text:
hir ze! 3
The transgender population of the US is now estimated to be o.3% of the total.
The rest of us 322,000,000+* have to be real nice to them. For their sakes we must all make changes in the way we live and the way we speak. The government orders us to. And it tells us how. And it will punish us with the full force of the law if we disobey.
But with the best will in the world, what is to be done about the huge problem troubling government, business, states, stores, restaurants, hotels, schools, the military, the police, progressives and moralists: Which public bathroom/restroom/locker-room should transgenders use, the one reserved for the gender they started out as, or the one reserved for the gender they have become or are becoming or would like to become?
It is the dilemma of the age.
From Truth Revolt, by Trey Sanchez:
Welcome to Obama's America, where the government will provide you a list of approved words to speak and those you must never utter. Any violators will be punished and issued stiff fines.
It would sound like a conspiracy theory if it weren't true, but it's already happening in places like New York City and Chicago.
The following are legal requirements made by New York City's Commission on Human Rights:
The NYCHRL [New York City Human Rights Law] requires employers, landlords, and all businesses and professionals to use an employee's, tenant's, customer's, or client's preferred name, pronoun and title (eg. Ms./Mrs.) regardless of the individual's sex assigned at birth, anatomy, gender, medical history, appearance, or the sex indicated on the individual's identification.
Most individuals and many transgender people use female or male pronouns and titles. Some transgender and gender non-conforming people prefer to use pronouns other than he/him/his or she/her/hers, such as they/them/theirs or ze/hir. [Footnote: Ze and hir are popular gender-free pronouns preferred by some transgender and/or gender non-conforming individuals.] …
This isn't just the government as employer, requiring its employees to say things that keep government patrons happy with government services. This is the government as sovereign, threatening "civil penalties up to $125,000 for violations, and up to $250,000 for violations that are the result of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct" if people don't speak the way the government tells them to speak.
These government-enforced rules don't apply just to adult citizens but to children as well. The Chicago Public School (CPS) system has now decreed that children must address teachers and classmates with their preferred gender pronouns and if they willfully refuse, they face charges of sexual harassment according to Title IX discrimination policies.
CPS Chief Education Officer Dr. Janice K. Jackson said:
The guidelines released today will help ensure every student and adult in the CPS family can participate in an environment of complete tolerance and respect. CPS, like much of the country, has become far more aware of the needs and experiences of the transgender community, and it's crucial for CPS guidelines to reflect our commitment to promoting safe and inclusive schools. These guidelines build on our commitment to fostering healthy and supportive learning opportunities across the District so that each of our students can reach their full potential.
What's more, students who decide to change their gender at school aren't required to notify their parents and in fact are protected by the school if they would like to keep the decision confidential:
When speaking with other staff members, parents, guardians, or third parties, school staff should not disclose a student's preferred name, pronoun, or other confidential information pertaining to the student's transgender or gender nonconforming status without the student's permission, unless authorized to do so by the Law Department.
Whoa! New problem coming up right there. How will they allude to the student under discussion? The right (preferred) pronoun could let the secret out. But the wrong pronoun could put the staff member, parent, guardian, or third party in trouble with the law.
And that's not all. A tide of problems is washing in:
This is all going to get extremely difficult to navigate as "gender fluid" folks can change their gender status based on how they are feeling on any given day. Will anyone be able to keep with when "ze" is better than "he" or when "sie" is more appropriate than "she" since the rules themselves are just as fluid?
And who gives his full blessing to the government forcing its ideology about gender on the rest of the country? None other than President Obama himself, who recently gave his own decree to the nation's public schools, threatening litigation and loss of federal funding if students aren't allowed to enter the bathroom of their choice while under the care of the state.
This is no longer a plot from some fictional dystopia. It's reality.
It is to be hoped that when the history of America in 2016 comes to be written, historians will understand that the most important issue facing the government then, in the last year of the 44th president, was not the advancing conquest of the Western world by Islam; not the bellicose threats of Russia to nations under the NATO defense umbrella; not the wars raging in the Middle East; not the vast trade imbalance between the US and China; not Third World poverty; not the zika epidemic; not even the looming general election that would decide the future of the nation and the rest of the world, but the issue of which bathroom transgenders should use.
We hope this post will be of help to them.
*The US population was computed to be 322,762,018 at the start of 2016.
Pretzels from Neptune 6
We are about to make sweeping generalizations, with no attempt to accommodate all shades of opinion. ( Shades of opinion are welcome in comment.)
Left and Right inhabit different universes of discourse. Completely different issues concern them.
The biggest issues on the American Left (in random order) are:
- Climate and the Environment
- Sex
- Race
- Social Justice
To elaborate a little more:
The Left – internationally – holds man-made global warming to be an urgent threat to all life on earth, and tries in the name of saving the planet to force redistribution of wealth over the whole world, the redistributing agent being ideally a world government run according to Leftist values.
The one freedom the Left passionately advocates for is that of Each to seek sexual satisfaction of any kind, and for Each to choose a personal sexual identity, all personal choices connected with sex to be protected by law and subsidized financially, where required, by government.
The Left catalogues all Americans and all foreign nations according to a race analysis, according to which the white race is privileged and oppressive, and all institutions, led by government, have a moral duty to compensate non-whites and handicap whites.
All inequalities between sexes, races, and classes are considered by the Left to be unjust, the injustice being perpetrated by institutions and needing to be corrected by government using any means, including quotas for opportunity and advancement; adjustment of standards for inclusion and compensation; enforced limitations on the expression of dissenting opinion; the redistribution of wealth and power.
The Right does not concern itself with these issues unless compelled to, in which case its dismissive opinion of them is:
Man-made global warming is not true and would not be a bad thing if it were.
Sex is a private matter, only of public concern if it harms children.
Race is irrelevant to all political issues.
All justice is personal, having no meaning apart from the individual; standards must be upheld; power belongs to the powerful and cannot be bestowed; wealth is inescapably unequal in a free society, equality and liberty being mutually exclusive.
The biggest issues on the American Right (also in random order) are:
- Individual freedom
- The economy
- Defense
- The Constitution
A little more:
The Right holds that individual freedom is the highest value. All innovation, all progress, depends on it. It requires absolute freedom of speech. The prime duty of government is to protect it.
Capitalism is the only system that lifts people out of poverty and secures prosperity. The Right wants the free market to be left to operate without government interference.
The government's duty of protection requires a strong military to defend the nation from foreign attack; to maintain America's superpower status of which the Right is proud; and specifically at this time to stop the advance of Islam and its terrorism.
The Constitution established the best possible system of government for a free society and the Right holds that it must be upheld and defended in its entirety.
The Left does not concern itself with these issues unless compelled to, in which case its dismissive opinion of them is:
The individual is less important than the collective, and individual interests are always subordinate to those of the collective.
Capitalism is evil, it values profits above people, it allows some to be rich while it keeps the many poor. The economy needs to be planned centrally by government for the equal good of all.
Wars should never be fought. Spending money on the military is a huge waste. America should not be the world's policeman. It should not be a superower.
The Constitution is an outdated document. It says nothing about slavery. It stands in the way of an enlightened executive, such as President Obama's, hampering his laudable efforts to change America into a more equal society.
Plainly, there is no common ground between Left and Right.
Dennis Prager writes at Townhall:
Just about all candidates for president regularly announce their intent to unite Americans, to "bring us together".
It's a gimmick.
If they are sincere, they are profoundly naive; if they are just muttering sweet nothings in order to seduce Americans to vote for them, they are manipulative.
In his acceptance speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, John Kerry, one of the most polarizing figures in modern American political history, said, "Maybe some just see us divided into those red states and blue states, but I see us as one America: red, white and blue."
And President Barack Obama, who has disunited Americans by race, class and gender perhaps more than any president since the beginning of the 20th century, regularly campaigned on the theme of uniting Americans.
In his 2008 victory speech, President-elect Barack Obama said: "We have never been just a collection of … red states and blue states. We are, and always will be, the United States of America."
In their current campaigns for president, Republican Gov. John Kasich and Democrat Hillary Clinton regularly proclaim their intention to bring Americans together. He, one suspects, because he is naive, and she, because she will say pretzels come from Neptune if it will garner votes.
Bringing people together is actually the theme of John Kasich's entire campaign.
One headline on the "Meet John" page of his website says, "BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER, LIFTING PEOPLE UP."
Senator Rob Portman said of Kasich on Feb. 1, 2016, "I am endorsing John Kasich because I believe he is the person our country needs to bring Americans together."
And Clinton, who, according to CNN, is tied with Trump for the most negatives in presidential polling for either Republicans or Democrats since 1984, also speaks repeatedly about her ability and desire to bring Americans together.
The "Hillary Clinton for President Supporters" Facebook page has even said, "We're in the business of bringing people together."
What's more, on April 6, 2016, CNN posted a YouTube video titled: "Hillary Clinton — We need a president who can bring people together."
Lanny Davis, who served as special counsel to former President Bill Clinton, wrote on The Hill website that "Clinton wants to bring us together".
Beyond Kasich and Clinton, Sen. Bernie Sanders made this a major theme in one of his ads called "Together", which begins with Sanders saying, "Our job is to bring people together."
Even Trump, who divides Republicans – not to mention other Americans – like no Republican ever has, uses this mantra.
A January article on The Hill site quoted Trump saying, "I can really bring people together."
Gov. Chris Christie introduced Trump on Super Tuesday, and a NJ.com column released that night was titled, "Christie on Super Tuesday: Trump is 'bringing the country together'."
