Sucking your own cock

Jesse Bering on "the contorted history of auto-fellatio":

Long before I knew very much about anything regarding sex, I did what many young males do, which of course is to place an empty paper-towel roll over my penis and suck hopefully upon the cardboard end. Okay, perhaps not everyone does this; I was a little confused about the suction principle. And now I'm a bit embarrassed by the story, although it's been a full year since the event and I'm much better informed on the subject of fellatio today. Oh, settle down, I'm only joking.

Well, kind of. I did actually attempt this feat, but I was 12 or 13 at the time, which, to give you a clearer sense of my unimpressive carnal knowledge at that age, is also around the time that I submitted to my older sister with great confidence that a "blow job" involves using one's lips to blow a cool breeze upon another's anus.

So to avoid similar confusion, let us define our terms clearly. Autofellatio, the subject at hand—or rather, not at hand at all—is the act of taking one's genitals in one's mouth to derive sexual pleasure. Terminology is important here, because at least one team of psychiatrists writing on this subject distinguishes between autofellatio and "self-irrumatio." In nonsolo sex, fellatio sees most of the action in the sucking party while irrumatio has more of a thrusting element to it, wherein the other person's mouth serves as a passive penile receptacle. (Hence the colorful and rather aggressive-sounding slang for irrumatio—"face-f*cking," "skull-f*cking," and so on.)

You'll have to click on the link to read the rest - at least that's easier than trying to lick your own dick like a dog. I know because, like Jesse, I did it when I was a teen.

The Bourgeois Virtues

From a review of Deirdre McCloskey's Ethics for an Age of Commerce:

Deirdre McCloskey is well aware that the Western intellectual class—what she calls, following Samuel Coleridge, “the clerisy”—has been, with notable exceptions, hostile to capitalism and downright contemptuous of the morals and attitudes of the middle class that has flourished under capitalism. Since 1848, the most damning adjective among intellectuals from the radical left through the romantic right has been “bourgeois.” McCloskey also knows, and demonstrates beyond cavil, that such contempt has been not only mistaken but dangerous: She observes that “in actual fact middle-class people have not been monsters” while “their sworn enemies, from Lenin to Pol Pot, Abimael Guzman, and Osama bin Laden, commonly have been.” The great anticapitalist tyrannies of the 20th century “killed many millions and nearly killed us all.”

Meanwhile, even well-meaning attempts to interfere with free markets have almost always hurt rather than helped those needing help the most. McCloskey provides plenty
of examples:

Minimum wages protected union jobs but made the poor unemployable. .  .  . Zoning and planning permission has protected rich landlords rather than helping the poor. Rent control makes the poor and the mentally ill unhousable. .  .  . Regulation of electricity hurt householders by raising electricity costs, as did the ban on nuclear power. .  .  . The importation of socialism into the third world .  .  . stifled growth, enriched large industrialists, and kept the people poor.

Today there should be little question that capitalism “works better for the average person, as we saw 1917-1989, than so-called central planning backed by a Cheka or a KGB.” The success of capitalism and the failure of central planning in improving the lot of ordinary citizens have not, however, diminished the clerisy’s attraction to government planning or its disdain for the market. Instead, the clerisy has claimed that the wealth of some in a world where others are poor is a sure sign of the sinfulness of the former and the innocence, if not sainthood, of the latter.

McCloskey will have none of it. Ernest Hemingway is supposed to have pointed out to Scott Fitzgerald that the rich were not really different except in having more money. McCloskey makes a similar observation about those with less: “The poor are not better than you and me. They’re just poorer.” Individual success in the market does not require another’s failure, so personal wealth is not an indicator of moral culpability: “Guilt over success in a commercial society is for a victimless crime.”
...
McCloskey’s argument is, in part, historical. Against romantics of both the right and left who yearn for the alleged warmth and community of a medieval village, she points out that “the murder rate in villages in the thirteenth century, to take the English case, was higher than comparable places now.” It was, after all, the despised bourgeoisie that “ended slavery and emancipated women and founded universities and rebuilt churches, none of these for material profit and none by damaging the rest of the world.” In the long view, it has been the “bourgeois virtues [that] led us from terrified hunter bands and violent agricultural villages to peaceful suburbs and lively cities.” In traditional societies where outsiders are enemies, “one makes friends to keep from being assaulted,” while in societies where relations between individuals are governed by the infamous “cash nexus,” friendship based on personal affinities is possible: “In a world governed by markets one buys protection, one hopes, anonymously with taxes or with fees to one’s condominium association, and then is at leisure to make friends for the sake of real friendship.”

