Given the popularity of income redistribution, some are now calling for redistribution of health care. Economist Dwight R. Lee has a modest proposal:
Few would deny that a few additional years of life would be more precious to most Americans than the extra money they might receive from government transfers. If inequality in things that matter is important, there is a basic inequality that the worriers about inequality should be paying attention to: the inequality in life expectancy between men and women.
In 2005, life expectancy at birth was almost seven percent higher for American women than for American men (80.4 years for women vs. 75.2 years for men). Governments could certainly reduce this life-expectancy inequality by redistributing medical research funding on women's health to research on men's health, and general medical care funding from women to men.
Canadian university students push to redistribute medical funding in the opposite direction:
The Carleton University Students' Association has voted to drop a cystic fibrosis charity as the beneficiary of its annual Shinearama fundraiser, supporting a motion that argued the disease is not "inclusive" enough.
Cystic fibrosis "has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men" said the motion read Monday night to student councillors, who voted almost unanimously in favour of it.
The difference is that one of these proposals is knowingly absurd and used to make a larger point; the other is sincere.
There is no evidence that products widely promoted to help the body "detox" work, scientists warn.
The charitable trust Sense About Science reviewed 15 products, from bottled water to face scrub, and found many detox claims were "meaningless".
Anyone worried about the after-effects of Christmas overindulgence would get the same benefits from eating healthily and getting plenty of sleep, they said.
Salesman: Here is this shiny, awesome product that will improve your body in no time. Just sign here and you'll look like those models on the pictures you see on the glowing box.
Common sense: Let me see, we've gone through thousands of years of evolution and during that time we ate vegetables, berries, some meat, and drank water. I think--I'm not sure, but I think if we continue to do the same, we'll be alright, without your shiny product.
Salesman: But it will make you cool!
Common sense: Doing what's rational is cool. Buying stuff no one needs just to make you rich is not.
Really, why do we fall for these tricks? Every day there's a new amazing health product coming along, promoted by some celebrity on TV, yet the recipe for good health is simple:
- Eat a lot of vegetables, fruits, nuts, berries and lean meat
- Drink a lot of water
- Be physically active every day for at least an hour, or split the time up over a week with more intense training
- Get a good night's sleep as often as you can
The Vatican City State, the world's smallest sovereign state, has decided to divorce itself from Italian law.
Vatican legal experts say there are too many laws in Italian civil and criminal codes, and that they frequently conflict with Church principles.
Some legal observers believe that the Vatican is simply trying to assert its legal independence in cases involving for example, civil unions, divorce, living wills, or euthanasia.
So what if that's true? If I was the Pope, I'd want to secede as well, to protect the traditional core of my religion and avoid all the failure associated with big, central governments in general. The entire West is a safe haven for atheists, sluts and bureaucrats, so why not let this one tiny sovereign state decide its own laws? Makes sense to me.
This Saturday was the 120th anniversary of the day the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche collapsed mentally, never to return to sanity again. His legacy is immense, but has been influential mostly outside of the field of philosophy. To name a few influences, Freud and modern psychology would not be the same without Nietzsche's idea of the subconcious will, classical masters like Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler composed music based on Nietzsche's works, and literary geniuses like Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse owed much of their inspiration to the German philosopher. I could go on forever.
What did Nietzsche say that's been of lasting importance?
Knowledge and truth serve social and evolutionary functions: Like Quine, Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers to emphasize evolutionary aspects to epistemology, or the philosophical study of the nature of knowledge. Nietzsche claimed that most of our epistemological concepts like knowledge, truth and (the) good really serve competing purposes in our social culture--concepts that previous philosophers of his time had simply assumed were absolute and distinct from social life. Nietzsche instead suggested that we often use these concepts rhetorically to socially get ahead of others.
Morality is a power tool: Most philosophers and thinkers before Nietzsche's time had a very innocent relation to morals and ethics. Plato and Aristotle, one of the two heaviest figures in Western philosophy, each created a set of ethics believed to uphold the good in man. Nietzsche liked Aristotle's idea of an ethics serving to promote excellence, but became a moral psychologist when he traced the history of morality and found that two conflicting set of morals dominated the studies: master morality and slave morality. Morality, Nietzsche suggested, is a tool to gain power and control of others, and outlined a controversial but lasting theory that morality has played a central role in the conflict between classes, races and religions.
God is dead, because we killed him: Perhaps the most famous Nietzsche-citation still appears in the most likely and unlikely places: "God is dead!" Nietzsche, a critic of organized religion and dogma, suggested that the scientific culture that came with the Enlightenment, was killing the belief in world duality that's central in Judeo-Christian tradition. With the fall of heaven came the fall of God--man had become an atheist. But with it, the whole ethical system that kept West on its feet was rumbling, and Nietzsche held an ambivalent approach to the modern, atheistic age. The age of nihilism, or the belief in nothing, consumed the creative culture Nietzsche wished Germany would embrace, with the Ancient Greeks as his foremost influence and role model.
Existential philosophy should be naturalistic and life-affirming: Nietzsche was a naturalist, meaning he believed only in the natural reality known to us via our senses. He firmly rejected dualism, or the belief in dual worlds, and used this as one of his criticism against Abrahamistic religion. This was reflected in his existential philosophy, which centered around personal development, artistic expression, dynamic ethics, struggle, and the ever-controversial concept of the overman, or a person who accepts the inevitable aspects of the earthly life and learns to love life as it is. Central to Nietzsche's life-affirming philosophy is the idea that we must overcome resentment and appreciate our own place in the world.
Modern science confirms one of Nietzsche's main thesis
There's plenty more to be said, but I'll wrap this up by quoting a recent scientific study, confirming a classic Nietzschean-Freudian thesis:
Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that the human brain—once thought to be a seriously flawed decision maker—is actually hard-wired to allow us to make the best decisions possible with the information we are given.
Neuroscientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky received a 2002 Nobel Prize for their 1979 research that argued humans rarely make rational decisions. Since then, this has become conventional wisdom among cognition researchers
Contrary to Kahnneman and Tversky's research, Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people do indeed make optimal decisions—but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice.
Nietzsche (and later Freud) argued that reason is not the central factor in determining our behavior, thought process and impulses. Instead he claimed that emotions, instincts and the subconcious play a greater role than what we might think, and therefore came to introduce the infamous artistic dichotomy Dionysian (uncontrollable, emotional) and Apollonian (self-controlled, rational), placing emphasis on the former. Emotion and instinct fundamentally drive man, Nietzsche believed, and only later do we try to rationalize our behavior according to social and cultural norms. We're locked up in our cultural patterns and thus, in a way, our life is controlled by a fate outside of our reach. Turning that into something positive was one of Nietzsche's life quests.
What did Nietzsche leave behind him that is available to us today?
Although Nietzsche's role in modern analytic philosophy today is limited, his influence has been lasting in almost all academic, social and artistic fields in Western culture. After suffering from a mental break down, today believed to have been caused by brain cancer, Nietzsche said good bye to a public life he had already lived secluded from much of his life. His philosophy was that of a strong-willed and gifted loner, who excelled in everything from poetry, philosophy, polemic and even classical music. His legacy is astounding and speaks to all free souls who search for inner truth, balance and power. Are you one of those people? Begin your journey here.
