<$BlogRSDUrl$>

Neko

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

The war on... sick people 


If you're not sick, you will be once you've read this:

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050607/ap_on_go_su_co/scotus_medical_marijuana

which gives us the latest from the Supreme Court:

"In a 6-3 decision, the court on Monday said those who smoke marijuana because their doctors recommend it to ease pain can be prosecuted for violating federal drug laws, overriding medical marijuana statutes in 10 states."

There are disclaimers about how they're not going to be targeting sick people, but if that's so, why go to such lengths to be sure they CAN? I don't buy the idea of, "Don't worry about this new restriction on you/new power we have over you, because we're not gonna use it, honest"; if they weren't ever going to use it, they wouldn't be laying the groundwork.

Groundwork to deprive sick people of, and take legal action against them for, something they need to control their level of suffering.

The justification for this is:

"The Bush administration, like the Clinton White House before it, has taken a hard stand against state medical marijuana laws, arguing that such statutes could undermine the fight against illegal drugs."

Um, excuse me, aren't there already countless drugs that a doctor can prescribe that are illegal to procure withOUT a doctor's prescription, including many that are used "recreationally," like marijuana usually is? Just because marijuana's been illegal for a long time, well before its medical uses were discovered, why should that make a difference? When people are SUFFERING, isn't the more important issue the relief of that suffering, NOT whether something that would help them has been made illegal because people were smoking it and... eating lots of cookies?

The point is made in the article that

"John Walters, director of national drug control policy, defended the government's ban. 'Science and research have not determined that smoking marijuana is safe or effective,' he said."

This is of course true, but it's a valid argument against allowing marijuana use by the ill if and only if it's followed by a statement along the lines of, "... and therefore, we're going to invest lots of $ starting right now so that we CAN determine these things"; the lack of such a statement tells me that the concern that marijuana might not be helping, or could even be hurting, the sick people is FAKE, and is just being mouthed to make them sound better.

Know WHY there's no research backing up the medicinal value of marijuana? Because it's an illegal substance, even for medical researchers, and they'd have to get special permission to possess it in order to study it, AND get someone to pay for what would be controversial research, which would be made harder by the fact that they couldn't expect any gov't $... and they KNOW that. Pointing to the lack of a sort of research that's been made essentially impossible to conduct is grossly disingenuous... SHAME on them!!

Doctors need to be allowed to do their jobs as best as they can, and that means that they should be able to prescribe ANYTHING that will reduce human suffering; if they discover than HEROIN would help these desperate people control their agony, I think it should be given to them, and marijuana should be permitted without a moment's hesitation.

The Yahoo article fails to mention a more prevalent medical use for marijuana; the suppression of nausea, which can literally be a life or death issue for patients with things like AIDS and cancer, for whom the nausea can be so horrific that they can't eat. One of my own uncles owes his life to marijuana; his nausea was so bad that he couldn't keep ANYTHING down, not even water, so he'd smoke half a joint, take his medicines and vitamins, eat a meal, drink some fluids, and hope it'd all be far enough into his body to not come shooting back out when the nausea returned. Why are they no longer talking about the nausea-relief angle... is it the connection to AIDS? There's a grim thought for you...

The Yahoo article DOES make the final important point on this issue:

"Allen St. Pierre, executive director of NORML, which favors legalization of marijuana... said the decision points up a large difference between the administration and the public.

'The disconnect is so wide here,' St. Pierre said. 'In no circumstance where voters have the opportunity to weigh in have they said no to medical marijuana.'"

Damn straight. Wake up, Washington; the American people want all possible treatments to be made available to those who are sickest, and if you're smart you'll back down gracefully on this one before the media starts showcasing dreadfully ill people whose suffering you won't allow to be relieved... before the voters start contemplating the need for greater compassion in our elected officials.


Monday, June 06, 2005

The shape of karma 


Does karma fill the entire universe, or if, as seems very likely, there are multiple universes in a 10- or 11- dimensional omniverse, does karma fill it all? Without knowing that, it's hard to narrow the choices down as to karma's possible shapes; as of the last I heard, the universe is shaped like a saddle, it's stuck to a brane that's a ripply plane, and the branes are all in an omniverse that's a very long and thin cylinder... if you think karma fills all of one of these entities, that'd give you its shape. I think it's entirely possible that karma expands until it bumps into the edges of reality, but that doesn't intuitively feel like the right choice; it seems to me like karma, which is largely generated by our thoughts, feelings and souls, should be concentrated around our planet, and of course any other planets with intelligent beings (which statistically must be out there)... there's no proof of this, but that's my starting point for lack of a better one.

