So, maybe now we can stop shaming the fat shamers, and stop catering to the fashion industry who just want to sell their ware, and admit that being fat, no not big, that is different and involves being tall and big-boned, not the same thing, but being fat isn't good for one's health.
Twelve years after the Islamic revolution, the mullahs sent three assassins to kill Shapour Bakthiar, the last prime minister under the Shah and the head of The National Resistance Movement of Iran. They succeeded, along with him, they murdered a young man who served as his assistant. The killers escaped. No one was brought to justice. Now, years after the publication of the Satanic Verses, they finally get its author, Salman Rushdie. Our lesson: The mullahs never forget so don't be lulled into a sense that it's over, so much time has gone by, no one remembers anymore, no one cares anymore. Be aware!
https://news.yahoo.com/sarah-campbell-jailed-made-boy-sexual-plaything-had-baby-091032408.html
This is the kind of thing that drives me crazy about patriarchal sexually repressed societies. Most adolescent boys dream of having sex with an attractive older woman. Nine years in jail for getting some young buck off? Really?! If he impregnated her, he had an orgasm; he experience bliss. How is that abuse?
To keep equating men's abuse of adolescent girl with women's abuse of adolescent boys is stupid. Men and women aren't sexually the same--not biologically, physiologically or chemically. Case in point: a woman can't rape a man with her body whereas a man can. A woman can rarely hurt a man with her body but a man sure can either in sexual or asexual ways. So, let's stop pretending these incidents are the same. His childhood was stolen? He lived the dream bitches!
In my 20s, I had two fur coats, a brown mink and a silver fox. They were both very warm. Then my friend Carolyn Mahboubi told me to watch a video on fur farms. I sold my furs and haven't worn one since. Nowadays, with all the alternatives, there is no need to wear fur for warmth. Those who do for status and show of wealth, are morally bankrupt. These animals are treated as objects, dead before being killed, worse than agricultural animals. Look at them all at the wires like human prisoners. Perhaps the association between Covid and fur farms will pursue more people to give up supporting the torture of these animals and vacuous symbols of material prosperity.
Usually I write about something that has gotten my goat, but today I'm writing from a bit of sadness, a bit of nostalgia. I was too young to go to studio 54 when I first arrived in NYC at 17. It closed before I started going out to nightclubs or rather discotheques. But I went to Regine's often and loved it. I never came across a celebrity there, but had a fun time every time. When I worked at International Promotions, our boss once took the whole office staff there to celebrate us. She was a cool woman, Narissa Bainbridge was. A tough Jamaican who taught me that when you are thrown on your ass by life, you get up, dust off and go on.
Today, Regine's obituary in The Times reminded me of my youth, those glamorous times, and it seems that with her death a chapter in my life has also closed. I felt the same way when I read Alex of LA's obituary too some time back. Life marches on, no doubt about that.
We are just about done trashing the Earth, now it's Mars' turn. We haven't landed yet, but our trash has.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/11/how-everyone-got-so-lonely-laura-kipnis-noreena-hertz
A spate of recent articles, including those in the New Yorker and The New York Times, report on the lack of sex among people in general, even or especially during Covid, and the youth in particular. This a group of people who according to hormones and present liberal sexual norms should be having lots and lots of sex. So what is going on? I speculate on this question only from point of view of heterosexual a woman with only several casual gay encounters. I, under no circumstances am willing or able to speak for a gender fluid or even a gay individual.
Is one reason for decline in sex the meteoric rise of porn, or rather its availability? Gone are the days of my parents' film reels, or my venture to a Times Square theatre with my gay friend as escort and protector to see an X rated movie; gone are even the days of trying to enter the X rated section of the video store without wondering whether you will get raped or recognized. Now, porn is in private and at our fingertips. Have we decided that sex is easier and even better with ourselves? Perhaps. But masturbation has been around from beginning of time, for most of that time considered a sin by many. And that is my friend point. Sin.
Sex as forbidden, sex as mysterious, mystifying thing, sex as something only adults do, naughty naughty sex. Well, sex is no longer naughty or forbidden (in most of the western world) or a mysterious, mystifying thing, or even a thing that can tickle our naughty bone. So, the rebellion against "propriety" and the excitement of transgression long associated with sex are gone. Sex, in our society is no longer bad. It is good. And that is a good thing. Too many people have suffered under repression of their natural desires and have in turn hurt others because of their fear, guilt and shame. Still. Sex has lost one dimension that made it attractive. The thrill of being bad.