Recent research has shown that women don't like their partners to be domineering - as if this is some kind of surprise. A lot of reports now tend to be all about confirming the stark nakedly obvious.
Being domineering isn't a trait in any way exclusive to male personalities, as women are more than capable of being bullies. Yet why is it that only women are accused of being nags? Men nag worse than I ever would, as I am repeatedly making clear. There's a saracastic saying though: women nag, but men remind. Nagging is not quite the same thing as being domineering though, it's more like being whiny.
Being domineering is arrogant, "you will do as I say and I don't want to hear any objection" rather than considering other options. It is the caveman dragging the mate off by the hair. It's no wonder if women don't like men to be domineering towards them. What we DO like, however, is that our partner is able to make firm decisions and has a "take charge" attitude. It really isn't the same thing as being domineering. The alternative, after all, is a man who doesn't know what he wants to do. We want him to know what to do, but it had better be the right thing, or else.
Residents of a small Massachusetts town, Hamilton, have a fairly cozy existence. Their hamlet is only about 30 miles from Boston, yet is secluded off a state highway which, when heading further north, eventually leads to Massachusetts' finest beach areas.
As has been the case for decades in these once working-class New England towns, wealthy urbanites decided to move in when urban sprawl took hold, and the old guard was mostly washed away. Nearby Marblehead, once known for its fisherman contingent, barely has any fishing operation left, and any new residents in town don't move in for the fishing opportunities.
So what happens when a town begins to lose its cultural identity?
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health suspended the license of Hamilton's police-run ambulance service earlier this month after an investigation revealed that a majority of the town's officers, including the chief, participated in a scheme to falsify emergency medical technician training and certification records.
That enabled them to continue to run the ambulance service - and receive thousands of dollars in bonus pay as officer-EMTs - despite the apparent widespread failure to keep up with mandatory continuing education and refresher training designed to protect the public.
'I could see if a few got away with it, but all the way to the top? That's unforgivable,' said Anthony DiFrancisco, a 74-year-old architect. Like Davis, he was interviewed at the Shoppes at Hamilton Crossing, a clapboard-covered plaza near the Wenham line where all the stores, including the Dunkin' Donuts, have signs of carved wood and polished brass.
When long-standing community values are replaced by people seeking a pseudo-quiet "country" lifestyle with all of the benefits of modern technology still at their fingertips, these communities tend to decay very slowly. Eventually, one sees that law enforcement and local politicians do what they please, since the people in the town are no longer connected to its history and there's no shared sense of community. Hamilton has become one of those towns; a few long-standing locals left, with most of the wealthy residents being transplants from more urban areas.
Do we blame the police, residents, board of selectmen? A flawed values system allowed these towns to be taken over by urbanites looking to settle with their spouses, children, and increased material junk. Massachusetts is known for layers of bureaucracy, so pointing our fingers at the policemen and replacing them with more corruptible law enforcement can't be the only solution.
Corrupt.org promotes parallelism, or the idea that communities with different values can co-exist in the same society, allowing those with strong values to prosper and those with a weaker population to die naturally and – more importantly - without affecting the strong organisms of society. Assigning rights to hundreds of millions of people across the board, then assuming we can all live in harmony with those rights has proven to be a failed strategy.
The law enforcement corruption issue has become immense, both at the local level, as seen here in Hamilton, MA, and at the federal level, as we see with drug and firearm convictions (to name two examples). It is a symptom of a society still struggling with the idea that uniform rights and entitlements for all only gives us the lowest common denominator to support the weak and corrupt, and is a clear sign that a large population cannot be managed centrally.
Breaking free of this bureaucratic paradigm and forming smaller, self-governing communities would be a step toward a better society.
The 2009 annual question from the Edge World Question Center is "what will change everything?" Answers range from the optimistic to the pessimistic, from biodegradable running shoes to the discovery of new universes. As every year, many of the answers make fascinating and mind-opening reading.
A surprisingly large number mention engineering our own bodies and brains, and many others talk about the discovery of life or intelligence outside the Earth. For what it's worth, I'd bet on the former.
Elites love liberalism because liberalism is the one ideology that won't get you torn apart by a mob. They're trying to keep their jobs, promote their businesses, and not get destroyed by idiots with a grudge.
It's just like in Bolshevik Russia during the revolution, or France during their revolution. Anyone who appeared to side with the ancien regime was a troublemaker, and that gave the crowd license to loot their homes, rape their daughters, etc.
So the elites made a big show of being liberal. It's no different in America today. If you want people to like you, convince them you're with the new and hip, the unique, the people-powered, "The People," the tolerant, the Progressive, the nice-to-everyone, the great granter of gifts to the dispossessed, etc. They don't honestly believe these views. They use their views as a justification for their status and wealth, and in an attempt to make the crowd not tear them apart.
Of course, that will never work -- when a true revolution is in play, order is suspended, and those with the guns take whatever they want. And if you are with the struggle, comrade, you will not mind sharing your house|daughters|wealth for the cause, will you?
I identify myself as a liberal, in that I believe in justice, but I'm also a historical literate, and I view the results of history as scientific knowledge. So I am anti-liberal in that liberal methods will lead to tyranny by failing and creating third-world disorder.
I have lived in third world places and, while their are good people there, the society at large is dysfunctional and it penalizes and isolates smart people. If humanity wants to reach great heights, we need to nurture and support smart people, and beat down idiots and corrupt people. Simple truth, but it requires work, and getting off the couch -- and risking being made a fool in the eyes of others, or failing, or not having the absolute "freedom" to be obligated and beholden to nothing except your whims and your slavelike job -- is the one taboo in this society.
This give us a good view of those of us in any kind of "third way": we're not liberals or conservatives, but tend to be people who from liberal motivations adopt conservative ("proven by history") viewpoints.
We tend to go beyond what even paleoconservatives will do, and look toward types of societies that thrived in the past, and try to hybridize those with our technology.
It's about time to do this. We changed our society so it could create technology; now, we should look over our options, and pick the best way to live so that our society doesn't "wag the dog" and have us serving it.
Increasing conflict worldwide and a neurotic, divided, miserable state within our society shows us that not only would this be a good idea, but it would be fun, and could liberate us from obligation to dead and dying ideas that make no sense whatsoever but are supported because they "look good" to the masses, and we want to sell them stuff, yes we do.
However, the masses are inert, and if given a chance, will destroy society around them and end up living in third-world corruption, dysfunction and squalor all while loudly proclaiming their freedom. They're not the ones to make political decisions because just like brain surgeon is a role requiring a rare personality, so is "leader." Not everyone can do it. Not even by voting.
So as you see the bloviation of wealthy, wasteful Hollywood and East Coast elites, and see them loudly proclaim their Progressive dogma, keep in mind that they're just trying to sell products. If they believed what they said, they'd live in inner city neighborhoods and be activists first and actors/marketers/politicians second.
But they don't, and that's the proof positive that elite liberalism is a marketing ploy and not an honest, well-considered belief. Feel free to laugh at anyone who takes it seriously.
"Rights" is such an absolute term. It implies that only 1 context exists for all things, and only 1 solution exists, and this same 1 solution should be applied to ∞ contexts.
