Scientific American: Large Study Finds No Link between Marijuana and Lung Cancer

I had read that a British study came to a similar conclusion but haven't been able to find a reference to that study in years so it was goo to read this today. Scientific American: Large Study Finds No Link between Marijuana and Lung Cancer

In defense of assasination

I'm glad Bob said it...(this page may chacne on June 1 '06 and if it doesn't have a brief passage about assassinating world leaders than read the text below - but I recommend checing out the site anyway...) Robert Anton Wilson Home Page


Just as a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day, even a Christian Fundamentalist gets a savvy notion every now and then. I think rev. Robertson had a good idea when he suggested replacing war with assassination in one case, on economic grounds. He merely didn’t carry the concept far enough.

I suggest that we should abolish war utterly and replace it entirely with selective assassination. Think about the savings this would mean, in this age when even our “little” wars cost billions of dollars a year, and rememer the cogent observation of the late Senator Dirkson: “A billion here, a billion there – pretty soon you’re talking about REAL Money.” We’ve already gotten our national debt so high that our posterity “unto the seventh generation” will never pay it off; do we really need to enslave the whole future to the international bankers?

On the moral side, killing a few dozen foreigners a year instead of a few hundred thousand should seem less messy, to say the least of it, especially when you consider the collatarel damage to our own side. How much blood and death do we need?

Reversing a sentimental error of the ‘60s, the new anti-war slogan should be MAKE ASSASSINATIONS, NOT WARS.

And, best of all, if this idea catches on internationally we can expect at least 50 contracts on George Bush the first week.

A surprisingly good movie...

I wrote the grafs below in a letter to a friend and thought it worth repeating. Something weird is going on with me this weekend. It must be because I've had such a shitty Memorial Day weekend; a friend came to visit but she was sick as a dog, left early, and now I'm sitting around the golf course for the rest of the weekend with, no car, othing to do, my thumb up my ass and the one-hitter in my teeth. I keep thinking about war and death. The post below this one, this post, the fact that I've also just rented Lord of War to watch tonight. I have pretty pix of a sunset and finally got those canoe pix I mentioend earlier off my phone and onto my laptop. I'll post those later and leave this theme of war behind...


I watched Jarheadas a nod to Memorial Day weekend. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. Not at all what I expected. I felt it was neither preachy or glorifying, neither pro or anti war or military. I saw it as a darkly humorous portrayal of the training of marines and the many things, some incredibly mundane, some terribly sad, that they are asked to do - as well as some insight on the many reasons as to why kids join the marines (my favorite, "I got lost on my way to college sir!"). There was a moment where afeter months of waiting in the Saudi Desert, they finally are deployed for action against Iraq, and I could feel the excitement and relief they must have felt - and the very fact that a film could, even momentarily, make me feel excited about going to kill, was impressive. I think the film accomplishes to some degree providing some ability for those who have not experienced the reality of war, some empathy for those who have. Not approval, but empathy, sorta', if not for the grace of god, there go I, kinda' shit.

And I thought it was just well directed and written too.

And hey, since they raised the enlistment age to 37 <actually, I just found out, it's been raised to 39> recently, maybe I'll watch this movie a few more times and join up before my birthday in August. Then my resume could read:

Journalist
Publisher
Editor
Advertising
Middle Management
Organic Farmer
Archaeologist
Bike Courier
Rock Musician
Event Producer
Cook (I told you I ran my own underground bar and one man restaurant right?) Activist
Baby sitter
Contractor (framing/painitng/sheet rock)
Soldier

Nah, I'd rather add "professor" instead of soldier. Everyone should read Edward M. Said's Culture & Imperialism, then, perhaps there'd be less war. And books are cheaper than bullets, bombs and aircraft carriers last I checked.

Wow, this is odd, I'm actually thinking about war on Memorial Day - I wonder how many people do? And I'm apparently stoned enough to continue writing down all my thoughts about it while convincing myself you give a shit.

