burn one down

This is nice and all, but the point of drug criminalization is not to decrease dangerous drug use or protect the sweet innocent children or whatever the fuck the idiots yap about.  It has been obvious for many years that prohibition is a miserable failure at those stated goals, ergo cogito, the stated goals aren't the real ones.  They're diversions, conjured for public consumption, in service of narrow sectors of interests, force-fed by a complicit media.  

A prominent story about how one nation's decriminalization of drugs led to decreased drug abuse across the board is only relevant in The Greatest And Best Nation On The Face Of Jesus Christ's Sweet Earth to the extent that it helps the unwashed masses (1) see through the charade and (2) fight against it.  In other words, it doesn't matter.  The Portuguese are just a bunch of Euro-fags.

things people without appendices do?

today has been a good recovery day.  i took a walk outside, and my bowels are getting closer to normal functioning*.  i'm going to eat a hamburger for dinner, and i might have a beer too.  it still hurts though if i do anything that uses ab muscles, which turns out to be just about every movement.

i've watched way too many movies and tv episodes over the last few days.  in the hospital i actually managed to read a lot, and finished chomsky's "Necessary Illusions."  but i've had trouble concentrating on reading here.  that will improve soon.   i've watched:

• entire season 3 of The Office, and the last 5 episodes of whatever this season is
  
• the 2 recent episodes of Prison Break, which apparently started back up again (guilty pleasure)
  
• several episodes of Life of Birds with Attenborough (always awesome)
  
• 3:10 to Yuma (pretty good for a western starring a brit and an aussie)
  
• So Goes the Nation (very limited value, and not in the way they intended)
  
• Bourne Ultimatum (always awesome)
• American Gangster (pretty good, but more boring than i expected)

on my walk i picked up 2 more documentaries from the library that i'll watch soon, and that will probably end the dvd binge:

• the smartest guys in the room (mark cuban's enron movie)
• not yet rated (some expose of the the movie ratings nazis)

i just noticed that i threw in some random capitalization of the movie titles, but not the last two.  i'm weird.

* - every once in a while it occurs to me that everything i write on this stupid blog could conceivably be available to read 50 years from now.  my grandkids could be reading this, seeing how grandpa's bowels were functioning back in 2009.  hopefully just as well as they are in 2059!

fuck the police

Shit like this happens every single day.  Agents of the state use violence against peaceful people who merely wish to assert their basic rights.  Obey or else.  What a fucking joke America is.

hiding in a spider hole

In reference to how the supreme court thinks its pretty much just fine for school officials to strip search little girls to make sure they don't have any WMDs tylenol hidden in their panties, I'd just like to second IOZ's point: public schools are prisons for kids.

Is there any imagined threat that doesn't justify a US Government invasion of some kind?

canadian medicine stole my appendix

monday night: trip to ER - appendicitis

tuesday night: appendectomy

wednesday afternoon: home

ouuuuuuuuch

I just watched the new X-Files movie on DVD.  Holy shit was that awful.

gangsters

Dennis Perrin, 13-April-2009:

Democrats love spilling blood, believing they can do it better and more efficiently than those evil, crazy tea-bagging Repubs. The Dems as Michael Corleone to the GOP's Sonny.

adspar, 25-June-2008:

Democrats are dirty mob lawyers; Republicans are the mob enforcers. In the power struggle to be the next don, people get to choose between the no-neck tough guy (McCain) or the smooth-talking debonair schmoozer (Obama).

Notes on Morality and Evolution: Intro

I TAed a Behavioral Ecology course this semester, and a couple weeks ago I gave a 45 minute presentation to the class. I was asked to present about my research, but since I didn't have any decent data from my experiment yet, I decided to just present on topic related to my research that is somewhat relevant to the course. I'm going to make a series of blog posts based on my presentation.

So, here you go.

Intro.

This picture was chosen by the course professor to be on the front page of the course website. It is a great choice because it is such a dramatic illustration of an animal behavior that seems puzzling but can be explained quite well. The course covers parental favoritism and sibling rivalry, and students learn that these phenomena are widespread in the animal kingdom and that there are piles of data showing how these behaviors are explained by evolutionary theories.

