Anyway, I’m very excited that this legislation has gotten so much negative attention, and feel there’s a pretty good chance that it will wind up getting shot down altogether. However, people who are concerned with internet censorship should remember or learn for the very first time that the internet is already censored and has been for years. The DMCA (Digitial Millennium Copyright Act) was passed way back in 1998 and not only permits websites to be shut down, but also for search engine results to be culled.

Further, a very nasty piece of legislation was recently signed into law by Obama that expressly allows for indefinite detention of anyone in the world without trial and without Habeas Corpus. The 2012 NDAA has gotten relatively little press. It got a lot of attention, but if one bill was to get enough negative attention to wind up not becoming law, this is the one I would’ve picked.

Did you know that two days ago Howard Stern solicited phone numbers from his twitter followers so he and his wife could drunk dial them? He then tweeted something about each person he called. So, twitter’s fun and you should totally follow me on it.

Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people weren’t even aware that horses where ever slaughtered for human consumption in the US. It has apparently been an ongoing practice throughout my life up until 2006, and even then I only have one distinct memory of the practice being mentioned by anyone. There was an Episode of All in the Family where Archie unknowingly ate horse meat, and I have some vague memory of it being an option for pathetic poor people who can’t afford “real” meat. It turns out that it’s pretty common in Mexico, France, and much of the rest of the world. Some animal rights groups are upset that the de facto ban is ending, but PETA isn’t. They’re actually looking at the real effect of the law:

In an interview with the Monitor, PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk said the US should never have banned domestic horse slaughter – a stance that has put the organization at odds with other mainstream animal rights groups, like the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA).

The reason he feels this way is that the ban on horse slaughter has led to the exportation of horses for slaughter, and from a horse’s point of view being shipped a thousand or so miles and then being slaughtered in Mexico is worse than being driven 80 miles away to be slaughtered in the same state.

While PETA says the optimal solution is to ban both consumption slaughter and export of horses, it supports reintroducing horse slaughterhouses in the US, especially if accompanied by a ban on exporting any horses at all to other countries.

Okay, that sounds more like the PETA I know. I don’t see how any combination of bans could ever be “optimal” in any sense, but I can appreciate the fact that they acknowledge that a ban on something they find distasteful has actually worsened the situation from their perspective. Other groups are reportedly outraged by the end of the ban.

The issue has galvanized the animal rights community, which contends that horses are too intelligent to be food animals, and that legal processing of horse meat will endanger wild horse populations and motivate Americans to raise horses specifically for human consumption.

That won’t happen, but what if it did? Horses are neat animals, but you’ll have a hard time convincing me that they’re any more intelligent than the other tasty animals we eat. Horse meat will only become popular if people discover that they taste awesome, which is apparently the case. I’ve just read a few random internet people claim that it’s pretty good, much like beef with a slightly stronger taste. If these people were eating meat from retired work horses, and not from horses raised specifically for meat, we can speculate that food horses might be even tastier. Also, if horse meat wasn’t tasty, the French wouldn’t be eating it.

The totally predictable effects of the ban haven’t been awesome…

…more abandoned and neglected horses in the US are being sold and processed for meat anyway in countries that may not have the same standard of humane euthanasia that US law requires. Government statistics show that 138,000 American horses were sold and processed for meat in other countries in 2010 – a 660 percent increase from 2007, according to the GAO report.

…especially on horse owners, some of whom aren’t rich.

The poor economy has been tough on horse owners and the animals themselves, leading to what Representative Kingston calls an “unanticipated problem with horse neglect and abandonment.” InColorado alone, horse abandonment ”increased 60 percent from 975 in 2005 to 1,588 in 2009,” the GAO report stated.

What’s more, The New York Times reports that the law forced many breeders and owners to go out of business because their inability to sell horses for meat “removed the floor” for prices while forcing owners to shoulder costs for euthanizing and disposing of unwanted horses. Before the ban, the horse slaughter business generated some $65 million in revenues a year.

I picture small time breeders have a much harder time shipping their horses to Mexico for slaughter than larger operations, so the now worthless horses are either euthanized or abandoned. Awesome.

Part of me hopes that the ridiculous fears of the animal rights folks that Americans will begin raising horses specifically for human consumption become true. After reading various reports, I’d really like to try some roast horse.

