Our Descent Into Madness

How crazy is this?

Apparently, this is a new trend in Japan. The body and its insides are made completely of food, and it “bleeds” when you cut into it. Like hufu, there’s speculation as to whether or not cannibal banquets really take place, or if they’re some kind of sick joke. From Weird Asia News, via Boing Boing.

Relatedly, Daisy and I learned a new word yesterday- Vorarephilia.

Vorarephilia (also referred to as vore) is a fetish which focuses primarily upon the consumption of another person or creature, containing another person or creature entirely inside one’s body, or being consumed or contained.

Yikes.

The number of licensed hunters has dropped significantly in the last twenty years. So the NRA is reaching out to kids and putting hunting classes in schools.

One measure of the campaign’s success has been the infectious growth of the association’s Scholastic Clay Target Program, which organizes skeet and trap shooting contests for elementary to high-school-aged kids. Backed by direct donations from major ammunition and firearm manufacturers including Remington, White Flyer and Berretta, the program boasted 8,300-plus participants in 41 states last year.

“We see it as a gateway sport,” said Josh Sugarmann of the Violence Policy Center, a DC research and advocacy organization. ”The goal is to get the kids hunting and buying firearms.” The average hunter, according to NSSF data, spends $17,726.59 on hunting equipment in his or her lifetime.

Let’s review real quick; make sure we’re up on this.

“The goal is to get the kids hunting and buying firearms.” Alright, moving on.

Aimee Falls described being “shocked” and “offended” when she looked in her 13-year-old daughter’s schoolbag to find a copy of “Today’s Hunter.” She tried to rally other parents to speak out against the class, with limited success, and called the local media.

“This class teaches them how to use the gun, how to load the gun,” she told reporters, “I do not feel comfortable with them knowing this information.”

Well, they definitely shouldn’t be spending classtime on it, that’s for sure. Maybe they should be learning, oh, i dunno, science instead.

In spite of parent concern, Indiana Department of Natural Resources Conservation Officer Ken Dowdle, who teaches the hunting course at Lincoln Junior High, said he has noticed a growing interest in hunting classes: “There probably isn’t a county in Indiana that doesn’t have it in at least one of their schools.”

Classes are becoming more and more prevalent throughout the country, as well. The March issue of Guns and Ammo reported a new program getting off the ground recently in Juneau, Alaska in Floyd Dryden Middle School’s sixth-grade class, while in Kansas, the Department of Wildlife and Parks has recently developed a ‘Hunters Education in our Schools’ program, devoted entirely to creating and promoting the classes in public schools. The effort includes matching hunter’s education to state curriculum standards, so that it can easily fit into PE, science or even shop classes.

In Kansas, class instruction includes having students use computer games and either live firearms or Lasershot rifles — firearms that have been converted to shoot lasers instead of live rounds.

And the “no no, we’re trying to prevent violence!” argument is total crap.

“We want them to know how to safely handle those firearms, or what to do when they come across firearms in the home,” said Monica Bickerstaff, coordinator of Kansas’ program.

But violence prevention experts say teaching gun safety in order to prevent accidents is counter-intuitive.

“Only 5 percent of gun deaths are accidental,” said Deanne Calhoun, Executive Director of Youth Alive, a violence prevention organization in Oakland, California. “It is ridiculous to think there is this type of a program in a school. It isn’t a big health issue for kids.”

“People clearly are profiting off of the violence that is out there,” Calhoun added. “What we’d like to do is find a way to turn off the faucet, to stop the guns from getting in the hands of kids in the first place.”

Gun safety education should include protocol to use if ever faced with a weapon. It should be about preventing violence and knowing how to avoid it. Gun safety education should not involve teaching kids how to load and use guns. No one should be able to profit by promoting violence and exploiting children. I mean, really, let’s not give kids guns. It’s that simple.

And let’s re-evaluate the loose firearms ownership regulations that exist for adults, too, while we’re at it.

Scientists working with the Robot Engineering Technology Research Center at the Shandong University of Science and Technology in China have successfully taken control of pigeons’ brains by implanting them with micro electrodes.

The implants stimulated different areas of the pigeon’s brain according to signals sent by the scientists via computer, and forced the bird to comply with their commands.

So they can control its flight. This is supposedly a picture of one, from Mutant Palm, via Boing Boing:

Add this to the list of hybrids that wouldn’t exist if the world was a good place.

Al says:

Sign the postcard to your representative demanding real action on global warming below and I’ll personally deliver it to Washington in March. I’ll keep you up to date on how things are going by email.

Do it here.

Check out this really short and funny documentary about Texas politicians and their biggest concerns.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

We find ourselves in truly strange times, my friends. I just encountered this headline: Exotic Animals Seen Where Antarctic Ice Used to Be.

Wowww.

Spindly orange sea stars, fan-finned ice fish and herds of roving sea cucumbers are among the exotic creatures spied off the Antarctic coast in an area formerly covered by ice, scientists reported Sunday.

Among the hundreds of specimens collected, the scientists identified 15 possible new species of shrimp-like amphipods, and four possible new species of cnidarians, organisms related to coral, jellyfish and sea anemones, the scientists said in a statement.

Crazy, crazy stuff.

Don’t think about it too much: you’ll end up as disturbed as me.

You can now see photographic evidence of the gigantic sinkhole we mentioned this weekend.

Orlando Sierra / AFP / Getty Images

(Via Boing Boing)

As is right and proper, An Inconvenient Truth won best documentary at the Oscars last night. Congratulations, Mr. Gore (and Laurie David, too, who deserves just as much admiration)!

Now that that’s off the list, let’s get to hoping he’ll announce a presidential bid…

Alright. I don’t even know where to begin. Or what to do with myself. One thing is certain: I will never be the same.

Scientists have begun blurring the line between human and animal by producing chimeras—a hybrid creature that’s part human, part animal.

Chinese scientists at the Shanghai Second Medical University in 2003 successfully fused human cells with rabbit eggs. The embryos were reportedly the first human-animal chimeras successfully created. They were allowed to develop for several days in a laboratory dish before the scientists destroyed the embryos to harvest their stem cells.

Um, excuse me?

In Minnesota last year researchers at the Mayo Clinic created pigs with human blood flowing through their bodies.

And at Stanford University in California an experiment might be done later this year to create mice with human brains.

Scientists feel that, the more humanlike the animal, the better research model it makes for testing drugs or possibly growing “spare parts,” such as livers, to transplant into humans.

Look, I wouldn’t believe it either, but it’s from the National Geographic! What choice do I have? (Hint: here’s the part where some knowledgable commenter stumbles along to save the day by telling me that this was a prank or something that just never got edited out…)

Now just get ready for this.

David Magnus, director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University, believes the real worry is whether or not chimeras will be put to uses that are problematic, risky, or dangerous.

Human Born to Mice Parents?

For example, an experiment that would raise concerns, he said, is genetically engineering mice to produce human sperm and eggs, then doing in vitro fertilization to produce a child whose parents are a pair of mice.

What the fuck is that shit!?

What planet are we on? Who am I?

Who are you…?

Okay, now go cry and throw up.

I almost forgot! Sunday pug blogging, also known as plogging, from here on out. Forgive the lack of last week; China was out of town.

She’s got such a lovely profile, don’t you think?