Born Again Redneck's Daily Duh!

Magic mshrooms: "demedicalisation of dying"

2011-10-15T00:49:00.000-07:00

I recently read an article about this but it's old hat as this essay from 2004 suggests.

From The Hallucinogenic Way of Dying:

Almost as soon as Dr. Charles Grob secured approval to study the effects of psilocybin on Stage IV cancer patients, he faced another challenge, one nearly as formidable.
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Psilocybin is relatively safe; significantly safer, in fact, than the drug Grob had initially sought to use for the study, MDMA (otherwise known as "Ecstasy"); according to most research, you'd have to ingest your own body weight in "magic mushrooms" to poison yourself. But it's still a Schedule I drug, regarded by the federal authorities as having a high potential for abuse and no medical application.
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Grob hopes to find that, in addition to reducing psychological distress associated with impending death, psilocybin is the rare substance that can safely reduce a cancer sufferer's need for pain medication – not because it blunts pain, as morphine does, but because it "changes one's perception of pain."

The whole essay is worth reading but it just confirms my hunch, after thirty years of working in pharmacy that herbal drugs are illegal because they would cut into big pharmacy's profits. They work better and have fewer nasty side effects and they're basically free - god-given.

I have prescriptions for quite a few drugs that have "a high potential for abuse" but they are not classed as Schedule I drug because they are manufactured by big pharmacy. The problem is their side-effects which affect one's "quality of life". Most man-made drugs are two-edged swords. Think about the TV commercials for minor irritations like itches and sneezes. They all end up by saying that there is a "possibility" that you will piss your liver out through your kidneys. I'm sorry; but even nausea and constipation (side-effects of many man-made "painkillers" like morphine and codeine and all opiates) is a "quality of life" issue.

From Using 'magic mushrooms' to reduce anxiety in the final hours of life:

A medical ethics expert has said hallucinogenic drugs could be used to enhance the experience of dying.

The controversial suggestions include using ecstasy and 'magic mushrooms' to encourage closer bonding with family members and reduce anxiety in the final hours of life.

Robin Mackenzie, director of medical law and ethics at the University of Kent, will speak out at a workshop in London today to call for people to be given more choice over how they die.

Dr Mackenzie told the Independent newspaper: 'We have the technology to enhance the experience of dying.'
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She said: 'My research into the demedicalisation of dying suggests that there is a groundswell of people wanting to exercise choices in dying beyond euthanasia and palliative care options.

'We are encouraged to manage our lives and managing our deaths could be part of that.

'I can see good reasons why doctors don't want to be involved. But that will increase the demand for self-help measures.'

For a "real life" story read Stairway to Heaven: Psychedelics Soothe Dying.

I'm all for the "demedicalisation of dying." Or at least the de-institutionilization of death. It's the difference between dining in a fine restaurant and getting an intravenous infusion of "nutrition" in hospital. Anybody got any "magic mushrooms?"

Occupy Wall Street: the "herbal tea party"

2011-10-09T22:06:00.000-07:00

I know where they're coming from - but...

Do you want chamomile or patchouli in your hot water?

I was born and raised in Africa and to me these "impoverished" neo-hippies are risible.

Taylor Marvin checks the math of the above image, which has been making the rounds:

Is this true? Is the income of the bottom 99% of US citizens in the top 1% of world income? Short answer: maybe. From the World Bank, World Development Indicators dataset, in 2009 per capita US income was $45,989, compared to a world average of $8,599. Plugging this into the Global Rich List income comparison tool tell us that the average American falls into the top 1.43% of humanity, suggesting that the 99 Percent graphic’s claim is just off.

Adbusters behind "Occupy Wall Street"

2011-10-04T22:39:00.000-07:00

We all know that the kids camping out in NY are "useful idiots" but who are the agents provocateurs Marxist/Leninist puppeteers manipulating them?

Adbusters!

A friend sent me over a well thought-out critique of the event from Mother Jones. When I saw the third word in the article, "Adbusters," I immediately looked away from my screen and said out loud "Oh dear God. The poor kids..." The article clearly states Adbusters' hand in perpetuating this into being, which is exactly the problem. Adbusters makes caviar socialists like Dominique Strauss-Kahn look like the salt of the earth, saviors of the working class. They basically prey on college students and twenty-somethings unsure of themselves but with distrust in authority, selling their massive and expensive glossy magazine. The pages reek of anarchist navel-gazing and wankery and self-important "down with corporations/big business/capitalism" screeds that really say little if anything at all.

But worst is Adbusters' method of "protesting," called "culture jamming."

It's a cross between an elaborate prank and choosing not to do something voluntarily. "Buy Nothing Day," a protest to Black Friday by buying...nothing? "Digital Detox Week," a protest to technology by not using it for a week? To anyone else, these "culture jams" look really silly. But Adbusters sincerely believes that performing these acts of "protest," rather than confronting and attacking the institutions that harm culture directly, is the best way of changing the culture. Really. And when you ask how the culture should change, they blather without outlining a specific agenda. Hell, Adbusters' whole existence seems bent on the hopes that nobody will notice that when challenged, they are incapable of making a coherent and compelling argument defending their beliefs and politics, or seeing that their actions may not have an impact. They live in a detached fantasy world similar to Sarah Palin's, only much bigger.

Were Occupy Wall Street an organic creation, then I'd be slightly more sympathetic to the cause. But this is Adbusters' wet dream: Twisting and diluting the positive and overwhelming force of the Arab Spring (even name-checking Tahrir in their announcement of Occupy Wall Street), even going as far as warping the definition of civil disobedience, to create a slightly more advanced form of culture jamming that might give them the attention they so crave. Of course the people in Occupy Wall Street don't have clear reasons or goals. Adbusters made it that way. And that alone fills me with rage.

My immediate thought is: Who's behind Adbusters?

Here's their website.

Wikipedia:

Adbusters Media Foundation is a not-for-profit, anti-consumerist, pro-environment organization founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The foundation describes itself as "a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age."

The Adbusters Media Foundation publishes the reader-supported, advertising-free Adbusters, an activist magazine with an international circulation of 120,000 devoted to challenging consumerism.

Lasn and Schmalz sound like "useful idiots" too. Where do they get their money? Or maybe just typical opportunistic predators:

In 2004, Adbusters began selling vegan, indy shoes...The V2 is designed by Canadian shoe designer John Fluevog. It is made from organic hemp and recycled car tires."

Even though the founders are "Jews", they have been accused of anti-semitism. Sounds just like the opportunistic "Jews" in Hollywood.

Culture Jam:

Adbusters is the brainchild of Kalle Lasn, an Estonian-born documentary filmmaker. He spent his childhood in a German refugee camp and in Australia. Lasn founded a market research company in Tokyo in the 1960s and eventually moved to Vancouver, Canada. For twenty years, he produced documentaries for PBS and Canada’s National Film Board. Then, as he tells it, a “realization” hit him.

Lasn stood in a Canadian supermarket parking lot frustrated because he had to insert a quarter into a cart to shop there. He jammed his quarter in so that the cart became inoperable. This was the first “culture jam” (quite literally). “I didn’t stop to analyze whether this was ethical or not,” Lasn would later explain in his book. “I just let my anger flow.”
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Adbusters magazine began as a local quarterly in 1989 with three full-time volunteers and a circulation of 5,000 copies. Now an international bi-monthly (still advertisement-free), it boasts a dozen editors, over 250 freelancers, and a circulation of 120,000. Two-thirds of those readers are American, but there are subscribers in more than 60 countries. The magazine is the top-selling Canadian title in the U.S., and can be found at mainstream outlets like Barnes & Noble and Borders.

Leafing through a copy of Adbusters, however, the typical book-browser is likely to be shocked. The publication is a sort of MAD Magazine for the pretentious -- but much more sinister. There are always parodies and rip-offs of well-known ads. There are articles on how to be a better activist, and justifying the targeting of activism’s latest disfavored industry. And there is art: sometimes obvious, sometimes incomprehensible. One recent issue included a picture of adolescents giving the finger, and a photograph of hair being plucked from a human nipple.
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At the heart of Adbusters is hatred of big business, in any form. As Naomi Klein writes in No Logo, “Simply put, anticorporatism is the brand of politics capturing the imagination of the next generation of troublemakers and shit-disturbers, and we need only look to the student radicals of the 1960s and the ID [identity politics] warriors of the eighties and nineties to see the transformative impact such a shift can have.”

This leads Adbusters to its animus: the desire to make corporations extinct.
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Self-described culture jammers are typically also rabidly opposed to economic globalization and harbor virulent hatred for multinational corporations. Don’t call them “lefties,” though. Lasn thinks the Left is too “establishment” these days.
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Despite all its bluster about the virtues of an advertising-free world, Adbusters uses the very techniques it excoriates corporations for. It uses marketing to try and kill marketing.
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Why do Adbusters writers and editors hate personal choice so much? Because their utopia would be a nightmare for most Americans. “What makes you think you have the right to drive around with a ton of metal wrapped around you,” asks the September/October 2003 issue, “the right to twist a tap and get hot water, the right to flick a switch and get your house warmed up?” Were the Adbusters group to get its way, hundreds of years of progress would vanish.
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Adbusters generally prefers rage to discernment. “Let your anger out. When it wells up suddenly from deep in your gut, don’t suppress it -- channel it, trust it, use it. Don’t be so unthinkingly civil all the time,” Kalle Lasn advises. “Rage drives revolutions.”

The very name of the group implies destruction of private property. This is specifically advocated in nearly every issue of the magazine. Of course, its leaders prefer to couch this directive in lofty rhetoric, thinking of themselves as freedom fighters. “Consumer capitalism is by its very nature unethical,” Lasn writes, “and therefore it’s not unethical to jam it … liberating a billboard in the middle of the night can be a rather honest and joyful thing to do.”
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The slick glossy has a cover price of $7.95 -- more than twice the price of People, Vogue, or GQ. The Adbusters website features a plethora of products for sale, including videos, posters, calendars, postcards, books, and even a 3x5-foot “corporate” flag -- the American flag with the stars replaced by corporate logos. In 2002, Adbusters suggested substituting its version for the real Stars and Stripes on July 4 in front of stores, schools, and embassies.

Lasn is Estonian i.e. born and raised under Soviet socialism and, just like his fellow former communists, the Russian kleptocrats, is not human but a cockroach. Sadly the "useful idiots" will keep buying his bullshit at $7.95 a pop.

Anders Breivik - "A little learning is a dangerous thing"

2011-07-29T21:49:00.000-07:00

Was Anders Breivik a troll?

I’m sorry if that seems a flippant question to ask about a man who killed dozens of Norwegian teenagers, but you can’t read his 1,500-page “manifesto” without being struck by how thoroughly he trawled the web. Whatever the explanation for his murderous actions, this was definitely a brain warped by the blogosphere.

For readers unfamiliar with blogs, I should explain what I mean by “troll”. The word can be used to describe two types of commenters who write underneath published posts. There are simple-minded folk with jokey nicknames who fling insults at each other for hours at a stretch, amusing no one but themselves. My own blog is infested with them.
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These trolls aren’t confined to the far Left or the far Right: some of the most noxious internet bores turn out to be Liberal Democrats. It’s true that, on the whole, their views tend to be controversial, but the essence of their trolling is their rhetorical style: in particular, an insistence that they know the truth about everything. All they really have in common – apart from an aversion to deodorant – is hysterical omniscience.
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He knew where to look to find statistics to support his vicious theories. He knew that the far Right can succeed only by exploiting public anger at political correctness and immigration, avoiding the idiocy of neo-Nazism, about which the manifesto is scathing. Above all, he revelled in the special hysteria of the internet, which allows its users to bolt together whatever ideas turn them on, while ruthlessly excluding inconvenient data. (This new hysteria taints even the most trivial internet discourse – you should have seen the way supporters and opponents of vibrato-free Mahler were squawking at each other after Roger Norrington’s Prom on Monday.)

I don’t know why Breivik made the leap from propaganda to mass murder. I don’t think he was mad, in the sense of suffering from psychotic delusions, but there’s no doubt that years spent in the echo chambers of cyberspace can cause psychological damage.

In the months leading up to last Friday’s atrocity, did he join in the internet discussions he read so avidly? Given his verbosity, it’s more than likely. The manifesto is written in the self-righteous, autodidactic style of a troll; it will be interesting to see whether, following Breivik’s arrest, one of the anonymous contributors to Right-wing websites suddenly disappears off the map.

Sounds about right. I actually knew a troll in person. He used to stalk me on the Web after I contributed to an anti-cult Web group. He believed that the government was poisoning us with contrails and a bunch of other paranoid nonsense. My hunch is that Breivik is also some sort of twisted closet case like a child-molester or coprophiliac or something unhealthy like that; not insane but definitely solipsistic, intellectually-challenged and half-educated.

As Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744) wrote in An Essay on Criticism:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again.

No Medicare for ex-pats so Uruguay is out of the question

2011-07-26T14:40:00.001-07:00

I thought I'd better check on whether I can get Medicare as an ex-pat. Nope. Of course the Medicare premium is garnished from SS before you even get paid but Medicare will not pay for any health-care outside the USA. And of course Medicare is mandatory. If you chose not to have Medicare, you forfeit your entire SS. Who the hell thought of this? Stalin? It's no wonder that only the very rich can afford to retire outside the USA.

The Norwegian Nazi

2011-07-26T00:21:00.000-07:00

John Derbyshire quotes Ralph Peters' “The ‘Eurabia’ Myth":

Peters prophesied that John/Jean/Josef/José/Giuseppe Q. European will eventually get in touch with his inner fascist:
Don’t let Europe’s current round of playing pacifist dress-up fool you: This is the continent that perfected genocide and ethnic cleansing, the happy-go-lucky slice of humanity that brought us such recent hits as the Holocaust and Srebrenica. The historical patterns are clear: When Europeans feel sufficiently threatened — even when the threat’s concocted nonsense — they don’t just react, they over-react with stunning ferocity.

I lived in Europe for 8 years and soon found that, if you scratch a European socialist deep enough, you'll find a national socialist aka Nazi. The Norwegian nutcase may claim to be anti-Hitler but he is an unadulterated racist Nazi.

Uruguay here I come

2011-07-25T22:23:00.000-07:00

I just turned 64. It's time for me to retire. I've lived in Africa, Europe and North America. I think I'm ready for another continent. Uruguay here I come.

From the diary of an American ex-pat in Uruguay:

Uruguay has the second greatest reserves of water, per capita, in the world, after Canada.
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It is at the same relative latitude as the North Carolina Capes - the climate is perfect for me.
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On average it goes below freezing about 2.5 days/year and above 90F/32C only 6 days per year. As we all know, the Good Lord did not intend fat men in wheelchairs to live where it is hot!
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Contrary to my impressions from afar, a high percentage of people speak some English. Between their English and my limited Spanish, we do pretty well.
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Comment on currency symbols: Uruguayans use the $ sign for their Uruguayan Pesos (UYU), which are about 24 to the US Dollar. Consequently, when you see $ on UY websites, it means Pesos, not Dollars. Dollars are usually denominated as U$S.
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I guess they haven't figured out how to "sock it to the gringos yet"; maybe their culture is such that they never will. Too easy - too normal; I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I can't take it! Waiting for the other hob-nailed boot to drop is killing me! If this keeps up I'm going to have to leave here because of the stress...of waiting for the big "gotcha" that must be out there somewhere.

This morning, the government-owned phone company, Antel, showed up as promised and installed our two additional phone lines: amazing! The only downside is that if you want more than one jack per line, you have to hire a private contractor for the additional jacks. Earlier in the day, a 20-page tabloid size advertising flyer in full color was delivered in the post. It was from the local 24 hour pharmacy chain. It offered the usual gamut of items from lipstick to hemorrhoid treatment. That, plus free dial-up Internet access and even real street addresses is too much to take. The normalcy is killing me. To paraphrase one of my readers, I'm waiting for the "immigration police to kick in my door", or the transplanted Russian Mafia to kidnap Harry, or something, anything that will burst this bubble of seeming normalcy before I get suckered in again.
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Another difference is the attitude towards time. After living in the West Indies for a while I learned the system there: whatever time frame was promised would really happen in the next higher time unit: 1 minute is really 1 hour, 1 hour is really 1 day, 1 day is really one week, etc.

I also figured out the time rules in Costa Rica: there are none! If someone is really considerate, they will ring you 45 minutes after they were supposed to arrive to cancel or postpone. If they are from the government telecoms, they will set an appointment and never show up; or they will show up out of the blue and expect you to drop everything to accommodate them.

Time here seems to be understood in an Italianate mode: they try to be on time, but sometimes things happen; and when things happen they are very, very sorry and will do better next time: and they do. Thus far, nothing has slipped more than a day - which amazes me. I waited weeks for telephones in Costa Rica and months for broadband. This place may really be "Eisenhower's America in Spanish". ¡Hasta luego!
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Well, now I'm really annoyed! It is becoming increasingly hard to remain skeptical when everything is working properly. Both ADSL lines are working (all we did to the first line was reposition the wireless router); the housekeeper has been coming in on time and doing a good job (at $2.10/hour inclusive), and we've been able to buy everything we need locally.

On top of that McDonalds delivers, as do the local mom & pop food shops. They seem to have a fleet of kids on motorbikes; and delivery usually takes no more than 10-15 minutes.

Expat Daily News.

The word Uruguay, coming from the Guaraní language, means "river of painted birds":

Translated into English, República Oriental del Uruguay becomes Oriental Republic of Uruguay; The Eastern Republic of Uruguay; or the Republic East of the Uruguay. The last is actually the only correct literal translation (though probably the least common), as it is named after its geographic location to the east of the Uruguay River. Because of the ambiguity in its meaning when translated, the government of Uruguay normally uses simply Uruguay in English.
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[O]fficially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay, sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; Spanish: República Oriental del Uruguay pronounced [reˈpuβlika oɾjenˈtal del uɾuˈɣwai]) is a country located in the south eastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area. An estimated 88% of the population are of European descent.
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The only documented inhabitants of Uruguay before European colonization of the area were the Charrúa, a small tribe driven south by the Guaraní of Paraguay.

The Spanish arrived in the territory of present-day Uruguay in 1516 but the people's fierce resistance to conquest, combined with the absence of gold and silver, limited their settlement in the region during the 16th and 17th centuries. Uruguay then became a zone of contention between the Spanish and the Portuguese empires. In 1603 the Spanish began to introduce cattle, which became a source of wealth in the region. The first permanent settlement on the territory of present-day Uruguay was founded by the Spanish in 1624 at Soriano on the Río Negro. In 1669–71 the Portuguese built a fort at Colonia del Sacramento. Spanish colonization increased as Spain sought to limit Portugal's expansion of Brazil's frontiers.
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Colonia del Sacramento, one of Uruguay's oldest European settlements, was founded by the Portuguese in 1680. Montevideo was founded by the Spanish in the early 18th century as a military stronghold. Uruguay won its independence in 1811–28 following a three-way struggle between the claims of Spain, Argentina and Brazil.
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Montevideo was founded by the Spanish in the early 18th century as a military stronghold. Its natural harbor soon developed into a commercial area competing with Argentina's capital, Buenos Aires. Uruguay's early 19th century history was shaped by ongoing fights between the British, Spanish, Portuguese, and other colonial forces for dominance in the Platine region. In 1806 and 1807 the British army attempted to seize Buenos Aires as part of the Napoleonic Wars. As a result Montevideo was occupied by a British force from February to September 1807.
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In 1811 José Gervasio Artigas, who became Uruguay's national hero, launched a successful revolution against the Spanish authorities, defeating them on 18 May at the Battle of Las Piedras.
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This led to the 500 day-long Argentina-Brazil War. Neither side gained the upper hand and in 1828 the Treaty of Montevideo, fostered by the United Kingdom, gave birth to Uruguay as an independent state. The nation's first constitution was adopted on 18 July 1830.
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Uruguay is one of the most economically developed countries in South America, with a high GDP per capita.
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Uruguay is rated as the 2nd least corrupt country in Latin America (behind Chile), although Uruguay scores considerably better than Chile on domestic polls of corruption perception. Its political and labour conditions are the highest level of freedom on the continent. It was the highest rated country in Latin America on Legatum's 2010 Prosperity Index. Reader's Digest ranked Uruguay as ninth "Most livable and greenest" country in the world, and first in all the Americas.
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Uruguay was the first South American country to legalize same-sex and different-sex civil unions at a national level, and to allow gay adoption. Uruguay and Bolivia were the only countries in the Americas which did not go into recession (2 consecutive quarters of retraction) as a result of the Late-2000s financial crisis. Uruguay is reimbursed by the UN for the majority of its military spending, because the majority of its military is deployed as UN Peacekeepers. In 2009, Uruguay became the first nation in the world to provide every school child with a free laptop and wireless internet. Uruguay was the first nation in the Americas to test hemp cultivation.

Uruguay's only land border is with Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, to the north. To the west lie the Uruguay River and to the southwest lies the estuary of Río de la Plata with Argentina only a short commute across the banks of either of these bodies of water, while to the southeast lies the southern part of the Atlantic Ocean. Uruguay, with an area of approximately 176,000 square kilometres (68,000 sq mi

Uruguay's climate is relatively mild. Located entirely within the temperate zone Uruguay has a climate that is fairly uniform nationwide. Seasonal variations are pronounced, but extremes in temperature are rare. As would be expected by its abundance of water, high humidity and fog are common. The absence of mountains, which act as weather barriers, makes all locations vulnerable to high winds and rapid changes in weather as fronts or storms sweep across the country. Both summer and winter weather may vary from day to day with the passing of storm fronts where a hot northerly wind may occasionally be followed by a cold wind (pampero) from the Argentine Pampas.

