HOUGHWOUT'S POST

And tthat is an end he shares with other ancient Emperors Caligula and Nero just across the sea.

2011-10-27T06:30:00.000-07:00

On sunday, the 27th day of February 2011, I predicted here that Emperor Qaddafi of Libya would eventually fall very hard. He has, revoltingly and savagely.

Experience teaches us that things that cannot bend tend to break, eventually. I wonder how he felt, in the hands of people he long despised. I wonder what he told them, whether he tried negotiations with them, as injured as he was, I wonder whether he cried for mercy.

What goes through the mind, if he still has it, of a man, already violent sodomised with the crudest of instruments, and who knows that the crudest of ends is near? Any normal-functioning human being watching a man in that description must sympathize with him. That is why I sympathise with the injured and sodomised Qaddafi. But again, those are some of the dangers of denying others their freedoms, just because of who you think you are.

We are once again, sternly reminded, of the dangers of rule without the mandate of the ruled. Silenced people are not mute forever. Soonner or later, they will raise their voices and when they do, there will be so much noise the world will think we have returned to the barbarity of the ancients.

Talking of the ancients, the events in Libya remind me of the fate of Roman Emperors Caligula and Nero. Caligula both were so evil. When Caligula's body was examined after his assassination, they found not less than 30 knife wounds on it. Nero's barbarity, by the way, would lead to the concept of 'the anti christ' in the book of revelation in the new testament. The evil life of these two people is a topic we will cover in our next edition.

Turning back to the topic at hand; there has been a rising chorus, and rightly so, of vilification of the way Qaddafi met his end. But the bigger question in my mind is to invesigate why a people would turn so violently on their leader. It is not the first time a brutal dictator has been savagely murdered; and, by far, not the last.

Well some even disapprove of calling Qaddafi a leader. He ruled with an iron fist without the mandate, let alone the informed mandate, of the ruled. He used vile words to refer to the segments of his subjects who, for lack of what to do, voiced their disagreement with him. He jailed them in their thousands, murdered them, promoted violent overthrow of foreign governments etc etc.

Allegations have been made in support of Qaddafi that he developed Libya to unimaginable levels in the region. Well, look, that is what one must do who rules a nation, I thought. It is not a favour to the people that the President or King does what a President or King ordinarily must do anyway.

Happy life

2011-10-09T03:57:00.000-07:00

In say thirty years time, if I should live that long, I will be about sixty years old. It seems a far place away a long time away but we will get there, unless ofcourse, we die earlier. Some are already there and looking back can see what choices in life they made that have, directly or indirectly placed them in the circumstances they find themselves in.

The choices might have to do with education, lifeskills they acquired or did not, career, food they ate, lifestyle they lived, whether they married, persons they married, if they married,the number of children they have or had, if they have children etc etc.

But can we really plan to detail. You know things just happen in life. They's no plan to our conception. Well who who is alive today really knows the time and date of which day he was conceived? But we know when we were born.

Not so with death, some deaths are predictable. First, there are a thousand ways to die. There are those whose deaths have been told in advance, perhaps because of some rare terminal condition. There those who die accidentally. There are those who die incidentally. There sudden deaths. There are deaths from ilnsses bravely borne. There are many kinds of deaths each day.

If that is the case that we, eventually, will all, at different times of the day/night, die; what's the big deal? Why do we waste so much time not enjoying this only life. Why do we unlawfully accumulate so much wealth at the expense of many others who also need food and other basics to enjoy the very one and only thing we have in common; LIFE.

Wangari Maathai was cremated yesterday. She loved trees to death. She, in life, even found it reprehensible that people should be buried in wooden coffins. That was how strong her love affair with trees was and she won a nobel peace prize for it.

Well she's simply gone and in due course will fade away, from our memory, whether we like it or not. Yes there will be this University Insitution named after her. Yes there will be this school or park and the like named after her and rightly so; but sooner or later, as we ourselves progress slowly through the years to that decade when people are known to abruptly die, we will have to come to terms with the fact that DEATH IS A NATURAL NECESSITY. No one is spared.

Death is necessary for the evolution of mankind. It retires the old to create space for the new. There should be nothing mournful about that. And perhaps more importantly, death is an event meant to warn us as well as to remind us that, in the end, not many things that we are insanely crazy about, unless they make our lives more fulfilling without having a deleterious effect on those of others, are not that important in life.

S what is important in life, one needs to ask! LIFE ITSELF. That's what we forget. Whatever you are doing, do it for life. Have a happy life! Join me!

smell

2011-09-08T00:20:00.000-07:00

Can we even think properly if we are permanently unable to smell things? I know air is more enjoyable breathing when it is also sweeter smelling.

I have been horrendous at posting lately. I have to blame the courts. Too much court work!

Anyhow, what does one do when one finds oneself able to breath but permanently unable to smell. I know one can have a flu/cold and not be able to breath for sometime until one recovers but not to be able to smell anything, even the strongest of odors must be a very unsettling thing, if it can happen.

During sleep, we breath just fine but do we really smell things? I do not think so. We would be unable to sleep, I think, if we were also able to smell as we sleep. Is it possible then that there is a necessary connection between consciousness and smell or the perception of it; that we can only smell if we are also conscious and awake!

what then do we make of dreams in which we 'smell' things. Is our smell sensation activated during dreams? I don't think so since we also 'see' buildings and people in dreams when our eyes are completely shut!

Which then leads me to this: our brain with its many grooves, like an onion, must have many layers that serves the function of not only keeping us alive but also keeping that existence enjoyable.

Just a thought to get me back.

Current famine in Northern Kenya is the product weak democracy.

2011-08-05T01:51:00.000-07:00

The debilitating diet of hunger and death that is currently famishing a segment of our population has once again showed the value of a free news media in exposing the plight of the forgotten, vulnerable and weak members of our population.

But did it have to take the news media for the Government to act. Didn't the Government foresee the famine?

Hunger and death from hunger is not the natural product of drought or famine. Hunger is not a natural calamity but a social calamity. It is the product of a weak democracy, ineffective food production policies, and momentous policy mistakes related to economic growth, unemployment, gender inequalities and the like. In most cases, hunger is State induced like in Zimbabwe under Mugabe, in China under Mao during the Great Leap Forward or in Cambodia under POL Pot.

Indeed in the horrific history of famines in the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred in any country with a democratic form of Government and a relatively free press determined and dedicated to reporting and informing.

Amartya Sen has said that there has been no substantial famine in any country with periodic and genuine multi party elections, that has vigorous opposition parties to voice criticisms, and that has free media that reports and questions the wisdom of Government policies.

It is not the first time Kenyans are dying of hunger and certainly not the last and that is because our rulers have no political incentives to try hard to stop famine. In a true democracy, elections would be impossible to win on the wake of famine from reckless state action or inaction.

Certainly in western democracies, it would be very hard for a Government to survive protests from the populace, and criticism from media and opposition parties and certainly harder for it to survive elections after widespread hunger and death from hunger.

Kenyans perennially die of famine because the Government can afford to have Kenyans die of hunger and yet itself survive with little challenges to its existence.

Our rulers never have to suffer from famine. In fairness to them, though, they manage to live surprisingly comfortably living in gated neighborhoods with twenty four hour security, attending their children to elite private schools, flying over dilapidated public hospitals on their way to hospitals in London. Instead of financing effective food production techniques, they import and exorbitantly sell imported foods.

That is why our hope lies in the corrective function of democracy for it can make a world of difference. So we must build a vibrant democracy. We must nurture strong opposition parties and forcefully champion freedom of the news media.

A courageous and dedicated opposition can be fruitful in making Government alert to popular concerns. A free news media can bring out facts that embarrass Government thereby prompting it to act. More importantly, these institutions serve to spread the penalty of famine to political leaders.

In China of today, the responsible Government Ministers or officers would almost certainly be hanged for their action, inaction and insensitive and ludicrous remarks. China however, has made great leaps. Between 1958 and 1961, the period of the Great Leap Forward, China had a truly major famine caused entirely by the State and in which some Seventy million people died.

Deprivation of food is a debilitating condition and has may causes. Admittedly, we are not Sweden neither are we China. But we don’t have to be either of them to eradicate hunger from this country.

Narcissistic Personality 2nd Edition

2011-04-06T04:15:00.000-07:00

He feels entitled to special treatment. He is unable to empathize with the feelings of others. He is often envious of those who are more accomplished or successful.

I have previously written here about Narcissistic personality disorder. However after reading an interesting article by Scott Barry Kaufman in the Huffingtonpost, I felt to read and write more on this very interesting personality disorder.

(Where appropriate replace 'he' with 'she').

There is narcissist in every single one of us. But the narcissistic personality exhibits a grandiose sense of self-regard, expecting their superior talent, ability, and intelligence to be recognized even in the absence of commensurate performance. He is preoccupied with fantasies of
almost infinite success, power, brilliance, beauty, or accomplishment.

He has a sense of specialness and affiliates only with others who are likewise special.
He actively requires admiration and seeks to evoke displays of admiration from others.

Narcissists have a tough job because perfection is viewed as either all or nothing: If you are not perfect, you are imperfect, and if you are imperfect, you are nothing. This ego ideal must then be projected as a public persona whom others must appease with sacrifices of admiration and submission. Anything short of this ideal tarnishes the self,squashing perfection outright and leading to chronic feelings of emptiness or shame.

Narcissists cannot tolerate any flaw, however small, in the perfection of the self. Because of this intolerance, narcissists must find ways of dealing with information that is foreign to their perceptions, data that tell them that they exploit others, they make mistakes, it is they who are envious, and so on. Much of this information is simply denied or repressed, but more elaborate defenses are also frequently employed. Narcissists often use rationalization to construct alternative realities that draw on the actual substance of events but change their significance to excuse blunders and exploitations.

Once a scenario is found that saves face and puts the narcissist in the best possible light, it replaces the previous version of events and becomes the working model of reality on which the narcissist proceeds. This may lead to some strange role reversals: The narcissist does not exploit others; others should be flattered that the narcissist consorts with them. The narcissist doesn’t make mistakes; the narcissist is a visionary who pursues dreams others cannot possibly understand. The narcissist is not a dictator, but an enlightened autocrat. Many more variations routinely take place in the experience of these individuals.

More later.

A political conversation

2011-02-27T23:37:00.000-08:00

Telling the truth about one's country is not always very pleasant but it is a very patriotic thing to do. Many of us are puzzled and disappointed by our democracy or should I say our politicians. That is not unique to us. It is global. Yet this is the only life we have. It is in this life that we must experience all these emotions

First things first, Kenya is far more democratic; our politics far more participatory to suffer the ongoing cataclysms of the Arab lands, at least not tomorrow or next year or the year after. However, no historian can tell for sure why revolutions happen when they happen. No revolution was ever scripted. None ever followed a script. (Who knew Qadaffi, a founding revolutionary in the same league as Fidel Castro and Gamal Abdel Nasser would be toppled-Not yet though. But he will, probably.)

The ongoing mass revolt against a sclerotic dictatorship in Libya is of significance to black Africa where tribal loyalties permeate every nook and cranny of our politics. Libya, like many Black African countries, has tribes. And yet that has not deterred a people from speaking with one voice against rule without mandate. That is the biggest lesson for mighty leaders in black Africa; sooner or later, unless you govern responsibly, responsively, and accountably, you will fall.

It is in the nature of leadership that the composition of rulers is never constant. It shifts to correspond with the shifting political, economic and social environment. It is also in the nature of concentrated political power that unfit leaders are rarely conscious of the decay of their ruling structures.

It is safe to say that most of the worst tumultuous revolts of history have been caused by an obstinate resistance to change by the leadership of a country when resistance was no longer possible or beneficial. Look what is happening in the Sahel region.

Basically, as I have written before, when a bad system remains stable it does so because any tendency towards change is met, normally, by increased effectiveness of the factors which resist the change. Bad government and its consequences bring reformers into power but their tight rein soon provokes restiveness, the desire for release and further reform.

