"Ex-gay" touch therapy

Cuddling the gay away:

Imagine a father cradling a baby, only the baby is an adult man. Now, imagine that this man-baby is trying to cure his homosexuality and you have an accurate picture of what's known as "ex-gay" touch therapy.
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The idea behind cuddle conversion is that homosexuality -- or same-sex attraction (SSA), as proponents prefer to call it -- is caused in part by a lack of fatherly love and affection. The thinking is that when boys miss out on healthy same-sex affection, they eroticize all male touch.

Hmmm? Maybe. I've even heard heard one religious nut claim that cock-sucking was a substitute for fatherly love. Of course none of these freaks knew my dad who was the most touchy-feely man I knew who loved cuddling me until I first went to school and he realized that I finally was no longer his "little boy."

He also realized that I was a sissy and soon sent me to boxing lessons so I "could take care of myself." Thanks, dad. That was one of the best things you did for me.

King Edward queer and Wallis Simpson a tranny?

Was Wallis Simpson all woman?

There's been always been speculation about her sexual make-up. Now in a major reassessment her biographer uncovers new evidence.
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Her face was square-jawed and masculine, with an unfortunate mole.

Her voice had an unpleasant rasp, according to many aristocrats who knew her, and her idea of wit was raucous American wisecracks.
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Recent research suggests that she might well have been born with what’s currently called a Disorder of Sexual Development (DSD) or intersexuality, which affects about 4,000 babies annually in the UK.

Some of its effects are so subtle that, even today, doctors delivering babies with ambiguous genitals cannot be immediately certain if they are holding a boy or a girl.
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Another possibility is that she was born a pseudo-hermaphrodite, with the internal reproductive organs of one sex and the external organs of another.

Was this the case with Wallis? It certainly makes sense of an extraordinary remark she once made to a friend.

She had never had sexual intercourse with either of her first two husbands, she confided; nor had she ever allowed anyone else to touch her below her personal ‘Mason–Dixon line’ — the name given to the border between the Southern and Northern parts of the United States.
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The biographer James Pope-Hennessy, who met her in 1958, commented in his journal that Wallis was ‘one of the very oddest women I have ever seen’.

‘She is, to look at, phenomenal,’ he added. ‘She is flat and angular and could have been designed for a medieval playing card. I should be tempted to classify her as an American woman par excellence were it not for the suspicion that she is not a woman at all.’
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Of more weight is the opinion of Dr Christopher Inglefield, a plastic surgeon specialising in gender surgery today.

Through his clinical practice, in which he advises patients on corrective surgery, he has considerable experience in assessing whether an individual is predisposed to survive as one sex or the other.

According to him, Wallis’s known physical and behavioural characteristics clearly fit the stereotype for intersexuality.
She didn't have sex with her first husbands

He points out that her angular, almost square-jawed face indicates a lack of the female hormone, oestrogen.

Her masculine traits become even more obvious, he says, when you look at photographs of Wallis posing with her girlfriends — such as her best friend from school, Mary Kirk.

‘Oestrogen is very softening. You can see Wallis’s condition clearly next to the very rounded face of Mary. Today, a course of oestrogen therapy can transform facial features. Had it been available in Wallis’s day, it would have dramatically changed her appearance.’

It’s well-known, too, that a lack of ovaries affects body shape and breast development.
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The ultimate confirmation of womanhood, of course, is to get pregnant — a clear impossibility for those born without a womb. So it seems significant that Wallis avoided the subject of reproduction entirely in her own memoirs.
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Wallis’s mother Alice apparently said on her deathbed that her daughter could never have children.
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But like Wallis, [Edward] had dark secrets of his own.

Several of those closest to him had already expressed the opinion that Edward was mentally unbalanced. Not only that, but it was even whispered that the future king was actually insane.

Intriguingly, as we shall find out on Monday, there is indeed evidence to support this.

Even when I was a kid (a half a century ago) there were rumors that Simpson was an hermaphrodite and that Edward was a poofter. Edward may not have been queer in the modern sense but he was definitely queer as a clockwork orange in the traditional sense.