For the record, Sen. Ted Cruz speaks about uniting Republicans, but not often about uniting all Americans.
All calls for unity by Democrats are particularly fraudulent. Dividing Americans by race, gender and class is how the left views America and how Democratic candidates seek to win elections.
But calls for unity are meaningless no matter who makes them, because no one who calls for unity tells you what they really mean. What they really mean is that they want to unite Americans around their values — and around their values only.
Would Clinton be willing to unite all Americans around recognizing the human rights of the unborn? Would she be willing to unite all Americans around support for widespread gun ownership?
Of course not.
She is willing to unite Americans provided they adopt her views.
Would Sanders like to "bring people together" in support of reducing corporate and individual income taxes in order to spur the economy?
Would Kasich be in favor of "bringing Americans together" by having them all support increasing the size of government and the national debt? One hopes not.
I first realized the dishonesty of just about all calls for unity during a 10-year period in which I engaged in weekly dialogues with clergy of all faiths. Protestant and Catholic clergymen and women would routinely call for Christian unity. When I asked Protestants if they would support such unity if it entailed them adopting the sacraments of the Catholic Church and recognizing the pope as the Vicar of Christ on Earth, the discussion ended. Similarly, when I asked Catholic priests if they would give up the sacraments and the papacy in order to achieve unity with Protestant Christians, all talk of unity stopped. And, of course, the same would hold true for both Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews who routinely call for Jewish unity.
Even more absurd are the calls of naive Christians and Jews to have all the "children of Abraham" – Jewish, Christian and Muslim – unite.
The calls themselves can even be dangerous. One would be hard-pressed to name a single free society that was ever united outside of wartime. The only truly united countries are totalitarian states.
So, why do presidential candidates repeat this nonsense every four years? Because Americans fall for it every four years.
But it's time to grow up.
The gap between the left and right is unbridgeable. Their worldviews are mutually exclusive.
The Left is dangerously wrong.
What Hillary did 8
The Democratic Party must be "in denial". Is it really offering as its only candidates for the presidency an old communist – aka "a democratic socialist" – whose mind was badly made up never to change again way back in the last century; some other man no one knows or cares anything about; and, primarily, a hideously corrupt old female whose reputation is laden with more scandals than any other figure in modern American history, and is the subject of a criminal investigation by the FBI?
Yes, mirabile dictu, it is!
John Hawkins provides a useful summary of things the old woman has been and done:
Conservatives have been amusing themselves for months by watching Hillary Clinton supporters sputter out laughable answers when they're asked to name her biggest accomplishments. You can't blame them for not being able to come up with anything significant because Hillary has choked on the same question in interviews. That's one of the reasons her staffers have been shielding her from the press like a mother standing between her child and Jared Fogle.
If you want to double down on the laughs, go read an actual list of "accomplishments" on her website.
All seven "accomplishments" are things Hillary didn't have much to do with — like CHIP and the Family Medical Leave Act (Those went into effect when her husband was in office) or getting 9/11 first responders health care (Was that ever a question?). Alternately, they're just ridiculous.
"Fought for children and families for 40 years and counting."
"Told the world that 'women's rights are human rights',"
"Stood up for LGBT rights at home and abroad."
The very fact that Hillary Clinton considers those things to be "accomplishments" that she should be applauded for as opposed to things that should evoke eye-rolling and "Is she serious?" comments tells you a lot about why she shouldn't be President.
Of course, the real problem Hillary has isn't that she doesn't have achievements; it's just that they're not exploits that anyone would want to base a run at the Presidency on.
1) She has been willing to endure America's most humiliating marriage to achieve wealth and power: It's fun to guess what Hillary Clinton would have done with her life if she hadn't married Bill and ridden his coattails. City council member in Little Rock, Arkansas? EPA bureaucrat? A lawyer for Planned Parenthood? She's a very small person who latched onto her husband's very big last name.
In return, she had to stay married to a man who cheated on her. Constantly. Worse yet, not only did she know it, the whole world knows it.
Bill Clinton was impeached by the House for perjuring himself over an affair with Monica Lewinsky. He settled a sexual harassment case against Paula Jones. He was accused of sexual assault by Kathleen Willey. He was accused of rape by Juanita Broaddrick. Then there's Gennifer Flowers, Dolly Kyle Browning, Elizabeth Ward Gracen and undoubtedly dozens of other women he's slept with. Given that some of the troopers who guarded him in Arkansas claimed they procured women for him and his confirmed trips to "orgy island", the number may be in the hundreds and chances are, while you're reading this, Bill is having sex with a woman who's not Hillary Clinton. No normal woman would be so hungry for power over her fellow human beings that she would endure that and that does separate Hillary from the rest of us who aren't as desperate for power.
2) Four people are dead in Benghazi because of her: It seems hard to believe that it's even possible, but there were more than 600 ignored security requests related to Libya and the consulate in Benghazi. Had Hillary paid attention to those requests, it's entirely possible that none of our men would have died in Libya. However, Hillary claims none of those requests reached her desk. Since it's generally accepted that Hillary lies incessantly about anything and everything, maybe that's another lie. On the other hand, given that she's 68 years old, hasn't driven a car since 1996 and clearly can't handle her own email, maybe she just didn't know what she was doing. Either way, if we had a different Secretary of State, those four men would probably be alive today. Most of us have made mistakes at work, but how many of us have the guts to ask for a promotion after four people DIED because we missed hundreds of requests for help from them?
3) She was one of the worst Secretaries of State in U.S. history: Donald Trump calls her "the worst Secretary of State" in American history, but this is an old country that has had a lot of people in that position; so that may be unfair. Maybe she's just one of the worst Secretaries of State in American history. Look at what happened on her watch.
We helped radical jihadis take over in Libya and that country is falling apart. Benghazi also happened and while she was publicly telling the world a video caused it, she was privately telling people it was a terrorist attack. Additionally, we backed a radical jihadi takeover of the government in Egypt that thankfully fell apart. We pulled all our troops out of Iraq, which set the stage for ISIS to move in. Our relationship with the Israeli government deteriorated. So did our relationships with China and Russia. To top it all off, the State Department lost track of 6 billion dollars while she was Secretary of State. It would be easy to write Clinton off as a pitiable character whose ambition led her to take a job that was far too big for someone of her meager abilities, but unfortunately she's trying to use her miserable failure as Secretary of State as a stepping stone to the presidency where she could do even more damage.
4) She managed to turn a career in government service into immense wealth: Hillary and her husband managed to become filthy rich one percenters because of their government service. Granted, they did cut a few corners in the process. For example, while Bill was governor, Hillary got away with taking a nearly $100,000 bribe from Robert L. "Red" Bone via sleazy cattle futures deals. While she was Secretary of State, money poured into the pockets of her husband and the Clinton Foundation from defense contractors and foreign governments that got fat contracts from the State Department. Among the governments that funneled money into the Clinton bank account via speeches are Iran, North Korea [actually, the State Department did not permit that one! – ed] the Democratic Republic of the Congo, UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Russia and China. They paid the Clintons an awful lot of money and if Hillary becomes our next President, people might be surprised at how much those foreign governments end up getting in return for making the Clintons rich.
5) She's better at surviving sleazy scandals than anyone else: Hillary Clinton has been tied into more scandals than any other five politicians combined. Where she goes, an ocean of corruption, sleaze and controversy always follows. It's amazing in a horrific way that Hillary is still considered a serious candidate for the presidency despite having more gaffes and scandals than the entire GOP field COMBINED. It would take a book to fully detail all of them, but just to name a few, there's Emailgate, Pardongate, Whitewater, Travelgate, using the IRS to attack her political opponents, looting the White House, illegally acquiring FBI files on her Republican opponents, the Boeing payoff, the Uranium One payoff, the Norway embassy payoff, the Congo payoff, ripping off AIDS patients in the Third World, taking bribes via cattle futures, lying about landing under "sniper fire" in Bosnia, laughing about tearing apart a 12 year old girl in court to get a child rapist off and Benghazi. There are mob bosses with cleaner records than Hillary Clinton and yet, not only has she avoided prison so far, she's running for President.
An appalling record. Yet it leaves out the worst thing Hillary Clinton accomplished.
She it was who insisted that Libya be attacked from the air to help anti-Gaddafi rebels depose the dictator. That they did (and tortured him to death). Tritely she squealed, "We came, we saw, he died." And since then, Libya has been in chaos. From its shores untold multitudes of "refugees" sail for Europe. Many drown. Families are torn apart. Europe sinks.
If she could do so much harm as secretary of state, how much more could she do as president?
The French pandemonium (two) 1
Today we post under Pages (listed at the top of our margin), essay number 12 in Part Two of the series titled The Darkness of This World, by Jillian Becker.
It continues the discussion of French writers whose works are concerned with Evil, praise it, and argue passionately that it should be done.
The title of this essay is The French Pandemonium (Two). Its subjects are the twentieth century writers Georges Bataille, and – to a lesser extent – André Breton.
Here is part of the essay:
Of all the cultivators of Evil in twentieth century France, none was so devout, so persistent, or plunged so deep into moral and material muck as Georges Bataille. He hungered and lusted for Evil. He was a coprophiliac, and a necrophiliac – committing, by his own confession or boast, an incestuous sexual act, in a state of "arousal to the limit", upon his mother's corpse in the moments after her death.
Bataille wrote that human beings, as a species, should move towards "an ever more shameless awareness of the erotic bond that links them to death, to cadavers, and to horrible physical pain."