Hardly does a country continue to the stage of disaster; before that extreme is reached corrective forces arise which check the slide into chaos and they so commonly prevail to such an excessive degree as themselves to cause a reaction and revolution again

The French Revolution is the classic example of the total destruction of an unbending leadership. But the French Revolution, a movement ostensibly directed against despotism culminated in the establishment of despotism far more complete than that which had been overthrown. The ‘apostles of liberty’ proscribed whole classes of their fellow-citizens, drenching in innocent blood the land which they claimed to deliver from oppression. ‘The apostles of equality’ established a tyranny of horror, laboring to kill all who had committed the sin of being fortunate.

Anyhow, regardless of what reformers bring in, when a reform has become necessary, and the moment for accomplishing it has arrived, nothing can prevent it, everything furthers it. Mr President, ROGER THAT!

The last Nation: Herald the beginning of the Tribe State

2011-02-16T23:15:00.000-08:00

First things first. This article is more relevant to those of humanity who still labour under sclerotic dictatorships, who live in Hobbessian societies where life, as always, is short, nasty and brutish; with infant micro and macro-nutrient malnutrition; youth unemployment and underemployment in the high double digits; short lifespan in adulthood etc.

To their leaders, one thing you must know: Do not look at citizens and mistake their silence for happiness. Mute societies are not silent forever. Sooner or later the need to say something will become impossible to ignore. And when that day comes, the world will here so much noise people ill think we have gone back to the confusion of Babel.

The last Nation: Herald the beginning of the Tribe State

Somehow, vaguely and dimly as most humans see everything; when we (Kenyans) launched the second Republic on 27th August 2010, we assumed we had refounded the government on a new basis of constitutionalism, accountability and responsibility. We were naïve. It is still the era of cutting edge impunity.

Ours is a foundation starting to scramble. The political instability we face now is result of longstanding political and economic grievances that furiously came to a head on 27th December 2007, pitting tribes against tribes and continue to pose an existential threat to our existence. We have deep regional and tribal divides at work in the country.

Something very basic went very wrong. In the past decades past two Presidents made a series of poor ethnic based political and economic decisions that left us on an inexorable path to poverty, inequality, underdevelopment and instability. This President has done next to nothing to reverse that commute and the slide towards permanent instability is gathering steam and speed.

When a bad system remains stable it does so because any tendency towards change is met by increased effectiveness of the factors which resist the change. Bad government and its consequences bring reformers into power but their tight rein soon provokes restiveness and the desire for release and further reform. Hardly does a country continue to the stage of disaster; before that extreme is reached corrective forces arise which check the slide into chaos and they commonly prevail to an excessive degree as themselves to cause a reaction.

That is the cycle operating in this country. After big wins in 2002, the current President, a long serving vice president in an autocratic regime before then, started running the country just like the one he had just replaced, the ultimate boss. Centralizing power in his hands, he copied the leadership plan of his predecessor.

With his mouth opening and shutting like that of a landed fish, he went about gutting core institutions like Courts, the Central bank, the civil service, the Security forces, promoting his ethnic loyalists to key posts and using public speeches to hoodwink the public that it was all reform. Shredding the inter-tribal unity that had made him President, his rule severely damaged social cohesion, creating not only a vast under-class, but an under-class with a tribal and rational grievance.

His rule has left us with a furious population resentful of inequality in national resource allocation and waiting to explode. We are fractured and factious than ever.

This President seems unable or unwilling to do anything to bring us all on board. In fact, he has overlooked one vital lesson from President Moi. Like Moi and the autocrat before Moi, this President has allowed himself to be surrounded by a clique of looters and shady sycophants who have insinuated themselves into every aspect government. They do his bidding and he has rewarded them richly, too.

Now they are reassessing the new constitution their own way. They even seem eager to trash it altogether. In the short term this President may be able to count on the loyalty of his tribe and the newly co-opted to do whatever he pleases.

However, in all but name, one Nation of many tribes is long gone. Somehow, vaguely and dimly as most humans see everything; they just don’t seem to know it yet.

Marriage

2011-02-15T04:56:00.000-08:00

I haven't read a better article on Women and marriage. Here is a link.

May be we were colonized too late and for a short period! Just may be

2011-01-27T23:58:00.000-08:00

LET me begin with the conclusion. When a system remains steady it does so because any tendency towards change will normally be met by increased effectiveness of the factor(s) which resist the change. So therefore, for example, loose government and its consequences bring the reformers into power, but their tight rein soon provoke restiveness and the desire for release. hardly any strong tendency in a country continues to the stage of disaster; before that extreme is reached corrective forces arise which check the tendency and they commonly prevail to such an excessive degree as themselves to cause a reaction.

Yet we know of countries that are unstable. In fact our own political system is unstable. Our neighbor Uganda is unstable regardless of what President Museveni says. Our other neighbor Somalia is completely beyond instability. It is failed. Egypt is unstable so is Tunisia and many Arab countries. Sudan, yet another neighbor was and still will be even after the split between the Arab North and Christian/animist South.

I am not feeling very well myself!

It is a routine Friday morning in Nairobi. I am pondering many things, more particularly ethnicity and corruption in this country. I might at some point in the day dash to court to earn a livelihood. I am not sure yet. Lately. No that is a lie. From our independence the Kenyan judiciary has been managed with breathtaking incompetence.

But that is not what I want to discuss here save to say that I actually think that factors like objectivity of interpretation of the law by the courts and stricter enforcement of contract play a much greater role in the luring foreign direct investment into a country than many people actually realize.

We live in a time of failed and failing institutions.

But the Judiciary is not the only failing institution that has lately surpassed lowly expectations in this country. We have a political leadership and a civil service that is emblematic of crass ethnicity They too are failing. And then we have the citizenry not faring any better. Tribalism is at the core. Individually and collectively, in church pews and corridors of power, in schools and in offices; in open market and in the Capital Market, police force and in the military; everywhere chokes with tribalism. And that is dangerous for as nation.

So often then I ask myself the question whose answer I think I know. What is wrong with us?

The problem is fairly simple, simply put; WE WERE COLONIZED TOO LATE AND FOR A SHORT PERIOD. Our leaders are primitive pure and simple. They might have gone to London School of economics, Oxford, Harvard, Yale but these prestigious institutions did not go through them. One might be forgiven for assuming that they saw the future and knows exactly how it works.One thing I might say to lower down the many raised hands is: LOOK AT SOUTH AFRICA. Could it have turned out an economic giant without the iron fist rule of the white minority?

TRIBALISM IN KENYA

Recalling our history reveals that there has been, since our founding, a preponderance of the President’s trbespeople appointed to positions that matter in the public service. In President kenyatta’s time, the public service was firmly dominated by the kikuyu tribe. When President Moi came to power upon Kenyatta’s demise he simply reversed kikuyu appointments with kalenjin appointments.

Tribalism kills. Three years ago we were met at Armageddon. The incumbent had just stolen an election that was suppose to be free and fair-we wrongly assumed. He stole it to perpetuate a tribal staus quo in a corrupt Government that had marginalized sections of the country ostensibly, because they mostly tended to vote in the opposition.

A revolt by many tribes led by Kalenjin and Luo ensued and hundreds were burnt or hacked to death in the Kalenjin dominated areas. Most of the victims were Kikuyus. Kikuyus retaliated in their own small way whichever way they could and with the assistance, we are now told by the International Criminal Court (ICC), of the State. The International community intervened, thankfully, in our ‘internal affairs’ when it became quite clear that we, steadily and surely, Somalia-bound unless we changed track.

At some point during the restructure of the state-which process by the way was as a result of the total collapse we nearly experienced, we were all agreed, when it seemed impossible that perpetrators of crimes against humanity would be prosecuted in courts such as the one I was in today, that the Hague should take up the investigation and possible prosecution of the perpetrators. The Hague would eventually take up the cases.

Fast forward to the year 2010. Summons have been issued to five top guns, (a deputy prime minister; the immediate former police commissioner who over saw police liquidation-in-broad-day-light, ‘anti-kikuyu people; a ethnic kingpin of the kalenjins; Head of the civil service and Secretary to the cabinet-the man closest to the president; a long service kalenjin politician, and one vernacular-speaking fm station journalist), referred to as the Ocampo six (Ocampo is the Chief Prosecutor at the Hague). Instead of focusing on implementation of the new constitution, rebuilding State institutions and uniting a fractured citizenry, the Government, a section of it is now busy shuttling through Afrcan capitals seeking support to discredit the ICC at the forth coming AU meeting In Addis Ababa Ethiopia. It claims that ICC is ‘eating’ into our sovereignty.

The question in my mind is: ‘What do we make of the arguments they ( friends of the Ocampo six) made when they were for the Hague?’ In reality by sovereignty they mean their ethnic hegemony not our national interest. To them everything else must be subordinated to the predominating interest of their key tribes-people and by extension their. Meanwhile the victims of the post-election violence-people who once owned houses and had stable lives, are still languishing in want in camps for the internally displaced.

Government is necessary only when it is responsive to the citizens, protective of the citizens, individually and collectively, supportive of citizen’s individual effort at economic maximization and accountable to the citizenry. This mongrel is none of these, at least not in the way I would expect it\ to be.

Yet we appear to be in a cycle of bad leadership to ‘reformers’ who then become exactly like the leadership they have replaced. Remember my conclusion at the beginning!

Untitled document (elvisobok.houghwout@blogger.com)

2011-01-27T22:04:00.001-08:00

I've shared Untitled document

Click to open:

Untitled document

Untitled document

May be we were colonized too late and for a short period! Just may be.

Yet we know of countries that are unstable. In fact our own is politically unstable. Our neighbour Uganda is politically unstable. Our other neighbour Somalia is completely beyond instability. It is failed. Sudan, yet another neighbour was and still will be even after the split between the Arab North and Christian/animist South.

It is a routine Friday morning in Nairobi. I am pondering many things, more particularly ethnicity and corruption in this country. I might at some point in the day dash to court to earn a livelihood. I am not sure yet. Lately. No that is a lie. From our independence the Kenyan judiciary has been managed with breathtaking incompetence.

But that is not what I want to discuss here save to say that I actually think that factors like objectivity of interpretation of the law by the courts and stricter enforcement of contract play a much greater role in the luring foreign direct investment into a country than many people actually realize.

We live in a time of failed and failing insttitutions.

But the Judiciary is not the only failing institution that has lately surpassed lowly expectations in this country. We have a political leadership and a civil service that is emblematic of crass ethnicity They too are failing. And then we have the citizenry not faring any better. Tribalism is at the core. Individually and collectively, in church pews and corridors of power, in schools and in offices; in open market and in the Capital Market, police force and in the military; everywhere chokes with tribalism. And that is dangerous for as nation.

So often then I ask myself the question whose answer I think I know. What is wrong with us?

The problem is fairly simple, simply put; WE WERE COLONIZED TOO LATE AND FOR A SHORT PERIOD. Our leaders are primitive pure and simple. They might have gone to London School of economics, Oxford, harvard, Yale but these prestigious institutions did not go through them. One might be forgiven for assuming that they saw the future and knows exactly how it works.One thing I might say to lower down the many raised hands is: LOOK AT SOUTH AFRICA. Could it have turned out an economic giant without the iron fist rule of the white minority?

Tribalism in Kenya

Recalling our history reveals that there has been, since our founding, a preponderance of the President’s trbespeople appointed to positions that matter in the public service.

In President kenyatta’s time, the public service was firmly dominated by the kikuyu tribe. When President Moi came to power upon Kenyatta’s demise he simply reversed kikuyu appointments with kalenjin appointments.

Tribalism kills. Three years ago we were met at Armageddon. The incumbent had just stolen an election that was suppose to be free and fair-we wrongly assumed. He stole it to perpetuate a tribal staus quo in a corrupt Government that had marginalised sections of the country ostensibly, because they mostly tended to vote in the opposition.

