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So who among us doesn’t want to feel younger, stronger, richer, smarter, and more heroic between the sheets?
The problem is, achieving these goals is hard. They take work. Discipline. Luck. Talent.
We’d need to eat kale. Study hard. Forgo alcohol. Sign up for a PX90.
And that makes us feel, like, ugh. Where’s the remote?
So how about a shortcut to stardom?
Got it.
As anyone who’s visited a pharmacy knows, there’s no dearth of potions promising vigor, happiness and superior wit — or at least a healthier prostate. Just hand-over some cash, and swallow with 8 ounces of water.
Not buying it?
Westerners are by no means alone in seeking such shortcuts.
In Asia, concoctions purporting to carry super-hero powers are not just ubiquitous. They’ve been around for centuries. In some may lie Big Pharma’s next billion dollar blockbuster — Artemisinin, a key malaria drug, is derived from traditional Chinese medicine. Some are placebos. Others are toxic.
Either way, they tend to be somewhat more exotic than what you get at CVS.
This list, compiled by our Asia correspondents, includes some of the more noteworthy.
But be forewarned: We have no evidence that they work better than the concoctions in the vitamin aisle.
And some (i.e. human sacrifice) are downright hazardous.
1) Deer antler snuff
Imagine inhaling a horn through one’s nostrils. Few things sound less appealing. But such is the putative potency of deer antler velvet that American athletes have taken to snorting the stuff to partake of its growth-inducing properties.
In the corpus of traditional Chinese medicine, deer antler is believed to impart strength, energy, and vitality because of growth hormones in the horns. In Asia, it is generally consumed as a tea made from boiling horn slices. (Dried horn is sold in buckets on my street, whose name in Chinese means “Ginseng and Deer Antler Road.”)
This remedy has caught on in the West in the form of nose spray. Athletes think it helps repair their tendons and muscles. Last year, Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis drew controversy when he admitted he had snorted antler spray to fix a torn tricep.
The science is still out on what exactly it does, but for a macho image, at least, saying you “snort horn” can’t hurt.
It’s the next best thing to the elixir of life — as long as you can get over the fact that it’s effectively a bowl of bird drool.
“Bird’s nest soup,” as it’s known in China in Hong Kong, is an expensive delicacy made from the nests of Southeast Asian birds that build their homes out of salivary excretions. Restaurants charge anywhere from $ 30 to $ 100 for a bowl of “soup,” which resembles a clear, gloopy jelly.
While I have little appetite for other, more exotic Cantonese specialties — rat, cat, civet, dog, snake — this is one that I can stomach. It’s sweet, delicate, a little refreshing — and more importantly, it’s reputed to keep you safe from Father Time.
By Ben Carlson in Hong Kong
3) Raw baby octupus
Chopped up and served raw, Sannakji is a baby octopus whose tentacles squirm and twist on the plate. Diners dip the delicacy in sesame oil and chew thoroughly, resisting the grip of suction cups that cling to their cheeks and tongue.
Tempted?
If so, eat with caution. Each year a handful of Koreans swallow hastily and suffocate from a tentacle stuck to the throat. Yet for some, the risk is worth the reward: Koreans say that men who survive the wet and slimy treat can count on elevated sexual power.
But in nearly all restaurants, the invertebrates are already dead before being cut up. Nerve activity keeps the tentacles wriggling. Consider this seasonal summer dish, a pride of the southern coastal city of Busan, an opportunity to savor the world’s most stomach-wrenching, alleged virility-endowing seafood.
By Geoff Cain in Seoul
4) Vietnamese serpent wine
Fear gripped me the first time I put the stuff to my lips. I would have passed on the offer, but it was one of those cross-cultural situations that simply demand acquiescence.
The offer: A highball of wretched smelling, potent rice wine, home-brewed in the Mekong Delta, and marinated in a glass urn filled with dead serpents — snakes, lizards and all manner of bizarre reptiles.
The promise: In addition to the usual bonhomie that from sharing a drink, my visa status depended on this bonding ritual. Plus, the serpent tonic, I was told, would keep me healthy for 6 months. It would impart gusto, make me more manly.
The offerer: My editor at the Communist Party’s English language daily in Saigon (a man whose success depended on speaking so softly that no one could ever hear him, let alone object to what he’d say). We had an unwritten, unspoken deal: I’d fix his writers’ English; He would let me continue filing magazine stories for foreign publications, despite a nebulous work visa status.
There were venomous snakes in that liquor, and while I’d seen him drink the stuff and survive, I’d also watched Southeast Asians eat food so spicy that it would just blow a hole in my stomach.
In the end I survived, and grew to enjoy this ritual. Did the elixir work? Well, let’s just say I didn’t get sick much for a while.
By David Case, formerly in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Unfortunately, attaining super-natural powers is not all about eating.
Every year or two, police in India arrest someone for performing a human sacrifice in the hope of attaining wealth or magical powers.
Usually offered to the Hindu goddess Kali, the sacrifice purportedly grants the person who performs it power over his enemies, according to ancient texts. But in most modern cases, some poor, illiterate perpetrator hoping to change his fortune performs the sacrifice on the advice of a tantric — a kind of witch doctor who himself claims magical powers, such as the ability to put curses on people or even kill with the touch of his hand.
