Denial and lying seem like an instinctive response to panic and avoiding punishment that children do all the time. You watch a child do something they know is wrong, and when confronted they immediately deny they were involved, or make up an obvious lie. People usually try to avoid confrontation, and this is one way, but it can become a bad and sometimes abusive habit.

Ugh - how to I start this:

First, not many Republicans are "right wing" any more. Many vote against free markets and Capitalism and vote for social engineering, wealth redistribution, and growing the size of the Government.

There are a few true right wingers left, but the establishment Republicans are not right wing at all if you test their voting habits against what it means to be on the right side of the political spectrum.

Also, I patently reject that notion that all racists are Republican. If you think racism only happens in the white community I suggest you open Youtube and simply search the term "kill whites".

Not too long ago, David Duke, a major KKK leader of some sort, was a Democrat in Congress.

My point is the only reason these people are voting Republican right now is because the social engineering of the left is seen as anti-white, which I am certain makes it untenable for a white racist to vote for that candidate/party.

D'oh. Force of habit...fixed...thanks.

It all goes to how comfortable you are with the government legislating what you can and can't do. I used to smoke, nasty habit. I did it for at least 20 years, started when I was 14. I was a light smoker, usually less than 4 or so a day, but I did do it until I weaned myself off with nicotine gum and then quit that later.

Now, I wouldn't want to stay in a hotel or go to an establishment (bar, eatery, etc) 'alone' that allowed it in all areas. But in selected areas that I don't have to enter, I don't have a problem with it. I feel that way because I want people to be able to do what they want to their own body.

As far as employees being forced to be exposed to it, no one can force you to do anything in a job unless you are essentially a slave. You always have the option to look for work elsewhere. Bars could offer a pay differential or force patrons to pay an automatic tip percentage if they want service in a smoking area, giving incentive for people who don't care about serving smokers. Their body, their choice.

Crap. Meant to down vote this and clicked the up vote out of habit.

I lived in Turkey for four years, and after a while I noticed that Turks didn't respond well to my smiling. They didn't understand it as a friendly signal, and it actually caused friction. I never asked about it, but I somehow caught on that they thought I was stupid. I thought about it, and it made perfect sense to me that it was stupid to smile at things that shouldn't make you happy.

So I stopped smiling in stores and restaurants, with coworkers, and even with Turkish friends. My interactions with people improved noticeably.

After four years, I moved back to Canada, where I continued not smiling for no reason. I've never been able to get back into the habit. I just feel stupid and unnatural smiling for no reason. People smile at me just because they see me, and they smile politely. I can't smile back. I just raise my eyebrows.

People now tell me constantly that I'm too sad, that I should smile more that I'm not happy. Now, there's some truth to that -- I do suffer from depression -- but that predates living in Turkey and it's only since then that anyone's accused me of being sad, or even noticed that I don't smile as much as I should. I've had to train my friends out of referring to me as grumpy.

My job is teaching English as a Second Language to students from all over the world. My Western students -- particularly the Latinos -- tell me daily (literally) that I don't smile enough. My East Asian and Eastern European students have never said a word in that direction. I just realized the divide now after watching this video.

LOL, East Palo Alto. I volunteered at the Boys and Girls Club there for a year when I lived in Mountain View. Two cops got shot and East Palo Alto had the highest murder rate ever that year. It's utterly insane how on one side of the 101 you have these multi-million dollar mansions and Stanford University and on the other side you have gangland.

Meanwhile, back on topic, when I moved to Mountain View in 2002 my rent was $800 a month for a studio apartment. The rent went up by $100 a year every year until I finally called it quits in 2007 when they wanted to charge me $1300 a month. I gave up ever actually being able to own a home in the Bay Area (let alone rent) and left in 2009.

In Japan now, and things aren't quite as bad as the Bay Area, but we've been house hunting recently and we're shocked at the disparity between what we want versus what we can actually afford, even with both us being full-time professionals. I know that 2nd place he goes to is supposed to be a joke but it's not that far off from the truth, at least as far as our experiences go. While the places we've been shown by the real estate agent are certainly habitable, they aren't particularly nice. So we're going to have to decide whether we want to live someplace not so great with the advantage being the mortgage will be paid off by the time we retire or just rent in a place we're comfortable with and wind up having to really budget hard after retirement since rent will consume a sizable portion of our pensions/social security.

"The deal came in the wake of cutbacks that had affected the series in recent years, the changing viewer habits of American children in the previous ten years, and Sesame Workshop's dependence upon revenue from DVD sales."

Yup.

HBO? When did it move to HBO?

