Movin' In and Out

Well, I've moved, both in the phenomenal world and cyberspace. While I've been wanting to get back to blogging, I knew something had to be different this time. I really don't think I am going to have the time to be thoughtfully political, and the politics always came at the expense of my more creative proclivities. So, imagine my pleasant surprise when I got invited to A HaHa is (N)ot Art!, a new group blog including the work of Hilton Hightower, the best half-man, half-robot, half-carnivorous ninja pirate writing on the web. We will also be joined by Ronald Polar, a questionable fellow, in my estimation.

What are my digs going to be like? I can't say for sure, but you won't be going there for straight-ahead discourse. Perhaps the best way to describe its potentialities would be to think of it as an amateur outgrowth of the Dada-John Cage-Fluxus art-stream. It's In There has been fun, but sometimes you know it's finally time to move.

Thank You

Thank you, various commenters for your various comments on my last post. Be assured that QuickSauce has, in fact, been incarnated in multiple times and forms. I very well may eat my ruffage and get more regular. In the meantime, I am moving to a house 26 miles away.

But if you wish to raise your eyebrow (just one) at the strangeness of life, imagine being a 35-year old culinary naif, one sheltered enough to ask the following:

I am wanting to find out how to prepare broccoli and well, how to eat it without adding cheese. Trying to learn new healthy habits and whatnot.

Does one have to boil, steam it or can one just wash it off and commencing eating? Do you eat just the stem?

Perhaps some of my Texas friends can explain. Do they not have relish plates in Texas? Is broccoli preparation exotic anywhere in the States?

I'm not making fun. But my eyebrow raised, and maybe yours will too.

I'm not dead

Recent Searches

I always love to share these.

drinking shampoo (Google)

want to castrate man (Google)

"male masturbation expert" (Google)

Note that the first two searchers must have been very patient, as I do not show up among the first 100 results for those searches. However, it looks like I've got "male masturbation expert" almost to myself.

Where I Have Been

Make a map.

I will confess that two of the states above are a bit sketchy, in terms of how much I have really "been there." My brief time in both Texas and Colorado was spent solely within airport property. That may or may not count, depending on your persuasion.

Via Alterdestiny

Not Only Does His Music Suck

but he's got the sense of a tub of butter:

Scott Stapp[, formerly of the cock-rock band Creed,] thinks a recently released sex video showing him and Kid Rock with several strippers is meant to sabotage him.

"Obviously someone wants to hurt me and doesn't want me to be successful in my solo career," Stapp told AP Radio in a recent interview.

....

Stapp, 32, says the tape was made soon after he was divorced from Hillaree Burns.

He said he previously told his new wife about having a wild year and that she accepts the tape as part of his past.

"You think it's part of your rock 'n' roll memories," Stapp said. "I should have burned that tape."

Rule #1: if you are thinking of making a "sex tape," ask yourself, "Do I care if strangers catch a glimpse of this?" If your answer is yes, then don't make the damn thing.

Rule #2: if you are already famous, repeat Rule #1.

Funny Shit

Rush Limbaugh, on Tuesday:

This is a survey, first of all, of just adults, Americans. This is not a survey of voters. It is not a survey of likely voters. It is not a survey of registered voters. It's just a random sample of "Will you answer the phone today, and I got some questions for ya." And the questions are absurd. And the questions are misleading. And the questions lie. And this poll was produced to make news. Just as they all are these days. This whole -- this poll was nothing more than a way for CBS to get its editorial position out there as a so-called news story. That's all this poll was.

....

...This is not representative of the -- of the population of the country in any way, shape, manner, or form. Nor is the fact that Bush has 34 percent. Nor is the fact that Cheney has 18. You just know that's not possible. It simply isn't possible. [emphasis added]

Too bad other polls that came out today concur. FOX gives Bush 39% and Gallup gives him 38%. True, it's not quite 34%, but it's also not exactly a refutation of the CBS poll. Of course, FOX must be "in" with those Commies at CBS.

SCOTUS Seating Chart

It may be trivial, but it's interesting.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. may or may not change the Supreme Court's jurisprudence [Now, that statement's a wee bit silly - QS]. But he will shake up one aspect of court business that was unchanged for more than 11 years: the seating chart.

As the junior associate justice, Alito will occupy the end of the bench farthest to the courtroom audience's right during oral arguments. Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who has sat there since October 1994, will move across to the audience's extreme left.

Kind of symbolic, too.

