bluprnt 4 rvolution: Bizarre

The Horrid Myth of Cow Tipping

Did you know that it is impossible for you to actually tip a cow over? Well, physically, it's true, especially now that the physics have been worked out. Researchers in British Columbia figured it out a few years ago.

My old friend Stu used to always point out how conveinent it was that people always knew people who had tipped a cow, but had never seen it in person.
This is because
A) cows sleep lying down and
B) when you push them, they move, much like people.

Reflections on LSD (from the NYT)

Albert Hoffman, rounding a century, talks about the possible uses of his "problem child."

Great things:

He said any natural scientist who was not a mystic was not a real natural scientist.

"Outside is pure energy and colorless substance," he said. "All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings."

Also, did you know Aldous Huxley asked his wife for an injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of his fatal throat cancer? Amazing.

In a nutshell:

MR. HOFMANN studied chemistry and took a job with the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz Laboratories, because it had started a program to identify and synthesize the active compounds of medically important plants. He soon began work on the poisonous ergot fungus that grows in grains of rye. Midwives had used it for centuries to precipitate childbirths, but chemists had never succeeded in isolating the chemical that produced the pharmacological effect. Finally, chemists in the United States identified the active component as lysergic acid, and Mr. Hofmann began combining other molecules with the unstable chemical in search of pharmacologically useful compounds.

His work on ergot produced several important drugs, including a compound still in use to prevent hemorrhaging after childbirth. But it was the 25th compound that he synthesized, lysergic acid diethylamide, that was to have the greatest impact. When he first created it in 1938, the drug yielded no significant pharmacological results. But when his work on ergot was completed, he decided to go back to LSD-25, hoping that improved tests could detect the stimulating effect on the body's circulatory system that he had expected from it. It was as he was synthesizing the drug on a Friday afternoon in April 1943 that he first experienced the altered state of consciousness for which it became famous. "Immediately, I recognized it as the same experience I had had as a child," he said. "I didn't know what caused it, but I knew that it was important."

He felt, "the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960's and then demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed. He said LSD could be dangerous and called its distribution by Timothy Leary and others "a crime."

flavor makers

yet another article stolen from stayfree. it is flattery, you realize.

This is an interview with people who make artificial flavors. It will turn you away from Doritoes and chinese food forever.

Revelations:

Small doses of the stuff used to make pepper spray goes into BBQ sauce and is actually corosive.

"We'd have to mix our own food colorings. Food coloring came in two forms: powder and granulated. You had big warning labels on it saying "CONTAINS LEAD AND ARSENIC!" Supposedly it was a byproduct of burning coal, this fine ash."

" There was this flavor that was really brutal to work with--Butter 20--and there was this one ingredient, diacetyl, that, if you inhaled it, would make you vomit."

Black Metal Babes

This guy did an amazing photo project of Norwegian Black Metal Satan worshiping men. It's incredibly interesting. And sort of hot. Well, I guess they would be without all that blood....

It's funny how they're quite litterally as hardcore as humanly possible, but there's still an obvious dress code. The bullet belt, the spikey forearms, the upsidown cross. You've got to imagine they're like "Wow, Urrrgn's nails on his leather arm cuffs are rusted. That's killer! Satan would pleased if I had such arm cuffs. Oh yes, I'm coveting. Take THAT ten commandments!"

But there are interviews as well!

Remote Control Animals

Crazy article on humans out of control with frankensteined flies:

"The 18th-century Italian anatomist Luigi Galvani found that a spark could make a frog's leg kick. His experiments established that electricity was the hidden force nerves used to control the body. Now researchers at Yale have done Galvani one better. They can make fruit flies walk, leap or fly by shining a laser at the insects, setting off certain neurons inside them.

It's possible, at least in theory, that this method could someday be developed into a sort of animal remote control. "

WOAH! "Decapitated flies can survive a day or more without their heads, although they spend that time standing motionless. "

Yes, it's in the New York Times. So it must be true. Please be advised that Blueprnt for Revolution does not advocate the decapitation of flies to test this. Well, more than one fly, I guess.

