You Gotta Fight, For Your Right, Toooo

have a few helpful aids while partaking in the solitary-vice of onanism*...?

What happened to the 'Support Our Troops' motto so vehemently espoused by the far right?

Via USA Today:

WASHINGTON — Ten years after Congress banned sales of sexually explicit material on military bases, the Pentagon is under fire for continuing to sell adult fare, such as Penthouse and Playmates In Bed, that it doesn't consider explicit enough to pull from its stores.

Dozens of religious and anti-pornography groups have complained to Congress and Defense Secretary Robert Gates that a Pentagon board set up to review magazines and films is allowing sales of material that Congress intended to ban.

"They're saying 'we're not selling stuff that's sexually explicit' … and we say it's pornography," says Donald Wildmon, head of the American Family Association, a Christian anti-pornography group. A letter-writing campaign launched Friday by opponents of the policy aims to convince Congress to "get the Pentagon to obey the law," he adds.


On a tangential note there was a time period in America, referred to as "masturbation hysteria", when all sorts of weird and whacky, religiously affiliated ideas emerged concerning the horrible sinful, shameful, self-gratifying act of masturbation. People like Sylvester Graham (yes father of the graham cracker) or John Harvey Kellogg, (yes, Corn Flakes cereal inventor) who believed and argued in his books that masturbation could lead to blindness, epilespy, atrophy of the testes, heart disease, cancer of the womb (yes masturbation applied to ladies too), urinary diseases, nocturnal emissions, impotence, extreme mental and physical deibility, oh and was the primary cause of acne. In his book Plain Facts For Old and Young he wrote "neither the plague, nor war, nor small-pox, nor similar diseases, have produced results so disastrous to humanity as the pernicious habit of onanism."

Kellogg's and Graham's prescriped remedies--which were dieting (only 2 meals a day) and not eating meat--in order to avoid the temptation of masturbation were, however, much more kosher (from an adolescent boy/man's perspective) than some of the other more, umm, shall we say barbaric methods such as straitjackets, cauterization, or the Chastity belt, seen in the picture below:


Or Albert V. Todd's contraption which was "designed to prevent masturbation by inflicting electric shocks upon the perpetrator, by ringing an alarm bell, and through spikes at the inner edge of the tube into which the penis is inserted."


I can't even imagine that people would actually make their sons do this...Im glad Alfred Kinsey came along to tell us that there was no need for spike tubed, electric shocking, metal panties...cause otherwise I think I can safely say that I would have had a much more tramatic childhood compared to the few emabrassing incidents of 'being caught in the act'.

Wikipedia has an entire history of masturbation article which you can access here.
(I love the fact that the ancient Egyptians creation story was that the god Atum masturbated them into existence. God the Egyptians were cool.)


*I wonder if the word 'onanism' derived from someone who went oh no--splurt--and then decided to make it an -ism...

Fate: In Some Stories Is Fatefully Fatal

Aeschylus the "father of tragedy" was an Athenian tragic poet as well as playwright of popular Greek dramas such as Agamemnon, The Persians, Prometheus Bound, and Oresteia. The inspiration to write tragedy, according to his own telling, came one fateful day as a child when he was sent out into the countryside to watch grapes ripen and (not surprisingly) dozed off, at which point Dionysus, the Greek goddess of love, visited him and commanded him to write tragedies. So the very next day the obedient Aeschylus began to write his first tragedy and "succeeded very easily."

But, relevant information aside, my favorite tid-bit about Aeschylus is the tragic fate of his death. According to Pliny and Valerius Maximus, Ascehylus, who upon recently being warned that he would meet his death by something falling on his head, decided to venture out into an open field, where be believed himself to be absolutely safe under the trustful provisions of a clear blue sky, only to be killed by an eagle who released a helpless tortoise from its talonous clasps when it mistook Ascehylus' soft bald head for a hard, shell-cracking rock. (At the time it was common knowledge that eagles dropped tortoises on rocks to break their shells and access the fleshy meat, though I doubt anyone had ever witnessed it themselves).

