Swedish "Genital Song" goes viral, makes it past You Tube censors

Today I woke up to a dancing cartoon penis and vagina singing to me how awesome and elegant genitals are (even on old ladies). The song and accompanying video were written for a Swedish Children's program. Though the video is "graphic" it has so far made it past the you tube censors. Well here is one way to celebrate freedom of expression through cartoons in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris... Thanks to my friend Mindy Weisberger for originally sharing this video.

Invisible Bike Helmet!

The Invisible Bicycle Helmet | Fredrik Gertten from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

If you aren't quite ready to purchase one of these airbag helmets check out this comprehensive guide to buying am old-fashioned bike helmet that's right for you.

"Same Love"

Udder Debauchery: mixing milk, alchohol, and science

Open Access: what memes may come

Jason Silva takes us on a journey imagining future possibilities where radical openness reigns supreme. In the wake of this week's decision by the UK to mandate all research funded by the public be made open access this seems an apt celebration of speculation.

Spirit and Sam Harris

Sam Harris has suggested the secular humanist movement reclaim the word "spirit." Though you may think otherwise, this word can have a secular definition. A definition unencumbered by the assumption of an afterlife or any notion of the supernatural at all. Harris would like to untangle the word spirit from "its association with medieval superstition."

I comprehend this word in a literal sense. This is known as the Epicurean definition. Spirit translates from the Latin for breathe. This conceptual syntax can be seen in words like "inspire" "aspire" and "perspire." Indeed, an alternate definition of "inspiration" is to "breath in." 

With this in mind I see the spirit not as metaphorical but as real. 

All people "breathe" their spirit into the world by their interactions with people around them. Someone can breathe their spirit into the world by writing a thousand page tome on moral philosophy, or simply smiling at a child. 

In any case these spiritual expressions I see as the path to immortality (not by living in some imaginary afterlife) but by actually influencing the world of the living after we have died. Living on through the "extra soma"  though this phrase has more to do with living on through writing more so than actions.

Many different forces have formed my own view of the word "spirit" most notably my own Swedish grandmother. We called her "Zsage" though her name was Doris. She still has a daily influence on my life. Not that I speak with her on some astral plain but I'm reminded of her wisdom, in the garden, the kitchen, and  in the studio by all kinds of memory ques. 

I hope this explains what I think "spirit" means. I have written these thoughts before in different ways. Read additional thoughts here.   

Also, the following videos have influenced my view on this topic. The fist is a segment from an interview with the writer Margaret Atwood, and second a speech by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Goodwin's speech is particularly poignant in explaining Abraham Lincoln's Epicurean perspective on the afterlife. Famed professor of animal sciences Temple Grandin speaks of the "extra soma" in the last chapter of her famous "thinking in pictures" book as well.

Read Sam Harris' essay "in defense of 'spiritual'" here.

Swedish Midsummer: VIDEO guide

John Robinson - Tiny Ghosts

On the Origin of Beauty

Philosopher Denis Dutton provides a Darwinian explanation of human aesthetics. As I watched I felt the chills of prehistory run up my spine. This forces a question that (in my mind) has a hard-to-swallow answer - Do we have the freedom in to decide what is beautiful?

Four Loko Banned... I see why.

The Food and Drug Administration is preparing to ban alcoholic energy drinks, the biggest brand name being "Four Loko." Think Monster infused with malt liquor.  The "beverage" is manufactured by Phusion Projects LLC of Chicago, Illinois. The company has already pledged to remove the caffeine from their recipe. 

After I saw "The Social Network" the first weekend it came to Fort Collins I had a thought - if I want to know what the mainstream headlines  will be in a month or two I should make a point to visit the Harvard Crimson and the Cornell Daily Sun websites on a regular basis. I remember being a big fan of the Cornell Daily Sun the summer of 2004 when I was a bum and lived in Ithaca, NY in a house on College Avenue with seven women. I was indeed one of the "heathens on the hill" though I do not have the student loans to show for it.   I just lived with them.  Those were some of the most stimulating days of my life. Serving as my introduction to Dr. Bronner's Castile soap, kombucha, birding,  and flip-cup. Ah flip-cup, a beloved game of beer and physics that many a college student harmlessly participates in but if you are still playing after college you might want to assess your state of alcohol consumption. You have a drinking problem when 20 drinks isn't enough, but one is too many. But, I digress

While the commute back to my beloved state school (SUNY Fredonia)  always looming, I made the most of my time on the shores of old Cayuga.   Those drives through New York's southern tier on route 86 were  beautifully bucolic all the way from Tompkins to Chautauqua county.

