Not according to Kerry Campbell and her daughter Britney. who regularly has Botox injections and also gets “virgin” waxes even though she has not yet hit puberty. You know, ‘cos being 8 can be rough on your skin! From the UK’s Daily Mail:

California mum Kerry Campbell has come under fire after admitting she injects her young daughter Britney with Botox to get rid of ‘wrinkles’ that appear on the girl’s face when she smiles.

...

Kerry also admitted to waxing her daughter in the name of pageant success.

‘They call it little fluffy hair,’ she said. ‘They get judged on all that stuff. It’s a tough world, the pageant world, I’m telling you. The kids are harsh.’
Eight-year-old Britney added: ‘I just don’t think it’s ladylike to have hair on your legs. I did that one time. It was super, super hard. It hurts.”

Thanks to Samantha Veal for the link, who would like to make it known that she is NOT a regular reader of the Daily Mail.

 
William Burroughs ponders the atom bomb, UFOs, dreams, psychedelics, astral projection, space travel, Brion Gysin and the cut-up technique in this lecture held at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado on August 11, 1980. Allen Ginsberg takes part toward the end.

In an experiment based on the cut-up technique, video of apocalyptic scenes from various Japanese monster films were randomly juxtaposed with Burroughs lecture. There are moments of synchronicity that are both humorous and bizarre and at times genuinely resonant. I think the Burroughs video mashup illustrates how randomness is often not as random as it seems and accidents often reveal hidden truths that are not accidental.

In light of recent developments in Japan, Burroughs comments on nuclear energy and the atomic bomb are particularly on point and prophetic.
 

 
I’m decorating my entire apartment with these.
 
Via Don’t Ride The White Horse

 
Man these folks are spangled to the gills. Jaws are gurning, teeth grinding, eyes bugging and rolling in this security camera video from a 1991 rave in Doncaster, England.

I get a surge of dopamine just watching this thing.

The DJ that uploaded the video to Youtube says it’s edited down from four hours of footage. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the uncut DVD boxset.

Meet you in the K-hole.
 

 
Via Funkagenda

 
The insignias, uniforms, weaponry and branded jewelry of Mexican drug cartels are that of a military organization with a street gang sensibility. On display in this video are the gear, regalia and deadly bling belonging to The Zetas, CDG (Cartel del Golfo) and Sinaloa cartels.
 

 
Via Warren Ellis.

 
Satoshi Kanazawa is an evolutionary psychologist at LSE and the coauthor of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters (a book, I highly recommend, no pun intended). He also has a great blog on Psychology Today’s website.

Kanazawa has a theory, which he calls the “Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis” which goes something like this: “Intelligence” evolved as a coping mechanism of sorts (maybe stress-related?) to deal with “evolutionary novelties”—that is to say, to help humankind respond to things in their environment to which they were previously, as a species, unaccustomed to. An adaptation strategy, in other words.

Translation: Smart folk are more likely to try “new” things and to seek out novel experiences. Like drugs.

How else to explain toad licking? Someone, uh, “smart” had to figure that one out, originally, right? Someone intelligent had to come up with the idea to synthesize opium into heroin, yes? Yes.

But to be clear, and not to misrepresent his theories, Kanazawa clearly states (in the subtitle) that “Intelligent people don’t always do the right thing,” either…

Consistent with the prediction of the Hypothesis, the analysis of the National Child Development Study shows that more intelligent children in the United Kingdom are more likely to grow up to consume psychoactive drugs than less intelligent children.  Net of sex, religion, religiosity, marital status, number of children, education, earnings, depression, satisfaction with life, social class at birth, mother’s education, and father’s education, British children who are more intelligent before the age of 16 are more likely to consume psychoactive drugs at age 42 than less intelligent children.

The following graph shows the association between childhood general intelligence and the latent factor for the consumption of psychoactive drugs, constructed from indicators for the consumption of 13 different types of psychoactive drugs (cannabis, ecstasy, amphetamines, LSD, amyl nitrate, magic mushrooms, cocaine, temazepan, semeron, ketamine, crack, heroin, and methadone).  As you can see, there is a clear monotonic association between childhood general intelligence and adult consumption of psychoactive drugs.  “Very bright” individuals (with IQs above 125) are roughly three-tenths of a standard deviation more likely to consume psychoactive drugs than “very dull” individuals (with IQs below 75).

 

 
Shit, I must’ve been pretty smart because I purt’near crossed almost everything off this list (except for the sleeping pills) by the time I was seventeen!

Kanazawa concludes:

Consistent with the prediction of the Hypothesis, the analysis of the National Child Development Study shows that more intelligent children in the United Kingdom are more likely to grow up to consume psychoactive drugs than less intelligent children. ... “Very bright” individuals (with IQs above 125) are roughly three-tenths of a standard deviation more likely to consume psychoactive drugs than “very dull” individuals (with IQs below 75).