Does karma expand outward from Earth in a sphere, or in an uneven but vaguely spherical shape? There's no reason to assume that just because it's increasing with each bit of energy that gets produced that it's doing anything as prosaic as just spreading out, I suppose; it could grow outwards in rings, rays, spirals, ever-shifting blobs like in a lava lamp, or in an exotic geometric form... or in some shape beyond human imagination, of course (which goes double if it's growing in more than 3-4 dimensions).

Does karma pass into one of the parallel universes predicted by string theory and collect there? Does it coalesce like a cloud, or form bubbles, or just fill it up like water being poured into a glass?

Does karma permeate the omniverse? Does it drift through it in wisps like smoke, or line it like spiritual tissue paper, or make intricate lacings throughout it like a spiderweb?

Where do our souls, which are made of karma, go when we die? Is karma in 2 sections, the part affecting the living and the part consisting of souls? Do souls all hang out together, do they form a cube or pyramid or octahedron, or do they freckle the universe, or omniverse, with dots of karma?

How about the shape of karma at the local level? We know from string theory that everything is made of tiny strings of energy, and I think that either karma is made of those strings, or those strings are made out of karma, but what shape(s) does karma take collectively as it's generated en mass by our actions, thoughts and feelings? Does karma shoot away from us along a line, does it encase us in a shell, does it form a halo around our heads or a coil around our bodies?

As I was typing the above, I remembered a Scott Adams quote; "I suspect that the only way time can be infinite is if the past connects to the future like some huge Mobius strip-wormhole kind of deal." A Mobius strip is a one-sided surface, which you can read more about here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%F6bius_strip

So, I'm thinking about shapes of karma, and the one-sidedness concept joins in, and I know that karma has to be more "substantial" than just a strip... and then I thought, maybe it's a Klein bottle, which looks like an enclosed form but in fact has no inside or outside:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottle

http://torus.math.uiuc.edu/jms/Images/klein.html

http://www.math.rochester.edu/misc/klein-bottle.html

A Klein bottle needs 4 dimensions to exist, but we've probably got 11 dimensions, so we could have something like that, or even something with only one "side" throughout all the dimensions, such that you could travel along it forever in any direction and never reach a boundary of any kind... ahhhhhhh, if that's not the real shape of karma, it oughta be!! :-)


Sunday, June 05, 2005

A behavioral oddity 


From the May 2005 issue of Discover (yes, I'm still shamefully far behind in my reading), in an article called "Think Tank," comes the following:

"The most important discovery in the last 25 years in systems neuroscience is the function of the dopamine neurons in the midbrain... the neurons fire brief bursts of spikes when a monkey is rewarded, but after a while the response to the reward goes away and instead the neurons respond to sensory stimuli that predict that a reward will be received in the near future."

HUH?!!

If the reward stops being exciting, that's one thing, but if the reward is still compelling enough that just the thought of getting it in the near future is stimulating, why would the response to the reward itself go away? Like so many other aspects of psychology, this is totally counterintuitive, but since it's been shown to exist in monkeys, and thus is almost certain to exist in humans, it's worth thinking about.

Sometimes people talk about feeling let down when they get some longed-for thing that they'd been all excited about receiving; that could be an example of this concept in action. The way that people who're wealthy enough to have everything tend to be miserable much of the time could certainly suggest that having gets old, that we have an intrinsic need to want things, to feel the desire for things we don't have. In the relationship arena, we've all seen people who were eagerly pursuing someone until they got them, after which they immediately lost interest. I think we could even make a case that those who talk about the journey or process being what's important, rather than the destination or result, are examples of this idea.

Clearly, then, this odd reaction scenario applies to humans, too... but WHY? What evolutionary advantage do we gain from it? I can see the benefit of being revved up by cues that a reward is on the way, as that would make us ready to grab it and more likely to actually get it, but why lose the rush from the reward itself... why not have responses to BOTH things to maximize our likelihood of going for the gold?

This one's got me stumped. It'll still be useful, though, both by providing a biological explanation for previously inexplicable emotional responses and by suggesting a useful tool for motivating other people; if a just handing over a reward isn't getting it done, switch to offering the idea that a reward might be forthcoming.

Does anyone besides me see this possibly tying into the equally counterintuitive concept of intermittent reinforcement, which refers to how we tend to pursue a thing more ardently if our efforts are only sporadically rewarded, even to the point of becoming obsessive about the pursuit (see my post of 9-10-04)? Hmmmmmmm.......


Saturday, June 04, 2005

SQUIRREL BABIES!!!!!!!!!! 