Quilt

Early Teen Memory

Years ago (we were probably in 8^th or 9^th grade), I went with A. to an NBA basketball game with a group of people from A.’s church. As is typical, the team had cheerleaders. At one point during one of the cheerleading routines, this guy a couple of rows behind us (he was probably drunk, thinking back upon the whole situation) yelled out, very loudly, “I. Want. Your. Pussyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!” We still laugh about that.

Assholes

"When $10 Billion Isn’t Enough" - Think Progress

Today, Exxon Mobil recorded the highest quarterly profit ever for a publicly traded U.S. company, raking in $10.71 billion in the fourth quarter of 2005. The previous record was $9.92 billion, set by Exxon in the third quarter of 2005.

....

Exxon Mobil Corp. urged a federal appeals court Friday to erase the $5 billion in damages an Alaska jury ordered the oil giant to pay for the 1989 Valdez oil spill.

Exxon attorney Walter Dellinger told a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that the company should be liable for no more than $25 million in punitive damages. Punitive damages are meant to deter and punish misconduct.

You can do the math.

Washington and Tehran Agree

Queers don't count.

(Washington, D.C., January 25, 2006) - In a reversal of policy, the United States on Monday backed an Iranian initiative to deny United Nations consultative status to organizations working to protect the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people.

....

In May 2005, the International Lesbian and Gay Association, which is based in Brussels, and the Danish gay rights group Landsforeningen for Bøsser og Lesbiske (LBL) applied for consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council. Consultative status is the only official means by which non-governmental organizations (NGOs) around the world can influence and participate in discussions among member states at the United Nations. Nearly 3,000 groups enjoy this status.

States opposed to the two groups’ applications moved to have them summarily dismissed, an almost unprecedented move at the UN, where organizations are ordinarily allowed to state their cases. The U.S. abstained on a vote which would have allowed the debate to continue and the groups to be heard. It then voted to reject the applications.

Remember that every time Bush acts like he knows a damn thing about "civilization."

Mega Reptilian Jesus W. Bush

Really. The title says it all.

America's Mengele

I happened upon Wikipedia's entry for chemist Sidney Gottlieb, an American of note whom I hadn't heard of. Very interesting stuff.

In April 1953 Sidney Gottlieb headed the secret Project MKULTRA which was activated on the order of CIA director Allen Dulles. Gottlieb was known for administration of LSD and other psycho-active drugs to unwitting subjects and for financing psychiatric research and development of "techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything." He sponsored physicians such as Ewen Cameron and Harris Isbell in controversial psychiatric research that used unwitting humans as guinea pigs. Many people had their lives destroyed in this research financed by Gottlieb and the Rockefeller Foundation.

What strikes me about this new-to-me information is how much it reinforces my incredulity that there are people who would trust a government to not cross lines it says it hasn't. Eavesdropping on innocent Americans? Why wouldn't they? Sending people to other countries for the real dirty work to be done? Pshaw. Teaching weekend warriors abject sadism, sans the masochism? Please. The idea that those "normal" Americans we send to the White House have the same moral compass as the rest of us is naive and silly. There are exceptions to this of course, but they are exceptions.

After US president Eisenhower, in August 1960, ordered the assasination of Congolese prime minister Lumumba, secret agent QJ/WIN (Sidney Gottlieb) was sent by the CIA to deliver a tube of poisonous toothpaste, of the same brand used by Lumumba, to a CIA contact named Larry Devlin. The toothpaste was to be secretly switched with Lumumba's personal toothpaste. Devlin, however, in his undercover work had come to admire Lumumba and could not in good conscience murder him. So Devlin abandoned his CIA mission.

Some historians speculate that the CIA eventually played some role in the events that transpired in those weeks before Lumumba was murdered in January 1961. The US government has never made an official statement to the Congolese people.

....Less known was an operation within the CIA's Phoenix Program in Vietnam where a team of CIA psychologists performed mind control experiments on NLF suspects being detained at Bien Hoa Prison outside of Saigon. Through electrode implants in the brain, the prisoners were manipulated to attack each other with knives. The experiment was a failure and the prisoners were shot and their bodies burned. [emphases added]

Yes, Mengele was a doctor and Gottlieb was a chemist, but that matters little. They both were men willing to use their academic training to further not their own sciences, but the science of suffering and misery. Let's not fool ourselves into believing we don't have similar creatures among us.

Random Shit For My Homies

Salmon P. Chase was the lucky face for the $10,000 bill, discontinued in 1946. Not a President.



The best thing I read today.

I finally got to see Napoleon Dynamite, and I certainly liked it.

Nietzsche quote for today, from The Twilight of the Idols:"...the concept of 'pure blood' is the opposite of a harmless concept."

