This Monday, February 23, the senate passed the New Jersey Compassionate Use Medical Marijuana Act in a vote 22-16 with two abstentions. This bill is supposed to aid patients with debilitating diseases (e.g. cancer, glaucoma, AIDS) and other disorders that cause “wasting syndrome, severe or chronic pain, seizures and severe and persistent muscle spasms.” Patients with a special ID (acquired thru a doctor’s recommendation and approval by the Department of Health and Senior Services) could have up to six plants or one ounce of marijuana. Also, the state would license “compassion centers” that grow and distribute plants. If the bill passes in the Assembly and is then signed by the governor, New Jersey will be the 14th state to create a sanctioned medical marijuana program. The Assembly version of the bill, sponsored by Assemblymen Reed Gusciora, (D-Mercer), Michael Patrick Carroll (R-Morris) and Joan Voss (D-Hudson), will likely face opposition from groups like the Drug Free School Coalition. But, considering that Massachusetts decriminalized marijuana in November, New Jersey is likely to be the next state to follow suit. NJ governor Jon Corzine said he would "absolutely" sign the bill.

N.J. Senate approves bill allowing the use of medical merijuana, NJ.com
NJ god says he’d sign medical marijuana law, Newsday.com
Coalition for Medical Marijuana - New Jersey (CMMNJ.org)

A new study in Psychological Science explores the relationship between religion and support of extreme forms of parochial altruism, such as suicide attacks. The researchers have found that support for such activities is related less to what religion one practices, and more how often one participates in collective religious rituals. First, they surveyed Palestinian Muslims on their attitude towards religion, how often they prayed, went to masque, and whether they supported suicide attacks. The result was that those who attended masque more than once a day were more likely to support such, while devotion to Islam and frequency of prayer did not play a strong role in the opinion. Second, they surveyed some Israeli Jews living in West Bank and Gaza about their synagogue attendance, prayer and support of suicide attacks against Palestinians. Result, 23% of those asked about synagogue attendance supported the attacks, contrasted with 6% questioned about prayer. Lastly, the researchers surveyed six religious majorities – Mexican Catholics, Indonesian Muslims, Israeli Jews, Russian Orthodox in Russia, British Protestants and Indian Hindus – to check the theory across a spectrum of cultural contexts, and again the results showed that support for extreme parochial altruism was influenced by religious services and unrelated to frequency of prayer. This study helps further the understanding of group psychology’s influence on the self-destruction of the individual and revealing of organized religion’s violent origins (see: Rene Girard on the single victim mechanism). The research was authored by Jeremy Ginges and Ian Hansen from the New School for Social Research and psychologist Ara Norenzayan from the University of British Columbia.

Study Suggests Collective Religious Rituals, Not Religious Devotion, Spur Support for Suicide Attacks, PsychologicalScience.org

Man Enough: An Interdisciplinary New York University Graduate Student Colloquium on Masculinity, presents:

Institution, Work and the Masculine Self.

On Thursday, 19 February 2009, 5-7 pm, in the Great Room, 1st Floor, 19 University Place, New York City

Free and open to the public

What role do work and institution play in the gendered construction of masculine self-consciousness and what are the effects of hegemonic masculinities as constructed through work? How have the changing concepts of “man’s work” or the “all-male sphere”, over the last century or so, operated upon male self awareness, representation and action, and what relationships may be perceived between the construction of masculinity through institution and work, and military interventionism? Centered around a discussion of these and related topics our panel features:

‘The Literary Study of Victorian Masculinities’ – Benedick Turner, PhD, Department of English, NYU

‘Keeping Workers Out of the Spineless Class: Samuel Gompers, the American Federation of Labor, and Masculinity in the Making of Labor’s Foreign Policy, 1895-1918’ – Justin Jackson, PhD candidate, Department of History, Columbia University

Film screening: ‘Debating Masculinity’: A short film of interviews with five leading voices in masculinity studies – Introduced by Josep M. Armengol, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Professor, Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, SUNY at Stony Brook

Moderator: Josep M. Armengol

Man Enough Blog

The first stanza of Jabberwocky first appeared in Misch-Masch (a series of private periodicals for his siblings, which Carroll wrote and illustrated) in 1855, when Carroll was 23, under the heading “Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry.”

 After interpreting the different words, he wrote:

 Hence the literal English of the passage is: ‘It was evening, and the smooth active badgers were scratching and boring holes in the hill-side; all unhappy were the parrots; and the grave turtles squeaked out.’

There were probably sundials on the top of the hill, and the ‘borogoves’ were afraid that their nests would be undermined. The hill was probably full of the nests of ‘raths’, which ran out, squeaking with fear, on hearing the ‘toves’ scratching outside. This is an obscure, but yet deeply-affecting, relic of ancient Poetry.