I think it is interesting that this picture should even seem so dramatic to us. After all, if this behavior is so common, and makes such good sense in light of well established scientific theory, why should it be so surprising to us?

I think that it is because of our moral sense that the image is so powerful. We feel bad for the little bird getting squashed by his mother. It seems unfair. And if we were to see a pictures of a human mother doing the equivalent to her child, we'd probably make a moral judgment about her.

So, this series of blog posts is about morality, specifically from an evolutionary perspective. Morality is a broad topic, and a difficult one to define, despite most of us feeling like we have a pretty clear understanding of what it is. I'm not going to attempt to thoroughly cover the subject; instead I'll be breaking morality down into components or looking at certain facets of morality. By components I mean things like I mentioned in regards to the baby bird: feelings of fairness, empathy, and moral judgment. A facet of morality to keep in mind is that our moral sense seems to push us to act in service to others, as opposed to our own "selfish" interests. Another is that moral rules and judgments often feel absolute, an observation that I'll expound upon in the next post.

I'll discuss 4 pieces of research in 3 future posts, that will look something like this:

1) Why did morality evolve?
A model of stability-dependent cooperation.

2) Phylogeny and the Origins of Fairness.
Fairness in monkeys?

3) How do we study morality in psychology labs?
i. Economic games in the lab: Dictator games with manipulation of information.
ii. Proximate factors: audience effects.

Stay tuned for the next installment.

conversations

say, adspar, what is that obama fellow up to these days?  you know, that guy who was going to change everything for the better?  the one who gives us hope?

he's been busy.

that's good.  hope and change are hard work.  what a great guy.  so clean and articulate!  so charismatic and intelligent.  so what is he doing?  lots of great and wonderful things i'm sure!

yeah, well he's been changing bush's war on terror by escalating the slaughter of civilians in pakistan.  you didn't even know we were killing pakistanis did you?  

aren't they supposed to be our allies?  

oh well, no matter.  i'm sure he has very good reasons.  just like he has good reasons to send his troops to shoot pregnant women and destroy farms and crops in afghanistan.  you should have seen how articulately he gave that order!

that sounds kind of bad actually.  but i probably just don't know enough about it.  i'm sure he has access to secret information that makes this more understandable.  we should just trust his judgment on this.  he's not bush after all!  remember all those criticisms of bush he intelligently articulated in his campaign?  surely those criticisms prove his heart is pure and good.  yes, definitely, we should just trust him.

yeah, remember how he criticized bush for kidnapping people off the street and locking them in cages in guantanamo without any ability to challenge their detention?  obama is hoping and changing this by locking them in cages in bagram instead!  that probably sounds like it contradicts his campaign rhetoric, but don't worry, i'm sure you'll figure out some way to excuse him for it.

i don't know... i'll try hard...

i think you owe him that much.  he's working very hard to make sure there are no investigations or prosecutions of the well-documented widespread use of torture by bush's henchman.  he's working hard to make sure he can torture too.  so you better work hard to excuse, rationalize, or ignore anything he does that you don't like.

adspar, you're really such a downer.  i just want to feel good about the world, and have some hope.  times are really tough, so i don't think that's too much to ask for.  but you have to go and ruin it for me.  i don't think i'm going to ask you about politics any more.

cause he's the LESSER

when i posted this, the format of this blog included images that compare BO to an ape.   there's a point to that, and it isn't a racist one.  

SAYS I.  and the foolPROOF is that dick and dubya also are apes.  some of my best friends!  so clearly i'm as squeeeeeeky-ass clean as a flowing white KKK sheet.

but racism is fun, and this blog is all about fun, so i'm guessing that it makes way more sense to just call me racist and move on.  so, yeah.  go forth, ye progressive non-neocon wariors and wage your (righteous) wars and (efficiently) smite thine enemies and labelest thine detractors "racists" and "rednecks" and "dinosaurs."  

cause you know what?  dinosaurs are fucking cool as shit.  for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory.  baba yetu.

this shit, as far as i recall, has always primarily been about two things: truth and fun.  it is clear to me now that one of these two things just isn't very important at all.

This is an amazing photo exhibit.