Update

If any of my readers are still out there, I do apologize. I've been wasting all this free virtual real estate by keeping almost silent for many months. There are several reasons for this.

First, my job requires a lot of typing and date entry. When I started blogging, this was not the case, and now that it is, I feel much less inclined to put for the effort for It's In There.

Second, I haven't been feeling especially verbal. I wish I knew why. Part of the problem is, as I believe I have mentioned, that I really hate to repeat myself, or offer refutations of Republican spin that are already plentiful in the 'sphere. It really is frustrating to see the same false claims surfacing again and again, despite efforts much more valiant than mine to counter them. I guess my position on political blogging, certainly for my voice, and not necessarily those fine writers at the top, can be summed up in one word: futile.

But that doesn't mean I can't work up some posts more regularly. Of course, my withdrawal has only made myself even less relevant. But I still have friends, and this is a good way to provide a "one stop shop" for them to know what I've been thinking about.

So, it is only 19 days into the new year, and only 7 days since my 31st birthday. Maybe I should post some shit.

Love,

The Start Of the Great Northern Police State

I'm not sure, as an American of the political left, if it is comforting or frightening to read that even Canada is starting to use these tactics.

Essentially what is happening is this: Police knock on your door and ask for your consent to search your premises without a warrant. If you refuse, that is if you exercise your constitutional rights, you will be considered a suspect, and clearly subject to more rigorous, onerous, and disruptive processes of investigation. Effectively, there is tacit coercion to abdicate your rights in the face of an implied threat of considerable future harassment. People "volunteer" because of the tacit, but clear consequences of not "volunteering." [italics in original]

I always have found some solace in the idea that, if push came to shove, moving to Canada would somehow be an option. Unfortunately, it looks like our growing disregard for civil liberties is contagious.

Too Many Males

As I suspected:

To study how animals respond to sex ratio bias in their population, the scientists monitored two groups of common lizards. The reptiles were kept in enclosures covered by nets to stop birds from munching the lizards.

Each lizard population was skewed to either three-quarters male or three-quarters female.

After a year, the group of mostly female lizards had grown from 73 to 118, while the population with excess males had declined to just 35.

The mostly male population became even more skewed toward a male majority, as adult and yearling females in that group died four times more often and produced three or four offspring instead of the usual five.

Of course it is only personal preference on my part, but I've always found the workplace atmosphere somewhat more, say, polluted when the men outnumber the women. It's comforting to see that other reptiles feel the same way.

It's In There Weekly

Blogging is an interesting medium, to be sure. It has provided me with a free way to vent and contemplate, for friends and strangers to view at their discretion. However, there is something very time-conscious about the medium, too. What's the point in stopping by a blog if there isn't fresh material? Unfortunately, I've been feeling very laconic, and posting often is just not likely. So, for any of you still out there, I'm going to promise a weekly post, and I'll try to make them longer. But if I just provide you with an interesting "link dump," don't be too surprised, either.

Alive, Thinking, Contemplating

In case anybody has stopped by and wondered, I'm not calling it quits. I've just been busy with other projects.

Another Reminder

that we are all Africans.

A new genetic study supports just such a scenario and suggests that early Africans colonized the planet gradually through a series of small migratory steps.

Results of the worldwide genetic sampling project show a strong correlation between genetic diversity and geographic distance. The closer modern people live to one another, as measured along the ancient migration routes that led humans out of Africa, the more similar is their DNA.

....

The new data show that genetic diversity decreases as one traces ancient migration routes out of Africa.

"There's a very linear decrease of [genetic diversity] as you leave Africa, and it's a bit surprising that it would fit the pattern so well," Ramachandran said.

Ramachandran and her colleagues studied the genes of 53 indigenous populations around the world.

In other news from National Geographic, "Dogs Used as Shark Bait on French Island."

Violence In Cleveland

This I did not know:

[The first mayor of Cleveland, John W.] Willey[,] bought a section of the Flats with plans to transform it into Cleveland Centre, a business and residential district. Willey then bought a piece of land from the southeast section of Ohio City across from Columbus St. in Cleveland. Willey named the new territory Willeyville and subsequently built a bridge connecting the two sections calling it Columbus Sreet Bridge. The bridge siphoned off commercial traffic to Cleveland before it could reach Ohio City's mercantile district. This action aggravated citizens of Ohio City, and brought to surface the fierce rivalry between the small city and Cleveland. Ohio City citizens rallied for "Two Bridges or None!" and on October 1836, they sought, violently, to stop the use of Cleveland's new bridge by bombing the western end of it. The explosion, however, did little damage. A group of 1,000 Ohio City volunteers began digging deep ditches at both ends of the bridge, making it impossible for horses and wagons to reach the structure. Some citizens were still unsatisfied with this and took to using guns, crowbars, axes, and other weapons to finish off the bridge. They were then met by Willey and a group of armed Cleveland militiamen. A battle ensued on the bridge, with two men seriously wounded before the county sheriff arrived to end the violence and arrest many. A court injunction prevented any further confrontations to take place that may have lead to an all out war between Cleveland and Ohio City.