A Possible Interpretation

Stanza 1: Around 4pm, the toves spin and screw near a sundial, while the depressed birds turn up their noses and the foolish kneeling land-turtles whistle and sneeze.

Stanza 2: Words of caution in the Name of the Father, who warns to beware the Jabberwock, the thing that speaks incoherently, thereby destroying sense. Also, the Son should avoid the bird in passion that has no release as it lives in isolation, for this perhaps makes its thoughts muddled, as well as the raging Bandersnatch, which Carroll does not define possibly on account of its lewd origin

Stanza 3: So, wielding a vorpal sword, the Word as Gospel, he goes off seeking his foe. On the way, he stops by the monotonously rustling tree and contemplates awhile.

Stanza 4: But, unlike Buddha’s serene meditation under the Bodhi tree, the Son’s mind is turbulent, and suddenly the Jabberwock appears. It’s whiffling and burbling could be huffing and puffing (like the Wolf in Three Little Pigs), but could also mean that it’s whistling lightly, mumbling to itself, or just talking to itself in a silly way.

Stanza 5: One, two! One, two! The Son, through binary oppositional logic, slays the nonsensical metaphoric beast, his sword laughing as it feeds. Upon cutting off the Jabberwock’s head, the Son galumphs home, though this can mean either that he is galloping triumphantly as a hero, or that he moves clumsily and slow, in which case maybe the Jabberwock was no real threat and killing it was unnecessary.

Stanza 6: The Father welcomes the Son back, rejoicing with open arms. Yet the restraint of his laughter hints at insincerity, and his caveats on the Jabberwock’s danger may have been false.

Stanza 7/1: The story comes full circle and starts anew, perhaps this time with the hero in the role of the Father talking to his Son.

Limerick for Miss Vera Beringer (1869)
There was a young lady of station
“I love man” was her sole exclamation
But when men cried, “You flatter”
She replied, “Oh! no matter
Isle of Man is the true explanation.”

There are a couple of Gaelic words in the poem, particularly ‘rath’ and ‘manxome’. Carroll clarified that ‘rath’ rhymes with ‘bath’, hence it is a homonym with ‘wrath’. The limerick above makes a plausible case that ‘manxome’ is related to Manx (the Ancient Gaelic spoken on the Isle of Man, as well as a type of cat native to the island), and so could mean ‘of man’. In combination as ‘wrath of man’, this possibly hidden connection may refer to the violence done to meaning through binary opposition logic and blind obedience to the Name of the Father.

This is a "death van" used in China as an alternative to the traditional method of execution by firing squad. Manufactured by Jinguan Auto, a maker of ambulances, the van has a sliding stretcher that comes out the back, so as to avoid the brutal scene of dragging the condemned prisoner onboard for their lethal cocktail. It also comes equiped with a live video feed to broadcast the executions. Certain critics argue that the vehicle makes it easier for authorities to engage in illegal organ harvesting of the prisoners, difficult to verify, since no one is allowed to view the corpses of the executed prior to cremation. Amnesty International reports that the profits from organ sales may be part of the reason China refuses to abandon the death penalty. According to Kang Zhongwen, designer of the vehicle, the shift from shooting people in the back of the head to poisoning them in the back of a bus reflects how China "promotes human rights now." It’s also a horror movie begging to be made.

China Makes Ultimate Punishment Mobile, USAToday.com

Social scientist and engineer Noshir Contractor of Northwestern University conducted a curious study on the social dynamics of virtual reality using the popular game EverQuest II. Using 60 terabytes of game data and a survey of 7,000 players, Contractor found several “structural signatures”, particular kinds of social network configurations:

Many players underestimate the time they spend playing the game
The amount of players who admit to being depressed is disproportionately high
Women don’t like to play with other women
The average player is not a teenager, the mean age being 25-26
Most people play with others from the same general geographic area

Virtual Games Players Stick Close To Home, ScienceDaily.com

Intellectual Love, by me

A new psychological study suggests that it is the experience of making certain purchases (like movie tickets, meals in restaurants) that bring us happiness, by satisfying higher order needs for social acceptance and vitality, rather than the actual products involved. "These findings support an extension of basic need theory, where purchases that increase psychological need satisfaction will produce the greatest well-being," said Ryan Howell of San Francisco State University. In his experiment, Howell asked participants to answer a series of questions about recent purchases. The common theme was that people saw experiential purchases as money better spent, regardless of the amount spent or the income of the individual. “Purchased experiences provide memory capital… We don’t tend to get bored of happy memories like we do with a material object”.

Buying experiences, not possessions, leads to greater happiness, EurekAlert.org