"But when the flies were injected with ATP and then zapped with a laser for a fifth of a second, they jumped up and began flapping their wings in 60 to 80 percent of the trials.

"When we saw these headless bodies flying away, we were absolutely stunned," Dr. Miesenböck said" NO KIDDING! Mad scientists....

Laws of shopping

This guy actually used a legitimate social anthropology degree to figure out human behavior while shopping. Sort of evil but totally interesting:

* If a woman is brushed on the behind while examing something, she will bolt from the store.

* When people enter a store, the *always* do a quick turn to the right to see what's there. (I'm going to test this one)

* Human beings walk the way they drive, which is to say that Americans tend to keep to the right when they stroll down shopping-mall concourses or city sidewalks. This is why in a well-designed airport travellers drifting toward their gate will always find the fast-food restaurants on their left and the gift shops on their right: people will readily cross a lane of pedestrian traffic to satisfy their hunger but rarely to make an impulse buy of a T-shirt or a magazine.

* The human downshift period to be anywhere from twelve to twenty-five feet, so if you own a store, he says, you never want to be next door to a bank: potential shoppers speed up when they walk past a bank (since there's nothing to look at), and by the time they slow down they've walked right past your business.

* The downshift factor also means that when potential shoppers enter a store it's going to take them from five to fifteen paces to adjust to the light and refocus and gear down from walking speed to shopping speed.

* People increasingly want to touch clothes when they look at them. This is why Banana Republic and Gap have their clothes on tables more and more. They have a manaquin with the "look" then a table for "petting."

* The chances that a shopper will buy something is directly related to the amount of time they spend shopping. Supermarkets will often put dairy products on one side, meat at the back, and fresh produce on the other side, so that the typical shopper can't just do a drive-by but has to make an entire circuit of the store.

* Generally, dads are not as good as moms at saying no.

* Men tend to be more impulse-driven than women in grocery stores. They tend to shop less often with a list. They tend to shop much less frequently with coupons, and they can be marching down the aisle and something will catch their eye and they will stop and buy it.

* Women don't get spooked navigating through apparel of the opposite sex, whereas men most assuredly do. Men like to feel comfortable that they will not buy women's clothes by mistake.

* Store put "destination items" in the back so you have to walk all the way through. That's where Gap keeps denim.

Where the boys aren't

This is terrifying. It's an article on how chemical pollutants are altering hormones so that embryos become females. This is actually a huge problem. My friend at school here is studying how estrogens in waste make insects and fish all female as well. The body only typically absorbs 10% of medications, and the rest gets flushed into the sewer system and out into the environment. People really need to start thinking about what they put in their toilets. These estrogens are also produced when you microwave plastic, and then they seep into your food. So only microwave glass, ok? The full article is in "more."

Where the boys aren't

Living with constant pollutants emanating from a dense concentration of chemical plants, a native band struggles to understand why women are giving birth to a disproportionate number of girls

By MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT
Saturday, July 31, 2004 - Page A3

SARNIA -- Over the past five years, the Aamjiwnaang First Nation on the outskirts of Sarnia has had nearly two girls born for every boy, an unusual run of female births.

Last year, it was nine boys to 19 girls. The year before it was 10 boys to 21 girls. And the year before that, only six boys to 15 girls. In the band's registry, baby girls began dominating around 1993, but the trend to female births has become most pronounced in recent years.

After a decade of a girl-baby boom, boys often complain of not having friends nearby to play with, and it's never a problem to fill a girls sports team.

But the long string of female births is starting to cause deep unease. Many women have also reported multiple miscarriages, and in local elementary schools, a large number of children have been identified as having developmental delays.

"We're in almost a period of denial right now. This can't be. There are too many things wrong, it can't be true," Darren Henry, a band member, says.

His wife, Kim Henry, who works as a native counsellor at one of the schools, fears that living so close to many chemical plants is affecting the reserve's children. "Are our kids going through all of this because of all the chemicals here and the leaks that are happening?" she asked.

At the reserve, there usually isn't much doubt about what sex a child will be these days. Lisa Joseph has had four girls and one boy, all under 10.

