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The universe is an amazing thing. While you are “sitting still” reading this post, you, me, and everyone else are hurdling through space at an unfathomable speed. This is almost as amazing as the fact that we, for the most part, don’t even notice that we’re doing it. The Earth rotates 1,600km/h at the equator, which goes down to 0 at the poles, for an average of 800km/h across the planet. Our orbit takes us around the sun at 107,000 km/h and our solar system’s orbit around the galaxy has us going about 792,000 km/h. On top of that our solar system kind of meanders about at 70,000km/h in our section of the Milky Way. On top of all of that, our galaxy’s movement in relation to the background cosmic radiation has us cruising at a cool 2.1 million km/h through the universe. All tolled, we are moving through space at about 3,000,000 km/h OR 853 km/s OR 0.3% the speed of light. That is damn fast.
What the hell does this have to do with ghosts?
Glad you asked. Read the rest of this entry »
As I’ve written previously, The Fashion and I don’t get along. The last time I focused on how The Fashion aims primarily to destroy your self-image in order to then save it in exchange for your money. Today let’s look at one of the many ways The Fashion is willing to sacrifice your health to line it’s pockets. The insidious high heeled shoe.
I’ve never liked high heels. On anyone. That is not to say that my objection to high heels, nor this post, is born out of some subjective style preference of mine. You could dress in a fuchsia burlap sack with eye holes for all I care and I’d never write about it. No, the problem with heels is far beyond mere opinion or particular taste. They are inherently evil and should be discarded by all. The elimination of the high heel will bring about a happier healthier world.
Lets talk practicality. No, it’s more basic than that. Let’s talk purpose and meaning. Why do we have shoes at all? Walking barefoot out in the world comes with many hazards. There are sharp pokey bits everywhere. There are unpleasantly cold and wet environments. There is dirt and filth and all manor of disgusting grossness that will instantly defile any bare skin it comes in contact with. Footwear’s primary purpose is to protect our feet from a world of dangers. Further, a good pair of shoes allow us to accomplish more foot based activity than we could do otherwise. They support ankles and arches, pad the foot, and ease the stress of each step. Proper footwear allows us to run faster, to walk farther, to fully realize the potential offered to us by bipedalism. Thus, the quality of a shoe can be determined by how well it protects our foot and how much it empowers our foot-based locomotion. On both these criteria, the high heel fails in spectacular fashion.
Do you know why it is so easy to spot someone who isn’t used to the heels they are wearing? Because heels get a negative score on the ‘making-walking-easier’ metric. They make walking harder, the complete opposite of what shoes are supposed to do. Wherever there is a dance floor, there are people ditching their oh so “fashionable” heels. They risk finding a shard of broken glass with their foot or having their toes accidentally stomped on. Why? Because the possibility of a mangled and injured foot is a small price compared to the certain pain of trying to dance in heels. And there is simply nothing to be done if you suddenly need to run. No matter how you try to use them, high heels are anti-shoes.
And protection? Sure, heels will still allow you to walk across sharp objects without slicing your foot, but they subject the wearer to so many other health risks, you may as well use a rusty chainsaw as a back scratcher. Yeah, the itch is gone, but at what cost?
I should have known! Sometimes I just bite off more than I can chew. It’s that damned hope…but I’m getting ahead of myself.
For those of you still unaware, John Zande has just put out a new book. Further, in an unimaginable act of generosity, he has been gracious enough to share some of the basic groundwork concerning his case for an omnimalevolent creator in a few recent posts over at The Superstitious Naked Ape. Briefly, all the suffering in the universe points to a creator that is all knowing, all powerful, and all malevolent. It is a surprisingly polished theology, surpassing all others before it in terms coherency and elegance.
Reading through these delicious teaser-trailer posts, an idea arose that I may have uncovered a fatal flaw in Zande’s otherwise brilliant reasoning. It came to me while I was reading through his latest post, “Before there was Light: A Functional Proof for the Omnimalevolent Creator“. Even before I finished reading the post, I had named this flaw ‘The Problem of Good’. I even had clear cut example to demonstrate it: Me. Read the rest of this entry »
Why are drugs still illegal? I wrote a while ago about the success of Portugal, where all drugs were legalized, and the money previously used to enforce drug laws were instead used to fund social programs to help those with drug problems. Not only was Portugal’s drug abuse problem significantly reduced, but HIV and crime rates plummeted as well. It has been almost 15 years since Portugal started their non-prohibition experiment, with revolutionary results, and yet other countries still refuse to let go of their self-defeating War on Drugs.
