I have a hard time even writing about the news from Tibet. To many people in the US it’s some faraway place which is the pet project of a few effete actors. It is way more than that. It is unique in the world, but not because it’s beautiful. Most of the planet is beautiful. It’s culturally extraordinary, but that’s not unique either. Tibet has become a test for the world because of who the rest of the world is.

I’ll begin at the beginning. My own interest in Tibet began years ago. I majored in ethnobotany as an undergrad. (Yes, I know. Weird. It was known as a “Special Concentration.”) My senior thesis was on the Tibetan pharmacopoeia, and I chose that country because it’s medicines and practitioners had a legendary reputation in Asia. That’s saying something, considering that the competition is China and Indian Ayurveda. And yet, unlike its huge neighbors, very little was known about which plants were actually used. I set off to identify as many as I could. Read more »

I have a boring bathroom with not much in it except towels and soap and that kind of thing. But there are inevitably times when you’re just sitting in a bathroom without much to do. So I started reading the package on the toilet paper (“6 BIG rolls!”) that I hadn’t put away yet. (I have no excuse. It was sensory deprivation.)

And this is what I saw in the fine print on the back.

Made under one or more U. S. patents: 5,114,771; 5,143,776; 5,240,562; 5,274,930; 5,328.565; 5,581,906; 5,584,126; 5,584,128; 5,671,897; 5,679,222; 5,728,268; 5,827,384; 5,846,380; 5,855,738; 5,865,396; 5,865,950; 5,942,085; 5,944,945; 5,980,691; 6,036,139; 6,048,938; 6,106,670; 6,126,784; 6,149,769; 6,162,329; 6,187,138; 6,207,734; 6,402,013; 6,464,831; 6,547,928; 6,551,453; 6,572,722; 6,579,416; 6,607,637; 6,755,939; 6,797,117; 6,821,386; 6,845,282; 6,948,378; 7,035,706.

Forty patents on TOILET PAPER?

I think it’s time to admit that current concepts of Intellectual Property are broken beyond human help. It’s high time to flush the whole thing away.

Crossposted to Shakesville

Technorati tags: Intellectual Property, patent, trolls.

It goes without saying (but I’m saying it anyway) that killing thousands of people is terrible. On the scale of the thousands who die daily all over the world, the main difference in 9/11/2001 was the cost of the real estate destroyed.

The other main difference is that most US citizens never thought it could happen here. Now they have to think about it.

Lessing has done nothing but point out that others have been thinking about it all their lives. They’ve lived — or live — with the terror of bombs or kneecapping or lingering deaths down dark alleys every day of their lives.

Lessing has pointed out that the US is not special.

Technorati tags: Lessing, 9/11, terrorism, exceptionalism, politics, current affairs

The following excerpt is from the US Government Peace Corps Manual for volunteers working in the Amazon Jungle (about 20 years ago, I think, when volunteers were a tough lot). It details what to do if an anaconda attacks you.

“Related to the boa constrictor, the anaconda is the largest snake species in the world. It grows to thirty-five feet in length and weighs 300 to 400 pounds.

• 1. If you are attacked by an anaconda, do not run. The snake is faster than you are.
• 2. Lie flat on the ground. Put your arms tight against your sides, your legs tight against one another.
• 3. Tuck your chin in.
• 4. The snake will begin to nudge and climb over your body.
• 5. Do not panic.
• 6. After the snake has examined you, it will begin to swallow you from the feet end – always from the feet end. Permit the snake to swallow your feet and ankles. Do not panic!
• 7. The snake will now begin to suck your legs into its body. You must lie perfectly still. This will take a long time.
• 8. When the snake has reached your knees slowly and with as little movement as possible, reach down, take your knife and very gently slide it into the side of the snake’s mouth between the edge of its mouth and your leg, then suddenly rip upwards, severing the snake’s head.
• 9. Be sure you have your knife.
• 10. Be sure your knife is sharp.”

I came across this great story on Ars Technica.

Trained rats sniff out unexploded mines. They’re smart, calm, and light enough not to set the horrible things off. And cheap, compared to the $25,000 invested in a trained dog. A Belgian outfit called Apopo came up with the idea and has been training the rats, a special, six-pound, African species. It takes about a year, and one in four “graduates.”