"I have the one and only boy in my part of the family," she says.

Two of her sisters have had six girls between them and a third sister is now pregnant. "She is probably going to have a girl," Ms. Joseph says.

In Canada, and in most industrialized countries where sex ratios have been studied, the percentage of boys born has been in a slight, long-term decline for reasons that are not entirely clear. This trend began in Canada around the start of the 1970s.

Some researchers suspect that environmental pollutants, many of which act like female hormones, could be a factor. Several chemicals, including dioxin, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) and hexachlorobenzene, a chemical used in rubber manufacturing, have been associated with excess female births.

Samples taken from around a creek that winds through the reserve have been found to be contaminated with both PCBs and hexachlorobenzene, among other chemicals.

"There is certainly growing evidence that environmental chemicals, even at fairly low levels, can alter sex ratios," says Shanna Swan, a professor in the department of family and community medicine at the University of Missouri-Columbia, who has conducted research linking poor sperm quality to pesticide exposure.

Fertility drugs, such as clomiphene citrate, also lead to more girls being born.

The normal state of affairs in the human sex ratio has been for a slight surfeit of males, with about 106 born for every 100 females. At the time of conception, the ratio is even more dramatic, with about 120 males for every 100 females.

That more boys generally are conceived and born is thought to be the way humans evolved to compensate for the higher fragility of male fetuses and the higher mortality rates among males once they are born.

"It's a feedback mechanism that protects against excess male attrition," says John Jarrell, a gynecologist at the University of Calgary, who helped compile the study showing the decline in the ratio of male births in Canada.

At Aamjiwnaang, the expected situation -- slightly more male births than female -- prevailed among the band's approximately 1,500 members from 1984 to 1993.

It is not clear why the ratio suddenly tipped the other way.

Ada Lockridge, one of the band's councillors, suspects chemical exposure and says one major incident occurred around the time of the change. She shows visitors an article from the local paper about an evacuation that took place at the reserve in December of 1993, after a fire and chemical release at the nearby Suncor plant.

Sarnia's chemical valley has been built literally to the edge of the reserve, with a who's who of major companies often just across the road or around the corner. Besides Suncor Energy Inc., the neighbours include Imperial Oil Ltd., Shell Canada Ltd., Dupont Canada Inc., and Dow Chemical Canada Inc. Residents say they have watched workers protected by space suits go about their jobs, while they stand watching from the reserve.

The native community was granted its land at the southern edge of Sarnia in 1827. Much of the 14-square-kilometre reserve remains forested and is dotted with suburban-style homes, an incongruous sight in the middle of a sprawling industrial complex that has 20 per cent of Canada's refineries and produces about 40 per cent of its petrochemicals.

The reserve is also located just downriver from where the so-called Sarnia blob of dangerous chemicals was found on the bottom of the St. Clair River in the 1980s.

Residents complain there is almost always some sort of stink in the air. Sometimes it's like rotten turnips. Other times it's like rotting eggs. Each corner of the reserve has a slightly different stench.

Being hemmed in by big chemical complexes means any exposure to harmful compounds is likely to be far greater than in Sarnia itself, where most residents live kilometres away from the plants.

There are about 20 chemical plants or refineries in the area whose emissions are large enough that they must be reported to Environment Canada's national registry of pollution releases.

Earlier this year, Ontario sent its environmental SWAT team to Sarnia because of the high number of chemical spills. The St. Clair River near Sarnia is also one of the sites where federal environmental scientists have found male wildlife species with blurred sexual characteristics.

Finding explanations to the puzzling birth trend will require a major study comparing the reserve to other similar native communities that don't have such high chemical exposure, according to Dr. Jarrell.

On the ground in the reserve, Mr. Henry, who helped coach teams, says girl squads were easier to assemble. "I know it was a lot, lot easier to raise a team of girls to play sports than it was for boys. It just seemed like there was a whole lot of girls here."

Edna Cottrelle, who lives about 10 houses down from the Suncor plant, says her son Nodin, 11, finds the shortage of boys acute. "There are no boys his age along the river," she says. "He's always complaining."