Killing With Kindness

From a review of David Stove's What’s Wrong With Benevolence - Happiness, Private Property, and the Limits of Enlightenment by John Derbyshire:

David Stove (1927-1994) was a philosopher and polemicist who taught at the University of Sydney for many years. A pessimist, a conservative, and a common-sense reductionist in the grand Anglo-Saxon tradition, Stove deployed a keen wit and an imaginative style against a wide range of modern shibboleths.
...
He is also good on the humorlessness of the benevolent world-improvers and their lack of personal bonds. I think he is wrong to absolve them of cruelty, though. Communism could not have been as monstrously cruel as it was, and still is, if its promoters and enforcers were merely indifferent to human suffering. Lenin, says Stove, was not cruel: “To those who experienced the effects of Lenin’s benevolence, cruelty from him would have been a relief: a reassuring touch of common humanity.” Bertrand Russell, who met Lenin in 1920, came away with a different impression:

When I met Lenin … my most vivid impressions were of bigotry and Mongolian cruelty. When I put a question to him about socialism in agriculture, he explained with glee how he had incited the poorer peasants against the richer ones, ‘and they soon hanged them from the nearest tree—ha ha ha!’ His guffaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold.

I think Stove is right, though—prescient even—about the ultimate destination of the welfare state: “We also know that the inherent tendency of the welfare state is to increase poverty; that ‘welfare’ still continues every year to absorb a greater proportion of our nations’ wealth and population; and that there is no social force in sight capable of stopping that process.”

Bertrand Russell was a true-believing Marxist.

The book review that killed John Keats

From How not to write a book review:

Possibly the most famous book review, ever, was written by the young Irish wit and polemicist John Wilson Croker. Croker is still remembered, though obscurely, as a founder of modern political conservatism. What's more, according to some sources, John Wilson Croker invented the very term "conservative."

The opening passage of Croker's review, published in the September 1818 Quarterly Review, displays his formidable and venomous approach. What he writes is smart as well as odious. It is also quite wrong, in more than one sense of the word:

Reviewers have been sometimes accused of not reading the works which they affected to criticise. On the present occasion we shall anticipate the author's complaint, and honestly confess that we have not read his work. Not that we have been wanting in our duty - far from it - indeed, we have made efforts almost as superhuman as the story itself appears to be, to get through it; but with the fullest stretch of our perseverance, we are forced to confess that we have not been able to struggle beyond the first of the four books of which this Poetic Romance consists. We should extremely lament this want of energy, or whatever it may be, on our parts, were it not for one consolation - namely, that we are no better acquainted with the meaning of the book through which we have so painfully toiled, than we are with that of the three which we have not looked into.

...

He continues, with a well-calculated, languidly aristocratic tone of affected vagueness, as though not sure where he read a snotty phrase he borrows:

It is not that Mr Keats, (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt that any man in his sense would put his real name to such a rhapsody,) it is not, we say, that the author has not powers of language, rays of fancy, and gleams of genius - he has all these; but he is unhappily a disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere called Cockney poetry; which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language. ...

[Mr Keats] is a copyist of Mr Hunt; but he is more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd than his prototype.

...

No wonder this review was known as the one that killed John Keats.

Keats wrote some lovely stuff ("Beauty is truth, truth beauty") but he was also a thuddingly dull and boring neurotic narcissist as John Wilson Croker clearly saw.