Crazy talk, my nillas. Crazy talk.
As many who have read me here before (both of you!) know, I agree plenty with conservatives but am basically a liberal. Why: I believe we must impose a fair and rational society, and we cannot allow "free markets" or "social darwinism" exclusively to define it. It doesn't mean I'm against those things, but that I realize they alone are not a solution.
Big surprise: we need more than a single principle to rule ourselves.
One area I differ with conservatives is the idea that there is an absolute, right, moral, correct 1 way for us all to live. Liberals have the same idea, but their 1 way is many ways, which is equally dysfunctional. In fact, I laugh at both parties for their wholesale ignorance of history and philosophy. "The 1 way, man!!! It's the truth and the light!!!" -- more likely a camouflaged control mechanism. But I digress.
Many conservatives, wanting their kids to grow up with clear ideals, are not fond of homosexuality. They also cite some social problems with homosexuality, like its increased correlation with pedophilia, coprophagia, promiscuity, AIDS, et al. I don't deny any of this. All I say is that we need places for fags to be fags, and for conservatives to be conservatives, and it ain't gonna be the same places. No 1 rule for ₶ groups or places, right?
If we talk in terms of rights, fags have the right to be fags... that makes sense. Live and let them live.
But by the same token, and here's where get in trouble with absolutes (univeralism, 1 rule for all people) like "rights" --
If we talk in terms of rights, conservatives also have the right to be conservatives... which does not include fags. Live and let live, separately.
Now we've got a crisis.
Michael Moore, a fat turd of a human being who makes his money pandering to idiot leftists, has a good point here. So does Phred Phelps. That's why this story is interesting: two people with legitimate points duking it out.
But we who care about living in a nice place not constantly divided by conflict would like a resolution.
Mine is simple. Some parts of town are sodomy-friendly, and others are not. Any other solution is oppression to one or more groups.
As the West gets increasingly divided, we're going to see more of this action. One reason many conservatives retreat to religious communities is not so much that they love Jesus, but that they love the idea that their society has a consensus upon its values and those are conservative -- read: historically proven to succeed -- values.
I like the idea of anarchy zones, too. Don't make the rest of us pay for them, but let them rule themselves, and legalize whatever they want. Drugs. Sodomy. Prostitution. Murder. Pedophilia. The world always needs frontiers and bad lawless horrible places for it to filter out its out-of-control denizens.
If you live in a conservative zone, and want to do a ton of drugs and sodomize boars, you need to go to an anarchy zone. Sure, you lose some of the benefits of a conservative zone -- but other citizens gain the freedom to not have your lifestyle screw up their lives. And you can do all the drugs and boar anal you need.
Earlier this month, the Mini Self Storage company in Scarborough was prepared to auction off the contents of a unit rented to a mortgage brokerage that hadn't paid its bill: 60 boxes of financial records, including loan applications with personal financial information such as Social Security and bank account numbers.
In the wrong hands, sensitive information such as this can be used for identity theft. But the sale of such documents is legal.
Nothing in Maine law prevents storage facilities from selling sensitive financial, personal or medical records to the highest bidder, when their original owners do not pay their storage bills. And that is becoming a real concern, with the failure of several dozen mortgage companies in Maine since the recession began one year ago.
Our laws aren't geared toward the idea that marks on paper, or the abstractions it represents, can be unique patterns that can harm us.
You don't own your own image, if you are photographed in the street. Or even if you leave a blind down. The photographer owns that image.
You don't own your own data that companies collect from you when you visit their websites. It's perfectly legal for them to probe your leaky browser for information, and then use that to connect you to visits on their partner sites.
You don't own your own financial information that you give to mortgage companies or other financial companies. And while technically giving your social security number is voluntary, we all know it is isn't, on a practical basis.
Who's the tail and who's the dog here in our modern civilization? It's like the plot of a bad romantic comedy:
Wonderful consumer society -- which brings us admittedly some very cool technologies -- could be like a farm in which the corn just thinks it gets free room and board, until harvest time. And they're bleeding us, and each year it's harder to get what we really want: homes in safe neighborhoods with good schools, a comfortable life and enough to retire. But since we can't mention unpopular stuff in public, that remains a little secret among those who haven't yet been destroyed.
Sure, we can afford the gadgets and crap, because those are relatively small change. But who's really going to take care of us as we age? Who's going to make sure our kids don't get taught garbage and thrown out to be grist for the mill, cube-slaves instead of enlightened apes?
Big business is staffed with people who don't want to be the ones beneath the wheel. Their workers are distracted by television, drink, socialization, movies, music, anything but reality. Go to a job, and people fill your head with paranoid, useless crap information. Watch TV and it's worse. And so it grinds on. And our leaders? Our leaders are actors; in addition, they're entering their twilight years, when they stop noticing negative aspects of reality -- this is what, in nature, helped predators carry off the old and infirm:
There's a scientific reason why older people tend to see the past through rose-colored glasses, Canadian researchers suggest -- negative memories are more inclined to fade.
Study author Dr. Florin Dolcos of the University of Alberta in collaboration with colleagues at Duke University in Durham, N.C., identified brain activity that causes older adults to remember fewer negative events than their younger counterparts.
If this evidence isn't clear to you, let me make it very clear: never, ever, ever trust a Baby Boomer (anyone born 1943-1953). These people are the blight who brought us the People's Revolution of the United States, which even absent political concerns was a bad idea, as it took a divided society and fragmented it, all while legalizing and encouraging selfishness. In short, these people were dumb once; now they're dumb and blind to the consequences of their stupidity. Expect nothing from your leaders. They are checked out of reality and never to return.
The good thing about this debacle is that destruction comes to the stupid and unwary. In fact, it's coming in a tidal wave, and only those who are already prepared to keep their heads above water are going to do well. You will need to have personal discipline, family, finance and basic survival mastered, but if you do that, you'll be part of the next civilization instead of getting dragged down with the delusional.
Science Fiction writer David Brin weighs in with a classic liberal humanist Enlightenment dogma screed. What I've done is excerpt only the nodal points:
On one side are those who think the Internet will liberate humanity, in a virtuous cycle of e-volving creativity that may culminate in new and higher forms of citizenship. Meanwhile, their diametrically gloomy critics see a kind of devolution taking hold, as millions are sucked into spirals of distraction, shallowness and homogeneity, gradually surrendering what little claim we had to the term "civilization."
{ snip }
But the very freedom that makes the Internet so attractive also undermines the influence of gatekeepers who used to sift and extol some things over others, helping people to pick gold from dross.
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Carr and others worry how 6 billion ships will navigate when they can no longer even agree upon a north star.
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Clay Shirky, the technology forecaster and author of "Here Comes Everybody," presents an equally impressive array of evidence showing that the ability of individuals to autonomously scan, correlate and creatively utilize vast amounts of information is rising faster, almost daily.
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If our bodies were this inefficient -- with such an astronomical ratio of silliness to quality -- we'd explode from all the excess white blood cells before ever benefiting from the few that usefully attack an error or disease.
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Can Shirky or Huffington point to even one stupidity that has been decisively disproved online?
