come on, kitty-kitty-kitty

If the goal is to earn a living, then, maybe it isn’t really true that 18-year-olds need to be imparted with a sense of panic about getting into college (though they certainly need to learn). Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or fix things. One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”

A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.

New York TImes | The Case for Working with Your Hands

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Krinshnamurti

Most of what we feed to chickens, pigs, and other farmed animals—most of it is burned off, simply keeping the animals alive until they're slaughtered.

It's bizarre, really: You take a crop like soybeans, oats, corn, or wheat, which are all high in protein, fiber, and complex carbohydrates but devoid of cholesterol and artery-clogging saturated fat. You feed them to an animal and create a product with no fiber or complex carbohydrates at all but with lots of cholesterol and saturated fat. It makes about as much sense as taking pure water, running it through a sewer system, and then drinking it.

Vegetarianism in a Nutshell: Environment

we experience ourselves

What's in your pocket? Screws and fastenings? A lottery ticket? A scrap of felt?

All of these insignificant objects reveal something about a person. They carry some history and become stories in themselves, says Rachel Ellison. She calls her study of pockets "pocketology."Ellison, a 24-year-old art student, has used pocketology to connect strangers and express the autobiographical in what's known as relational art. In a hyper-connected digital world, these person-to-person links create a moment's intimacy.

Ellison organized a Pocketology Picnic at Christie Pits on a recent Sunday. It was a rainy afternoon and only a dozen people joined her but they willingly emptied their pockets.

Raoul, who is from El Salvador, produced a packet of Marlboro cigarettes.

"Marlboro are the only ones I smoke," he told her. "I started smoking when I was 18 years old. I was in Guatemala for two months waiting for some papers ... I was sitting in a park and there were a lot of people and didn't know what to do because I didn't know anybody. So I decided to go to the store and buy cigarettes. I bought Marlboro Reds. Since then, when I feel stressed, I smoke a cigarette and try to feel better."

Thestar.com Sociology | Pocketology 101

"Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they'll just have to learn how to be babies longer." - Andy Warhol

A problem with interventions that use role-playing to beat prejudice is that bigots usually aren't motivated to take the perspective of the groups that they discriminate against. In a new study, Gordon Hodson and colleagues have tested the effectiveness of an unusual alien-themed intervention for reducing homophobia that involves participants taking the perspective of a homosexual person, without really realising that that is what they're doing.

Hodson's team tested the homophobic tendencies of 101 heterosexual students and then had 79 of them complete the so-called "Alien-Nation" simulation, whilst the remainder acted as controls and attended a lecture on homophobia. For the Alien-Nation task, the students formed groups of four to five members and imagined landing on an alien planet that's populated by aliens who look exactly like humans, but who don't allow any public displays of affection, and live in same-sex housing and reproduce by artificial insemination.

The participants answered questions about how they would cope with life on the planet and maintain their lifestyles. They also shared plans for how to behave romantically in secret and how to identify other humans. Research assistants then asked the participants whether the situation applied to any real-life groups. The participants failed to recognise the parallel with homosexuality, but the research assistants pointed out the comparison and drew attention to ways that people who are homosexual deal with the constraints of an intolerant society.

BPS Research Digest Blog | Intervention Helps Reduce Homophobia

As I wended the shores I know, / As I walk'd with that electric self seeking types.

Social workers in the Netherlands have taken legal action to try to stop a 13-year-old girl from sailing around the world on her own.
They want Laura Dekker to be made a ward of court, so that her parents, who support her plans, temporarily lose the right to make decisions about her.[...]
Laura had a yacht by the age of six and began sailing solo when she was 10.
"Since I was 10 years old, I've known that I would like to sail around the world," she told Dutch television.
"I want simply to learn about the world and to live freely."

BBC News | Dutch bid to thwart young sailor

"That which you call "the external world" is as much you as your own body." - Alan Watts

Nine years ago, in the autumn of 2000, Suelo decided to stop using money. He just quit it, like a bad drug habit. His dwelling, hidden high in a canyon lined with waterfalls, is an hour by foot from the desert town of Moab, Utah, where people who know him are of two minds: He’s either a latter-day prophet or an irredeemable hobo. [...]

The tribe had been getting richer for a decade, and during the two years he was there he watched as the villagers began to adopt the economics of modernity. They sold the food from their fields — quinoa, potatoes, corn, lentils — for cash, which they used to purchase things they didn’t need, as Suelo describes it.