Uruguay has a largely uniform temperature throughout the year, summer being tempered by winds off the Atlantic, and severe cold in winter is unknown. The heaviest precipitation occurs during the autumn months, although more frequent rainy spells occur in winter. The mean annual precipitation is generally greater than 40 inches (1,000 mm), decreasing with distance from the sea coast, and is relatively evenly distributed throughout the year.

The average temperature for the mid-winter month of July varies from 12 °C (54 °F) at Salto in the northern interior to 9 °C (48 °F) at Montevideo in the south.[5] The midsummer month of January varies from a warm average of 26 °C (79 °F) at Salto to 22 °C (72 °F) at Montevideo.[5] National extreme temperatures at sea level are, Paysandú city 44 °C (111 °F) (20 January 1943) and Melo city −11 °C (12.2 °F) (14 June 1967).
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Uruguayans are of predominantly European origin with an estimated 88% of the population being of European descent. A 2008 survey by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE) of Uruguay requesting the respondent to self-report their predominant ancestry (only one choice was allowed) found that 95.4% reported a predominant white ancestry, 3.4% Black or African, 1.1% Indigenous and 0.1% Asian or Amarillo ("yellow"). Another INE survey, also conducted in 2008, found that 10% reported having some degree of Black/African ancestry, 5.5% partial Indigenous, and 0.3% partial Asian ancestry.

Most Uruguayans of European ancestry are descendants of 19th and 20th century immigrants from Spain and Italy (about one-quarter of the population is of Italian origin)[7] and, to a much lesser degree, from France and Britain. Earlier settlers had migrated from Argentina and Paraguay. Few direct descendants of Uruguay’s indigenous peoples remain, and mestizos account for less than one-tenth of the population. People of African descent make up an even smaller proportion of the total.
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Uruguay has no official religion, church and state are officially separated and religious freedom is guaranteed. A 2008 survey by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística of Uruguay gave Catholicism as the main religion, with 45.7% of the population, 9.0% are non-Catholic Christians, 0.6% are Animists or Umbandists (an Afro-Brazilian religion) and 0.4% Jewish. 30.1% reported believing in a god, but not belonging to any religion, while 14% were Atheist or Agnostic.
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Uruguay [is] the most secular country in the Americas. Uruguay's secularization began with the relatively minor role of the church in the colonial era, compared with other parts of the Spanish Empire. The small numbers of Uruguay's Indians and their fierce resistance to proselytism reduced the influence of the ecclesiastical authorities.

After independence [In 1811} anticlerical ideas spread to Uruguay, particularly from France, further eroding the influence of the church. In 1837 civil marriage was recognized and in 1861 the state took over the running of public cemeteries. In 1907 divorce was legalized and in 1909 all religious instruction was banned from state schools.
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A dense fluvial network covers the country, consisting of four river basins or deltas; the Río de la Plata, the Uruguay River, the Laguna Merín and the Río Negro. The major internal river is the Río Negro ('black river'). Several lagoons are found along the Atlantic coast.

The highest point in the country is the Cerro Catedral whose peak reaches to 514 metres (1,686 ft) AMSL in the Sierra Carapé hill range. To the southwest is the Río de Plata, the estuary of the Uruguay River which forms the western border, and the Paraná River.

Montevideo is the southernmost capital city in the Americas, and the third most southerly in the world (only Canberra and Wellington are further south).
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From 1963 to 1985 an estimated 320,000 Uruguayans emigrated. By far the most popular destination for Uruguayan emigrants was Argentina followed by the United States, Australia, Spain, Brazil, and Venezuela. In 2009, for the first time in 44 years, the country saw an overall positive influx when comparing immigration to emigration. 3,825 residence permits were awarded in 2009, compared with 1,216 in 2005.[83] 50% of new legal residents come from Argentina and Brazil. A migration law passed in 2008 gives immigrants the same rights and opportunities that nationals have, with the requisite of proving a monthly income of $650.

Metropolitan Montevideo is the only large city and has around 1.3 million inhabitants. The rest of the urban population lives in about 20 towns. Uruguay is less densely populated than Argentina and Brazil
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Uruguayan Spanish has some modifications due to the considerable number of Italian immigrants. Immigrants used to speak a mixture of Italian and Spanish known as 'cocoliche' and some of the words are still commonly used by the population.
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The folk and popular music of Uruguay shares not only its gaucho roots with Argentina but also those of the tango. One of the most famous tangos, La Cumparsita (1917), was written by the Uruguayan composer Gerardo Matos Rodríguez.
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Asado is a popular traditional dish in Uruguay, a kind of barbecued beef.

Beef is fundamental to Uruguayan cuisine and the country is one of the world’s top consumers of red meat per capita. Popular foods include beef platters, steak sandwiches (chivito), pastas, barbecued kidneys and sausages.

Locally produced soft drinks, beer, and wine are commonly served, as is clericó, a mixture of fruit juice and wine.[5] Uruguay and Argentina share a national drink called mate. Grappamiel, made with alcohol and honey, is served in the cold mornings of autumn and winter to warm up the body. Often locals can be seen carrying leather cases containing a thermos of hot water, the traditional hollowed gourd called a mate or guampa, a metal straw called a bombilla, and the dried yerba mate leaves. Sweet treats, including flans with dulce de leche and alfajores (shortbread cookies), are favourites for desserts or afternoon snacks.

Other Uruguayan dishes include: morcilla dulce, a type of blood sausage cooked with ground orange fruit, orange peel and walnuts; milanesa, a breaded veal cutlet similar to the Italian cotoletta; snacks such as olímpicos (club sandwiches), húngaras (spicy sausage in a hot dog roll), and masas surtidas (bite-sized pastries).
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Motto: Libertad o muerte Spanish for "Liberty or Death".

Uruguay has the same population as Oregon (3.5 million) but is smaller: 68,037 sq mi. (Oregon is 96,000 sq mi.)

FAQs.

Uruguay has a large (and wealthy) expat community.

Expat forum on Immigration requirements.

Investing: Ease of Doing Business rank is 114 out of 183 countries, with Standard and Poor’ currency risk rating of BB-.

I haven't yet checked out commercial real estate.

Land in Uruguay is not cheap. The average price for a hectare (2.7 acres) of farmland in Uruguay during 2010 increased 13% and reached 2,650 US dollars.

There are some bargains (gambles?) Winery Plus Vineyards (12 Acres) $50,000.

42 acres for $155,000 with two buildings.

50 inches of rain a year spread throughout the year!

Estancias (cattle ranches):

Please view our current listings here farmland for sale Uruguay. An Estancia in Uruguay could be an alternative for you if the following aspects attract you :

- owning land that has real agricultural potential (as opposed to southern Europe where agriculture is hardly viable once subsedies stop)
- temperate climate, not tropical, but with distinct seasons, reverse to the northern hemisphere. Roughly a mediterranian climate with more summer rain.
- Rural estates with stately mediterranian, late 1800s, architecture (patio with well/cistern, wrough iron, high ceilings), elements you would expect from a historic cortijo in Andalucia. One needs patience to find one in Uruguay though.

Panagea estancia - pics of a real ranch.

Or maybe a polo ranch?

[T]he Polo heartland, a heaven for raising horses with mild climate and natural pasture year round.

Distance to Polo locations like Buenos Aires, Montevideo/Carrasco, Punta del Este is in the 1-3h drive range.

Or a hotel like ESTANCIA PARADA ARTEAGA.

One of the Easiest Countries to Gain Residency and Citizenship:

The income requirement is fulfilled by proving that you have a yearly income of at least US$6,000.
...
Uruguay does not require that you own property or have investments in the country, in order to grant residency. On the other hand, owning property does not eliminate the income requirement.

Punta del Este:

Just a one-hour flight from Buenos Aires, Punta del Este and surrounds are full of pristine Atlantic beaches, bronzed beauties, and great food.

Estancias for sale.

45% of the population lives in Montevideo. 70% of the population lives in the cities on the south coast such as Montevideo, Punta del Este and Piriopolis which remind me a lot of Durban in South Africa where I was born and raised.

Great amateur non-tourist pics here.

Anders Behring Breivik: Norway's McVeigh?

2011-07-22T19:20:00.000-07:00

From the Daily Mail:

Police have said the Norwegian terror attacks do not appear to be linked to Islamist terrorism.

The 32-year-old Norwegian man arrested for gunning down children on the holiday island of Utoya has been named locally as Anders Behring Breivik.

Described as 6ft tall and blond, he is reported to have arrived on the island of Utoya and opened fire after beckoning several young people over in his native Norwegian tongue.

Reports suggest he was also seen loitering around the site of the bomb blast in Oslo two hours before the island incident.

From his Facebook page:

Director at Breivik Geofarm

Religion - Christian

Politics - Conservative

Sports - Hunting

Music - Classical

Books

William James

Consequences of Pragmatism

On Liberty

Nineteen Eighty-Four

The Trial

War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)

The Iliad and the Odyssey

Critique of Pure Reason

The Prince

The Wealth of Nations

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

First Folio (Shakespeare)

Leviathan (Hobbes)

The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli)

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

The Republic by Plato

Movies

Gladiator

300

Dogville

Television

Caprica

True Blood

Stargate Universe

Dexter

The Shield

Activities

Founding and developing organizations

Reading and Writing

Interests

Socializing

Traveling

Freemasonry

Working

Gaming

Partying

Fitness

He already has a Wikipedia page:

Anders Behring Breivik (born 13 February 1979) is suspected of being the perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks. On 22 July 2011, he allegedly approached a Labour Party youth camp, posing as a police officer. He then proceeded to open fire on the 13 to 25 year old youth present, reportedly killing at least 10. He has also been linked with the bomb blast that took place approximately two hours earlier, and is now in police custody.

Behring studied at the Oslo Commerce School, and is described by newspaper Verdens Gang as Conservative and nationalist. He is also described as a one-time freemason. He expresses his sympathies for Winston Churchill and Norwegian anti-nazi World War II hero Max Manus on his alleged Facebook profile. He owns the company Breivik Geofarm.

PS I just went back to his FB page to confirm that he played World of War (or some such teenage crap like that) but the page has since been removed. I had a hunch that might happen which is why I copied and pasted so much from it. That was quick.

Top pic from his Facebook page; bottom pic, of him in his masonry drag, from the Daily Mail:

First job

2011-07-17T19:46:00.000-07:00

Zoë Pollock has been posting emails from her readers about their "Lessons Learned On The Job":

This week readers remembered some of their first jobs and how it changed them.

Some of my favorites:

[M]y first job during high school was working at the Burger King near where I lived... It was the 1970's, also known as the age of total ugliness, and I wore a paper hat and a brown and orange striped polyester short sleeved tunic (with a plastic name tag, of course.) It was hot, greasy work but I loved that job.

It was a fresh start with people my age but not with all the baggage from my own school - no more outcast, as long as I worked hard I got respect and I got paid. And when you are young and feel trapped, money is freedom. OK I couldn't permanently flee the Island on the wages of a part-time job at Burger King but in a way my job at Burger King was my sanctuary from the turmoil in my teenage life...and I got paid!
...
After leaving college with a History degree and an overall lack of motivation I found myself working as a beer deliveryman for six years in Buffalo, NY. I had to lug cases and kegs of beer into some of the nastiest bars, restaurants and convenience stores around (try doing that in four feet of snow when it's two degrees outside). I was robbed more than once, my back ached daily and I spent hour after hour listening to people ask for "free samples." I hated every single day of my life during that time but look back on it now and really appreciate what that job did for me. The thought of spending the next 30 years on a beer truck made me get off my ass and go back to school to earn my teacher certification certificate. Whenever I hear a fellow teacher complain about how hard teaching is I just have to laugh. Compared to delivering 100 cases of 40 oz. malt liquor into the basement of a filthy neighborhood convenience store, teaching high school students in an air-conditioned room is a snap.
...
My first job was at McDonald's. My boss was a former drill sergeant, and he had some strong ideas about how things would be done. Every surface had to shine. No fingerprints anywhere. Everyone shared the jobs no one wanted: cleaning the bathrooms and picking up the trash on the lot. And women were not allowed to cook the burgers; grilling was a man's job. Other than that last nonsense, he gave me a great work ethic, and I never forgot what he taught me about self-respect: "You don't have to be proud of your job, but you must always be proud of your work."
...
Ten days before Christmas, I had the flu. I called my assistant manager only to learn that she also had the flu and therefore I was trumped on calling out sick. I got to the store and learned that the two clerks scheduled to work with me were also sick. I called around frantically and got one replacement to come in a couple of hours after we opened. By ten in the morning the small store was overflowing with people, the phone was ringing off the hook and I was alone. And that was when the people of Roxborough taught me a thing or two about decency and community.

First a woman that wanted her books gift-wrapped asked if she could just come behind the counter and do it herself rather than trouble me. Of course, I said. She was there for thirty minutes as she wrapped books for other customers, too. Other customers started helping each other find books they were looking for. The retired guys that always browsed the magazine rack while their wives ran errands elsewhere in the shopping center started joking around with customers to lighten the mood. One of them brought me a coffee. Around one in the afternoon one of my sick clerks stopped in after picking up antibiotics for his pneumonia at the pharmacy next door, looked around, and just put on his apron and started working. That whole day, no one complained, ever. It really might have been the best day I’ve had at any job in my life.
...
Back in college, I worked as a coat-man in a four-star restaurant in Washington, DC. The most interesting thing I learned is that I could predict - with a fair degree of accuracy - how much of a tip I would get, based on a person's coat. If the person had a regular jacket, they would always give a $1-2 dollar tip, without fail. But, if the woman had on a fur coat, one of two things would happen. About four out of every five of them would give no tip at all, regardless of the level of service. But the fifth one would give not only a $10 tip, but a big smile and a short conversation. A good chunk of those people would comment on how they remember working a similar job back when they were younger or in college.

So, lesson learned: If I ever make enough money to get my wife a fur coat, I'm also going to make sure my daughter works a customer service job to start. And I'll always tip the coat-guy.
...
But when I grew up and read biographies of successful people, they all said the same thing. Each one worked a different job -- waiter, car repairman, short order cook, paper delivery, day laborer, whatever. And each of these guys insisted that this is really the best education a young person could have and recommends that for everyone.

That's when it hit me -- it isn't the job that teaches you anything. After all, there are plenty of people who are or were waiters who never learned a damn thing from their job. It's whether you bothered to learn from whatever job you might have: Successful people learn lessons where ever they are. That's the difference.

Sadly most teens can't get these kinds of minimum-wage jobs anymore. Savvy businessmen are hiring seniors instead.

My first job, at the age of nine, was stamping envelopes in the local post office during the Christmas holidays. No, there were no machines to cancel stamps in those days. My palm ached constantly during the first week.

"I'm so sorry," said my mom.

"Grow up," said my dad.

I plodded on and was surprised that the pain went away.

On Christmas Eve I got my first paycheck which my dad asked to borrow - no doubt to pay off his gambling debts - and never repaid.

But it set me up for life.

There's nothing so certain as death and taxes

2011-07-15T20:06:00.000-07:00

Several famous authors have uttered lines to this effect. The first was Daniel Defoe, in The Political History of the Devil, 1726:

"Things as certain as death and taxes, can be more firmly believed."

Benjamin Franklin used the form we are currently more familiar with, in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, 1789 (which was re-printed in The Works of Benjamin Franklin, 1817):

"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."

Ryan Anderson:

The NRO web briefing and Yuval Levin draw our attention to today’s column by David Brooks. And rightly so. As Yuval points out, our modern pursuit of health as “the primary good” is making it almost impossible to prevent it “from overwhelming every other good” and bankrupting us in the process.
But there is an unsettling oddity about Brooks’ column. He opens by uncritically praising Dudley Clendinen’s essay, “The Good Short Life,” in The Times’s Sunday Review section. And he closes by recommending three other essays:

. . . let me provide links to three other essays, which offer other perspectives on why we should accept the finitude of life and the naturalness of death. They are: “Born Toward Dying,” by Richard John Neuhaus, “L’Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?” by Leon Kass and “Thinking About Aging,” by Gilbert Meilaender.

But all three of these authors would firmly reject the central argument advanced by Clendinen: that his life will soon no longer be worth living:

I have a plan. If I get pneumonia, I’ll let it snuff me out. If not, there are those other ways. I just have to act while my hands still work: the gun, narcotics, sharp blades, a plastic bag, a fast car, over-the-counter drugs, oleander tea (the polite Southern way), carbon monoxide, even helium. That would give me a really funny voice at the end.

I have found the way. Not a gun. A way that’s quiet and calm.

I've come close to death three or four times and, according to the bible, I've only got another 6 years before I kick the bucket at the allotted span of three score and ten. So I'm getting a bit more sanguine about death every day.

It has also become clear to me that "dialectical materialism" (as Marx termed communism/socialism) is based on a fear of death - actually a fear of reality in all it's forms. Hence the fallacy that food, housing and "health-care" are rights along with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - as well as handsome husbands, obedient children, fluffy pets and gardens full of flowers, butterflies, rainbows and unicorns.

America is a state of mind

2011-07-04T17:58:00.000-07:00

Gordon S. Wood :

For us Americans, the words of the Declaration have become central to our sense of nationhood. Because the United States is composed of so many immigrants and so many different races and ethnicities, we can never assume our identity as a matter of course. The nation has had to be invented. At the end of the Declaration, the members of the Continental Congress could only “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” There was nothing else but themselves that they could dedicate themselves to—no patria, no fatherland, no nation as yet. In comparison with the 235 year-old United States, many states in the world today are new, some of them created within fairly recent past. Yet many of these states, new as they may be, are under-girded by peoples who had a pre-existing sense of their ethnicity, their nationality. In the case of the United States, the process was reversed: We Americans were a state before we were a nation, and much of our history has been an effort to define that nationality.

Akim Reinhardt on patriotism:

As I’ve written elsewhere, I have never been one to make a show out of patriotism. It makes me uneasy. And much of that attitude I inherited from my father, which is perhaps ironic because in many ways he fits the profile of someone who would be likely to beat his chest while waving a flag. ... For my father, reality is streaked with a deep pride that comes from many generations of living in, believing in, and fighting and dying for the United States of America. What that has instilled within him is a quiet confidence about the nation, as opposed to an insecurity that needs to frequently and publicly assert itself.

I understand and sympathize. Who was it who said religion should be worn inside like underwear not outside on one's sleeve? I don't like public displays of religion but I actually enjoy public displays of patriotism even if the Declaration is my religion.

Ann Coulter: "How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America"

2011-07-01T20:13:00.000-07:00

I just saw her on the TV saying that she is sick of the Casey Anthony trial - as any sane person would be. I can't find a quote on the net but I paraphrase: "There should be a TV channel just for white trash; how they murder and rape each other and all that other crap that they do."

She sounded just like I did in my rant about white trash on welfare at the dinner table tonight.

When I was Googling to find her exact quote I came across these juicy quotes.

From HuffPo:

The conservative commentator raised some eyebrows in a new interview with "The Insider" co-host Kevin Frazier.

"I find it a little baffling when Americans get so gaga-eyed over a princess. In particular Lady Di, who was just this anorexic, bulimic narcissist," Coulter said.

Coulter, who was promoting her new book "Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America", has professed contempt for Diana and the Royal Family before.

In April, Coulter appeared on "The O'Reilly Factor" to call the late princess a "nitwit hussy" and said of the Royal Wedding: "It's totally embarrassing Americans cared about that."

She also said she was specifically going to be on a plane to France so she wouldn't have to watch William and Kate's nuptials.

Coulter did admit on her "Fox News" appearance that she looked up Kate Middleton and said, "She seems like a lovely woman, I feel sorry for the life she's signed on to."

If Ann were less skinny, less blond and less female, I'd marry her tomorrow.

From The View with Joy Behar:

HIRSCHHORN: In other words, the internet searches were in March. And then Caylee goes missing in June.

BEHAR: So? You`re planning. You`re planning.

LUDWIG: She used it as an informal babysitter. And maybe it went awry.

HIRSCHHORN: But the question, Joy, is what was the tipping point? What put her over the edge?

BEHAR: Ok.

LUDWIG: If there was a tipping point.

BEHAR: We`re covering this case every day. So maybe we`ll find out some truth tomorrow.

Thanks, guys, we`ll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BEHAR: In her new book, Ann Coulter likens liberals to an angry mob trampling all over the countryside. That`s funny. Last time I saw a mob of liberals they were in Woodstock and they were passed out in the grass. The book is called "Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America." And Ann Coulter joins me now. So the mob, huh?

ANN COULTER, AUTHOR: The mob.

BEHAR: The demonic liberals. Well, you know, I`m Italian and I`m a liberal. Does that mean I belong to two mobs?

COULTER: Well, that`s why I didn`t call the book "Mob." It took me forever to come up with the title, because "Mob" would really be a great title. The other great title I really wanted for it because I start with a scene from the Bible where Jesus drives the demons out of -- out of a possessed man, and he says, Jesus says to the possessed man, what is your name? Speaking to the demon. And the demon responds, my name is Legion. So Legion would have been a great title, but I thought only Christians would understand that.

BEHAR: Legion.

COULTER: And "Mob" would sound like I`m talking about the mob.