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Beyond imagination and creativity and opinion, we also need a dance of Shiva, destroying the insipid, vicious and untrue.
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I can self-express with the best of 'em. It's how I make my living! But all by itself, it is never, ever going to bring us to a singularity -- or even a culture of relatively effective problem solvers.
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What we need to remember is that there is nothing unique about today's quandary. Ever since the arrival of glass lenses and movable type, the amount that each person can see and know has multiplied, with new tools ranging from newspapers and lithographs to steamships and telegraphs, to radio and so on. And every time, conservative nostalgists claimed that normal people could not adapt, that such godlike powers should be reserved to an elite, or perhaps renounced.
What if both sides were correct: we're processing more information than ever before, but it's information created by our disconnection from reality?
Think of it this way. When there's a consensus as to what reality is and how to assess (judge) it and our actions toward it, relatively little information is generated. But when this isn't known, each person veers off into their own path, becoming automatic mental chaff generators before their arc converges on well-known paths and becomes normed.
Of all the blogs out there, 98% of them expressed the same six things today, just dressed up in "unique" and "important" forms.
The information we're processing -- opinions, viral videos, computer games, Wikipedia editorial drama -- has very little to do with reality. Our technology is building on the shoulders of giants but breakthroughs are not as dramatic. There is more bulk to process, and less of those rare and insightful moments when a change at the center of a structure alters its fundamental character.
Some of this is science. After you discover the digital computer, you must build a whole bunch of them to evolve the process. After you discover DNA, you begin the long process of documenting each part of it. But even that is hampered by our drama. Scientists must get funding for research that generates money; computers are products and so the fancy ones sell more than new technologies.
Maybe what Brin is looking for, as a writer, is the knowledge that the 6 billion lacking agreement about the north star are the problem -- that our civilization is in decay -- and that this process began long before technology. It happens to every society. Just like humans, if we keep our focus, we thrive; if not, we dissolve and die.
Luckily, this seemingly grim knowledge spares us from worrying about whether the internet will make us 6 billion geniuses or 6 billion fetuses: realists know that we've already arrived at 6 billion cabbage heads nodding sagely to lies and frowning at truth. Wikipedia just documents it conveniently for us.
Dying civilizations always birth a final group, a remnant who can still recognize reality despite the influx of socialized reality dogma, or the idea that humans in society can re-define reality based on human form and socialization. This parting group goes on somewhere else to found a new society. They do so on the basis of consensus about what is real, not being self-impressed by how much bloviation about nothing they can foment to convince each other of their own importance. And that's really the only singularity or net.wisdom we need look for here.
Emmanuel Goldstein's Book sums up the support for equality in this way:
The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittenly conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.
Was Goldstein right in his assumption that equality is mainly advocated by proles? Martin Regnen has the answer in his latest column: Who Loves Equality?
There is much debate over natural diet and what that means for our current consumption. Obviously, our ancestors didn't have McDonald's, but we should also be questioning very basic assumptions about what governments tell their respective people in regard to a safe and healthy diet:
For the key to the osteoporosis riddle, don’t look at calcium, look at protein. Consider these two contrasting groups. Eskimos have an exceptionally high protein intake estimated at 25 percent of total calories. They also have a high calcium intake at 2,500 mg/day. Their osteoporosis is among the worst in the world. The other instructive group are the Bantus of South Africa. They have a 12 percent protein diet, mostly plant protein, and only 200 to 350 mg/day of calcium, about half our women's intake. The women have virtually no osteoporosis despite bearing six or more children and nursing them for prolonged periods! When African women immigrate to the United States, do they develop osteoporosis? The answer is yes, but not quite as much as Caucasian or Asian women. Thus, there is a genetic difference that is modified by diet.
To answer the obvious question, "Well, where do you get your calcium?" The answer is: "From exactly the same place the cow gets the calcium, from green things that grow in the ground," mainly from leafy vegetables. After all, elephants and rhinos develop their huge bones (after being weaned) by eating green leafy plants, so do horses. Carnivorous animals also do quite nicely without leafy plants. It seems that all of earth's mammals do well if they live in harmony with their genetic programming and natural food. Only humans living an affluent life style have rampant osteoporosis.
If animal references do not convince you, think of the several billion humans on this earth who have never seen cows' milk. Wouldn't you think osteoporosis would be prevalent in this huge group? The dairy people would suggest this but the truth is exactly the opposite. They have far
less than that seen in the countries where dairy products are commonly consumed.
There are more great points brought up in this article, mainly surrounding how cows are treated, and simple analyses showing that cow milk is for cows and human milk is for humans.
In Europe, local cultures brought us niceties like Italian and French cheeses, Polish and German sausage, etc., but when all of those customs were picked up in the United States, suddenly there was a huge influx of dairy and meat consumption that is far beyond what is necessary. Our decadent lifestyles in "developed" nations have led us to consume the richest products of these cultures instead of developing a sane and healthy diet mostly free of dangerous chemicals and unnatural ingredients. Throw in fast food and one can understand just how damaging our modern diets can be.
Farmer subsidies encourage the production of cow's milk in the US, and government-sponsored initiatives follow through by encouraging US citizens to drink more milk and eat more beef (yes, even recently, where obesity has become a huge problem). This has resulted in hormones and penicillin making its way into our diets, abnormal growth patterns, and perhaps even higher incidents of disease and cancers – caused by continued consumption of something that not only was unnatural to begin with (cow's milk for humans), but is only supposed to occur in infancy.
The point we should take from this information is that nature and traditional culture typically know what's best for our bodies. Anything unnatural that's introduced into our diets is only going to be harmful down the road, especially if we are told to consume vast quantities of such things.
One extreme form of following a natural diet is the Paleo diet. Some examples of what to eat and what to avoid when following this diet include:
Eat none of the following:
• Grains- including bread, pasta, noodles
• Beans- including string beans, kidney beans, lentils, peanuts, snow-peas and peas
• Potatoes
• Dairy products
• Sugar
• Salt
Eat the following:
• Meat, chicken and fish
• Eggs
• Fruit
• Vegetables (especially root vegetables, but definitely not including potatoes or sweet potatoes)
• Nuts, eg. walnuts, brazil nuts, macadamia, almond. Do not eat peanuts (a bean) or cashews (a family of their own)
• Berries- strawberries, blueberries, raspberries etc.
Try to increase your intake of:
• Root vegetables- carrots, turnips, parsnips, rutabagas, Swedes
• Organ meats- liver and kidneys (I accept that many people find these unpalatable and won’t eat them)
There may be some debate over the specifics – certainly, bread and aged cheese are parts of the diet in traditional European culture - but there probably isn’t any harm in following the diet, as it’s grounded in common sense when considering our genetic makeup has not changed significantly in thousands of years.
Cows, chickens, eggs, milk – none of this was ever meant to be consumed in exactly the same absurd quantities across millions of people and different geographical locations. Corporate farming may have brought us equality on the supermarket shelf, but has certainly messed with our diets, and now we're seeing serious consequences.
Solution: stop human growth, reduce population, reduce unnecessary use of power -- this requires telling Joe Sixpack he can't have a giant pickup truck, Martha Upperclassuburbanwife that she can't fly to Rio, and your average dumb liberal cubicle dwelling apartment voter that social welfare programs must die so we stop breeding parasites.