Top veteran official joins pentacle debate - Yahoo! News

Oddly enough, I thought this debate had already been settled and that the pentacle had been added to the list of approved religious symbols for vets. But what confuses me is that there is an "approval" at all. I would think that if a vet wanted a symbol of a nose being picked, then, hey, s/he died for his/her country, give a soldier what s/he wants in death, dammit. Gotta' admit, I feel more protected when wearing a pentacle, and I stopped wearing one just before I came down here (belt buckle broke) and I ya’ know, things have been very tough since then. I concede that wearing such icons may simply offer a placebo effect, a psychological boost, a Samson effect, instilling confidence and motivation which can lead to healthier, better decisions than if one is unsure, insecure, what have you. But whether supernatural, or psychological, that particular symbol does bring me comfort and I think I will endeavor to wear one regularly again.
Top veteran official joins pentacle debate - Yahoo! News

The End Is Near

As I feared, depression and chaos have made it difficult to maintain this blog recently, but, I think I'm getting a handle on things, particularly because it's getting very close to the end of this job. As beautiful as the Everglades have been, as swank as the pad here has been, and as enriching as the work experience has been, I’m tired. The emotional toll of being quasi-homeless and on the road for some six months has been much heavier than expected. It’s not just the break-up, which has left me heartbroken no doubt, but there’s also a pervasive loneliness that surrounds work on the road. No doubt there are good people around me on this crew, but to be going through such emotionally upending times, the breakup, the upcoming move to Chicago, the trip to Italy .. and to be alone, to have no close friend to grab a drink with, to not be able to stop by my folks, to not even have Ashley to call now – all this has become exhausting.

The end is near and I am grateful for it.

I had planned on posting a few pictures of a rattler we saw in the field a few days ago, and, a possible several hundred year old canoe. But once again Verizon is fucking me in regards to getting pix off my phone and onto my laptop. As soon as I get this fixed, prob sometime over the holiday weekend, I will post – the canoe is intriguing and I’ll write more about that and the sometimes controversial aspects of interpretation within archaeology when the pix are freed from the phone

I have a few more posts/rants in mind too (like, why I think Artifical Intelligence won’t become a reality until digital copying becomes less perfect). So, I think that over the next week or so I’ll be blogging more regularly.

Just in case anyone actually reads this.

Google "immigration debate"

And you'll come up with some very interesting websites. I'm too busy at the moment to comment much on this but I am stunned as to how opposed so many people are to immigration, veen among the anthropologists I work with - very strange. I plan on wiritng more on this alter, as well as adding links to the dioatibe on the spiritual gene pool below. I should have time this weekend to do all this. No car, no girlfriend, nothing to do except hang out on the golf course.

The forest is beginning to turn green again indeed!

I took some really nice high-res photos of the forest I'm working in turning greener by the day, but Verizon disables the ability for its customers to upload some high res images from Motorola phones - this is the source of a lot of customer outrage, and I'm looking at fixes so that I can show you all some of these pix.

The Spiritual Gene Pool Or Why I’m None Too Happy With Organized Religion And Christianity In Particular.

Note: The following post will be revised serval times over the next day or two. I am still leanring how to fromat within blogspot and I have many links I want to add ot this page but have not yet had the time to include:

Spirituality, a belief in the afterlife, a cosmology of the universe’s creation and what happens after our personal demise, dreamworlds, heaven, gods, goddesses and the religions that describe their deeds and expectations of their created. There’s nary a culture in history or prehistory that we are aware of that did not have a supernatural belief system.

Sure there have been cultures that did not have a word for “god” or concept of a single all powerful creator. A paper here discusses a Mexican indigenous culture, the Huichol, that has no word for God. But even these cultures possessed a concept of the supernatural, in this case a nature based pantheon of deities and ritualistic sacrifice cult.

Obviously atheistic beliefs have existed in small minorities of populations, usually only in those cultures that have developed and/or have access to science and philosophy. But such belief systems are not inherently, in my opinion, non-spiritual. Both atheists and those of far more theistic beliefs are of the same ilk in many ways; the same questions burn in all of us, and even among atheists there are disagreements as to the best answers to these most base of questions regarding the origin of the universe and life, or the nature of consciousness. And this cosmological debate, whether atheists amongst themselves, or between any of the spiritual practices throughout history, provides the diverse characteristics of what I have oft considered to be a “Spiritual Gene Pool.”

I have come to believe that a spiritual gene pool works like a biological gene pool. In other words, increased diversity usually results in a healthier population.