Democratic policies lead straight back to Stone Age

My generation, the Boomers, ran up so much debt - with their personal profligacy and with their Democratic Party political idiocy - that we now have more debt than we can repay in our lifetimes. Oops! Sorry, kids.

Obama has doubled that debt in two and a half years. Sorry, grand-kids.

I don't like radio talk-shows and never listen to them. Limbaugh, Beck and Bruce et al are so superficial that they're only two steps above side-show freaks to me. But today I saw this Limbaugh quote that tickled me:

You leave it up to Obama, and we won't need to be defeated by al Qaeda; we'll end up in the seventh century on our own.

Neat.

Some eye-candy

Around the world in 60 seconds:

Rick Mereki and his friends Tim White and Andrew Lees, decided to take the trip of a lifetime and document key moments from their fantastic journey.

Rick Mereki's video, MOVE.

Zionism = socialism

Shlomo Avinieri:

It seems the neo-capitalist model, which clearly caused the economic crises the West is currently experiencing, is contrary to the requirements and values of the Zionist enterprise. It is therefore wonderful to see the Israeli flag flying at these [tent-city] demonstrations after it seemed to have become the property of the right-wing settlement movement. The current demonstrations are not only a reflection of social protest. They are Zionist in the deeper sense of a just and humanistic Zionism.

Israel was founded by communists and will always be a socialist state. Yes, we need Israel as a model of democratic freedom in the Mid-east and I'm a supporter but I really don't trust American Christians who blindly worship "The Holy Land". I have a hunch that they simply want to fulfill their primitive biblical prophesies of Armageddon.

Health news

What your food cravings say about your health?

The Mail this week reported the story of 59-year-old Elsie Campbell, whose breast cancer was detected after she developed an unusual appetite for salad.

The mother-of-two was eating four lettuces a day, prompting her husband Jim, a research scientist, to investigate.

He worked out that lettuce contains a natural chemical called sulforaphane, which can attack cancer cells and which breast cancer sufferers often lack.

He correctly guessed his wife’s addiction meant she was suffering from the disease. Jim has since set up question myhealth.com, providing information about other odd symptoms.

So, what could your craving be trying to tell you?

CRAVING: MARMITE

Possible ailment: Heart arrhythmia, atrial fibrillation.

Marmite is rich in B-vitamins, which are essential for breaking down carbohydrates for energy. B-vitamins also maintain nerves, skin and brain.

There are eight different types of B-vitamin and a deficiency of any one of them can result in a range of conditions, including heart palpitations, arrhythmia or fibrillation (an irregular heartbeat), chronic fatigue, irritability and poor concentration.

So love it or loathe it, a craving for Marmite could be your body’s way of trying to make up for a deficiency.

Chuck has learned to love the British "staple", Marmite, after 30 years with me but Andy still can't stand the stuff after 20 years. I love the stuff and, yes, I do have hereditary arrhythmia and atrial fibrillation.

But I wonder if food aversions also tell a story. I recently suffered from an aversion to my two favorite foods: fish and asparagus. The aversion lasted a couple of months. Thank God it finally went away.

Visualize whirled peas:

Eating pulses, brown rice, green vegetables and dried fruit could cut the risk of bowel cancer.

People who consume pulses such as kidney beans or lentils at least three times a week reduce their risk of developing polyps – small growths in the lining of the bowel which can become cancerous – by a third, researchers say.

Eating brown rice once a week cuts the risk by two fifths, while having cooked green vegetables at least once a day reduces it by a quarter.

Well, duh! We've known for 40 years to give peas a chance.

Smoke, drink, eat the wrong food and live to 100...if you've inherited the right genes:

A study of hundreds of centenarians revealed they were just as likely to have vices as other people – and in some cases they indulged in them more.

Some of them had smoked for 85 years, others got through more than two packets of cigarettes a day. They also exercised less than their shorter-lived counterparts but were less likely to become obese.