Returning to porn: although it has made masturbation much easier and more pleasurable and perhaps more prevalent, it has done women no service. Many men are bad in bed. Why? Because they think what pleases them pleases women. Wrong. They need to learn, and only real life women can teach them what to do to become better sexual partners. The funny thing is that it has nothing to do with virility or sexual prowess and everything to do with teachable techniques. It isn't innate; it's learned. If young men, however, think that porn is real sex; they are more in trouble than their "ancestors" who didn't get to see so much sex and had to figure it out with a real life partner. No one explains to these young fools that the women are getting paid, paid much better than the men. That the squeals are fake, grimaces sometimes are more from pain than pleasure and "dirty" words uttered are to speed up the damn male orgasm. That is my one beef with porn. I hope parents and educators step in to preclude unreasonable sexual expectation in young men, because then they really won't get any sex, or will have to unlearn most of what they have seen before they can learn what real life sex is.
One of the old-fashioned things that come to mind about sex in our society is not only that it is so prevalent and easy to have but that science and liberal culture has emptied it off its importance, it's beauty, it commitment. Although, abandoning of gender roles are good for both men and women in so many ways, it hasn't helped our sex lives. Men where the protectors, the providers. They were sexy because of this. Evolutionary psychology tells us because women found them good future parents for their offspring and so good mates--sexy. Now that women provide for themselves and for most part protect themselves, they have less "use" for the male. But don't forget our lizard brains still long for that evolutionary kink of finding "benevolent authority" eternally sexy. Just remember the insane success of Shades of Gray, a terribly written novel depicting S&M a la Disney, but with an aggressive/assertive, benevolent male lead.
As to men: It's hard being a man. All that darn testosterone making them aggressive and competitive. Living among men is hard, not only for women, but for men. Imagine all of that competition and pressure and alpha races. So, what men sought in women? A respite, an oasis, a soft warm place away from the harshness of the world they have created outside of the home for themselves. But we women are too busy trying to imitate them, taking care of ourselves to take care of them. In our insistence on equality we are erasing differences. Equality yes, decency yes, but we are vastly different and thank God for that. The biology, chemistry and physiology of us are different. That is why it makes me laugh when some hot teacher seduces a sixteen year old guy and people call it rape. If you came, it ain't rape. And that is why women, unless armed with a pole, can't rape men. On the other hand there is the ridiculously schizophrenic modern female culture of baring half your ass but getting mad when men look. Really?! On one hand, a bunch of people can't stop shouting, #Metoo, on the other celebrities and influencers are more and more bare in photos and online.
Also funny that although we are far from the promised "maid" robot, except those vacuums that don't even pick up a shoe to vacuum under it, we already have sexbots. Instead, men and women should talk to one another about sex and not be afraid to engage in a give and take as opposed to everyone for him/herself. Isn't that what sex is? A give and take and at its most beautiful becomes one--the give is take and the take is give. Sex, after all, is two people complimenting and completing each other.
Sex is the intersection of the trivial (not brain surgery) and the divine (our only real connection to the greater universe). When we take the mental and the emotional out of it, we just become two people rubbing against each other. And that is pretty much not sexy. As we are going, there soon will be no definable sexuality and so no sex. We will become a society of equal androgynous beings who don't need anyone to procreate. I wonder how we humans will feel when such a fundamental reason for our existence is gone.
NY is only doing what DC has been doing for some years. Come on, NYS regulators, hurry the fuck up. But we are NY, baby, we are unstoppable, we are an open air market, we are Sodom, we are Gomorrah, we are love, we are business, we are pretty, we are ugly, we are change, we are knowledge, we know that we are alone yet together, don't put a drop in an 8 million people pot, it will eat it up. You give an inch, we'll take a yard, we are NYC, we are unstoppable. Churn baby, churn.
Yes, I know that the regulators are right and it must be done by the book and in good time and all of that great stuff, but babies, we have been smoking weed since the 60s and we had no taxes or regulators. Just Nature's gift. Make no mistake, outside of the personal growth/possession, once they roll out the rules, they will be your mafia babies, they will replace the mob. They won't kill your sweet ass but they will put it out of business unless you pay their cut--the tax.