Thousands of children and farmers would not lose legs, hands, eyes, or their lives if these animals could be deployed everywhere they’re needed.

Oh, and did I mention that they’re seriously cute?

Not only would lives be saved, hundreds of square miles of farmland could be returned to production if the explosives were cleared.

The rats can be trained for any work that requires a sensitive nose, such as TB scanning, as well as other diseases. Imagine it. Each health worker with her or his own little pet carrier.

The hardest part, I gather, has been getting people to fund work with rats.

Look, I try not to blog about stuff that’s silly and insignificant. Honest, I do. But I have to share a major “Aha!” moment with you.

Way back in the 1970s, Republicans fought like demons against the Amendment for equal rights for both genders. It seems like an obvious Mom and apple pie issue. Like being against war and poverty.

But the Republicans couldn’t stand it. Their big issue? It would lead to unisex toilets! That would be the worst thing in the world.

Even more amazing was how many people agreed with them.

But now, suddenly, it all makes sense.

First link not completely work safe….

Technorati tags: Craig, Allen, Republican, hypocrisy

There’s way more out there than a procrastinator like me can write good posts about. So, when the spirit moves me, I’ll post a few links.

IBM researchers demonstrate the feasibility of storing data on a single atom. (Original sources here and here. Another, slightly more detailed, popular article here.) The storage densities are vast. Somebody pointed out you could put all of YouTube on one small chip, or thereabouts. I’m sure the advertising industry will figure out a way to fill it all with crap by tomorrow.

Possible vaccine against multiple sclerosis. This is over two weeks old by now, but, well, that’s how it goes. The vaccine consists of special parts of the myelin protein, the one which the immune system attacks in multiple sclerosis. DNA engineering was used to get just the part that tends to calm the immune system down. Early results look promising.

Engineered cells in the brain dissolve amyloid plaques in mice. Amyloid plaques are the immediate cause of brain degeneration in Alzheimer’s, so this is exciting news. Mice have rather different brains than people (well, most people), so it remains to be seen how well this scales up. The method was to take fibroblast cells from the skin of the mice, introduce the gene for an amyloid-destroying enzyme, and then implant the engineered cells into the brains of the mice where they proceeded to secrete enyme and destroy plaques.

And, finally, a crochet project. You too can represent Lorenz equations in your living room.

Lorenz manifold model crocheted by Hinke Ozinga and Bernd Krauskopf, Bristol University

Bishop Muskens … told Dutch television on Monday that God did not mind what he was named and that in Indonesia, where Muskens spent eight years, priests used the word “Allah” while celebrating Mass. … “What does God care what we call him? It is our problem.”

(via memeorandum, reported in WaPo [2015: link broken] and MSNBC)(2015: also e.g. in Dutch press.)

Unlike some of the people who think they have a direct line to God, if this Bishop claimed it, I might believe him.

What a great way to remind everyone that there is only one God. (Right? I mean, that’s a central tenet, isn’t it?) In which case, some reciprocity in naming is an excellent way to put that front and center in all our minds.

And a great way of reminding everyone how far we’ve slipped from really believing that.

I’m so relieved. “Wall Street bonuses safe from volatility” MarketWatch tells us.

Compensation will be hit by firm-wide financial losses from loan-related fees and write offs. Those losses will be offset by the seven- to eight-month build up of the bonus pool

So nice to know they’ve been thinking ahead, at least in this case.

Bankers also can expect to see more options in compensation packages.

The poor diddums. (At least, I assume this isn’t as nice as a few million in plain cash.)

“The growing divergence in incentive pool increases and compensation levels between major firms and broader comparators continues.”

Translation: Executives’ bonuses and their actual performance in the market (“broader comparators”) have less and less to do with each other.

[A series of the biggest brokerage firms] have set aside more than 45% of revenue for compensation and benefits

No comment.

Any species that is capable of this there’s hope for.

From the report (update: link invalid, but Seattle Times has the same report) (via Cartalk):

Last weekend, Kent Couch settled down in his lawn chair with some snacks — and a parachute. Attached to his lawn chair were 105 large helium balloons.