He was fascinated by the filthy, the stinking; by secretions, excretions, exudations; by things discarded, damaged, abandoned. "Bataille," wrote one of his appreciators, "displayed a quasi-religious veneration toward objects and acts that, according to the mores of bourgeois convention, were targets of opprobrium … During the '30s, Bataille's 'literary' activities centered on developing a theory of 'base matter', items and effluvia that remained impervious to assimilation by the all-consuming maw of bourgeois cultural respectability: feces, menstrual blood, cadavers, the baboon's brightly colored anus, and so forth."
But Bataille's veneration of the disgusting was not just "quasi-religious" – it was intensely religious. It was Gnostic . This the admiring writer goes on to demonstrate, though without referring to the Gnostic precedent. He writes: "Herein lie the affinities between Bataille's world view and the discourse of 'negative theology' or redemption through sin. … The duality between the 'sacred' and the 'profane' obsessed him, but the habitual signs were reversed. He elevated acts of profanation or desecration to epiphanies: singular mystical moments of Oneness with the All. … For Bataille … the act of willfully violating taboos offered privileged access to the holy."
Raised in a non-believing family, young Georges converted to Catholicism when he was seventeen, and even spent a year in a seminary studying to be a priest. When he became a priest of blasphemy, or holy sinner, he retained all the self-flagellating passion, all the pious devotion and aura of sanctity of the Catholic ecclesiastic. He remained throughout his adult life shut mentally in the box of religion with its atmosphere of incense and sulfur, its fixation on blood, pain, death and sin.
He contended that what was missing in ordinary modern life, what society lacked for full satisfaction, was the "expression of savage needs" that "subsist only at the limits of horror". And what were the "limits of horror" in Bataille's dream? Nothing less than ritual human sacrifice. The combination of agony, death, and religious rite was very much to his taste. He wrote: "Human sacrifice is loftier than any other – not in the sense that it is crueler than any other, but because it is close to the only sacrifice without trickery, which can only be the ecstatic loss of oneself."
His best of all horrors was "ecstatic loss of the self" by choice: voluntary human sacrifice. He wrote: "The movement that pushes a man to give himself (in other words, to destroy himself) completely, so that a bloody death ensues, can only be compared, in its irresistible and hideous nature, to the blinding flashes of lightning that transform the most withering storm into transports of joy." Oh, the intense joy of dying in excruciating pain! He and others in his circle formed a secret society which was to launch itself with a beheading. Every member was willing to be the sacrificial victim and have his head sawn off – but none would consent to be the executioner.
The external movement that he would have push him to transports of joy was Communism. …
You can find all of it here.
The harm that feminism has done 7
When a whole whimper of western women sex-changed into feminists – starting in the 1960s – they did not give up dependency, they simply switched from being dependent on a husband to being dependent on the state.
It was a bad move. It is generally far easier to negotiate for your wants with a single person whose life and comfort is bound up with your own, than with an indifferent bureaucracy.
Feminism is a Leftist movement – the ideology or faith of the Left being the belief that government, like a god who commands all the resources of the world and can forever pluck more out of the infinite, must and will supply your every need: cradle you, coddle you, teach you, care for you, shelter and protect you, and so give you joy.
The model American "woomin" in this dreary long age of Obama, is a fictitious feminist named Julia. Julia Government is her married name. Her channel of communication with her remote, powerful, immaterial spouse is gov dot com. She signals her needs to him, and he responds with grants and services throughout her life.
She has a child with his indirect assistance. She does not have to stay at home to care for it as women used to do. Government raises and educates it in the Faith. And to keep her occupied and in pocket, Government grants her a little business of her own – not too lucrative, nothing that would make an obscene private-sector type profit!
Generations of children have now grown up nurtured in the cold bosom of the state. Each generation is smaller than the last. "Wimmin" don't see the point of having them, actually. And Government provides almost free contraception. And Planned Parenthood provides cheap abortions. So let the human species dwindle. It's bad for the planet anyway.
And besides – life, the feminists say, is not all it's cracked up to be.
So why don't you try going back to the old ways, wimmin? Share a marriage bed with a person? Bear more children, raise them, teach them, enjoy making them happy and letting them make you happy?
No, no!, the feminists reply, we would be housebound. We would have to give the best years of our lives to changing diapers, and cooking, and putting clothes in washing machines!
Instead of?
Instead of what we're doing now.
Which is?
Copulating with anyone we want when we want; accusing men of rape whether they've done it or not; having the occasional abortion; running a little business on a grant; or working for our master, the Government. You know – all that.
No downside to all that?
Well, (the wimmin tell us, deeply resenting our hostile questioning), even if being married to the state has its drawbacks, at least (they say, singing in their chains like the sea) – at least we're free!
It profits me but little, after all, that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquility of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life. – Alexis de Tocqueville
Bruce Thornton quotes that wise saying in an article at Front Page, from which we extract these points:
California recently passed a law requiring that sexual encounters between students in universities and colleges can proceed only on the basis of "affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement". Failure to resist or to ask the partner to stop the encounter can no longer be taken as consent. Institutions that wish to receive state funds or financial aid must adhere to this standard when investigating charges of "sexual assault", a phrase redefined to include behaviors once considered boorish or insensitive, but not legally actionable. The California law follows on the 2011 Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights's "dear colleague" letter that instructed schools investigating sexual assault complaints to use the "more likely than not" or "preponderance of the evidence" standard of evidence rather than the "clear and convincing" one.
The dangers to individual privacy and accountability that follow such regulatory intrusions into sexual intimacy between legal adults have been well documented, not the least being the violation of the rights of the accused, who now enter a hearing with a presumption of guilt rather than of innocence. Also problematic is the double standard inherent in such rules, particularly when both accuser and accused are drunk or otherwise incapacitated. …
The feminists' championing of sexual autonomy for women reached a head in the 1960s. Before the modern age, sex was seen as a necessary but dangerous force that, if left uncontrolled, not just impaired the mind, but also destroyed whole civilizations. It was the illicit sexual passion of Paris and Helen that "burnt the topless towers" of Troy, as Christopher Marlow wrote. As such, sex had to be contained and channeled by social practices and cultural institutions. Virtues, taboos, and especially marriage all attempted to direct sexual energy to its most socially important goal, procreation and the family. …
By the late nineteenth century, many social and cultural developments had undermined this traditional sexual realism. Over the following decades, in the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, Margaret Mead, Alfred Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, and numerous others, sex was [regarded as] a natural phenomenon that science could understand and hence make more enjoyable and less damaging. The destructive effects of sex, in this view, were not inherent, but the consequence of repressive social institutions …
In the sixties, Cultural Marxism interpreted traditional limits on sexual behavior as the instruments of oppression and conformity, reinforcing the "false consciousness" that perpetuated the ruling class and its power.
Breaking sexual taboos and experiencing sexual pleasure thus became acts of liberation, leading to self-fulfillment and personal freedom.
Feminism embraced this notion of sexual liberation. The autonomy of women depended on their casting off the shackles of patriarchal misogyny most evident in male control of women's sexuality – "our bodies, ourselves" became the battle cry. Women should have the equal power to choose sexual experiences and pleasure, and the unjust double standards that gave men but not women sexual autonomy should be discarded. The biological differences between men and women, especially nature's subjection of women's bodies to the relentless imperatives of procreation, were now discarded as arbitrary, unjust impediments to women's freedom and autonomy. This process was moved along by the new technologies of reliable birth control and accessible and safe abortion.
In the ensuing decades, however, the malign consequences of sexual liberation became increasingly manifest – the proliferation of sexually transmitted diseases, the wider access to demeaning pornography, and the explosion of out-of-wedlock childbirth and the attendant social dysfunctions that follow from children being raised without fathers.
Even for more privileged women, there were psychological costs to be paid for contending with male sexual predators and absolving them of responsibility for their behavior, given that now men and women were equally in control of their sexual choices, and that the traditional mores once enshrining male responsibility, such as chivalry, had been dismissed as patronizing and sexist.
But as the years passed, many women began to discover that there are indeed differences between men and women and their experiences of sex. Liberation did not lead to the sexual utopia of carefree and cost-free pleasure, but to the guilt, regret, and humiliation that follow being used as an object for somebody else's transient enjoyment.
The response to these ill effects was to create rules and codes designed to eliminate the negative consequences of sexual freedom. But contrary to the assumptions of lawmakers who want to regulate sexual behavior, sex is not a game like tennis that can be pleasurable for the players provided the rules are followed. As Camille Paglia has pointed out, when it comes to sex, the more appropriate metaphor is to the old Roman arena, where there was no law. An act that is so physically and psychologically complicated, and that exposes our most intimate longings and hidden selves, cannot be rationalized and made cost-free, or its unpleasant effects neutralized, by reducing it to a "voluntary agreement" in which the terms and conditions are spelled out and followed as in a contract. …
Faced with the costs of sexual liberation, [feminists chose] to demand that the state use its coercive power to protect women not just from insensitive men, but from the consequences of their own choices. Sexual harassment law is the most widespread expression of this impulse to use the tutelary state to defend women from a "hostile and intimidating" environment. The vulgar joke or boorish innuendo is now not just a violation of social decorum, but a crime subject to law and punishment.
But nothing infantilizes women more than the sexual codes promulgated by numerous universities. Obviously, sexual assault properly defined is a crime that should be investigated and the guilty punished. But getting drunk and then sleeping with an equally intoxicated partner is not a crime. It's a learning experience about taking responsibility for one's actions, and practicing the virtues of prudence and self-control. …
At the same time that feminists still call for unlimited sexual freedom, they treat women as Victorian maidens who lack agency and resources of character, and thus must be defended against sexual cads and bounders. As the Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald puts it, this "new order is a bizarre hybrid of liberationist and traditionalist values. It carefully preserves the prerogative of no-strings-attached sex while cabining it with legalistic caveats that allow females to revert at will to a stance of offended virtue."