I have recently read a fantastic interview with Johann Hari, on Sam Harris’ blog. Hari is a highly experienced and accredited journalist who has travelled the globe researching and writing a book on the War on Drugs, its history, and it’s effects on societies. While a good portion of the interview elaborated many of the points I was already familiar with, there was a massive amount of information that I had no previous notion of. For instance, while it is quite apparent that racism plays a big role in drugs issues today, I had no idea that racism played such a huge part in the War on Drugs’ inception. There are further insights that extend far beyond drug addiction as well. Hari also focuses quite a bit on individual stories, bringing a painfully absent human element to the discussion. It certainly provides a lot to think about. Here are a few excerpts, but I highly recommend reading the entire interview.
“Harry Anslinger was probably the most influential person that no one’s ever heard of. He took over the Department of Prohibition just as alcohol prohibition was ending … he was driven by two intense hatreds: One was a hatred of addicts, and the other was a hatred of African Americans…He was regarded as an extreme racist by the racists of the 1930s. This is a guy who used the “N” word in official memos so often that his own senator said he should have to resign.”
“But if you had said to me four years ago, “What causes, say, heroin addiction?” I would have looked at you as if you were a bit simpleminded, and I would have said, “Heroin causes heroin addiction.”
For 100 years we’ve been told a story about addiction that’s just become part of our common sense. It’s obvious to us. We think that if you, I, and the first 20 people to read this on your site all used heroin together for 20 days, on day 21 we would be heroin addicts, because there are chemical hooks in heroin that our bodies would start to physically need, and that’s what addiction is.
The first thing that alerted me to what’s not right about this story is when I learned that if you step out onto the street and are hit by a car and break your hip, you’ll be taken to a hospital where it’s quite likely that you’ll be given a lot of diamorphine. Diamorphine is heroin. It’s much more potent than what you get on the street, because it’s medically pure, not f***ed up by dealers. You’ll be given that diamorphine for quite a long period of time. Anywhere in the developed world, people near you are being giving loads of heroin in hospitals now.
If what we think about addiction is right, what will happen? Some of those people will leave the hospital as heroin addicts. That doesn’t happen.”
“You and I have probably got enough money in the bank that we could spend the next year drinking vodka and never stop. We could just be drunk all the time. But we don’t. And the reason we don’t is not because someone’s stopping us but because we want to be present in our lives. We’ve got relationships. We’ve got friends. We’ve got people we love. We’ve got books we want to read. We’ve got books we want to write. We’ve got things we want to do. Most of addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life.
And by the way, that’s true not just of drug addiction. If you’ve ever known a gambling addict, you see that the pleasure he’s getting is not the pleasure of the specific bet. It’s the pleasure of not being present in his own life. It’s the pleasure of being taken out of himself, even to what I regard as a very squalid and depressing world. It’s the same with sex addiction. There’s a continuity between drug addictions and other addictions that I think tells you something fundamental.”
“We need to create a society where people are less isolated and distressed. There are places in the world where that exists: Addiction is very low in Sweden, because it’s a very connected society with very low levels of insecurity. We can learn from that.”
The War on Drugs is society shooting itself in the foot. The U.S has escalated the war to shooting itself in the kneecaps and Canada is looking to follow suit. We need to stop this before we end up aiming even higher.
‘Nuff said.
The following post has a higher than usual amount of profanity (for DWR, anyway). You have been warned.
Eating right is hard. Eating horribly wrong is so very easy. Are we all doomed to clogged arteries, pickled livers, and malnourished obese children? No! Thug Kitchen is here to save us all! What started as an awesome blog is now a cookbook with it’s own trailer!
What makes Thug Kitchen so special? There are lots of health cook books out there, but you may have noticed a slightly unusual tone in the trailer. From the Thug Kitchen FAQ section:
[Thug Kitchen] is here to help your narrow dietary mind explore some goddamn options so that you can look and feel like a fucking champ. We hope readers reconsider what kind of behaviors they attribute to people who try to eat healthy. Everyone deserves to feel a part of our push toward a healthier diet, not just people with disposable incomes who speak a certain way. So we’re here to help cut through the bullshit. Promoting accessibility and community are important as fuck here at Thug Kitchen. We’ve got a big table and everyone is welcome to it.
Busting up stereotypes, promoting a healthier society, inclusion of people at any income level, a healthy dose of humour, fantastic photography, and delicious food, there is so much here to love. I look forward to learning more fantastic things from Thug Kitchen and I can’t thank them enough for what they do.
So now you’ve learned how to eat like you give a fuck. You’re a healthier you and a goddamn champ. You can’t wait to make more of this tasty, cheap, good-for-you food. But part of you figures you deserve a totally bad-for-you reward for all this progress. You’re damn right you do.
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