Game, as it is understood today, came about as a mechanism to get men, especially men of high intelligence (who arguably think too much), to stop projecting rational thinking onto women. Instead, we should behave in a way that takes advantage of their instinctual drives if we should hope to get what we want from them. This doesn’t just work for men on women they want to bang, but it’s definitely the scenario where it’s most pronounced.

I’ve also learned, and this is similar, that if you want to convince people to agree with you, rational argument is not normally the most effective means of accomplishing this goal. It is generally more effective to appeal to one’s emotions. If you can appeal to the more powerful emotions like fear, even better. Understanding this helps explain why democracy doesn’t work so well, why the people who manage to get elected to political offices tend to be awful human beings with no discernible conscience.

Rational arguments work on critical thinkers, typically people of well above average intelligence. The problem is that most people are not critical thinkers. The structure of anarcho-capitalist society is a hard sell, largely because of it’s necessary complexity. It could be argued that people in an anarcho-capitalist society don’t need to “believe in” anarcho-capitalism for things to run smoothly, but I’m not convinced. I’m not saying anarcho-capitalism is the necessary endpoint of critical political thinking, but that any sufficiently complex and sufficiently different social arrangement is too far-out for the typical idiot to understand or accept.

More recently, I’ve been heavily into the ideas of the paleo diet community, and when you think about the natural environment of our ancestors and how it differs from what we have, it’s easy to wonder if we might be seriously ill-equipped to deal with the society we’ve accidentally created. A very recent post by Andrew at Evolvify addresses this. There’s a lot I could say about his post, but right now I’m mostly just referencing his claims about hunter-gatherers. He’s got a lot of footnotes, is what I’m saying.

When we think about humans in paleolithic times or even modern hunter-gatherers, we see small groups of 20-100 people where everyone knows each other. Such small societies are inherently orderly because each person needs the rest of the group for their own survival and reproductive success. Hunting, gathering, and child care are performed communally. Violence within groups exists almost exclusively among males vying for the mates.

What we don’t see are property rights outside of a man’s hut, his tools, and maybe his wife. We don’t see individuals lost among thousands of fellow humans who neither know nor care about each other. Outsiders may be welcome among hunter-gatherers, but they will certainly have to demonstrate that they are trustworthy before they are trusted. In such a world, a man is never expected to interact peacefully with people he’s never met and has no reason to trust, as we are expected to when we go about our business.

The problem here is that this world is very different from what we have today and very different from any future world we can imagine that doesn’t involve massive depopulation, something I’m not a supporter of, to put it mildly. What we can do here is question the practicality and necessity of private property in land, I suppose. I’m not one to argue against the private ownership of land, but I’ve always felt the the arguments of georgists or geoists have some merit. If you fell off a cruise ship, landed on an island, and met a guy who claimed to own the entire island because he got there first, you might really have a problem with his further claim that you must either do as he demands or leave.

In the Evolvify post I linked to above, Andrew notes how common it is for paleo people to also be libertarians and how these ideas are at conflict. Libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism support the institutions of private property, and individual responsibility and autonomy. Communist anarchists favor limited private property rights and shared responsibilities, and this sounds a lot more like the environment to which we are best suited, as long as we’re talking about the social arrangement inside the monkeysphere™. If you’ve never heard the term, please follow the link to Cracked.com and learn. Basically, it’s the size of a group of people we can be part of and care for everyone else in the group, estimated to be about 150 for humans. Of course (as if this is common knowledge), communist anarchists typically support collective societies on a much larger scale, all the way up to the entire population of Earth.

It may well be a good idea be part of a monkeysphere™ of some sort, where wealth and and responsibilities may be shared to some extent. I think fraternal orders might be good for this, and I think those who embrace paleo-living concepts would likely benefit from building interdependent groups based on this one common interest. I also think that it’s impractical and unwise to totally abandon private property and individual autonomy for several reasons, including the fact that the cost of being shunned from a group just isn’t what it used to be and that we quite literally don’t need to depend on each other the way we once did. Also, I can’t ignore the reality that even if we build wonderful monkeyspheres™ for ourselves we will still need to deal peacefully with outsiders on a regular basis.