Make your own porn

This is crazy! I found it by mistake. When I was looking for some tribal clothing company on google. It's pretty much for people to create thir own realistic pornography digitally. There's a whole program for various stockings. Lip colors. Shoes. The native guy is hilarious. The little girls are troublesome. Does that count as child pornography if you draw it yourself? I wonder. I think it's odd too how much the women look like they've had plastic surgery. I mean, plastic surgery used to be in the name of making women look like cartoon versions of themselves, now the cartoons look like what real fake women actually look like.
The fantasy became the reality, then that reality was idealized back to fantasy. How convienente...

BC bud

I am personally suprised that most of the pot smoked in the US is home grown. Although I have heard stories about Mexicans in California's public parks taking hostages when they hike too close to their outdoor growing operations... Here in BC, a friend just told me that export of marijuana has just surpassed logging to become the province's biggest export. But a lot of the pot smokers here are actually anti-legalization. They think the government will drive up the price. Plus the Hell's Angles, who manage a lot of the growing, will just go ballistic and take over. From what I've heard at least....

Canada Says Pot Use Surges as Martin Weighs Decriminalization
2004-07-21 10:08 (New York)

By Greg Quinn
July 21 (Bloomberg) -- Canadian marijuana and hashish use almost doubled from 1989 to 2002, and nearly a third of the population admits to trying cannabis at least once, the government said in its first major study of the drug's popularity since proposing to decriminalize possession.
Statistics Canada said 12 percent of the Canadians aged 15 and older it surveyed in 2002 said they had used cannabis at least once in the past year.

That's an increase from 6.5 percent in 1989 and 7.4 percent in 1994 and more than triple the United Nations estimate of worldwide pot usage.
Prime Minister Paul Martin, who has said he may have eaten brownies laced with hashish when he was younger, told reporters in June that he plans to revive a bill making possession of small amounts of pot no more serious that a parking infraction. In doing so, he risks the ire of the U.S. government and may jeopardize some of the $1.5 billion a day in commerce between the two countries, the world's largest trading partners.
``If we become known as a haven for the production of marijuana, I think it's only reasonable to assume that there will be controls put in place to prevent that type of activity from crossing the border,'' Chris McNeil, deputy chief of police in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and chairman of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police drug-abuse committee, said in a telephone interview Friday.
U.S. Ambassador to Canada Paul Cellucci has said decriminalizing pot possession may lead to delays at the border as officials frisk travelers and search vehicles for drugs. In the U.S., possession charges may lead to a minimum fine of $1,000 and a year in prison.

Border Delays

Canada and U.S. share the world's longest undefended border at 5,527 miles (8,893 kilometers), including the Alaska frontier. Already, ``clogged and inefficient border crossings'' cost Ontario, the engine for more than 40 percent of Canada's economy, C$5.25 billion ($4 billion) a year, the province's chamber of commerce found in a June study.
So far, Canada remains a minor source of marijuana available in the U.S., according to U.S. Customs figures: U.S. agents seized 406,200 kilograms (895,500 pounds) of pot inbound from Mexico last year, about 26 times more than from Canada. The U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center estimates that most of the cannabis available in the U.S. is domestically grown.
Still, exporting marijuana ``has become a thriving industry across Canada,'' a Royal Canadian Mounted Police report on the 2003 drug trade concluded. Traffickers use ``black market currency exchange'' and unscrupulous dealers to convert U.S. dollar receipts into Canadian dollars, the report said.
Earlier this year, Ontario police busted a marijuana operation north of Toronto where more than 30,000 plants were being grown in a defunct brewery.

European Tolerance

In much of Europe, where the UN estimates 4.9 percent of the population aged 15 and older uses pot, marijuana is widely tolerated. Amsterdam is known for its hash bars and Canada's government has cited lax possession laws in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Belgium and Luxembourg.
Jean Chretien, who retired as Canada's prime minister in December, first proposed decriminalization after a provincial court struck down possession penalties. The bill he introduced in Parliament, and which stalled last year, also proposed doubling the maximum penalty for growing more than 50 marijuana plants to 14 years in prison.
Chretien, 70, said at the time he might try marijuana if the law were changed.