As far as stories about death by falling tortoise go, I'm pretty sure that it is safe to say this particular tale is, as they say in Latin, sui generis. I've heard creation stories which rested on the backs of tortoises, one on top of the other, ad infintum, but this is the only story that I'm aware of in which a tortoise is used as a fatefully fatal flying projectile.

The ancient Greeks sure were good story tellers and exceptional myth makers.

Aeschylus was buried at Gela, where the following epitath (supposedly writen by Aeschylus) can be read on his grave:

Beneath this stone lies Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian,
Who perished in the wheat-bearing land of Gela;
Of his noble prowess the grove of Marathon can speak,
Or the long-haired Persian who knows it well.

My Blog's Reading Rating

I'm not sure how this is measured nor do I know the heirarchy of class, but I would assume/would like to flatter myself in thinking that 'genius' is pretty high up in tier.



Courtesy of A Blog Around the Clock

The Story Behind Tapioca

Bubble Tea (a name clearly simplified for the American market) is one of my all time favorite drinks. I can even remember the first time I had one...(dreamy memory sequence cue):
I was with a friend in Chinatown (DC) and he recommended that I try this quaint asian drink which he had recently discovered. I agreed, he relocated the place, I paid, and was then handed a nontransparent, white styrofoam cup, with a plastic lid and a colorful straw that was wider than my thumb. I rounded my lips and took a deep sip of what my tastebuds registered in this order: smooth, creamy fruit--WTF?! squishy, round, unidentifiably strange, string of balls which had the texture of large fish eggs!!! This of course signaled the reflex and chain reaction order to SPEW SPEW SPEW! I spat the drink out in front of me and my friend reacted with unfriendly laughter.
Friend: "Hahaha...Haven't you ever had tapioca before?"
Me: "No...what's tapioca, caviar injected with growth hormones?"

His explanation was basically tapioca was what's in that drink, it's tasteless, but texture rich, with a side of throat tickling. I took another sip reassured that it wasn't something fishy and found the drink incredibly delicious.

For those of you haven't yet enjoyed the abrosial mmm-ness of this drink or are just so culturally poversihed that you don't even have a clue what this drink even is, I, oh helpless reader, will try to describe it to you.

There seems to be two variations of the drink. The more popular one has the liquidy texture of a smooth milky tea, the taste of a fruity drink (usually its just one fruit like strawberry, coconut, mango, etc.), and gummy black, pearl-shaped orbs of tapicoa floating and swirling weightlessly around at the base of the drink.

The other is simply a change in liquidy texture, its more related to the icee family of fruit drinks, but its not quite as sugar food dye sweet as the icee you are used to getting at the cinema.

Anyways that established I have always been curious as to what, exactly, this tapioca substance was. Where did it come from, how was it discovered, was it a fruit, a plant, a synthetic creation of biotechnology, I wasn't sure and never really investigated these questions, because they weren't exactly questions at the forefront of life's other mysteries so they were relegated to the back files of my mind, but today I came across an entry addressing my aformentioned questions in a random book I picked up in the library by Stimpson called A Book About A Thousand Things

Here was the entry:

"Tapioca, a word of South American Indian origin, is the name applied to a vegetable food obtained from the starch roots of the poisonous plant known as bitter cassava, which is indigenous to tropical America but now widely cultivated in other parts of the world. According to Latin American tradition, the food vaule of cassava was accidentally discovered by a Spanish explorer lost in the jungles of Brazil. He had heard from the Indians that the sap of the cassava plant was highly poisonous, and preferring a quick death by poison to a slow one by starvation and fever, he ate a bowl of soup prepared by boiling cassava roots in water. Instead of dying he lived to tell the world how this pleasant and digestible food saved him from death. As a matter of fact the milky juice of the bitter cassava is highly poisonous and cannot be eaten in its natural condition without considerable danger, but the application of heat, as the explorer discovered, destroys the poisonous property."