Just as in an animal population a diversity of traits means more likelihood of survival in a changing environment (if you have no hairy elephants, then, when an ice age comes, you have no elephants at all, whereas some hairy and some hairless mean a greater chance for at least part of a species to survive regardless of the environment), I’ve come to believe that a diversity of spiritual practices allows the human population to better adapt to the rapidly changing moral issues that exist among us. With this in mind, I suggest that organized religions dilute the spiritual gene pool and leave us less and less adaptable to moral challenges in an ever more complex world with challenges and decisions that effect not only the individual but vast societies and across many cultures. Economic globalization, the proliferation of nuclear power, gender and sexual orientation issues, etc. all offer enormous shifts and complexity to the “moral environment” and the fact that a greater and greater percentage of the human population participate in fewer and fewer types of religions leaves us less adaptable to these ever increasing changes.

In particular the spread of Christianity, particularly from the old world to the new world over the last 500 years, as well as into Africa, has done more to dilute the spiritual gene pool than any other turn of events in recorded history. Consider that the Romans, as they expanded their empire over centuries, more often than not, allowed the cultures they conquered to continue practicing their religions. This lack of cosmological hegemony proved both useful in preventing constant rebellion by conquered peoples, as well as allowing a bidirectional influence of spiritual and cultural practiced. I think this may have allowed both the dominator, the Romans, and the dominated to continually evolve, rather than one set of spiritual genes being eliminated, and replaced with the dominators genes only. In effect, the Roman method of allowing local spiritual practices to perpetuate themselves and coexist with other practices (occasionally “interbreeding” as well) resulted in a more diverse, not less diverse spiritual gene pool. While I don’t claim, through this example, that as a result, Roman culture was inherently more moral than other cultures (for how can one measure “more” or “less” moral if one necessarily as a social scientist assumes a relative position on morality) it does beg the question, could this particular factor of Roman conquest been a major factor of at least Rome’s political success? In other words, were the Romans successful in dominating economically and militarily, so much of the world, at least in part, because for such a long time they created, knowingly or not, an extremely adaptable and diverse society that could face various crises better than homegenous cultures could?

I propose that a diversity of spiritual practices allows for a more adaptable society than a spiritually homogenous population does, and, by extension, that today’s world has a far less diverse collection of spiritual practices combined with a far more complex moral environment and as a result, we are less capable of solving these problems, that is, adapting to the new landscape.

In proposing such a hypothesis, I can think of at least a couple questions that I need to answer or at least address before even suggesting that the hypothesis could be tested through experimentation.

1. Couldn’t the spread of Christianity be considered a prime example of survival of the fittest? That is, if Christianity weren’t best adapted, how could it possibly come to dominate?
   a. One possible conclusion: My theory is bunk, and spiritual practices are not Darwinian and do not come to dominate a population according to similar laws as survival of the fittest.
   b. The Spread of Christianity is more akin to the spread of Dwarfism in a small population. In other words, Dogmatic Monotheism is some sort of recessive gene that usually only pops up once in a while but somehow, due to a set of specific circumstances became widespread in the current population. In Biological evolution, such a set of circumstances involves a small isolated population with a high number of fertile members possessing the recessive gene and then interbreeding resulting in a predominance of the recessive gene over time. This is difficult to apply conceptually to the whole population of the planet, unless we abandon the notion that humans are alone in the universe and instead we look at this planet as a small island in the vast population of the universe. Then indeed, a rapidly spreading but potentially maladaptable spiritual trait such a Dogmatic Monotheism centered around a specific deity could be considered a type of allopatric speciation, and over time a genetic drift of sorts is going to lead us to an extremely homogenous spiritual evolution
   i. Of course the problem with such a hypothesis is that it is untestable in that we have no alien population to compare ourselves against, or no opportunity to view, say, one part of the population that has become homogenous spiritually and another part which is far more diverse and witness how they adapt to similar moral challenges.
   ii. In the interest of playing Devil’s Advocate, it might be interesting to try to find a parallel. Maybe we could look at political schemes within democracies. For instance, the two-party system of the US, is nearly homogenous, with only two dominating political philosophies (whose differences are, arguably, minimal and abrely diverse, more akin to “what color of hair” rather than hairy vs. hairless) vs. the multi-party (diverse) parliaments of Europe which have to build consensuses between many often contradicting philosophies on various social issues in order to reach a majority decision. In Europe, the diversity and requisite consensus building results in very different approaches between the Europe and US on issues of taxation, the governing of property and natural resources and the funding of higher education and health care.
2. Is there really any way to test such a hypothesis? Can we, though a multidisciplinary approach, using the four fields of anthropology (archaeology, socio-cultural, linguistic and physical), history, philosophy, theology, and environmental and geological sciences, look at the different ways that different societies deal with similar problems and in any way define what a “moral” crises or conflict really is as well as hierarchically evaluate the success of various cultures facing such conflicts while determining to what affect if any, spiritual practices, and the diversity of them amongst various populations, played a role in these populations adapting to the conflicts?
   a. Are there examples throughout history of say widespread environmental shifts affecting a wide number of societies, where we can both accurately measure the success how well various cultures survived the shift as well as have access to information on the types of spiritual practices that existed among the various population affected?