They bought soda and white flour and refined sugar and noodles and big bags of MSG to flavor the starchy meals. They bought TVs. The more they spent, says Suelo, the more their health declined. He could measure the deterioration on his charts. “It looked,” he says, “like money was impoverishing them.”

Men.Style.com | Could You Survive Without Money?

"Now I can look at you in peace; I don’t eat you anymore." - Franz Kafka

How It's Made | How Hatchery Chicks are Made

"Our task must be to free ourselves...by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty."

What do these crises have in common:

Economic crisis
Water shortages
Global warming
Healthcare
Energy

Okay, they probably have lots of things in common. But the answer I was looking for is "food."

Imagine for a minute that everyone in the United States stopped overeating and became vegetarians, perhaps with some fish thrown in the mix for protein and Omega-3. We all know that situation can never happen, so this is just a thought experiment...

Read more: The Common Crisis | Dilbert.com Blog
Quote: Albert Einstein

This beautiful creature must die

Meat consumption has more than doubled in the United States in the last 50 years.

Now a new study of more than 500,000 Americans has provided the best evidence yet that our affinity for red meat has exacted a hefty price on our health and limited our longevity.

The study found that, other things being equal, the men and women who consumed the most red and processed meat were likely to die sooner, especially from one of our two leading killers, heart disease and cancer, than people who consumed much smaller amounts of these foods.

Paying a Price for Loving Red Meat

"They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself." - Andy Warhol

If the bondage business seems an unlikely pursuit for two button-down, slightly awkward, decidedly deadpan lower-class Pakistanis, it is. But then, discretion has been their byword. The brothers have taken extreme measures to conceal a business that in this deeply conservative Muslim country is as risky as it is risqué.

It helps that the dozens of veiled and uneducated female laborers who assemble the handmade items — gag balls, lime-green corsets, thonged spanking skirts — have no idea what the items are used for. Even the owners’ wives, and their conservative Muslim mother, have not been informed.

Today, they sell their products to online and brick-and-mortar shops, and to individuals via eBay. Their market research, they said, showed that 70 percent of their customers were middle- to upper-class Americans, and a majority of them Democrats. The Netherlands and Germany account for the bulk of their European sales.[...]

“I go to Sin City every year,” said Rizwan, referring to Las Vegas in a sheepish laugh. It’s all business, he said. “Clients know our country and culture, and they don’t invite us to participate. We’re a little bit shy.”

NYT | Lacy Threads and Leather Straps Bind a Business (With Video)

"Truth is a mobile army of metaphors." - Nietzsche

We share 99 percent of our genes with chimps, but we also share 95 percent of our genes with pigs and rats. And so most of the story of humans, our biology and deep history, is told equally well by the body of any mammal — even a lowly rat. Especially a rat.

We imagine the rat as despicable, disease ridden, grotesque. In tandem with fleas and plague, rats nearly did us in. But they may also have saved us. It is from the rat that we have learned most of what we know about ourselves. Look into a lab rat’s black eyes and you will find, if not your sister, an increasingly good mirror. Rats have immune systems like our immune systems. They have brains like our brains, fat like our fat. They have no language. They don’t dream about the stars. But otherwise we are the same. And so we poke them to learn about ourselves. We have long known that rats are like us. What is new is the realization that our similarities to each other are greater each year. More and more, I am a laboratory rat, and so are you.

Seed Magazine | I am a Rat and So are You
Photo from Jessica Florence

and the universe is shown

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
–Albert Einstein

"I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism."
–Albert Einstein

"How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."
–Carl Sagan

New York Times, The God Delusion | Wikipedia, Pantheism
Image: Jacob Magraw-Mickelson

lmfao he is soooo cute its just too funny lolz

Preaching babies on Youtube

yum for the tum ^_^

and i'm proud to be an...

Nacirema culture is characterized by a highly developed market economy which has evolved in a rich natural habitat. While much of the people's time is devoted to economic pursuits, a large part of the fruits of these labors and a considerable portion of the day are spent in ritual activity. The focus of this activity is the human body, the appearance and health of which loom as a dominant concern in the ethos of the people. While such a concern is certainly not unusual, its ceremonial aspects and associated philosophy are unique.
The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease. Incarcerated in such a body, man's only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of ritual and ceremony. Every household has one or more shrines devoted to this purpose. The more powerful individuals in the society have several shrines in their houses and, in fact, the opulence of a house is often referred to in terms of the number of such ritual centers it possesses. Most houses are of wattle and daub construction, but the shrine rooms of the more wealthy are walled with stone. Poorer families imitate the rich by applying pottery plaques to their shrine walls. [...]

