Winter Walks to Get those Wiggles Out

Enthusiastic night walkers!

  



Winter in Oregon. Winter anywhere brings more darkness and makes it harder to get out after school and work to get the wiggles out of the little ones and trying to stay active. In Oregon, we do not get lots of sub-zero temperatures or mountains of snow. We get wet. This year we have gotten the rain boots and will be getting rain pants and coats shortly!

Our excitement right now has to do with newly purchased headlamps! My wife Theresa is sporting one of them in the picture above - the Coast LED Lenser with a link on this page - which is very cool... We got three of them so the boys could each wear one during dark winter walks in the neighborhood. The boys have used them and are thrilled with them while they walk with us! They have their hands free and can stumble around on the sidewalk, pick up items of interest, and make the street signs light up! A couple of nice features of this particular model: they take a single aaa battery (you can use rechargeable batteries, aaa batteries are easy to find, and inexpensive), there are two blue LED lights on the back for visibility from behind, the LED in front is definitely bright enough for walking, and the whole setup (with the one battery) is quite light weight!

Get away from the TV: go out and enjoy the winter!

Michael B. Keegan: Known Unknowns: The Power of Secret Money in the 2010 Elections

I am not a fan of the flood of "Dark Money" which flowed through interest groups, into my mailbox, yapped on my radio, and paraded about on my TV. Maybe next election cycle the money will flow to other candidates with different politics: It is still a huge problem in a Democracy.

Michael B. Keegan: Known Unknowns: The Power of Secret Money in the 2010 Elections

How Ordinary People Become Monsters ... or Heroes ...

Here is a link to a talk by Phillip Zimbardo.  If you have 24 minutes to explore the nature of evil in everyman, this is a great talk!  The title is How Ordinary People Become Monsters … or Heroes  You may remember Zimbardo from the Sanford Prison Study where average college students did some really interesting things when given power or having it taken away…

Zimbardo has also come out with a super book delving into Social Psychology, the nature of evil, and how putting good apples into a bad barrel is a recipe for rottenness! In "The Lucifer Effect" Zimbardo walks us through the Stanford Prison Study day by day and hour by hour. We see the compliance with corruption of both the "Guards" and the "Prisoners." He also takes us inside other experiments done by social psychologists and startles us with the results. He brings it together by reviewing the deplorable conditions for detainees and our soldiers in Abu Grahib. 

The short message: Humans are often pushed passed their ethical boundaries by conditions and social situations. The moral: We can learn from those who resist the pressure and behave heroically.

Scary Word of the Week

Word of the week that scares me:

Dominionism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It is, of course, not the word itself but the end product of those ideas. And, of course, those ideas are to be seen in action here in America.

"The highest-ranking House official in charge of environmental and energy policy may soon be a Republican legislator who denies climate change on the grounds of his belief that nothing bad can come of the Earth unless it is preordained by God.

Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), a member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce since 1997, submitted a letter to his colleagues earlier this week asking for their blessing in his campaign to assume the gavel when Republicans take control of the chamber"

See the rest of the Huffington Post article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/13/john-shimkus-climate-change_n_782664.html

Trek 1000sl

Have to add this little bike in. My first real road bike since a Jr. High Schwinn. Not overly fancy, but quite nice! I will be switching out the frame soon as I bought it a little too big and need something a little smaller.