Why your body jerks before you fall asleep
Today in “Things you’ve always wondered but never thought to ask at the right time”.
I have kicked the sheets clean off my bed before. I’ve smacked my wife in the head and I’ve sent my dog flying. All because of involuntary jerks at the brink of slumber. Scientists think it’s the result of the final moments of a battle between your sleep and waking cycles.
Deep in the core of our brain, a region called the reticular activating system controls our feeling “awake”. Elsewhere, near the point where the nerves from the eyes cross inside your head, the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus senses the cycles of light and dark and shifts our brain to a deep sleep mode.
As your waking motor system teeters on the brink of control at that point just before the VLPO takes over, WHAM, KICK whatthehell?!
Now you know. Sleep tight.
(More info at BBC - Future)
Secret ‘Kill List’ Tests Obama’s Principles - NYTimes.com
Can Obama kill his way out of the “War on Terror”? Apparently he believes he can.
Big thunderstorms about to pound New England in 5…4…3…2..
Afghanistan has often enough been called “the graveyard of empires.” Americans have made it a habit to whistle past that graveyard, looking the other way — a form of obliviousness much aided by the fact that the American war dead conveniently come from the less well known or forgotten places in our country. They are so much easier to ignore thanks to that.
Except in their hometowns, how easy the war dead are to forget in an era when corporations go to war but Americans largely don’t. So far, 1,980 American military personnel (and significant but largely unacknowledged numbers of private contractors) have died in Afghanistan, as have 1,028 NATO and allied troops, and (despite U.N. efforts to count them) unknown but staggering numbers of Afghans.
The finest way to honor those that died defending us is to re-commit ourselves to the search for international peace. Each step we take toward ending armed conflict among peoples is a payment toward that debt.
Midnight Moon
Near the mid-night the last quarter moon rises over the skyline of Cologne with Germany´s famous Cologne Cathedral on the right.
They are a bunch of lying scum.
Roger Ailes, CEO of Fox News, on New York Times reporters. (via officialssay)
Shep Smith and Judge Robert Napolitano discuss the arrests of Chicago NATO protesters, including the five men accused of possessing explosives:
Napolitano: “But the Chicago folks want to make a case out of it, because they want to make an example out of these kids to deter other people from expressing their political opinions in the streets.”
Smith: “You’ve got to be kidding me. How do we have stories like this, two or three times a week, and no one in the nation seems to care?”
Napolitano: “Because the American public has been deluded into thinking that when the government finds a dope and persuades the dope to say bad things and think he’s assembling a bomb and then he eventually pleads guilty, somehow we are kept safe by that happening.”
Smith: “That’s a load of it! Somehow we are made to feel like maybe they’re doing something for us, and what they’re really doing is trampling on our liberty.”
Bless you, Shep Smith. This same shit happened in Minnesota in 2004 with the RNC convention, and in NYC and Denver at the RNC and DNC conventions. How much you want to bet it’ll happen in Tampa at the 2012 RNC convention?
As a progressive activist, I swear — I’m worried about giving details of any upcoming protest actions to people I don’t know. Not because I plan acts of violence or support acts of violence, but because I don’t want to be a target of a midnight raid as an example. And let’s be real, I’m pretty boring out here Wyoming…
However, an injury to one is an injury to all.
Following this dream hasn’t been easy. Along the way, Michaela has had to battle racism within the ballet world. “When I was eight, I was cast to play Marie in The Nutcracker, and I prepared hard for it. But right before the show, I was told that someone else would be dancing the part because ‘people aren’t ready for a black Marie,’ ” she recalls. She seriously considered quitting ballet until she got the chance to see black dancer Heidi Cruz perform with The Pennsylvania Ballet. “I was like, Wow, she’s amazing! She inspired me to keep dancing,” Michaela says.
Read Michaela’s heartbreaking and inspiring story