Parliamentary Obstacles

Passing the bill may prove harder now that Martin's Liberal Party lost its governing majority in Canada's June 28 federal election. With only 135 of 308 seats in the House of Commons, the Liberals need the support of opposition legislators to pass laws, and the Conservative Party, with 99 seats, wants marijuana to remain illegal.
Martin, 65, would have to rely on backing from members of the Bloc Quebecois, which advocates the separation of French-speaking Quebec from Canada, or the socialist New Democratic Party. Pot usage in Quebec is higher than the national average, at 14 percent, according to StatsCan.
Parliament is due to reconvene Oct. 4.
The Fraser Institute, a research organization that advocates free markets, has studied the argument that marijuana should be sold and taxed, like alcohol. Simon Fraser University economics professor Stephen Easton wrote in a June report for the institute that pot taxation would raise C$2 billion a year for the
government.
``We are reliving the experience of alcohol prohibition of the early years of the last century,'' Easton wrote.
He estimated that a joint, or marijuana cigarette, costs C$1.50 to produce and sells for C$8.60.

--Editors: Schatzker.

Story illustration: to view the report on Statistics Canada's Web
site see {STCA }. For a list of stories and news releases on
Canadian health and drugs, see {CNP 09483480103 }. For
functions related to the Canadian government, type
{CNP 08971340103 }. To pause on a screen, press the space bar.
To resume tour, press GO.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Greg Quinn in Ottawa at (1) (613) 231-1069 or
gquinn1@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Erik Schatzker at (1) (416) 203-5726 or eschatzker@bloomberg.net.

Fuck for Forest

http://pub.tv2.no/nettavisen/english/article250240.ece

Excerpt: "The goal is to take over the entire commercial porn industry and transfer all the money to protection of the environment"

Yes, there are pictures.

Trannies in spandex

Transsexuals will be able to compete in Athens
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/olympics_2004/3496678.stm

Super soldiers

In an apparent tribute to Phillip K. Dick, The FDA has granted a company in the States the ability to implant chips in the heads of humans for the supposed purpose of helping paralyzed people.

But the head of the company used to work for DARPA, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, a military organization openly working on Human Assisted Neural Devices in the hopes of creating soldiers who can continue to fight in situations of extreem stress, possibly without food or sleep.

Here is a page that everyone should read. It's a list of all DARPA's current projects on humans.

Lord's Resistance Army

Modern cultish figureheads always fascinate me. I just learned of this man Joseph Kony, who runs the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda. The army is mostly made up of abducted children and the warriors are mostly child aged. He claims to want to run Uganda by the Ten Commandment plus another ten his prostitute cousin wrote such as, "Thou shall not have any kinds of charms or remains of small sticks in your pocket, including also the small piece used as a toothbrush." He is possessed by spirits who help him run his people.

They number in the thousands and the government has been forced to negotiate with them. So they're actually becoming a "legitimate" political party. Apparently more than 1 in 10 children in Northern Uganda have been abducted.

Also there's just one ethnic group who make up the LRA, the Acholi. AND the REASON, these people are so war prone, is because when "the British ruled the nation, they mandated that all soldiers had to be over 6 feet tall. Unlike the rest of Uganda's population, which are short and squat, the Acholi are tall and slim — and the Acholi parlayed their positions in the military into subjugating their peers."

Plus they're cannibals.
Fascinating.

An excerpt from the article below,

" According to U.N. documents, Kony's imagined spirits include a Sudanese female Chief of Operations; a Chinese Deputy Chief, Ing Chu, who commands an imaginary jeep battalion; an American named King Bruce, reportedly after martial arts film star Bruce Lee; another American named Jim Brickey, who fights with Kony's troops as long as they obey his commands, and the spirit of Juma Oris, the deceased interior minister under former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

Kony is a former altar boy and was part of an earlier Christian fundamentalist rebel movement, the Holy Spirit Movement, which was founded in 1986 by a former prostitute, Alice Lakwena. But that movement came to a quick end — no doubt because Lakwena promised her followers immunity from the bullets of government troops."

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/uganda021104.html