BEHAR: No, Legion sounds like you`re talking about the American Legion.

COULTER: Right. Right. French Foreign Legion.

BEHAR: Yes.

COULTER: The idea is that liberals are a mob, they have the psychological characteristics of the mob --

BEHAR: How?

COULTER: Sometimes launching out into actual literal mobs. And mobs are always bad things.

BEHAR: But you know, I said to you when you were on "The View" the other day that the Tea Party is more of a mob than the liberals.

COULTER: No.

BEHAR: I don`t see the mob. You know, I --

COULTER: Well, look, just today you had -- was it today or yesterday? The union protesters in Wisconsin are disrupting Special Olympics so that they can protest the Republican governor.

BEHAR: I see. So a mob to you is a group of protesters.

COULTER: No, no, no, no. The first like third of the book is on the psychological mob. And that more has to do with how liberals argue, how they easily accept contradictions, how they create messiahs -- Obama, Clinton, JFK, RFK --

BEHAR: What about the Republican Party? They seem to create saints. Ronald Reagan.

COULTER: The closest one, which is the one I looked at, and this is more of a whitewashed memories now, would be Ronald Reagan. But A, it`s based on his record, not before he`s even done anything and just says hope and change, and oh, I`m having sex dreams about him.

BEHAR: But you know, I think that`s so unfair -- so unfair to Obama because Obama came in with a big problem from the Bush years. And you have to admit it. Admit it.

COULTER: No, but what I`m saying --

BEHAR: Admit it, Ann. Come on. Admit it.

(CROSSTALK)

BEHAR: Just admit that one thing and I`ll let you talk the rest of the time.

COULTER: No, because you`re going to trick me into talking about the economy again, and once again we`ll drive away the viewers.

BEHAR: I don`t want to talk about the economy. It`s too boring.

COULTER: But that`s not what I`m talking about, whether he inherited a problem. What I`m saying is, he hadn`t done anything yet. The love for Reagan, to the extent you`d call it love, is based on an eight-year record, not on a presidential campaign, point one.

But point two, as I describe in the book, I went through Lexis Nexis throughout the eight years of the Reagan administration. Reagan wasn`t even the most popular conservative his first year in office. His favorite newspaper, my newspaper, "Human Events," was attacking him so much that the "Washington Post" reported that Reagan met the editors and said, well, I`m still reading you guys but I`m liking it a lot less.

(CROSSTALK)

COULTER: Liberals drink Obama`s bathwater.

BEHAR: That`s so ridiculous.

COULTER: There have been articles about how women are having sex dreams about Bill Clinton. They are having -- in the "New York Times," Judith Warner, having sex dreams about Obama. And don`t act surprised by that.

BEHAR: So what? So what`s wrong with that?

COULTER: I promise you I am not having sex dreams about Dwight Eisenhower.

BEHAR: Yes, but I had them about President Taft.

(LAUGHTER)

BEHAR: You know how fat he was, President Taft? They had to make a special bathtub for him. Did you know that?

COULTER: Yes, I did.

BEHAR: You don`t want any fat guys in the White House.

COULTER: No, no, no, it`s part of what makes me think that a Chris Christie 2012 presidency could --

BEHAR: I know you love him, don`t you?

COULTER: Yes, I do.

BEHAR: I asked you on "The View --"

COULTER: He could use the Taft bathtub.

BEHAR: I asked you on "The View" if you were a chubby chaser because you love Christie so much. But you know, New Jersey`s starting to turn on him. He cut the education budget so severely. What, is he going to have Snooki as secretary of state when he`s president? Come on, nobody will be able to read anymore in New Jersey.

COULTER: He`s not going to have Snooki as the secretary of state. That is a mob technique of making up some story that has nothing to do with the facts.

BEHAR: Wait a second. As if you don`t. Give me a god -- give me a break here.

(CROSSTALK)

BEHAR: You make up so many things in this book. You make up so many things--

COULTER: Like what?

BEHAR: I`m plugging it while I`m yelling at you.

COULTER: Thank you. Good work.

BEHAR: That`s the kind of girl I am. I`m so nice.

COULTER: Thank you.

BEHAR: I mean, other things I found (ph) out (ph). Tea Party violence.

COULTER: Right.

BEHAR: A brick was thrown through the window of the district office of Democratic Representative Louise Slaughter in Niagara Falls.

COULTER: I remember that. They don`t know who did it.

BEHAR: Oh, who did it. Not the Democrats. Not the liberals. She`s a Democrat.

COULTER: OK, but in the cases I give of liberals, for example, biting off a finger of a Tea Partier, there are eyewitnesses, they know who we`re looking for. When Kenneth Gladmey (ph) was beaten up at the Tea Party in St. Louis, they were six arrests. They were all SEIU guys. Just because a Democrat has a brick thrown through a window, there are a lot of bricks thrown through Republican congressional windows.

BEHAR: This is one of my favorites, though.

COULTER: We need a suspect or an actual arrest.

BEHAR: OK. Whatever. This is good. Representative James Clyburn said he received a fax with an image of a noose. I thought it said moose. I thought Sarah Palin must have sent it. But it says noose. That wasn`t nice. Somebody cut the gas line --

COULTER: But you don`t know who did it.

BEHAR: Oh, it`s all around the same time that they were protesting Obamacare.

COULTER: Oddly enough they`ve never actually traced such an attack back --

BEHAR: Oh, if it walks like a duck and it talks like a duck --

COULTER: No, no, no, no. In fact, I would say after all of the many, many false accusations of racism from Tawanna Brawley up to Duke lacrosse to claims that conservatives were yelling the N word 15 times at Democrats, all of them turning out to be false, I don`t believe the noose was sent by a conservative. I think you start with the presumption these days that the racist act is a hoax, and then, you know, if you produce proof, I`ll change my mind.

BEHAR: The thing that you do, Ann, is that you find what will support your argument and then you write a book about it.

COULTER: Well, of course I find what supports my argument.

BEHAR: You don`t have two points of view on the situation. No, you do not.

COULTER: No, I disagree. Look, I told you, I considered your point, which I think is the best point that can be made of whom conservatives would at all come close to worshiping like a messiah the way liberals worship Clinton, Obama, Hillary --

BEHAR: But it`s such a--

COULTER: I looked at it. I went through -- look, it takes me a week to go through eight years of Nexis to see how Reagan was being written about. And it`s simply not true. He was not treated as some sort of idol. It was always conservatives angry at him.

BEHAR: So it`s after the fact he`s being canonized now.

COULTER: Not that much.

BEHAR: Oh, come on, you cannot turn on a conservative personality (ph) on television without them quoting Ronald Reagan did this, did this, and did this. Even his son doesn`t canonize him the way Fox TV does.

COULTER: Look, some conservatives may have some mob attributes in a small way.

BEHAR: Oh, boy, what a concession.

COULTER: No, no, no, no. But like I say, we admire him for his record. It`s not that we want to have sex with him or drink his bathwater. And the other point is often Reagan is brought up because you`re contrasting him with the candidates we`re dealing with now.

BEHAR: This other thing --

COULTER: And it`s to say --

(CROSSTALK)

BEHAR: This other thing you said about Obama, people want to sleep him and President Clinton. Who would you rather? President Clinton or Mitch McConnell? Tell the truth.

COULTER: I actually think that -- I`ve never understood the thing with Bill Clinton. I think he is a butterball--

BEHAR: So you`d actually rather sleep with Mitch McConnell?

COULTER: No, that isn`t my choice.

(CROSSTALK)

COULTER: The two that I think are about the same are Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton. I find them equally unsexual.

BEHAR: Oh, no. Wait a second.

COULTER: I find each of them saltpeter.

BEHAR: Newt Gingrich looks like Chucky.

COULTER: Yes, as does chubby Bill Clinton, whose greatest moments on the football field involved a saxophone. He was locked in his gym locker throughout high school. Those are always the politicians who cheat, by the way.

BEHAR: No, but Clinton has a certain side about him that`s kind of sexy. I can see it.

COULTER: Oh, and you told me you don`t create messiahs.

BEHAR: No, he`s not a messiah. He`s just a sex object.

COULTER: I promise you, no conservative would say that even about Reagan. And he was a movie star.

BEHAR: Well, he wasn`t that sexy though.

COULTER: My point is being proved.

BEHAR: I thought George Bush Jr. had some sex appeal. How do you like that? Stopped in her tracks.

COULTER: I promise you conservatives were not having sex dreams about him.

BEHAR: Well, maybe I do. You say that liberals belittle their opponents. But then you --

COULTER: No, no.

BEHAR: Yes, that`s what you say.

COULTER: No, I don`t. Because I belittle my opponents. I promise you I`ll cop to that. I ridicule them. No, what I say, and it`s not me, I`m ghosting Gustave Le Bon, the father of groupthink, describing--

BEHAR: Who?

COULTER: Gustave Le Bon.

BEHAR: Did you date him?

COULTER: He wrote this in 1896, and I`m old but I`m not that old. No, when he goes through -- that`s the first like third of the book, using his description of groupthink characteristics, the mob psychology, and comparing it to today`s liberals.

No, what he says is a mob will very quickly go from infatuation to hatred. They turn their leaders into messiahs. And they turn those they disagree with into enemies. That`s not -- you don`t belittle an enemy. You create hatred for an enemy.

BEHAR: I guess I see a mobster like Sharron Angle to me was a mobster. She`s provocative. She will cause a mob to--

COULTER: Sharron Angle, like so many things that get talked about in the mainstream media, I`m trying to think how to put this, Sharron Angle --

BEHAR: You know what she did? Let me tell you what she did to me.

COULTER: Wait.

(CROSSTALK)

COULTER: This point will be interesting to you. Sharron Angle, Sarah Palin, and the birthers are talked about more on the liberal networks than on the conservative networks.

BEHAR: Because they don`t want to go there on the conservative networks because they know they`re talking about some mental midgets over there.

COULTER: Whereas you all -- you all dis the great Chris Christie, ignore him, talk about that one little helicopter thing.

BEHAR: Oh, you mean -- where is he now, at a buffet? OK. Her book is called "Demonic: How the Liberals" -- that was wrong of me.

COULTER: I hope so.

BEHAR: I take it back. "The Liberal Mob is Endangering America." How about Ann Coulter is endangering America? We`ll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

If was stuck with Behar on a desert island, I'd seriously consider using her as fishing bait - keep her alive tied to a coconut tree while I snipped hook-sized pieces off her. Live bait always works better. What a hideous harpy!

From Ann's website:

Of all the details surrounding the liberal mob attack on Glenn Beck and his family in New York's Bryant Park last Monday night, one element stands out. "No, it won't be like that, Dad," his daughter said when Beck questioned the wisdom of attending a free, outdoor movie showing in a New York park.

People who have never been set upon by a mob of liberals have absolutely no idea what it's like to be a publicly recognizable conservative. Even your friends will constantly be telling you: "Oh, it will be fine. Don't worry. Nothing will happen. This place isn't like that."

Liberals are not like most Americans. They are the biggest pussies on Earth, city-bred weaklings who didn't play a sport and have never been in a fight in their entire lives. Their mothers made excuses for them when they threw tantrums and spent way too much time praising them during toilet training.

I could draw a mug shot of every one of Beck's tormentors, and I wasn't there.

Beck and his family would have been fine at an outdoor rap concert. They would have been fine at a sporting event. They would have been fine at any paid event, mostly because people who work for the government and live in rent-controlled apartments would be too cheap to attend.

Only a sad leftist with a crappy job could be so brimming with self-righteousness to harangue a complete stranger in public.

A liberal's idea of being a bad-ass is to say vicious things to a conservative public figure who can't afford to strike back. Getting in a stranger's face and hurling insults at him, knowing full well he has too much at risk to deck you, is like baiting a bear chained to a wall.

They are not only exploiting our lawsuit-mad culture, they are exploiting other people's manners. I know I'll be safe because this person has better manners than I do.

These brave-hearts know exactly what they can get away with. They assault a conservative only when it's a sucker-punch, they outnumber him, or he can't fight back for reasons of law or decorum.

I'm not a Beck fan. I'm just not a TV/radio talking-heads fan. They're all semi-educated and have come late to the truth. I just don't have the patience for their half-baked ideas...but there's no doubting that he's a decent man.

Ann, however, is a different kettle of fish. She's actually educated and she's funny as hell. I love her to bits.

Al Gore's global warming or the big chill?

2011-06-14T22:22:00.000-07:00

Or just another cock and bull story?

The latest long-range space forecast predicts a prolonged drop in solar activity after the next peak — and scientists say that might cool down temperatures here on Earth, or at least slow down the warming trend a bit.

Scientists have studied sunspots and the sun's 11-year activity cycle for 400 years, and they're getting increasingly savvy about spotting the harbingers of "space weather" years in advance, just as meteorologists can figure out what's coming after the next storm.

Storms from the sun are expected to build to a peak in 2013 or so, but after that, the long-range indicators are pointing to an extended period of low activity — or even hibernation.

Look, see, I'm holding this crystal ball to my head and I predict....an inconvenient truth.

As Quark said to Snark as they circled the earth in their flying saucer one hundred years ago: "I think Barnum's got the jump on us with this lot."

Sleep and the "inner caveman"

2011-06-04T23:49:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's because I was born and raised in Africa but this sounds sort of lazy and comfy. Jessa Gamble on sleep:

Solitary sleep on a softly cushioned surface, between four walls and under a roof—it’s hardly typical. Anthropologist Carol Worthman has spent many years in the field studying nighttime in traditional societies. In contrast with the Western sleep model—a regular bedtime followed by continuous sleep until morning—the Eje of Congo have some level of social activity persisting through all hours. The sleeping area of a family will see coming and going as some members retire, grooming each other for parasites that might disturb their sleep, and others hear the familiar strains of a thumb piano and get up to dance.

Botswana’s !Kung have similarly staggered bedtimes in their two-metre-round huts made of sticks and leaves. The huts aren’t much of an insulator for heat, sound, or predators—they mostly just keep the rain off—and it’s easy to feel embedded in the social interaction outside the hut. This setup lends itself to a less defined difference between sleeping and waking. Adults and children alike stay up as long as something interesting is going on, and it’s perfectly acceptable to check out of a group conversation by going to sleep.

It's no wonder that I fit right in with hippie communes in the Sixties.

But it's fine for kids - and people who do not have to run a modern business. Us old capitalist farts prefer "solitary sleep on a softly cushioned surface". Democrats on welfare, hippies and the !Kung don't seem to mind subsistence living. The rest of us have real jobs to do - mostly because we prefer some modicum of individual sovereignty and financial independence instead of being blown away by the next storm. I guess that's known as the "protestant work ethic."

Raising hackles

2011-06-03T22:34:00.000-07:00

And I don't mean this. I mean this:

Fly shop manager Jim Bernstein was warned that hair stylists would come banging on his door, but he didn't listen.

Sure enough, less than 24 hours later, a woman walked into the Eldredge Bros. Fly Shop in Maine and made a beeline toward a display of hackles — the long, skinny rooster feathers fishermen use to make lure.

"She brought a bunch up to the counter and asked if I could get them in pink," he said. "That's when I knew."

Fly fishing shops nationwide, he learned, are at the center of the latest hair trend: Feather extensions. Supplies at stores from the coasts of Maine to landlocked Idaho are running out, and some feathers sold online are fetching hundreds of dollars more than the usual prices.
...
"It takes years and years and years to develop these chickens to grow these feathers. And now, instead of ending up on a fly, it's going into women's hair," said Matt Brower, a guide and assistant manager at Idaho Angler in Boise.

"I think that's the reason a lot of people are a little peeved about it," he said.

The feathers are not easy to come by in the first place.

They come from roosters that are genetically bred and raised for their plumage. In most cases, the birds do not survive the plucking.

At Whiting Farms, Inc., in western Colorado, one of the world's largest producers of fly tying feathers, the roosters live about a year while their saddle feathers — the ones on the bird's backside and the most popular for hair extensions — grow as long as possible. Then the animal is euthanized.
...
It's not uncommon to find a package of rooster saddle feathers that would have cost around $60 at a fly shop now priced from $200 to $400.

A package of the most popular fly tying hackle for hair extensions, a black and white striped feather called grizzly saddle, would normally retail anywhere from $40 to $60. It sold for $480 on eBay last month after 31 bids.

Read the rest and weep. Of course, by euthanize, they mean behead, butcher and eat the way normal human beings do.

And to think of all the hackles we've thrown away. The thing is to pluck the hackles out before beheading our cocks. That way they aren't covered in blood.

I never thought I would ever agree with Ruth Bader-Ginsburg

2011-05-21T23:36:00.000-07:00

But I do this time. As does Mike Walsh at NRO:

[F]rom the Chicago Tribune:
The Supreme Court on Monday gave police more leeway to break into residences in search of illegal drugs.

The justices in an 8-1 decision said officers who loudly knock on a door and then hear sounds suggesting evidence is being destroyed may break down the door and enter without a search warrant.

Residents who “attempt to destroy evidence have only themselves to blame” when police burst in, said Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.
Sorry, but I’m with Ruth Bader Ginsburg on this one:
In a lone dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she feared the ruling in a Kentucky case will give police an easy way to ignore the 4th Amendment. “Police officers may not knock, listen and then break the door down,” she said, without violating the 4th Amendment. . . . in the Kentucky case, [the police] entered the wrong apartment, raising the issue of what is permissible in situations where police have reason to believe evidence is being destroyed.
After all, it’s not like the police ever make a mistake, or anything:
. . . in the Kentucky case, [the police] entered the wrong apartment, raising the issue of what is permissible in situations where police have reason to believe evidence is being destroyed.
That’s right — the guy who wound up in the can wasn’t even the guy they were looking for in the first place. Details, details:
Alito said the police conduct in this case “was entirely lawful,” and they were justified in breaking down the door to prevent the destruction of the evidence.

“When law enforcement officers who are not armed with a warrant knock on a door, they do no more than any private citizen may do,” he wrote. A resident need not respond, he added. But the sounds of people moving and perhaps toilets being flushed could justify police entering without a warrant, he added.
Moral of this story: If you hear the cops at the door, quietly get off the john, and whatever you do, don’t flush. Read the whole account of the case, which ought to get your blood boiling. Here’s the kicker, from Ginsburg:
Ginsburg, however, said the court’s approach “arms the police with a way routinely to dishonor the 4th Amendment’s warrant requirement in drug cases.” She said the police did not face a “genuine emergency” and should not have been allowed to enter the apartment without a warrant.

Yep, sometimes the commies are right and the "moral majority" are dead wrong. And Alito has simply confirmed what I've always suspected. He's an ass-licking tool.

Get rid of the Post Office

2011-05-14T11:53:00.001-07:00

The U.S. Postal Service has lost $2.6 billion so far this year.

The Dutch postal service:

Every week Dutch households and businesses are visited by postmen and postwomen from four different companies. There are the ‘orange’ postmen of the privatised Dutch mail company, trading as TNT Post but about to change their name to PostNL; the ‘blue’ postmen of Sandd, a private Dutch firm; the ‘yellow’ postmen of Selekt, owned by Deutsche Post/DHL; and the ‘half-orange’ postmen of Netwerk VSP, set up by TNT to compete cannibalistically against itself by using casual labour that is cheaper than its own (unionised) workforce. TNT delivers six days a week, Sandd and Selekt two, and VSP one.

Definitely the best photo that I've ever seen of Osama

2011-05-01T22:57:00.001-07:00

I've deleted this pic because it's supposedly a four year old pshop but mostly because I don't feel like looking at it all the time.

The kiss heard around the world

2011-04-29T19:41:00.000-07:00

I'm not a fan of PDAs (public displays of affection) especially kissing. In fact, when it comes to kissing, I'm a Hindu. To me, kissing is a very private and intimate thing. Kate's and William's kiss did not disgust me. It was sweet, dignified and respectful. The kiss of true friends who like each other - not a food-hole sucking vacuum-cleaner roto-rooter sexual display.

I'm also not a fan of "royalty." To me they're basically inbred hillbillies who happened to be born into a very rich and powerful family. But I love Kate. She's much more beautiful than Diana - but of course I've always preferred brunettes to blondes.

And it helps that she's a normal human being not a plastic pod person like the other inbred hillbilly royal kissin' cousins. Kate definitely brings out my heterosexual tendencies. What a stunner! William is a lucky man.

There are over 120,000 pics of Kate on Google. I liked this one because it shows that she's a not a silly neurotic child like Diana but a mature, smart and sensible woman - the same age as my mom when she married my dad.

"He was as dull and uninspired as, I don’t know what"

2011-04-25T19:09:00.000-07:00

In Competition No. 2691 you were invited to submit toe-curlingly bad analogies:

The first five winners, printed below, pocket £18 each; the rest get £10.

The state of the bathroom could only bring to mind the surface of a remote planet in which dungheaps and memphitic swamps co-existed with the entire toiletries and fragrances range of Galeries Lafayette.

The accountant had the world-weary air of a ferret that had been up so many trouser legs that life held no more surprises.

How to describe this novel? Picture it as The Aeniad meets Othello meets Moby Dick meets Peter Rabbit meets Mein Kampf meets the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus meets The Highway Code. In that ballpark, anyway.

His morals were as twisted as an expensive Sicilian corkscrew that had been used as a way of extracting the pith from a bad apple before being driven over by an Eddie Stobart truck.