PS
I have to say that the images on the walls of this particular dispensary are rather assaulting to the eye and alarming to the brain. Tone it down, give it some love.
I am so sick of this fake woke stuff. I will be the first to say that when it comes to brains women are equal (different yes, but equal) to men in every way. Differences are evident in our bodies as well; many men are bigger and stronger than women, many women are more flexible than men. However, when it comes to competitive sports, I firmly believe that initial biology should determine which team one plays for. Just like some male gymnasts or yoga practitioners may find themselves at a disadvantage against a female in this arena, an XX athlete will find herself at a disadvantage against an XY athlete no matter how many body parts have been altered and how much hormone the person has taken.
Chromosomes should determine this not social norms. Chromosomes have done their job for hundreds of thousands of years. Transgender designations and such are what, fifty years old ? And may change yet.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/08/business/mcdonalds-russia.html
This must be the saddest photo of the whole war. Fat Russians pining for their American junk food. What does it tell you about nationalities and what does it tell you about class/education?
Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
A few days ago, an article in The New York Times reported that the Chinese government was aware of Putin's invasion, because the American government warned its Chinese counterpart and the Chinese went and told Putin all about it. It is clear where Putin and the Chinese stand. But where does the US and the West stand? If both knew about the invasion, which there is enough proof that they did, why didn't the leaders of these regions start the sanctions on Russia and its oligarchs BEFORE the invasion? Why didn't they send weapons and make speeches of support BEFORE the invasion? Perhaps then Putin would have thought twice about invading Ukraine. Or is it that the West, thinking of the two people's close ethnic, historical, geographical and cultural ties just figured they will "give" Putin Ukraine, a tit for tat they will collect on later, perhaps military presence in Poland. But all of this sympathy makes the Western governments look "good." Sometimes, the leaders of the world are so stupid that one thinks they must be evil. Same in Afghanistan, same in Iran. Same all over the world. We care only about our own interests. There isn't an iota of true sympathy for other peoples.
Now, western leaders keep making speeches, hold marches, send this and that. Too late. People have died as will many more. So, stupid or evil?
Today, our esteemed president Biden said the words that should have been said a decade ago, as a matter of fact the day, Mr. Yeltsin got into his car and drove away from a waving Putin after giving him the reins. I saw the scene of Yeltsin's departure in a documentary and will never forget the look on Putin's face as he watched Yeltsin recede into history and Russia be left at his disposal to steer as he chose. Putin is a KGB dude and felt deeply betrayed by his superiors as he kept calling to them that the sky was falling during the last days of the USSR and heard only silence. Putin never forgave the US for breaking up the USSR. And he is still pretty loud. The look in Putin's eyes the day he saw Yeltsin off was that of pure glee, one that plainly said he didn't need to call up to anybody now. Now, he would restore USSR to its former glory. What he doesn't get is that the glory of the USSR was based on the utopian idea of Communism; Putin's is built on ego.
The US should have known this and removed Putin a long time ago, when he was just a little tadpole and not this immovable frog he has grown into.
Now, the people of Ukraine will pay. A terrible a shame again because of the US's short-sightedness and arrogance on one side, and indifference on the other.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/nyregion/trump-ny-fraud-investigation.html
OK PC police come and get me. Have you noticed how everyone in the position of power in NYC is black? Like there isn't one qualified white person? Ignorant, incompetent idiots, oh but they can't be, they are black!
The last couple of days, two articles in the the Times online have really gotten my goat. This one talks about the Sacklers, the pharma pill pushers having upped their settlement offer with those who got hooked on their pills to one billion dollars! The article the day before reported on more student debt being cancelled but only for those who were "tricked" by their for profit dishonest upper education institutions.
Well, as a starving writer who can't even afford to pay a decent editor to edit my recently completed novel, this shit really gets me. Why do people have to pay other people for being stupid? Only stupid people go to those colleges; smart ones go to hundreds that are actually legitimate institutions of learning. So, why does the government compensate not all students but some students? It pays the stupidest of students who can't tell a hoax when they see it.
