messiestobjects

A Preachy One About Your Health, Because I Know What's Best For You.

 This book is my new Bible. I got it for my birthday from a certain special someone who is quite familiar with my rants about the inadequacies of modern living, and who knows intimately of my recent obsession with health. Not that I'm one of those dippy health freaks, but since I started going to the gym last year so that I wouldn't have to take Lipitor for high cholesterol and get carpal tunnel syndrome, I've become more aware of how much of a difference that a certain amount of health consciousness can make.

I started taking a few vitamins (a multi-vitamin, some extra C and B and some fish oil) not too long after I began losing weight, because we all know that it is really difficult to get all of your nutrients from food anymore. Especially in today's junk food culture, but what I'm learning is that even if you are a very healthy eater, there are very few vitamins and nutrients left in your fruits and veggies by the time they get to your table. I mean, I think we've all heard that. I'd heard it before, but it kind of goes under your alarm-o-meter what with all of the other things to be terrified about these days. But after reading this book I've decided to pay more attention.

In a nutshell, Dr. Shari Lieberman's case is as follows: Vegetables begin to lose their nutritional potency the minute they are born; The soil ain't what it used to be. Food gets its vitamins and minerals from the ground as it grows. And due in part to modern farming practices, our soil is depleted of selenium in most parts of the county and often has only marginal levels of zinc, magnesium, calcium, and other minerals. Without mineral-rich soils, it is impossible for fruits and vegetables to contain a rich supply of nutrients. Then, once they're picked, they really begin to lose steam. Most of them have been picked, then stored, then shipped, then stored again, possibly for weeks or months. After we buy them, we may store them again for a bit. Then you might cook them, or at least cut or slice them. Each of these steps causes further nutrient loss. And don't even get me started on processed food. You might as well be eating bacon flavored paper for all the vitamins you'll get out of them.

Waitaminnit... am I a dippy health freak? How'd that happen? Well, just because you're paranoid.... yeah you get it.

She has a lot more detail in the book. She's quite a respected nutritionist, and her statements are based on studies and measurements of soil and veggie samples. Plus, you know, the real evidence for her case is all around us every day. America is overweight and unhealthy. Cancer is rampant and so are a host of other mysterious illnesses. Vitamin therapy has been shown to fight many forms of illness. I won't get into it, but if you want to find out more read the damn book for yourself.

So the upshot is this: The Recommended Daily Intake (RDI) or Daily Values (DV) amounts of vitamins that you see on food nutrition labels is a bunch of bunkum. Those numbers, in reality, indicate the amount of vitamins to take only to prevent the most obvious deficiency diseases, such as gangrene. RDI is the minimum wage of the health pay scale, in other words. By taking significantly higher doses of all of the basic vitamins and minerals, as well as certain others depending on your personal health profile, you can in fact prevent a whole host of illnesses and larger health problems. The important thing is to take high doses of all of them, not just one or two, as another important point she makes is that vitamins all work together and support each other. Deficiency in one can cause inadequacy in another. Dr. Lieberman calls it the Optimum Daily Intake (ODI). It's very hard to overdose on vitamins, impossible on some of them, but best do a little research yourself before determining what your own personal ODI is.

I've started taking three batches of vitamins a day, one with each meal. That's 3 full multi-vitamins a day plus extra supplements each of A, C, E, a balanced mix of B-complex vitamins, chromium, calcium, magnesium, fish oil, (for the omega fatty acids) and echinacea just for fun.

There. Now if that doesn't make me a total health freakazoid, I don't know what will. Ohh, maybe regular enemas! ... Nah, I drink Metamucil every day too so, I don't need to go that far. What am I, a Californian?