A revolt by many tribes led by Kalenjin and Luo ensued and hundreds were burnt or hacked to death in the Kalenjin dominated areas. Most of the victims were Kikuyus. Kikuyus retaliated in their own small way whichever way they could and with the assistance, we are now told by the International Criminal Court (ICC), of the State. The International community intervened, thankfully, in our ‘internal affairs’ when it became quite clear that we, steadily and surely, somalia-bound unless we changed track.

At some point during the restructure of the state-which process by the way was as a result of the total collapse we nearly experienced, we were all agreed, when it seemed impossible that perpetrators of crimes against humanity would be prosecuted in courts such as the one I was in today, that the Hague should take up the investigation and possible prosecution of the perpetrators. The Hague would eventually take up the cases.

Fast forward to the year 2010. Summons have been issued to five top guns, (a deputy prime minister; the immediate former police commissioner who over saw police liquidation-in-broad-day-light, ‘anti-kikuyu people; a ethnic kingpin of the kalenjins; Head of the civil service and Secreatary to the cabinet-the man closest to the president; a long service kalenjin politician, and one vernacular-speaking fm station journalist), referred to as the Ocampo six (Ocampo is the Chief Prosecutor at the Hague). Instead of focusing on implementation of the new constitution, rebuilding State institutions and uniting a fractured citizenry, the Government, a section of it is now busy shuttling through Afrcan capitals seeking support to discredit the ICC at the forth coming AU meeting In Addis Ababa Ethiopia. It claims that ICC is ‘eating’ into our sovereignty.

The question in my mind is: ‘What do we make of the arguments they ( friends of the Ocampo six) made when they were for the Hague?’ In reality by sovereignty they mean their ethnic hegemony not our national interest. To them everything else must be subordinated to the predominating interest of their key tribes-people and by extension their. Meanwhile the victims of the post-election violence-people who once owned houses and had stable lives, are still languishing in want in camps for the internally displaced.

Government is necessary only when it is responsive to the citizens, protective of the citizens, individually and collectively, supportive of citizen’s individual effort at economic maximization and accountable to the citizenry. This mongrel is none of these, at least not in the way I would expect it\ to be.

Yet we appear to be in a cycle of bad leadership to ‘reformers’ who then become exactly like the leadership they have replaced. Remember my conclusion at the beginning!

Google Docs makes it easy to create, store and share online documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

It is stll here

2010-12-26T07:08:00.001-08:00

Most people hear about it but probably don't really believe it, but Africa is still a poor place; burdened by the multiplying problems of a multiplying population and inhabited, more so in the rural, by children born to parents who gave up on hope long ago. That is the tragedy and pain of my people. For the destitution of the people, leadership and Government bears the greatest blame. Either ineffective or incompetent leadership or too much tyranny or too less stability on Government.

It takes miracle-like-effort to make it in Kenya.

This is a subject I approach with reluctance more so now as some 'celebrate' the coming baby Jesus-ostensibly-a promise of hope in a world of want.

On the eve of Xmas, The President gave a new year message in which, like he always does, extolled the virtues of a drank-free driving, blah..blah..blah. It's irrelevant what these people tell us. Personally I am tortured to death listening to them.

Let's see: How have the poor gone through this day?

Even here I do not bring home to us the real evil of poverty. What can poor families buy with their meager weekly earnings, if the earn at all (During Xmas employers of poor close shop and go vacation as poor go home during the employer's vacation).
Among the Nairobi city poor, the evil of sweaty long hours and low wages are intensified by high prices of food and fuel for cooking food. In general, the poorer the family the higher the prices it must pay for the necessaries of life.

Rent is naturally the first item in the poor man's budget. Some poor pay their entire income in rent! It is notorious that overcrowded, insanitary "slum" property is the most paying form of house property to its owners. The part played by rent in the problems of poverty can scarcely be over-estimated. Attempts to mitigate the evil by erecting model dwellings have scarcely touched the lower classes of wage-earners. The poor prefers a room in a small house to an intrinsically better accommodation in a barrack-like building. Other than pecuniary motives enter in. The "touchiness of the lower class" causes them to be offended by the very sanitary regulations designed for their benefit.

But "shelter" is not the only thing for which the poor pay high. The price of fresh vegetables, tomatoes, onions, cooking fat, etc is not infrequently seven times the price at which the same articles can be purchased wholesale from the growers. It is sometimes held sufficient to say that the poor are thoughtless and extravagant. And no doubt this is so. But it must also be remembered that the industrial conditions under which these people live, necessitate a hand-to-mouth existence, and themselves furnish an education in improvidence.

It is a depressing subject to talk about. We could go on and on and on. Then what!

Perhaps and this I must do. Ask, when finally there going which way, What for, life?

Who am I?

2010-11-28T05:05:00.000-08:00

Everyone has a PERSONALITY. And then we have personality disorders.

What sort of a person are you? What do you see as unique about your personality? How well do you really know yourself? Are there aspects of your personality of which you are unaware? Do others know you as you know yourself? What are the best and worst things about your personality? Questions such as these are easy to ask, but are often difficult to answer. Yet, they go directly to the essence of what we are as human beings.

Personality is that which makes us what we are and that which makes us different from others. People who are especially different, for example, are said to have “personality” or be “quite a character.” Other people have “no personality at all.” Depending on how someone affects us, he or she may be viewed as having a “good personality” or a “bad personality.”

Previously, under the label ‘Normality Abnormality’ we have discussed the fourteen or so personality disorders. Following now is a brief summary about all these disorders.

Personality Disorders
Schizoid - Apathetic, indifferent, remote, solitary. Neither desires nor need human attachments. Minimal awareness of feelings of self or others. Few drives or ambitions, if any.

Avoidant - Hesitant, self-conscious, embarrassed, anxious. Tense in social situations due to fear of rejection. Plagued by constant performance anxiety. Sees self as inept, inferior, or unappealing. Feels alone and empty.

Depressive - Somber, discouraged, pessimistic, brooding, fatalistic. Presents self as vulnerable and abandoned. Feels valueless, guilty, and impotent. Judges self as worthy only of criticism and contempt.

Dependent - Helpless, incompetent, submissive, immature. Withdraws from adult responsibilities. Sees self as weak or fragile. Seeks constant reassurance from stronger figures.

Histrionic - Dramatic, seductive, shallow, stimulus-seeking, vain. Overreacts to minor events. Exhibitionistic as a means of securing attention and favors. Sees self as attractive and charming.

Narcissistic - Egotistical, arrogant, grandiose, insouciant. Preoccupied with fantasies of success, beauty, or achievement. Sees self as admirable and superior, and therefore entitled to special treatment.

Antisocial - Impulsive, irresponsible, deviant, unruly. Acts without due consideration. Meets social obligations only when self-serving. Disrespects societal customs, rules, and standards. Sees self as free and independent.

Sadistic - Explosively hostile, abrasive, cruel, dogmatic. Liable to sudden outbursts of rage. Feels selfsatisfied through dominating, intimidating and humiliating others. Is opinionated and closeminded.

Compulsive - Restrained, conscientious, respectful, rigid. Maintains a rule-bound lifestyle. Adheres closely to social conventions. Sees the world in terms of regulations and hierarchies. Sees self as devoted, reliable, efficient, and productive.

Negativistic - Resentful, contrary, skeptical, discontented. Resist fulfilling others’ expectations. Deliberately inefficient. Vents anger indirectly by undermining others’ goals. Alternately moody and irritable, then sullen and withdrawn.

Masochistic - Deferential, pleasure-phobic, servile, blameful, self-effacing. Encourages others to take advantage. Deliberately defeats own achievements. Seeks condemning or mistreatful partners.

Paranoid - Guarded, defensive, distrustful and suspiciousness. Hypervigilant to the motives of others to undermine or do harm. Always seeking confirmatory evidence of hidden schemes. Feels righteous, but persecuted.

Schizotypal - Eccentric, self-estranged, bizarre, absent. Exhibits peculiar mannerisms and behaviors. Thinks can read thoughts of others. Preoccupied with odd daydreams and beliefs. Blurs line between reality and fantasy.

Borderline - Unpredictable, manipulative, unstable. Frantically fears abandonment and isolation. Experiences rapidly fluctuating moods. Shifts rapidly between loving and hating. Sees self and others alternatively as all-good and all-bad.

Who are you!?

NYTimes.com: Daily Pill Greatly Lowers AIDS Risk, Study Finds

2010-11-24T03:20:00.000-08:00

This page was sent to you by: elvisobok@yahoo.com

HEALTH | November 24, 2010
Daily Pill Greatly Lowers AIDS Risk, Study Finds
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
An antiretroviral drug that is already available proved more than 90 percent effective for faithful users.



Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company \| Privacy Policy

Commitment to bad rules have underdeveloped Africa read Kenya)

2010-09-22T04:34:00.000-07:00

WHY is it that an over 100-year-old technology for lighting homes is still unavailable for many people in rural kenya, more so Luo-Nyanza where I was bred?

Indeed I remember a time in the late eighties. It was world-cup time. Names of Maradona, Luther Mathias and Rummeniger were rampant in people's lips each waking day. Ivory coast was Cote-de vour or something like that and they were a power house in african football. What is more they were in this particular world-cup. The eighties were a good time to live. I was five or so years old. We had this black and white television, a big black and white television that my father had bought in the early eighties from a diplomat, from Venezuela, I here, who had been recalled. The problem is we had no electricity. Meanwhile we had a neighbour who had electricty but no television. So my father gave him the TV for the duration of the world cup and occasiionally we would stroll by his windowside to catch a glimpse of football on television.

As a student in primary I schooled without elctricity either in the house or in the schoolroom. As a student in Secondary I enjoyed the illumination of electricity only because I was in a boarding school.

SO WHY IS IT THAT A CENTURY OLD TECHNOLOGY FOR LIGHTING HOMES IS STILL BEYOND REACH IN SOME RURAL VILLAGES AND HOMES?

I think that the failure is traceable to weak or wrong rules or laws or policies whatever you may wish to call them. You see, right rules can harness self-interest and use it to reduce want and poverty. Wrong rules stifle this force or channel it in ways that harm society.

But how do you free people from bad rules? If it was so simple, I would tell you.

WE know that in the 'developed' world it costs very little to light a home. We also know that most of the poor in our rurals are not starving. They could afford some light. Our rurals do not lack electricity because africans are too poor. Indeed, reliable power is so important for education, productivity and job creation that it would be more accurate to say that many in Africa are poor because they don’t have electricity. So why don’t they?

Consider development the other way round. US customers have cheap electricity mostly because rules channel self-interest in the right way. Some protect investments made by utilities, others stop these companies abusing their monopoly power. With such rules, companies win; efficient providers make a profit. But customers win too; they get access to a vital resource at low cost. It’s the absence of these rules that explains why many Africans don’t have electricity at home. It might seem a simple insight, but it took economists a long time to understand it.

In the 1950s and 1960s, economic models treated ideas as public goods, meaning that once one existed it was assumed to exist everywhere. Some ideas are like this—for example, the formula for oral rehydration therapy, the mixture of sugar, salt, and water, (ORS-which by the way I consumed alot growing up), that stops children dying from diarrhoea. No one owns it and you can find it easily online. If all ideas were like this it would be easier for poor countries to grow. But they aren’t: patents and other legal rules stop some ideas spreading, while others are just easy to keep secret.

Why doesn’t ideas common in some parts of the world spread to others? Some countries are better able to establish the type of rules that help good ideas spread, while others are trapped by bad rules that keep ideas out. The rules stopping cheap electricity, for instance, are not hard to identify. Political instability stops many electricity companies moving into rural Africa. Those that do set up there can exploit their power as monopolists to charge excessive prices that the poor can hardly afford. Good rules would stop all this. So to unleash the potential of the marketplace, poor countries need to find a way to create good rules.