In conclusion, I don’t really know what to conclude. I still believe the state, especially the nation-state is an unnecessary evil, but maybe voluntary socialism on a small scale isn’t a terrible idea, and I should point out that we have that already in families. I’ve touched on a lot of stuff here, and I have a lot more to say in seven different directions. For inspiring me to think about this stuff, in addition to the game and paleo bloggers out there, I’d like to acknowledge Joe Rogan, for continually referencing our ape ancestry and our evolutionary limitations on his podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience, which is the most open-minded and informative podcast by a household name in all of the internet. I should also mention Richard Nikoley of freetheanimal.com, who twittered the Evolvify post to me and recently posted two related articles, If You Want Someone Dead Kill Them Yourself and Are You More Moral, More Benevolent and More Competent than Any Politician? Then Act Like It.

The idea was the immigration sweep. He sends a bunch of deputies to some part of the county, where they hang out and stop people for bullshit traffic violations and other bullshit reasons that they can think of. Then, if they’re suspected of being in the country illegally, they’re presumably deported. Sending Mexicans back to Mexico is a pretty popular idea in this county, at least among people with pink skin, white hair, and big blue sedans. The fact this practice isn’t simply tolerated but actually welcomed is pretty hard evidence in support of my hypothesis that people are really stupid and democracy is an absurd institution. I’m not too terribly bothered by these sweeps, and maybe it’s because I don’t really care about Mexicans. Their culture annoys me. I like the food, but I don’t like their music, the colors they paint their houses, their low expectations, their high birth rates, the terrible things they do to perfectly good cars, they way the whole family has to come with, and I really hate painted on eyebrows. I’m probably not the only person who feels this way, so I can see the idea of sending Mexicans back to Mexico at least sounding good, as an idea. But it’s not something that can be accomplished without violating the rights of people who are legally in the country and aren’t really doing anything wrong. Hell, if they’re illegally in the country and not doing anything wrong, I don’t see why they should be hassled.

One thing that bothered me about the sweeps was that it was the one thing that finally got him some negative press outside the Newtimes. Never mind the arrests of journalists and political opponents. Never mind the mentally unstable inmates who died in his jails at the hands of his deputies. Never mind the evidence that his net worth is a lot higher than it should be. Never mind a bunch of shit I can’t even remember. He takes on illegal immigration, and now he’s finally a bad guy. Actually, the press never really cast judgement on him, but they did finally cover the fact some people oppose his practices for once. Up until then, the only source for news on Joe Arpaio was Joe Arpaio.

Another thing that bothered me was the Newtimes itself. They started putting a lot of energy into covering the sweeps and protests and shit that doesn’t really matter. They’ve spent energy trying to paint him as a racist, as if that somehow makes him even worse than we already know he is. For a year or two now, the feature article in at least every other issue is something about the plight of the illegals, whether it’s a story about dying in the desert or some kid who does some really cool thing and didn’t even know he was an illegal immigrant until he tried to get a job. I just don’t care. I get it – Mexicans are people too. I don’t understand why they’re so interested in making me care about Mexicans in America when nobody gives a shit about Mexicans in Mexico. If they did, they might be a little more concerned with federal drug policy than Arizona’s SB1070 or Joe Arpaio’s lastest canine and equestrian extravaganza.

Since 2006, 25,000 to 40,000 people in Mexico have been killed as a result of the expansion of the US War On Drugs into Mexico. It’s been suggested that it’s a case of “caged animals attacking one another”, but among the dead are hundreds of police officers and soldiers, many politicians and journalists, and a great deal of innocent people. Never mind that the caged animals would probably be normal people with normal jobs if heavy enforcement tactics weren’t greatly boosting the profit potential of the recreational drug trade. The violence just gets worse every year. The obvious sensible solution is to pull the plug on enforcement. The Mexican government needs to stop taking our money and needs to tell us to fuck off. Our government should cease paying local law enforcement agencies to fight the drug war, fire the DEA, and legalize everything. It won’t happen, but some Mexican politicians are cautiously leaning in that direction.