Body Ritual Among the Nacirema
image: Brian Viveros

...Miner describes the Nacirema, a little-known tribe living in North America between Canada and Mexico. The way in which he writes about the curious practices that this group performs distances readers from the fact that the North American group described actually corresponds to modern-day Americans of the mid-1950s.

...hunting is one of the few areas of life where the experience of modern man is still in tune with our ancient ancestors

There’s a new type of digital camouflage specifically designed to fool deer’s vision. Called Optifade, it’s being unveiled today by W.L. Gore, the inventor of Gore-Tex. (…)

the new digital camouflage consists of a micropattern made up of tiny squares that are supposed to match the overall texture of the landscape — the “spatial frequency” or “busyness” of the forest or scrubland as seen through the deer’s eyes. It also has a macropattern of large geometric shapes that are supposed to break up the outline of the body so that even if a deer sees a hunter moving, it doesn’t register in the deer’s brain as a human shape.

Can You See Me Now?

Do hunters really need any more technological advantages over the deer then they already have? To call deer hunting a “sport” is absurd; considering all the hardware available to hunters, the deer never stand a chance. Unless you’re hunting with nothing but a bow and some simple hunting clothes, you are engaging in the ritualistic slaughter of animals, not anything resembling a competition of the man vs. nature variety.

More...

Quote From In Defense of Hunting

vote or

19. In 2009, the president and Congress will ride tandem on a new version of the federal transportation bill. If you ride a bike (or would, if there were a damn bike lane where you needed to go), this could mean a serious expansion of your ability to get around. As it stands, Obama has pledged to increase bike funding if elected president. McCain, meanwhile, hasn’t rolled out any commitments on the issue.
82. This is the one opportunity we have to let the world know that the people of the United States reject the direction we’ve been following for almost a decade now.
101. 20 percent of NYU students polled recently said they’d give up their right to vote in 2008 for an iPod Touch. A fucking iPod Touch.
108. Unless you are a white landowning male Protestant, there was a time in our history when you would have been thrown out of the polling facility without a second thought.
112. Great Britain is still looking for evidence that our little experiment didn’t work out. Don’t help them along.
176. There are 6.46 billion human beings who aren’t eligible to vote in this election, but who will have to live with the results.

Why Vote?

i suggest that everybody relax

Many stimulants, like caffeine, Adderall, and Ritalin, are taken to increase focus — one recent poll found that nearly twenty percent of scientists and researchers regularly took prescription drugs to “enhance concentration” — but, accordingly to Jung-Beeman and Kounios, drugs may actually make insights less like, by sharpening the spotlight of attention and discouraging mental rambles. Concentration, it seems, comes with the hidden cost of diminished creativity.

“There’s a good reason Google puts Ping-Pong tables in their headquarters,” Kounios said. ”I you want to encourage insights, then you’ve got to also encourage people to relax.” Jung-Beeman’s latest paper investigates why people who are in a good mood are so much better at solving insight puzzles. (On average, they solve nearly twenty percent more C.R.A. problems.)

Drugs & Science & Insight

chemical food

"This is a hamburger from McDonalds that I purchased in 1996.

That was 12 years ago."

give me ur moneys

Consider another invention, one so deeply embedded in our daily lives that we seldom think of it as an invention at all: money. It was a creation not of an individual but of the free market. And while money was once exclusively a material object, it is today increasingly abstract.

Human beings are, uniquely, trading animals. Trade has allowed both individuals and entire countries to specialize in what they are good at or have in abundance, selling the surplus to acquire what they lacked. Trade allows us to exploit what economists call “comparative advantage.” Because both parties to a transaction value what they receive more than what they trade away, wealth is created. And nothing has facilitated trade more—thus fostering the enrichment of the world—than the invention of money. (…)

Without money, people who want to trade what they have for something else they want must barter with someone with a complementary interest. If a man has apples and wants oranges, he must find a person who has oranges and wants apples. Economists, with their usual talent for turning an unmemorable phrase, call this a “double coincidence of want.”

But barter only works effectively when the number of goods being traded is limited. When humans in Neolithic times abandoned hunting and gathering in favor of agriculture, they settled down in one place for long periods and began developing ever more technologies (including pottery and beer fermentation). As the number of potential trade goods increased rapidly, the burden of finding the “double coincidence of want” increased exponentially, too.

As trade increased, the need for a means of comparing the value of different commodities also grew. (…) Slowly, people began to talk about the value of all goods in terms of one standard good, usually an item of high value.

The Buck Starts Here