Hitch-hiking

When I first came to America 33 years ago, I got all over the states by hitch-hiking and, when I got a car, I used to pick up hitch-hikers all the time. Sometimes it was a bit crazy: especially in southern California where I was often propositioned by hippie stoner "bisexuals" from Santa Monica or Malibu (and their "old ladies") after smoking a couple of doobies with them. But I never felt in danger. Those simple innocent days are long gone.

Jay Nordlinger on "thumbing it":

I’ve been receiving quite a bit of mail about hitchhiking.

Not so long ago, this country was full of hitchhikers. People hitchhiked all over the country. Especially young people — that was how you saw the country, if you didn’t have very much money.

There came a time when you couldn’t: It was just too dangerous. Such a shame. It is a shame, yes, that you can’t hitchhike. But you know what is the bigger shame? That you can’t pick up hitchhikers. You want to stop and help someone, give him a lift. You may even desire the company. But is it wise?

As you can imagine, readers have been sending in stories about hitchhiking — about their hitchhiking experiences long ago. These stories could make a neat little book. Many readers say something like the following: “Hitchhiking was a great way to get to know America — the land and its people. I’ll never forget it.”

Those were the days, my friend;
We thought they'd never end;
We'd sing and dance forever and a day;
We'd live the life we choose;
We'd fight and never lose;
La la la etc etc etc.

And then you grow up and stop taking so many chances.

Squirrel

Lately squirrel has been my favorite word and I'll use it in all sorts of inappropriate ways just because I love the sound of the word. It's like music to my ears. So I decided to look up the etymology of squirrel:

The word squirrel, first attested in 1327, comes via Anglo-Norman esquirel from the Old French escurel, the reflex of a Latin word sciurus. This Latin word was itself borrowed from Ancient Greek word σκίουρος, skiouros, which means shadow-tailed, referring to the bushy appendage possessed by many of its members.

When we first bought this farm there were hundreds of squirrels and chipmunks but then we got a cat to kill the rats in the chicken coop and she proceeded to decimate the chipmunks and committed complete and total genocide on the squirrels. Even our local flying squirrels, who are usually beyond the reach of most cats, got out of Dodge as quick as they could as far from the farm-house as possible deep into the forest. I miss our flying squirrels leaping from tree to tree through the forest at dusk and dawn.

"Only libertarianism can save the GOP"

James Poulos:

The Republican Party is in danger of returning to its roots — back to the time when its two main constituencies did not belong to a single party. Before the Civil War brought them together, the nationalist, money-driven Whigs and the regional, moralist Abolitionists held little in common. Now, the debt debacle has carried Republicans back to the deep divide present at their party’s creation.

One faction declares that without prosperity, all is lost. The other insists only repentance can save us. Both Prosperity Republicans and Repentance Republicans believe they are in a battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party.

The Reagan-era fusionism that once held them together has hit the ash heap of history — hastened to its grave by the political and economic reckoning that Reagan could defer but we can’t.

Now, Repentance Republicans view Prosperity Republicans as inescapably corrupted by an unsustainable form of crony capitalist governance. Prosperity Republicans view Repentance Republicans as unmanageably captivated with an unstable form of politically principled purity.

With neither faction able to triumph or surrender, both must change. The only fusionism that can succeed today must defeat the claims to dominance of both big GOP factions.

Fortunately for Republicans, the new path to unity isn’t as harrowing as the fight for the Union. Some fear that libertarianism is too theoretically brittle and politically uncompromising to form the foundation of a new Republican consensus. But whatever your judgment of libertarianism in its ideologically pure form, the triumph of practical libertarianism over the Republican Party is as necessary as it is inevitable.

The two factions each already claim a variety of libertarianism.

Read the rest. It's good. Many conservative Christians in our rural county campaigned and voted for Ron Paul in the last primaries. I also met several conservative Christians through my old blog (most did not realize at first that the "born again" part of the title was satirical) who were also Paulites.