We often associate serious violence between cities as something that happens other places, and when it did happen in America, there was a racial issue involved. Here we have a simple example of economic issues driving Americans to take up arms against the citizens of a neighboring city. Wow.

Perhaps Erik Loomis could point to other examples of such a thing, but this is the first time (that I recall; maybe I've forgotten something) I've encountered such an incident in American history.

It Means Nothing

Cartoons Aren't Just For Kids

Parents' group rates Fox shows as worst for family viewing

The group's president, L. Brent Bozell, said he was alarmed that the three Fox Sunday night comedies are being marketed as family friendly.

"Families should not be deceived," he said. "The top three worst shows all contain crude and raunchy dialogue with sex-themed jokes and foul language. Even worse is the fact that Hollywood is peddling its filth to families with cartoons." [emphasis added]

You would think someone who "studies" TV shows would understand that there is nothing nefarious about cartoons with adult themes. The Family Guy isn't some Trojan horse meant to corrupt young minds. Prudes are such a pain in the ass.

Post More, Worry Less

It's a philosophy I'm considering.

Play With Bush

In free fall. Note that you can "grab" Bush by left-clicking on him.

Via Arvin Hill's Carnival of Horror.

Substance(s)

I haven't been full of substance these days, and for that, I feel a small amount of guilt. I'm still obsessive about looking at my sitemeter, so I know people still stop by. Unfortunately, there hasn't been much of a reason for you to do so.

Maybe I need a sort of 'project' to focus my use of this space. I'm still thinking about that.

But in the meantime, chew on this:

A study published online today by the Journal of Clinical Investigation reports that a synthetic cannabinoid promotes the growth of new neurons in a region of the brain called the hippocampus, which is associated with memory.

The finding that production of new neurons, or neurogenesis, can occur at all in the hippocampus is itself a relatively new discovery.

In rats the effect of cannabinoid is dramatic: Chronic high doses of the substance relieve anxiety and depression, a result attributable to the birth of new neurons.

Xia Zhang, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Saskatchewan and senior author on the paper, notes that the synthetic cannabinoid is about a hundred times as potent as the street drug tetrahydrocannibinol, or THC.

Still, he says, "these results indicate that smoking marijuana may also produce more neurons in the hippocampus" with similar beneficial results. [emphases added]

Now, I'm not trying to claim that smoking marijuana is risk free, but it looks as though the caricatures of "pot heads" may be wrong. Anecdotally, I've known quite a few of them, myself included, who do quite well academically. Skeptics may say that pot-smokers do well despite their drug use, but that may be a less viable claim in the wake of this research. Again, marijuana isn't perfect or exactly harmless, but to claim it is more harmful than tobacco and alcohol, both of which are legal, is getting much sillier.

Attack Of the Peanuts

Oral Difference 1

Columbus Day Special

Okay, so this post doesn't really have anything to do with Christopher Columbus, but it does have to do with a European explorer (that designation sounds so quaint and innocent, doesn't it?). In a little over 450 years after his death, it looks as though we're finally reaching the goal of Hernán Cortés: the Northwest Passage.

It seems harsh to say that bad news for polar bears is good for Pat Broe. Mr. Broe, a Denver entrepreneur, is no more to blame than anyone else for a meltdown at the top of the world that threatens Arctic mammals and ancient traditions and lends credibility to dark visions of global warming.

Still, the newest study of the Arctic ice cap - finding that it faded this summer to its smallest size ever recorded - is beginning to make Mr. Broe look like a visionary for buying this derelict Hudson Bay port from the Canadian government in 1997. Especially at the price he paid: about $7.

By Mr. Broe's calculations, Churchill could bring in as much as $100 million a year as a port on Arctic shipping lanes shorter by thousands of miles than routes to the south, and traffic would only increase as the retreat of ice in the region clears the way for a longer shipping season.

In case you were looking for a "bright side" to look at today.

It does offer up a tantalizing contradiction for global warming denyers. On the one hand, they could offer this up, probably unironically, as a completely great thing that defies us "chicken littles," but in order to do so they would have to admit that global warming exists.