That's socially unacceptable.
So instead, we get the faux solutions:
At the heart of much of the disagreement is that perennial struggle between rich and poor. Developing countries want industrialized countries – whose populations are responsible the lion’s share of greenhouse emissions – to lead the way by making the steepest reductions in emissions. They also want money and technology to help them make their own emissions cuts and adapt to the impacts of climate change.
According to the Guardian, in Britain, European Union officials have proposed making an 80 percent to 95 percent reduction in greenhouse emissions by 2050 in exchange for developing countries’ reducing their emissions by 15 percent to 30 percent over the next decade. They have not yet heard a reaction, but Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that the developed world is unlikely to be impressed by the offer, which does not mandate any short-term cuts for rich countries.
“Unless the developed world comes up with strong, clear targets for 2020 themselves,” Dr. Pachauri told the Guardian, “I think it is unlikely the developing world will commit itself to reductions.”
First, I think we'll find when more accurate figures are available that the developing world -- a euphemism for third world countries with average IQs below 98 -- is creating as much carbon and worse pollution than the developed -- a euphemism for industrialized countries with average IQs near or above 100 -- world, through slash and burn agriculture, the burning of waste, deforestation and general disorganization.
Third world people outnumber first world people nine to one.
Second, I think they ask the impossible: the rich have spent a long time building an infrastructure and cannot simply reverse it; that's like suicide. So they propose a gradual de-escalation, but that's not enough for the third world, which wants to be under the illusion that it will be just like London and Munich tomorrow if "just given a chance" -- like every dishwasher who's an aspiring rapper, and every pasty white cubicle dwelling apartment voter who doesn't understand why CEOs get paid more than workers. It's just not fair, man!
Finally, let's look at this strategically. We're asking humanity's most productive people to slow down and let others catch up, but the others are politically unstable, greater in population, and much higher in dysfunction. Why stop? Let the best rise.
We all contribute to climate change, but none of us can individually be blamed for it. So we walk around with a free-floating sense of guilt that’s unlikely to be lifted by the purchase of wind-power credits or halogen bulbs.
Annina Rüst, a Swiss-born artist-inventor...built a translucent leg band that keeps track of your electricity consumption. When it detects, via a special power monitor, that electric current levels have exceeded a certain threshold, the wireless device slowly drives six stainless-steel thorns into the flesh of your leg. “It’s therapy for environmental guilt,” says Rüst, who modeled her “personal techno-garter” on the spiked bands worn as a means of self-mortification by a monk in Dan Brown’s novel “The Da Vinci Code.”
The 21st century equivalent of self-flagellation, but now it's for secular, not religious reasons.
Regardless, it's oblivious to the nature of the problem or its potential solutions. Cause yourself pain, feel better; is that any different than causing yourself pleasure, feel better? These are distractions.
The solutions are simple. We're just not mentally mature enough to face them.
Environmentalists who hope a slowing global economy will mean big falls in greenhouse gas emissions are likely to be disappointed.
Because despite a gloomy economic forecast for 2009, the annual growth in emissions of 3% is only likely to slow modestly, and may even rise over the long term because of the downturn's impact on global climate talks and the funding of renewable energy projects.
Shoot, we were hoping it was this easy. But it wasn't. The system won't self-regulate. We'll actually have to fix it. And that requires we come out of our comfort zones, face our fear of being judged inferior, and decide to cut ourselves back -- and accept the results as they fall.
But that's socially unacceptable, because society is filled with the underconfident, the socially retarded, the immature, the fearful, the withdrawn, the neurotic... a bumper crop of stupid. When will smarter people learn that dumber people ALWAYS oppress smarter people by blocking the path to necessary decisions?
The Republic of Texas movement campaigns for Texas to be officially separated from the United States of America, on the grounds that Texas never acceded to be part of the union and has the right to forge its own future, maintaining sovereignty and resisting integration into the planned North American Union. Senator Ed Brannum is spokesman for the Republic of Texas movement, and kindly granted us an interview.
Martin Regnen poses a controversial question this week:
The primary purpose of marriage is and has always been to reduce violence between men competing for mates. Westerners are much less violent than we were only a few hundred years ago, and other peoples possibly are as well. We are far less likely to die by violence. Have we become so nonviolent and orderly that marriage has lost its raison d'etre? Would marriage still be going strong in spite of the easy availability of birth control and employment for women if trying to kill your wife's lover were normal behavior?
A long-married couple's claim that they are still as much in love as they day they wed is usually met with more than a pinch of disbelief.
Couples who are still deeply in love after more than two decades of marriage experience the same sense of euphoria as those in the first flush of love, brain scans showed.
Those newly in love also showed activity in a part of the brain associated with obsession and anxiety, whereas the long-timers were using parts linked to calmness and the suppression of pain.
Dr Fisher said: 'The difference is that in long-term love, the obsession, the mania, the anxiety, has been replaced with calm.
Other work by the same researchers has shown that the brain can differentiate between sex and love.
Love exists.
Something in this universe loves enough to create love, and to leave sweet delight there for those who can discipline themselves enough to see it.
Sex, sweat, money, symbols and tokens are NOT the things they seem to be effects of.
Love, and love for life, alone are immortal.
What about love for an idea... can that be immortal?
Ludwig van Beethoven was born into the end of an age and the birth of a new one, and striding both, was able to see by parallax motion the clarity for which both strived, but fell short. As a musical genius and not a historian, he was caught between the two in a search for an idealized beauty that he found only in music.
After his birth on December 16, 1770, Beethoven grew up in a musical family. His father, a singer in a local choir, taught him the basics but afterwards Beethoven studied with a series of composers and court musicians: Christian Gottlob Neefe, Joseph Haydn, Johann Baptist Schenk, Johann Georg Albrechtsberger and Antonio Salieri. Publishing his first music at age 12, he had a moderately successful career as a court musician until age 24, when he was able to find patrons in Vienna -- the musical center of the world at that time.
He faced challenges in his early life that left him somewhat isolated. His home life was semi-stable as a youth. His father was an alcoholic; tuberculosis killed his mother when he was 16. He raised his brothers and at one point entailed half of his father's income to provide for them. He kept driving forward, possessed by a vision of his music, and often retreating from a chaotic life into that vision.
Originally from Bonn, Beethoven moved to Vienna in his early 20s and had to adapt to the more cosmopolitan, political urban lifestyle. Known as a masterful pianist, Beethoven was able to find work and was recognized as being of quality, but this never translated into a stable living. Forced to teach students, and frequently derailed by crises in his personal life of a familial nature, he longed for great stability where he could simply write music -- and be alone, a condition he had come to accept and even enjoy.
In his early 30s, however, Beethoven faced another crisis: the gradual but inevitable loss of his hearing. What he first noticed as tinnitus, or a ringing in his ears, burgeoned into a more serious loss of hearing spurred by lesions forming in his inner ears. In a relatively short span of days, Beethoven had to face the instability of his career and a new challenge, incoming deafness. At first he contemplated suicide, but after a long darkness of the soul, composed what he called his "Heiligenstadt Testament," which was a statement of heroic idealism in that he decided to not only stand and fight, but overcome physical and political barriers so that he might realize transcendental beauty through music.