If that pattern holds across societies, then it runs directly counter to a lot of our preconceived notions about both intelligence and drug use:

People—scientists and civilians alike—often associate intelligence with positive life outcomes.  The fact that more intelligent individuals are more likely to consume alcohol, tobacco, and psychoactive drugs tampers this universally positive view of intelligence and intelligent individuals.  Intelligent people don’t always do the right thing, only the evolutionarily novel thing.

Speaking for myself—and I wasn’t a very innocent child by any stretch of the imagination—I was already trying to smoke banana peels (“They call it ‘Mellow Yellow’) and consuming heaping spoonfuls of freshly ground nutmeg when I was just ten-years-old. I got the banana peels idea, yes, from reading about the Donovan song and its supposed “hidden meaning.” The nutmeg idea came from the infamous appendix of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, which I was able to pick up at the local mall (When my aunt, visiting from Chicago, caught wind of what my 4th grade reading material was, she was shocked—and told my mother so—but little did she know that I was already at that age actively trying my damnedest to get my hands on some real drugs).

This study explains a lot, I think. An awful lot!

Why Intelligent People Use More Drugs (Psychology Today)

A photo of Morningstar Ranch featured in Time Magazine in 1967.
 
By the time I visited Morningstar Ranch (aka The Digger Farm) in 1968 it was becoming a suburb of the Haight Ashbury. Young hippies, like myself, were drifting through the Sebastopol commune not quite knowing why we there but feeling we needed to be there. It felt less like an actual community than a halfway house for people yearning for community. None of us were actually ready to settle down yet. We were too fucking young. The idea of going back to the land was nice in theory, but we were still digging what the cities had to offer: rock clubs, bookstores, Love Burger on Haight St., hot water and supermarkets.

Lou Gottlieb founded Morningstar Ranch in 1966. A former member of the folk group The Limelighters, Lou had a spiritual epiphany and felt compelled to explore alternatives to the status quo approach to living. Morningstar was Lou’s experiment in communal living, a work in progress that wasn’t really work but some kind of joyous attempt at re-defining how we lived as neighbors, lovers and caretakers of planet Earth.

Morningstar had an anarchic spirit. It was literally open to everyone. What you did when you got there was up to you. I don’t remember any rules. Most of us didn’t have the discipline or patience to become active members of Lou’s wild dream. We were either too lazy, too restless, or both. There was a core group that kept the place functioning as a community, but for the most part nomadic flower children passed through the place on their way to something called the future.

In nearby Palo Alto, the beginning of virtual realities were stirring in the shadows of mainframe computers.

Long before he co-founded The Hackers Conference, The WELL (considered by many to be the first online social network) and the Global Business Network, Stewart Brand was staging acid tests with Ken Kesey and his ragtag band of Merry Pranksters. Brand, who popularized the term personal computer in his book II Cybernetics Frontiers, took his first dose of acid at the International Foundation for Advanced Study in 1962.

The proto-cybergeeks conjuring electric magic in what would eventually be known as Silicon Valley were dropping Owsley and conceiving realities in which brain meat interfaced with machine and the mind could perceive itself in its true limitless state. Many of these bearded outlaws from computerland were Gottlieb’s close friends and early pilgrims to Morningstar.

We - the generation of the ‘60s - were inspired by the “bards and hot-gospellers of technology,” as business historian Peter Drucker described media maven Marshall McLuhan and technophile Buckminster Fuller. And we bought enthusiastically into the exotic technologies of the day, such as Fuller’s geodesic domes and psychoactive drugs like LSD. We learned from them, but ultimately they turned out to be blind alleys. Most of our generation scorned computers as the embodiment of centralized control. But a tiny contingent - later called “hackers” - embraced computers and set about transforming them into tools of liberation. That turned out to be the true royal road to the future.”  Stewart Brand (founder of The Whole Earth Catalog).

In this short clip from Canadian television, Lou envisions a cybernetic world where machines do the work while humans have all the fun.
 

 
Hunter Thompson ran for Sheriff in Aspen, Colorado in 1970. His campaign posters featured a fist clenching a peyote button. While running on a platform to legalize drugs, he promised that if elected, he wouldn’t do any mescaline while on duty. He clearly spelled out his plan for punishing drug dealers:

It will be the general philosophy of the sheriff’s office that no drug worth taking shall be sold for money. My first act as sheriff will be to install on the sheriff’s lawn a set of stocks to punish dishonest dope dealers.”

Hunter lost the election. Aspen continued its decline into an enclave for the super rich.

Here’s his ad campaign for Sheriff:
 

 
Via biblioklept

 
In another twist on the apparent death of 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden, it turns out that US Special Forces were pretty much helpless to find the world’s most wanted terrorist.

It took one of Jamaica’s most heroic and physically capable dreads, Konfu Dread, to use his “so excellent” kung-fu powers—which he deems “amongst the greatest”—to take down the man who eluded so many leaders and armed forces. 
 

 
After the jump: all four ass-kicking episodes of the Konfu Dread saga so far!

 
I’ll have what he’s having, please. BTW, the gentleman regains consciousness at the 1:54 mark.

 
(via Unique Daily)