"Todo hombre debe ser capaz de todas las ideas y entiendo que en el porvenir...
MoreA review worth breaking one abstention to write and another to thumb up. And curious that we still have some access to this older incarnation of SU.
From a party that accepts no money from corporations or PACs. http://www.gp.org
These hardhat economists and bluecollar ecologists are developing a "global village construction set", fifty modular open-source machines to meet most of the needs of a small post-scarcity community, "everything from a tractor to an oven to a circuit-maker".
Their main site: http://bit.ly/gCqQd5
And their wiki: http://bit.ly/kr11w6
Found via durgil.
Thumbs up for the high production-values and the blonde bombshell with a whisky-smooth voice, but I've a bad habit of looking, or imagining, beyond the surface.
"I'm hoping at the gates they'll tell me that you're mine," because fantasizing about sharing Heaven with a dreamy badboy who, for now, makes you laugh and gets you high, walks on the wild side and likes his girls insane, is easier than working through the ups and downs of a real relationship.
"Sometimes love is not enough and the road gets tough," therefore your lover must never make you sad or make you cry, like well-meaning but imperfect human beings sometimes do. You need a tattooed, muscle-car-driving savior, someone you can idealize with lyrics adapted from Amazing Grace.
But this is unrealistic. He won't be perfect. Looks and personalities change. Better to martyr yourself now and hope for an everlasting union with him in an imagined afterlife. "So choose your last words, this is the last time, 'cause you and I" are making a reckless suicide-pact that goes wrong.
A borderline-disorder sufferer's view of romance exemplifies a record-studio marketer's view of America, and, with 11M views in one month, they may be onto something.
"To use guns," "forcing other people," "at gunpoint" -- seriously? Libertarians, unless you're militia members or Branch Davidians -- that is, sufficiently ballsy and brainsick to make this absurdly reductionist construal of law-enforcement and democracy a self-fulfilling prophecy and thereby land your lily-white butts in prison -- kindly replace your rhetoric with something sensible.
Most agree that the government is bloated and dysfunctional in many respects -- but that's not your point, is it? You're reaching further with the ridiculous suggestion and emotional appeal that the IRS wields the police as a kind of Gestapo, storming your home with weapons drawn and shooting you in the face if you fail to fork over everything The Party demands.
They don't, of course -- preferring to collect what's owed to them electronically -- unless you're batshit enough to instigate the violence and reap the consequences. But you won't, because you're so often wounded male geeks compensating for your own feelings of ineffectuality through a vicarious fantasy-world of Ayn Rand characters, Bear Grylls, and porn.
If you wholeheartedly endorse personal responsibility, follow it through instead by voting with your feet. Living in a society that elects to spend public funds on social services (i.e., civilization) is your choice. You rational agents can march your anarchist asses right out of here on our socialist roadways. Pick one. We'll rename it The John Galt Memorial Highway in your honor.
Oh, and you might consider the irony in taking compassion-counsel from Penn Jillette. What he "gets" is millions in stupidity taxes from the born-every-minute types who flock to Vegas to piss away their earnings. He's not unlike his fellow three-piece-suit-clad one-percenters on Wall Street -- another professional parasite, albeit with a neon-lit niche and a painted fingernail.
Plus what dAtkRak said: http://bit.ly/ygjlMd
And DoctorCongo: http://bit.ly/wRTX23
More on libertarianism: http://bit.ly/zBDBwG
Fittin' listenin': http://tinysong.com/lz2T
I remember my grandfather (a smartassed, cynical, liberal Marine) singing this when I came home from school. It's a satirical protest song performed by the Chad Mitchell Trio (not Pete Seeger), here set to a powerful slideshow. The Ron Paul and Tea Party plugs are unfortunate and misguided, however. The trio even lampooned similar conservatism in their softshoe, Barry's Boys: http://tinysong.com/rl14
Alonso del Rio has a YouTube channel.