Ultimately, what I wonder, is, if Christianity had not wiped out the many smaller, localized, clan based, and indigenous spiritual practices of pagan Europe, North and South American cosmologies, African pantheons, etc. what might the world look like today? For example:

1. What might the discourse on homosexuality look like? Many Native American tribes had a culturally accepted and oft revered third gender status for homosexuals. And the notion that “traditional” marriage exists is all but absurd given the near infinite ways people have “coupled” over the millennia and of the vast varied versions of culturally sanctioned mating – many of these traditions now all but lost.
2. Welfare and childcare: How many different clan based methods of child rearing have been all but rejected in the mainstream and legal landscapes of the Western modern world, while at the same time, particularly in poor inner city environments, extended clans, similar in many ways to egalitarian and indigenous social structures rarely found elsewhere in the first world today (cousins and brothers and aunts and uncles who are not always blood related but fulfill similar roles and are accepted as such) often evolve due to the necessity of mutual cooperation in order to face economic hardships as well as insure and improve the survival and rearing of children.

This question of a Spiritual Gene Pool is one that has dogged me for several years, and this essay offers a glimpse into the questions that I have developed, and more specifically, a preliminary outline on how one might go about answering some of these questions. While it will not be at the center of either my MA or PhD papers while I’m at Chicago, I have a hunch that the research questions I do develop there (more on those at a later date), will, in some part, be influenced by these questions and conversely my research at Chicago, may offer me some insight on how to better explore these questions. Perhaps someday, when grey(er) and semi-retired, I may come back to these questions as an eccentric professor and write a book or three bout these things, to be honest, the aforementioned pirate story is not just a story of a broken heart but of a man with this same burning question, a man, who takes his wealth and skills as a navigator and confronts the slave trade, the inquisition, and colonialism, for fear that the Church and Europe in the 16th century are wiping out people, cultures and traditions that are both irreplaceable and necessary for the ongoing health of humanity.

Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that I’m bored out of my mind on weekends down here at the golf course.

More news on the rain or lack thereof and the fires...

Saw this on CNN last night and thought it was a far more up to date description of just how dry things are here in Florida (but, like I said, the fountains are still on here and the golf course looks beautiful).

It finally rained today...and that made me think of revolution.

I've been working here for over two months now, here in Naples FL, and until today there has been rain on only 3 or 4 occasions, and all of it quite minimal. This is apparently one of the driest springs on record. As a result, there have been endless forest fires, including in the Picayune Strand Forest where I am working. Today I worked in an area that had burned only a few weeks ago. When the wind blew, it still smelled like a barbecue.






It looks like an alien landscape. Despite their trunks being burned severely – some of them so much that they are bound to blow over during hurricane season – the trees are all still alive, and sprouting green leaves. The underbrush was mostly burned away, and already new sprouts are coming up. And, as one walks through this burned forest, there are green oases, small wetlands and ponds that didn’t burn during the fire.




Some of these fires have been so large and damaging that they have made the national news, and in a way I feel bad. The whole crew down here wants the rain to hold off because A) we can't work on rain days B) with the rain comes the flooding of the forest we work in potentially ending our work sooner than we hope and C) No rain = no mosquitoes and, conversely, rain = mosquitoes. And, according to the guys on this year's crew who worked last year, we've all been lucky bastards that there hasn't been any bugs just yet. Apparently, by this time last year, one had to work wearing a mosquito net and all day long all one ever heard was the hum of bugs. Lunch was taken in the trucks to get out of the bugs for 30 minutes a day. So, while I am glad that the rain has held off, for all the above reasons, the drought down here was starting to get a little unnerving and I always am curious as to what the power of intenstion can create. All the reading I've done about "magic" always warns that before you ask the universe for anythng, consdier the repercussions. Now I'm not trying to say that my crew's wishes has led to Florida's drought, only that I've been forced to refelct on a very simple lesson about the environment that needs to be repeated: what's good for a few humans, is not always good for nature as a whole.