Why I Love 3 Quarks Daily; An Ode To Best-Of Episodes

Here are some items which I've liberated from one of my favorite websites, 3 Quarks Daily, in order to avoid having to come up with/find original stuff on my own. First up is an awesome table-turn on those damn African email scammers:

Scammer scammed

No doubt you are aware of what are known as "419" scams. Emails that begin with things like "I am the widow of the former President of Nigeria," and then promise you a fee of millions of dollars for arranging some transaction. [Read here about a woman who lost $400,000 to a Nigerian scammer!] There is also a whole cadre of devoted people who spend inordinate amounts of time and energy scamming the scammers back. This is a particularly hilarious account of one such scheme, where a man named Arthur Dent manages to convince the scammer to copy all of a Harry Potter book out in longhand and send the scanned pages to him. It is particularly gratifying to read the exchange as the scammer becomes more and more desperate.

Full email exchange is here.

Next up is a YouTube that compiles a few interviews with a guy back in early 2007 saying how a huge financial crisis is on the way... and he gets laughed at. Mostly by FOX commentators, but also by Ben Stein! Priceless. Wish I'd known about Peter Shiff and how smart he was way back then.

And now for a pretty messed up YouTube about how some scientists totally destroyed a city and murdered all of it's inhabitants for the purely selfish gain of really awesome knowledge. I'm not being tongue in cheek; I'm totally ambivalent about the terrible coolness of these sociopathic scientists.

It's like Ant Pompeii.

So okay I'm a bit YouTube heavy today, but this is the best thing ever, and by the best I mean dumbest: A video trying to ensnare potential investors to buy into the dumbest piece of fitness equipment of all time... A moving treadmill, so, you know, if you don't feel like really running, you can run on a treadmill, and then if you don't feel like running inside in place, you can run on a treadmill outside that moves. I wonder if this is the same company that invented powdered water. You know; just add water.

And finally, 50 Facts about Obama that you might not know:

• He collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics

• He was known as "O'Bomber" at high school for his skill at basketball

• His name means "one who is blessed" in Swahili

• His favorite meal is wife Michelle's shrimp linguini

• He won a Grammy in 2006 for the audio version of his memoir, Dreams From My Father

• He is left-handed – the sixth post-war president to be left-handed

• He has read every Harry Potter book

• He owns a set of red boxing gloves autographed by Muhammad Ali

• He worked in a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop as a teenager and now can't stand ice cream

• His favorite snacks are chocolate-peanut protein bars

• He ate dog meat, snake meat, and roasted grasshopper while living in Indonesia

• He can speak Spanish

• While on the campaign trail he refused to watch CNN and had sports channels on instead

• His favorite drink is black forest berry iced tea

• He promised Michelle he would quit smoking before running for president – he didn't

• He kept a pet ape called Tata while in Indonesia

• He can bench press an impressive 200lbs

• He was known as Barry until university when he asked to be addressed by his full name

• His favorite book is Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

• He visited Wokingham, Berks, in 1996 for the stag party of his half-sister's fiancé, but left when a stripper arrived

• His desk in his Senate office once belonged to Robert Kennedy

• He and Michelle made $4.2 million (£2.7 million) last year, with much coming from sales of his books

• His favorite films are Casablanca and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

• He carries a tiny Madonna and child statue and a bracelet belonging to a soldier in Iraq for good luck

• He applied to appear in a black pin-up calendar while at Harvard but was rejected by the all-female committee.

• His favorite music includes Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Bach and The Fugees

• He took Michelle to see the Spike Lee film Do The Right Thing on their first date

• He enjoys playing Scrabble and poker

• He doesn't drink coffee and rarely drinks alcohol

• He would have liked to have been an architect if he were not a politician

• As a teenager he took drugs including marijuana and cocaine

• His daughters' ambitions are to go to Yale before becoming an actress (Malia, 10) and to sing and dance (Sasha, 7)

• He hates the youth trend for trousers which sag beneath the backside

• He repaid his student loan only four years ago after signing his book deal

• His house in Chicago has four fire places

• Daughter Malia's godmother is Jesse Jackson's daughter Santita

• He says his worst habit is constantly checking his BlackBerry

• He uses an Apple Mac laptop

• He drives a Ford Escape Hybrid, having ditched his gas-guzzling Chrysler 300

• He wears $1,500 (£952) Hart Schaffner Marx suits

• He owns four identical pairs of black size 11 shoes

• He has his hair cut once a week by his Chicago barber, Zariff, who charges $21 (£13)