Destination: Idaho.

With instruments to measure his altitude and speed, a global positioning system device in his pocket, and about four plastic bags holding five gallons of water each to act as ballast — he could turn a spigot, release water and rise — Couch headed into the Oregon sky.

Nearly nine hours later, the 47-year-old gas station owner came back to earth in a farmer’s field near Union, short of Idaho but about 193 miles from home.

The fighters who do most of the dying in war don’t get special graves. Those most wounded don’t get special hospitals. They don’t get invited to the White House, or to any other Big House. They don’t get armor. They don’t get guns. They get to walk through the soldiers who have all that without anything except courage so huge, we can’t even see it.

Look at this graph from the BBC, and see if anything strikes you about it.

I know. It’s still not Friday. That’s just the way it is.

I’m feeling bellicose. Having a Fourth Branch of Government will do that to you. So here’s to fighting hummingbirds. They do it right. Take no prisoners.

Via Carolyn Kay at Make Them Accountable comes this brilliant article by David Podvin: Always the lesser priority.

The cynical calculations of political movements… the burning ambition of leaders…the multiculturalism that emphasizes respecting misogynistic societies over defending females. From the liberal perspective, there is an extended litany of priorities more important than women’s rights. And for conservatives, every priority is more important.

Even feminist activists have a higher priority than advocating the rights of women. Increasingly, feminists have argued that women share an immutable common cause with “people of color”. That multicultural convolution explains the vulgar silence on the Left when Third World females are being tortured and murdered.

And, I might add, there is a peculiar blindness to First World crimes too. Somewhere between one in ten and one in six women between the ages of 15 and 40 are raped every year. Every goddamn year. This is a holocaust of sexual torture. It scars people for life. The fact that they find the strength to carry on and even heal does not make it less of a crime. The fact that I even feel the need to explain that, tells you everything you need to know about how low a priority these atrocities are.

So where is the outrage? And where is the pushback?

Nowhere, mon frère. There has long been an all-out war pitting a multicultural coalition of misogynists against women, but only one side has been fighting. Until that battle is joined the savagery visited upon females will not end. Feeble Feminism must be replaced by Kick Ass Feminism. The time has come to stop turning the other cheek and start turning the cheeks of the reprobates.

That vigilance begins where all vigilance begins… at home.

…

The endless assault upon females constitutes a crime against every person who values women. Integrity demands that the criminals be vanquished, but most people – even most good people – are just too busy worrying about higher priorities.

There can be no higher priority. At stake is the liberty of more than half the human population.

It’s what I’ve been trying to say in Are Women Human?, Lipstick is not liberation, The Cure for terrorism? Islamic law for women, Iran, yellow stars, and dress codes, as well as here, here, and here, and practically everywhere throughout this whole damn blog. It feels like water in the desert to find someone who gets it.

The big issue is supposed to be that women are attractive to men, which means there are only two possible alternatives. Women have to be kept in a box (or tent, according to taste) so the poor men aren’t driven to distraction, or women can be distracting and men have to deal with it.

Some man with a very limited little mind came up with that. Those are not our only choices. They don’t begin to cover the spectrum of possibilities. Half of humanity, for instance, is not driven to distraction by women, whether boxed or not. For women, there are issues of being pleased as well as pleasing, and that doesn’t even seem to be on the map for the limited little man.

And then, how about another whole range of choices? Imagine a world where everyone had a good sex life. A world where men didn’t have to come howling out of the woodwork whenever anyone made a noise like a vagina. One where women could express an interest in sex without being trampled. There’d be dozsens of choices then, not just two invented by some guy starving in a basement.

What brought on this rant was an article about the new, sexy music videos appearing in the Arab world.

Habib recalls how one of her early videos helped shoot her to superstardom.

“The video Akhasmak Ah was basically shot in a cafe in Beirut, and the woman was seen as a power figure in the video.

“She was dancing on the table and it was a room full of men and the men were just at her feet. And she was just commanding them. So in some ways it was seen as showing a woman as an object and in other ways it was seen as a woman being empowered.”

Many of the music clips – like those in the West – are selling sex in a way that is new to the Middle East.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I hardly know where to start, the whole world view is so pathetic. (If only it were limited to Arabs, but the BBC reporter himself obviously thinks in those terms too.)