Former President Vincente Fox has suggested a cease-fire, possibly offering amnesty to gang members. That idea didn’t go over well, apparently. Current Mexican President Felipe Calderon, speaking in his state of the Union Address just one week after 52 people were killed in a drug gang attack on a casino, blamed US drug consumers while carefully suggesting decriminalizationg. He said, “If [the US-ians] are determined and resigned to consuming drugs, they should look for market alternatives that annul the stratospheric profits of the criminals, or establish clear points of access that are not the border with Mexico.” That sounds a lot like he’s suggesting the US allow drug imports, presumably directly from South America.

Of course, the people who know what’s best for us are having none of that. From this blog at Reason:

 …a high level State Department functionary insisted last month that the anti-cartel Merida Initiative would continue regardless of who Mexicans elected president in 2012. Hopefully Calderón grows a conscience and a spine between now and then.

It doesn’t seem very likely, and even if the legalization movement gathers steam in Mexico, they’re still doomed as long as the drugs remain very illegal in the US.

So, that’s my thought. Anyone who gives a shit about Mexicans should really be throwing their shoes at Obama and his fellow clowns, insisting they reverse this insanity, that they legalize drugs for the sake of our neighbors. It’s the only human thing to do. I’m sure the only thing most people will take from this is that I’m a racist because I don’t like Sharpie™ eyebrows.

This all fits in well with the paleo diet idea that humans have adapted to eating certain foods (wild animal meat, fish, root vegetables, and fruit) and are ill-equipped to deal with foods that have only been around for 10,000 or less years (added sugar, grains, seed oils, and dairy).  For some, this is the prescription for what we should eat.  For others, it’s just the starting assumption.  I like that approach, and if that sounds good to you, check out the Archevore Diet by Dr. Kurt Harris.

The major media news articles don’t really get much into the specifics of Ms. Pereira’s diet.  They spend at least as much energy focusing on Guinness World Records needing more proof to declare her the oldest living person in the world.  I’d like someone to go spend a few days with her, documenting her eating habits before she kicks off.  I also wonder what her great-great-great-grandchildren are eating.

I thought of another shitty story when I woke up this morning, but I can’t remember it now

For the majority of my life, I’ve been one of those people who can eat anything and not accumulate any body fat.  I was in the Army several years ago, went to Basic Training at age 18.  While some of my platoon-mates lost 30 or 40 pounds in the eight weeks we were there, I gained 17 and still showed no sign of body fat.  I ate voraciously in that time because I was extremely scared that I might lose weight, which I could not afford to do.  When I went in, I weighed 148 pounds at 5’11″ and was fairly muscular, at least above the waist.  After Basic when my activity level had slowed down, I learned that I couldn’t eat as much any more.  I’m not saying I learned that I couldn’t get away with eating just as much, but that I literally couldn’t eat the same amount of food as I had been accustomed to.  I remained lean for years.

Since the beginning of puberty, I would complain about constantly being hungry and having difficulty in maintaining or gaining weight.  I felt better when I weighed more, but if I gained five pounds in a week, I’d lose the next week.  Somewhere around age 23, I began to lose this problem.  I was out of the Army and working security when I discovered a way out of constant hunger.  I would stock up on frozen dinners and eat about 3 pounds worth in one 12-hour shift.  For the first time ever, I had an ass.  My wife was quite pleased about this.  I wasn’t entirely happy about how I’d done it or the shape of my body, but it stopped the painful persistent hunger and that made it worth it.  You know, people aren’t all that sympathetic when someone complains about how hard it is being fat, but try complaining about being too skinny and you’ll only get unmasked hostility (assuming you’re actually skinny).

For years I maintained a nearly athletic figure with a BMI in the “normal weight” range, while eating crap food and exercising very little.  I knew about the Atkins diet, but I didn’t know a lot about it.  It sounded kind of too good to be true.  I read a little about the paleo diet, and that seemed to make a lot of sense to me, but I didn’t invest much time into reading about.  There also seemed to be some contraversy about what Paleolithic man actually ate.  I wasn’t overweight, so this stuff wasn’t that important to me.  Then one day,  I was.  I swear to God I went to Chipotle and got one of their delicious burritos.  I ate the whole thing and became bloated, which was normal.  Which wasn’t normal was that the bloat didn’t seem to go away.