However, how can a 'developing' country like Kenya, promise to keep the rules that govern investment fair? Rich nations use well-functioning systems of courts, police and jails, developed over centuries, to solve problems. Two people can make a commitment. If they don’t follow through, the courts will punish them. But many developing countries are still working their way down the same arduous path. Their leaders can fight corruption and establish independent courts and better rules over property rights, but such moves often require unpopular measures to coerce and cajole populations, making internal reforms excruciatingly slow.

What is more subsequent leaders may undo any commitments made by previous leaders. A faster route would seem to be for a developed country to impose new rules by force, as they did in the colonial period. There is evidence that some former colonized people are more successful today because of rules established during their occupations. Yet any economic benefits usually took a long time to show up, and rarely compensated for years of condescension and the violent opposition it provoked. Today, violent civil conflicts have led some countries to again consider military humanitarian intervention.

I END LIKE I BEGAN; WITH QUESTIONS WHOSE ANSWERS I DO NOT KNOW. WHY HAS AFRICA LAGGED BEHIND? WILL THE WESTERN HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE OF INDUSTRIALIZATION ONE DAY REPEAT ITSELF IN AFRICA?

We are all creatures of Assumptions

2010-08-20T03:11:00.000-07:00

About 30-40% of the Brain is devoted to Vision. That is a huge portion of the Brain just for Vision. You see vision is important. With it we have all these things in the world. I doubt there would have been any invention in the world without the ability to see. Do you agree?

But vision is deceptive. Vision creates crime. Vision creates prejudices. Think for a moment; would there be racism if we all were not able to see? Would there be fashion if we all were not able to see? There would be no difference between Madam Jolie over yonder and Joyce Atieno, the local girl in my village. Infact without clothes, there might be no hollywood.

Next to medicine, I consider clothes to be the greatest invention of all time. CLOTHES MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE. IT CREATES ALL THE DIFFERENCE. It ain't planes or cars or laundry machine or ipod but the attire to cover you for without it many things fail to make sense or value. You simply cannot go beyond looking at anything else a naked person may be carrying, but the naked man himself. Why?

If man could not come up with a way of covering himself first, it is unlikely he would be able to come up with or even desire to come up with say a microchip. What for? Crocs need no radio or palmtop but they sure have a blast.

Without clothes we are like wild animals in maasai mara. We live to find food and eat it, to procreate and procreate more. After all even with all our sophistication, life still is as basic as eating, (whatever it is we eat), sleeping, (wherever it is we sleep), sexing, (whoever it is you do it with). The act is basic common to us and animals.

About assumptions: Look we assume the existence of many things which a closer reflection would prove does not exist. Provided, for example that we believe that God exists, there is a good reason to suppose that God has grandparents. The same goes for belief in dragons, devil and ghosts. I mean why not! After all no one has seen him. Forget about Moses, he saw nothing.

Magicians do what they do because they play on our assumptions. They can float in the air because, (hold on Mr Isaac Newton), there probably ain't nothing called gravitational pull. When things fall they just fall! When they float it is because they are capable of floating! The assumption, for example is that we see nothing when we close our eyes. Really! I see darkness. The assumption is that our eyes do not move when we fix our gaze on something. You think so? Try it again.

But the amazing thing is WE DO NOT REFLECT, SERIOUSLY, ON THE ASSUMPTIONS WE GROW UP WITH. That is why we have prejudices on basis of say religion, sex, race, education et al. We relate with people on the basis of mindsets we have and in which we are enslaved.

While It is important that we are able to see, it is also important that we wee things in their proper perspective.

JUDICIARY SHOULD NOT LOBBY AGAINST THE PASSAGE OF THE PROPOSED CONSTITUTION

2010-06-21T01:12:00.000-07:00

For our foundering Judiciary, its bad times have mostly been recent; its worst freshest in our minds. Weeks ago three High Court judges dramatically declared a constitutional provision unconstitutional. It is not always in the law that so few can attempt to so quickly change so much. That Judgment was a clear case of Judges’ perverting public power and guarding of antagonistic individual interest to public detriment. It was meant to arouse public sentiment against the proposed constitution and to aid against the passage of the proposed constitution.

It is wrong for Judges, whose adjudicative role requires neutrality rather than advocacy, to urge, directly or indirectly, the passage or defeat of proposed legislation. The decision that Kadhis courts should not be in the constitution was wrong as there is no law super-ordinate to the constitution. The constitution itself creates the Judiciary to safeguard it not fight it. For Judges to check it is to invite lawless adjudication. To permit the constitution to be modified at Judges’ discretion is to leave us without constitution. It is to withdraw the direction of that public wisdom by which the deficiencies of private understanding are to be supplied.

The courts on which Judges serve constitute, thanks to the Constitution, a separate coequal branch of government, sharing responsibility with Parliament and the Executive for exercising political authority over the nation. While the trappings and roles of a Judge may vary from those of the more outwardly brother political institutions, politics and self-interest is not lacking in the courts.

Accepting a judgeship does not carry with it a forfeiture of cunning self-interest and survival priority. A Judge is usually aware of the judicial role, but putting on the red robe does not neutralize his or her self-interest or survival priority. Being like us, they are subject to the same forces that influence our behavior. They have attitudes, self-interests, biases, and political opinions. They share with us the preference to see their own interests and priorities prevail over competing policy interests. That is why they seek to drown the proposed constitution.

It is the conceit of each people to imagine that there problems are without precedent. In the United States, the infamous 1861 case of Dred Scott-V-Sandford helped precipitate the Civil war. It held slaves to be vendible chattels capable of being bought and sold like cattle. Slavery was then a divisive and dangerous issue just like Kadhis courts is now and slave-holding states were agitating for rights to govern themselves independently. Indeed the American independence convention had five decades earlier deliberately omitted to deal with the slavery question for had it; there probably would not have been a constitution.

To the naysayer, the proposed constitution is good in many ways. Every one of its provisions has a history. Every one stops a way through which the overwhelming power of Government has oppressed the weak individual Kenyans, and may do so again if the way is opened. That judgment was meant to derail our realizing the proposed constitution.

Religion is charlatanry, a play on emotions

2010-05-26T03:01:00.000-07:00

Human creature is curious and curiosity is bold.

What on earth makes us think that the worship of a deity in our own age is far removed from the worship of an idol by our ancestors! Our ancestor prayed to his idol, that is, he begged. He begged the idol to watch over his flock or his fields. The modern prays, that is he begs of his idol, his deity, to prosper his business, to guard his life.

The ancestor voiced his incantations; the modern sings hymns, that is he flatters. There is still a great deal of the charlatanry of the magician in the construction of the houses of prayer, with the sunlight shut out and only filtering through the leaded and multi-colored panes, the semidarkness, the solemnity, the rise and swell of the organ; all things combined to overcome the senses, to play upon the emotions, and to subdue the reason.

The savage made sacrifices to his idols, that is, he paid tribute, chiefly out of fear, but partly in the hope of getting something better in return. The modern does not offer human or animal sacrifice, it is true; but it must be borne in mind that the wealth of the savage consisted of his sheep, oxen, oils, and wines, not money. Today, the devout offer a sacrifice of money to the Deity. We are all familiar with the requests of religious institutions for gifts, which nearly always finish with the phrase, "AND THE LORD WILL REPAY YOU MANY FOLD." In other words, sacrifice part of your worldly goods to the idol, and he will repay with high interest. He will give in return long life and much riches.

For 1400 years now, we have progressed with no new prophet, and no new divine revelation is perturbing us, well there are a few; the old ones, however, are causing quite enough disturbance.

When, long ago, there was a rift among the Jews, and the sectarians were defeated and expelled, the sectarians cast aside the laws of Moses and offered the Hebrew religion without the Hebrew ceremonies to the Greek and Roman world. JESUS was the man who prepared the way for this remarkable event.

When Mohammed conceived the divine conception that he would follow in the footsteps of his brother-prophets, Moses and Jesus, the latest of the major religions was revealed. I have to stop here for failure to do so might invite wrath of a brother with explosives wired to his tits and who has been promised virgins elsewhere if only he can violently dispatch people like us.

Feelings are allright if one does not get drunk on them

2010-05-07T02:44:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday I was in some church in Ngong and noticed, unsurprisingly, the devotion of men and women to pastors and preachers who imagine themselves patented to think truth, and never to be wrong in the enunciation of it.

The conclusion one makes is that Religion is not the product of civilized person. For sure it made some contributions to civilization in early days to fix the calendar but what else. Feelings are all right, if one does not get drunk on them.

We did not discover gods, we invented them. Our ancestors invented them in the light of their experiences and endowed them with capacities that indicated the stage of their mental development. It is not strange, therefore, that there has not been advanced a new major religious belief in the last 1300 years or so. All modern religions, no matter how disguised, find their origin in the fear-stricken ignorance of the primitive ancestor.

Most religions date from a time when men were crueler than they are now, and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the present age has outgrown. The degrading picture of womankind, for example, as depicted in the Old Testament is well known to anyone who has read that storehouse of mythology. In Deuteronomy we find the right of divorce given entirely to the husband. The discarded wife must acquiesce to "divine justice." In the twenty second chapter of the same book is enacted the law for Test of Virginity, which empowers gynecological elders to go into a peeping Tom's conference and if the damsel is found not a virgin, then she is to be stoned to death.

A Christian will admit that the gods of others are man-made, and that they worship like a primitive ancestor. The christian looks at the gods of others with the vision of a civilized person; but when he looks at his own god, he forgets his civilization, he relapses centuries of time, and his mental viewpoint is that of the primitive ancestor. There never was a religionist who believed his or her own religion mere superstition. All shrink indignantly from the charge of being superstitious; while all raise churches and mosques and temples to, and bow down before, thingless names.

Religion arose as a means of explaining things at a time when no other explanation of the origin of things had been ascertained. God is always the asylum of ignorance. When causes are unknown, God is brought forward; when causes are known, God retires into the background. In an age of ignorance, God is active; in an age of science, he is impotent.

Indeed the word God retains its influence with many people today because of the imprecise manner in which it is used. It is just one of those blessed words where the comfort felt in their use is proportionate to the lack of definite meaning that accompanies them.

People rarely confess ignorance and so where problems are persistent and seemingly unsolvable what most people are in search of is a narcotic and God is a popular narcotic. When not used as a narcotic, God is brought into an argument as though it stood for a term which carried a well defined and well understood meaning.

The oft-repeated question still admits of no answer, who created the creator. It is an absurd answer to reply that the creator created himself. Yet even if this is granted, may not the universe have created itself. If God has always existed, why can we not say that the universe has always existed.

Clerical Error: The Church has erred

2010-04-18T23:22:00.000-07:00

WE are today faced with an existential onslaught by the clerics who are threatening to lead a vote against the proposed long-dreamed new constitution for the reasons that that constitution allows abortion.

I believe that if there are any greater personal rights of a woman over which Church and State should have no control, it is the sexual right of a woman to say, 'Yes' or 'No', 'Yes' or "No" to conception, and 'Yes' or 'No' to abortion, at least until that time we all agree proper life worth saving as formed. These rights are so deeply imbedded in natural morality that no clear-headed, clean-hearted person should wish to controvert. Enforced motherhood is oppression. In the struggle for freedom, woman's most rigorous antagonist has always been the Church.

The clerics for a long time centuries ago opposed fire and marine insurance on the ground that it was tempting of Providence or an attempt to influence God's will. They regarded life insurance, as they do now abortion, as an act of interference with the consequence of God's will. For fear of witches, the church persecuted and burnt women.

We know that because of the church, Copernicus did not permit his book about earth and planets revolving round the sun to be published until he was dying and even then he published it with an apologetic lie by a friend that he had propounded the doctrine of the earth's movement not as a fact, but as a hypothesis.