After over 2 agonizing months of waiting (see my post of 3-29-05), of watching my little angel girl become the Pamela Anderson of the squirrel world with enormous, bloated teats (TWELVE of them!!), of knowing that she was, in fact, a female (we'd always thought she was a boy, lol) and nursing a litter, I finally, FINALLY saw the babies today!! They are, without a doubt, the cutest creatures to ever walk the Earth!! :-)

Here's the progression of events:

A couple of weeks ago, we had some loud and protracted construction here, and the squirrel, which had been coming every day forever, was obviously freaked out, and first didn't come at all for several days, then just came along on the fence (where she'd take food from me if offered), then vanished again for 5 days... right at the time we were expecting the babies to show up, GRRRRRRRRRRRR.

Last night, I non-coincidentally had a dream about a squirrel; it looked "wrong," as its body shape and color were "off," but it smiled at me (yes, SMILED), and I knew it was "mine"; when I woke up, I wondered if that meant I'd be getting a squirrel visit today.

Late this afternoon, I walked into the kitchen, looked out the window, and saw a sweet furry face; my 1st reaction was "there she is!!", but almost immediately I saw a 2ND face, and thought "she's brought a baby!!", instantly followed by, "they're both far too small to be her... this is 2 babies here withOUT their mother."

My EXTREME excitement at seeing the little darlings (which are about 2/3 of adult size, and so technically are more like adolescents than babies) was mitigated by 2 unpleasant realizations:

1) The unexpected absence of their mother might mean that she's abandoned the territory to the babies (or, in theory, that she's hurt, or sick, or worse), and thus that it might be a long while before she returns, or that we might never see her again; she's utterly irreplaceable in our hearts, so, no matter how many babies there are, it's not worth it if we lose HER, both because we love her and because she's semi-tame and I can pet and hand-feed her.

2) It's normal for ground squirrels to have EIGHT babies (and given how bloated the mother was with milk, and how swollen all 12 teats were, with the fur rubbed off around them, it seems as if she MUST have nursed a sizable litter), if it turns out that the ones I saw today are all there are, that means that it's likely that the other babies, which only had a 10% chance of reaching adulthood according to what I've read, are... are...

{dead}

... well, let's hope that they're in my neighbors' yards eating THEIR ornamental plants and staking out new territories.

Without their mother's example to follow, the babies we've got won't have the incentive to come and be hand-fed, so I'm looking at a potentially lengthy taming process before I can have close squirrel contact if my angel girl doesn't return soon; I hope I don't have to do things the hard way, but I'm not counting on it... I'm launching right into acclimating them to me with the goal of getting them to take food from me as soon as possible.

I'm certain that the mommy has been bringing them to my yard (as opposed to their wandering in by accident), because the babies knew where to dig up her nut caches, and, more importantly, knew to climb up onto this one big pot and drink mud out of it like she does; I'd have given ANYTHING to have seen those visits, but most of the day neither my husband nor I can be standing at the window looking around, so for all we know they've been coming for WEEKS, just not at times that we're available.... and maybe there were more babies then, sigh...

Although what we've got is far from the mob of babies we'd hoped for, and we have to worry about when we'll see our angel girl again, the 2 newcomers have already charmed us with their curiosity, playfulness, and the sometimes-clumsiness of creatures that're still trying to grow into their limbs. One of them is significantly larger and more aggressive than the other, and has exhibited mounting behavior with the smaller one, so naturally we're assuming that they're a male and a female; we've been fooled before, though, so we're keeping an open mind. If they ARE of opposite sexes, we then have to wonder if, relatedness notwithstanding, they're going to be a breeding pair; animals naturally do what's right, mating-wise (with humans as the glaring exception), so it must be ok if that's what's up, and it'd have the bonus of meaning that neither of them will be taking off in search of its own territory.

Despite the sudden onset of never before encountered camcorder problems (naturally), I got some priceless footage of the little darlings nuzzling each other and even wrestling a little, as well as climbing and eating everything in sight; still, my husband would of course like to see them live, and I'm dying to see more of them, so we've laid out enough food to feed an elephant, of every kind we could think of, to lure them in and see what they prefer, and... now, all we can do is wait and see what sort of squirrel visits we'll get next.