Over the next decade, he slowly decreased and eventually stopped both performing in public and most conversation, trying to shield what was left of his hearing. At the same time, he had to shield himself from disappointments as inspirations from his youth turned prosaic or destructive in his adulthood; in the transitional age between classical and Romantic music, Beethoven aspired to the new ideals of the enlightenment, including democracy and individualism. As time went on, he saw democracy lead to tyranny -- he scratched out the dedication of his third symphony to Napoleon as soon as the latter declared himself Emperor -- and saw through the bad judgments of others the triumph of individualism in a lack of discipline and consequently, error.
For Beethoven, his gift was not the effortless emanations from another world that others, notably Mozart, professed to have. It was a grueling process of organizing his thoughts, a spark of an idea, and then an even more grueling process of revision and refinement. He may have been the best composer of his day, but he may equally have been the hardest working, even as he saw rewards go to lesser talents and other discouragements. Following his realizations in the Heiligenstadt Testament, he ploughed ahead for a shimmering transcendental vision, and ignored daily privations including awkward living circumstances, worries about money, his collapsing failing and his decaying hearing.
Par for the course in the new democratic era, Beethoven was also probably the first rockstar-style composer in that he was recognized by society at large and not only a select group of nobles (for whom music was written on commission) and intellectuals. He also expressed what the crowd wanted to hear, incorporating the humanistic poem "Ode to Joy" of Friedrich Schiller into his final symphonic work; even so, he had an ambivalent relationship to these ideas, finding them too concrete for the turbulence of his soul, although he had nothing better to shove into the maw of need demanding a narrative for the future.
When Beethoven died in 1827, his funeral was that of a public artist adored although not necessarily understood by the masses, forming the basis for the crisis that faced rockstars of the future from Jim Morrison to Kurt Cobain. Over ten thousand people attended what became one of the major events of the year. During his lifetime, however, Beethoven was known as much for his feisty intolerance of the stupidity of others as for any humanistic gestures, which was fitting for someone who had to bulldoze aside confused minds in order to realize his own vision.
Like any born between identifiable cycles of history, Beethoven lived in ambiguity and struggled with it in his music and ideas. While he belonged to the new age, he sung praises of the old especially in the second half of his life, studying past composers and integrating their own styles into his own; he also while acknowledging the humanistic urge of the age, found problems with it and was disappointed by it time and again. What kept him together was his focus on creating transcendental music that could unite the ages around the abstraction of values, and all with the patience to hear his works with an open heart are richer for it.
Other work by the same researchers has shown that the brain can differentiate between work and love.
Whether it's nature, science, God or nothingness that creates such love as 20-year-newlywedism or Ludwig van Beethoven, I will worship it in profound humility of my soul, and act according to a code that exhalts it.
Here's a fascinating religious group about to go extinct:
Zoroastrians (known in India as Parsis) regard sky burials, in which the bodies are exposed to natural elements including vultures in open-topped "Towers of Silence," as an ecologically friendly alternative to cremation, consistent with their religion's reverence for the earth. A Zoroastrian priest clad in a long, cotton robe explains: "Death is considered to be the work of Angra Mainyu, the embodiment of all that is evil, whereas the earth and all that is beautiful is considered to be the pure work of God. We must not pollute the earth with our remains."
Worldwide, there are 190,000 Zoroastrians at most, and perhaps as few as 124,000 by some estimates. Although Zoroastrians are few in number, their faith has influenced Judaism, Christianity and Islam with its teachings of a single deity, a dualistic universe of good versus evil, and a final day of reckoning. The religion professes that humankind is designed to evolve toward perfection, but is complicated by evil forces such as greed, lust and hatred, explains Mehraban Firouzgary, the head priest of the Zoroastrian temple in Tehran. According to Zoroastrians, these evil forces must be challenged proactively by developing a "good mind" that embraces a life of good thoughts, good words and good deeds.
Despite their shrinking population, Zoroastrians remain fiercely divided over whether to recognize interfaith families, let alone accept non-generational Zoroastrians. Tens of thousands fled Persia during the Islamic incursions in the 10th Century and were granted refuge in India under the condition they did not marry outside their faith or proselytize to the Hindu majority. Ramiyar P. Karanjia, principal of a Zoroastrian religious school in Mumbai, India, insists, "Conversion is not part of our religion." Yet, in India, home to the majority of Zoroastrians, the community is declining by about 10% every decennial census, according to a report released by UNESCO. Today, Zoroastrians remain a tight-knit and self-secluded community that strongly encourages marriage within the faith.
The Zoroastrians clearly intend to remain an ethnically distinct group with its own set of religious and cultural values. If they decide to merge with other ethnic groups, or adopt the universalist values of globalization, their culture will lose its essence and retain only the facade of its former glory. Alternately, they can embrace parallelism, the mutually independent existence of local, organic communities whose members share the same ethnic, cultural, historical and linguistic roots. Some people would object here on the grounds that the Zoroastrian population is so small that ethnic separatism would lead to inbreeding. We're realists here at Corrupt, so let's review the facts:
In 2002, the anthropologist John H. Moore estimated that a population of 150–180 would allow normal reproduction for 60 to 80 generations — equivalent to 2000 years.
A much smaller initial population of as little as two female humans should be viable as long as human embryos are available from Earth. Use of a sperm bank from Earth also allows a smaller starting base with negligible inbreeding.
Researchers in conservation biology have tended to adopt the "50/500" rule of thumb initially advanced by Franklin and Soule. This rule says a short-term effective population size (Ne) of 50 is needed to prevent an unacceptable rate of inbreeding, while a long‐term Ne of 500 is required to maintain overall genetic variability. The Ne = 50 prescription corresponds to an inbreeding rate of 1% per generation, approximately half the maximum rate tolerated by domestic animal breeders. The Ne = 500 value attempts to balance the rate of gain in genetic variation due to mutation with the rate of loss due to genetic drift.
Even the lower estimate of the Zoroastrian population well exceeds healthy limits. So what other factor could be preventing the development of parallelism? As usual, human ignorance and short-term thinking are to blame:
Brazil is bracing for an imminent ruling on the future of one of its largest indigenous reservations - a decision that campaigners claim could spell disaster for indigenous communities across the country.
Located in the isolated Amazonian state of Roraima, the sprawling 1.7m-hectare (4.2m-acre) reserve was ordered by Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio da Silva, and is home to more than 18,000 aborigines from five different ethnic groups. Campaigners hailed the establishment of Raposa Serra do Sol as a historic move to protect the country's indigenous peoples from contact with the outside world.
Nearly all non-aborigines require legal permission to enter indigenous lands. But several rice farmers have continued to operate inside the reserve. They describe the demarcation of Raposa Serra do Sol as an obstacle to economic development and point to the fact that there are numerous aborigines among their employees.