The rest are just as ~~good~~ bad - i.e. #6:

She spoke as throatily as if a frog and its family had got into her throat and smoked a few packets of Peter Stuyvesant before growing claws and scratching at the inside of her thorax.

And my favorite (after the ferret/accountant):

The sea was agitated, like an old man demanding directions in a library as his wife is telling him to put the batteries back in his hearing aid.

The book that created the hegemony of the English language and cultural Christianity

2011-04-24T18:12:00.000-07:00

The King James Bible is 400 years old this year:

It has been printed in millions of copies and hundreds of editions. It gives us our most memorable phrases and arresting images – from ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ to a ‘sting in the tail’.

The title of the article, "The publishing sensation that made England conquer the world," made me think that the gist of the article was about how the King James Bible had conquered the known world linguistically, religiously and culturally. But really most of the essay is about William Tyndale and is worth reading if you enjoy history.

Maybe I should write an article about "the book that created the hegemony of the English language and cultural Christianity." It spread Christianity to all the British colonies and inspired not only the Glorious Revolution but the American Revolution.

Fifty-four scholars were nominated as translators, of whom 47 actually served. They were divided into six separate ‘companies’ or committees, two meeting at Oxford, two at Cambridge and two at Westminster, and the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha were parcelled out among them. Each committee then went through its alloted portion, line by line and word by word.

They began with the original texts in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic; they compared and contrasted later translations in Latin and many other languages; they scoured reference books and commentaries; they consulted with other scholars on speciﬁc issues. And, being academics, they debated and quarrelled endlessly and ferociously.

Contrary to popular belief, however, what the translators did not do was to start the work of translation from scratch. Their instructions, whose substance was dictated by James himself, were quite explicit on the point. Instead, they were to base themselves on the main English Bible translations of the 16th century: ‘Tindall’s (sic).
...
Though I spake with the tongues of men and angels, and yet had no love, I were even as sounding brass: and as a tinkling cymbal. And though I could prophesy, and understood all secrets, and all knowledge: yea, if I had all faith so that I could move mountains out of their places, and yet had no love, I were nothing. (I Corinthians 13. 1-2)

All the great phrases, which have become the very fabric of the language, are there, too: ‘the spirit is willing’; ‘ﬁght the good ﬁght’; ‘the powers that be’. Yet More denounced Tyndale’s great work as ‘a ﬁlthy foam of blasphemies’.

This was because Tyndale, basing himself on Erasmus, had dared to translate key words in their Greek meanings as ‘elder’, ‘congregation’, ‘love’ and ‘repent’, instead of the ofﬁcially approved ‘priest’, ‘church’, ‘charity’ and ‘do penance’.

A hundred years of strife was in the difference, and Tyndale was one of the ﬁrst victims.

He was betrayed to the Flemish authorities, condemned and, having been strangled ﬁrst (out of respect to his scholarship), his body was burned at the stake.

It is hard to exaggerate the difference between the lonely, hunted Tyndale and the comfortable cohorts of the Jacobean translators, with their fellowships and deaneries. Nine-tenths of Tyndale’s New Testament are reproduced word for word in the King James version.
...
In 1607, halfway through the work of the Jacobean translators, the ﬁrst lasting English settlement was established in North America, ﬁttingly enough at Jamestown.

With the Empire as the medium and the King James Bible as the message, English had begun its path to global dominance.

Happy Easter

2011-04-24T16:55:00.000-07:00

Peter Hitchens (brother of atheist Christopher Hitchens) compares Jesus Christ and Che Guevara?

[W]hat we recall at Easter is the show trial and judicial murder of Jesus of Nazareth. A mob is manipulated into calling for his death. The judge, who knows he is innocent, feebly gives in. Such things are common in the real world, to this day.
...
Among other things, Easter enshrines the idea that what we do here matters somewhere else, that there is an absolute standard by which our actions are judged.

Down 20 centuries, this idea has restrained the powerful. They do not like it. Never have. Never will.

The worship of Christ, victim of a lynch mob and a crooked judge, is dangerously radical. What about the cult of Comrade Guevara...?

It claims to be radical too. But its devotees are the power-worshipping generation that now dominates our culture, using their slogan of ‘equality’ as a bludgeon to flatten opposition.

Guevara was an evil killer, the exact opposite of Jesus. There is no excuse at all for revering him.

He personally slaughtered alleged traitors to his nasty revolution.

One of these was Eutimio Guerra, a peasant and army guide. Guevara himself icily recounted: ‘I fired a .32 calibre bullet into the right hemisphere of his brain which came out through his left temple. He moaned for a few moments, then died.’

Later, when the rock-star rebel ‘Che’ was in power, he would lie on top of the wall at
La Cabana prison, jauntily smoking a cigar while he watched the firing squads below punching bloody holes in the victims of his kangaroo trials.

Guevara’s view of justice was typical of the smug Left, which knows it is right because it knows it is good. ‘Don’t drag out the process. This is a revolution. Don’t use bourgeois legal methods, the proof is secondary.’

There you have it, rather neatly expressed – the two rival forces that compete for supremacy in what was once a Christian country – the Gospel of Che, hot with hate and splattered with other people’s blood and brains in the pursuit of a utopia that never comes, and the Gospel of Christ, a life laid down willingly for others. Care to choose?

I'm not a religious Christian but I am a "cultural Christian" - in other words: I live my life according to Jesus' only two commandments: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself."

(Maybe I should put the word God in quotes because I'm not sure if I use it the same way as other people. But it's impossible to define my "God" simply and honestly without sounding like a pretentious fool and a raving lunatic.)

I've been called a "moralist" by disapproving educated elites plenty of times. And I have to confess that I believe that Jesus' commandments are the "absolute standard by which our actions are judged" and I answer only to one Lord - and that will never be Caesar, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin or Che Guevara or anyone who thinks of government as God or bows to the power, might and coercion of an earthly Lord.

A gust of cool air eases breathlessness

2011-04-19T00:01:00.000-07:00

A simple hand-held electric fan could provide rapid relief:

The device, held six inches from the face and aimed at the central area of the face and the sides of the nose, reduces breathlessness in less than five minutes, suggests new research.

Medics believe cool air activates nerves in the face that are stimulated when people dive into cold water, prompting the body to conserve oxygen.
...
It [breathlessness] is caused by a wide range of conditions, including asthma, heart failure (where fluid accumulates in the lungs) and lung diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which includes emphysema and bronchitis.

A wide range of treatments is used for the conditions, including steroids, morphine and inhalers, to help reduce inflammation and spasm in the airways of the lungs.

But many people are helped only partially by these therapies. The team of doctors and physiotherapists behind the research, at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, stumbled on the idea of using a hand-held fan.

They followed up reports from patients that their symptoms are reduced when they feel a cool draught from an open window or door.

Doctors at the Breathlessness Intervention Service at Addenbrooke’s studied 50 patients. They found the method so effective that they are providing all of their patients with a basic three-blade hand-held fan when they are referred to the clinic.
...
Meanwhile, new research has revealed that broccoli sprouts — three to four-day-old broccoli plants — could help tackle bronchitis.

Researchers have discovered that a key compound in young broccoli plants seems to lower inflammation in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

A clinical trial is about to start where patients with the disease will be given concentrated extracts of the broccoli compound, an antioxidant called sulphoraphane, daily for four weeks.

The 90 patients on the trial will get one of three options: a low dose of the antioxidant; a high dose; or a placebo.

The aim of the trial, at the American Lung Association Asthma Clinical Research Centres, is to test the idea that sulphoraphane may reduce the harm that leads to lung damage in COPD.

Previous research has shown the lungs of patients with COPD have significantly lower levels of anti-inflammatory antioxidants.

The researchers add that there is not enough evidence yet to show that eating broccoli would have similarly beneficial effects.

A history of American cooking

2011-04-18T23:21:00.001-07:00

From Classic American recipes come to life:

Anthony Bourdain would have eaten well in the 1870s, which presented some extreme foods, including horse steak, brain fritters, starfish, roasted cat (Rôti de chat) and braised lion with olives and oranges.

This last dish was served as a special dinner at Restaurant Magny in New York. 'When Mr Lion was placed upon the table,' a participant wrote, 'there was a religious silence, which, however, lasted only for a few seconds, for at the first mouthful a murmur of approbation ran round the table, and the guests with one accord drank to the health of Mr Cheret' – the hunter – 'and M Magny, coupling in their admiration the valiant lion–slayer and the clever artiste who had proved himself able to prepare such a delicious dish out of the flesh of this ferocious game, which is more frequently in the habit of eating others than of being eaten itself.'
...
My cooking axioms
Use fresh spices, good oil and flaky non–iodised salt
Low–fat dairy is not a dependable substitute
Add enough salt to your pasta water that it tastes like seawater
If a recipe calls for yogurt, use a whole–milk Greek yogurt. The recipe and your life will be better for it
Good ingredients are expensive. But if more people buy them, the prices will drop (at last, my economics degree proves useful) Use more salt and higher heat than you think is prudent when searing meats
Take biscuits off the baking sheet within two minutes, no matter what the recipe says Undermixing is better than overmixing
I know this sounds batty, but no toasters and no kettles–they take up valuable worktop and oven space. (Use your grill for toasting and a pan to boil water)
Refrigerate your best oils and definitely don't store them near your stove
Use a meat pounder to crush garlic and spices
When it comes to pastry and bread doughs, remember you're the boss

* This is an extract from 'The Essential New York Times Cookbook: Classic Recipes for a New Century' by Amanda Hesser.

The rest of the essay is just as fascinating for those of us who cook and love food.

Why the middle-aged are grumpy

2011-04-18T23:19:00.000-07:00

Happiness in U-shaped:

Satisfaction with life starts to drop as early as a person's late 20s and does not begin to recover until well past 50, says Bert van Landeghem, an economist at Maastricht University in Belgium.

While young adults are carefree and full of hope for the future and the over-50s have come to terms with the trials of life, the research indicates that those in the middle feel weighed down by the demands on them.

This should be a daily duh! Your first childhood ends in your late 20s when your kids start arriving and you have to take responsibility for others. Your second childhood starts when the kids are grown up.

Could olive leaves help beat heart disease?

2011-04-15T23:15:00.000-07:00

As effective as some prescription medicines at reducing high blood pressure:

[I]t also appears to lower levels of harmful blood fats, called triglycerides, known to raise the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

In a study, patients who took the olive leaf pill for eight weeks saw a significant decline in blood pressure readings and triglyceride levels.

If further studies confirm the powerful effects of olive leaf tablets, they could be used to help patients who struggle to take blood pressure drugs because of their side-effects.
...
Researchers at the University of Indonesia, in Jakarta, investigated olive leaf extract by recruiting 180 patients with high blood pressure – and splitting them into two groups.

One received olive leaf pills for eight weeks. The rest were given an anti-hypertension drug called captopril, which can cause dizziness.
...
According to the research published in the journal Phytomedicine, systolic blood pressure – the higher reading – dropped an average of 11.5 points in the olive leaf group and 13.7 in the captopril patients. Diastolic blood pressure – the lower reading – fell 4.8 points in the olive leaf volunteers and 6.4 points in those on the prescription medicine.

Those on the olive treatment also saw ‘a significant reduction’ in levels of triglycerides. In a report on the study, sponsored by a Swiss manufacturer of olive leaf extract and PT Dexa Medica, which makes captopril, researcher Professor Endang Susalit said: ‘The leaves of the olive tree have been used since ancient times to combat high blood pressure, atherosclerosis [blocked arteries] and diabetes.

‘The anti-hypertensive activity of the extract was comparable to captopril, and its beneficial effects in reducing triglyceride levels were strongly indicated.’

Captopril is one of the ACE inhibitors:

Angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors are a group of drugs used primarily for the treatment of hypertension (high blood pressure) and congestive heart failure. Originally synthesized from compounds found in pit viper venom, they inhibit angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE), a component of the blood pressure-regulating renin-angiotensin system. Frequently prescribed ACE inhibitors include captopril, enalapril, lisinopril, and ramipril.

After years of taking lisinopril I have suddenly developed an allergy to it - hives - so I'm game to give olive leaves a go because all the other anti-hypertension drugs (beta-blockers and calcium channel blockers) also give me hives.

Goat-powered weed-whacking

2011-04-15T10:03:00.000-07:00

Replace pesticides and gas-guzzling garden tools with hungry goats:

The patch of weeds behind Steve Holdaway's Chapel Hill, N.C., home grew so unkempt that he hired outside help. For six hours, the crew's members tackled tall grass and thorny blackberry plants and toiled without a break — other than to chew their cud, that is.

His workers: seven hungry — and carbon-emission-free — goats.
...
Internet rivals Google and Yahoo hired herds to clear around their Northern California headquarters in 2010. So did the Vanderbilt Mansion, a national historic site in Hyde Park, N.Y. And in April 2010, nannies and billies were deployed at the U.S. Naval Base Kitsap Bangor in Silverdale, Wash., to annihilate pesky scotch broom plants.

While predators, poisonous plants and peeved neighbors can test goats on the job, the small livestock are well-suited for such labors.

Easy to manage, they relish prickly brush and weeds, and their agility makes them "popular employees" for navigating steep slopes that can thwart humans and machines, says Brian Faris, president of the American Boer Goat Association in San Angelo, Texas.

It cost 55-year-old Holdaway $200 to clear a 1,700-square-foot swath on his land with goats, pricier than the weed-whacking he's been doing himself for a decade with a gas-powered trimmer.
...
At Vanderbilt Mansion, where a small herd has grazed on seven hilly acres, the job's $9,000 annual price tag is about two-thirds what hired manpower would run, says Dave Hayes, the estate's natural-resource program manager. "And the goats are a lot more popular."
...
In Vernonia, Ore., Lewis Cochran started Vegetation Management Services Inc. with his dad in March 2010 after he lost his truck-driving job. He studied goat management online and is now the boss of nearly 50 critters, charging between $6 and $10 a head per day.

Time to build that goat-shed, buy some goats and rent them out as weed-whackers? Free food for the goats and free milk for us.

Why are these barbarians even considered members of civilized society?

2011-04-14T19:20:00.000-07:00

France’s Burqa Ban:

The notion of “Islamophobia” emerged from the Islamic Republic of Iran following the revolution in 1979. According to Caroline Fourest and Fiammetta Venner, two French journalists who have written extensively on the subject, the Iranian mullahs created the idea as a response to international criticism of such practices as the forcing of women to wear headscarves and persecution of homosexuals and other violators of “Islamic morality.”
...
Honor killings, arranged marriages, compelling adolescent girls and women to drape themselves in full body and face coverings, torching embassies and murdering humans because of cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad, female genital mutilation, terror attacks animated by political Islam — these are part and parcel of a larger political and social superstructure. Sadly, the West, particularly Europe, is simply tweaking the edges of the problem.

Actually "persecution of homosexuals and other violators of 'Islamic morality'" should really be "execution of homosexuals and other violators of 'Islamic morality'".

Why I hardly ever blog anymore

2011-04-07T21:43:00.000-07:00

I'm too old. I've been there, done that and seen it all. Politics is predictable. Human nature is natural and the sky has been falling since Adam took the apple from Eve.

I prefer watching the paint peel off the side of my barn while I sit in my rocking-chair and observe the flow of the seasons and enjoy the simple but magical world that man has not created.

Malcolm X was a fag

2011-04-02T22:14:00.000-07:00

Or maybe just on the "down low" like many black men:

Malcolm X himself contributed to many of the fictions, Mr. Marable argues, by exaggerating, glossing over or omitting important incidents in his life. These episodes include a criminal career far more modest than he claimed, an early homosexual relationship with a white businessman, his mother’s confinement in a mental hospital for nearly 25 years and secret meetings with leaders of groups as divergent as the Ku Klux Klan and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Elizabeth Taylor nude

2011-04-01T23:11:00.000-07:00

A private collector has released the only known picture of the star – then aged 24 – posing nude.

It is understood to be the first time the photo has been shown publicly. It was an engagement gift from Miss Taylor to producer Michael Todd, who was her third husband.

Why are there no anti-war demonstrations?

2011-03-31T23:28:00.000-07:00

Democrats killed the antiwar movement:

Last year, I blogged about some research that Michael Heaney and I were doing on the anti-Iraq War movement. I found that the antiwar movement quickly collapsed after Obama’s election. Smaller crowds, less attention. The big finding is that Democrats stopped showing up after Obama’s inauguration. Based on 5, 398 surveys of street demonstrators, here’s the paper’s key chart: (Click on link to see chart.)
...
In other words, once a Democrat gained power, Democrats stopped showing up to antiwar protests. If you want the full write up, read the paper, which has now appeared in Mobilization.

Bottom line: Social movements and parties rely on each other. Movements benefit when partisans appear because they can bolster their numbers. Parties use movements as platform for partisan grievances. But there’s a drawback, electoral victories mean that the rank and file will stop showing up.

What this means in human language (not commie crap talking points)is that the anti-war movement is fake. It's a cover for communists to undermine freedom just like the climate change boondoggle. The hard-core commies in the unions and the Plantation/Slave Party, aka the Democrats, don't want to challenge Obama. That's why they haven't stirred up the Cindy Sheehan type Berkeley Birkenstock peaceniks who really are unemployed useful idiots. Where are the masked thugs of MoveOn when the Code Pink pansies need them to stir the shit?

Just say no to Newt #378

2011-03-31T23:26:00.000-07:00

"I was happy to see that Newt Gingrich has staked out a position on the war, a position, or two, or maybe three. I don’t know. I think he has more war positions than he’s had wives. [...] There’s a big debate over there. Fox News can’t decide, what do they love more, bombing the Middle East or bashing the president? It’s like I was over there and there was an anchor going, they were pleading, can’t we do both? Can’t we bomb the Middle East and bash the president at the same time?" - Senator Rand Paul.

And just say yes to Rand Paul.

My idea of heaven on earth

2011-03-31T23:24:00.000-07:00

A shit in the woods with running water and toilet paper. This is in Bali.

Obama's war in Libya

2011-03-27T19:01:00.000-07:00

Gandhi - the "Great (fascist racist) Soul"

2011-03-27T16:28:00.000-07:00

From a review of Joseph Lelyveld's new book, Great Soul:

Joseph Lelyveld has written a generally admiring book about Mohandas Gandhi, the man credited with leading India to independence from Britain in 1947. Yet "Great Soul" also obligingly gives readers more than enough information to discern that he was a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist—one who was often downright cruel to those around him. Gandhi was therefore the archetypal 20th-century progressive intellectual, professing his love for mankind as a concept while actually despising people as individuals.

That about sums up exactly what I think about Gandhi too. He lived in South Africa for 21 years before returning to India and there are two ashrams and a farm near where I was born in Natal that were founded by and for his disciples. Gandhi's oldest son had a falling out with his father and, when the "Great Soul" returned to India, his son stayed behind in South Africa. I once met one of Gandhi's grandsons and knew two of his grandchildren through my Gujarati friends when I lived in a Hindu ashram in Durban for two years.

The whole review is worth reading. Here are a few more snippets:

Although Gandhi's nonviolence made him an icon to the American civil-rights movement, Mr. Lelyveld shows how implacably racist he was toward the blacks of South Africa. "We were then marched off to a prison intended for Kaffirs," Gandhi complained during one of his campaigns for the rights of Indians settled there. "We could understand not being classed with whites, but to be placed on the same level as the Natives seemed too much to put up with. Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized—the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals."

In an open letter to the legislature of South Africa's Natal province, Gandhi wrote of how "the Indian is being dragged down to the position of the raw Kaffir," someone, he later stated, "whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a number of cattle to buy a wife, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness." Of white Afrikaaners and Indians, he wrote: "We believe as much in the purity of races as we think they do." That was possibly why he refused to allow his son Manilal to marry Fatima Gool, a Muslim, despite publicly promoting Muslim-Hindu unity.

Gandhi's pejorative reference to nakedness is ironic considering that, as Mr. Lelyveld details, when he was in his 70s and close to leading India to independence, he encouraged his 17-year-old great-niece, Manu, to be naked during her "nightly cuddles" with him. After sacking several long-standing and loyal members of his 100-strong personal entourage who might disapprove of this part of his spiritual quest, Gandhi began sleeping naked with Manu and other young women. He told a woman on one occasion: "Despite my best efforts, the organ remained aroused. It was an altogether strange and shameful experience."

Gandhi's devotees don't like to think that their Mahatma ("Great Soul") was a dirty old man who molested his young niece. And of course they are too embarrassed to ever mention just how queer he really was. In fact I'd never even heard of this take on Gandhi's relationship with Kallenbach before:

Yet as Mr. Lelyveld makes abundantly clear, Gandhi's organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908. "Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom," he wrote to Kallenbach. "The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed." For some reason, cotton wool and Vaseline were "a constant reminder" of Kallenbach, which Mr. Lelyveld believes might relate to the enemas Gandhi gave himself, although there could be other, less generous, explanations.

Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach about "how completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance." Gandhi nicknamed himself "Upper House" and Kallenbach "Lower House," and he made Lower House promise not to "look lustfully upon any woman." The two then pledged "more love, and yet more love . . . such love as they hope the world has not yet seen."

But his blatant racism really takes the cake:

Gandhi was willing to stand up for the Untouchables, just not at the crucial moment when they were demanding the right to pray in temples in 1924-25. He was worried about alienating high-caste Hindus. "Would you teach the Gospel to a cow?" he asked a visiting missionary in 1936. "Well, some of the Untouchables are worse than cows in their understanding."