The local NPR station ran an interview today with folks from the state water department and they touched on several of interesting points about how much water is consumed just watering lawns – millions of gallons a day. There have been a number of lawn watering bans of various types in SW Florida, but no matter how many brown dry lawns one might see in front of houses, the golf courses are all still immaculate. The swimming pools here where I am living is always full, and the grass is always green around here, It’s a little unnerving. I don’t know if these types of businesses pay a special surcharges, tax, what have you for the right to use so much water to service so few people, but it reeks the type of short-sighted thinking that gives me grave concern about the future of the human race.

All of this water talk around here along with catching an HBO documentary on the environment last night, got me to thinking about two things regarding water shortages. The first is how much water it takes to produce meat. Several sources differ on just how much water it takes to raise cattle, ranging from 4000 to 12000 gallons of water to produce just one pound of beef. The number varies between whether you count just the water used by the steer for drinking (lower end) or also include all the water it takes a to produce all the grain that is also fed to the animal (high end). If there was one single argument to reduce meat consumption, I think the environmental one is the strongest.

But this also made me think of the movie Life and Debt (Netflix users can rent it). This documentary takes a scathing look at how the US, IMF and World Bank have encouraged Caribbean islands, in this film, Jamaica, to squander away natural resources, prime land, and the very labor of it’s people for short term gains that ultimately leak most of the profit out of the island. Hotel developers have been handed over prime coastal lands to develop resorts that hire locals for low wages while consuming massive amounts of natural resources. Much fo the land handed over had been prime fishing and living space for indigenous people. Furthermore, with fewer people now working farms and many people converted to a dollar economy from low wages supplied by the tourism industries, agriculture has all but stopped on the island and almost all the foods available to locals are foreign goods. I can’t do the movie justice, but water is big part of the problem. These islands have limited access to clean water being tropical islands and all, and the tourism industry both consumes massive amounts of water and produces far more waste than the island’s ecosystem can handle. I have to admit, before watching this movie I was never quite clear on what Bob Marley was singing about, after seeing this film, I can’t help but see him as a passionate revolutionary poet.

Check out this flick.

I'm a geek, but this rocks...

It's a NASA Mars Pathfinder animation set to NIN's "Sunspots". The subtle re-editing of the video to sync with the song is excellent - look for the "whipcrack" synced to a parachute opening about 2/3 of the way into the song. Recommended herbalized. YouTube - NIN to Mars

I don’t know how to be my best me without her

So Ash and I broke up again. It isn’t my intention to pine about personal matters here, but just a few days ago I did decide to make an effort to maintain this site far better than I have in the past, and this sad turn of events is bound to dismotivate me and make maintaining an online travel and thought journal a bit difficult. I mean, I could write pages and pages about how sad I am and the loss I feel, but such writing would probably only interest me and at the moment I don’t feel that I have any particularly brilliant insights on love and relationships that could be of any benefit to anyone.

That being said, it’s nice to know that Yin and Yang are still fast at play in my life. On the same night that Ash and I had what will probably be our last conversation for quite some time, a friend whom I have not heard from in years sent an unexpected e-mail letting me know she was alive and well (two things that, unfortunately, I wasn’t sure were true).

Additionally, yesterday I found out that we will definitely be working until the end of the month (yay guaranteed money) and may work through part of June as well (yay more money). Which means that today I send in my final payment for the mapping project in Pompeii that I have wanted to go to for the last two years: Pompeii Food and Drink.

And, to distract me from sadness and serendipity, I think I am going to a Pirate Festival today. Oddly, about three years ago, before I met Ash, I began work on a novel (that I have barely touched in the last two years) that is about a pirate. A very special pirate, who, ironically, falls in love with a much younger woman, who, though she loves him dearly, leaves him at the end of the book.

Arrrrgh! A pirate’s life is not for everyone.