It makes perfect sense for the native tribes to require legal permission from non-aborigines to enter their land, especially tourists, who tend to be less respectful than local visitors. The rice farmers who complain about restricted economic growth aren't concerned about the region's overall well-being; they're simply trying to cash in on cheap labour. Economic and industrial growth are exactly what's threatening to replace traditional culture with universalist values, and have almost driven our environment to the brink of collapse. We can reverse this trend, and many things point to the fact that the new world order – globalization – is finally losing momentum. Parallelism is the philosophy that will replace it in the future, offering a multitude of small-scale communities in which people live traditional, sustainable and healthy lifestyles. And it is the only organizational plan which naturally remedies the conflicts between “minority” groups and their more influential host cultures.
Newly-published research reveals that financial incentives are remarkably effective in motivating people to lose weight. In a study involving 57 subjects, half were rewarded with a lottery prize if they achieved the weight loss goal (16 pounds), and the other half were asked to make a substantial cash deposit (several hundred dollars) which they would forfeit if they failed to lose the 16 pounds.
What this fascinatingly reveals is that many people consider a financial incentive to be far more important than protecting or improving their own health. The promise of simply "being healthier" doesn't work for many people, but flashing some cash seems to work relatively well to incentivize their weight loss efforts.
This study, of course, has larger implications: Should society create financial incentives that pay people to stay healthy? From a purely economic point of view, it would certainly be worth the investment, given the extremely high costs of medical care associated with obesity and all the diseases it promotes (cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc.).
While at first this may seem like a great idea, it's really a crowd trap, because it'll make unhealthy people dependent upon healthy people. In other words, we're offering to pay clueless individuals to refrain from being clueless. It reminds me of the joke, “I'll give you ten bucks to shut up for five minutes!.” It's blackmail by morons. A better suggestion would be to deny these people public health care and let them finance their own lifestyles via private alternatives. One of the biggest problems with our civilization is that it insists on taking care of the clueless on everyone's account. Now the social healthcare system is on the verge of collapse and the economic damage caused by their ignorance is immeasurable. Let them pay their own dues, because it's time to start taking responsibility for ourselves and our communities again.
A survey this month found that almost three quarters of doctors believe in miracles. Somehow I doubt that this news is all that reasurring to a patient, even if they are themselves religious. We want doctors to have faith in the medicines they give us, but we would prefer that this confidence came from the scientific proof of its efficacy rather than through keeping their fingers crossed and hoping for divine intervention. There is a problem though. Being a doctor is not a very happy career for those who demand that medicines are thoroughly tested, safe and beneficial to patients. Maybe this is why those who believe in miracles end up dominating the medical profession.
It has occasionally been observed that when doctors go on strike, the death rate drops significantly.
To find out whether the industrial action was affecting deaths in the country, the Jerusalem Post interviewed non-profit making Jewish burial societies, which perform funerals for the vast majority of Israelis. Hananya Shahor, the veteran director of Jerusalems Kehilat Yerushalayim burial society said, "The number of funerals we have performed has fallen drastically." Meir Adler, manager of the Shamgar Funeral Parlour, which buries most other residents of Jerusalem, declared with much more certainty: "There definitely is a connection between the doctors sanctions and fewer deaths. We saw the same thing in 1983 when the Israel Medical Association applied sanctions for four and a half months."
For those who think in black and white: no I am not saying that doctors only do harm, after all, if they never helped anyone there wouldn't be any apparent miracles now would there? You should see a doctor if you really feel you need to, but it is a good thing that you can check for yourself what the possible side-effects may be of whatever drug they administer to you. Sound fair?
After a series of prescription-medication scares in recent years, consumers are receiving a flood of safety information about the drugs they take -- so much that it risks scaring some people.Too much information about drug safety -- disseminated through media, online alerts from consumer watchdog groups and even by the Food and Drug Administration itself -- might overwhelm patients and raise undue alarm, some medical professionals caution. A Pfizer Inc. survey of 300 medical professionals in March found that 89% of respondents were at least somewhat concerned that patients might stop their medications if potentially negative safety information was released to the public too early.
Let's hope these professionals don't succeed in having this information taken away from us. Some of us like to weigh up risks, but we are probably in the minority anyway to judge by the wreck society is in. If people eat GM crops, never mind smoking and generally unhealthy lifestyles, it is not that likely many will worry much about what's in the magic pills their faith healer doles out. If you do check it out, you can try to make an educated choice.
Financial pressures and incentives put upon the medical profession by corporate bullies are the biggest threat to drug safety. Doctors are bribed to sell certain brands and practices such as paying doctors per vaccine shot encourage coercion to maximise uptake.
Critics, including prominent cancer and kidney doctors, say the payments give physicians an incentive to prescribe the medicines at levels that might increase patients risks of heart attacks or strokes.
Sometimes the drug company conspires to lie to the doctors.
In her lawsuit, Gleason charges she was sexually harassed and, eventually, fired because she refused to follow orders to market the drug for all purposes, such as telling docs the drug could be used in lower-cost, 100mg doses to treat candidemia. The FDA, though, had not approved Mycamine for that use or dosage. As an example, she cites a June 2007 club luncheon at which a presentation was being made and she refused her supervisor's instructions to discuss an unapproved clinical study article.However, her supervisor, Tom Long, allegedly proceeded to discuss the article. In violation of FDA rules, Mr. Long represented to the physicians who were present at the luncheon that Mycamine 100mg is being used at Tampa General Hospital and Jackson Memorial, two large hospitals in Tampa Regionals sales territory, according to the lawsuit. Mr. Long falsely told the physicians present at the luncheon that, with regard to Mycamine, no one questions the 100 mg anymore, its a given.
In the above case a drug was being pushed for uses other than those it was approved for. But the corruption often starts at an earlier stage in the process. There are side effects for some drugs that you simply cannot discover, unless you find out the hard way.
There's a common assumption that when a drug makes it to market, it has run a rigorous gantlet of testing and proper disclosure. Testing, yes. Disclosure - not necessarily.Findings from many clinical studies assessing prescription drugs never see light of day. That skews the basic scientific record that every patient, physician and researcher needs to judge whether treatments cause more harm than good. There is no easy way to discover how much knowledge we've been missing, raising the possibility that we may be taking medications that are less effective than we've been led to believe or may have undisclosed side effects."
As the medical industry is run for private profit these problems are inevitable. Given that medicine has such a profound impact upon our lives and upon society itself, there is good reason to prioritise strict controls, wiping out the growing mafia-like corruption by Big Pharma. It is hoping for a miracle if anyone expect's this to be tackled under a democracy in which corporations pull political strings.
[President-elect Barack Obama's chief of staff Rahm ] Emanuel gave the governor's office a list of "candidates that would be acceptable to President-elect Barack Obama" but no "quid pro quo" or "dealmaking" is suspected.
Citing "a source familiar with the investigation," Fox says that Emanuel had "multiple conversations" with Blagojevich and his chief of staff John Harris, who was also arrested Tuesday on federal corruption charges, about the seat and that they we're "likely recorded and in FBI possession."
He isn't even in office yet, and we're having corruption scandals worse than anything during the Bush years.
I guess "hope" and "change" beg the question: hope for who? And change for who? Being a third world corrupt banana republic is a big change, and gives hope to all who hate us.
Brett Stevens reviews green teas and British candy this week:
Trying to live a healthy, moral, realistic life in a time when most people are oriented toward distraction is a beast. The rest of them care more about what makes them look cool to others, and how they can band together to conspire to face the fewest challenges in life possible, and you're without hope looking for something as simple as a beverage you can believe in. Never fear: we've found the answer, at least for green teas.