This strange demand for absolute freedom without responsibility for one's choices is not just a symptom of feminism. It reaches into our broader culture. It has become the enabler of the entitlement state, which justifies its growing size and regulatory power over people's lives by promising to protect them not just from the vicissitudes of life, but from the consequences of their own choices … Thus the feminist demand for government-subsidized birth control and abortion is of a piece with government bailouts for homeowners who over-borrowed on the equity of their homes or lied on their mortgage applications.
The demand for personal freedom without accountability contradicts the foundational philosophy of our republic. The right to liberty is not the right be absolved from the consequences of one's actions. Taking that responsibility is what makes one worthy of freedom and equal to others who likewise must be accountable for their actions.
71 genders and one T-shirt fits all 14
We wonder which of the 71 genders now recognized, these three belong to. Anyway they're all feminists. Shouldn't Pajama Boy be with them? And Barry "Chickenshit" Obama?
Our opinion: They'd all look great in a Burkha!
Here's the Telegraph's list of the 71 genders:
The 21 new options for UK Facebook users
Female to male trans man
Female to male transgender man
Female to male transsexual man
Gender neutral
Intersex man
Intersex person
Intersex woman
Male to female trans woman
Male to female transgender woman
Male to female transsexual woman
T man
T woman
Two person
Two-spirit person
The list of the 50 previous gender options
Cis Female
Cis Male
Cis Man
Cis Woman
Cisgender Female
Cisgender Male
Cisgender Man
Cisgender Woman
Female to Male
Gender Fluid
Gender Nonconforming
Gender Questioning
Gender Variant
Male to Female
Trans Female
Trans Male
Trans Man
Trans Person
Trans Female
Trans Male
Trans Man
Trans Person
Trans Woman
Transexual Female
Transexual Male
Transexual Man
Transexual Person
Transexual Woman
Transgender Female
Transgender Person
At least one of these should be easy to recognize: the Bigenders.
There seems to be a certain redundancy in (for instance) Female to Male and also FTM and even still F2M. But I can already hear an exasperated voice – breaking in mid-sentence – crying out impatiently: 'You're so dumb! Can't you get it that there's all the difference in the world whether you want a full label applied to you or only the initials or a description suitable for a text message?"
What is the difference, we wonder, between the first list of Trans- (female male man person) and the second list of the same which we have italicized? We suspect a printing error occurred there, and if so the total of the tally is wrong. The number needs to be reduced from 71 to 67 max.
The Trans person is a particularly curious category. What can a person trans into? An animal? A plant?
Man and Woman were not among the previous options, and have apparently only just been introduced. Most people were ahead of Facebook there.
Gender Fluid brings to mind the shape-changers of Star Trek.
Amazing that, with so comprehensive-seeming a list, there is still the category of "Other". Wouldn't Male, Female, Other have covered everything?
And most amazing of all is Pangender. There are people going about among us who are all of the listed genders simultaneously? Aren't some of them mutually exclusive – as, for instance, Neither and Man/Woman? Or Agender and most of the others?
(The picture of the three feminists comes from a Front Page article by Daniel Greenfield.)
(Hat-tip to Robert Kantor for the 71 genders.)
School bathroom sign privileging only 3 genders 1
What about the remaining 60 genders? (There are alleged to be "at least" 63.)
Where must they go?
Isn't this heartless sexist discrimination?
(Only kidding.)
Britain – a pussy nation? 4
"Conscience does make cowards of us all,"
– says Hamlet.
Is it conscience – deriving from the wrong belief that Britain was bad for the nations it ruled under its imperium until the middle of the twentieth century – that has transformed the British bulldog into a pussycat?
These days British officials are so afraid of being called nasty names, they would rather destroy themselves and their country than risk provoking some name-calling by their enemies. (As a result their friends have cause to call them such names as cowards, fools, pussycats.)
British authorities enforcing political correctness have allowed Muslim paedophile gangs to sexually abuse children with impunity for more than two decades, according to a comprehensive new study that examines the harrowing epidemic of child grooming in towns and cities across Britain.
The meticulously documented report, entitled, Easy Meat: Multiculturalism, Islam and Child Sex Slavery, shows how officials in England and Wales were aware of rampant child grooming — the process by which sexual predators befriend and build trust with children in order to prepare them for abuse — by Muslim gangs since at least 1988.
Rather than taking steps to protect British children, however, police, social workers, teachers, neighbors, politicians and the media deliberately downplayed the severity of the crimes perpetrated by the grooming gangs in order to avoid being accused of "Islamophobia" or racism.
The conspiracy of silence was not broken until November 2010, when it was leaked that police in Derbyshire had carried out an undercover investigation — dubbed Operation Retriever — and arrested 13 members of a Muslim gang for grooming up to 100 underage girls for sex.
So there are still strong Britons who know right from wrong. Something happened in Derbyshire, among the police, that could restore an iota of national pride.
Some journalists on the Times were inspired (perhaps) by the Derbyshire police to do their job of reporting what was happening in their country.
Shortly thereafter, the Times of London published the results of a groundbreaking investigation into the sexual exploitation and internal trafficking of girls in the Midlands and the north of England. In January 2011, the newspaper reported that in 17 court cases since 1997 in which groups of men were prosecuted for grooming 11 to 16 year old girls, 3 of the 56 men found guilty were Asian, 50 of them Muslim, and three were white.
In September 2012, the Times published another exposé that revealed the hidden truth about the sale and extensive use of British children for sex.
The article showed that organized groups of Muslim men were able to groom, pimp and traffic girls across the country with virtual impunity. Although offenders were identified to police, they were not prosecuted. A child welfare expert interviewed by the newspaper said the government's reluctance to tackle such street grooming networks represented "the biggest child protection scandal of our time."
So Soeren Kern reports and comments at Gatestone. We are quoting him, and his quotations, at length.
He goes on:
But the latest study — which avoids sensational details and confines itself to exposing where officialdom has failed — demonstrates that even the coverage in the Times has understated the scale of the problem:
There is far more to this story than has come out so far. The population are already outraged by what they have learned in the last year or two, but know only a fraction of the scandal … This massive over-representation of Muslim men in this crime spree has been borne out by the prosecutions of the last three to four years, but it is clear that it must have been known long ago and should have been made public.
Because the predators were Muslims, the agencies responsible for child-protection have almost entirely failed in their job to protect vulnerable children. From a fear of being called 'racist,' police forces across the country have buried the evidence.
On the rare occasion when the phenomenon [of child grooming] would be discussed in more than the briefest details, political activists and the authorities would come together to stop the public from knowing more. Political correctness would be used to make sure that people did not speak about this phenomenon, enabling the perpetrators free rein to sexually abuse schoolgirls for decades.Yes, decades. We know that in an age where parents are not allowed to smack their children, this sounds unbelievable.
The report shows that even documents that supposedly address the problem of child grooming have gone out of their way to avoid discussing why some "ethnic groups" are massively over-represented as perpetrators—the study calculates that Muslims are 154 times more likely to be perpetrators of these crimes than non-Muslims—while the schoolgirl victims are overwhelmingly of a different ethnic group.
The perpetrators have been overwhelmingly men from Muslim communities, and the victims have been overwhelmingly girls from non-Muslim communities (Sikhs, Christians and Atheists). Yet the professionals never deemed it important to declare this, or even denied the pattern existed.
Atheists ? With a capital A? Atheist girl prostitutes? Intellectual, thinking girl prostitutes? We appreciate the article, but we suggest that Soeren Kern is wrong here and simply means "non-religious".
Now comes a quoted piece of uproariously stupid, cowardly, official claptrap à la mode:
Despite government agencies in Rotherham knowing about (and privately discussing) the Muslim grooming gangs from 1996, a 2010 document by Rotherham Safeguarding Children Board stated that "great care will be taken in drafting … this report to ensure that its findings embrace Rotherham's qualities of diversity. It is imperative that suggestions of a wider cultural phenomenon are avoided".
Rotherham's "qualities of diversity"! Of which it is proud. "Diversity": the euphemisim for "not being racist".
Full translation: "We Rotherhamites don't look down on people just because they're child sex-slavers and pimps and criminals – not anyway if they're Muslim – because we want to prove that we don't think of ourselves as superior. We're sorry that we used to think of ourselves like that. But now, to achieve your forgiveness, O Muslims, watch us sacrifice our values, our law, our pride, and grovel in the dirt before you like good Socialists (and Christians)."
One of the defining features of child grooming is the ethnic/cultural homogeneity of the gang members, and the refusal of other members of their community to speak out about them or to condemn their behavior. According to the report, the gangs are often made up of brothers and members of their extended family, many from Pakistan, who take part in the grooming and/or rape of the schoolgirls.
The report states that grooming gangs target young girls, aged between 11 and 16, because the gang members want virgins and girls who are free of sexual diseases. "Most of the men buying sex with the girls have Muslim wives and they don't want to risk infection," the report states. "The younger you look, the more saleable you are."
The schoolgirls they target are overwhelmingly non-Muslim, while the gangs are overwhelmingly Muslim. The girls are often lured into the clutches of the gang using a young Muslim man who befriends/seduces the girl. None of this is accidental; here we are not talking about cross-cultural romantic relationships. What is so unusual about this disparity in ethnicity, is that most Muslims in Britain have little or no interaction with the indigenous population.
Yes, well – isn't that how multiculturalism is supposed to work?