• His favorite fictional television programs are Mash and The Wire

• He was given the code name "Renegade" by his Secret Service handlers

• He was nicknamed "Bar" by his late grandmother

• He plans to install a basketball court in the White House grounds

• His favorite artist is Pablo Picasso

• His specialty as a cook is chili

• He has said many of his friends in Indonesia were "street urchins"

• He keeps on his desk a carving of a wooden hand holding an egg, a Kenyan symbol of the fragility of life

• His late father was a senior economist for the Kenyan government

Ba-Doink-a BOINC

I don't often do this, but there is a gnarly piece of software that I want to recommend that everybody use. It's called BOINC, and it's awesome. I actually used to use it years ago, but between all my traveling and moving I kind of forgot about it, and I've just rediscovered it. It's basically a screen saver program, but not just a pretty one. It's useful. What you do is you download the BOINC software, and then choose a project. The instructions are all there on the homepage. But what BOINC does is this: When your computer is idle, it comes on just like your normal screen saver would, and it uses your computer processor to perform calculations needed by various scientific projects which you can choose from, showing you a neat little visual of the calculations being performed as the screen saver. What's so powerful about this tool is that thousands of people doing calculations on a project offers more computing power than is possible to the individual scientific programs on their own, so you can help them to do some really incredible things.

I myself run a project called SETI@home, which I've I had a link to on my sidebar forever and still managed to forget about all this time, dur. But as an example of how BOINC works, SETI@home is the radio signal project for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) people. You may have heard of them from that movie Contact, in which Jodi Foster represented them, based on the book by Carl Sagan. So anyway, what they do is point their radio telescopes at different points in the sky for periods of time, and record space noise of all sorts. They record this space noise in huge batches and parcel it up, then send it out to everybody running their project via BOINC. BOINC, with the help of your computer processor while you're not using it, then sifts through this raw data, searching for patterns and signals, and sends the results back to SETI. If your computer is the one that finds indication of Extra-Terrestrial radio signals, you'll be famous. Here's what my screen saver looks like:

Of course I understand that a lot of people might think that this is a loopy project, with about a zero chance of ever finding anything meaningful. To you people, I say up yours. Aliens is cool. But, you know, there are plenty of other projects to choose from should the search for the answer to the most profound question we have (are we alone?) not be your particular cup of awesome.

There is a nice one called Rosetta@home, which needs your help to determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins in research that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases. There is also one called climateprediction.net, which is the largest experiment to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century because climate change, and our response to it, are issues of global importance, affecting food production, water resources, ecosystems, energy demand, insurance costs and much else. There is a broad scientific consensus that the Earth will probably warm over the coming century; climateprediction.net should, for the first time, tell us what is most likely to happen.

But there is a whole list of such non-profit projects you can choose from over on the BOINC project page, so you can choose one that you feel is important, regardless of the ultimate importance of the Alien question.

Soulless Meat Products Of War

I ran across this article on this guy because of email alerts I get from Google on any news out there relating to my imprisoned boss from Iraq. The article barely mentions my old boss, but this guy, Colonel Frank Wismer III, is a real piece of work. He's an Episcopalian Army Chaplain; you know, a believer in the Bible and Jesus and peace and love, and the article says this:

"Wismer, whose awards include the Bronze Star Medal and the Combat Action Badge, passes on to readers many lessons he learned while in Iraq. Here's one: "Going to war is an incredibly fantastic experience if one lives through it…One year in Iraq revealed things about community that the church was not able to reveal to me in 50-some years. I say that not as a criticism of the church, but to highlight the incredible bond that is established by individuals who survive the horrors of war."