Other experimental studies demonstrate that THC actually increases the risk of psychosis. In other words, it's not just a favored self-medication among the already addled. But, as in the learning-and-memory studies summarized here, the effect is short-term. Plus the risk appears only with strains high in THC, which are necessarily low in CBD, a cannabinoid that won't get you high but offering antipsychotic and even cancer-fighting effects on its own. Sources in my old review, now at Categorian: http://bit.ly/u1I0bo
Of course, none of this warrants the prohibition of cannabis. In fact, the CBD evidence alone challenges the second criterion for Schedule I drugs. But rather than pigeonholing these studies according to their potential for use or misuse in criminalization conversations, I see them as further exposing the relativity of psychiatric diagnoses. Terence McKenna explains: http://bit.ly/t7PMr
Also, cannabis isn't alone in augmenting semantic priming. Read this on psilocybin: http://bit.ly/u1Nvj9
Cannabis, psilocybin, SSRIs, and exercise all appear to promote hippocampal neurogenesis, which is probably the mechanism driving the improvements in mood and creativity they (usually) confer.
Get in the spirit.
The fairy-tale will survive. This is from a recent musical-comedy adaptation of the 1964 Russian cult-film, Morozko, which MST3K fans know and love as Jack Frost. The singers seem to be Ivan and Nastenka, but, alas, it's missing a glitzed-up Father Mushroom. Found via the Morozko entry at TVTropes, one of my favorite wastes of time.
Full film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN5tmjFghqM
I'll likely keep my SU account for a while, but I'm in the process of setting up here.
Having spent a good chunk of the past two and a half years crafting my page, and having met some amazing Stumblers in the community that early features brought together, I'm not looking forward to the Oct 24th changes. But I'm not terribly surprised either, consistent as they are with the profit-over-personality devolution of the web in general and SU in particular. I mean, I first went online when names such as "cyberspace" were still invoked with starry eyed optimism. OMNI was still in print, ferchrissake. What's the deprivation of html reviews to a generation that cut its collective teeth on William Gibson novels? Or, for that matter, to those Stumblers who've already had one or more accts put under perpetual review?
In short, I'm disappointed and pissed off, but I save my wailing-and-gnashing-of-teeth for rereadings of articles such as Terence McKenna's falsely prophetic "Virtual Reality and Electronic Highs", a crushed dream as depressing as the Star Wars prequels. So go on and make your schlocktastic changes, SU. I can take it. It'll feel like coming home. But make the background black, the text a DOS-like monospace green, and don't forget the occasional CRT flicker.
And as lytdb pointed out to me today -- she evinces a greater grasp of media studies through her intuition than I through my reading -- changes in design are changes in selection parameters, still offering opportunities. Some excellent and underappreciated text-only Stumblers could shine under the new layout, and I hope they'll continue their examples. To name just a few: civver, dAtkRaK, ignirtoq, shadowpool. They've all gone without html formatting since before it was cool. By which I mean mandatory. If anyone could survive these changes and still inspire me, they could. StumbleUpon is what it is, and as long as I'm here, I'll admire those who make the most of it, whatever it becomes.
You're the sub-Tara-nean mycelium, spreading unseen through acres of woodland. You feast on decaying trees and feed the roots of living ones. You peek from treetrunks in rain and fog and crisp autumn air. You're invisible and unappreciated to all but the trained eyes of hunters and explorers, misfits of society who come seeking misfits of the woods.
If you like this, you may also enjoy Terence McKenna's Food of the Gods, to which Narby alludes. The lives and ideas of these two parallel in some interesting ways, and ayahuasca culture, including the tourism industry of the upper Amazon, owes much to them both. Thanks, ASWIN.
Besides being cultish, many Paulite libertarians are fundamentalists.
They have holy writ, the Constitution, taking care to preserve and interpret it only according to the intentions of their saints, the Founders, ignoring inconvenient opinions, such as Jefferson's, that "laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind" and his endorsement of progressive taxes and "many devices for subdividing property".
For them, it's an article of faith that less government is necessarily better. This isn't open for discussion, not a matter to be informed by history or the examples of nations more socialist as well as more civilized than the US. It's simply to be believed and supported with Fox News clips and Ayn Rand quotations. Only a communist would question it.