Writing - there's nothing new under the sun

From Do I Repeat Myself? The problem of the ’already said' by John Barth:

Full disclosure: my remarks on this subject have quite possibly been made by me before, in other contexts. When the eminent Italian critic and novelist Umberto Eco visited Johns Hopkins some decades ago, he spoke of the problem, for contemporary writers, of the “already said”: the circumstance that because Homer, for example, spoke so memorably in The Odyssey of the “wine-dark sea” and of “rosy-fingered Dawn,” nearly 3,000 years’ worth of poets and storytellers have had to find other images for sea and sunrise—a task that must become increasingly difficult as the repertory of possibilities is exhausted.

Indeed, Homer may have had an easier time than we comparative latecomers to literature have, but we need to remember that literature didn’t begin with Homer—not even written literature, not to mention the millennia-old oral tradition that preceded writing. Once upon a time, perusing a book about the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, I noted that some twelve centuries before Homer, in about 2000 B.C.E., the scribe Khakheperresenb was already voicing what I like to call Khakheperresenb’s Complaint: “Would I had phrases that are not known,” the scribe laments, “in new language that has not been used not an utterance which has grown stale, which men of old have spoken.”

Fear not, bookworms and library rats. Two fellow bibliophiles, novelist (The Name of the Rose) and critic Umberto Eco, and playwright and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, have collaborated on a volume whose title says it all: This is Not the End of the Book.

Henry James

From Susan Goodman's essay:

Of the many contributors who supported and found support from the Atlantic Monthly, Henry James stands apart. James, who came into his own in the pages of the magazine, published stories, reviews, and novels through half a century—and with the Atlantic ocean between himself and the editors in Boston. The second son of the eccentric Swedenborgian philosopher for whom he was named, James spent his peripatetic childhood traveling between the United States and Europe, studying with tutors in Geneva, London, Paris, Bologna, and Bonn. About people raised abroad like James and herself, Edith Wharton would say that they had been “produced in a European glass-house.” They were “wretched exotics,” none of them American; “We don’t think or feel as the Americans do.” In 1864, the James family moved to Boston, before putting down roots in Cambridge. Two years earlier, James had followed his older brother, William, to Harvard, where he studied law until literature asserted itself as his calling.

Inheriting his father’s wanderlust, James visited London in 1869 and made the acquaintance of artists and intellectuals, including George Eliot, William Morris, Gabriel Rossetti, and Leslie Stephen. After extended periods in Paris, where he wrote letters for the New York Tribune, and Rome, James moved permanently to England in 1876. His house in Rye, purchased in 1898, became a center for friends as different as Joseph Conrad and Stephen Crane.

Today the broader public knows James through films of his novels, notably Merchant Ivory productions of The Golden Bowl, The Bostonians, and The Europeans. He holds a special place in the Atlantic’s pantheon of writers for a number of reasons, chief among them the many novels that explore the cultural and psychological differences between Europeans and Americans. To his contemporaries, James represented the quintessential artist, laboring at his craft to the exclusion of much else. In a May 1885 Atlantic review of a biography of George Eliot written by her husband, John Cross, James presents the author of Middlemarch as many saw James himself. The “creations” which “possessed” her and “brought her renown,” James wrote, “were of the incalculable kind, shaped themselves in mystery, in some intellectual back shop or secret crucible, and were as little as possible implied in the aspect of her life.”

What is remarkable … is that this quiet, anxious, sedentary, serious, invalidical English lady, without animal spirits, without adventures, without extravagance, assumption, or bravado, should have made us believe that nothing in the world was alien to her; should have produced such rich, deep, masterly pictures of the multifold life of man.

...

Whatever freedom James accords his protagonists comes with profound loneliness. To James, “the free spirit, always much tormented, and by no means always triumphant, is heroic, ironic, pathetic … and ‘successful’ only through having remained free.”

Maybe it's time to re-read James whom I found too dry in my youth. Amazon's James page.

Jerry Lewis on getting old

From an interview with GQ:

At 85, Lewis employs three full-time people to help him stay organized. He loves them fiercely—and drives them bonkers.
...
"Can I get another orange soda?" he asks, and when it arrives twenty seconds later: "What took you so long?"