Some time back, I watched a lecture by science writer, Gary Taubes.  Gary was asking some very good questions about the common beliefs of human nutrition.  He had found what people around here like to call a shit-ton of evidence suggesting that ideas such as the big one that obesity is caused by gluttony, sloth, or some evil combination of the two, might be very wrong.  He also suggested that maybe Atkins was right, pointing to scientific research indicating that he was.  I was sold, and further reading on dietary intake of saturated fat and cholesterol convinced me that Atkins was right.  More reading convinced me that a diet devoid of grains, low in carbs, and high in saturated animal fat is not only good for losing weight but can also prevent and often cure almost every disease humans face.  This should make sense if you understand the concept of the paleo diet.  The diet that modern humans have adapted to eating is the one which our bodies work best on.  This means that health problems of modern humans are caused by us eating foods that are not natural for us.  Obesity is just one of those many problems.  If you first become overweight at age 15 and learn what to do about it, you might just live a longer healthier life than someone who waits until they’re 40 to become overweight.

When I started getting a fat belly, I cut back on sugar, and it seemed to do the trick somewhat, but I really wish I had known this stuff years ago.

If you’ve never looked into the low-carb or paleo diet, and need a quick explanation of why it would work or how carbs make us fat, go read Dr. Michael Eades review on Taubes’s new book, Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It.

If that sounds interesting, get Taubes’s book.

If you want to know more about Taubes research into everyone else’s research, or you need endless citations and a response to every challenge he could ever anticipate, get his other older book, Good Calories Bad Calories.  It’s an amazing book, but it’s very long and very detailed.  The newer book is much more concise and to the point.

If you don’t want to pay for either book, the video lecture that I watched way back when is on Google Videos for free.  It’s 71 minutes long and has some pictures of naked fat people.  You have been warned.

If you have a really hard time accepting the notion that doctors and researchers could be so wrong about nutrition for so many decades, please watch this presentation, by marginal comedian, blogger, and creator of the Fathead documentary, Tom Naughton.  It’s 42 minutes or so, and is full of lame jokes in front of a very receptive audience.  You have been warned again.

If you don’t care for that, and just want to hear someone funny, go watch some Lewis C.K. videos.

I don’t hate fat people.  I hate the fact that so many people are fat, especially the women.  I found this very depressing.  It’s even worse when it happens to girls I know.  I don’t really hate fat people.

Avoid carbs. It really is that simple.

Others advised Weight Watchers, 2 hours of daily exercise, dietary fat avoidance, get a trainer, and other shit she won’t do and wouldn’t work if she did.  Later, I went back and saw this by Dr. Michael:

Google “keto” diet or “ketosis” diet. It is a high protein low carb diet. Don’t fall victim to the “low fat diet” and counting calories. Low fat diets are high carb diets and will pack on the fat. Another side effect of low fat diets is depression and hormone imbalance since humans require animal fat for survival. Limit your carbs to 25-45 grams a day and avoid sugar totally. If you eat more than 4 grams of sugar in one setting, and you do not burn the excess sugar immediately, then it will be stored as fat. When you are on a keto diet, your body goes into ketosis. This means that your body will not have carbs to burn immediately for energy as needed so it will start breaking down body fat into “ketones” that will mimic a carb and be burned for energy. That’s why the diet is called a keto diet.

Also avoid artificial sweeteners such as Equal and Splenda, they will spike insulin levels. Instead, use saccharine or stevia sweeteners. A lot of drinks have the bad artificial sweeteners in them.

Losing body fat is all about controlling your metabolism. The best way to increase your metabolism is to weight train. Google “high intensity training” also known as “H.I.T.” or “Nautilus workout”. The stronger you are the more calories you will burn at rest. One pound of muscle requires 7 to 15 calories a day to maintain.

You can also increase your metabolism by eating often. Your stomach empties every 2hours, so try eating a small meal or snack every 2 hours or so. By doing this your body will always be digesting food thus increasing your metabolism. Your body will think you are in a “rich” environment, so to speak, and will be less inclined to store fat for survival.

Hope this helps!

If you don’t know, this is what I hold to be true.  I guess I can safely delete my answer.  I don’t really know about that last part, eating more often to boost metabolism, but it makes sense intuitively.  Is this Dr. Michael the very Dr. Michael Eades whose blog I have a link to over there on the right?