We understand why Galileo was made to recant a discovery that the youngest of children now takes for granted. Also, today when the doctor administers quinine for malaria, or something for syphilis, he effects cures for these diseases by using drugs to which the clergy strenuously objected when they were first introduced. Future generations may well declare religion to have been the curse of humanity.

Religion has never accepted anything that science has shown to be a fact or of benefit to people until it was compelled to do so to save its face. Today in our country, religion constitutes a cultural lag and an active menace to our best interests. The church still resists the spread of information concerning contraception and birth control, and yet this information is so vital to the welfare of humanity. It is safe to say that the church is the last refuge of human savagery.

There are many reasons why a woman may opt for abortion such as where the parents are on the bread-line and have no means or insufficient means of supporting a child; or where the woman forsees life as a single parent and fears it. Dread of large families or of close interval pregnancies and a legitimate intention to maintain a higher standard of living is another cause of abortion. Also some women are influenced by comparisons. Seeing their neighbours leading less burdensome and more pleasure-full lives, they decide to follow suit. Wives of the unemployed or the precariously employed might also see wisdom in aborting.

Also, the modern desire for pleasure and freedom from responsibility has led many to lose sight of the ideal of the family as a service to the State and the unit of social life. Unwillingness on the part of the wife to give up remunerative work is a factor that operates in certain cases. Some women also abort purely out of thoughtlessness and selfishness. Abortion might be is a delayed, dangerous, and unsatisfactory form of birth-control. However the safer options of birth control have all been rejected by the church.

Women should have the right to exercise their reproductive rights unmolested by the church.

Child Adoption in Kenya:Finding Homes for needy Children OR Children for Western Homes

2010-04-15T03:18:00.000-07:00

Westerners have been sold the myth of a world orphan crisis. They are told that millions of children are waiting for their "forever families" to rescue them from lives of abandonment and abuse. But many of the infants and toddlers being adopted by Western parents today are not orphans at all. Yes, hundreds of thousands of children around the world do need loving homes. But more often than not, the neediest children are sick, disabled, traumatized, or older than 5. They are not the healthy babies that, quite understandably, most Westerners hope to adopt. There are simply not enough healthy, adoptable infants to meet Western demand AND there's too much Western money in search of children. As a result, many international adoption agencies work not to find homes for needy children but to find children for Western homes.

ADOPTION IN KENYA

Adoptions in Kenya are governed by the provisions of the Children’s Act No. 8 of 2001. The law provides two categories of adoptions: Local Adoptions and International adoptions. The following institutions are responsible for adoptions:
• The Local Adoption Societies. There are three licenced by the Government these are: Little Angels Network, Kenya Christian Homes Adoption Society and Child Welfare Society.
• National Adoption Committee which is the Government body responsible for overseeing all aspects of adoption in Kenya.
• International Foreign adoption agencies. Only those which are approved by the National Adoption Committee (NAC) work in Kenya and only through one of the local societies. They cannot work independently. Operation licences for all the local and international services are renewed annually.
• Adoption secretariat, a department of the director of the Children’s services responsible for: Investigating adopting parents and giving reports to the courts; Giving letters of no objection for adopters wishing to leave the country.

LOCAL ADOPTIONS
There two categories covered under local adoptions:
a) Kenyan citizens living in Kenya
b) Foreign residents living in Kenya.

A person wishing to adopt must first contact an Adoption Society, which will assess them and establish whether they are fit as adoptive parents. The final approval for adoption is given by a case committee of the society.

Once approved, the adopting parent is then placed with a child for a three month care period. During this period the adopting parents may contact their lawyers to prepare the case. Once the care period has been completed (90 days) the parents may file the application for adoption with the Courts.

Once the application is filed, there must be two hearing dates:
The first (1st) for the appointment of the Guardian ad litem and orders for a Government Report;
The second (2nd) for the final hearing.
If the Court grants the application after the second hearing, then the lawyers will follow up the completion of orders and certificates.

Foreign Resident in Kenya
These are treated very much like international adopters.

INTERNATIONAL ADOPTIONS
An adopting couple must first be assessed and approved by an adoption agency in their country of residence.
That Agency must be licenced to operate in Kenya by the National Adoption Committee (NAC) and must be working with a Kenyan Adoption society.

Once approved by their foreign agency the adopter application is forwarded through the local society to the NAC for approval (all foreign adopters must be approved by this body before they can be placed with a child)
Once approved by the NAC, the foreign adopters will then be allowed to come to Kenya and upon arrival will be placed with a child by the local adoption agency.

They have to be in the care and control relationship with the infant for 3 months in Kenya. During this period the applicants may contact their advocates and begin preparations for Court.
The advocates will file the case after the expiry of the care period and go through the steps set out in 4.5 and 4.6 above.

Hearing Dates
At the first hearing, the Court will order for a Government Assessment Report. This means that the Adoption Secretariat will be served with an order to investigate the adopting parent(s). To do this the following happens:
The applicants will seek an initial appointment with the government social worker at the offices of Children’s Department;
The social worker will make an appointment for a home visit;
The Government social worker will prepare a report to be filed in Court. Beause the department thinks it is very busy, this process can take between 2 and 3 months. Once the Government Report is filed the advocate can get a date for the 2nd hearing and not before.

THE PROCEDURE IN SUMMARY

a) Appointment of Guardian ad litem;

b) Hearing of the Adoption Application;

c) Pursuing Adoption Order and Adoption Certificate;

Stages a) and b) are usually done in two separate Court hearings. The first is for the appointment of the guardian ad litem while the second is to have the application for the adoption determined by the Court. If the application is successful, we proceed to obtain the Adoption order from the Court and thereafter apply for the Adoption Certificate from the Registry of Births. This usually takes between two to four weeks, depending on the circumstances of the case.

TIME FRAME

The average time taken between the filing of the application in Court to getting the Adoption Certificate is 4 – 5 months. Once the application is filed the speed at which it proceeds is determined by the courts calendar and the Judges discretion and may go beyond 5 months.

TRAVEL
Applicants wishing to travel out of the country with the infant before the completion of the adoption process are required to make their own arrangements with the relevant authorities, as arrangements of travel documents is not considered part of the adoption brief.

The current immigration position is that travel is not encouraged until the final orders are granted. Most children’s homes will not give consent to travel before the Adoption Orders are obtained.

NOTE

a) It is important to have all the requisite documentation upfront to avoid delays.
b) Ensure you are working with a foreign agency licenced to work in Kenya.
c) It is important that the child to be adopted has been declared free for adoption by a local licenced adoption agency. Do not rely on anybody else whatsoever to give you a child. If you want to adopt a relative, please ensure that they too are declared free for adoption by an adoption agency.
d) When planning, keep in mind that in addition to the compulsory 3 months period, there is the Government report period and the Court period. The whole process can extend between 7-9 months. In addition foreigners have to process the travel papers.
e) Until all the orders have been granted, the child cannot travel out of the country.

God(s) on the Dock

2010-04-08T05:25:00.000-07:00

It is essential to intellectual and moral advances that the beliefs that come into existence should have free play. Antagonistic beliefs (beliefs that change the social and religious order) must have the chance of proving their worth in open contest. It is in this way scientific theories are tested, and in this way also, religious and ethical conceptions should be tried.

Arguments, for example, for abortion should be much tolerated and heard just as much as are arguments in favor of abortion. So should the debate about homosexuality and the debates we are currently having for or against the inclusion of Kadhis courts in the proposed new constitution for kenya. For my part I believe that everyone has a personal choice in self determination, including the aborting mothers of unborn entities and John and James who have decided to tie the knot.

The Mohammedan, the Jew, the Christian, will agree that the animism, the fetishism, and idolatry of the savage were man-made foolish beliefs. They can perceive that there was nothing supernatural, nothing revealed, in such beliefs; but they do not realize that to him, in his infantile development, the fetish and the idol were just as supernatural and superior as the modern conception of a Supreme Being.

In each age man creates his god, in his own image, and within the confines of his own mental development. The mind of man has expanded so that it has conquered more and more of his environment; it has grown and wrested from nature those secrets which constitute his civilization. Along with this has progressed the conception of a deity, but only to a certain extent.

The mind has embellished the outward appearance of its gods, consolidated them, and built upon them intricate systems of theology, upon which feed vast hordes of clergy; but the basic conception, the fundamental principle, that there must be something supernatural to explain something which we cannot explain at the present moment, that conception still drugs the mind of man.

Primitive man did not understand the meaning of lightning, thunder, shadows, echoes, and he placed these among the supernatural phenomena. The modern mind explains these phenomena, understands the laws governing their production. Yet, it is this same modern mind which persists in going back to our savage ancestors and their mental sloth, by attributing the myriads of phenomena which still elude its present stage of mental development, to a particular idol, this time, a Supreme Being. Brahmanism, Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, Hebraism, Mohammedanism, Christianity. WHICH IS THE TRUE RELIGION?

"Men (and women) were born for the sake of men and (women), that each should assist the others". When the principles of free thought shall have dispelled the intellectual cloud of the God-idea and the vanishing dream of a heaven which has too long drawn men's (and women's) eyes away from this earth, then, and then only, will the above words have widespread meaning.

Unabashedly Doubtful.

2010-02-25T05:39:00.000-08:00

Plain speaking is necessary in any discussion of religion. We have monkey Godparents. We ARE descendants ape-like progenitiors.

Recently in Kenya, we have witnessed the spectacle of some church people praying, unsuccessfully, for the resurrection of their two late pastors who had died in a road accident. BTW when it was obvious the prayers would not work, the church leaders informed the congregation that the deceased were still sleeping so burial arrangements would proceed. That is as far as I will dwell on that unique brand of insanity.

With the development of the mind of man throughout the ages there was conceived also his self-made religious systems, based on a subjective interpretation of the universe and full of emotional bias. Primitive man did not understand the natural cause of shadows, night, the birth and death of vegetable and animals. Of this ignorance religion was born, and theology was evolved as its art of expression.

My story takes us back some twelve thousand years to neolithic man. Squatting in his rude hut or gloomy cave, he listens to the sounds of a storm. The howling of the wind, the flashes of lightning, and crashing of thunder give rise to that elemental emotion—fear. Fear was always with him, as he thought of the huge stones that fell and crushed him, and the beasts which were so eager to devour him. All things about him seemed to conspire for his death: the wind, lightning, thunder, rain and storm, as well as the beasts and falling trees; for in his mind he did not differentiate animate from inanimate objects.

Slowly, through his groping mind there evolved the thought, due to past experience, that he could not contend with these things by physical force, but must subdue them with magic; his magic consisted of the beating of crude drum-like instruments, dances, and the mumbling of words.

Upon falling asleep he dreams, and awakening, he finds that he is still in the same place where he had lain the night before. Yet, he is certain that during the night he had traveled to his favorite wood and killed an animal whose tender flesh he was still savoring. Since the conception of a dream was as yet foreign to him, the logical conclusion he arrived at was that he had both a body and a spirit. If he possessed a body and a spirit, then all things about him, he reasoned, must likewise possess a similar spirit. Some spirits, he felt, were friendly; some, hostile to him. Slowly, slowly, down through the ages, as the mind of man progressed, his self-made religious conceptions would advance. He would worship idols, and these idols would be his gods.

Religious reasons/biblical statements are nothing more than secular reasons, most of which were merely thought up hundreds or thousands of years ago in different cultural contexts, by less informed people. Some of the biblical statements make sense and are still valid today. Some were valid once, but no longer are, and some were never valid in the first place.

VALID THEN & STILL VALID NOW: The truth is that the commandment not to steal wasn't passed on to Moses by God, it was common sense arrived at through secular thought and given religious weight by a priestly ruling class.

VALID THEN BUT NOLONGER VALID: The laws against eating pork made sense millenias ago in the desert where food spoiled quickly, but today with modern refrigeration it no longer makes sense. In reality the reason for the rule in the first place was almost certainly "empirical observation", by the society noticing that there was a higher incidence of disease associated with pork. So 'do not eat pork' was simply a product of empirical observation which was then codified by a priestly class.

