Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

A new study has proven that men are more narcissistic than women. I suppose it isn’t too surprising. Narcissus, who the condition was named after, was a man. Also, it had to be one or the other, didn’t it? When they were going into this study, there were only two possibilities, and one of them won out. There you have it.

Actually, as far as physical vanity, which is a big part of narcissism, IMHO, men and women were about even. It was the other aspects of narcissism, the parts that are actually considered sort of a personality disorder, the self-centeredness, the sense of entitlement, the nearly pathological self-confidence and completely irrational lack of self doubt (which, whether it’s pathological at its base or not, can be self-fulfilling, so who are we to criticize?) where men scored higher than women.
Interesting, but in things like this, I feel the same way about gender that I do about race. It’s interesting to know, and there’s no point in denying actual scientific facts, but you still have to judge the individual.
It would be a mistake for women to read this survey and say “I knew it. All men are self-centered, egotistical bastards,” in the same way that it’s a mistake to assume somebody can dance just because they are black, or can do math just because they are Korean.
But I wonder what other correlations are out there to be made. Do blue eyed people tend to sleep later? Are left handers bigger coffee drinkers? Are middle children more athletic?
Sort of a different topic, but I saw a documentary the other day on epigenetics, i.e. the concept that a parent’s life experiences actually affect the DNA passed down to their children. My mom always said she thought my youngest brother was the fittest and most athletic of all of us because he was the only one born after my Dad gave up smoking. We always laughed at her but it seems, now, that science might be on her side.

People sometimes accuse me of being a conspiracy theorist, but I think that’s an overused and abused term. Sure, I don’t always think the official version of things is the truth. But there has to be some evidence. And some relevance. And some skepticism.

I believe that 9/11 was an inside job. I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone. I believe that the attack on the USS Liberty by the Israeli Air Force on June 8th, 1967 was deliberate. And I believe that Guy Fawkes was framed, the whole gunpowder plot was a false flag to shore up James’ support and sell a lot of bibles, but as far as I know I’m the only one on that last one.
But I don’t believe in Bigfoot. I don’t think the Rothschild’s run the world. I suspect the Chupacabra is actually wild dogs. Crop circles are made by pranksters. The moon landing and the holocaust both happened. Vaccines do not cause autism.
I’m on the fence about aliens and ghosts.
Here’s one that I just saw a minute ago that might be true and might not and the main thing I want to say about it is it doesn’t really matter one way or the other. The article says that Van Gogh’s painting “Cafe Terrace at Night” contains a hidden reference to “The Last Supper.”
It’s possible. Van Gogh was a priest before he was a painter, but he kind of sucked at it. His weird personality scared and offended his parishioners so Church authorities just kept sending him to less and less desirable places until eventually he and the church parted professional ways, but he was still a deeply religious man. The painting does show twelve people in a restaurant (the waiter is Jesus, I guess).
But, I suspect it’s mostly pareidolie, some art expert seeing what he/she wants to see. Sure, there are twelve people. It’s not an unusual number. Sure, both are scenes of people eating. It’s a common theme. Sure, Van Gogh could have put some religious symbolism in the painting. He was clever enough. But it might be just coincidence, too. I’m going to keep looking at it as a nice painting of people enjoying a cafe at night, because it works that way, too, and I like it.

The internet is an amazing thing. In case after case of police shooting people, which formerly got little press, video evidence actually proves that the police do shoot people. Innocent people. Deliberately. Damned near casually.
Politician’s dirty deeds are being exposed at a rate never seen before. Some day, it may actually be hard for somebody to hold political office after they’re caught selling children to child molesters. At any rate, they are being exposed.
Which brings us to tonight’s story. A satellite, with the extremely unpoetic name of DMSP-13, exploded.
It’s not really too surprising. With 3,700 satellites floating around the Earth 24/7, one of them’s bound to go kerflooey once in a while.
Maybe an overheated battery. Maybe metal fatigue. Maybe it got hit by an asteroid. We may never know.
The important thing about this is that the U.S. Department of Defense, the owner of this particular satellite, did not inform anybody of this sudden patch of space debris, which happened over a month ago.
No, the news came to us, via a web site of astronomy nerds with big telescopes.
If we ever have evidence of alien intelligence, it’s going to come from these same nerds with telescopes.

I’m not going to waste my blog tonight talking about Netanyahu’s speech, because Chris Matthews has the definitive statement on that. He’s not my favorite political commentator, but he hit it out of the park with this one.
I’m not going to dwell on ex-Senator Danforth’s very unusual funeral oration, although I might in future. It’s Republicans fighting Republicans, which is always fun to see, but when somebody commits suicide there are often hidden issues, and I don’t want to start blathering on about it before reading a bit more.

Tonight I want to talk about the Kettle Falls Five, a family which was growing a small amount of marijuana (fewer than 100 plants) on their farm, for personal use only they said and there’s no evidence to the contrary and one of them does have cancer. They got busted by federal agents and it’s being tried as a federal case, of course, because as far as the State of Washington is concerned, what they did is legal.
IMHO, the feds should just back the fuck off. It is legal in Washington. It is clearly the will of a majority of the American people that marijuana be legalized, the experiment seems to be working well in the states that are trying it, and the science is in.
It is as certain as global climate change being caused by man-made industry, it is as certain as the medical value of vaccinations, it is as certain as Spring will come that marijuana is totally harmless. There has been no epidemic of addiction, no open floodgate to other drugs, no increased danger on the roads, no rise in crime, no none of it. Just a significant increase in tax revenue, which is a good thing.
Give it up, already, non-stoner people. The war on drugs is over. You lost.

I remember one time me and a bunch of people were sitting around my room, this was back in my Kibbutz volunteer days, a group of mixed nationalities and cultures, and we were passing around joints and getting just as stoned as we could be, and somebody offered a hit to

my dog, Grover, a shaggy, lovable, little ball of white fur. I objected quite loudly, and went on a bit of a rant, a totally inappropriate, or at least out of character, lecture about how animals aren’t people and it was borderline animal abuse to try and get a dog high because they didn’t have the whole social paradigm to fully appreciate this drug, they weren’t seeking it, they’d probably just think they were sick or something, and my friend was looking very repentant and embarrassed but then, when he passed the joint on to the next person, Grover just moved on down the line and sat in front of the joint-holder, in the classic canine big-eyed begging posture.
Everybody burst out laughing and my point was about as firmly disproven as any point ever was. Animals absolutely love marijuana. If you feed it to cows, they will give more milk.
So, it’s kind of humorous when a DEA agent in Utah warns against animals getting high all the time if the state legalized medical marijuana. He specifically mentioned rabbits, and told a funny story about how one time he and his fascist droogies were destroying a plantation of this wonderful plant, and there was this rabbit who was obviously stoned out of his little rabbit head because he didn’t run away.
I don’t quite get how this is supposed to be a bad thing. Is we worried that hordes of crazed rabbits and going to go mad in the desert and start hijacking tourists, slaughtering them and leaving their bodies to rot in the hot sun, while they drive off with their cars? Are they afraid of hordes of rabbit looters flooding into Safeway after hours and plundering the produce section?
Damn. Let Reefer Rabbit have a little fun. Allow these cannabis loving cottontails to do what they like. The world is unthreatened.