I'm going to be climbing the walls tomorrow until I see some fuzzy, elfin faces; I'm so excited to be a "grandma" at last, to have the chance to watch squirrel babies up close, and of course there's still hope of seeing more babies, and their mother... keep your fingers crossed for me!! :-)


Friday, June 03, 2005

"Beauty and the Geek" 


Amazingly for someone who mostly ignores what's on regular TV unless it's a movie, I saw ANOTHER interesting show today (it came on after "Blue Collar TV" on the WB, and I got sucked in before I could find something else to watch from my endless digital cable listings); it sounds like yet another romantic hookup type program, but it's not... or so they're claiming for now. It starts out with a group of men that, as the title implies, are smart, of varying degrees of unattractive and poorly-dressed, and totally socially inept (ie have never been on a date, never kissed a girl, are virgins at nearly 30), and women who are, not just beautiful, but dumb as rocks; the premise is that they pair up, the women try to make the men socially acceptable, the men try to stuff some knowledge into the women's heads, and competitions will show who's done the best at it... and of course, eliminations occur at the end of each show based on who the winners nominate and the others vote for, and the winners get $250K.

Time will tell if there's a built-in twist, but even if they didn't intend one there still is one: Dr. Joyce Brothers once said that if you put ANY straight man and woman on a deserted island together, a romance WILL eventually develop, as that's how we're programmed to behave; that concept operates everywhere men and women spend alot of time around each other, and so is bound to become a factor even with such shy and awkward men and picky women. In fact, it already IS a factor, as one of the women has developed an obvious interest in one of the men (NOT her game partner, which livens things up even more), and has started to pursue him... and I'm betting that that won't be all the romance that blossoms during the course of the show.

This "reality" series will be far more interesting than any of the various combinations of hotties that've been thrown together for other shows, or the one (one?) with an "average" guy with hot babes (can you imagine it ever being done the other way around?); super-hot women and men just short of the absolute bottom of the dating food chain, with the former forced to get to know those they'd never spare a minute to in real life, and the latter in a situation where they're guaranteed extensive contact with those they'd never dare approach, much less get to know... stay tuned, folks, human nature will be clearly on display in the weeks to come.


Thursday, June 02, 2005

Childhood clothing oddities 


Throughout my entire childhood, my mother's clothing philosophy, at least for MY clothes, was to wait until stuff was WAY out of style and on the mega-clearance racks at K-Mart, and then she'd get it. Do you remember in the early 80's when a white shirt with a rainbow across the front was the hot item, soon to be followed by an endless variety of other styles of rainbow clothes? As always, my mother ignored my frenzied pleas to have something cute while it was "in," but as soon as it was OUT she got me a bunch of different ones on sale. When mesh shirts over t-shirts were in for about 5 minutes, she managed to get me a couple of dorky shirts with ATTACHED mesh, and I got stuck with several sailor shirts when those made a similar brief appearance in stores; when patterned jeans, including those that looked like flowers had been painted on them, made it to the clearance racks, there was my pants wardrobe for college and beyond. The strangest example of how she went out of her way to make me look as weird and different as possible was with the terry-cloth shirts; I had at least TEN of them, all cut the same way (indented waist, low scoop neckline, cap sleeves), and of 3 different varieties (plain, with shiny stripes, and with designs on the front), and I've never seen any evidence that those shirts ever existed other than in my closet... I never saw them advertised, or in stores, or on anyone else, or in any of the retrospectives that've been done on 80's clothes-and that's not a hyperbole, either, I mean NEVER. Were they something that some local company made by mistake and fire-saled off to K-Mart, where only my mother bought them?

I cringe to contemplate what people must have thought seeing me wearing that sort of stuff, especially since it was ALL I had, and thus all I wore... and I wore those things until my mid-20's, too (because I couldn't afford to complete the process of replacing my entire wardrobe until then, and I had to wear SOMETHING), how grim is THAT?

What's even worse, in a way, is what happened the one and only time in my entire life that my mother actually got me clothes that were still in the stores on the regular racks; this wasn't due to generosity on her part, but because I'd had such a huge growth spurt that, even though she was perfectly happy for me to go to school with high-waters, even SHE couldn't deny that I needed all new pants for the 8th grade school year. We'd moved at the end of my 7th grade year, during which I'd been sent to school in patterned polyester stretch pants and turtlenecks layered with short-sleeved polyester shirts (none of which my peers were wearing, needless to say, and you've gotta wonder what sick train of thought led her to design this uniform for an innocent child), and I was faced with being able, wonder of wonders, to get proper clothing with which to meet my new schoolmates for the 1st time.