Gandhi's first Great Fast—undertaken despite his belief that hunger strikes were "the worst form of coercion, which militates against the fundamental principles of non-violence"—was launched in 1932 to prevent Untouchables from having their own reserved seats in any future Indian parliament. Because he said that it was "a religious, not a political question," he accepted no debate on the matter. He elsewhere stated that "the abolition of Untouchability would not entail caste Hindus having to dine with former Untouchables." At his monster rallies against Untouchability in the 1930s, which tens of thousands of people attended, the Untouchables themselves were kept in holding pens well away from the caste Hindus.
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Gandhi and Mussolini got on well when they met in December 1931, with the Great Soul praising the Duce's "service to the poor, his opposition to super-urbanization, his efforts to bring about a coordination between Capital and Labour, his passionate love for his people."

Most Indians are very caste, class and color conscious. When I first moved into that Hindu ashram in Durban, I used to invite all my friends. After a few visits by some of my Zulu friends, I was told by the leader of the cult not to invite anymore blacks because it made the Indian devotees uncomfortable to be so close to "such dirty people."

Of course I had to find out about Gandhi's German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder:

Hermann Kallenbach (1871–1945) was a South African architect who is best known for being a very close friend of Mahatma Gandhi, starting from the latter's early days in South Africa. Together with another Jew, H.S.L. Polak, Kallenbach was associated with Gandhi throughout the Satyagraha (non-violent resistance) struggle which lasted in South Africa until 1914.

Hermann was born in 1871 in East Prussia to a German Jewish family. He went to study architecture in Stuttgart and Munich. In 1896 he went to South Africa, where he practiced as an architect and became a South African citizen.

In 1904 he met Mohandas Gandhi, who was then working in South Africa. He was highly influenced by Gandhi's ideas of Satyagraha and equality among human beings and became his intimate friend and a dedicated devotee. In 1910 Kallenbach, who was a rich man, donated to Gandhi a thousand acre (4 km²) farm belonging to him near Johannesburg. The farm was used to run Gandhi's famous "Tolstoy Farm" that housed the families of satyagrahis. Abandoning the life of a wealthy, sport-loving bachelor, he adopted a simple lifestyle, vegetarian diet and equality politics of Gandhi on this farm. In Gandhi's words, they became "soulmates" and, for a time, shared Kallenbach's home.

Of course, Hermann and Mahandas may not have been actual butt-buddies but I know all about the "homo-erotic" aspects of Hindu monastic life. I had a very intensely emotional and sensuous (but not sexual) relationship with one of the male disciples who used to come to my ashram for devotions. There's a fine line between the intimacy of sharing with another "brother" in the experience of ecstatic love for "God" (that is generated by constant meditation) and plain old human emotional and physical love and affection.

Here is a photo of Kallenbach:

And here he is with Gandhi and his secretary Sonia Schlesin (click to biggify):

The statue of Gandhi in Durban.

Just say no to Newt

2011-03-23T23:01:00.000-07:00

I'm voting for Newt. I know that, if I wait long enough on any issue, he'll eventually take the position I agree with.

Unless of course you like a pandering opportunist who completely over-estimates his own intelligence. He should have been neutered like the runt of the litter a long time ago.

Soros' war in Libya

2011-03-21T12:36:00.000-07:00

Cameron and Obama are telling the same lies about Libya as Bush and Blair told about Iraq: it's a "humanitarian intervention." What BS. It's about oil. I'm not against war for oil but let's tell the truth.

We all know that George Soros is Obama's puppet-master so I did some checking.

From Good Sense:

Update: Obama departed to Brazil where he personally strengthens Soros' oil interests there.

Out with Western oil, in with Russian and Chinese oil. Is it just coincidence that George Soros sold his Western oil stock and bought stock in Russia and Chinese oil companies, about three months ago?

Starting in 2009, George Soros invested heavily in Western oil companies in Libya. His investments brought enormous returns, and then at the end of 2010 he mysteriously sold them, and bought stock in Russian and Venezuelan oil.

Each Western company saw stock prices skyrocket over the last six months: Suncore Energy up 46%, Petroleo Brasileiro SA Petrobras up 15%, Occidental Petroleum up 36%, Marathon Oil Corp. up 61%, Conoco Phillips up 42%, Halliburton up 67%, Hess Corp up 57%.

Soros somehow knew to reduce Suncore stocks on New Years eve. Soros dumped almost all his holdings. Likewise, Soros dumped almost all of Halliburton on New Years eve. Same for Hess. Soros dumped almost all of Occidental at the end of September, along with most of Conoco Phillips. He dumped much of Marathon in June. Soros actually increased PBR but that might have more to do with its huge oil bock buy in Africa. Each company began to tumble over these last few days because of the bloody revolution in Libya.

Soros switched much of that over to Russia and Venezuela oil giant Harvest National Resources, which skyrocketed right after his initial September 2010 buy.

Last March, Soros invested in airport screeners. How did he know to do that? Insider info! But how did he know what would go down across the Middle East?

Soros was behind the Egyptian uprising. But it is crucial for him that Gaddafi must stay in power! Otherwise his Russian investments might lose out. That explains why Obama dittered on something as simple as a no-fly zone for 31 days!

There are more smoking guns.

The emergency bicycle pedal pump solves two problems

2011-03-20T19:00:00.000-07:00

My buddy Chas says he wants one of these:

Not the Japanese policeman, but the emergency bicycle pedal pump he's using to manually pump gas from an underground tank.

Such a practical and sensible device could also be used, I think, to manually pump water out of my well if our power were out for a long length of time.

I did a Google search for "tmc pump pedal", and I found the device here:

Emergency Pump “KP Series”

But alas, you can't buy it from the website, and I can't find an American distributor that carries it.

A search for equivalent devices didn't turn up much: you can buy plans to build your own, or student projects, and various other farm-quality devices, that don't seem to be commercially available.

Why are such devices not available in the USA? They could be so useful in so many ways.

Maybe we need an incentive to start making them. Such devices can also be used to generate electricity. So here is an idea.

In the 1930's, they had all those "pick and shovel" programs to make work for people. Obama can't do that now, because heavy machinery have replaced most those pick-and shovel jobs. But we could have a new kind of "job" instead.

Create tons of bicycle pump generators, and then let all the overweight people who sit around collecting welfare, pump water or generate electricity for several hours per day. They could even watch TV while they are doing it. There would be many benefits:

1.) In our nation of obese people, it would be a way to get thinner and stay healthier.

2.) Taxpayer's would actually be getting SOMETHING in return for their money.

3.) It's GREEN energy. Hooray! Placate fanatics AND get people to work!

4.) In an emergency, "pumpers" could be deployed to pump gas, water, and generate electricity to charge batteries as needed.

Isn't that what they call a win/win situation? Or does it just make too much sense? Or is it just Sunday, and I haven't drank enough coffee yet?

Posted by Chas @ Chas' Compilation.

Safe nuclear - thorium

2011-03-20T16:57:00.000-07:00

China launching a rival technology to build a safer, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper network of reactors based on thorium:

China’s Academy of Sciences said it had chosen a “thorium-based molten salt reactor system”. The liquid fuel idea was pioneered by US physicists at Oak Ridge National Lab in the 1960s, but the US has long since dropped the ball.
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Chinese scientists claim that hazardous waste will be a thousand times less than with uranium. The system is inherently less prone to disaster.

“The reactor has an amazing safety feature,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA engineer at Teledyne Brown and a thorium expert.

“If it begins to overheat, a little plug melts and the salts drain into a pan. There is no need for computers, or the sort of electrical pumps that were crippled by the tsunami. The reactor saves itself,” he said.

“They operate at atmospheric pressure so you don’t have the sort of hydrogen explosions we’ve seen in Japan. One of these reactors would have come through the tsunami just fine. There would have been no radiation release.”

Thorium is a silvery metal named after the Norse god of thunder. The metal has its own “issues” but no thorium reactor could easily spin out of control in the manner of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or now Fukushima.

Professor Robert Cywinksi from Huddersfield University said thorium must be bombarded with neutrons to drive the fission process. “There is no chain reaction. Fission dies the moment you switch off the photon beam. There are not enough neutrons for it continue of its own accord,” he said.

Dr Cywinski, who anchors a UK-wide thorium team, said the residual heat left behind in a crisis would be “orders of magnitude less” than in a uranium reactor.

The earth’s crust holds 80 years of uranium at expected usage rates, he said. Thorium is as common as lead. America has buried tons as a by-product of rare earth metals mining. Norway has so much that Oslo is planning a post-oil era where thorium might drive the country’s next great phase of wealth. Even Britain has seams in Wales and in the granite cliffs of Cornwall. Almost all the mineral is usable as fuel, compared to 0.7pc of uranium. There is enough to power civilization for thousands of years.
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We cannot avoid the fact that two to three billion extra people now expect – and will obtain – a western lifestyle. China alone plans to produce 100m cars and buses every year by 2020.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said the world currently has 442 nuclear reactors. They generate 372 gigawatts of power, providing 14pc of global electricity. Nuclear output must double over twenty years just to keep pace with the rise of the China and India.
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US physicists in the late 1940s explored thorium fuel for power. It has a higher neutron yield than uranium, a better fission rating, longer fuel cycles, and does not require the extra cost of isotope separation.

The plans were shelved because thorium does not produce plutonium for bombs. As a happy bonus, it can burn up plutonium and toxic waste from old reactors, reducing radio-toxicity and acting as an eco-cleaner.

Marilyn Monroe the literature lover

2011-03-18T23:31:00.000-07:00

From a review by Larry McMurtry of 3 new books about MM :

Of the three books under review, easily the most accessible is MM—Personal. Marilyn Monroe, particularly during the decades of the 1940s and 1950s, was arguably the most famous woman on earth. In Korea during the Korean War—of which she was the dominant pin-up—she drew ten thousand soldiers at her appearances. She wrote and received many letters. Here’s a response to one she wrote Somerset Maugham:
Dear Miss Monroe,

Thank you for your charming telegram of good wishes on my birthday. It was extremely kind of you to think of me; I was touched and much pleased.
I am so glad to hear that you are going to play Sadie in the T.V. production of “Rain.” I am sure you will be splendid. I wish you the best of luck.

Yours very sincerely, W. Somerset Maugham
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Two years before she died, Frank Sinatra gave Marilyn a Maltese terrier that she named Maf. Andrew O’Hagan knows a great deal about Marilyn Monroe, and he has chosen to write about her from the point of view of her canine companion Maf the dog—certainly a daring, even a cheeky thing to do. He has made Maf into a very well-read dog. On each of the 277 pages we are likely to find a number of literary references.
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To say that the dog Maf has come up with a truly dizzying number of literary references would be to understate. O’Hagan has combed world literature for references to writers and their dogs, and picked up scores. Here, for example, is Vita Sackville-West, who “once spoke of her admiration for a certain French tapestry showing Ulysses being met on the doorstep by his dog, Argos.”
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Curiously, MM—Personal includes a charming series of letters Marilyn wrote to Arthur Miller’s children from the point of view of their basset hound:
Some terrible insects by the name of ticks have been getting on me lately and Janie it’s just terrible but I am managing the problem pretty well because when I get one on me I just run to Daddy or Marilyn and they get them off me in a hurry.
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Marilyn’s favorite photograph of herself was made by the British photographer Cecil Beaton in New York on February 22, 1956. She liked it so much that Josh Logan, who had just directed Bus Stop, had it framed for her, between two notes from Beaton. Marilyn had dozens of prints of it made. What struck Beaton was her ability to endlessly transform herself—without inhibition but with a real uncertainty and vulnerability:
She had rocketed from obscurity to become our post-war sex symbol, the pin-up girl of an age. And whatever press agentry or manufactured illusion may have lit the fuse, it is her own weird genius that has sustained her flight. Transfigured by the garish marvel of Technicolor cinemascope, she walks like an undulating basilisk, scorching everything in her path…. Perhaps she was born just the post-war day we had need of her. Certainly she had no knowledge of the past. Like Giraudoux’s Ondine, she is only fifteen years old, and she will never die.
The photograph—like many of her photographs—is stunning, but she doesn’t look fifteen and, six years later, she did die, after saying this to a reporter:
It might be kind of a relief to be finished. It’s sort of like you don’t know what kind of a yard dash you’re running, but then you’re at the finish line and you sort of sigh—you’ve made it! But you never have—you have to start all over again.

I've never heard of the TV version of "Rain". In 1953 Rita Hayworth did a remake of the 1932 cult classic movie with Joan Crawford (which I have ordered from Netflix).

If you're an MM fan, the rest of the review is worth reading.

MM's favorite photo of herself by Cecil Beaton:

MM with Edith Sitwell:

Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago

2011-03-18T20:06:00.000-07:00

Pasternak began writing Doctor Zhivago in 1946:

[H]e didn’t complete it until 1955, by which time he’d already published ten of the poems contained in the novel’s final chapter. Hoping to see the book appear in the Soviet Union under the terms of the Khrushchevite cultural “thaw,” he submitted the manuscript to the liberal journal Novy Mir in 1956 and asked the state publishing firm Gosizdat to consider bringing it out. He was rebuffed by both because of the subjective nature of the novel and its rebellion against Marxist orthodoxy. Instead, Pasternak agreed to hand it off to an Italian Communist journalist who had visited him that same year at the poet’s home in the Moscow suburb of Peredelkino, announcing grandly but not entirely without reason, “You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad.”
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The repercussions, however, were dire for Pasternak’s kin. After his death in 1960, his mistress Olga Ivinskaya—the woman upon whom part of the novel’s heroine Larissa Fyodorovna, or Lara, is based—was arrested along with her daughter, Lyudmila. Their crime was the “illegal” receipt of foreign royalties for Doctor Zhivago. Ivinskaya was sentenced to eight years of hard labor in Siberia, more or less following the fate of her fictional counterpart, while her daughter was sentenced to three.
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When Stalin’s wife N. S. Alliluyeva committed suicide in 1932, an obsequious letter of condolence, signed by thirty-three prominent Soviet writers—all of them subsequently executed in the Great Terror—was sent to the Kremlin. Pasternak was offered an opportunity to add his signature but declined, instead choosing to append a postscript to the letter saying:
I had been thinking, the evening before, deeply and persistently of Stalin; for the first time from the point of view of the artist. In the morning I read the news. I was as shaken as if I had been present, as if I had lived it and seen it.
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Pasternak again chanced fate when he lobbied to free the poet Osip Mandelstam, who was arrested in 1934 for writing a satiric epigram about the “Kremlin mountaineer” with “cockroach whiskers.” Stalin rang Pasternak on the phone at 2 o’clock in the morning, asking why the Soviet writers’ organizations hadn’t appealed to him directly on Mandelstam’s behalf, clearly wanting to scandalize the poets who wouldn’t stick up for their friend. Pasternak explained that it was no longer the custom of these organizations to interfere in such matters. There followed this exchange:
STALIN: But is he [Mandelstam] or is he not a master?
PASTERNAK: That is not the issue!
STALIN: What is the issue then?
PASTERNAK: I would like to meet with you . . . and for us to talk.
STALIN: About what?
PASTERNAK: About life and death . . .
(Stalin then hung up.)
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No other Soviet writer had the same breadth of vision, the same hopefulness, in the midst of so many human catastrophes. If Pasternak endures beyond the century that didn’t deserve him then it is because, as Robert Conquest noted in 1961, he “saw the human experience more sub specie aeternitatis than is possible to most of us.”

The father of the free-market - Adam Smith

2011-03-18T17:56:00.000-07:00

Adam Smith was born in 1723 in Kirkcaldy, Scotland.

Unlike his French counterparts and even his bosom friend David Hume, he led a retired life, much of it in the small Scottish town where he was born, and he lived with his mother until she died at a very advanced age. He was shy, destroyed most of his letters, and did not seem to relish giving brilliant performances, either in print or in conversation. He never fell afoul of civil or religious authority, had no mistresses, and engaged in no public quarrels.
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Adam Smith has become, along with Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, one of the deities in the libertarian-conservative pantheon. I suspect Smith would have firmly declined this honor, even before his more zealous devotees, the proponents of the “efficient markets” hypothesis, nearly succeeded in wrecking the economies of the United States, Britain, and their unfortunate imitators.

The Wealth of Nations appeared in the eventful year 1776. The title page described the author as “formerly professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow.” His principal influence, Francois Quesnay, chief of the Physiocrats, was a distinguished physician. They were both amateurs, generalists, and reformers—political economists, far removed in outlook and purpose from today’s “specialists without spirit.” The celebrated sarcasms and exhortations in Wealth of Nations—“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind,” for example, or “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”—are not incidental but central. The book might equally well have been titled The Welfare of Nations.

Everyone knows, of course, what Adam Smith stood for: free trade, the division of labor, the minimal state, the invisible hand, the illimitable growth of wants and needs. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” “Every individual … intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.” Case closed.

What everyone knows is seldom altogether wrong; but often it is not altogether right, either. As Emma Rothschild notes at the outset of Economic Sentiments, her superb study of Smith and Condorcet, “They think and write about self-interest and competition, about institutions and corporations, about the ‘market’ and the ‘state.’ But the words mean different things to them, and their connotation is of a different, and sometimes of an opposite, politics.” It is far from obvious that Smith would have entertained cordial feelings toward Alan Greenspan or Margaret Thatcher.

For one thing, Smith roundly mistrusted businessmen. In addition to the sallies already quoted, he insisted that businessmen, for all they may talk of freedom and fairness, “generally have an interest to deceive and even oppress the public.” One example out of many from The Wealth of Nations:
Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.

In other words Smith was a sane and circumspect pragmatist not a lala-land libertarian.

The difference between tsunamis and okinamis - distance from the shore

2011-03-15T23:41:00.000-07:00

Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa:

(神奈川沖浪裏, Kanagawa Oki Nami Ura, lit. "Under a Wave off Kanagawa"), also known as The Great Wave or simply The Wave, is a woodblock print by the Japanese artist Hokusai. An example of ukiyo-e art, it was published sometime between 1830 and 1833 (during the Edo Period) as the first in Hokusai's series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei (富嶽三十六景^?)), and is his most famous work.

This particular woodblock is one of the most recognized works of Japanese art in the world. It depicts an enormous wave threatening boats near the Japanese prefecture of Kanagawa. While sometimes assumed to be a tsunami, ["harbor wave"] the wave is, as the picture's title notes, more likely to be a large okinami [lit. "wave of the open sea."]

As in all the prints in the series, it depicts the area around Mount Fuji under particular conditions, and the mountain itself appears in the background.

This pic is huge. Click to biggify and see details. It's stunning.

Earthquakes and solar flares

2011-03-11T15:28:00.001-08:00

Japan was hit by a magnitude 8.9 quake on Friday afternoon and it happened when a shockwave from an X-Class flare hit the planet during a 24 hour window.

Today's naked redneck chick post

2011-03-09T23:35:00.000-08:00

A study has found that chickens are capable of empathy.

Chickens have feelings too:

The writer E.B. White, patron saint of us dwellers in darkness who have come late to the barnyard, wrote about the mystery and menace of country life from his saltwater farm in Maine. He wrote about weak lambs who die in the night, heifers who refuse to breed, colts who go lame for no discernible reason. The theme that runs through all his farm accounts is the extremely tenuous thread that links livestock to life, a thread he turned into the world’s most famous web when he wrote Charlotte’s Web.

The story White never wrote was one that I reckon he deemed too hard for young readers to take, the story of a tame hen who willfully tore a chick to pieces and then, crazed with remorse, went into the cellar and committed suicide by eating moth balls.
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The story this week that chickens are capable of feeling empathy might have surprised some folk but it sure didn’t surprise me. I’ve known chickens who were capable of love, jealousy, selfishness and lust. I’ve observed the politics of the chicken yard and found them to be as complicated and heartbreaking as any parish council in the land.

New footage of September 11 attacks

2011-03-08T11:34:00.000-08:00

Captured from a New York Police Department (NYPD) helicopter, the 17-minute video shows the aircraft hovering just 300ft above the Twin Towers as thick black smoke spewing out from the roof of the building.

After the 1727ft North Tower imploded, the police pilot can be heard on camera commenting: "Holy ----, that’s it, biggest disaster in the world, right there".

The footage was used at the official inquiry into the collapse of the World Trade Centre buildings. It was obtained from New York City authorities under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) but was not released publicly.

However, the video was passed onto whistleblowing website Cryptome who leaked it onto the internet.

It's here.

Sorry guys, size DOES matter...

2011-03-08T11:33:00.001-08:00

...at least when it comes to fertility:

When it comes to male fertility, it turns out that size does matter. But not the measurement that most men worry about.

The dimension in question is a measurement known as anogenital distance, or AGD.

The shorter the AGD, the more likely a man was to have a low sperm count, a U.S. study has shown.

Men whose AGD is shorter than the median length - around two inches - have seven times the chance of being sub-fertile as those with a longer AGD, according to the study published on Friday in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

That distance, measured from the anus to the underside of the scrotum, is linked to male fertility, including semen volume and sperm count, the study found.

I'll show you my AGD if you show me yours.

The last "White Rajah"

2011-03-08T00:10:00.000-08:00

Anthony Brooke, who died on March 2 aged 98, was heir to the throne of Sarawak and briefly ruled the romantic jungle kingdom on Borneo:

Brooke's English family had been the absolute rulers of Sarawak for three generations. Popularly known as the White Rajahs, they had their own money, stamps, flag and constabulary, and the power of life and death over their various subjects – Malays, Chinese and Dyak tribesmen, a few of whom still indulged in the grisly custom of headhunting.