One such family in Texas comes to mind. They are real holy-rollers (like our nearest neighbors who attend a church were they "talk in tongues" and run around trying to catch the Holy Ghost in a brown paper bag - well, I'm just kidding about the bag). The Texas mom home-schooled her kids and her two oldest daughters had blogs. They joined the Compatriots blogroll that I started.

One day I wrote a post about why I disagree with "gay rights" (and all group identity "rights" for that matter) in which I addressed some controversial subjects. The Texas mom emailed me to "check" me out and make sure that her kids were not hanging out with a dirty old man.

After that, I toned down the more controversial aspects the blog and ended up with dozens of Christian "followers". I ended up being their affirmative action "token fag". Most were old-fashioned bible-thumping "social conservatives". But a surprising number were libertarian when it came to social issues. They still believed that homosexuality is evil but they did not think that they could (or should) use government to outlaw it.

Western conservatives (including the Christians) seem to be just naturally "live and let live" libertarians but many of my Christian "blog buddies" were from the South and even some of them were libertarian which is unusual because most "conservative" Southerners seem to be converted Dixiecrats who love big government.

The saner and more libertarian Christians realized that using government to push one's agenda is a two-edged sword: when the other side is in power they will obviously use government coercion to push their atheist dialectical materialism aka Marxism and destroy Christianity. I'll take a Christian over a communist any day.

Obama turns 50 tomorrow

I don't give a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut but Derb posted some interesting quotations for the occasion:

Forty is the old age of youth: fifty is the youth of old age. — (Variously attributed, mostly to Victor Hugo)

If you’re not strong at twenty, handsome at thirty, rich at forty, and wise at fifty, then you will never be strong, or handsome, or rich, or wise. — (George Herbert)

At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning.
At thirty, I stood firm.
At forty, I had no doubts.
At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven.
At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth.
At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.
— (Confucius, Analects II.4, tr. James Legge)

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves. — (George Orwell, Extracts from a Manuscript Notebook, 4/17/1949.)

Derb also had another interesting quote today:

Back in the 1930s when Chiang Kai-shek ruled China, he faced two great problems threatening his nation. One was Japanese aggression, the other was communist insurrection. Chiang concentrated his efforts on the communists. When people criticized him for this, he explained: “The Japanese are a disease of the skin; the communists are a disease of the bowels.”

Whatever you think of Chiang Kai-shek’s judgment in that particular matter, something similar applies here. The U.S.A. has a disease of the bowels. Repeated applications of Clearasil won’t help.

This isn't really a blog

I blogged at Born Again Redneck for six years and eventually realized that I had nothing more to say. I started this blog as a way to share stuff that I enjoyed with my buddies, Chuck and Andy. So, if anyone else stumbles over here, don't expect much commentary on politics and daily affairs. I got tired of saying the same thing for 6 years and it all boiled down to: "Most Democrats are insane. Half the Republicans are fools and there's a crook and a liar in the WH."

No title needed

Chuckle of the day

Why the USA has turned commie

In 1910 72% of Americans lived in rural areas - now rural America accounts for just 16% of population:

In 1950 the countryside remained home to a majority of Americans, amid post-World War II economic expansion and the baby boom.
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Overall the share of people in rural areas over the past decade fell to 16 percent, passing the previous low of 20 percent in 2000, and is expected to drop further because of the economic crisis.

But in contrast American cities are booming and will continue to swallow suburban communities, producing a virtual mega-city stretching through Boston, Massachusetts, through New York City, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Baltimore, Maryland and ending in the capital Washington, D.C.
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The rural share is expected to drop further as the U.S. population balloons from 309 million to 400 million by 2050, leading even more people to crowd cities and suburbs and fill in the land around them.

The majority of Americans used to live in small towns and rural areas until 1950. So, for nearly 200 years, they had to be pretty independent and self-reliant. Us country bumpkins don't have instant police protection so we have to be armed and ready to defend ourselves. We also don't have professional fire departments and have to rely on volunteers.

City folk have all those services (and more) and have become dependent on government. And the more dependent on government you become, the more government you want. The days of Mayberry RFD are over and the USA is headed for full-blown European-style socialism.