriculum or library collection.”
Ultimately, the problem of book banning and challenging won’t go away. Public libraries and schools with limited budgets must make tough calls on what to buy, remove or put behind the check-out desk. Their choices tell us much about where we stand culturally, while their willingness (for the most part) to combat challenges reflects their unwavering commitment to free expression.
There is a growing concern about the cost, quality and value of higher education.
Despite the increasing cost of an academic degree, recent studies show substantial percentages of students, even in the most selective US colleges and universities, have failed to demonstrate significant improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills over the four years of college.
While students score high grades – an A has become by far the most common grade and is awarded three times more frequently now than in the 1960s – surveys done over the last 30 years indicate that the amount of time college students report actually studying for their academic degrees has declined by almost 50%.
Other indicators too show a decline in student academic achievement. In 1995, the US led developed nations in the share of the population (ages 25-34) with a college degree; today we have fallen to 19 among 28 nations.
Consequently, Congress is now considering major reforms to academic accreditation, the primary means by which we assure the academic quality of our colleges and universities.
Why are there problems with US academic accreditation, and what policies are needed to improve and assure academic quality?
I have been studying academic quality assurance (QA) for the last decade. Comparative research on the quality assurance policies of other developed nations offers useful insights.
What is academic accreditation?
In the US, the process of accreditation was developed by colleges and universities over the last 100 years to evaluate, assure and improve academic quality.
Today, each accrediting agency is a private membership association which, based upon an external peer review of an institution or academic program, recommends the award of accredited status to colleges and universities. The US has six regional agencies accrediting nonprofit public and private as well as for-profit institutions.
Accreditation is now crucial for the economic survival of colleges and universities. Beginning with the Korean War GI Bill in 1952, student grants and loans provided by the federal government could be used only at accredited institutions.
Therefore, accreditation in the US now serves the dual function of academic quality assurance and eligibility to receive federal funds.
A significant difference lies in the structure of our baccalaureate education.
In most other countries, baccalaureate programs are focused on a particular field. The courses of instruction students take are largely mandated by each university, and academic programs often culminate in a comprehensive exam or project that influences students’ graduation.
A more cohesive degree structure in other countries motivates students to take their learning seriously. smannion, CC BY-NC
Foreign academic programs, even in the arts and sciences, are more comparable to US undergraduate professional programs such as engineering and architecture.
The more cohesive degree structure in other countries motivates students to take their learning seriously and to invest greater time and effort in their studies.
These structured degrees also provide valuable information – both to the student and to the student’s program faculty – of what each student has actually learned.
In contrast, the majority of US baccalaureate students are enrolled in degree programs in which over three-quarters of their academic work is part of a general education component, and students personally select most of the courses they complete.
Because of the influence of a student’s grade point average on his or her future success, many, even at select colleges and universities, choose individual courses and academic majors characterized by greater grade inflation.
A study of Duke University undergraduate students estimated they elected 50% fewer courses in the educationally rigorous fields of the natural sciences and mathematics because grading practices across disciplines are not equitable.
Our undergraduate programs are distinctive in their large number of elective courses, the variation in grading standards across subject fields and the degree of student choice. There is also a lack of comprehensive measures of what students actually learn from their general education as well as from many majors.
Consequently, the faculty’s reliance on academic credits and grades as the principal means of assuring academic standards is ineffective.
Effective reform
So, how can public policy best address this problem?
As Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom argued, neither markets nor the rules of the state are the most effective means “to govern, provide, and manage public goods” that are complex and difficult to measure, like academic knowledge.
This is particularly the case in professional, self-governing organizations like US colleges and universities.
First, as the education ministers of the European Union (EU) stipulated in a collective policy governing QA agencies in their respective countries: effective quality assurance requires a national regulatory agency with appropriate expertise, which is truly independent from governments, higher education institutions and organs of political influence.
As of now, in the US, the private accrediting agencies are owned, operated and financially supported by fees paid by the institutions they evaluate.
The NACIQI reports to the Department of Education and is composed of 18 members, six appointed by the secretary of education and 12 appointments divided evenly between the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate.
In short, the existing system for assuring academic quality in the US is neither independent nor autonomous.
One means of creating a truly independent and competent national quality assurance agency would be to assign the responsibilities of NACIQI to an agency governed by and reporting to the National Academies of Science.
The National Academies are private, nonprofit societies of distinguished scholars dedicated to the furtherance of science and technology and to their use for the general welfare. Based upon a congressional charter granted in 1863, the National Academies have a mandate to advise the federal government on matters of science and education.
Institutional measures for learning outcomes
The criteria for US academic accreditation need to be more sharply focused on institutional processes that ensure quality in teaching and student learning.
These include the institution’s processes for:
designing, approving, and evaluating academic courses and programs
evaluating and improving instruction
assuring the integrity of grading standards across subject fields
assuring the validity of means for assessing student learning outcomes.
Instead, the accreditation criteria mandated by NACIQI now include institutional measures not directly related to student academic performance. These include facilities, fiscal and administrative capacity, as well as student recruiting and admissions practices.
The question for accreditors is not whether an institution has a process for evaluating academic programs, but whether evaluations are objectively assessing program quality and resulting in demonstrable improvement in teaching and student learning within identified programs.
The academic audit review at Hong Kong’s universities, adapted by the public university systems in Missouri and Tennessee, provides a valuable model for this approach.
External evaluation
Third, the policy approved by the educational ministers in the EU countries also required that all national QA agencies in participating countries undergo an independent external evaluation, which is made public.
Our higher education would be served best if a new federal QA agency were similarly required to be publicly evaluated by an established, respected and truly independent national organization such as the US Government Accountability Office.
This would also help provide assessments of the extent to which a regulatory agency helps assure academic standards.
Eventually, the most effective means of reforming US academic accreditation would be to reframe and redesign our national process for assuring academic quality.
We need to remember that academic accreditation should reinforce the incentives for collective action by faculty members within each college and university, for that is the surest means to effectively assess and continually improve teaching and student learning.
The statements below have not been evaluated by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA). Information regarding the use of kratom in folk medicine is provided for education purposes only, it is not intended as medical advice.
This guide was created as an educational resource to provide accurate information about kratom. It is also intended to correct much of the misinformation circulating on the Internet and being perpetrated by the Media.
What is Kratom?
Kratom is a tree native to Southeast Asia (Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Borneo, etc.). Its botanical name is Mitragyna speciosa. Kratom is in the same family as the coffee tree (Rubiaceae). The leaves of kratom have been used as an herbal drug from time immemorial by peoples of Southeast Asia. It is used in folk medicine as a stimulant (at low doses), sedative (at high doses), recreational drug, pain killer, medicine for diarrhea, and treatment for opiate addiction.
How is it taken?
In Thailand, kratom leaves are often chewed fresh (usually after removing the stringy central vein). Dried leaves can also be chewed, but since they are a bit tough most people prefer to crush them up or powder them so that they can be swallowed. Powdered kratom can be mixed with water and then drunk. This method is quick and easy. It can also be mixed with fruit juice or apple sauce. Dried kratom leaves are often made into a tea that is strained and then drunk. Tea is easier to drink than powdered kratom suspended in water. Kratom can be smoked, but doing so is impractical because the amount of leaf that constitutes a typical dose is too much to be smoked easily. A paste-like extract can be prepared by evaporating the water from kratom tea. This can be stored for later use. Small pellets of this extract can be swallowed, or it can be dissolved in hot water and consumed as a tea. Some people like to mix kratom tea with ordinary black tea, or other herbal teas, before it is consumed. This is done to make it more palatable. Sugar or honey can be added to sweeten it. Read more by clicking here!