The Brooke family ruled Sarawak (which is the size of England) from 1841 until 1946 when they were forced to cede it to the British Empire. It was finally given independence in 1963 when it joined the new Federation of Malaysia. Read the whole thing if you can stomach the British jingoism but I did enjoy how Anthony Brooke ended up after ceding Sarawak:

[He] embarked on a second career as a self-styled "travelling salesman" for world peace. In the late 1950s, he led a campaign to put morality back into British politics, and in the 1960s he toured the world on a "peace pilgrimage", meeting Nehru, Zhou En-lai and U Nu of Burma, and walking across the Punjab with the Indian saint Vinoba Bhave. He lived with the New Age commune at Findhorn, in the northeast of Scotland, adopting their belief that flying saucers would bring "peace on earth and the brotherhood of man".

I think I'd take the lunacy of the British Empire over flying saucers anyday.

"Obama’s deep thinking is ultimately bogus"

2011-03-07T23:27:00.000-08:00

Any sane person knows that Obama is a phony but it takes a fag to really see how totally insincere he is about "gay marriage". Bruce Bawer:

Of course, Obama isn’t just your run-of-the-mill opponent of gay marriage. No, he wants to have that one both ways, too. So it is that every time he reiterates his hostility to gay marriage, he insists on adding that he’s “grappling” or “wrestling” with the issue.
...
Obama’s distinguishing characteristic throughout his adult years has been a species of intellectual vanity that seems to overwhelm his every other personal attribute, good or bad. So pronounced is this intellectual vanity — and the self-seriousness that goes with it — that it stood out even at Harvard Law, where he studied, and the law school at the University of Chicago, where he taught. He has, in short, even by the formidable standards of the Ivy League, the law profession, and high-stakes politics, an exceedingly lofty opinion of his own mind and wants us to share that opinion. Nothing else, it would seem, matters to him nearly as much.

So thoroughly does this trait dominate Obama’s character, indeed, that it utterly dwarfs other traits that one might consider important in a president — or, for that matter, an alderman, school superintendent, night manager at a deli, or anybody else in a position of responsibility. Time and again, when the impressive thing would be to make a strong and timely decision — and to make a clear case for it — Obama hesitates, vacillates, equivocates, and ends up, as in the matter of gay marriage, making a muddle of things and riling up pretty much everybody; and instead of recognizing this habit as a weakness, Obama himself shows every sign of considering it a virtue, a mark of excellence, that distinguishes him from lesser — which is to say less cognitively inclined — beings.
...
Obama’s deep thinking is ultimately bogus. It’s as if he’s posing for Rodin, elbow on knee, chin on fist — all the while staring in a mirror, pleased by what he sees.

Couldn't have said it better myself. I'd have just said he is simply a typical pseudo-intellectual airhead snob.

HT GayandRight.

The odds of an American soldier being killed in various wars

2011-03-06T22:28:00.000-08:00

From Nicholas Hobbes' Essential Militaria:

• War of Independence: 2 percent (1 in 50)
• War of 1812: 0.8 percent (1 in 127)
• Indian Wars: 0.9 percent (1 in 106)
• Mexican War: 2.2 percent (1 in 45)
• Civil War: 6.7 percent (1 in 15)
• Spanish-American War: 0.1 percent (1 in 798 )
• World War I: 1.1 percent (1 in 89)
• World War II: 1.8 percent (1 in 56)
• Korean War: 0.6 percent (1 in 171)
• Vietnam War: 0.5 percent (1 in 185)
• Persian Gulf War: 0.03 percent (1 in 3,162)

Our Civil War was the deadliest but the figure is more than double the others because both sides were counted as American soldiers.

Lies, damned lies and statistics: American kids are the dumbest on earth

2011-03-04T22:47:00.000-08:00

In general, kids from wealthy families perform well in school - better, in fact, than almost anywhere else in the world - but poor students rarely succeed.

In less politically correct words: kids from decent middle-class American families outperform kids everywhere in the world. It's the under-achieving black and white trash on welfare who drag our statistics down.

It's the same with the murder rate. Ghetto blacks killing ghetto blacks makes our murder rate high. Ditto with all the other statistics. Middle-class Americans are the most civilized people in the world. And anyone can become middle-class in America unlike anywhere else in the world.

As the Silky Pony says: there are two Americas. There are the Americans who work hard and pay taxes and then there are the bums who pay no taxes and suck off the government tit.

Socialism/welfarism has not solved any problems but it has created a huge one. We're stuck with a bunch of bums who would have died of starvation generations ago in a world without "from each according to his ability; to each according to his need" Marxist bullshit.

I'm an unapologetic Spencerian. Good old-fashioned Christian charity would have helped those who were willing to help themselves.

Jane Russell RIP

2011-03-02T21:57:00.000-08:00

The unseen files of Marilyn Monroe

2011-02-28T23:06:00.000-08:00

From a review of the book, MM – Personal: From the Private Archive of Marilyn Monroe by Lois Banner:

What is certain is that sometime on the night of 4 August the cabinet in the guest cottage was broken into, and that crucial files were removed – perhaps pertaining to Monroe's relationship with the Kennedys and their links with the Mafia boss Sam Giancana.
...
Monroe's horror at the idea of not being able to get pregnant is made starkly and rather zanily clear by a handwritten letter she taped to her stomach before having her appendix removed in 1952: "Cut as little as possible," it reads. "I know it seems vain but that doesn't really come into it. The fact I'm a woman is important. You have children and you must know what it means. For God's sakes Dear Doctor no ovaries removed."

Monroe suffered three miscarriages in the mid-1950s while married to the playwright Arthur Miller, and the archive is full of reminders of how painful that time must have been.
...
Would Monroe have been a good mother? Who can tell? But letters she wrote to her stepchildren, Bobby and Jane Miller, reveal a playfulness and understanding of childhood needs and disappointments that would surely have stood her in good stead.

In August 1957 we find her writing to them at summer camp in the guise of their basset hound, Hugo (she also wrote to them as their Siamese cat, Sugar Finney): "It sure is lonesome round here! I made a mistake and I am sorry, but I chewed up one of your baseballs. I didn't mean to. I thought it was a tennis ball and that it wouldn't make any difference but Daddy and Marilyn said that they would get you another one, so is it all right for me to keep playing with this one as long as you are getting a new one? Love from your friend and ankle-chewer."
...
Despite knowing how infuriating she could be, it remains impossible not to like Monroe. She had a wit worthy of Mae West ("There is only one way he could comment on my sexuality and I'm afraid he has never had the opportunity!" she wrote of Tony Curtis, though he would later claim to have been her lover) and an ability to remain winsome even in adversity.

After she was fired from the film Something's Got to Give in 1962, as her drug habit escalated, she wrote to George Cukor, the director: "I blame myself but never you. The next weekend I will do any painting, cleaning, brushing you need around the house. I can also dust."
...
Equally moving is a note from the mother of a soldier who saw Monroe perform in Korea in 1955. She quotes from the letter her son sent her: "When she appeared on the stage, there was just a sort of gasp from the audience – a single gasp multiplied by the 12,000 soldiers present… The broadcasting system was extremely poor… However, it didn't matter. Had she only walked out on stage and smiled it would have been enough."

If representatives of the Kennedys did remove documents from the filing cabinet on the night of Monroe's death, and Lois Banner is certain that they did ('I know who took them and what happened to them, but I don't feel at liberty to say at this point,' Banner told me), they were pretty thorough. The archive now has almost no material relating to Monroe's relationships with JFK and Robert Kennedy, which are thought to have dominated the final months of her life.

My man: Chris Christie

2011-02-25T22:55:00.000-08:00

Like a stand-up comedian working out-of-the-way clubs:

Chris Christie travels the townships and boroughs of New Jersey, places like Hackettstown and Raritan and Scotch Plains, sharpening his riffs about the state’s public employees, whom he largely blames for plunging New Jersey into a fiscal death spiral. In one well-worn routine, for instance, the governor reminds his audiences that, until he passed a recent law that changed the system, most teachers in the state didn’t pay a dime for their health care coverage, the cost of which was borne by taxpayers.

And so, Christie goes on, forced to cut more than $1 billion in local aid in order to balance the budget, he asked the teachers not only to accept a pay freeze for a year but also to begin contributing 1.5 percent of their salaries toward health care. The dominant teachers’ union in the state responded by spending millions of dollars in television and radio ads to attack him.

“The argument you heard most vociferously from the teachers’ union,” Christie says, “was that this was the greatest assault on public education in the history of New Jersey.” Here the fleshy governor lumbers a few steps toward the audience and lowers his voice for effect. “Now, do you really think that your child is now stressed out and unable to learn because they know that their poor teacher has to pay 1½ percent of their salary for their health care benefits? Have any of your children come home — any of them — and said, ‘Mom.’ ” Pause. “ ‘Dad.’ ” Another pause. “ ‘Please. Stop the madness.’ ”

By this point the audience is starting to titter, but Christie remains steadfastly somber in his role as the beseeching student. “ ‘Just pay for my teacher’s health benefits,’ ” he pleads, “ ‘and I’ll get A’s, I swear. But I just cannot take the stress that’s being presented by a 1½ percent contribution to health benefits.’ ” As the crowd breaks into appreciative guffaws, Christie waits a theatrical moment, then slams his point home. “Now, you’re all laughing, right?” he says. “But this is the crap I have to hear.”

The rest is worth reading even if it is in the NYT. Yep, the NYT. Even some of their writers are fed up with teachers' unions like the rest of us.

Snow in San Francisco?

2011-02-25T11:29:00.000-08:00

For the first time in 35 years:

There have been snowflakes on Twin Peaks as recently as 2009, and flurries peppered even lower spots in San Francisco in 1988, '89 and '98.

But the gold standard of true snowfall is to have it hit sea level - and to stick long enough to make a snowman. That hasn't happened since Feb. 5, 1976.
...
If the storm hits California with its expected frosty ferocity by then, daytime highs will drop to the 40s and showers will start. By late Friday night, after a couple of days of frigid sogginess, the stage should be set for a traditional winter wonderland.

If the thermometer in San Francisco dips into the mid- to upper 30s as expected after dark, rain continues to fall and the earth stays chilled so it won't melt everything hitting it, there should be snow everywhere from the Financial District to the Sunset, forecasters say.

As for higher Bay Area spots such as Mount Diablo, Mount Hamilton and Mount Tamalpais, which sported snow blankets last weekend - count on a repeat show of the same, forecasters said. Mount Diablo alone had 8 inches of snow Friday.
...
Previous snowfall at sea level in San Francisco:

Dec. 25, 1856 2.5 inches

June 12, 1868 2 inches

Dec. 31, 1882 3.5 inches

Feb. 7, 1884 1.5 inches

Feb. 5, 1887 3.7 inches (most snow ever recorded in the city)

Jan. 16, 1888 0.1 of an inch

March 3, 1896 1 inch (latest ever)

Dec. 11, 1932 0.8 of an inch

Jan. 15, 1952 0.3 of an inch

Jan. 21, 1962 2 inches

Feb. 5, 1976 1 inch
...
February 5, 1887: The photo was taken on Shotwell Street between 22nd and 24th. I'm betting those houses look almost exactly the same now, with a few more cars parked in front.

More photos here.

I really love global warming. It snowed here yesterday for the third time this winter.

Daffy the Duck is just an aging old drag queen

2011-02-25T10:57:00.000-08:00

The embattled dictator said he was like the Queen, who he says has not been overthrown for 57 years:

"You need to listen to your parents. If people disobey their parents they end up destroying the country," he said. "The same case as in Britain (where) for 57 years the Queen has been ruling. I have been in the same situation."

Daffy says Osama bib Laden is the real villain:

He says those revolting are "loyal to bin Laden ... This is al Qaeda that the whole world is fighting."

He says al Qaeda militants are "exploiting" teenagers, giving them "hallucinogenic pills in their coffee with milk, like Nescafe."
...
Seriously, why are you guys even directing this rage at Qaddafi to begin with? He's just a gentle old man who smiles and waves to people and drinks tea and wears white gloves to protect his delicate hands and hosts foreign dignitaries and unleashes mercenary death squads on his people and takes leisurely strolls through floral gardens.

Libya supplies 50% of Europe's oil

2011-02-24T22:59:00.000-08:00

They should deal with Momo the Daffy Duck:

Libya's violent upheaval has taken 1.2 million barrels of oil off the global market as energy plants and ports are shut down, according to Italy's Eni, the largest producer in the country.

The figure represents most of Libya's total daily production, which before the crisis was about 1.6 million barrels of crude. The country sits on the biggest proven oil reserves in Africa.

The end of the American oil "empire"

2011-02-24T19:11:00.001-08:00

I put "empire" in quotes because the USA was never a real empire like Rome and Britain but there are some good observations in How will America handle the fall of its Middle East empire?

The British empire reached its fullest extent in 1930. Twenty years later, it was all over.

Today, it is reasonable to ask whether the United States, seemingly invincible a decade ago, will follow the same trajectory. America has suffered two convulsive blows in the last three years. The first was the financial crisis of 2008, whose consequences are yet to be properly felt. Although the immediate cause was the debacle in the mortgage market, the underlying problem was chronic imbalance in the economy.

For a number of years, America has been incapable of funding its domestic programmes and overseas commitments without resorting to massive help from China, its global rival. China has a pressing motive to assist: it needs to sustain US demand in order to provide a market for its exports and thus avert an economic crisis of its own. This situation is the contemporary equivalent of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), the doctrine which prevented nuclear war breaking out between America and Russia.

Unlike MAD, this pact is unsustainable. But Barack Obama has not sought to address the problem. Instead, he responded to the crisis with the same failed policies that caused the trouble in the first place: easy credit and yet more debt. It is certain that America will, in due course, be forced into a massive adjustment both to its living standards at home and its commitments abroad.

I don't agree completely with the author's world-view but the rest is worth reading.

The Christchurch quake

2011-02-23T23:40:00.000-08:00

Two days before the quake in New Zealand I made contact after 50 years with someone there with whom I had grown up in a small village in South Africa. He had recently published a book about that village. We chatted by email for a few days and then the quake happened and I have not heard from him since.

This was the scene (click to enlarge) just seconds after the quake struck, kicking up a cloud of dust that choked the streets of Christchurch. More pictures here:

What would the budget look like if the United States were a middle-class household?

2011-02-23T22:44:00.000-08:00

A thought experiment:

[T]he Obama budget throws around some very big numbers, a dizzying array of billions and trillions, and they are difficult to parse and compare. So let's cut them down to a useful, human, household size. Next year, the government plans to take in $2.63 trillion—and to spend $3.73 trillion. For our purposes, let's use $60,000 as the government's income and $85,000 as its expenses.
...
Where does all of that spending go? Mostly, to mandatory programs, spending that does not change much year-to-year and is not easily reduced. But given that mandatory spending makes up about 60 percent of spending, if the debt is going to come down, these are the line items that need to change. Next year, Obama is requesting $17,400 for Social Security, $10,700 for Medicare, $6,100 for Medicaid, and $13,600 for other mandatory programs such as food stamps. There's no way around any of those expenditures, which total about $48,000—or more than three-quarters of the federal government's annual income. (Last year, mandatory spending alone actually exceeded income.)
...
But wait—there's more, as they say. You have to pay for all the debt you're ringing up. This year, you are on the hook for $5,500, and that is just for interest payments to creditors. So you see the problem here: Before you've even gotten to anything that anyone even talks about cutting, you're already about 25 percent over budget.

Then, we come to nonsecurity, discretionary programs—all of the money for bridges, schools, nuclear power plants, foreign aid, space flight, and everything else. Obama is asking for $10,400 for all of this, or about 12 percent of total spending. In the discretionary budget, the sums are astounding not because they're so huge, but because they're so puny: $400 on energy, $500 on agriculture, $1,000 on housing and urban development, and $1,800 on education, for example. Nuff said.

We can't throw stones at the greaseballs in Greece because our house is also built of glass.

Do solar flares cause earthquakes?

2011-02-22T00:41:00.001-08:00

Solar activity peaks every 11 years. Reading about the quake in New Zealand today made me realize that the worst earthquake I lived through (San Francisco in 1989) happened 22 years ago.

Did solar flares trigger the Christchurch earthquake?

The theory that solar flares trigger earthquakes is far from widely accepted, but has received some serious attention from geophysicists. According to the theory, disturbances from the Sun upset the Earth’s magnetic field, which may somehow lead to instability in tectonic plates.

It turns out that today’s devastating Christchurch earthquake has occurred just five days after a major solar flare. As a result of the flare, a few websites went so far as to predict a high probability of earthquakes.

This blogger predicted possible major earthquakes in the northern hemisphere, which thankfully have not eventuated, but also this:
Southern Hemisphere there is a potential event around 45-50 Degrees Latitude, most likely fit region is the base or South Island New Zealand extending down towards Macquarie Islands, possible magnitude could be 6.2 to 6.5.
With the Christchurch earthquake rating at 6.3 on the Richter Scale, this would have to go down as a good call. This website also predicted possible earthquakes in light of the solar flares.

From the American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2007, abstract #IN33A-03:

We present the study of 682 earthquakes of 4.0 magnitude observed during January 1991 to January 2007 in the light of solar flares observed by GOES and SOXS missions in order to explore the possibility of any association between solar flares and earthquakes. Our investigation preliminarily shows that each earthquake under study was preceded by a solar flare of GOES importance B to X class by 10-100 hrs.

Do solar flares stimulate political rebellions?

2011-02-21T17:38:00.001-08:00

Chas recently did a post about a theory that solar flares affect people and stimulate political rebellions:

Excitability, due to solar activity? I had previously posted about this last May. But with the recent increase in solar activity as we enter our Solar Maximum, I can't help but think of the Middle East. Compare what Tchijevsky said, and what is happening there now:

A. L. Tchijevsky’s Theory of Sunspot Activity and Human Activity
[...] That sunspot cycle activity increased and decreased in a cycle of approximately 11 years was established in the 1750s when astronomers began to make the first charts of the numbers of sunspots over time. During World War I, A. L. Tchijevsky, a Russian professor of Astronomy and Biological Physics who continued his studies at the war front, noticed that particularly severe battles regularly followed each solar flare during the sunspot peak period of 1916-17.

To test his hypothesis that sunspot cycle influenced human activity, Tchijevsky constructed an Index of Mass Human Excitability covering each year form 500 BC to 1922 AD. He then investigated the histories of 72 countries during that period, noting signs of human unrest such as wars, revolutions, riots, expeditions and migrations, plus the numbers of humans involved.

Tchijevsky found that fully 80% of the most significant events occurred during the 5 years of maximum sunspot activity. (Tchijevsky's merely noting that the 1917 Russian Revolution occurred during the height of the sunspot cycle earned him almost 30 years in Soviet prisons because his theory challenged Marxist dialectics.)

Chas also posted more info on the recent increase in solar activity.

Get rid of government unions

2011-02-21T09:13:00.000-08:00

Many people reminded us last week that the patron saint of the working-class, FDR, did not agree with government unions. So I decided to find an actual quote.

In a letter to a public employee union, Roosevelt explains that, yes, they do have a right to organize, but there are some restrictions:

All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.
...
Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that "under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government."

Oregon Congressman is insane

2011-02-18T23:25:00.001-08:00

So what else is new? They're all Democratic nuts but this one takes the cake.

The USA and the Middle East

2011-02-18T23:09:00.000-08:00

From Pillars of Sand:

America used to be the essential trade partner for the Gulf countries, but this has now changed. In 2009, Saudi Arabia exported 57% of its 2009 crude oil to the Far East, and just 14% to the US. Responding to this underlying shift, King Abdullah has been pursuing a “look East” policy since 2005, resulting in trade worth more than $60 billion.

This eastward shift has made China a bigger trading partner than the US for both Qatar and the UAE. And almost a quarter of Qatar’s trade is with China, compared to just over 5% with the US. Likewise, 37% of the UAE’s trade is with China, India, and South Korea. To many Middle East states, what China wants is now just as important as US interests.

Bahrain is home to the Fifth Fleet and hopefully somehow we can keep that base open as it our eye on the Persian Gulf. But...

There's No Turning Back in the Middle East:

The central, underlying feature of the Middle East's crisis is a massive youth bulge. About 60% of the region's population is under 30. These millions of young people have aspirations that need to be fulfilled, and the regimes in place right now show little ability to do so. The protesters' demands have been dismissed by the regimes as being for Islamic fundamentalism or a product of Western interference. But plainly these are homegrown protests that have often made the West uneasy as they have shaken up old alliances. And what the protesters want in the first place is to be treated as citizens, not subjects. In a recent survey of Middle Eastern youth, the No. 1 wish of the young in nine countries was to live in a free country, although, to be sure, jobs and the desire to live in well-run, modern societies ranked very high as well.

The uprisings in the Middle east will probably eventually be co-opted by Islamicists. It would be nice if we could let go and let the Chinese handle the the Muslims. They might be able to put them in their place. It would also be nice to pull our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan and concentrate on our immediate problems.

We've got a 1,000 mile "border" with Mexico. That's our real problem. There are two solutions. We could build an impenetrable wall and become a paranoid police state or - we could accept that Mexico will one day be the 51st state. Meanwhile both Mexico and Canada have all the oil that we need. So why not annex Canada also. It could be the 52nd state. That will probably happen anyway eventually. Lines in the sand are not real borders.