On August 13, 2015, as part of a five-year programming and development deal, Sesame Workshop announced that first-run episodes of Sesame Street would move to premium television service HBO beginning with season 46, which premiered on January 16, 2016. HBO will hold first-run rights to all newer episodes of the series, after which they will air on PBS member stations following a nine-month exclusivity window, with no charge to the stations for airing the content. The agreement also gives HBO exclusive rights to stream past and future Sesame Street episodes on HBO Go and HBO Now – assuming those rights from Amazon Video and Netflix; on August 14, Sesame Workshop announced that it would phase out its in-house subscription streaming service, Sesame Go, as a standalone service; the service will remain in operation, likely with its offerings reduced to a slate content available for free or serving as a portal for Sesame Street's website.

The deal came in the wake of cutbacks that had affected the series in recent years, the changing viewer habits of American children in the previous ten years, and Sesame Workshop's dependence upon revenue from DVD sales.

/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesame_Street

EDIT: Based on past experience with his claims, that's not presenting the science, it's completely misrepresenting it. It's what this guy does, he cherry picks someone else's data, totally misrepresents the study and it's conclusions, and makes huge leaps and extrapolations to say things like 'eating meat is now proven to be the same carcinogenic cancer risk as being a chain smoker'....but anyone who can understand the study he cites, limited to highly processed cured meats and mentioning the levels of possible carcinogens was not measured but are likely infinitesimal, can see it said no such thing, and didn't even come close to implying it. That type of misuse of data gets my goat....I think lying about science and data are crimes against humanity, and I wish they were actionable.

Bullshit, that's not true at all. My wife eats cheese about 3-4 times a year, and enjoys it those times. Same with beef. No addiction cycle exists with that long of a period that I'm aware of.
Food preference/taste is in no way the same as addiction, and any "doctor" telling you differently is a liar.
Habits and addictions are different concepts, that's why they are spelled and pronounced differently.

I was born in the late 70s and had the fortune to experience the early days of personal computing and the internet via BBSes. The biggest issue I've personally experienced with the modern internet is the ease at which you can get side-tracked by deep links. I've lost count of the number of times I've started researching something work-related in the evening only to end up linking through two or three related articles and ending up on a YouTube video about the latest game trailer or whatever.

I've also noticed that my reading habits have changed. Instead of reading articles in their entirety, I will, at times, read a few sentences to get the gist then scan ahead to continue reading. I never used to do this but it is something I've caught myself doing with greater frequency over the past couple of decades. This has tripped me up a few times where I've had to go back and read the information again. I wonder if children that have grown up with the modern internet and its web of distractions (pun intended) are even worse off.

Maybe our brains are trying to adapt to a new way of gathering and processing so much disconnected information (e.g. one minute you're reading about a physics algorithm the next minute about screaming space goats). Perhaps it is a way to contain information overload and only retain what is useful?

The internet is an AMAZING invention and something everyone should have access to and be taught how to use effectively. As was mentioned above, you can pretty much teach yourself anything using the internet. The challenge is staying focused and sifting through all the ads, fluff articles, and random garbage that you get bombarded with every time you browse a website.

Wasn't easy being a planet hunter back in the day *promote

I'm looking for
1 tug
The pull of a planet
1 tell
A wobbling sun
I've searched for years
Haven't found a one
But they're out there

1 jump
In radial redshift
1 slip
Of spectral lines
They'll see if I can show them the sines

Pish tosh
Green men
Take five
Take ten

Just a little cash guys

Budget's tight
Don't fund this trash guys

I can take a hint
Better face the facts
Second-hand'll have to do

Eww
All you planet hunters at the bottom
You've got fact & fantasy entwined
Finding planets except they haven't got one

Well they gotta be forming readily
When you think about it given we've got nine

1 jump
A blip in the spectrum
1 shift of meters per second
1 graph of period power
They laugh but I'm not sour

Here goes
18 months of data
Cross & correlate it
All I gotta do is run

Pish tosh
Green men
Ah don't mind them
If only they'd look closer
Would they see a pure void
No sirree
They'd find out
There's worlds galore
To see

Make way for Pegasi
51 Pegasi

First was a world
Round an old pulsar
That's true
But the news
Is a sun-like star
With wobble
Too quick & precise
To be designed
No fluke not a spot
If you like it hot
You're gonna love this find

Pegasi 51b
Planet discovered
Orbit traced
Every 4 days
Hot as can be
Its order-Jupiter size
Was something of a surprise
Especially given its star's proximity

Pegasi 51b
It's a new era
To detect
Exoplanets
Soon there'll be three
As planet pulls on its Sun
It shifts the stellar spectrum
That's how we found 51b Pegasi

How'd a planet get so close in orbit
Cause I thought you needed ice to form it
Did it later undergo some strange migration
Star too small to be so long-pulsating
And too old to be so quick rotating
Is there any other good interpretation