Stimpson then goes on to describe how tapioca is extracted from the cassava root (or what is more commonly known as Yuca)

"After being thus separated from the constituents of the root the moist starch is spread on iron plates and exposed to heat sufficient, with the aid of constant stirring, to partly rupture the granules and cause them to agglomerate into the irregular pellets which, when cooked, become the hard, translucent tapioca used in puddings and soups [and bubble teas]."

Upon learning this new information the Yuca root has now elevated its status to become the quintessential food item I would request if I were marooned on an island, because not only is it delicious when dried out, but it also tastes good (after the requried process) in a blended fruit drink (and any postcard will show you that islands are known for being coconut plentiful).

I'm definitely going to challenge my usual Bubble Tea serving waitress' knowledge on tapioca the next time Im in her store, because I doubt she knows the true story behind those yummy gummy, squishy chewy, black and gooey, pearly balls*...



*(I think I can say with assurance that I am probably the first person to ever write that sentence.)

AAA Responds To HTS

Just noticed that the American Anthropology Association finally produced a statement on the US Military's Human Terrain System (which recruits anthropologists to assist their 'progressive' efforts in the regions they occupy).

I'll redirect you to two responses from fellow AnthroBloggers for all those interested:

In favor of and prolific posters on this issue: bloggers over at SavageMinds.org
&
Opposed to: the blogger(s) over at Anthropology.net

I'm still on the fence with this issue, since I'm a prospective AFSA with an undergraduate degree in anthropology...

But I think Marx's famous quote could be pertinently changed to:

"[Anthropologists] have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."

In my opinion your not going to change military policy and actions by writing in subscription journals and if you truly want to stop the egregious acts and culturally detrimental actions of the military you have to actually get engaged with it, learn the lingo, embed yourself within it, so you can not only understand it, but hopefully teach it the vaulable lessons that anthropology has uncovered over the years.

But that's just my two cents...it's a very tricky ethical question (as all ethical questions usually are).

The Superbowl of Particle Physics

There's a fantastic post up on Cosmic Variance on the Higgs boson, which is what scientists are hoping to discover after spending billions of dollars on the LHC at CERN, granted of course a black hole isn't created that inhales the planet...(just kidding according to Hawkings' formulas that is improbable, and if you can't trust him who can you trust).

I wish I could say more on this topic but I have a huge paper due tomorrow that I do not have the luxury of time to neglect.

You can find a peerty slide show of images of the Collider in this NYtimes article.

Spelunking In The Cave of the Unknown

Letter to Religion:

Dear Christianity,

Throughout history your theologian’s arguments have been based on such things as faith, un-knowledge, and the unknown, but thankfully science has been slowly illuminating these dark question-marks of religious sanctuary by continuously shining the light of inquiry and torch of explanation deep down into the depths of life's mysterious mine, exploring and uncovering the shadowy blanket of the unknown and leaving in its place a luminous wake of percipience and veritably knowable understanding.

For (theologians take note) the chief aim of Science is to plant a flag of explanation and understanding on the mountaintops of empirical data and not a flag of faith, which quells all further inquiry, in front of every deep question or seemingly bottomless mine of mystery which presents itself to us.

So please stop, I beg you, claiming god exists everytime you find a shadow of mystery to hide him in. It would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Sincerely,
Your faithful non-believer

Adam


In the meantime the rest of us who have picked up on this pattern and apparently tacit fact can occupy ourselves with the enjoyment of watching the laudable efforts made by theologians to find unexplored caves of mystery to plant their flags of faith in front of. (whether quantum mechanics, consciousness, life before the big bang, etc. Caves of mystery which remain so until they are explored and exorcised of mystery by those irritatingly irritant spelunking (and debunking) party of scientists, with their pesky headlamps of inquiry…for faith cannot find comfort living in a world of knowledge.)

Technological Works of Wonder

I want this so bad...