Let’s just start with the whole sex-as-control aspect. Sex can’t be a tool of control if you want it. Then you’d have nothing to withhold and nothing to bargain with. So the first step is to be so out of touch with yourself, so unaware of your own desires, so castrated that you can dole out sex as currency. That is not empowerment. That’s being so thoroughly crippled, your only jollies are hitting people with your crutches.

Depriving a woman of her own life until she’s nothing but a figment of somebody else’s imagination is not empowerment. Not even when she’s given the means to be a disturbing figment. Wearing lipstick is not liberation. She’s still living in somebody else’s world, even if she gets to do it in technicolor.

Empowerment is having your own life. It’s having enough control to be able to choose which life you want. It’s having enough control over your own fate to be able to get what you want sometimes, too.

Everything about the report, and the world view it echoes, rests on the same ignorance about empowerment, and, for that matter, sex. Take the comment about “selling sex.” It’s not sex that’s being sold, but only women’s sex. The implication being the same old myth: only men want sex, women don’t want it and all they do is use it.

Or, take the following statement.

Many Arab women say they find the videos demeaning.

The discussion has been about “sex,” not about sexless (although of course sexy) women. So the quote implies women find sex demeaning. Nobody wants humiliation (except perhaps sadomasochists who’ve bought into the idea that sex equals it). Hence, again, over and over, the message is the same. Women don’t want sex.

Outside the world of sex-deprived men, though, it doesn’t take much to see how asinine the videos are. It doesn’t take a spiritual giant to know that a body slave is not really a step up from a maid of all work. All it takes is any sense of self. Women who see where the videos put them are closer to empowerment than reporters who sound like they have no idea what the problem might be.

The really sad thing is that this pathetic ignorance is far from harmless. It’s worse than not liberating. It is the opposite. It takes everyone further and further away from ever being free of it.

The truth (which on good authority is said to set us free) is that women spend at least as much time as men thinking about sex. Sometimes it seems like they think about it even more. If you’re female, you have no trouble remembering examples. (If you’re male, probably not so much. See “trampling,” above, if you wonder why.)

It’s true that at this point women don’t always dream of exactly the same sort of satisfactions as men, for the simple reason that men have succeeded in making sex either frustrating or even unpleasant for so many women. But it’s not nature that made things that way. Any time we want to stop living inside narrow fantasies, there’s a whole world of other choices out there.

Left to themselves, women are crazy about men. Left to themselves, women are crazy about sex. If they didn’t have to fear frustration or worse, they’d be having a lot more sex, not less. As a result, men would be having a lot more sex too, if they stopped trying to have all of it.

*(Written from a straight perspective. As they say: write what you know.)

Technorati tags: politics, gender, sex, relationships, liberation

(I know. It’s not Friday. See bottom of sidebar….)

An Allen’s hummingbird, stretching after a nap.

I’ve bumped into a few articles reminiscing about how innocent life was prior to September 11, 2001. (Just the most recent example. There are others. Greg Mitchell, Editor & Publisher [link broken, 2014-01-25] [same gist e.g. here].)

I find them distasteful. No, it’s more than that. I find them offensive. Deeply offensive. Because what are they saying? That prior to 9/11/2001 we all lived in Eden?

I don’t think so. There were wrongful deaths before 9/11. Hundreds died in Kenya when the exact same group bombed the US embassy there. Thousands —hundreds of thousands— die, or worse, every day in violence committed against unarmed civilians. The purpose of the violence is to terrorize people into submission. The situation is exactly parallel, although the property damage is usually less when governments aren’t involved.

The only difference I can see is that the dead are not white, middle class US citizens.

Nobody should kill white, middle class US citizens. Neither should anyone kill anyone else.

Anyone who says everything was different before 9/11 is saying that all those other deaths, all the millions of them, mean nothing. All the hideous, infinite suffering of rape or amputated hands was irrelevant, is irrelevant, doesn’t matter.

What kind of a hollowed-out soul do you have, if you feel so little for your fellow human beings?

Technorati tags: 9/11, terrorism, exceptionalism, politics, current affairs