Also, their method isn't science or pragmatism, but moral outrage, and their priority isn't quality of life, but rights. Not rights that would empower them -- except the right to hole up in compounds with assault rifles, yeehawing as the world goes to shit -- but industry deregulation, so eager are they to give insurers and creditors even greater control.
If this seems a straw man, it's because I've met so many with the brains of scarecrows.
In which the ghost of a walrus delivers a PSA on the slippery slope of refusing herbicidal hasenpfeffer.
Seriously. Lyrics about drugs and poverty combined with depictions of imprisonment and death frighten a runaway girl into returning to the safety of home. Those of us who grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons and afterschool programming ought to recognize this as an early -- perhaps historically significant -- public service announcement. Though, Betty Boop being a teenage sex symbol, I doubt this was intended for the edification of wayward youths any more than Looney Tunes was intended to raise awareness of animal rights, mental retardation, or the importance of gun safety. In this connection the Motion Picture Production Code and its censorship of Betty Boop make informative reading.
Wow. An eye for an eye? Really? Why stop there when you can call for transgenerational punishments too, "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the fourth generation"? Setting aside the ethics of retaliation for a moment and considering it just from a pragmatic point of view, making life even more difficult for rioters won't turn them into productive members of society or restore peace. It'll only provoke them further. I imagine that sort of reaction would put a self-satisfied smile, if anything could, on the lipless hate-hole of this venomous cretin, but that just doesn't cut it for me.
Our sense of reciprocity, the root of justice, is a mixed blessing. Because individuals cooperate better when anticipating shared rewards, it aided primate survival, as long as some belligerent alpha wasn't perceiving or imagining slights from underlings and taking life on a fanged and furious turn for the Hobbesian. Our own payback mentality promoted markets, perhaps even mathematics, but blood-feuds too were fostered by our relish for retribution, an appetite afflicting us also with afterlife anxieties. We can do better than defaulting to this ape instinct and tribal tradition.
Justice is as justice does, and must not be blind to its consequences. Pat's would only bootstrap further resentment. Members of functional societies invest in one another not because it's the decent thing to do, but because everyone pays for poverty one way or another, through welfare or through crime. The issue isn't pitying versus punishing. Neither enculturating poverty nor criminalizing it binds communities together. Rather the challenge is to equip everyone -- the rich are no less opportunistic than the poor -- with stakes in social harmony they'll be able and willing to maintain.
See also this poem, found via Worzel.
The "new research" is probably the review article by Ethan Russo I discussed recently. Besides inspiring this video, it may also have informed the Israeli cabinet's official recognition last week of the medical value of marijuana. Some of the studies Russo cites may apply to airport guy's focus on aromatherapy (see the pun in this one), but they're only a small part of the picture that article presents.
Terpenes "interact with cell membranes, neuronal and muscle ion channels, neurotransmitter receptors, G-protein coupled (odorant) receptors, second messenger systems and enzymes", Russo wrote. But they also act through nuclear receptors, proteins that interface with DNA to regulate gene expression. Their endogenous ligands include the terpenes cholesterol, steroid hormones, and vitamins A & D.
Botanical terpenes bind to them too. Ganoderic acids (from reishis) inhibit certain cancers, but not healthy cells, by binding to androgen receptors. Ursolic acid (found in many plants) also inhibits cancers, binding to glucocorticoid receptors. Cafestol (a coffee-bean terpene) binds to FXR and PXR and protects against DMBA. I suspect cannabis terpenes also promote health via nuclear-receptor binding.
Plus, some receptors, including certain nuclear receptors, are called orphan receptors because nothing our bodies produce is known to bind to them very well. This surprising observation would make sense if these evolved by taking advantage of terpenes or other metabolites produced by animals, fungi, or plants in our environment. I predict future findings will be consistent with this explanation.
If DNA is a text, its meaning is contextual, informed by transcription factors, varying with tissue type, and by their ligands, varying with your environment. Your health, your life, depends on a swarm of signaling molecules belonging to plants, their sources, as much as to you, their recipient. The better we grasp this symbiosis, the better informed our use of cannabis and our condemnation of its prohibition will be.
Damn Gram-negative, motile, curved, rod-shaped bacterium.
All are lines from this beautiful and clever film.
Why not?