Datamancer's Exquisite Vintage Looking Wind-up Laptop:







Here's another cool creation

Japanese laptop includes a Morse key over the trackball and a manual typewriter keyboard straight out of Naked Lunch:

And though its not a laptop its certainly a cool looking accessory

Iron mouse:

Quantum Weirdness

I just came across this fantastic series (though at the moment there appears to only be three) on what I like to call quantum conundrums, the most infamous of which are addressed by Dr. Quantum, one of the foremost experts on quantum mechanics in the 3dimensional world, as you will soon see.

Enjoy!

Law Of Attraction: Double Slit experiment


Dr. Quantum visits Flatland


And lastly--and to me what is the strangest phenomenon of all--Entanglement

Forgiving is Forgetting

Just came across this on the recent vote in the UN General Assembly denouncing the US embargo on Cuba. The vote was unanimous184-4, the four being the US, Israel, Palau, and Marshall Islands and Micronesia abstained.

We're currently watching a video in class on the Cuban missile crisis and the more I've learned about the whole affair (namely CIA involvement to overthrow Castro) the less my sympathy has been on the side of the US, so for me I just don't understand why we still have an embargo...

Plenty of youtube videos available on the web if you're interested.

I think I remember this one being a decent one

Bay of Pigs:
Part 1, Part 2

Changing Our Perspective Towards Africa

Over the course of history the continent of Africa and its inhabitants have taken on numerous images and meanings in the eyes of the Western world. It has been the “Dark Continent” a rugged land of exoticism and savagery, which caused a mass of European explorers and expeditions, adventurers and thrill seekers to migrate to the mysterious continent, who then wrote books and letters home which fueled the African trope of barbarism and primitiveness amongst the ‘civilized’ citizens of Europe. It has been a helpless continent, ravaged by war, raped by poverty, and pillaged by disease and hunger, undeveloped and salvageable only by the advanced wealthy civilizations who are capable of fixing and rescuing it, which inspired a call to aid and assistance, propagandized by the media and popularized by celebrities such as Bono and Angelina Jolie. But in more recent years Africa has taken on yet another image, a new meaning, particularly in the eyes of the United States, it has become a national security risk.

“Africa Emerges as a Strategic Battleground” is the headline of the article by Wall Street Journalist Frederick Kempe, who suggests that the true motivation behind the US administration’s recent significant increase of aid to Africa is to combat the spread of terrorism by eliminating potential regions or environments out of which terrorism tends to emerge and take root. This notion of an increasingly volatile national threat emerging in Africa stems from the characterization that “great swaths of Africa are lawless, corrupt and bitterly poor”, a characterization which produces the conclusion that Africa is, therefore, “an ideal breeding ground for extremists.” But the domino reaction does not stop there since this very conclusion inspires a solution offered by the US in the form of engagement and intervention. Thus aid and assistance by organizations such as the U.N., IMF, and World Bank are increased and the U.S. now has a comforting justification for meddling in the affairs of African politics, economics, and society (and the beat goes on).

In his article Kempe provides an acute quote, which sums up the new role Africa plays in US foreign policy, when he quotes U.S. Gen. James Jones saying “Africa plays an increased strategic role militarily, economically and politically…We have to become more agile in terms of being able to compete in this environment.” This mindset is clearly a binary, black and white one, since it implies that a failure to be ‘king of the mountain’ in Africa politically, economically, and militarily, would be a national security disaster for the U.S.—whose safety is now directly linked to Africa’s stability. And as US involvement in Africa increases, so, too, do its interests. “In the Gulf of Guinea off West Africa -- through which 15% of U.S. oil imports flow, a figure expected to rise to some 25% in the next decade -- Gen. Jones sees a more lasting maritime presence to protect against piracy and bunkering, or the widespread siphoning of oil from pipelines.”

In order to maintain its pursuit and protection of its regional interests the US must emphasize the popular characterization or meme of Africa being a victim of underdevelopment, a place that is ridden by poverty, lawlessness, disease and starvation, in order to justify its involvement within the continent. This is comparable to the priest who teaches his parish that they are all abhorrent sinners destined for eternal punishment, unless they accept God and Jesus as their saviors—only then are they saved. Or better yet, a person who walks around cutting people with a razor blade in order to sell them a bandage. The point is that the US offers a solution to a problem of its own-making!