This is India, so more than occasionally, the tragedy plays as farce. Last summer, for instance, a gang of robbers confessed to attempting to strangle a man because a tantrik offered them a hefty sum for the rope used in the murder – only to refuse to pay when it turned out to be a dud.
In years past, atheist crusader Sanal Edamaruku challenged such a tantrik to kill him with his touch on live TV. Nothing happened, apart from stellar ratings.
Proponents of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) often insist that the new standards are not a federal takeover of education. Actually, Common Core supporters could be right in one sense: Common Core is not so much about a nationalization of education as it is part of a world-wide initiative that may ultimately serve to make American values and practices secondary to global sharing.
Writing at Crisis Magazine, journalist Mary Jo Anderson asserts that Common Core is nothing less than the latest attempt by the U.N. to impose on the United States a globalist perspective with the utopian goals of worldwide peace, environmental sustainability, and economic fairness. In that context, Common Core is part of the Obama administration’s “transformational” education plan that places emphasis on global relationships rather than a unique American culture.
It is commonly known that Common Core is being financed with more than $ 150 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In addition, the Gates Foundation has collaborated with the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
In 2004, Gates’ Microsoft Corporation signed a Cooperation Agreement with UNESCO to develop a “master curriculum” which would include benchmarks and a testing program. According to the agreement, “UNESCO will explore how to facilitate content development.”
In the Agreement, UNESCO maps out its intention to establish “Knowledge Communities,” which it defines as “web-based communities of practice in UNESCO’s fields.” The goal is to create, through Information and Communication Technology (ICT) throughout the globe, communities without borders, in a sense, so that all students around the world are learning similar content and sharing knowledge. As many Americans are aware, Common Core relies heavily upon increased broadband width. In at least some states and local school districts, total reconstruction of Internet capabilities has been necessary.
According to Anderson, in this concept of globalism that UNESCO and Microsoft proposed, “a nation is permitted to keep its surface culture, such as language, music, and cuisine. But patriotism, religion, and individualism are anathema, as each competes with the globalist vision of world harmony.”
Anderson writes that the most efficient way to urge a nation to abandon its culture and natural resources is to “invest in education to ensure that the coming generation will embrace the principles of globalism as a natural consequence of their formation.”
Despite the continued, overt insistence of the Obama administration–and some prominent Republicans–that Common Core is a state and local endeavor, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has actively promoted the standards in the U.S. Recently, however, he may have dealt a serious blow to the endeavor, with a controversial comment made during a meeting of state schools superintendents. Feeling the heat of increased opposition to Common Core, Duncan said that those who oppose the new standards are “white suburban moms who – all of a sudden – their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought.”
In 2010, Duncan addressed UNESCO, and in his remarks said that education would be the “beacon” that would light the way to stem a “global economic crisis.” Offering “two overarching messages” about America’s efforts to “transform” education and achievement, Duncan said:
First, the Obama administration has an ambitious and unified theory of action that propels our agenda. The challenge of transforming education in America cannot be met by quick-fix solutions or isolated reforms. It can only be accomplished with a clear, coherent, and coordinated vision of reform.
Second, while America must improve its stagnant educational and economic performance, President Obama and I both reject the protectionist Cold War-era assumption that improving economic competitiveness is somehow a zero-sum game, with one nation’s gain being another country’s loss.
Duncan cited Obama in the latter’s speech “to the Muslim world in Cairo” in 2009: “Any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.”
“In the United States, we feel an economic and moral imperative to challenge the status quo,” Duncan said. “Closing the achievement gap and closing the opportunity gap is the civil rights issue of our generation.”
Lamenting the high number of high school dropouts in the United States, Duncan said that global “partnerships” will inspire students to take responsibility for the betterment of the global community.
“A just and socially responsible society must also be anchored in civic engagement for the public good,” he said. “Education, as Nelson Mandela says, ‘is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.’”
Ironically, Duncan also touted in his UNESCO address that President Obama “wants to expand school choice to encourage innovation – and spread the effective practices of high-performing schools to all schools.”
It is doubtful, however, that school choice is in President Obama’s “transformational” education plan, as most Americans define it.
Recently, the Department of Justice challenged the state of Louisiana in court for starting a scholarship program that frees low-income minority children from failing schools. Last Friday, Attorney General Eric Holder decided to drop the initial lawsuit and instead announced he will seek to require Louisiana to submit to a bureaucratic review process that would mandate all voucher application information be sent to the federal government prior to awards being granted to students.
Similarly, the Obama administration has had a history of fighting the successful Washington, D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP).
The message from the Obama administration, then, seems to be that school choice will be tolerated only if it is regulated by the federal government.
Duncan went on to tell UNESCO the Obama administration has set a goal that the United States “will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world,” a goal that “can only be achieved by creating a strong cradle-to-career continuum that starts with early childhood learning and extends all the way to college and careers.”
Finally, in his description of the plans to achieve this goal, Duncan went on to tell UNESCO how the Obama administration used its Race to the Top stimulus bill grants to entice states to participate in the Common Core standards.
Barack Obama said he would “fundamentally transform” the United States of America. He has failed at transforming America’s economy and America’s health care system. Are American parents willing to trust his plan to transform their children’s education?