This will certainly help with our funding

We got your funding
We got your funding

Got a surface of 1200 C

It's treacherous
So treacherous

If in time this new breakthrough feels mundane
Planets are common

That's proof
Of the truth
I've been telling you
This is no mean anomaly

Pegasi 51b
Planet uncovered
Round a far
Main sequence star
Spectral type G
We know its mass to be high
Half Jupiter by sine i

It's 15.61 pc from home
And it shakes our faith in how planets are formed
And its star is in Pegasus
Give it an A and thus
Label the planet as b
51 Pegasi

Plotting Doppler shifts is glacial-pace
And that astrometry never prevails
But baby you're in luck cause
Up in space
You got a planet-finder never fails

You got the power of statistics now
You got a view without an atmosphere
So no more nights spent locked up in your tower
All you gotta do is wait right here
And I say

Kepler the planet-searcher
Got a dip, no 2, no 3
We just measure brightness
Plot it out & that's transiting photometry

When your stars do this
And your curves displace
Then your star's got this
Transiting its face

Then you hit compute
And lookie here

You get good diameter data
From that dip
And orbit distance from the length of year

Well now we need this tale supported by
A ground observer with a good Échelle
We got 2000 planets certified
2000 more that only time will tell

But let's take em all, plot em out
And find out if we're really all alone
Is there a rocky world we've found no doubt
That orbits in the habitable zone
Like home?

Kepler the planet searcher
Got an Earth 452b
Part of a throng
40 billion strong

There ain't never been a field
Clever as the field
There ain't never been a field
Better than the field they call
Exoplanetology

I can show you a world
A shining shimmering planet
Found concealed in the band-shifts
Of the closest star in sight

I've found hope in the skies
And facing wonder I wonder
Could the sine wave discovered be
A planet fit for life

A whole new world
A new fantastic point of blue
Placed in that narrow zone
Where water flows
Midway tween cold & steaming

A whole new world
Its sun a faint, reddish hue
Could there be waiting here
A biosphere
Evolving in this whole new world to view

Fathoming a whole new world to view

Unbelievable find
Indescribable feeling
Earthlings someday revealing
Through directly captured light
A whole new world

Don't just stare from a far

Though nigh impossible to see

Wouldn't close up be bolder

Next to its parent's flair
If life is there
We'll know through atmosphere spectroscopy

A whole new world

Block the glare of the star

A laser starshot to pursue

With a star-shaped occulter

Chasing that crazy dream
That's always been
Of walking in a whole new world with you

a whole new world
That's where we'll be
A thrilling chase
A home in space
For you and me

Upvote my #1 "Traffic Playlist" song. Closely followed by The Offspring, Bad Habit...

Good stuff. I'm a member of Interpol (Grammar Division) and I notice some Latinos have a habit of misspelling words that have the letters "v" or "b", they use them interchangeably.

Since those consonants sound fairly similar we usually let them off with a berbal warning.

coffee and cigarettes are my last vice,and i ain't fucking giving them up!

how is that people feel perfectly at ease to just walk up to me,a total stranger,and offer health advice?

"you know those will kill ya,you should quit"

thanks captain obvious.

so i always offer them options,people LOVE options.

cigarettes or heroin i ask them.

which always stops them in their tracks and totally bewilders them,and gives me the silent giggles.

which of course they suggest neither,but i tell them i kicked my heroin addiction,my coke addiction,my painkiller addiction,my sex addiction,my porn addiction,i have plenty of experience with addictions.

"so why not lose the cigarette addiction?"

because i don't want to i reply,as i sip my coffee and take a drag of my cigarette.

and they got nothing,and they know it.

smokers realize that smoking is bad for them.that it will facilitate future health issues and most likely result in an early death.

so when you walk up to a stranger smoking and preach the dangers of smoking.you are not revealing some secret truth that they are not already fully aware of,your intentions may be good and your heart coming from the right place,but it is extremely condescending and patronizing.

and the dangers of second hand smoke have been proven to be totally over-blown.it is just rude of a smoker to be forcing anyone to be in the same air space while they enjoy their addiction.

i do not smoke in someone elses car,or in their home.i don't blow smoke in peoples faces.i go out to smoke on the patio.i try to be respectful.

and when you look at the statistics,fewer and fewer young people are picking up the habit of smoking.for all the tobacco companies whining and crying,it appears education is the very simply answer to address a very nasty habit,and even worse addiction.

so to all you well-inentioned do-gooders out there.please do not waste your time or energy pointing out the obvious to people like me.who will be turning 50 in a few months.save that energy for the young people.

coffee and cigarettes are my last addictions.think i will keep them.

hmmmm....coffee sounds good right about now.