OK... long tangent. Anyway... Social Network, Four Loko, and me.  Here is the story.  I saw the Social Network, realized I needed to go the to the Cornell Daily Sun and Harvard Crimson websites  to see what's up and... lo and behold, the first article I read at the Cornell Daily Sun was all about the dangers of this crazy alcohol laden energy drink called - Four Loko. Again, ironic that I recently made the pilgrimage to Washington, DC to attend the "Rally to Restore Sanity"  with Four Loko on my mind.  Here is the article I'm talking about. And an earlier more entertaining piece I found simply titled "The Legend of the Loko."

Today I type in  W W W . C N N . C O M  and what is the primary story...???  FDA bans the Tuarine and Guarine alcohol drink "Four Loko."

My prediction was dead right!!! 

So what do I do? I go to the local liquor store and try to get my hands on this ephemeral beverage. As it is about to disappear as currently concocted.  My first attempt was fruitless... Aggie liquor  said their boss refused to re-order that "trash" and they did want that "stuff" in their town. Hahahaha.

So off to the College Liquor Depot I went; the closest geographically to my abode.

 

There they were, the whole rainbow of Four Lokos.  As I have two house-mates I choose three and purchased. @ $2.50 each I was quite impressed especially considering the subsequent effects.

Upon first cracking open the initial reaction was... DISGUST. I was drinking the orange blend and it tasted like straight vodka mixed with a crack-laden red-bull.  Caused my tongue muscles to retract in repulsion.  But "as a matter of principle" I decided I was going to conquer  this 23.5 oz can of shit!

So there I sat sipping this god awful brew watching Jeopardy with my braver housemate. At first I was texting so that accounted for me not paying attention. Eventually the category became plant biology which piqued my interest.  This WAS college jeopardy so it was semi-intellectual.  One plant question included a cross-sectional diagram of "fir's" needle. What is fir?    I was into this but as soon as they got into Shintoism, and Islam I lost interest and took to inspecting the ingredients label on the Blue Raspberry flavor I had traded my housemate for earlier. Blue Raspberry Four Loko is colored with blue # 1, in case you were wondering.   This was indeed gross. But as I kept drinking I experienced a different kind of drunkenness.  A state in which the veins of my forehead stuck out and I was verbally abusing my house mates for their lack of participation in this charade. I only drank one of these things and I was extremely inebriated. I finished the entire can only spilling a few drops and sharing a few with the more reticent (and perhaps more wise) housemate.  He reported that his one sip woke him up considerably.  Now after finishing one can of four loko I feel extremely energized and now we are ready head to the rec. center for some basketball.

Signing off, this is me live live-blogging once and only once after drinking an entire can of Four Loko... 

 

Why did I do this to myself  and my housemates?  One word - FREEDOM.

If I didn't the terrorists win. ;)

Reconsider

Reconsidercolumbusday.org  Being born in Western New York State I would like to take this day and honor the wisdom of the League of the Iroquois. In the midst of harvest season I take time to give thanks to the three sisters.

Why has "UNION" become a dirty word?

By Kristopher Hite

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me

...and on and on, as most people who attended grade-school anytime in the later half of the twentieth century probably know. This classic ballad of the American landscape was written by good old Woody Guthrie. But there is a song, most people probably do not know, that was written by this same brilliant American - the ballad of the Ludlow Massacre.

On April 20th, 1914 twenty men, women, and children were murdered in Ludlow, Colorado by the Colorado National Guard. The men in these families were part of the mine worker's union that were staging a labor strike. This struggle represents the roots of the American labor movement and unfortunately has been forgotten in recent years.



In his penetrating dissection of the recent financial meltdown and subsequent corporate power-grab Matt Taibbi makes a subtle point regarding unions and their political decline in recent decades. Taibbi describes how Bill Clinton's administration turned their back on unions simply because the Democrats were sick of loosing the fund-raising game during campaigns. Of course there has been a concerted effort by Republicans to undermine the philosophical concept of a union for the better part of the last century, but this relatively recent change in Democratic attitudes towards unions has further eroded any remaining traction unions held in the minds of the electorate.

Cornell University has an entire college dedicated to the study of industrial/labor relations. Much work here focuses on giving workers the tools they need to use leverage when undertaking collective bargaining. The college helps the research process of unions so they might identify weaknesses in corporations and exploit them in order to gain the basic rights they deserve - health care, decent pay, respect.

This is where, I think, there is a fundamental misunderstanding amongst the general public. What is the purpose of a union?

To guarantee basic rights - health care, decent pay, respect.

This is the reason I am writing about this on Tom Paine's Ghost.

People have been made to believe that unions are filled with fat lazy socialists who don't want to work. This is part of the distorting barrage of information that oozes from broadcast corporations such as the Sinclair Broadcast Group who have their tentacles wrapped around the visual cortices of the American Midwest. Some unions may have behaved improperly and over-stepped their bounds when considering the United Auto Workers Union and others. But this is no reason to disband the concept of unions altogether!