THOSE THAT WERE NEVER VALID TO BEGIN WITH: The Bible tells us that the earth is surrounded by water, that god walks on the clouds, that the sun at one time stood still, that a donkey spoke once, that Jesus ascended into the heavens, and that the famines, wars, diseases, and other troubles faced by the Jews over the centuries were a product of god's wrath against the Jews for not loving him enough or obeying him properly and for members of the group worshiping false gods again and again.

The reality is that WATER IS ON EARTH NOT AROUND IT.
The reality is that NO ONE HAS SEEN GOD ON THE CLOUDS. HAVE YOU?
The reality is that A DONKEY LACKS THE ANATOMICAL CAPACITY TO UTTER A WORD.

The reality is that the Jews didn't suffer famines, wars, plagues, and slavery because their god was punishing them, the reality is that those things are simply natural forces that afflict everyone, and the Jews just happened to be a relatively small and poor group of people surrounded by powerful empires who frequently dominated them.

So MOST "biblical truths" can well be understood as simply ideas of an ancient and uninformed people trying to make sense of the world. They are simply based on human guesses about how the world works.

BTW it is recorded that what Jesus said and did on earth wetre siom many that not even all the books in the world would be enough to record them.
SHEESH!! Where are the flashdisks!

We will get our constitution and still break stones

2010-02-01T07:26:00.000-08:00

“Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man; Ireland shall get her freedom and you (will) still break stone.”

When a nation allows its institutions to be formed by its weaknesses of character rather than by its strength it creates, in deeper ways than commonly imagined, an influence to increase weakness at the expense of strength. A society that clatters along with its rusty habits of prejudices unquestioned; political predilections uncritiqued will find itself faithfully mirrored in public affairs.

While it is commendable that we are ever closer to new constitutional plan, the mistaken habit of tailoring laws to fix perceived political competitors or groups breeds the habit of the constituted government itself creating laws, as might happen, to fix anything that comes in its way.

We have rejected absolutism and so have we aristocracy. Absolutism is served better when the people accept their ideas as authoritative and religiously sacrifice humanity to a non-human purpose. Aristocracy flourishes where the people find a sensational enjoyment in admiring the successes of the ruling class. No doubt Napoleon was well content with the philosophy of those guardsmen who drank his health before he executed them. But those excellent soldiers would make dismal citizens.

We make a dismal citizenry. A view of life in which one obediently allows oneself to be made grist for somebody else's mill is the poorest kind of preparation for the work of self-government. There is where our problem lies. We deceive ourselves mightily in changing the constitution without reforming our habits. Demolatry is not democracy.

It is destructive to government that it is formed merely by counting of heads during polls in total disregard of what is contained in those heads. That method has blessed us, for years, with presidents who routinely misunderstand the nature of their office. What happens during polls is that the parties appoint a presidential candidate to be our ruler and all that we, the unconscious puppets dancing to unseen music and moved by hidden wires, do is to, in a muddled angry way, strike off the names of those other selected candidates.

That method has given us an executive limited only by the popular will and which cannot be held to responsibility against its own will, since, having possession of all the powers, it can prevent any free and genuine expression adverse to itself. Unless it yields voluntarily, overturning it would be always bloody and deadly even.

In borrowing from the Americans we must remember that their constitution was shaped, adjusted and adapted to political and socio economic errors very different from ours. It worked well for them. It might not necessarily for us.

At a time when selfishness has grown less intelligent, may we remember that each constitutional guarantee we put in place has a history. Each of them stop a way through which the overwhelming power of government has oppressed the weak individual citizen, and may do so again if the way is opened.

Our choice, in these times of collapsed and collapsing institutions, lies between a blind push for constitutional reforms and a wise leadership in constitutional reforms, between thwarting misgovernance until it masters us, and implementing reforms and reforming reforms until we are answered without trembling too much over the result.

Laws are Nothing without Courts and Just Judges

2010-01-14T04:35:00.000-08:00

The importance of courts can never be overestimated. They come very close to the people. They settle the estates of the dead, protect the living and safe guard the interests of the unborn. They enforce rights of the petty briber and the powerful corruptor alike, the cop killer and the killer cop, the castle dweller and the alleyway dweller, murder suspects and white collar crime suspects, the over lords of the under world and the gang of the slum alike.

When the rule of the robes proves a mirage, the rule of robbery gets support and sanction and in time people abandon the Government for the gang. The solution is in making the system of justice and justicing accessible to the downtrodden and the poor through dispersal of the power of judicial appointment and decentralization of the Judiciary, something lacking in the harmonized draft Constitution.

Our courts have lost their credibility and prestige. Corruption has crept in. Ethics has been thrown out and no longer form inviolable virtue. Delay of dockets and suits and numerous adjournments frustrate the hope of justice for the seekers. While the system is accessible to those from the creamy layer, the under-privileged y and are priced out of the institution.

The Bar, an indispensable factor in the adversarial system, is too expensive for the lowly. The fees and the formalities make the law too dear for the underprivileged. The hierarchy adds to the cost, the delay and the uncertainty of the final verdict.

Appeals upon appeals make justice through litigation inordinately dilatory and costly, and the law becomes the last means for the aggrieved to get relief. The litigant has only one life but litigation has several lives to see its end. Judgments typically take years to pronounce and some judges do not pronounce any judgment at all. They would seem to be unaccountable since there is almost nothing to be accountable to.

Judges are appointed in bizarre fashion. There is room for nepotism, tribalism, cronyism and corruption. Reform is necessary even here and a sense of scientific spirit and reason is needed if the judicature is not to become a caricature, or a torture of the right to justice.

Judges have a heavy responsibility in the matter of chronic backlog. In Kenya, litigation is known to last up to half a century. The art of fast disposal of cases seems to have become alien to some judges, who cannot have a brief hearing and delivery of judgment.

A leisurely and even bellicose style by advocates, a high-and-mighty bearing, and slow and endless arguments are hampering the competent performance of the judges. Originality, imagination and talent have become scarce commodities. These are mostly covered up by demands for more judges.
Let us appoint able persons who can efficiently and satisfactorily deal with the accumulation of work. What is more let us then leave them alone to do their work. Otherwise, we may continue with a system in which the outcome is pre-determined and the process then shaped to assure it ahead of time, thus perfectly adhering to this exchange from Chapter twelve of Alice in the Wonderland:

“Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King said, for about the twentieth time that day. “No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first verdict afterward.” “Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!” “Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple. “I won’t!” said Alice. “Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.

How is that remotely just or fair under any definition of those terms.

Abelard AND Heloise

2009-12-17T04:39:00.000-08:00

Many a woman, amid the transports of passionate and languishing love, has cried out in a sort of ecstasy:

"I love you as no woman ever loved a man before!"

When she says this she believes it. Her whole soul is aflame with the ardor of emotion. It really seems to her that no one ever could have loved so much as she.

This cry—spontaneous, untaught, sincere—has become almost one of those conventionalities of amorous expression which belong to the vocabulary of self-abandonment. Every woman who utters it, when torn by the almost terrible extravagance of a great love, believes that no one before her has ever said it, and that in her own case it is absolutely true.

Yet, HOW MANY WOMEN ARE REALLY FAITHFUL TO THE END? Very many, indeed, if circumstances admit of easy faithfulness. A high-souled, generous, ardent nature will endure an infinity of disillusionment, of misfortune, of neglect, and even of ill treatment. Even so, the flame, though it may sink low, can be revived again to burn as brightly as before. But in order that this may be so it is necessary that the object of such a wonderful devotion be alive, that he be present and visible; or, if he be absent, that there should still exist some hope of renewing the intimacy of the past.

A man who is sincerely loved may be compelled to take long journeys which will separate him for an indefinite time from the woman who has given her heart to him, and she will still be constant. He may be imprisoned, perhaps for life, yet there is always the hope of his release or of his escape; and some women will be faithful to him and will watch for his return. But, given a situation which absolutely bars out hope, which sunders two souls in such a way that they can never be united in this world, and there we have a test so terribly severe that few even of the most loyal and intensely clinging lovers can endure it.

Not that such a situation would lead a woman to turn to any other man than the one to whom she had given her very life; but we might expect that at least her strong desire would cool and weaken. She might cherish his memory among the precious souvenirs of her love life; but that she should still pour out the same rapturous, unstinted passion as before seems almost too much to believe.

The annals of emotion record only one such instance; and so this instance has become known to many. It involves the story of a woman who did love, perhaps, as no one ever loved before or since; for she was subjected to this cruel test, and she met the test not alone completely, but triumphantly and almost fiercely.

This is the story of Abelard and Heloise. The story continues... . COME BACK NEXT TIME!

Whereas the noxious behaviour of antisocials

2009-11-24T05:23:00.001-08:00

The Total Portrait of the AntiSocial

Ever jealous and envious, pushy and greedy, they may make ostentatious or wasteful displays of materialism and conspicuous consumption such as buying exotic cars, mansions, and elaborate jewellery as a means of exhibiting their power and achievements to others. Most feel a deep sense of emptiness, juxtaposed with vague images of how different life might have been had opportunity blessed them, as it has so many others.

He is an individual who is not only antisocial, as evidenced by early behaviour problems, multiple short marriages, juvenile delinquency, a versatile criminal past, a parasitic lifestyle, and sexual promiscuity, but also narcissistic, as evidenced by traits such as egocentricity, grandiosity, intolerance of boredom, lack of empathy, manipulativeness, and an inability to feel remorse.

They do things their own way and are willing to take the consequences, regardless of how others might judge them. Inclined at times to finesse the truth, they sometimes flirt with legal boundaries in pursuit of their own goals and desires. Rather than accept customary responsibilities, they see themselves as independent or creatively autonomous. Authority is viewed contemptibly.

Such individuals dislike daily routine and are often criticized by others as being impulsive and irresponsible. In general, they are action-oriented, independent thinking, enterprising, and confrontational. They stretch the limit of established social standards and push forward by means of sheer will, overturning obstacles with clever manoeuvres or an aggressive and intimidating posture.

Self-motivated and often extremely resourceful, they seize the initiative to make matters work toward their own ends. Many make masterful leaders, ready to take charge with confident, decisive action.

The envious antisocial is a variant. These individuals feel that life has not given them “their due”; they have been deprived of their rightful amount of love, support, or material reward; and others have received more than their share. Jealous of those who have received the bounty of a good life, they are driven by an envious desire for retribution to take what destiny has refused

them. Whether through deceit or destruction, their goal is compensation for the emptiness of life, rationalized by the assertion that they alone can restore the imbalance fated to them.

Seething with anger and resentment, their greatest pleasure lies in taking control of the property and possessions of others. Some are overtly criminal.

Many possess an enormous drive for revenge, manipulating others like pawns in a power game. REGARDLESS OF THEIR SUCCESS, HOWEVER, COVETOUS ANTISOCIALS USUALLY REMAIN INSECURE ABOUT THEIR POWER AND STATUS, NEVER FEELING THAT THEY’VE BEEN COMPENSATED FOR LIFE’S IMPOVERISHMENTS.

Some are simple thieves, while others become manipulative entrepreneurs who exploit people as objects to satisfy their desires. Although they have little compassion for or guilt about the effects of their behaviour, they never feel that they have acquired quite enough, never achieve a sense of contentment, and feel unfulfilled regardless of their successes, remaining forever dissatisfied and insatiable.

Methods of Behaviour control

2009-10-31T03:51:00.001-07:00

What training procedures are used to regulate the child’s behavior and to control what he or she learns?

PUNITIVE METHODS: Parents disposed to intimidate and ridicule their offspring, using punitive and repressive measures to control their behavior and thought, may set the stage for a variety of maladaptive patterns. If the child submits to pressure and succeeds in fulfilling parental expectations, he or she is apt to become an overly obedient and circumspect person. Typically, these individuals learn not only to keep in check their impulses and contrary thoughts but also, by vicarious observation and imitation, to adopt the parental behavior model and begin to be punitive of deviant behavior on the part of others.