Journalists such as Kempe and many others (if you don’t believe me just scan the news coming out of Africa and see if you notice a theme) assist and even promulgate this sentiment of the need to assist Africa, making it our obligation, because we are wealthy and advanced and they are poor and primitive. I will agree that equality is something to be strived for and we, members raised in Western culture, are obviously indoctrinated with these Lockean values, and as a result have a missionary zeal and sense of duty to go out and eradicate inequality and injustice in other countries, but we must be careful that these enthusiasms and zestful aspirations are not solely serving the interests of our state. For it seems true that in the 20th century the inherent values of individual equal rights, political representation, and social justice have all been merely side affects of the United States protecting and increasing its material interests.

If we continue to view Africa through the popularized view in the media and amongst the general public as being our sickly patient, who is helpless without us, then we will continue to feel justified in the political prescriptions we give and the economic remedies we offer. Africa will continue to be dependent on our aid and assistance and it will most likely never develop into a healthy, stable, and sustainable independent continent—it will, to carry the metaphor further, never get better. But if we change the way we see Africa, denude ourselves of the mischaracterizations and misconceptions that have plagued our policy decisions and attitude towards Africa, then perhaps, just maybe, we will start seeing Africa get its color back, its elan vital, and it will finally become the healthy, sustainable, and stable continent—which we so often forget—that it wants to be and not the Africa—supported by the mass media, journalists like Kempe, and the US administration, whose importance is solely constituted by its strategic significance--that we want it to be.



Article link found here

Japanese Television: The Paragon of Entertainment

Enjoy!

Japanese Spa Prank


Here's one of my personal favorites. It combines learning English with aerobics, a ridiculous looking mugger who wields what appears to be the blunt end of a teaspoon, and a cameraman who apparently has an obsession with armpits...


Here's a sequel if you want some more laughs. = )


And lastly this gem of a game show, where participants have to take the shapes of the cutouts in the large pink foam squares that come at them or be knocked into the pool of water behind them.

There's A Reason 'Panache' Is A French Word

La Blogotheque is a fabulous place to find some your favorite artists or bands--Arcade Fire, Andrew Bird, Beirut, Sufjan Stevens, etc.--playing live & unplugged in various settings (in the streets, on rooftops, in cafes and elevators) and in various towns and cities.

Here are a few of my favorite videos that are posted on the website:

Sufjan Stevens - The Lakes of Canada

#50.2 - Sufjan Stevens (MusicNow) - The lakes of Canada
Uploaded by lablogotheque

Arcade Fire - Neon Bible and Wake Up

#41 - Arcade Fire - Neon Bible & Wake Up
Uploaded by lablogotheque

Beirut - Nantes

#64.1 - Beirut - Nantes
Uploaded by lablogotheque

Andrew Bird - Spare-Oh

#45.3 - Andrew Bird - Spare-Oh
Uploaded by lablogotheque

Cali - La Fin Du Monde

#30.3 - CALI - La fin du monde
Uploaded by lablogotheque

A Question Mark In The Desert Sands of Syria (so big you can see it from Space!)

The mysteries surrounding the Israeli strike on a Syrian "structure" seem to be blossoming exponentially as more information concerning the incident is slowly being leaked.

There's myriad theories and speculations that are bouncing around on the web, but here are two trust-worthy sources that I recommend you consult if you're interested in the matter:

Jeffery Lewis, Director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation, has been dedicating a lot of his posts lately to this topic, over at Arms Control Wonk, and his most recent post is particularly intersting (as are the comments to the post).

Also the China Matters blog has a number of posts found here, here, and here, that you should check out if you're interested in sifting through the sediment of rumors and hypothesis' in the pursuit of a golden nugget of truth. ; - )