Noble savages - yeah right!

2011-02-17T23:09:00.000-08:00

Ancient Britons were cannibals:

Ancient Britons stand accused today of ritually killing each other, boiling and eating human flesh and drinking out of hollowed out skulls – including the skulls of children. This may be a startling revelation to the general public, but I doubt that it will be much of a surprise to anthropologists. And it may even come as a relief to champions of aboriginal peoples around the world who have tried to dismiss evidence of native cannibalism as a white colonialist smear. At least now they can say: the Brits were at it, too.

The most significant thing about the discoveries, arguably, is the relatively sophistication of the society that committed these atrocities. These cannibals were Ice Age hunter-gatherers, not savages. They chopped up the bodies and hollowed out the skulls with meticulous culinary precision. (It’s sheer coincidence, I’m sure, that the ancestors of these Cro-Magnon people came from France.)

It’s an uncomfortable truth that cannibalism isn’t confined to the most primitive people, but survived among societies – even civilisations – that Western scholars have depicted as “noble”, “peaceful” and “advanced”. For most of the 20th century, for example, there was a romantic cult of the Mayans of Central America as a gentle theocracy ruled by priest-astronomers. Then the murals of Bonampak were discovered – gorgeous works of art, but obviously the product of a people whose warrior-kings were ankle-deep in gore. Now the consensus is that the Mayans practised Aztec-style human sacrifice and ate the hearts of the the victims.

Theories involving cannibalism can wreak havoc in an age when archaeologists have to work in a politically correct academic environment. There was an explosive row in the late 1990s when evidence emerged that the Anasazi, ancestors of the revered Hopi Native Americans, sometimes butchered human victims like game animals.

Some Native American spokesmen, meanwhile, just refused to countenance the hypothesis. So have the representatives of other aboriginal peoples confronted by evidence of ancestral cannibalism, particularly if the practice occurred recently. As for New Age worshippers of the noble savage, the whole subject induces acute cognitive dissonance.

Modern liberals know for sure that all of our ancestors lived on tofu. I hope those French cannibals cooked better than the native Brits. At least their menus would have been fancier. Any one for Granny a la coq au vin?

Teachers teaching kids it's okay to lie

2011-02-17T11:12:00.000-08:00

On the "sick-out" by teachers in Wisconsin.

Jay Nordlinger:

One thing about all these teachers — 40 percent of the union — calling in “sick”? They’re lying. And it’s not nice to lie, yes? These are the adults, of course, who are expected to set examples for “the children”: those vaunted children in whose name the unionists pretend to be doing everything they do.

Ace:

Public employees should not be allowed to unionize or if they are, they should be forbidden to contribute to political campaigns. The current system essentially allows the employees to buy off the managers (politicians) in order to rip off the owners (the public). It's a system that is corrupt by it's very existence. The proof of this is the public pension and benefits schemes that threatens to crush the fiscal solvency of many states.

Even that well known conservative, anti-labor President Franklin Roosevelt knew this.

I despise all unions but have a special hatred for public employee unions.

Why I left San Francisco after living there for 25 years

2011-02-16T23:07:00.000-08:00

Sarah and the San Francisco Poster Wars by Ray Gross at American Thinker:

I am gay. I live in San Francisco. For the last few years I've had a terrible secret, one I felt necessary to hide from hateful and intolerant people. Who would these people be, and what am I hiding?

I am hiding from the Liberal Left. I am hiding that I'm a conservative.

Gay people are used to feeling the fear of backlash and intolerance. It's been a common theme for me, and I hid being gay for a good part of my life because of that fear.

But here I am, hiding again, hiding from those who have been telling me my whole life that they are the tolerant, loving and accepting ones. And I believed them, joining them in pinning the labels of hate and intolerance on the political right.

Now I fear them. They are not tolerant or accepting. They accuse others of hate and intolerance and yet, by their behavior they show themselves again and again to be the hypocrites they are. They are incapable of seeing the irony of the situation; that those who preach "tolerance" are intolerant, and those who champion "love" exude hate.

Like Pavlov's dog they are trained by the left and the liberal media to salivate at the mere mention of the words "conservative" "Republican," "right," "Christian," and "Bush". Now, they have a new favorite victim for their hate and intolerance, Sarah Palin.

The rest of the article is quite an eye-opener.

HT Gay Patriot.

The "third rail"

2011-02-14T19:58:00.001-08:00

After Obama's "budget" came out today, everyblogger and his auntie posted some sort of graph or pie-chart.

This one got my attention because it is wrong in a significant way. It defines Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as "insurance."

Those programs may have started as insurance but they are now entitlements unlike REAL insurance. Home-owners and auto insurance are real insurances. Health "insurance" has been so perverted that it can no longer be called insurance. Real insurance is what you pay IN CASE something bad happens. Health "insurance" has now become more like an "extended auto maintenance plan."

And Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are definitely not insurance. As any sane person knows, they are all basically Ponzi schemes, wealth redistributive socialist "entitlements." They consume 41% of all taxes. Together with "welfare" and other socialist schemes/scams, they account for 70% of our budget.

And sadly we are stuck with them. No politician (except maybe Ron Paul who's dreaming) will advocate scrapping them. But they will have to be curtailed or limited. The problem with socialism, as Maggie said, is that eventually you run out of other peoples' money. Socialism/welfare statism is unsustainable.

The Baby Boomers are going to have to bite the bullet and start treating Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other "welfare" scams as insurance - a safety net for those who are disabled. You don't get it if you don't need it.

That means "means testing." It's the only compromise that is possible, feasible and likely. There will be a lot of jostling about the way "means testing" is instigated but all "entitlements" will have to be limited to an "as needed" basis and treated as real insurance. That is: you pay IN CASE something bad happens and you don't collect unless "something bad happens." You don't get it if you don't need it.

How much we each pay into or collect from this insurance against disability or other calamity must be determined on real actuarial data and the proceeds need to be invested just as insurance premiums are.

Let the food fight begin.

The South African bulbul

2011-02-13T20:13:00.000-08:00

“He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War:

Some battles aren’t worth fighting. The rewards of victory are too small or the costs of combat are too high. Good generals know this, and so does evolution. The natural world is full of intense arms races between predators and prey, hosts and parasites. If one side evolves a small advantage, the other counters it with an adaptation of their own, and both species are locked in an ever-escalating stalemate. But sometimes, these arms races never take off. The costs of engagement just aren’t worth it.

Oliver Kruger from the University of Bath has found one such example in South Africa, where a small local bird called the Cape bulbul is plagued by the Jacobin cuckoo. Like many other cuckoos, the Jacobin is a “brood parasite”, an animal that relies on others to rear its young. It lays its eggs in a bulbul nest, palming off its own young to unwitting surrogate parents.

Cuckoos and their hosts are usually excellent examples of evolutionary arms races.

The cuckoo and the bulbul:

Why are Muhammad cartoons taboo?

2011-02-13T19:48:00.000-08:00

Mmm?

Traditional Islamic doctrine offers little explanation for this violent response. There is no explicit ban on figurative art in the Quran, and representations of Muhammad, though absent from public spaces, appear in illuminated manuscripts up until the seventeenth century; they still feature in the popular iconography of Shiism, where antipathy to pictures of the Prophet is much less prevalent. There are numerous such depictions—faceless or veiled as an indication of his holiness, or even depicted with facial features—in manuscript collections. It is only quite recently that Muslims living in the west have begun lodging objections to the reproduction of these images in books. The objections are by no means confined to a militant fringe. Populist sentiment—fuelled by the Salafist or “fundamentalist” trends emanating from the Gulf and Saudi Arabia, has produced a near consensus among a majority of Muslims that representations of the Prophet and other holy figures are forbidden by Islam.

All the more puzzling, the recent iconophobia in popular Islam has largely ignored the spread of such images on the Web.

An engraving from Gustav Doré’s version of Dante’s Divine Comedy depicting the punishment of Muhammad in the Eighth Circle of Hell, 1880.

And my favorite from Jesus and Mo:

Oregon news with a South African connection

2011-02-13T17:30:00.000-08:00

Oregon lawmaker tells Euros to butt out:

Oregon state Senate Minority Leader Ted Ferrioli says he doesn't need any advice from foreigners about protecting wolves.

The Republican from John Day, in Eastern Oregon, sent a blunt reply to a South African singer living in Greece, Louise du Toit, when she wrote him to urge opposition to a bill that would remove wolves from Oregon's endangered species list, The Oregonian reported.

Ferrioli said input from European Union residents makes no difference to him.

"You are delusional if you believe U.S. elected officials will bow to activist pressure from outside our borders," the lawmaker fired back in one of several e-mails he shared with the newspaper. "Let your friends, family and fellow Europeans in their thousands write passionate emails. We will ignore them."

Ferrioli noted the bill's sponsor, state Sen. Doug Whitsett, is a fellow Republican from Klamath Falls, and is a veterinarian who understands the complex issues involved.

"By the way, perhaps I should be writing to EU ministers to stop bailing out Greece. Clearly it has become a haven for morons," Ferrioli wrote to du Toit, adding: "Go away!"

Ferrioli's response enraged wolf advocates from around the country and in Europe, who wrote to demand that he apologize.

"To think that we, as a nation, have voted such rude and closed minded individuals as yourself into office, is unfortunate," wrote Susan Williams of Salt Lake City.
...
Furthermore, he said, Europeans simply "don't have a dog in this fight."

Du Toit, however, wrote back to Ferrioli: "There are NO borders in our fight for endangered species."

Du Toit said in an e-mail to The Oregonian that she has been "fighting vigorously for the suffering wolf populations of Sweden" and that it was "totally natural to me to stand up for the precious wolves of Oregon."

Wolves are listed under the federal Endangered Species Act, so there's debate about whether Whitsett's bill to remove them from the state list would have any immediate impact.

But supporters of the bill say it is part of their effort to halt the spread of wolves and the threat they pose to livestock.

Louise du Toit can be called a "singer" only if you regard modern mediocre crap as music. But she's definitely a moron; one of those international multi-culti commie cows whose IQ is the same size as her bra cup. I would say: "Louise, just shut up and sing" except I wish she's just shut up period.

Mubarak and Mandela

2011-02-12T22:18:00.000-08:00

Mubarak and Mandela are simply symbols: one hated and one loved.

But really it's all about the middle-class; the tipping point; the demographics. A growing middle-class has more aspirations and expectations.

I watched what happened in South Africa as I grew up. When I was little, quite a few Africans still captured kids and ate their hearts for muthi. Fifty years later only a few do so and most Africans now have middle-class aspirations.

Egypt will probably go the way of Turkey and be an uneasy blend of Westernism and Islamism. Islam is not the worst and, as the lesser of two evil, it beats animistic muthi anyday.

Animism is close to animalism. Islam is a step in the direction of having your tail cut off just as Judaism was a step up from idolatry and Catholicism was a step up from Roman emperor worship.

I'm convinced that naked apes are slowly evolving into human beings. There may be a few bumps in the road like Socialism in the West and Islamism in the East but one day we'll all lose our tails.

But some of us will always have horns. There will always be a few evil people which is why we will always need the Declaration and Constitution. Our Founders were smart and probably a few centuries ahead of their time.

Today in history

2011-02-11T19:51:00.001-08:00

On this day 32 years ago the Iranian revolution took place when the Shah's forces were overwhelmed. And 21 years ago today Nelson Mandela was freed by the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Will Egypt be another Iran or another South Africa? My hunch is that it will be a mixture: part intolerable Islamofascist and part relatively tolerable left-wing lunacy and multi-culti mayhem.

Firewood

2011-02-11T17:19:00.000-08:00

Some tips:

All freshly felled timber needs to dry before burning. By splitting the wood you create a larger surface area from which water can evaporate and wood dries faster.

This is called seasoning. For the best burning results, store wood in a ventilated area and protect it from driving rain for a year.
...
The latest chainsaw from Bosch does away with electrical and starter cables and smelly fuel. A neat machine, it combines all that is great about chainsaws with safety and efficiency.

The lithium ion battery provides enough power to slice through up to 100 4in timbers on one charge and takes one-and-a-half hours to recharge.

The 12in blade is brilliant for larger branches and small trunks, too large for handsaws and loppers. It starts effortlessly and stops faster than safety standards require.
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Traditionalists will like the new range of seven wood-choppers from Fiskars. The axe head has been integrated into the blade design so it doesn't fly off.

The handle is virtually unbreakable and ultralight to minimise fatigue; the axe is finely balanced to facilitate a safe and efficient swing.

The blade geometry makes it easier to remove from a log when splitting and the safety sheath doubles as a carrying grip.
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If you have a large garden or lots of wood, the petrol-powered Ardisam Earthquake is a monster, with a 12-ton force - and it turns splitting wood into a matchstick-modeller's delight. It effortlessly dealt with a huge pile of large logs in a short time.

Perfect if you have access to free timber and a wood burner, it even has a trailer hitch for towing and a second hitch at the back. It's female-friendly (I used it with ease) but ideally needs two people for efficient working.
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An electric wood splitter such as the five-ton force Alko KHS5200 (pictured) or the four-ton force Ryobi ELS52, 1,500-watt model is good for beginners. Both chomped through a variety of green and seasoned rounds and cope with medium logs up to 20in long.

La Hacienda's latest range of chic chimineas in oxidised Cor-Ten steel can double as sculpture.

There are cheaper terracotta chimineas too. (I first heard the word "chiminea" from my son when he bought one for his mom-in-law recently.)

Mubarak - it's the demographics, stupid!

2011-02-11T00:52:00.000-08:00

Maybe he's an evil tyrant and maybe not. I tend to see the good in everybody until they slit my throat - and then...oops!

Mostly his speech today was too little too late.

He's gotten rich off the USA as he has done our bidding to keep the Suez canal open and don't provoke Israel into nuking the Nile and all its inhabitants - and keep the mad imams on a short leash.

All well and good but he is out of touch with the zeitgeist - the demographics. He probably only knows and mixes with other plutocrats nowadays and no longer groks the growing expectations of a new middle-class which is springing up all over the world.

Who does? Certainly not Americans and definitely not Europeans. They all have their heads up each others' multi-culti politically-correct assholes.

But the one thing that the wily old serpent of the Nile probably does know for sure is that this growing Third World middle-class is only half-civilized and, in their enthusiasm for "freedom", could cut off the branch on which they are sitting as they have done in Iran, Venezuela and South Africa.

Mubarak is playing for time but it's already the eleventh hour and...well, not all the monkeys in the Third World have had their tails removed and Egypt will probably go the way of Turkey.

It could be worse but it won't. Things really are getting better every day as more monkeys lose their tails.

So call me a "white supremacist" but white men do have a burden. Well, maybe not "white men" - because God knows there are plenty of white trash - maybe just "relatively civilized humans no matter what color."

I'm a "human supremacist" and not all naked apes are fully human yet. We live in interesting times but I probably won't live to see all naked apes lose their tails. If you're young, you may.

GOP Congressman quits after Craigslist scandal

2011-02-09T19:46:00.000-08:00

If he'd been a Democrat, Pelosi would have said that he had a bad reaction to his psych meds and he would have been given a plum committee job:

Republican Christopher Lee had just begun his second term representing New York's 26th District. Just hours after the scandal broke on Gawker.com, Lee announced that he was quitting Congress, and a clerk read his letter of resignation on the House floor.
...
The controversy erupted when Gawker reported that a Maryland woman had sent in emails supposedly written by Lee in response to a dating ad that she had placed on Craigslist. Gawker said the ad had asked: "Will someone prove to me not all CL men look like toads?"

In response came emails from a man representing himself as a divorced lobbyist younger than Lee's actual age of 46. The woman responded.

Gawker published a shirtless photo that he had taken of himself, flexing his muscles. One of the emails described him as a "fit fun classy guy."
...
Gawker said the flirting ended when the woman concluded after an online search that Lee had lied. She then sent the material to Gawker.

Lee and his wife, Michele, live in Amherst, N.Y. They have one son.

The GOP is better off with0ut him. What an idiot. Doesn't he know that you never put anything on the Net that you wouldn't your mom (let alone your wife) to see? At least he didn't post a photo of his family jewels on the Net which seems to be de rigeur nowadays - so I've decided to post a pic of my big cock below the pic of Lee's tits,

Tahrir photos

2011-02-07T19:02:00.000-08:00

Count me among those who have been impressed by the protests in Egypt. Apart from the pro-Mubarak thugs, the Egyptians have behaved in a very civilized fashion - a lot more civilized than the unionist protestors in Greece or the student protestors in the UK.

There were plenty of horrible photos but there were also some heart-warming ones. It's nice to see Muslims smiling for a change. These are some of my favorites from top to bottom: one of the "horrible photos" which turned out to look unintentionally funny; Christians holding hands to form protection around praying Muslims; a wedding etc. The last picture is one of the photos of make-shift helmets worn by protestors seen here.

Today's naked redneck chick post: cocks can be dangerous

2011-02-06T23:36:00.000-08:00

I guess no one told this fellow:

A 35-year-old man was killed after being stabbed in the thigh by a cock-fighting rooster. Jose Ochoa died after suffering a wound to his leg from a razor sharp blade attached to one of the fighting cocks. It is not known if he bled to death or suffered an infection.

The 35-year-old was admitted to hospital in Earlimart, California, shortly after suffering the injury. Police said he was among a group of men attending an illegal cock fight. The birds had sharp blades attached to their feet and after police raided the fight Ochoa was fatally stabbed in the calf. It is thought he owned one of the birds taking part in the fight and had been attempting to scoop him up when police arrived.
..
Last month a man in India was killed after his champion rooster slashed his throat. The bird is said to have attacked owner Singrai Soren when he was pushing it back into the ring after it repeatedly tried to escape. The bird slit his throat with razor blades he had attached to its legs.

We have a half dozen fighting cocks. They can be a problem as they are also gang rapists but they are also our best defense against predators and will stand up to any varmint to protect their harems of egg-laying hens.

Big Brother bans man from having sex

2011-02-05T11:45:00.000-08:00

Only in Airstrip One:

The 41 year-old had been in a relationship with a man whom he lived with and told officials “it would make me feel happy” for it to continue.

But his local council decided his “vigorous sex drive” was inappropriate and that with an IQ of 48 and a “moderate” learning disability, he did not understand what he was doing.
...
Under the judge’s order, the man is now subject to “close supervision” by the local authority that provides his accommodation, in order to ensure he does not break the highly unusual order.

The judge concluded: “I therefore make a declaration that at the present time Alan does not have the capacity to consent to and engage in sexual relations.

“In such circumstances it is agreed that the present régime for Alan's supervision and for the prevention of future sexual activity is in his best interests.”

It is the latest controversial case to come before the Court of Protection, a little-known authority whose proceedings are held behind closed doors.

Under the Mental Capacity Act 2005, its judges have the power to make life or death decisions for people deemed to lack the intelligence to make them for themselves – such as ordering that they undergo surgery, have forced abortions, have life-support switched off or be forced to use contraception.

In the latest case, the man known as Alan was described as “sociable” and “presented as an able man” but who was “seriously challenged in all aspects of his mental functionality”.

He lived in a home provided by the council, where he developed a sexual relationship with a man called Kieron.
...
In June 2009 the town hall began court proceedings to restrict his contact with Kieron on the grounds that he lacked mental capacity, and an interim order was made to that effect.

“Since then Alan has been subjected to close supervision to prevent any further sexual activity on his part.”

"The Court of Protection?!?" Is that in the same building as the Ministry for Peace? Orwell is spinning in his grave. Actually Airstrip One doesn't even need Big Brother. Half the British population seems to be interfering busy-body nosy-parkers.

Of course the rule that good intentions often have unintended bad consequences will probably be proven once again. If this guy is anything like the mental retards I've known, he's extremely affectionate and horny as hell. Let's hope he doesn't rape a child out of sheer frustration.

Justine Bieber's boobs

2011-02-04T22:51:00.000-08:00

I just found about this critter. I was quite surprised that she has such mature tits for such a young kid.

Just kidding - I couldn't resist giving him a sex-change considering how much lipstick he wears.

Mona Lisa 'was a boy’

2011-02-03T11:14:00.000-08:00

Leonardo da Vinci modelled the “Mona Lisa” on the face of his young male apprentice and lover:

Most scholars believe Leonardo’s most famous portrait depicts Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a wealthy Florentine silk merchant.

But Silvano Vinceti, the head of a team of researchers, believes instead that the painting was inspired by Gian Giacomo Caprotti, who began working with the Renaissance master as a child and became one of his most trusted companions.

He said several of Leonardo’s works, including two paintings of St John the Baptist and a lesser-known drawing called “Angel Incarnate,” were based on Caprotti.

All of them portray a slim, rather effeminate youth with curly hair.

There were striking similarities between those works and that of the Mona Lisa, particularly in the depiction of mouths and noses, said Mr Vinceti, the head of the National Committee for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage.

“Salai was a favourite model for Leonardo,” he said. “Leonardo certainly inserted characteristics of Salai in the ... Mona Lisa.”

Caprotti is thought to have entered Leonardo’s household around 1490, when he was about 10 years old.

Working as Leonardo’s assistant for the next 20 years, he acquired the nickname Salai, or Little Devil. He was the subject of several erotic drawings produced by the Renaissance genius.

“Salai was very handsome and probably Leonardo’s lover,” said Mr Vinceti. “He stole from Leonardo and caused him many problems, but the artist always forgave him.”