Suddenly, Lewis's face goes blank and his hazel eyes get big as quarters. Slamming his chair back—boom!—he reaches for a trash can under his desk and expels a mouthful of soda in its general direction: a classic spit take. Except, he says, that it's not.

"Went down the wrong pipe," he announces, daintily dabbing at his mouth with a napkin. "I'm fine. It happens all the time, and when it does, you just have to let it." Getting older is crammed, he says, with such losses of control. "I'm taking Lasix, which makes me pee sometimes seven, eight, eleven, twelve times," he says. "I've decided to keep my fly open all day."

The mental illness masquerading as Marxism

"Why are there so many kids who have no ambition but to be horrible, criminal people that don't want to do anything other than cause misery for others? Their only aspiration in life is to be like someone in a rap video or to win the Lottery. All they want is a quick fix and that's fuelled by the media and by advertising.

And then there's all the good people out there who work hard and break our backs and do our best, and stay within the boundaries of what is right. I'm attempting to start my own small business but that's going to be even harder in this area now. I don't blame the police for not reacting fast enough. There are just thousands of scumbag criminals out there and not enough police," - Jon Davis, 32, a resident of Croydon, South London.

Sorry fella, but you were asleep at the wheel as so many middle-class folk were while you collected the spoils of a socialist welfare state with tax refunds for tampons, toothpaste and "free" health-care and the real communists created a pool of angry barbarians to further their Marxist revolution. Oops!

Do I have to spell it out? Liberal "luvvies" suffering from class and race guilt have ignored the barbarians at the gate for 70 years. But you can't force yobs to be responsible middle-class citizens through social engineering - aka bread and circuses. You can't give power to the powerless (they have to take it or else they are still powerless) or free slaves until they realize that they are slaves.

If you give power and freedom to slaves and peasants, they will simply end up being uppity ungrateful anarchistic slaves and peasants - just the way the true-believing Marxists intended; all the better to manipulate.

These people should have been culled - not coddled - 70 years ago. There would still be as many illogical mentally-ill Marxists but they would have had fewer pawns. These poor misbegotten rioters are useful idiots - as Lenin would say. Anything to destroy Western civilization, create anarchy and - take control as Stalin and Hitler did.

Of course they won't succeed but they (the commies not the yobs) will keep on with their misanthropic crap and we'll be stuck with these sub-humans as long as ordinary middle-class liberal "luvvies" put up with the mental illness of Marxism masquerading as multi-culturalism, moral equivalency and political correctness.

I'm glad that George Orwell finally conceded, just before he died, to Aldous Huxley that "Brave New World" was a more likely future than "1984." At least that way we can all be high on "soma" while Big Brother fucks us in the ass without grease.

London riots before and after pics

Check out the neat trick with the mouse.

Jackie O: "LBJ killed JFK"

Explosive Jackie O tapes:

Jackie Onassis believed that Lyndon B Johnson and a cabal of Texas tycoons were involved in the assassination of her husband John F Kennedy, ‘explosive’ recordings are set to reveal.

The secret tapes will show that the former first lady felt that her husband’s successor was at the heart of the plot to murder him.

She became convinced that the then vice president, along with businessmen in the South, had orchestrated the Dallas shooting, with gunman Lee Harvey Oswald – long claimed to have been a lone assassin – merely part of a much larger conspiracy.

Texas-born Mr Johnson, who served as the state’s governor and senator, completed Mr Kennedy’s term and went on to be elected president in his own right.

The tapes were recorded with leading historian Arthur Schlesinger Jnr within months of the assassination on November 22, 1963, and had been sealed in a vault at the Kennedy Library in Boston.

The then Mrs Kennedy, who went on to marry Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, had ordered that they should not be released until 50 years after her death, with some reports suggesting she feared that her revelations might make her family targets for revenge.

She died 17 years ago from cancer aged 64 and now her daughter, Caroline Kennedy, has agreed to release the recordings early.

I'm not a fan of conspiracy theories but the "LBJ killed JFK" theory has always seemed pretty plausible to me.