Again. The main purpose of a Union is to guarantee basic rights - health care, decent pay, respect.

Upon recommendation from a friend that attended the college of Industrial Labor Relations I began reading a book titled Global Unions. This book is the distillation of a conference held in February of 2006 regarding the past current and future role of unions on the international stage. Video of each talk given can be found here.

The main point made here, through historical perspectives and contemporary examples, is that in order for unions to be effective, from now on, they need to operate on the same scale as the multinational corporations they serve to balance.

While we approach the anniversary of the Ludlow massacre I feel obligated to breath onto the embers of understanding unions. It will be interesting to see how ideas about unions evolve in the recently bluing state of Colorado. This state has maintained an anti-union err up until very recent history. Traveling to Pueblo, CO in fall of 2008 I heard many first-hand accounts of scabs blocking the efficacy of a steel-workers strike at the Oregon Steel Mill there in the early 2000s.

On the birthday of Clarence Darrow I feel it appropriate to reignite an understanding and passion for core union precepts; basic rights - health care, decent pay, respect.

The Word "Spirit" Comes from the Latin word for "Breath"

Good Friday and God

As I walked through the plaza in the middle of campus this afternoon a young street preacher was speaking to a crowd about God and Jesus and the old "us and them" routine. He described what we in the crowd needed to do to attain salvation. How we needed to trust in Jesus so we could live forever in heaven.

When I asked him to describe the creation and tell me whether or not he believed God created the universe in 6 days some 6,000 years ago he got a little squeamish and said he didn't want to to talk about that but instead wanted to focus on discussing Jesus.

After having some discussion with others in the crowd about the semantics surrounding the trinity he got to talking about the holy spirit. I asked him to qualify and describe this human-like god and what "he" was like before the physical manifestation of Jesus. I asked several questions about what the holy spirit is. He had to come back to the same answer in each case: I don't know. The only answer he had a sure idea of was about God looking like a man but not having male genitalia.

I asked "does God have a penis?"

The young preacher replied flatly.

"No"

I had some more questions that were discussed with his ilk on the side. These were questions of what God's body looks like and is made of. If God does not need to eat then does he have no bacteria in his gut or teeth in his mouth? If God can be everywhere all at once does he have muscles and bones? The answer was always no, or I don't know. If the physical pieces of a man are stripped away and all the symbiotic relationships that exist between him and the bacteria within him removed then that body can not live. And these folks continued to say that if I went to heaven I would have no need for the bacteria in my gut.

Well I say that the struggle to sustain our bodies on this planet is what makes us human and our drive to pass on our genes and our values is also part of that. So what good is it to go to a place where you are missing all those traits and faculties that make life so entertaining?

When Galileo demonstrated that the earth was not located in the privileged location the church thought it should be he was branded a heretic. When Darwin suggested that humans had descended from "lower" forms of life he was committing the same sin as Galileo. Except this time it was a transgression against every man's ego. Darwin removed humanity from its special ranking among life forms.

Knowing the truth of how our bodies came to exist and house our minds is far more rewarding I would argue. When you sit and think of all the events that had to transpire in just the right way to give you the opportunity to live your life, you can appreciate it far more even if everything is not perfect. The atoms that make up your physical form were generated on the inside of a star billions of years ago. And every single one of your direct ancestors had the fortune of loving every other ancestor you have, even if only for a moment. And all those infinite moments combined to allow you to live and thrive on this intricately decorated blue ball.

As we study life more and more we realize that we are not so alone even in our own bodies. A human body is made of approximately 1 trillion cells, but the number of bacterial cells that live in and on each human can exceed ten times that number. Bonnie Bassler from Princeton University illustrates this well in the following TED talk.


As my father always said. "Never kick a horse ball for it may be your uncle."

It becomes more clear with age.

Inherit the Wind - The Monkey Trial on Film

I continue to be amazed by sites like Hulu!


The cinematography is carried out brilliantly in this film. The plot follows quite accurately the proceedings surrounding the famous Scopes trial of 1925 where John Scopes, a high school biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, was imprisoned for teaching the theory of evolution. He had violated the state mandate forbidding teachers from informing students of "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible."

Two titans of American history came to battle this case out. William Jennings Bryan and Clarance Darrow brought this case to the attention of the world through their arguments. The film you see above debuted in 1960 after it was adapted for screen from a Broadway play that premiered in 1955. The character names are changed but there is particular attention paid to the physical portrayal of the them, especially William Jennings Bryan.

Like other art of the time, such as Arthur Miller's the Crucible, this story was put on screen as a reaction the the McCarthy era. It has long been upheld as a work of art that lifted our nation from the plight of anti-intellectualism. The periodic nature of that anti-intellectual attitude in this country requires that we look back at the record of our recent history and remind ourselves that there is hope.