Should these youngsters fail to satisfy excessive parental demands and be subject to continued harassment and punishment, they may develop a pervasive anticipatory anxiety about personal relationships, leading to feelings of hopelessness and discouragement and resulting in instrumental strategies such as social avoidance and withdrawal. Others,faced with similar experiences, may learn to imitate parental harshness and develop hostile and aggressively rebellious behaviors.

CONTINGENT REWARD METHODS: Some parents rarely are punitive but expect certain behaviors to be performed before giving encouragement or doling out rewards. Youngsters reared this way tend to be socially pleasant and, by imitative learning, tend to be rewarding to others. Often, however, they may acquire an insatiable and indiscriminate need for social approval.

INCONSISTENT METHODS: Parental methods of control often are irregular, contradictory, and capricious. Some degree of variability is inevitable in the course of every child’s life, but there are parents who display
an extreme inconsistency in their standards and expectations and an extreme unpredictability in their application of rewards and punishments. Youngsters exposed to such a chaotic and capricious environment cannot learn consistently and cannot devise non-conflictive strategies for adaptive behavior; whatever behavior they display may be countermanded by an unpredictable parental reaction.

To avoid the suspense and anxiety of unpredictable reactions, some children may protectively become immobile and noncommittal. Others, imitatively adopting what they have been exposed to, may come to be characterized by their own ambivalence and their own tendency to vacillate from one action or feeling to another.

PROTECTIVE METHODS: Some parents so narrowly restrict the experiences to which their children are exposed that these youngsters fail to learn even the basic rudiments of autonomous behaviors. Overprotective mothers, worried that their children are too frail or are unable to care for themselves or make sensible judgments on their own, not only succeed in forestalling the growth of normal competencies but also, indirectly, give their children a feeling that they are inferior and frail.

These children, observing their actual inadequacies, have verification of the fact that they are weak, inept, and dependent on others. Thus, these youngsters not only are trained to be deficient in adaptive and self-reliant behaviors but also learn to view themselves as inferior and become progressively fearful of leaving the protective womb.

INDULGENT METHODS: Overly permissive, lax, or undisciplined parents allow children full rein to explore and assert their every whim. These parents fail to control their children and, by their own lack of discipline, provide a model to be imitated, which further strengthens their children’s irresponsibility. Unconstrained by parental control and not guided by selective rewards, these youngsters grow up displaying the INCONSIDERATE and often TYRANNICAL characteristics of undisciplined children.

Having had their way for so long, they tend to be exploitive, demanding, uncooperative, and antisocially aggressive. Unless rebuffed by external disciplinary forces, these youngsters may persist in their habits and become irresponsible members of society.

Sigmund Freud: The Psychodynamic Perspective

2009-10-02T07:39:00.001-07:00

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was born in 1856. As the oldest child of an adoring mother whose belief in her son’s destiny never flagged, Freud KNEW HE WOULD BE FAMOUS.

Naturally attracted to science and influenced by Darwin, he settled on a medical career and spent a period of time involved in pure research. Eventually, practical necessity intervened, and Freud began a more applied course, specializing in neurology and psychiatry.

Freud’s first theory of neuroses was the idea that behind every neurotic conflict lies a FORGOTTEN CHILDHOOD TRAUMA. Such memories are said to be repressed. Motivated to forget what it knows, the mind defends against the
painful experiences by actively excluding them from conscious awareness. The past cannot be rewritten, but its impact can be contained.

He elaborated his insights into what is known as the topographic model, the idea that the mind has an organization or architecture. At the foundation lies the UNCONSCIOUS, a mysterious realm consisting of everything that we cannot become aware of by simple reflection alone. The unconscious is the only part of the mind that exists at birth.

Just above the unconscious lies the PRECONSCIOUS, which consists of everything that can be summoned to consciousness on command, for example, your phone number.

And finally, there is the part of the mind that forms our waking lives, which we call CONSCIOUS AWARENESS. According to Freud, the desire to bring satisfaction to our unconscious instincts continues to be the main
motivator in human behavior throughout the life span. (President Obama's sister has just walked in. Unless you know her, nothing in her creation or demeanor would give her away).

We have seen previously that Avoidant personalities, (for more click the label normality abnormality and go to avoidant personality), deeply desire close connectedness to others, but also feel a sense of shame about themselves so profound that very few such relationships are possible. Instead, avoidants retreat into a shell where they can at least be alone with their humiliating defects and deficiencies.

Compulsive and negativistic personalities wrestle with issues related to the obedience versus defiance of authority. Compulsives express this conflict passively by overconforming to internalized superego demands; on the surface, they appear normal and in control, but beneath, they are taut, anxious, and ever circumspect of their own conduct.

The negativistic personality expresses conflict actively by vacillating between loyalty and insubordinate sabotage. KNOWING THE OUTCOMES THAT OTHERS SEEK, THEY WORK SUBTLY WITHIN THE SYSTEM TO BRING THE PLANS OF OTHERS TO RUIN or at least CAUSE THEM GREAT FRUSTRATION.

Psychology of sex

2009-09-29T21:04:00.001-07:00

Suppose that eating and drinking was never spoken of openly, save in veiled or poetic language, and that no one ever ate food publicly, because it was considered immoral and immodest to reveal the mysteries of that natural function.

You know what would occur. A considerable proportion of the community, especially youth, possessed by an instinctive and legitimate curiosity, would concentrate their thoughts on the SUBJECT.

They would have so many problems to puzzle over: How often ought I to eat? What ought I to eat? Is it wrong to eat fruit, which I like? Ought I to eat grass, which I don't like? Instinct notwithstanding, you may be quite sure that only a small minority would succeed in eating reasonably and wholesomely.

THE SEXUAL SECRECY OF LIFE is even more disastrous than such a nutritive secrecy would be; partly because we expend such a wealth of moral energy in directing or misdirecting it, partly because the sexual impulse normally develops at the same time as the intellectual impulse, not in the early years of life, when wholesome instinctive habits might be formed. And there is always some ignorant and foolish friend who is prepared still further to MUDDLE THINGS: “Eat a meal every other day! Eat twelve meals a day! Never eat fruit! Always eat grass!”

The advice emphatically given in sexual matters is usually not less absurd than this. When, however, the matter is fully open, the problems of food are not indeed wholly solved, but everyone is enabled by the experience of his fellows to reach some sort of situation suited to his own case. And when the rigid secrecy is once swept away a sane and natural reticence becomes for the first time possible.

Has sexual pleasure the same power on the sex which less loudly demands it?
My answer; Yes. A woman's erotic demands, though more silent than man's, are stronger. Without doubt she is more passionate than man, and more often torn by the evils of love.

The seeming reluctance of the female is not intended, I think, to inhibit sexual activity either in the male or in herself, but to increase it in both. The passivity of the female is not a real, but only an apparent, passivity, and this holds true of our own species as much as of the lower animals.

“Women are like delicately adjusted alembics,” said a seventeenth-century author. "No fire can be seen outside, but if you look underneath the alembic, if you place your hand on the hearts of women, in both places you will find a great furnace”
The passivity of women is the passivity of the magnet, which in its apparent immobility is drawing the iron toward it. An intense energy lies behind such passivity, an absorbed preoccupation in the end to be attained.

Some women do not express their sensations and feelings as much as (most men do). But the belief that the feminine sex feels the stimulus of sex less than the male is quite false. Intercourse before marriage is the rule in many agricultural and commercial villages and cities (they are three) in Kenya, with or without intention of subsequent marriage. The girls are often the seducing parties, or at least very willing; they seek to bind their lovers to them and compel them to marriage. Sexual enjoyment is more delicious and protracted in women than in men.

IT IS CERTAIN that very much of what is best in religion, art, and life owes its charm to the progressively-widening irradiation of sexual feeling AND human relations.

2009-09-14T08:43:00.001-07:00

Read 'Amici Curiae: Sotomayor, Law Lords and Judicial Underpants Edition' on The Court at: http://www.thecourt.ca/2009/09/11/amicus-curiae-sotomayor-law-lords-and-judicial-underpants-edition/

Women perceived as Sex Vendors:Sex as Commodity

2009-09-08T02:19:00.000-07:00

Marriage is for woman the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.

- BERTRAND RUSSELL

This might be controversial so I ask for pardon. I start off on the rebuttable presumption that male’s urges are stronger and self-control weaker than that of the female. Women (not necessarily all women), as a sex, are the owners of a commodity vitally necessary to the health and well-being of man.

As a sex, they possess a commodity to sell or to barter. Men, as a sex, are buyers of, or barterers for, this commodity. The fact remains that men and women meet each other, in the capitalist system, as buyers and sellers of, or barterers for, a commodity.

The consequence: there is no office or saloon scrub-woman so displeasing and decrepit, no court clerk so old and so unattractive, no dish-washer so sodden, that she does not know, tucked far away in her inner consciousness, perhaps, that, if the worst comes to the very worst and she loses her job, there is the truck driver or the office clerk, the shaky-legged bar patron, or the squint-eyed salesman, or the local politician, who can be counted on to tide her over an emergency-usually for goods delivered.

When a woman loses a job, especially if she loses her self-control, she has always the sale of her sex to fall back upon as a last resort. This is in no way a criticism of women. I lay no stigma upon them. I lay no stigma upon any class or sex or group, for down at bottom, men and women do what they do because they have to do it. It is the nature of life that in the struggle for existence today the laurels are only to those who use any and all methods to save themselves.

Every group which possesses anything which is necessary to the health and well-being of any other group is bound to be pursued, wooed, bribed, and paid. The monopolistic class/sex, in turn, learns to withhold, to barter, to become “uncertain, coy and hard to please,” to enhance and raise the price of her commodity, even though the economic basis of the transaction be utterly concealed or disguised. All this is exactly as natural and inevitable as a group of wage workers demanding all they can get in payment for their labour power, or the broker selling to the highest bidder. No one is to be blamed.

We discuss women philosophically and idealistically but rarely economically, when it is economics that explains commercial sex. BTW everywhere in the animal world except among humankind, the male possesses the gay and attractive plumage, the colour and form to please the eye. Naturally he should possess them. But this is not so in the WORLD OF MAN. Here we find the woman decorating herself in the colourful garb. Woman has ceased to ask, “Is he beautiful?” She asks “What does he own?” or, “How much can he pay?”

Men love to dress their women in expensive clothes, to provide them with luxurious surroundings, because this advertises to the world the fact that they are able to purchase a SUPERIOR, i. e., a HIGHER PRICED COMMODITY. Women give much time and spend money extravagantly in articles of “conspicuous waste” for the simple reason that by so doing they announce the fact that THEY are finer than other women, higher priced, of a fancier brand, possessed of better wares.

Everybody knows that the man in the office, for example, who aspires to the affections of a beautiful young woman, often spends most of his wages (at times with all irrationality) upon her in the hope of winning her attention. His office associates may describe her as “fancy,” or speak of her as “an expensive package.” And so the man magnifies his “income” in order to bribe the young lady into “giving herself” to him in exchange for his name and some sort of life-long support, provided he can produce it.

How many young wives have learned, to their chagrin, of the deceits thus practiced upon them by their husbands! Alas! The scenes that are enacted when it is discovered, after the ceremony, that the man has another young woman somewhere else, or that the “diamond” engagement ring is not yet paid for, and that the beautiful car so joyously selected by the young bride-elect, was bought upon the installment plan! That “John” earns only so much a week instead of the what he declared, John is perceived as not paying as promised and every one feels that the woman has made a “bad bargain.”

On the other hand, women (some) disguise the economic basis of the deal in every possible way; lie, cheat and compete in a life and death struggle with others of their sex. A thousand illusions, tricks, subtleties, hypocrisies are employed to cover the bald fact that WARES ARE BEING DISPLAYED, are being bidden for by other men. The deal is smothered in chivalrous urbanities and sentimental verbiage. Unnumbered circumlocutions are resorted to, to conceal the salesmanship of one who has a commodity to sell.