None of us like modern society, yet we have to live in it. Part of that means finding candy for your kids, because although I too dislike beet-derived refined sugar, they're going to get exposed to it, so you want an option at home that's not chock full of chemicals to shrink their testicles and give them cancer or pre-AIDS. Ideally, from the somewhat paranoid perspective of a protective parent, you would be able to give them sugared zucchini, but let's be realistic about what kids will accept.
A more truthful (and therefore more useful) explanation of the Virginia Tech murders focuses not on Cho’s character but on the interaction between it and the situations he was in, not on his personal identity but on the interplay between who he was and how other people treated him.
In social settings, he froze. He was diagnosed at the age of 14 as having a disorder called selective mutism, the loss of ability to speak, out of fear of being laughed at. Cho found it sheer torture to speak in class.
From information that has so far come to light, Cho appears to have been the target of an uncommon but distinct and devastating social process called workplace mobbing. It is the impassioned ganging up of managers and/or peers against a targeted worker, the object being the target’s absolute humiliation and elimination from respectable company. It is a matter of turning a person who is different or troublesome into a nonperson, rubbing his or her nose in dirt.
The single main setting appears to have been Cho’s creative writing course. It was taught by Distinguished Professor Nikki Giovanni, a poet of such fame and scholarly authority that degradation by her would cut to the bone. By Giovanni’s admission, she and Cho locked horns, and the conflict between them was played out in full view of the class. Unable to understand or tolerate Cho's extreme introversion, Giovanni badgered him, asking him to remove his sunglasses, show his face, and participate in class as other students did. When he resisted, she decided he was, as she put it, a bully, an evil presence in her class. Eventually, Giovanni demanded that Cho leave the class. He refused. In a letter to her department chair, Lucinda Roy, Giovanni threatened to resign her position if Cho were not removed.
The other form of participation in a mob is action that forms part of one's job description. Lucinda Roy, as chair of English, had to do something in response to Giovanni's threat. Similarly, the police, mental-health professionals, and judge who dealt with Cho on December 13-14, 2005, were just "doing their jobs," fulfilling the duties for which they were being paid.
When social reality determines success in a society, the words of others are more than emotionally damaging -- they damage your prospects.
His teacher, an execrable poet, decided to make it morally acceptable to target him, and so he was mobbed.
When you step outside of social reality, as he had to, because of his social fear, you see the truths others are too busy being social to see.
That, plus a hatred for his insane and pompous teacher, could be a strong motivating force.
Either way, he showed us like Holden Caulfield the hollowness of this time -- with hollow points.
The Amish population has nearly doubled in the U.S. over the last 15 years, growing to 227,000 this year, according to estimates from Elizabethtown College's Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies.
The Amish emigrated from central Europe to Pennsylvania in the early 1700s. Also known as the "Plain People," the Amish believe they must live a simple, nonviolent life. Many reject electricity, indoor plumbing and cars.
Amish advocates - the Amish religion precludes them from defending themselves physically or legally - argue the Amish belief that they must live apart from the world trumps local regulations.
"The permit itself might not be so bad, but to change your lifestyle to have to get one, that's against our convictions," Borntreger said as he sat in his kitchen with his wife, Ruth.
More people and groups should secede from our multicultural, monocultural, capitalist, socialist, democratic, totalitarian, confused and dying civilization.
Stick to a few principles that make sense -- because they're direct responses to reality, not responses to "responses" to reality -- and live well. Ignore the theatrical illusion that is modern society.
It will burn itself out, and leave behind a confused grey race of third world people who you can hire to chop wood, but nothing more complicated. They will however be genetically able to cite the Deerhoof discography, make their hair flip, and wear little pointy shoes to make themselves look svelte and metrosexual.
The document presents the Bush record as an unalloyed success.
It mentions none of the episodes that detractors say have marred his presidency: the collapse of the housing market and major financial services companies, the flawed intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, the federal response to Hurricane Katrina or the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
That's all you've got?
The collapse of the housing market: was in play long before his presidency and, since it was designed to help the underprivileged, was politically untouchable.
The flawed intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war: probably not his concern. He wanted to hit someone back after terrorists hit the USA, and use democracy/capitalism to disrupt fundamentalist Islam just as it disrupted fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Judaism.
The federal response to Hurricane Katrina: this wasn't his fault, either. The local government was slow in asking for help, and FEMA -- untested -- did an OK job considering the evacuees were all insane criminals.
The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib/Gitmo: this one may stick, but the question is how important it is.
So why do people love to hate him?
We wanted to put our heads in the sand after 9/11. Instead, the war dragged on.
That's it. The rest are the usual callow excuses made by the usual dummies.
Colonialism, if you think about it, is a form of multiculturalism.
It leaves behind a revolutionary mindset that destroys culture in a way colonialism cannot and never attempts to do: it gets inside of that culture and perverts it, because the enemy appears so clearly to need defeating more than anything else.
What's left is reactionary and dissolves itself.
Mugabe has murdered more black Africans than even the apartheid regime in white-ruled South Africa. A liberation hero turned despot, he is Ian Smith with a black face - only many times worse.
I was shocked that liberals and leftwingers who had campaigned so honourably against apartheid were silent. They were outraged by a white racist regime killing black people, but not when the killing was being done by a black tyrant. This double standard and indifference to mass murder appalled me.
If Slobodan Milosevic can be indicted and put on trial, why can't Robert Mugabe?
My only problem with Mugabe is that he does not act in a totalitarian manner. If you want white farmers out, send them out... don't use hired thugs to try to drive them out. Be a man about it.
The writer of the piece quoted above doesn't understand the West's relationship to non-whites. They are for us ways to show we have social altruism points. We don't actually give a damn what happens to them; like Bono of U2 or Bill Gates of the Gates Foundation, we want to use our public acts of highly visible giving and empowerment of them to make ourselves look good, not to save them.
It's colonialism in reverse, except where colonialists wanted to rule over roughly autonomous states and use their resources, reverse colonialism is warfare against those who might happen to have power at all, or natural advantages. It's revenge war.
If you're going to play the game of politics -- convincing others of what they should do, a surrogate for natural selection pressure -- you're going to end up making big symbols you must defend even when reality clashes with them.
For the traditionalists:
The Vatican hardened its opposition Friday to using embryos for stem cell research, cloning and in-vitro fertilization. But in a major new document on bioethics, it showed flexibility on some forms of gene therapy and left open questions surrounding embryo adoption.
The Vatican's overall position stems from its belief that human life begins at conception and must be given the consequent respect and dignity from that moment on. The Vatican also holds that human life should be created through intercourse between husband and wife, not in a petri dish.
For the new revolutionaries and leftists, just suggest that abilities are determined by biology and are inherently unequal among nations, classes, castes, ethnicities, races, genders and professions, and you'll get a tantrum. "But I wanna believe I could be a rocket scientist, too!"
The correct political decision is to say "yes u can haz cheezburger" and then hope someone does rogue research so you don't end up broadsided when some nation-state with fewer laws does it.
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