Malik Rahim - Black and Green

Former Black Panther - Malik Rahim - speaks softly.
His gentle words were delivered with a jolly smile punctuated by serious pauses to a group of quiet listeners at the Matter Book Store in Fort Collins, Colorado on April 2nd.

He talked about his experience fighting in Vietnam, his participation in the Black Panther movement, time served on death row, and his perpetual activism for environmental peace and justice. Born in Algiers, Louisiana, Malik witnessed first-hand the havoc wreaked by Hurricane Katrina and watched in horror as a whole segment of the US population was decimated by a lack of response on the part of the U.S. government.

He co-founded the relief group "Common Ground" that provided clean water and supplies to victims of the hurricane which later expanding to provide further assistance to those displaced by the disaster.

Mr. Rahim spoke with a twinkle in his eye that resides only in those with the best of intentions. He strove to emphasize the issues front and center in his mind, and those issues were clear. Clean air and clean water. He pointed out that with all the worry and talk about everything going wrong with the economy there are not enough people engaged in the conversation about what is going right. That the movement toward green energy and environmental sustainability should be in the forefront of world discussion. That no matter what political affiliation you have you and your offspring will perpetually need clean air and clean water. He urged that we as a nation move beyond partisan differences to a conversation where tolerance reigns and cooperation converges on these issues.

He also spoke about the status of Martin Luther King's dream; the perception and the reality of that dream. Mr. Rahim fears that having a black president merely represents the facade of the dream realized. He speculated that the dream would not be truly realized until "content of character" above all is used as the measure of elected officials, not the color of their skin. He gave a brief history lesson as well while telling the story of FDR and Upton Sinclair.

"A lot of people have been saying that Obama is the modern incarnation of FDR. Well I sure hope he is not."

At this point the crowd looked confused as their progressive hero from history was being questioned. Then he filled us in. In the 1934 gubernatorial race in California the Pulitzer prize winning author Upton Sinclair was running as a DEMOCRAT with the platform of ending poverty in California (EPIC). For purely political reasons Franklin D. Roosevelt traveled to California and campaigned for the REPUBLICAN rival Frank F. Merriam. Sinclair lost and the race went down in history as one of the most propaganda-filled elections of all time.

The point Mr. Rahim was making was this; by allowing a leader to become too heroic, the citizenry looses sight of a leader's motives and is unable to objectively judge their character. This is no way to have a functioning democracy. He followed by saying that "a weak people need a leader, a strong people need a representative."

"Mr. Obama doesn't have no magic wand, but we do. Obviously you all are awake because you are here tonight. Now go wake up others."
And that is why I share this with you.

The Second American Revolution

Why limit it to America. Why not begin the first Global Revolution?

The actor Bob Basso is no doubt filled with passion, though I feel his interpretation of Thomas Paine is misguided. If he had actually read the works of Paine he might have stumbled across these CORE ENLIGHTENMENT BELIEFS outlined in The Rights of Man. Basso's anti-immigrant slant on Paine's character is highly contrary to Paine's belief that THE STATE HAS A DUTY TO HELP THE NEEDIEST OF ITS PEOPLE.

For a man that once said "My country is the world and my religion is to do good" I find it hard to believe Paine would have agreed with all the points made here by Basso. In my mind the revolution Thomas Paine might align himself with in 2009 would be the movement for GLOBAL DEMOCRACY.

Basso's Barking rhetoric in the video above echos the Ron Paul supporters that rallied around the free market philosophy so ardently for the past two years. This form of arch libertarianism leaves out many other key aspects of the bill of rights that all Americans need to reacquaint themselves with. Basso also seems to be unhappy with President Obama. I wonder if he knows how much academic respect Obama has for Paine. Having quoted Thomas Paine in is inaugural address I think Obama might actually listen to the more enlightened aspects of this rant, especially the call for service and sacrifice!

DeBaptism

Thanks to our friends at onegoodmove for the heads up on this story

Global Currency = Global Democracy

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have rejected the proposal for a global currency by Chinese central bank chief Zhou Xiaochuan. However this idea is gaining global support.

This is a big idea with big implications for the emergence of a global democracy. Increased economic integration is the first step in earth's coming of age.

It is selfish and provincial to reject this proposal flat out. In an era where individual decisions affect everyone more and more it would serve us to contemplate the immortal words of Thomas Paine.

"My country is the world and my religion is to do good."

Sunday Celebration - Guerrilla Theater

Many of you have seen this viral video in which the acting troupe Improv Everywhere stages a large scale theatrical "display" at grand central station by coordinating a motion freeze for five minutes.

Recently a new group of Guerrillas have been spotted at central station in Antwerp, Belgium.