Going to war is an incredibly fantastic experience? Because of the bond soldiers get while protecting each other and killing the other guy? I think he's missed the point of his religion. I mean, I get the bond thing, I really do. I've been in several situations which can never be understood by anyone who wasn't there with me, and this certainly creates a bond, so I can maybe imagine what being in the life or death struggles of combat can do for friendships, though I'm not sure what that has to do with religion. But this is a supposed man of God, talking about how great war is without any sense of irony. I'm not sure that "Onward Christian Soldiers" was meant as a literal call to literal bloody war, dude. My understanding, from having grown up in the church, was that we were being called to fight a purely spiritual war to convert human souls to God, and I'm not sure how you can justify turning people into soulless meat product in even a just war, let alone the atrocious moral and criminal mess that has been Bush's campaign in Iraq, as a so-called man of God.

"The big picture, he suggests, are the strategic objectives that led to the invasion of Iraq -- to fight the war on terror outside of America's borders, to plant democracy in a part of the world that spawns terror; to isolate neighboring Syria, influence a democratic movement in Iran and give notice Saudi Arabia that it cannot tolerate a strict, conservative brand of the Muslim faith practiced there and harbor Islamic militants."

He's agreeing with the sentiments in this paragraph, by the way, calling the lies and misinformation that led to our illegal and immoral war in Iraq "strategic objectives." And he feels that his God is okay with fighting the war on terror, America's war on terror, outside of America's borders. This, to me, is a most horrific sentiment. That a supposed Christian man thinks it is okay to take our battles and fight them in someone else's home. We've taken our war on terrorism, which now we all know had absolutely nothing to do with Saddam Hussein, Iraq or terrorism, and destroyed those innocent people's lives and homes, and he thinks this is what we as God's army had a right to do.

I don't know. I've never understood how any church can justify Army Chaplains who are also war mongers for the church. In my mind, if an Army Chaplain were to be living up to his beliefs, he should only be there to encourage moral behavior among the troops, (Hey guys, when you're out there today, please don't rape and kill any Iraqi women and their families. They're God's children too, you know) and to do everything in their power to help end conflicts, not promote them.

If you really want an extreme lefty belief here, I'm pretty sure that, were Jesus everything the Bible says he was, he'd vastly disapprove of the very concept of Army Chaplains. Men of God have no business in war, except perhaps to be there independently, (not on the military payroll) and being compassionate to all people involved while doing whatever possible to end it. However, he's actually against withdrawing our presence in Iraq, mostly because of how he thinks it would make us look.

"To pullout our troops out of Iraq now would be a colossal mistake and send that country to chaos," he says. "Strategically that would not be helpful. We would be seen as a people only in something for a short time, not for the long haul."

"I would like to see the Iranian government be able to manage, the military be able to protect the country from without and the police to protect it from within. Then there can be phased withdrawals, but that needs to be done over time."

Iranian Government? I hope that was just a misprint and not a telling slip of the tongue, dude.

I Feel Like An American Again. Weird.

Now I know why guys do that whole ridiculous thing where they stand up and yell and cheer and clap their hands when someone scores a stupid touchdown. I get it at last. Of course, I'll still never do that for some homoerotic sports team in tights, but when the west coast electoral vote count came in last night, as I was watching it happen live, my body involuntarily cheered and yelled OBAMA! loud enough for the neighbors to hear. I stood up, I clapped my hands, I screamed YEAH! 300 Electoral votes! He kicked McCain's ASS!!! YEAH!

Then I Immediately sat down and shut up in embarrassment. Very unlike myself. I wasn't expecting that rush of emotion because, you know, I very strongly believe that it's the Military-industrial complex in charge, or whomever. But that rush came nonetheless. In two and a half very long months from now, that idiot monkey boy will leave the office, and I won't be forced to watch him laugh with his shoulders or listen to him ugh and ook any more. Just as importantly, I won't have to listen to those red candidates spout their party nonsense either. We'll have a President who is a real adult taking charge, at last. I loved his acceptance speech. I believe he's going to try to do great things. I hope he proves me right about this.

He won in a landslide. A landslide. Which also means that I won't have to hear FOX news complaining of vote fraud now. This was no 2000, not even close. I'm so glad it's over, I'm so grateful that sense prevailed this election.