The scale of the problem is truly horrifying. According to Parents against Child Sexual Exploitation (PACE), a national charity focused on working with the victims of child grooming and their families, at least 10,000 British children are in the clutches of the gangs at any one time, and at least 1,000 new girls are being groomed by gangs each year.
But this is "just the tip of the iceberg," according to a document published by the House of Commons, which estimates that at least 20,000 British children are at risk of sexual exploitation by grooming gangs.
Meanwhile, prosecutions are few and far between. …
Finally, the authors of the report examine the links between Islamic culture and doctrine and the crime of child grooming. They note:
The notion that Islam could be the basis for this criminality is always ruled out of the question, with no investigation of Islamic theology, the history of Islam, or the rulings of Sharia law.
The authors then provide a thorough examination of Islamic sacred texts, and conclude, inter alia, that: Muslim men are taught in mosques that women are little more than chattels or possessions over whom they have absolute authority; Islam instructs Muslim men that they can have sex with their slaves, are permitted legally and morally to rape them, and may turn a slave girl into a prostitute; and Islam looks down on non-Muslims.
At the same time, British judges are increasingly using Islamic Sharia law to justify light sentences for Muslims who rape underage girls:
As late as May 2013, the media were reporting that a Muslim man in Nottingham who had raped an underage girl, was spared a prison term after the judge heard that the naïve 18-year-old attended an Islamic faith school where he was taught that women are worthless. Rashid told psychologists he had no idea that having sex with a willing 13-year-old was against the law; besides, his education had taught him to believe that "women are no more worthy than a lollipop that has been dropped on the ground".
And that belief of his was enough to get him an acquittal? There was a time when ignorance of the law was no excuse for breaking it, and British law declared that raping a child was a crime. But sharia sees it differently, and tolerance requires the descendants of imperialists to concede superiority to Third World ideas conceived in the dark ages.
The report is emphatic in blaming the doctrine of multiculturalism for Britain's lack of resolve in confronting the grooming gangs:
Multiculturalism is a fundamentally incoherent doctrine, invented to conceal the serious conflicts which have arisen when peoples from vastly different cultures, with different values, are forced to live together. Political correctness and the doctrine of multiculturalism meant that the professionals whose job it was to help the vulnerable were consciously commanding that these diverse cultural values could not be discussed. Multiculturalism came about in order to deny that there is any significance to cultures having different values and to conceal that there will be conflict when these incompatible values come together. Political correctness is the means by which such denial is enforced.
Those who propound and defend multiculturalism say that people from different cultural backgrounds have different values, and that we must all accept these values as being of equal validity. But when it comes to examining what those different values are, multiculturalists suddenly lose interest in the details of these differences and lose interest in the consequences that follow from these different values. …
Islamic society is a totalitarian society, all other values are to be subordinated to Islamic values. But if anyone in Britain dares to criticize Islam, they will be denounced and told they live in a multicultural society, and must accept these totalitarian values.
Finally the report, written by brave, sensible Britons, reminds the cowards that the Muslim population of Britain is doubling with each generation.
All too soon the non-Muslims will be the minority and lose the power their democratic system allows them – and of which the undemocratic Muslims will take full advantage – to make and enforce their own laws.
Other European countries should take note of that reminder too.
To adapt an expression that probably began with Muslims: The camel's nose of sharia is in the tent. And your rulers let it get there rather than risk being called "intolerant", "racist" "imperialist", "colonialist", "Islamophobic".
If that's what contemporary European civilization has become, it will be no great loss when the Muslims destroy it. Only it will be replaced by something far worse – the barbarism of Islam.
Of government, liberty, and libertarians 8
It seems tragically probable that the Left has won. Socialism – or call it statism, or collectivism – has won. All over the Western world it has won. There are no political parties in Europe or the New World that have any chance of coming to power that are not socialist. Those parties that call themselves conservative are no more likely to dismantle the welfare state that every Western nation has become than are the self-declared collectivist parties.
The Left, we repeat, has won throughout the West. And having allied itself with Islam, it is helping that savage force to replace our civilization and its outposts and defenders throughout the whole world.
It is too late to reverse the accumulating consequences of its victory. Sentiment has defeated Reason by achieving political power and using it to coerce conformity.
For all its claims to be rational, Socialism is the political expression of sentiment: the sentiment of egalitarianism, to appease the base emotion of envy.
In its claims to act in the name of compassion; in its determination to humble the more gifted and more accomplished; in its vision of a High Government as lord, father, judge, director, enforcer, provider, punisher; in its mystical doctrine of an ideal existence somewhere in the hereafter that will justify suffering and sacrifice; in its striving for total control; in all this Socialism closely resembles Christianity. Socialism can fairly be called "secular Christianity".
Though the Enlightenment destroyed the power of the Christian Churches, and to a large extent drained Europe of religious belief, Christianity has its revenge. It has crept back through the romantic idealism of Marxism and its daughter, the welfare state, until once again popes and primates – the ideology's elite – command obedience. The punishments they will inflict on you for not conforming are not now the rack, the wheel, or the stake. (Or not yet.) Rather, they will tax away your wealth. They will actively seek ways to incriminate and imprison you. They will surreptitiously deny you your rights under the law.
In America, agencies of oppression are now most notoriously the IRS, the EPA, the TSA (see here, here, and here.). Among the government departments which have arrogantly assumed dictatorial powers are those of Justice, Health, and Education. We have been told by a source we have no cause to doubt that law-enforcement agencies throughout the country have been instructed by the socialist administration to investigate, humiliate, accuse, and whenever possible condemn and imprison "the Rich", and – it seems from some cases we know of – to fine them to the limit of the law. Rich or not , you will find that there's no aspect of your life that the long fingers of despotism cannot or will not probe and re-direct.
For this calamitous system a growing majority, it seems, will cast their votes time and time again. Democracy itself has brought the one country which was founded on the idea of personal liberty to this condition.
The Left has won in America; it has won in Europe; it has won throughout the West. It prevails in the schools and academies where dissent is discouraged and even penalized. It is enthusiastically supported by the mass media. And those who should oppose it, the Republicans, far from standing for liberty, talk passionately about trivial issues, apparently seeing its mission as a holy crusade to keep people from making their own choices in matters of personal – especially sexual – relations. They would have us all conform to busy-body moral rules laid down by Christians. For in America the old Christianity still holds the minds of millions in thrall. The sacerdotal Christianity of the puritan Right will not be liberty's champion against the secular Christianity of the tyrannous Left.
The Left thinks in terms of achieving an ideal society. It has ends and goals. The leftist government steers the nation towards a vague vision. The people must be carried on forever towards it, whether they like it or not, while every effort is made to persuade them that the end, the goal, the destination is a paradise. But history tells us that socialism leads only to impoverishment at best and unmitigated hell at worst.
Governments should not have "ends". They should only have functions. Or rather, one function: to protect the liberty of the people. Government should serve us, not reign over us. With the only other political party likely to gain power in America too feeble to fight, is there no other force that we can look to for taking up the cause of liberty?
The answer ought to be the libertarian movement. If the libertarian movement were genuinely for liberty above all else, for defeating the Left by upholding the Constitution, shrinking government, keeping the state from interfering in the economy, and defending the nation, there would be hope for a future victory of Reason and Freedom.
But the libertarian movement is not a force bringing hope.
Derek Hunter writes at Townhall on The Problem With Libertarians:
There was a time I called myself a Libertarian. And there was a time I was a Libertarian. I just wanted to get government to leave me alone, to leave people alone and to go all crazy and limit itself to doing only that which is spelled out clearly in the Constitution. That was what a Libertarian was. But it's not anymore.
The word no longer has any meaning, no definition or parameters, certainly no coherent philosophy to speak of. And there's no one to blame for that except Libertarians themselves.
So what happened?
By not even loosely defining the parameters of a set of beliefs, Libertarians allowed their brand – as it was – to be hijacked by anyone willing to wear the label. They went from the movement for individual responsibility, small government and free markets to a gaggle of misfits who want pot and prostitution legalized and a total non-interventionist foreign policy. …
We have no objection to pot and prostitution being legalized. Why were they ever illegalized? But we hear libertarians defending child pornography; preaching historical revisionism; pretending liberty can dispense with the rule of law. And we object to all that. As for their non-interventionist foreign policy, they seem to think that we need not stir ourselves in our own defense unless America is invaded militarily by a hostile power. It makes us wonder if such libertarians are at all aware of what's going on in the outer world. Do they think about what it will mean for us when Iran becomes a nuclear power – which it soon will? Have they thought what will happen to this country if there is nuclear war anywhere on the globe? We doubt it.
The great Reason magazine is a wonderful publication filled with great articles, solid journalism you won't find elsewhere … and a voice that does little more than complain.
Reason is great at highlighting abuses by every level of government, stories ignored by other media outlets. But you won't find much in the way of philosophy or solutions. …
I love the Cato Institute and have a lot of good friends who work there, and they do offer some good solutions. They just refuse to do anything about them. Cato has a deserved reputation for refusing to play nice with anyone else. When was the last legislative "victory" spearheaded or introduced by Cato? …
On election night 2008, I was at a Reason/America's Future Foundation (another Libertarian group) election night party in a Chinatown bar in DC. The results of the election were a forgone conclusion, so what better way to mark the night than with a few drinks and friends. Hell, the band played as the Titanic sank, so why not imbibe a bit as the nation hit the iceberg?
It's not like anyone was thrilled to vote for John McCain that day. But as bad as McCain was (and still is), he was better than Barack Obama. At least that's a conclusion you'd expect anyone who supported liberty to draw.
