Actually, there's a good deal of evidence to suggest that pheromones are a factor in human sexual attraction. But they work a bit like the love potion described in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (which smells different to each person depending on what attracts THEM).

No doubt there are a wide variety of pheromones shed by humans some most commonly by males and some most commonly by females. But it's also likely that some males shed pheromones that are more commonly shed by women and vice versa.

To complicate things even more, each human is likely hard wired to respond to certain pheromones, again, usually males to females and vice versa, but not always. Furthermore studies show that there do, indeed, seem to be genetic factors which discourage individuals from being attracted to someone who is too genetically similar to themselves.

It's also common that the gay boys most likely to suffer verbal/physical abuse from homophobic straight boys are shedding what are more commonly female pheromones and thus invoking sexual attraction in those straight boys who react violently out of their own terror that they might be gay, themselves.

No single synthetic pheromone will attract ALL the people you want to attract (or even any of them). A complex combination of pheromones might work better, but even there, unless you knew exactly what trips the triggers in the pheromone receptors of the person you're trying to attract to yourself, it would be completely hit or miss as to whether the pheromones you were using would have the desired affect.

I must have grown up in a really strange part of America (small town in Central Minnesota), but this is exactly how my community believed adults were supposed to handle differences and the inevitable mistakes we all make. Those who used shouting, name calling, and insults, let alone physical violence, were regarded to be boorish and primitive.

It seems to me that what this has become is a "teachable moment" for our entire nation, in which our President got a bit carried away in his own language, just as did Prof. Gates and Officer Crowley, then made amends and helped the good professor and the good officer to make amends, all as mature, secure adults. In the process, each of the people involved learned something about himself and about each other.

Isn't this what actual adults do? Can't we PLEASE grow up? Can't we please ignore the loud-mouthed, temperamental, boorish, big-baby boys and girls who continue to throw ill-informed, childish verbal tantrums all over certain of our "news" outlets and start seeking and watching/listening to only the kind of accurate, well-informed, authoritatively-presented news offered by the late, great Walter Cronkite?

Under their "old" politics, simply ignored, fudged the analysis of, or didn't bother to actually research the issue deeply enough to discover data that might have supported conclusions calling into question the ability of the commodities markets and traders to regulate themselves, could it?

Certainly under Buscho, the CFTC wasn't going to challenge the ubiquitous "free market" theology, was it? I mean how's a person supposed to make a massive killing if you can't hide what you're doing while cornering a market, driving up the prices of futures contracts in that market, then dumping your holdings while the prices still appear to be going up for no apparent reason (but, of course "supply and demand" always makes a good smoke screen).

I'm convinced the only actual shortage of supply involving oil last summer was the shortage of futures contracts themselves.

The military seeks to damage the personalities of GIs so that they will be able to kill other human beings without any sense of empathy or regret. Not that they realize what they're doing, perhaps, but they've gotten very good at it.

The trouble is, the damage they inflict on GIs is permanent unless those men and women receive very specific kinds of help (simple but not well known) to undo that damage. Part of that damage makes it impossible for many of our troops to process the trauma of combat, not to mention the extreme grief of watching close friends die by horrific violence in combat situations.

The result of all of this is PTSD, but rather than acknowledging it and seeking to undo the damage done to some of the best young men and women in America as part of their training, the military continues to pretend that all these walking wounded are perfectly OK.

This is not surprising, since ALL military personnel have their own ability to be empathetic zapped out of them in basic training. This being the case, COs are simply unable to notice or appreciate that troops demonstrating PTSD symptoms are psychologically wounded or in pain, but only see them as bad soldiers. They proceed to blame and punish the victims who succumb to the effects of PTSD by self medicating with legal or illegal chemicals, often doing further damage in the process.

Those with less obvious symptoms they turn loose on society to spend the rest of their lives trying to live as normally as possible while seeking to work around the challenging reactions they have to normal situations.

For more information on how this all works and how you might help yourself or those you love find healing for the effects of military training or combat trauma, please check the psychozapp.com website.