The Sackler article takes the cake. By free will you take pill pusher's pills, get addicted, use more, devastate your life then sue the pill pusher? The pill pusher was just doing its job. No one held a gun to those people's heads to take pills, but oh they do feel so good, until they don't. After a 2010 emergency ulcer operation I was given all the oxycodone I wanted. I didn't become addicted because they constipate you and I'm very attached to my regular bowel movement (sorry to be gross). But when I was given the pills like they were candy, it was public knowledge that they are addictive. The doctor told me so, the literature online told people so as well. Now, I wish I had become addicted. I could have paid an editor and realized my life long ambition. Oh, well in this country one pays for being smart.
Vandalism to some is improvement to others. Is this painting worse for the eyes or better? Do the eyes just change what the painting is trying to convey, or erase it? And ultimately what is art? And why? I personally find this story endlessly amusing, especially for people who take things too seriously. And that is why I don't follow the stupid trend of investing in art. The value of art is so subjective that the price can never be fixed or guaranteed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/10/opinion/factory-farming-chicken.html
I believe that humans are omnivores; like our cousins, the chimps, we have the teeth structure to prove it. But only humans torture their food for greed. I have limited my consumption of meat to beef and chicken, always free range when I buy to cook at home. At restaurants, it's harder to hold to principles. I commend the Times for putting this horrific issue on its front online page and bringing it into the mainstream. I hope we all think about these images when we eat our next meat meal
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https://news.yahoo.com/teens-charged-mans-murder-allegedly-212555155.html
Let them go! Why would they report this crime to the police?! There already was a warrant for their step-father's arrest and he was still walking around free, sexually abusing little girls and ruining lives. These three young men stopped another heartbreaking crime. Let them go! Send them to anger management classes. These aren't criminals! These are vigilantes. And heroes certainly to their little sister and other would be victims of the monster they beat and left for dead.
Some years back when I read in myriad places that the US has stopped manufacturing things due to high cost of labor and has farmed it all out to China, becoming instead a service economy, I shook my head before I gave a grimace.
US a service economy? I come from the Middle East. So, I know many cultures including the Far East, have all sorts of niceties and manners and so on. Perhaps not honest but other people in the world know how to give service. Direct, mannerless, crude Americans making a service economy?! Not a talent we have.
On the other hand, we have made things and made them well. When I was visiting Iran in 2009, while the country was under sanctions, I made sure to look at every item I came across. Toilet? Made in Iran. Toothpaste? Made in Iran, and so on. This not only gave factory workers income, large swath of the masses, who support the Mullahs, but made Iran pretty self-sufficient. We, on the other hand, took the jobs of our masses and send them abroad so that big corporations can make more money for the top brass. And so they elected Donald Trump!
I am very happy to see in the news that we are beginning to make our own planes, our own chips, not potato! We make things well, we should make our own stuff, not because Covid or something similar can disrupt our supply chains and economy, although that is valid, but because we need to be self-sufficient when it does.
But I reserve the worse contempt for the wives of such men, who with their complacency allow such behavior to go on. Some stay because of their little kids, some like Hillary for position and power, some for the lifestyle. Whatever, it is, they are the enablers with self-esteems so low they almost deserve to be cheated on. So, the next time you judge the "other woman", remember the enabling wife.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/16/us/mark-schlissel-fired.html
The above article appeared in The New York Times today. Finally, finally, my long time question has been answered. I have been interested in whether female animals have orgasms for years. When I first started to Google the topic, I found nothing but bestiality sites or blogs. On one a man described in full loving detail how to get your female dog let you fuck her. Some years later, I actually found an article stating that many animals have their clitoris inside their vaginas, so intercourse directly stimulates it. It also stated that at some point, the female clitoris moved outside the vagina and sits where it does now above it. I'm not clear, as I haven't seen any research on it, why that happened in terms of evolution. A friend of mine often said that sometimes evolution doesn't improve things; it just doesn't worsen things so much that the species dies out. The wandering of the clit, however, has led to centuries of bad sex for many women, unfortunately. Still, male aggression overcame female reluctance and we ended up over-populating the earth anyway.