Yet that night, as each state was declared for Obama, cheers rose from the crowd. When Obama won Ohio, you would've thought you were in a bar in Green Bay and the Packers had just won the Super Bowl. High-fives and laughter filled the room.
It wasn't as though these self-described Libertarians wanted Obama to win. Well, actually, many of them did. But the majority of them wanted McCain to lose. They wanted Republicans to lose. Their victory was to let the country lose, to get that smug sense of self-satisfaction they were feeling. …
Libertarians have devolved from the pro-liberty wing of the right side of the ledger to the annoying kid who, when he doesn't get 100 percent of what he wants, takes his ball and goes home. The team he agrees with more than half the time loses to the team he barely agrees with at all, and he cheers …
David Horowitz, writing at the National Review, argues for a united front to be formed against the Left; all factions of Republicans, libertarians, conservatives, coming together under the banner of liberty. But he does not expect the idea to win instant favor.
Naturally, the first reaction of conservatives to this advice will be to reject it. Conservatives do not want to behave like leftists, who see politics and government as a means for transforming the world and the people in it. Temperamentally, conservatives are cautious because they know that the problems the world faces are caused by human beings, not by the social institutions that progressives plan to change. …
Fortunately, the objections of conservatives are not an obstacle to getting behind a unifying idea. The conservative cause already has a moral core; it is just not currently a political theme, the way equality is for Democrats and progressives. But it can be made into one.
Conservatism … is about protecting the constitutional system created by the Founders. But the creation of this constitutional arrangement was a revolutionary act. It provided a political framework to maximize individual freedom and allow citizens to exercise their talents and enjoy the best possible lives.
What conservatism is about is freedom, and this is its natural unifying idea.
Individual freedom and ordered liberty made possible by the imposition of limits on government is the idea that unites conservatives and Republicans, and should be their rallying cry. The idea is fundamentally opposed to the "equality" that is the goal of progressives and Democrats. …
The equality proposed by progressives and Democrats is a declaration of war on individual freedom, and therefore on the American constitutional framework. The steady erosion of that freedom is the consequence of progressives' political successes. This is the war that divides Left and Right. Conservatives must recognize that it is a war, and prosecute it as a war to defend individual freedom. That should be the unifying idea of the conservative cause. …
The very struggle that inspired the Right in the Cold War era — the battle between tyranny and freedom — is once again staring us in the face, but we are reluctant to name it. We have gone almost silent instead. The silence must end. It is time to connect the battle for individual freedom at home and the defense of our free society abroad, and to make them one. That is the way to advance the conservative message and unify the political forces on which the future of our nation depends.
He warns:
If conservatives continue to ignore the fact that their opponents approach politics as a religious war, if they fail to organize their own resistance as a moral cause, they will eventually lose the war and everything that depends on it.
Eventually? We fear "eventually" is now.
The darkness of this world (3) 2
Continuing our series on contemporary Gnosticism, here is the third essay under the title The Darkness of This World. The first two can be found here and here.
The Darkness of This World
essays on
Our Gnostic Age
New Age religion is – according to taste and judgment – a rich diversity of "spiritualities", or a junk-heap of irrationalities.
It arose in the West as an unplanned rejection movement against reason, science, capitalism, Western political institutions and cultural norms, often to the point of antinomianism. It started as a counter-culture, but many of its beliefs and practices have come to be accepted as normal. Most obviously it impacts the lives of almost everyone in developed countries through Environmentalism, one of the most successful of its superstitions.
New Age includes mythical, mystical, and simply fantastical cult ingredients. Its theorists draw on the occult and witchcraft; on religions of the Far East [1]; on the modern mystic faith of psycho-analysis (in particular the theories of C. G. Jung); on Richard Wagner's mythology and mysticism [2]; on UFO legends; on "alternative" Western religious cults and systems – Scientology, Mormonism, Hare Krishna, Shamanism, pop-Kabala, Environmentalism. Among its assorted mysticisms and occultisms are: astrology [3]; fortune telling by tarot cards, I Ching, Ouija boards; spirit guides; processes of faith healing or imaginary empowerment through the use of crystals and pyramids; chanting, dancing, meditation, Yoga exercises. It was partly inspired by the hundred-plus years old, Orient-derived, Theosophy of Madame Blavatsky, and its offshoots, including the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner with their theories of education, art, agriculture, and health.
As a religion rather than a life-style movement – which it has primarily become – New Age is loosely likened to the Gnostic sects of the 2nd century and the Middle Ages because it is mystical, esoteric, and challenging to the "revealed" religions. There are also specific similarities.
First, like the Gnostics of old, New Age acolytes revile the "God of the bible" (whatever they conceive him to be – Jehovah, "God the Father", or the Trinity), and they "know" the "true God" by innate knowledge.
Second, as in the Gnostic cults, there is a hierarchy of classes in New Age doctrine. The divisions are according to "spiritual" ability. The highest class is that of the adepts, the Masters, who have attained "cosmic consciousness". They know they possess the innate knowledge (gnosis) of the real God. Below them are Disciples, whose minds are open to New Age teaching but have yet to master it. At the bottom are the rest, "animal men", unenlightened by the faith.
Third, those who have the gift – the Masters – can release, or bring to consciousness, or make effective, or bring into being (all of those effects are stated or implied at different times), the "divinity" they "know" is within them by achieving a state of ecstasy. And like the Gnostics of old, they do this by taking drugs and indulging in sexual libertinism. Each New Age participant's "divine blood" asserts itself as the right guide to human thought and action. In a New Age orgy, "group-consciousness" reveals itself and exerts its will.
Fourth, in New Age as in old Gnosticism, believers rebel against ethical norms by reversing conventional values: what is generally accepted as good is held to be bad, and vice versa.
But in one important respect there is a difference between old Gnosticism and New Age. To almost all the old Gnostics, this earth and everything on it (except their inner spark of Knowledge) was evil, the creation of an evil God, so they were defying evil by doing what the ignorant masses called sinning; defiling their bodies to express scorn for the dirt they were made of [4]. But New Age holds the earth sacred, and sensual experience is a sacrament in itself, often the supreme sacrament.
The old Gnostics, to defy the Creator God, would destroy his earth to save man – or at least themselves. The new Gnostics claim to be God, at least potentially, and would destroy man – or at least a lot of other people – to save the earth [5].
Being a hotch-potch of beliefs – belief in almost anything that reason rejects – New Age religion inevitably contains contradictions. For instance, while some of its authoritative theorists hold that the divine dwells within the human species (even in the "animal men", the general theory implies) [6], the earth is an external and separate goddess, "Mother Earth", identical to her whom the ancient Greeks called Gaia. She has suffered "ecological wounds" through human industrial activity (thus the specie-sin of "anthropogenic global warming"), and she needs to be "healed".
These different attitudes to nature between the ancient and the new cults entail different attitudes to sex. To the ancient Gnostics, everything material, including the human body, was evil, so they indulged in sacramental orgies of conventionally forbidden sex in order to defy the Creator God of this world and his commandments. But New Age orgies – similarly considered to be sacraments – are performed as acts of Earth worship. They celebrate the physical, not scorn it. [7] Sensual pleasure is a good in itself. The performance of communal rituals – chanting, dancing, sado-masochistic sex, all-gender-inclusive sex (with male homosexuality particularly stressed by Matthew Fox [8]) – advances the coming into being of a new synthesized God: "I" become God; "we" become God; Man, God, and Nature become One, and the one is the universal God, the "Cosmic Christ".
New Age writing is full of vapid declarations expressed with stirring passion rather than semantic sense. It is verbal impressionism. Matthew Fox, for instance – one of the most widely read New Age writers, blends "the Cosmic Christ" with "Mother Earth". The Cosmic Christ is an eternal Being who became incarnate in Jesus – so far in tune with at least some long-established Christianities – but is also (if not exactly "incarnate" by the actual meaning of the word, "made flesh"), one with Mother Earth. She is crucified like Jesus; and as such she is a symbol of the incarnated Cosmic Christ, or of the Cosmic Christ as Jesus crucified; or Jesus crucified is a symbol of Mother Earth crucified:
The appropriate symbol of the Cosmic Christ who became incarnate in Jesus is that of Jesus as Mother Earth crucified yet rising daily … like Jesus, she rises from her tomb every day [so not quite like Jesus] … wounded, yet rising, Mother Earth blesses us each day. [9]
New Age has had an effect on conventional religious institutions. Some of the established churches, Catholic and Protestant, have picked out bits from New Age to add flavor to their own offerings [10] – which may indicate how weary, stale, flat and washed out they must feel their own faiths to be. As for social and political effects, New Age cults contribute cumulatively to the character of the times, but most of them have had little or no effect on major events.
There are two exceptions. One is Liberation Theology (an emulsion of two opiates of the people, Marxism and Catholicism), which has had an historical effect in South America as an ideological cause of the rise of terrorist organizations.
Marxism comes into our purview. New Age harmonizes with Marxism easily, both being collectivist ideologies. In almost all its manifestations, New Age requires group practice. Its ultimate vision is of a single shared human consciousness (rather like the imaginary alien species called the Borg in Star Trek, whose every individual is one with the "hive mind"). The Catholic writer Teilhard de Chardin had a strong influence on New Age theory. In his book The Future of Man, he foresees "the end of a 'thinking species'; not disintegration and death, but a new breakthrough and a rebirth, this time outside Time and Space. Man would at some future time 'form a single consciousness'." [11] ). New Age goes further yet: humanity will share its communal consciousness with the Earth. [12]
Marxism and magic (and pacifism and feminism), came together in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), starting in Britain in 1958 and continuing through the next three decades. Most of the CND protestors did not know that their leaders received funding from the USSR; they were simply the "useful idiots" of Lenin's famous phrase. In the early 1980s a Women's Peace Camp was set up on Greenham Common in Berkshire to protest against NATO cruise missiles being deployed at the RAF base situated there. The women would hold up mirrors to "reflect the evil" of the weapons back over the fence.