I decided to look and see for myself and found Da Vinci's St John. There is a similarity - especially the mouth.

My favorite YouTube this week: Landing in LA

2011-02-03T00:09:00.000-08:00

I've landed in LAX dozens of times. I wish I'd had this view. It's been sped up so that 30 minutes only takes about 4 mins. It's a fabulous city but I wouldn't want to live there.

Hump day hottie - Carla Sarkozy nee Bruni

2011-02-02T23:24:00.000-08:00

After three years of marriage to France's president Nicolas Sarkozy she "no longer feels left-wing".

Picture from right-wing lesbian Tammy Bruce. Tammy also loves Sarah. She sure has good taste in babes.

Former Oregon governor Goldschmidt child sex abuse

2011-02-02T19:33:00.000-08:00

Victim details recounted:

A woman sexually abused by Neil Goldschmidt, former governor of Oregon and mayor of Portland, said before she died that the abuse began earlier and lasted years longer than he has admitted, the Oregonian newspaper reported Tuesday.

Goldschmidt denied that part of a story written by former Oregonian columnist Marge Boule, who interviewed the woman often after the scandal became public in 2004.

The victim's name was not disclosed. She died last month at age 49 after a serious illness, the newspaper reported.

Goldschmidt acknowledged in 2004 that he had sex with a 14-year-old girl in 1975, when he was Portland's mayor and a rising political star. The statute of limitations at the time barred prosecution more than three years after the commission of a crime.

Boule said the woman's parents were active supporters of Goldschmidt's political career and developed a friendship when he was mayor. That, according to Boule's account of her interviews with the woman, led to a first sexual encounter with Goldschmidt.

The woman told Boule she was in eighth grade when Goldschmidt attended a birthday party for her mother. She said, "He asked if I wanted to play ping pong. We went down (to the basement) and then he said, `Oh, do you want to come give me a hug?' "

Boule said the woman told her the encounter turned into oral sex, adding she had "never even kissed a boy."

The woman told Boule that sex with Goldschmidt continued throughout his tenure as mayor; his years in Washington, D.C., as U.S. secretary of transportation; the years he worked at Nike; and even into his term as Oregon's governor.

"It lasted until I was 27," she told Boule.
...
On Tuesday, the newspaper printed a statement from Goldschmidt that said he was saddened by the woman's death but that many of her accusations "vary substantially from the truth."

"I wish to express publicly my enormous personal guilt and remorse for the damage I contributed to her young life experiences. The fact that these actions have haunted me since is no punishment for what I did," his statement said.

But he added: "Sadly, it appears that much of her account is fabricated and I can only speculate as to her reasons."

Boule said that over the past five years, the woman called her every few months to check in.

Her life was marked by alcoholism, mental illness and a brutal rape. When she was 27, she said, Goldschmidt helped get her a job at a Seattle law firm. "I was very happy in Seattle," she said. "It was like a new start. I had a beautiful apartment with a view of Elliott Bay."

But just three months after she began her job at the law firm, a man named Jeffrey L. Jacobsen kidnapped and brutally raped her. He was convicted and is now in prison. She moved back to Portland.

She died of undisclosed causes Jan. 16 in a hospice.

Goldschmidt was born in Eugene, Oregon on June 16, 1940 and was Governor of Oregon from 1987 to 1891:

In May 2004, Neil Goldschmidt, former governor of Oregon and Secretary of Transportation under Jimmy Carter, admitted that he had conducted a nine-month sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl in the 1970s while he was mayor of Portland. After this information was made public, he withdrew from participation in his various business enterprises.

I'll open a bottle of Veuve Clicquot when both Neil Goldschmidt and Jimmy Carter are behind bars or locked up in loony bins. Ugh! Are there any Democrats who not nuts, crooks or child molesters?

Local news: Andy Jackson RIP

2011-02-02T19:32:00.000-08:00

One of our three county commissioners kicked the bucket last night. We only elected him in November:

Jackson, 66, took office as commissioner Jan. 3 after defeating incumbent Kevin Stufflebean in the November election. Before that, he served as Coos County sheriff for 12 years.

Under Oregon law, the two remaining commissioners -- Bob Main and Nikki Whitty -- will choose Jackson's successor. That person will serve until after the 2012 election, Main said.
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A Georgia native, Jackson came to Coos County in 1974 after serving in the Navy.

He initially worked for the county Road Department but soon moved to the sheriff's office. He served as a deputy and corrections administrator before running for sheriff.

Jackson is survived by his wife, Linda; his children; and numerous grandchildren.

"He was a rare person," Main said. He said when Jackson went to community events, "he was just like a great big teddy bear magnet."

He said Jackson "was very sharp and perceptive and read people very easily."

"He was always trying to teach other people how to be nicer to others," Main said. He also said Jackson was "a strong believer in the Second Amendment and in individual rights."
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Jackson served on the Coquille City Council and held leadership positions in numerous local organizations, including the Coos County Republican Party, American Red Cross, Coos County Commission on Children and Families, Coquille Library Board, Coos County Human Rights Coalition, Myrtle Point Rotary, Coquille Lions and Leadership Coos.

He was also a board member of the Oregon State Sheriffs Association, as well as being an Elk and a Mason.

Jackson raised cattle on his Coquille property, and also enjoyed golfing, fishing, hunting, and participating in his grandchildren's activities.

Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

2011-02-02T19:31:00.000-08:00

Is this creature capable of exposing shocking internet illiteracy?

Donald Leu, a researcher from the University of Connecticut, conducted a U.S. Department of Education-funded study of internet literacy among so-called “digital natives,” fabricating the tree octopus to test students’ ability to evaluate information they find on the internet.

Researchers asked students to find out information about the endangered Pacific Northwest tree octopus. Students had no problem locating a Web site dedicated to the cause, http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/ “but insisted on the existence of the made-up story, even after researchers explained the information on the website was completely fabricated,” according to a press release.

(Author’s note: You gotta check out this Web site, you can actually buy posters and T-shirts through Cafe Press.)

Most students “simply have very little in the way of critical evaluation skills,” Leu said. “They may tell you they don’t believe everything they read on the Internet, but they do.”

The study also found that students shunned search engines in favor of typing what they think is the right site directly into the address bar, such as Georgewashington.com. When they did use a search engine, they skipped right over legitimate pages ”because it didn’t look like what they had in mind,” Leu said.

“That’s what children do with their rock stars and their other cultural stars. They are accustomed to typing in the name and adding ‘.com.’ That often doesn’t work for real academic research,” Leu said.

Leu’s conclusions are serious. As the internet becomes the primary tool for research, we are failing to teach kids how to critically analyze information they find there.

But darn it, that tree octopus thing is funny. I’m not laughing. Really. I’m not.

The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus:

Kucinich the Na'avi

2011-02-01T23:58:00.000-08:00

As soon as I saw this guy, I realized that he's a pod-person from outer-space. Of course as soon as his mom realized that her son was an alien body-snatcher, she clipped his ears and bleached his blue skin.

Mohamed ElBaradei's "government of national salvation"

2011-01-31T17:40:00.000-08:00

The uprising in Egypt has been very interesting. I know that "leaders" are sometimes necessary. But I have no faith in "leaders." Sometimes they are fairly decent people who don't mind sticking their necks out but usually they are the most opportunistic narcissistic types with mixed motives.

If you take a look at the history of the human race, you'll see that demographics is the driving force: surges in population and concomitant expansion and migration, financial booms and busts and cultural developments.

Half of Egypt's population is under 30 and half of them are unemployed or under-employed. Half of them are more educated than their parents and use Facebook and Twitter. But Egypt has concentration camps. Mubarak and his cronies have skimmed a huge share of US aid for themselves. (Mubarack is estimated to be worth more than 20 billion dollars.)

The Egyptians have serious financial and political problems and the uprising is mostly about practical secular concerns.

Demographic changes are like waves. Leaders surf that wave. Good leaders act as a co-ordinators or team-leaders but there are always some messiahs, fuhrers, mullahs and other mad men waiting in the wings.

I've tried to keep an open mind about Mohamed ElBaradei but today I read something that gives me the creeps. He said:

[T]he next step...as everybody now agrees on, is a transitional period, a government of national salvation, of national unity, and that will prepare the ground for a new constitution, free and fair election. These are the three basic demands, what every Egyptian is agreeing upon. And of course, you know, hoping that the army will be able to control the situation.

Uh-oh. Another messiah, fuhrer or mad mullah?

Global food revolutions?

2011-01-30T22:15:00.000-08:00

An era of cheap food may be drawing to a close:

A summer drought in Russia led to a suspension of grain exports, rains in Australia downgraded the quality of its wheat crop, and a lack of rain cut Argentine corn output. China bought near-record volumes of U.S. corn, and demand for corn-based ethanol surged.

Egypt and Tunisia usher in the new era of global food revolutions:

This is nothing like the fall of the Berlin Wall. The triumph of secular democracy was hardly in doubt in central Europe. Whatever the mix of aspirations of those on the streets of Cairo, such uprisings are easy prey for tight-knit organizations – known in the revolutionary lexicon as Leninist vanguard parties.

In Egypt this means the Muslim Brotherhood, whether or not Nobel laureate Mohammed El Baradei ever served as figleaf.
...
The surge in global food prices since the summer – since Ben Bernanke signalled a fresh dollar blitz, as it happens – is not the underlying cause of Arab revolt, any more than bad harvests in 1788 were the cause of the French Revolution.

Yet they are the trigger, and have set off a vicious circle. Vulnerable governments are scrambling to lock up world supplies of grain while they can. Algeria bought 800,000 tonnes of wheat last week, and Indonesia has ordered 800,000 tonnes of rice, both greatly exceeding their normal pace of purchases. Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Bangladesh, are trying to secure extra grain supplies.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said its global food index has surpassed the all-time high of 2008, both in nominal and real terms. The cereals index has risen 39pc in the last year, the oil and fats index 55pc.
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The immediate cause of this food spike was the worst drought in Russia and the Black Sea region for 130 years, lasting long enough to damage winter planting as well as the summer harvest.

The deeper causes are well-known: an annual rise in global population by 73m; the “exhaustion” of the Green Revolution as the gains in crop yields fade, to cite the World Bank; diet shifts in Asia as the rising middle class switch to animal-protein diets, requiring 3-5 kilos of grain feed for every kilo of meat produced; the biofuel mandates that have diverted a third of the US corn crop into ethanol for cars.

Add the loss of farmland to Asia’s urban sprawl, and the depletion of the non-renewable aquifers for irrigation of North China’s plains, and the geopolitics of global food supply starts to look neuralgic.

Charles Portis, the man who wrote True Grit

2011-01-30T16:40:00.000-08:00

The enigmatic and reclusive ex-marine who created Rooster Cogburn:

Rooster Cogburn, the charismatic rogue played by Jeff Bridges in the Coen brothers’ entertaining new film, True Grit, is fearsome enough – a one-eyed, whiskey-guzzling, trigger-happy US marshal. But his creator, Charles Portis, the reclusive and largely forgotten American novelist who wrote the 1968 book on which the film is based, wasn’t someone to mess with either.

“A reporter from The Times wanted to arm-wrestle, and as I recall, he kept challenging me,” Portis once revealed in a rare interview with Roy Reed for the Little Rock Gazette. “So we went at it and there was a pop. His arm broke. Very strange. He went into a kind of swoon.”
...
Roald Dahl – who rarely reviewed books – wrote in praise for the American first edition dust jacket: “True Grit is the best novel to come my way for a very long time. I was going to say it was the best novel to come my way since…Then I stopped. Since what? What book has given me greater pleasure in the last five years? Or in the last 20? I do not know. I expect some have, but I cannot recall them right now. Marvellous it is. He hasn’t put a foot wrong anywhere. What a writer!”

The book is written as a world-weary spinster’s account of the events of 1873, when, as a sassy 14 year-old, she avenged her father’s murder. Portis’s language is blunt but poetic. The murderer, Tom Chaney, was “a short man with cruel features”. Rooster Cogburn, the flawed hero, “a pitiless man who loves to pull a cork”.
...
The first film adaptation, starring John Wayne, was made in 1969 and when Portis visited the set he marvelled at the way Wayne and Robert Duvall blew up and stormed off – only to return as though nothing had happened.

The film, though, lacks the book’s charm and power – something the Coen brothers capture far more successfully, a success reflected in the 10 Oscar nominations the new film received this week.
...
Despite the enormous success of True Grit, decades would pass before Portis’s next, The Dog of the South, hit the shelves. Before long the writer, now 77, would all but disappear from the public eye. Portis has not published a book since Gringos in 1991.

Fingers

2011-01-26T23:39:00.000-08:00

What the length of your index finger says about you:

[F]or many decades now, scientists have noticed an extraordinary link between the ratio of two digits on the hand — the ring and index fingers, known in scientists’ jargon as 2D and 4D — and a whole host of seemingly unrelated traits.

Evidence is growing that this ‘digit ratio’, especially when applied to the right hand, is a fundamental indicator of sexuality, aggression and diseases suffered by men.
...
[S]trong evidence has emerged of a link between the ‘2D:4D finger ratio’ and a man’s likelihood of developing prostate cancer.

Specifically, men whose index fingers are longer than their ring fingers are significantly less likely to develop the disease, according to scientists at the Institute Of Cancer Research.

Working out your digit ratio is not simply a matter of looking at your hand and comparing the position of the tips of the fingers. You must measure the distance from the midpoint of the lowest crease at the base of the finger, on the palm side, to the very end of the fleshy tip (obviously the fingernail does not count!).

A long index finger also correlates strongly with a lower risk of early heart disease.
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People with relatively long index fingers are also more likely to suffer from schizophrenia, allergies, eczema and hay fever.

Young boys are more likely to be clingy and anxious than their low-ratio peers but also, ultimately, less attention-seeking and better behaved in school.

While a long index finger is considered a more feminine hand — men who have them are more likely to be homosexual — a short index finger relative to the ring finger is a more masculine hand.

It correlates with higher male fertility and sperm counts, higher levels of aggression and increased aptitude for both sport and music.

Women who have this masculine finger pattern are more likely to be lesbians than those who don’t, and display higher levels of aggression — as well as enjoy greater professional success.

The extraordinary thing is that these assertions are based on serious scientific evidence.
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According to developmental biologist Dr John Manning, who has been analysing digit ratios for more than 20 years, this subtle difference in finger lengths is linked to a foetus’s exposure in the womb to sex hormones, notably the ‘masculine’ hormone testosterone.

Put simply, more testosterone equals a greater chance of a more ‘masculine’ hand, i.e. one with a relatively short index finger.

And it is this exposure to testosterone in the womb that has very profound effects on our behaviour and susceptibility to diseases.

Studies have found that foetuses which have had a high exposure to testosterone — and have short index fingers — tend to be associated with an extroverted personality, a willingness to take risks, higher levels of aggression, stronger muscles and, interestingly (because musical ability is not commonly identified as particularly ‘masculine’), a much greater likelihood of playing an instrument well.
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[P]eople of both sexes with relatively short index fingers tend to be more sexually adventurous. They are more likely to experiment with drugs; they like watching violent movies and become addicted to alcohol more easily.

People with short index fingers make better soldiers, engineers, speculators and chess players, and are better at solving problems such as crosswords.
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Scientists have found that a longer wedding ring finger can help increase accuracy when throwing objects. And men who could throw well killed more animals, ate better and thus made better mates. So they would have been preferred as partners by the available females, thus ensuring that the masculinity-long ring finger link was passed on.

Chart of the day: changing attitudes to gun laws

2011-01-25T09:25:00.000-08:00

Nancy Pelosi and JFK

2011-01-24T22:31:00.000-08:00

Nancy posted this pic on her Facebook page last week. She was 22 when it was taken at JFK's inauguration ball. She doesn't look quite as demented then as she does now. JFK looks quite avuncular. I'm no fan of JFK but at least he could keep his drooling under control compared with his murderous brother who seemed to be slavering over pussy like Jabba the Hut until the day he died.

Oregon number three on "inbound" list

2011-01-17T17:43:00.000-08:00

John Walkenbach:

United Van Lines does an annual analysis of inbound and outbound moves, by state. (GREAT LAKES REGION LEADS NATION IN OUTBOUND TRAFFIC.)

Washington D.C. was #1 in the inbound list. Other states in that list are North Carolina, South Carolina, Oregon, and Idaho.

New Jersey was #1 in outbound moves.

So you think you're cold?

2011-01-17T16:08:00.001-08:00

The law of unintended consequences

2011-01-17T16:07:00.000-08:00

Maud Newton interviewed Misha Angrist, member four of the Personal Genome Project to have his entire genome to be published online, and author of Here Is A Human Being:

I think what will happen is that more and more people of reproductive age will undergo carrier screening in order to avoid conceiving kids with relatively rare genetic diseases that are caused by single genes gone awry. I'm talking about cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, muscular dystrophy, etc. One can imagine a day when having kids with those maladies will be stigmatized—a kind of GATTACA-lite.

That would suck, IMHO, and perhaps not only because of the icky eugenic implications. It could also suck because the genome is a dynamic thing, and a balancing act. Sickle cell trait has persisted because carrying it protects one from getting malaria. Who's to say that carrying one copy of a cystic fibrosis mutation doesn't similarly protect us against cholera or various diarrheal illnesses? If we eliminate those mutations from the population, are we opening the door to a future of intestinal problems?

Bear eats psychedelic mushrooms

2011-01-17T16:05:00.000-08:00

While we're on the subject of psychedelics:

Jared Loughner used the hallucinogen salvia

2011-01-17T16:02:00.000-08:00

Could the drug have affected his brain?

Salvia is still legal in a majority of states, and millions of Americans have used the drug without incident. That includes pop star Miley Cyrus, who was caught on video last year smoking salvia from a bong.
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What little research that has been done shows that all strains of Salvia divinorum, a plant grown for centuries in Mexico, produces a chemical called Salvionon A. This chemical affects the kappa opioid receptor, a part of the brain that’s in large part responsible for our perceptions of reality.

In an unmodified state, salvia—whether it’s smoked, chewed, or swallowed in extract form—produces an intense high, lasting less than half an hour. “It’s one of the most behaviorally impairing drugs that we’ve come across,” says Dr. Matthew Johnson, assistant professor of psychology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “At the higher doses, people are completely dissociated from this reality . . . They describe being completely transported to another dimension.”
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There is, however, at least one reported case of salvia leading to a mental breakdown. “We had a case of a male who came in, 23 years old, and was actively psychotic,” says Dr. Peter Przekop, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Loma Linda University School of Medicine in California. “The only thing we could attach it to was the night before, he had smoked the XXX [high-strength] salvia. We stabilized him, put him on medication, transferred him to the psych department. When we tried to gradually wean him off antipsychotics, the symptoms returned. This was permanent psychosis we suspect was brought on by this drug.”

Przekop, who published a letter detailing his case in the American Journal of Psychology, hypothesizes that the patient had a predisposition for mental illness brought on by salvia use.

Loughner was using Salvia Divinorum which is used by the Shaman's of the Sierra Mazateca and is often called Seer's Sage. Although it is indigenous to Oazaca, Mexico, it can be, and has been, ordered from online companies. In fact, it is legal in most states.

Salvia divinorum:

In their rituals, the shamans use only fresh S. divinorum leaves. They see the plant as an incarnation of the Virgin Mary, and begin the ritual with an invocation to Mary, Saint Peter, the Holy Trinity, and other saints. Ritual use traditionally involves being in a quiet place after ingestion of the leaf—the Maztec shamans say that "La Maria (S. divinorum) speaks with a quiet voice."

I probably experimented with every known psychedelic drug in the Sixties but not salvia as it was not available in those days. I'm glad I didn't after reading this:

I used it on a number of occasions, and I can say there were no positive qualities associated with it. It makes you entirely dissociative and causes powerful hallucinations. The "come down" kind of feels like going from insane => sane. I couldn't describe it any other way; your thoughts are jumbled, you don't know where you are or what matters. If you speak, it's generally nonsensical to the sober people around you. Unlike mushrooms or LSD, there is no insight, no feeling of empathy - just a powerful feeling of alienation and jumbled, dissociative thoughts. I can easily see a young mind, susceptible to mental illness, being snapped by a couple salvia trips.

I'm not saying this should turn into a witch hunt against salvia, but if there was ever a drug that I felt young people should not be able to get their hands on, salvia is the one. Frum's cannabis argument is pretty specious, but I'm telling you, salvia is a psychologically dangerous drug, especially when smoked as an extract, and especially for young, or mental-illness-prone minds.

All drugs are dangerous. Most psychedelic plants are not physically toxic and cannot be overdosed but I watched quite a few folks in the Sixties who were mentally unstable before taking a psychedelic drug go off the deep end. One close friend went nuts on LSD and turned to heroin (which, unlike psychedelics, dulls the mind.) He ended up being a heroin addict for 20 years. Another friend (the nephew of Harold Pinter the playwright) flipped on Acid and sort of recovered only to kill himself ten years later.

Psychedelics have traditionally been used for "divination" or some other sort of "spiritual" experience. They are not recreatational drugs and should be used with respect and caution.

I wonder, if Loughner's lawyer fails to convince jury that this kid is permanently and completely insane, if she will then attempt a "temporary insanity brought on by drugs" as an alternative defense. It has succeeded in some cases usually with alcohol but most notoriously was successful in the "Twinkie defense" used by Dan White's lawyer to reduce the crime from murder to manslaughter.