The central garment in this story is Dittos jeans, which is what every girl except me was wearing in those days. The closest I'd gotten was a pair of pants with that same sort of seam over the butt (aka "saddle seat") that my mother had gotten me as a concession to my endlessly pointing out the total lack of overlap between my clothes and anyone else's; she ripped out the tags with the no-name brand on them, and instructed me to tell anyone that asked if they were Dittos or not, "Why do you ask, can't you tell?"... which, as you might imagine, despite how clever SHE thought this was, did NOT fool anyone, so she might as well have saved what little $ she spent on them and not bothered. In our new city, there wasn't any polyester child's clothing in the stores, and there WAS an abundance of Dittos in every color of the rainbow; in fact, unless you wanted to pay more and get actual bluejeans like Levi's, which of course wasn't an option, Dittos were all there was for school pants... and thus the previously undreamed-of process of buying clothes that weren't already 6 months out of style began. I can close my eyes and still see them; red, hot pink, green, dark purple, lavender, and sky blue, some with the saddle seat and some with the double-barred back seam. When I started school in the fall, ready to strut my stuff in my Dittos wardrobe, I looked around at my classmates at the private school I'd be attending from then until college, and...

... no one but me was wearing Dittos.

That's right, I was in the one school in America where the girls totally ignored the current fashion; instead, they were wearing "Salt of the Earth" jeans, which I'd never heard of, never saw in any ad or store, and which a Google search of comes up blank... I don't know what store they were all shopping at, or what it was about that brand that made it the only acceptable one, but I DID know that, after all my high hopes, I had the wrong clothes AGAIN, and had been instantly branded as an outsider AGAIN.

Given the nightmarishness of my early-life clothes experiences, perhaps it's not a coincidence that now, when I'm pushing middle age and can afford to wear pretty much anything, all I wear is basic jeans and thrift-store t-shirts... while eagerly reading Vogue every month. As long as everything I wear is clean and hole-free (which it always is, of course) and my socks match, I'm in the upper 5% of my peer group (geeks), so, although I greatly enjoy the artistry of couture, in my actual life clothes have become pretty much a non-issue, which is really how it should ideally always have been.

I sure hope that that old saying about how clothes make the man (or woman) doesn't apply to what I wore in my formative years, though, lol.


Wednesday, June 01, 2005

"Strip Search" 


You can imagine what I THOUGHT this TV show was going to be about, lol, but the premise for this VH1 program turns out to be, "Men compete for a contract with a traveling male strip revue troupe." That sounded promising (hey, I'm married, not DEAD), so I watched it... and ran head-on into human nature.

Everyone knows what male strippers look like; tall, tan (or non-white), muscular, handsome. Everyone also knows what strippers need to be able to do to allow them to BE strippers rather than, say, models; dance and exude sexual energy. Why, then, were the applicants for this competition primarily homely, flabby, pasty, sporting guts and love handles, unable to dance, and with no clue whatsoever as to what to do with their bodies to project a sexual vibe? What went through these men's heads that made them think that, although they possessed NONE of the qualifications to be male strippers, they still had a shot? Are they CRAZY?

There's a classic "Cathy" cartoon where she and her friends are at the pool, and see a hugely fat man in a tiny Speedo who looks relaxed and happy to have his body hanging out, unlike the women, who are agonizing over every bodily flaw, real or imagined, that they have. They express dismay that HE is fine with his body when none of them are satisfied with their own, far closer to acceptable, bodies; he, meanwhile, is looking at one of them and thinking, "She'd be cute if she lost some weight." There are several good lessons about human nature there, but the applicable one is that, even with the advent of metrosexuality, and the belated emergence of male sex symbols that actually have fantasy-worthy bodies rather than just attractive faces, lots of men still have no idea how they rate lookswise, or even that they're BEING rated on things like whether they have a flat stomach, muscle definition, or a butt.

Don't get me wrong, fellas, I don't think you have to be mountains of muscle to be hot; on the contrary, I think that a sleeker but still well-defined body is FAR more attractive, as exemplified by my buddy Wes in the shirtless photo he posted on his terrific blog

http://www.wesoteric.com/blog-archives/05-30-2005/its-time-for-another-crayon-haiku-2/

and I also think that a wide variety of male body shapes that are healthy and strong without being chiseled or lean are very attractive... but to be a STRIPPER, of either gender, you need to have blatant sexual cues in how your body looks, which means big boobs for women and big muscles for men (sadly, it also means shaving the chests, which bums me out no end).

The most entertaining thing about this TV show was what most of the guys thought of as "dancing"; when they saw themselves bobbing, flapping and stomping on video, they probably died of shame... if not directly, then indirectly from the laughter of their friends. And as for dancing SEXY... does anyone besides me wonder how the gender that's biologically programmed for sexual pursuit can be so clueless as to how to BE sexy? What is this issue that straight, white American men have with moving their hips and undulating their bodies... do they think their balls will drop off if they do those things?

Anyways, that's my latest foray into reality TV; what's next, do you suppose, a competition to get guys for porn movies, where they'll whip out a ruler at the auditions? ;-)





Free Website Hit Counter
Free website hit counter












Navigation by WebRing.
This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours? Google