The other exception is Environmentalism, which has entranced half the population of the First World and pesters the whole human race.
Other than these, New Age cults, though numerous, are for the most part comparatively harmless and few will be mentioned in these essays. Most New Age leaders and followers don't think of themselves as doing evil, only redefining what good is. Homosexuality was bad until the 1960s; so to New Age devotees it was super-good. Alternative medical practices were bad; so to New Age devotees they were super-good. One of the most egregious examples of New Age success, of how it has penetrated even some institutions that by their nature should be impregnable to cults of unreason, is that practitioners of "alternative medicine" are working alongside physicians and surgeons in Western hospitals. They may do harm, but they probably do not intend to.
What these essays are concerned with is the deliberate choosing of evil. They are not about common crime, nor the immoral things everybody does from time to time. They are about evil intended as such, and the intended evil is the willful harming of human beings. The doing of it is advocated by a self-elected elite – intellectuals who claim to have a vision beyond the understanding of the rest of us – with verbal violence to scandalize the conventional. They often rationalize it with sophisticated philosophical excuses, arguing for instance that it is necessary for the attainment of a "higher good" for the whole human race, including the uncomprehending masses. The "higher good" is different now, the excuses more sophisticated, more subtle and complicated than they were for the Gnostics of old. The sins are less ingenuous, the evil more profound and more extensive. In sum, the new Gnostics are far more dangerous and destructive than the old.
Not only is evil preached, simulated in theatre or performance art, solemnly celebrated in religious or quasi-religious ceremonies, it is also done in reality. While most of its priests and shamans confine themselves to gestures and make-believe, others do it.
Jillian Becker September 5, 2013
1. The re-interpreted oriental religions are chiefly Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, and Hinduism, and in particular the doctrine of reincarnation. The re-interpretations were brought to the West by Indian gurus (such the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, popularized by The Beatles). Some Westerners took themselves to the East to garner its wisdoms and returned home with a new name and guru status (such as Richard Alpert, a Bostonian psychologist who journeyed to India and returned as Guru Ram Dass – see Understanding the New Age by Russell Chandler, Word Inc., Dallas, Texas, 1988, p 63).
2. Wagner's myths – Lohengrin, Siegfried, Parsifal – were superficially Christian and his heroes Christ-like redeemers. But he dilates at length in his massive prose writings on what is wrong with Christianity and Judaism, especially Judaism and even more especially Jews. He was of the opinion that Jews could only be redeemed by annihilating themselves. The Germans, he declared, needed to be "emancipated from the Jews"; "redeemed" from them by a real-life Parsifal. He praised pre-Christian polytheism. He praised the ancient Greeks for being "intuitive" – which means he loved the savage rites of their Dionysus worship, but ignored their fertile use of reason, their invention of logic and science. Reason, he opined, was a Jewish thing. He drew mostly on Nordic legends, which he considered quintessentially German. Among the ideas he passionately promoted were these: German heroes act out of feeling, not reason, being moved by "the god within"; the only god dwells within us and within nature; there is a "world spirit", the quintessence of Being, which is within both Man (Germans, that is) and nature; "We are God" and "to become God we need only instinctive Knowledge of the Self" – the indwelling divinity; the taking of hashish releases the feeling of being divine. As poet-priest and prophet, he looked to the coming of a German leader – a Führer – who would mount a "destructive revolution to destroy our civilization", a civilization which he despised as weak, unheroic, built by Jews. He died before his prophesied Führer was born, but Hitler was intensely inspired by Wagner's operas from the age of twelve, when he saw one for the first time. It was Lohengrin. And there is a portrait of Hitler as Lohengrin, not (disappointingly) mounted ludicrously on a swan as the knight is in the opera, but on a black horse, in white Medieval armor, carrying the Nazi flag, his head in profile, scowling, unmistakable with his little brushy mustache.) The echoes of Wagner's ideas in New Age are loud and clear. To hear a full discussion of them, go to a YouTube video titled: Wagner's Musical Religion: Art, Politics, Genocide, in which two authorities on Wagner, Margaret Brearley and Robert Wistrich, lecture on his life and works and quote his words.
3. Astrology and the signs of the zodiac feature large among New Age superstitions. The New Age is also called "The Age of Aquarius".
4. One exception among the old Gnostics was Epiphanes. He contradicted the usual Gnostic belief that this world is evil. All creation, he taught, belongs to all mankind. In his rituals, sexual intercourse was performed publicly as a sacred rite and called a love-feast. Drugs, especially aphrodisiacs, were routinely used. When he died at the age of 17, the islanders of Cephalonia, where his mother came from, built a temple to him and proclaimed him a god. His memory was also honored there with a museum which housed the many books he had found time to write in his short life. We have been protected from them by the Christian Church; but the Church Father, Clement of Alexandria, who was allowed to read them before they were destroyed, has left us brief summaries of their contents. Clement's account shows Epiphanes to have been full of "back to nature" idealism; a lover of animals; an aesthete moved by the beauty of the earth and the starry skies, rather than one who condemned this world as a place of darkness. God lets the light of the sun and the stars, Epiphanes said, fall equally on all human beings. Even the beasts are blessed by the light. Each man and beast takes his enjoyment of it without depleting it for any other. The sun causes the earth to be fruitful and the fruits of the earth are for all. Beasts are exemplars of communitarian life, and being so they are righteous. Together they graze, equal, harmonious, and innocent. And so would we be had not the Law made transgression possible. The Law "nibbled away" the fellowship of nature. Righteousness lies in fellowship and equality, in sharing and caring, which is to say in mutual and general love. Into every male God put vigorous and impetuous desire for the sake of the continuance of the human race. No law can take that away. It is right and good for a man to enjoy sexually every woman he desires. That a law should say 'Thou shalt not covet' is laughable. And the very idea of marriage is absurd since all women naturally belong to all men. (For more see Erotic religion, The Atheist Conservative, January 24 2010.)
5. The anti-human campaign among Environmentalists will be the subject of a later essay.
6. In some texts it is "within everything".
7. "All worship leaders need to be instructed … in body awareness and awakening'." The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance by Matthew Fox, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1988, pp 216f – quoted in Matthew Fox and the Cosmic Christ, an essay by Margaret Brearley in Anvil, Vol. 9, No 1, 1992, p 44. I have relied on Dr Brearley's meticulous scholarship, and with her permission taken my examples from her papers on New Age – and Matthew Fox in particular – so avoiding the punitive labor of reading more than a very few New Age texts myself. Most of the words and phrases marked as quotations come from this source.
8. "In practice Fox demands: worship in circles, 'preferably on the soil of Mother Earth' (Fox p 217); the centrality of Eros; and the breaking of divisions between body and mind using 'rituals of the native peoples'. These would include sweat lodges in every church and synagogue, Sun dances with drumming, moon rituals, drinking the 'blood of the cosmos' and radically replacing the existing liturgical calendar. Fox seriously suggests, for example, that each Sunday could be devoted to celebrating a different organ of the body." (Brearley, p 46]. "Fox cites the Hindu god Shiva, the creator and destroyer [as saying]: 'The phallos is identical with me …. The phallos is … the symbol of the god', and adds: 'This is Cosmic Christ language …. There alone will men recover active respect and reverence for their own amazing powers' (p 176). Fox teaches that one must 'recover the sense of sacred phallos … by way of drumming, dancing and entering into the irrational processes … puberty rites … celebrating one's chthonic wholeness in the company of male adults' (p 177). 'Love beds are altars' (p 177) and the sense of lust should be recovered as power and therefore as virtue: 'it takes courage to be lustful.' (p 178) Mystical sexuality is an 'important base for cultural renewal and personal spiritual grounding' (p 179). … '[G]ay people need to lead straight people.'" (Brearley p 45)
9. Fox p 145 (Brearley p 44)
10. Although Matthew Fox writes such predictions as this: "Christianity as we know it now will not survive …. The issue is the survival … of Mother Earth" (Fox p 149) [Brearley 54], New Age doctrine has made "inroads into the Protestant and Catholic Church worldwide" and "creation liturgies inspired by creation spirituality are increasingly being used in cathedrals and churches". (Brearley p 53)
11. Teilhard de Chardin, trs. N. Denny, The Future of Man, Collins, London 1969 p 302 (Brearley p 46).
12. Another leading New Age writer and spirit medium, David Spangler, also visualizes a "planetary spirituality" which "will be holistic, affirming interconnectedness and Gaia; it will be androgynous, mystical, global – with 'world communion' -, and will seek synthesis of person and planet. Above all, the New Age is a spirit, a 'presence made up of the collective spirit of humanity, and the spirit of our world, of Gaia'." [D. Spangler, Reflections on the Christ, Findhorn Publications, Findhorn 1981, p.84. [Brearley p 52]


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Organizers of the seventh annual Jordan Scheer Memorial Children's Relay for Life said the event was a success, despite having to be held indoors because of rain.