Now, finally, there is actual research on this. We have come a long way. It's good to be here.
https://news.yahoo.com/people-are-running-out-of-money-213744569.html
As Republicans predicted, they stop working. Take away free money and they will start looking for jobs! As a democrat, I would love to believe in the goodness of human nature but the stats make it difficult. Human nature harbors a lot of laziness. That's a fact. I, as a human, am not exempt from this, but it's good for economists to keep in mind when proposing fiscal policies.
In a previous post, I wrote how surprised I was that Maxwell's trial ended as it did, with her going to prison for the rest of her miserable life. Now, of course comes chapter two. Just as I predicted, the bitch will eventually go free as time served and/or probation and or simple mistrial, let out on a technicality. Conspiracy all the way. I see the paws of the British royal family all over this.
This is why conservatives hate democrats! A democrat myself, I'm beginning to hate the extremist ones. The government wants to raise money to help the poor, the government goes after tax evaders. The government who can never enact meaningful finance reform can't go after the big guys (corporations and trillionaires )so who will it squeeze? Gig workers who get paid $601 for this or that. Mark my words, those who will be audited will be the low hanging fruit not people and entities with shark lawyers on retainers to sue the government or fight it in courts for years over the minutia of the tax code. I'm fast turning Republican.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ghislaine-maxwell-trial-verdict-when-is-11640105836
I met Ghislaine Maxwell sometime in the early1980s, not long after her father supposedly fell off his boat in the night and drowned. I met her through a childhood friend who had moved to New York to escape her parents bitterly public, expensive divorce. My friend was Ghislaine's roommate in the one bedroom apartment that the media keeps mentioning. It was in the roundish building near Columbus Circle and 7th Ave. Ghislaine had the real bedroom; my friend's bedroom was actually a large closet off the living room with a pair of sliding glass doors to let in light. I visited my friend only once there when she first moved in and met Ghislaine then. She was a cold, standoffish bitch, not interested in even getting a coffee or a drink with her roommate and her roommates best friend. I guess she had her mind on snagging herself a millionaire to revamp the life style her father's financial dishonesty and death, perhaps suicide, had left devastated.
At hearing about her father's death, I remarked to my friend, "Well, he came into this world barefoot and he left this world barefoot." My friend snapped that, "only I would say such a thing." But I was more correct than I knew. The man had committed all kinds of financial crimes before his death and was basically a pauper, just as he was to begin with. Well, I didn't like Ghislaine then and I sure like her less now.
But I didn't think her trial would turn out the way it did. I thought she would squeal on the powerful men who I'm fairly sure had sex with those girls. She didn't. So I thought, they are helping her behind the scenes to get off easy, get a slap on the wrist or even time served and probation, then when out, they would make all kinds of contributions to her lifestyle under the table.
But the white men threw her to the wolves. Now, facing up to 40 years in prison with appeal being a long-shot, I'm wondering what she will do. Maybe she didn't squeal because she didn't want to be found dead in her cell, who knows.
I'm sure many an agent and publisher is chasing her for a tell-all book. I hope she writes it. Once, again a woman pays for the crime of men. How unsurprising.
How many times are we going to read about diets not working? The above article appeared today in The New York Times online, maybe just my online : ) but it brought home that even a respected publication like this one keeps repeating well-known facts without addressing the real, underlying issues with our society. My response published today follows:
I appreciate the veracity of this article, but I find it redundant for those of us who have known these facts for a long time. The research about diets not working isn't new. It has been around for several decades now. Yet dieting or not, Americans, and in fact the prosperous around the world, are gaining weight, many becoming obese and unhealthy. Our issue is the capitalistic commodification of food. From giant food companies selling chips and soda, to mom and pop makers of the latest version of the donut, food has become a commodity pushed onto consumers. Moreover, the sellers of food play on our lizard/child brains by providing the consumer with what the human brain and body need most--fat, salt and sugar. Food has become a pleasure activity, and as such has lost its bigger purpose, to nourish. Meanwhile, another capitalistic sector--apparel is normalizing being fat, excuse me large, to sell its own products. The only way for us to eat healthy is to be taught from the very beginning of our lives that we eat to nurture our bodies first and enjoy the transient pleasure second. There is no way a kid raised on pizza and soda will enjoy salads as an adult. There are always exceptions of course, but it holds true for the majority. The research is there.
I was extremely critical of this extremely privileged Arab woman, a human rights lawyer, for not speaking out against the genocide in Palest...