But before we get too carried away, lest we all forget in our tears of joy and sobs of relief, there is one SOB that will still try and screw us before January 20th. It is our duty as concerned citizens to be aware of the following bad news.

Ok that's all I got. Carry on.

Barock The Votebama!

Nothin'. I got nothin'. I just wanted to put my little play on words out there. You know, for happy election day. Which, by the way, is today if you're voting for Obama, and next Tuesday if you're voting for McCain. Yeah, it's a new rule. Like early voting and superdelegates. It's a new rule that's going to be used by the losing side to accuse the winning side of vote fraud. If Obama wins, you watch; FOX News will be making innuendos, (In your endos) if not outright accusations of electoral fraud related to early voting or perhaps, ironically, some sort of shady business at the polls in Ohio & Florida. That would be awesome. And if McCain wins, FOX News will be all like what? That was fair.

On the other hand, if McCain wins, that's exactly what me and Oliver Stone will be saying. Or perhaps not... I did go see W. last week, and it's disappointingly short of conspiracy theories. He didn't even try to cover the shady business in Ohio or Florida back in 2000, Ted Kennedy's accusations of fraud in 2004, or that day with those flying tin can thingies and the buildings that fell down and went boom. Maybe he's saving those subjects once the not-as-crazy-as-they-once-seemed conspiracy theorists get a chance to self-publish their investigative material.

But what was great about W. was the Rorschach Test that is Dubya. On the surface of the movie, Dubya came across as a pretty normal guy who constantly has more food in his mouth than a person normally should. Interesting depiction, by the way. Even while he was making the worst Presidential decisions imaginable, he seems pretty well meaning, even affable, if misguided perhaps. But hardly the demon he seems like from a distance. But if you look closer, after the credits roll and you've thought about it a bit, it's a more damning portrait than you might at first glance think.

I'm not going to say much about it though, because like I said, it's a Rorschach Test and the important thing is what you take away from it, if you ever see it, not what I think. I'm sure you can guess what my opinion of the man is. The one thing I do want to say though, is that even though it's a cliché, the road to hell is, in fact, paved with good intentions; Even Hitler believed he was doing what was right, all the while using his feelings and his guts as his guides, ignoring the evidence that was all around him that what he believed so strongly was only what he wanted to believe.

Of course, the movie is still merely an interpretation of the events. My gut tells me we shouldn't be so kind to ickle Georgie in the history books. I strongly believe, in the absence of any real evidence available to me, that he purposefully misled the nation and probably has nonconsensual sex with goats while feeding on aborted baby fetuses. But that's just an opinion, you know, don't take my word for it.

I guess the real point of this post is how different types of people interpret things, and how this election seems to have polarized people into two major groups of different interpretive capabilities. Is this an election which has polarized the Good from the Evil? The intelligent from the deeply stupid? The authoritative from the nonauthoritative? The butter side up from the butter side down? None of the above or all of the above? Humanity confuses me, and while I strongly believe that Obama is the right choice and that the McCain camp is only preying on one type of humanity's inability to deal with their inner conflict of Mind Vs. Fear, that's just my interpretation. I've been wrong before. Besides, it's also entirely possible that by even participating in this election, I have also succumbed to the fear by way of the terror that Palin inspires in me. I mean come on, do I really believe that she's Satan's goat-whore bride? That's just silly.

The brave thing to do might really be to sit it out, since what my actual leftist beliefs tell me is happening is that Obama and McCain are the left and right hands of the Military-industrial complex which murdered JFK, RFK, & MLK. After beating us with the stick in their right hand for eight years, they might let us rest up with a nice carrot from their left hand for a bit.

I know, I know, it's all a bit radical. But I'm feeling quite philosophical this morning, this election day. All my life I've been told that voting is the most sacred duty of every American, and to be fair I've never really believed that so my opinions are already coming out of left field. But I am voting today, for Obama, and it's not because I think Obama is going to save us, and it's mostly not because I think McCain and Palin are going to be another 4 to 8 years of happy-go-lucky skipping to Gomorrah, but because I'm simply tired of being beaten with a stick. Time for some Beta Carotene in my diet.