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silly question :). is there such thing as a flexible solar panel. also, is there any difference in space and earth solar panels. ie, is there such a thing as a space solar panel :). Speak to you later. Scott Elliott firstname.lastname@example.com 2E1FJB / M1SJE ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Bruninga" <firstname.lastname@example.com> To: <email@example.com> Cc: <email@example.com> Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2002 2:11 PM Subject: Re: [amsat-bb] Re: AMSAT O-E > On Tue, 30 Apr 2002 email@example.com wrote: > > > but isn't it possible to take one step forward on the mechanical side and > > have a couple of small thin/lightweight deployable panels strapped to the > > side of the satellite at launch? > > Thats the easy part. But with no way to point them at the sun, then they > are useless... > > ---- > Via the amsat-bb mailing list at AMSAT.ORG courtesy of AMSAT-NA. > To unsubscribe, send "unsubscribe amsat-bb" to firstname.lastname@example.com ---- Via the amsat-bb mailing list at AMSAT.ORG courtesy of AMSAT-NA. To unsubscribe, send "unsubscribe amsat-bb" to firstname.lastname@example.com
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GCSE Top Performers 2015
pupils are celebrating the best set of GCSE grades achieved at the school in
recent years, with 69% of pupils gaining 5 A* to C grades including English and
Mathematics. This represents an overall increase of 17% compared with the
previous year. Indeed, 78% of entries received grades in the A* to C boundary.
Richard Notman said "in a mixed ability school such as ours, the results speak
volumes about the dedication, work ethic and care taken by both our pupils and
the staff who work with them. Across the board pupils have met and in most
cases, exceeded their expectations".
particular note, Grace Smith achieved 1 A and 9 A* grades and Callum King 3 A
and 8 A* grades. Callum is looking forward to returning to the Sixth Form in
September to study Biology, Chemistry, French and Mathematics.
results follow hot on the heels of a 90% pass rate in the A level examinations
last week, which enabled Stover's Sixth Form pupils to secure places at
universities including Birmingham, Cardiff, King's College and Southampton.
I am delighted to report that our Upper Sixth Form
examination candidates achieved a pass rate of over 90% across all subject
entries for the summer 2015 sitting of their A2 examinations, with over 40% of
those results being A* to B grades.
Particular mention must be given to our Head Girl, Nabeelah
Afolabi, who achieved A*, A and B passes; exceeding her academic
expectation by 6 grades overall. As any good Head Girl should, she really set
the standard for her year group. Well done indeed.
Being a non-selected year group, there are a number of real
success stories, who while not achieving the top grades, far out-stripped their
personal targets. It is particularly pleasing to note that across all
subject entries, when measured against external educational predictors, our
pupils exceeded their expected results and delivered a net positive value added
position. So heartiest congratulations to all our pupils and the staff
who supported and encouraged them towards those achievements.
Kind regards.
Mr Richard Notman
Executive Head Teacher
Unfortunately, due to regulations under which the DfE league tables are collated, the hard work and success of our pupils is not always fully reflected.
The headline statistic used in League Tables is the percentage of pupils achieving 5 or more A* to C grades including Maths and English. As a boarding school, we have a proportion of our pupils who come from overseas, for whom English is not a first language. We feel it to be in the best interests of these pupils to enter them for the 'English as a Foreign Language' IGCSE rather than the standard English GCSE – but results in English as a Foreign Language are not allowed to be included in the '5 or more A* to C grades including Maths and English' statistic. We do however have to include all our pupils in our figures – even if they have never been entered for standard GCSE English. Effectively this means that some of our GCSE pupils were never even eligible for the chosen statistic in the first place – even though their Maths results were extremely good. A better indication of performance for a school such as Stover is perhaps the average points score – although even this has its limitations.
A second issue is that at Stover, if a pupil really wants to sit a GCSE exam in any particular subject, we will support them in that. Particularly for some of our Learning Support pupils a result of a grade D in English or Maths might be a major personal achievement – highlighting some outstanding application and progress.
In Stover we take pride in always trying to do what is in the very best interests of each pupil, in terms of entering them for exams, and choosing courses of study.
A Quote from Stover
he has exceeded our expectations: A, A, B; he has achieved his dream of getting a place at University; something we hoped for
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As you know, I'm not exactly the type of person to miss winter. But can I tell you something? When these vanilla spice cookies bake, even in the middle of May, filling the kitchen with a fragrance sweet and filled with nostalgia, I'd swear I was walking around a Christmas market where they sell fresh-roasted cinnamon pecans wrapped in paper cones, the kind you take in your gloved hands, the air visible in front of you as you breathe in and out, your face flushed pink. It's like that time last winter when my friend Becky and I drove out to Geneva, on, I swear, what must have been the coldest night ever, on the hunt for homemade candy canes and cups of hot chocolate. After we walked up and down a street of bundled carolers and holiday decorations, our skin cracking and our noses running, what we found instead were frozen toes and fingers, even after returning to the car; a few photos of us, in the dark, standing near twinkling lights; and my first taste of a chestnut, which, in all … [Read more...]
after all
Well, if you haven't heard, this site has been around for six months now, and, to celebrate, I'm holding a giveaway! Even if you don't want to enter to win a prize, you really should head over just to see the comments being left. One or two gave me a lump in my throat, which, admittedly, isn't too hard to do lately---Am I the only one who can never, ever watch P.S. I Love You again? Even Flash of Genius---I had to skip to the end to see the happy ending before I lost it, just 20 minutes into the video. This does not bode well for my future, in which I am supposed to grow more emotional, aren't I? But back to the comments: all of them have felt like they were written by old friends, and have convinced me, more completely than before, that the people who read this site are some of the nicest you'll find, anywhere. Speaking of which, those of you who love chocolate were awfully patient last week when I posted, the day before the biggest chocolate holiday of the year, a recipe for iced … [Read more...]
something new to love
Saturday night, I saw the San Antonio Spurs beat the Chicago Bulls, at the first professional basketball game I've ever attended in my life. We were in the front row, and when the Spurs players came out to warm up, they stopped to greet fans right in front of us, turning to crowds of pen-holding kids waving their arms and papers, competing for a chance to get an autograph. Early into the night, I told my friend the red-headed guy looks like Charlie Crews from Life, and then in the game, I saw him score a lot of points. But I think it was when some fellow Chicagoan started booing him that I knew I liked Bonner (for the record, I think you sound like you're two years old when you boo someone for playing well). Sean Elliot, such a classy guy, took a picture with my friend, who is the biggest fan of the Spurs I know, maybe the biggest fan there is. Ime Udoka chatted with some kids who made a sign for him. And Tony Parker, after speaking French to some girls who said Ça va? to him, … [Read more...]
a fair trade
People don't have dinner parties much nowadays, which is really a shame, I think. I mean, they still happen, less formally usually, but mostly eating at someone's house has been replaced by meeting them at a restaurant. And there is something lost in not cooking for friends and being cooked for by them. For one, you won't be trading recipes afterwards, and, that is a loss indeed. My mom's apricot chicken isn't really hers; it came from Alice, who had our family over years ago. My favorite butter cake came from Mrs. Newman, who made it for us---especially for me---many times before I finally coaxed the recipe from her. Some of my most-loved meals came from someone else's kitchen. In a way, maybe that's part of the appeal of food blogging. Pull up a good food blog, and you're the guest in someone's home, someone you come to know if you visit often enough. You see what ingredients and preparation went into the meal. You read the host's reactions and promises for good outcomes. … [Read more...]
The Best Cookies I Eat
**This recipe was featured in Bon Appetit's Blog Envy 2009 Contest, which, although we didn't win, was fun to be considered for. In my grandma's world, there were two good Christmas gifts: clothing hangers, wrapped with their heads sticking out and placed under the tree, and, homemade food. Every December, she stacked dozens of aluminum tins on the stairs to the dark, creaky attic of her Maywood bungalow. They were all different shapes and colors, some with holiday pictures of winter sleigh rides or smiling snowmen. And for the weeks leading up to December 25th, she filled them with what she baked: fudge, sugar cookies, pecan tassies, kolachkys, peanut butter cookies, chocolate-chip cookies, dessert bars. If you were one of the relatives, you got a tin. If you lived next door, you got a tin. If you were in one of her clubs or helped run her garage sales or somehow in some way knew Caroline, you got a tin. Bonus points if she found a recipe you liked, by the way: after she … [Read more...]
The Grow-on-You-Fast Cookies
The day after I made cowboy cookies, eating two of them at my desk in the middle of the afternoon, I told my coworkers that I wasn't very impressed. The cookies were fine, good maybe, but they weren't anything that special. A chocolate-chip cookie at heart, they include extras like coconut and nuts and oatmeal, becoming something too complicated and yet fairly simple at the same time. I managed to polish off both cookies, though, commenting aloud that they really were just fine, all while looking down at my plastic baggie, more sad than I'd admit that it was empty. That was the first batch. One habit I've developed after my experience with the New York Times chocolate-chip cookies is chilling the dough before baking (well, that and forming it all into rounded balls and placing the lot of them on the cookie sheet in the fridge ahead of time, meaning later I can just pull out as many as I want, ready to bake). So the first day I made cowboy cookies was the day I made the batter: … [Read more...]


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Video Industry News Video Company News Technology Industry News Technology Company News Novelty Industry News Novelty Company News Gay Industry News Gay Company News Legal Industry News All Company News
Released: Jan 30th, 2008
Running Time: 118 Min.
Director: Denys Defancesco
Company: Pink Moon Digital
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Cast: Laura Lion, Lady Zoom, Joe Monti, Katy Caro, Katy Parker, Cage (II) (Czech), Csoky, Thomas Stone, Lucy Love (II), Gianna Michaels, Nick Lang
Critical Rating: AAA 1/2
Genre: All-Sex
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