AND the prostitute is not, I think, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, the sex seller who controls the sexual channels.

Genius and Degeneracy

2009-08-30T07:56:00.000-07:00

The Hebrew word nabi means either madman or prophet, and it is now admitted that most of the prophets, unquestionably men of genius, gave evidences of insanity as well as genius. The Greeks and the Romans recognized the kinship between Genius and degeneration, and we read in the Bible of a certain Festus, who, when confronted by a man of genius, and being unable to answer his arguments, said to him,

"PAUL, much learning hath made thee mad!"

Saul, the first king of Israel, was a man of genius and, at times, a madman. We read that, before his coronation, he was seized with an attack of madness and joined a company of kindred eccentrics. His friends and acquaintances were naturally surprised and exclaimed: "Is Saul among the prophets?" i. e., "Has Saul become insane?" Again, we are told that he was suddenly seized with an attack of homicidal impulse, and tried to kill David. Before this time he had had repeated attacks of madness, which only the harp of David could control and subdue. David himself was a man whose mental equilibrium was not well established, as his history clearly indicates. He forsook his God, indulged in licentious practices, and was, withal, a very, immoral man at times. At his time, the Hebrews had reached a high degree of civilization. Abstract ethics had become very much developed, and any example of great immorality occurring during this epoch is proof positive of degeneration.

King Solomon, a man of pre-eminent genius, was mentally unbalanced. The "Song of Solomon" shows very clearly that he was a victim of some psychical disorder, sexual in its character and origin. The poems of Anacreon are lascivious, lustful, and essentially carnal, and history informs us that he was a sexual pervert.

Julius Caesar, military leader, statesman, politician, and author, was an epileptic. Twice on the field of battle he was stricken down by this disorder. On one occasion, while seated at the tribune, he was unable to rise when the senators and consuls paid him a visit of ceremony and honor. They were offended at his seeming lack of respect, and retired, showing signs of anger. Caesar returned home, stripped off his clothes, and offered his throat to be cut by anyone. He then explained his conduct to the senate, saying that he was the victim of a malady which, at times, rendered him incapable of standing. During the attacks of this disorder "he felt shocks in his limbs, became giddy, and at last lost consciousness." Mozart was the victim of epilepsy; so also was Charles V., St. Paul, Peter the Great, and Dostoieffsky; Schiller, Pascal, and Newton, were the victims of diseases epileptoid in character.

Alcoholism and morphinism, or an uncontrollable desire for alcohol or opium in some form or other, are now recognized as evidences of degeneration. Men of genius have shown this form of degeneration. Alexander died after having emptied ten times the goblet of Hercules, and it was, without doubt, in an alcoholic attack, while pursuing naked the infamous Thais, that he killed his dearest friend. Caesar was often carried home intoxicated on the shoulders of his soldiers. Neither Socrates, nor Seneca, nor Cato, nor Peter the Great (nor his wife Catherine, nor his daughter Elizabeth) were remarkable for their abstinence.

In men of genius the moral sense is sometimes obtunded, if not altogether absent. Seneca, and Bacon were suspected felons. Rousseau and Byron were grossly immoral, while Casanova, the gifted mathematician, was a common swindler. Murat, Rousseau, Diderot and Oscar Wilde were sexual perverts.

Genius, like insanity, lives in a world of its own. Some were celibates e.g Kant, Newton, Pitt, Beethoven, Galileo, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Gray, Dalton, Hume, Macaulay, Bentham, Leonardo da Vinci, Copernicus, Schopenhauer, and Voltaire. These men have neither ancestors nor descendants; they themselves form their entire posterity.

Thomas Paine gave evidences of a lack of mental equipoise. We find scattered throughout his works the most brilliant, irrefutable, and logical truths side by side with the most inane, illogical, and stolid crudities.

Boderlands of insanity

2009-08-21T07:50:00.000-07:00

Carlyle, you remember, Thomas Carlyle, himself a degenerate, wrote that nine-tenths of the world were fools, he was much nearer truth than most may think. When we take an introspective view of our sane personality, we shudder to see how near it is to the borderlands of insanity and the bizarre and eccentric world of crankdom. There hardly lives a man who does not possess some eccentricity, or who does not cherish, hidden, perhaps, deep within himself, some small delusion, which he is ashamed to acknowledge to the outside world.

Social relations and the iron rules of custom hold in place the balance-wheel of many a disordered mind. The mental equipoise is kept at the normal standard only by the powerful aid of the will, supported and assisted by extraneous adjuvants, such as fear of punishment, fear of personal harm, and, above all, by the fear of ridicule. Many a man hugs his delusions closely to his heart, indulges them only in the secret recesses of his soul, and, their sole owner and acquaintance, carries them with him to his grave.

Any one with a retentive memory, and one capable of minute analysis, can look back in his life and recall moments when his insane personality got the better of his will, and ran riot in forbidden pathways. He may not have committed an insane act; yet the thought, the impulse, the delusion was there and only outside influences kept it from breaking forth. Who fails to remember certain times in his life when he has had an almost overpowering desire to cry out in church, or to laugh on some sad or solemn occasion; or, having a razor in his hand, has had an impulse, sudden and intense, to draw it across his throat; or, being on some high place, has been seized with the desire to hurl himself downward? This shows how near indeed the healthy mind ever hovers on the borderlands of insanity.

Man stands so close to the portals of insanity that he can look through the gateway, when he takes an introspective view of his psychical being, and can see the phantoms and mental ghosts of his insane personality.

I think there is a vast amount of latent insanity. Taking the tables of our insane asylums, we find a thousand and one causes given as the exciting factors in the mental overthrow. Love, 'religion', anger, disappointment, etc., down through the long list of psychic and aesthetic emotions, until it seems as though even a breath of wind would be sufficient to destroy the mental equipoise.

There seems to be in the minds of men an instinctive awe of anything that appertains to the insane. In olden times a disordered mind was considered of divine or diabolic origin as it evinced good or evil tendencies. In the US, for example, the infamous Salem trials (remember Tituba) was literally and figuratively speaking a witch-hunt. Witches were executed in England and men burned at the stake in Spain, not two hundred years ago, for the crime of demoniacal possession. Here in Kenya women are still burnt todate for the suscpicion that they are withches.

In the Middle Ages, cranks, whose eccentricities took a religious turn, were considered holy. St. Simon Stylites was a very pronounced crank, and a very holy man also, because he chose to live the greater portion of his life perched on a pillar seventy feet high. St. Anthony was another holy crank who never, in all his life, washed his feet. Poor Joan of Arc was burned at the stake because she was “possessed of a false and lying devil.” She has been recently proposed for canonization by the same church that burned her, and thus, in a measure, had justice done her.

Some of the prophets of the Old Testament presented symptoms which can hardly be interpreted as other than the effects of madness; certainly if they were not mad, they imitated very closely some of its most striking features. Jeremiah takes a long journey to the river Euphrates and hides a linen girdle in a hole of a rock. He then returns home and in a few days makes the same journey, and finds the girdle rotten and good for nothing. Ezekiel digs a hole in the wall of his house, and through it removes his household goods, instead of through the door. Hosea marries a prostitute because he said he had been commanded by God so to do. Isaiah stripped himself naked and paraded up and down in sight of all the people.

The Psychology of Love

2009-08-12T08:11:00.000-07:00

It is put upon women the greater part of the burden of sexual reproduction.

Men have imposed, throughout history, their own rule of life on women and their own ideals, and have demanded from women opposite and contradictory virtues, (something not yet antiquated).

Earlier on, the condemnation of sexuality involved the glorification of the virgin; and indifference, even contempt, was felt for the woman who exercised sexual functions. The Jews attributed to women greater sexual desire than to men. This is illustrated, I think, by Genesis, chapter III, V. 16.

In Greek antiquity the romance and sentiment of love were mainly felt toward persons of the same sex, and were divorced from the more purely sexual feelings felt for persons of opposite sex. Theognis compared marriage to CATTLE-BREEDING. In love between men and women the latter were nearly always regarded as taking the more active part. In all Greek love-stories of early date the woman falls in love with the man, and never the reverse. Euripides emphasized the importance of women; "The Euripidean woman who 'falls in love' thinks first of all: 'How can I seduce the man I love?"

Research shows that among women, while some are absolutely insensitive, others are so violently excited by the paradise of physical love that, after the sexual embrace, they faint or fall into a cataleptic condition for several hours. Physical sex is a larger factor in the life of the woman. In the female sex, reproduction is a more dominant function of the organism than in the male, and has far larger, if not more intense, relationships to feeling and judgment. In woman the visceral system reacts, if not with greater intensity, certainly in a more general manner, to all the impressions, having a sexual basis, which dominate the life of woman, as related emotions closely dependent on the reproductive instinct.

Sinibaldus in the seventeenth century, argued that, though women are cold at first, and aroused with more difficulty and greater slowness than men, the flame of passion spreads in them the more afterward, just as iron is by nature cold, but when heated gives a great degree of heat. It has been said of women that "their passions are not so easily raised nor so suddenly fixed upon any particular object; but when this passion is once rooted in women it is much stronger and more durable than in men, and rather increases than diminishes by enjoying the person of the beloved."

Schopenhauer said that a man's love decreases with enjoyment, and a woman's increases.

Vision and Beauty

2009-08-07T08:05:00.000-07:00

The tendency for beauty of clothing to be accepted as a substitute for beauty of body appears early in the history of mankind, and, as we know, tends to be absolutely accepted in civilization. "We exclaim," as Goethe remarks, "'What a beautiful little foot!' when we have merely seen a pretty shoe; we admire the lovely waist when nothing has met out eyes but an elegant girdle."

Our realities and our traditional ideals are hopelessly at variance; the Greeks represented their statues without pubic hair because in real life they had adopted the oriental custom of removing the hairs; we compel our sculptors and painters to make similar representations, though they no longer correspond either to realities or to our own ideas of what is beautiful and fitting in real life. The main primitive purpose of adornment and clothing among early man was not to conceal the body, but to draw attention to it and to render it more attractive.

Whether among the the poet and story-teller, the educated or the uneducated who seeks to describe an ideally lovely and desirable woman; all always insists mainly, and often exclusively, on those characters which appeal to the eye. The richly laden word beauty is a synthesis of complex impressions obtained through a single sense, and so simple, comparatively, and vague are the impressions derived from the other senses that none of them can furnish us with any corresponding word.

To make the article fairly complete must be added at least one other factor: the influence of individual taste. Every individual builds up a feminine ideal of his own, in part on the basis of his own culture and demands, in part on the actual accidental attractions he has experienced. It is unnecessary to emphasize the existence of this factor, which has always to be taken into account in every consideration of sexual selection in man.

But its variations are numerous and in impassioned lovers it may even lead to the idealization of features which are in reality the reverse of beautiful. It may be said of many a man in relation to the woman he loves, that "he feels himself bound to 'her' by the real qualities of her body". There are no two women who in exactly the same way hold the hand in greeting, and no two who gather up their skirts as they walk with exactly the same movement.Among the multitude of minute differences which yet can be seen and felt, the beholder is variously attracted or repelled according to his own individual idiosyncrasy, and the operations of sexual selection are effected accordingly.

The Boderline Personality

2009-08-05T02:03:00.000-07:00

The last I cover and the stormiest by far! To live a life analogous to a soap opera is to live the life of a borderline personality. Wrought with emotional ups and downs, these individuals are known to be unstable and especially angry. What fuels the chaos are intense interpersonal needs and sudden shifts of opinion about others, who may be painted as loving, sensitive, and intelligent one minute and accused of neglect and betrayal the next.

When left alone, even for short periods, borderline personalities( 'the boderlines') feel INTOLERABLY LONELY & EMPTY. With romantic relations typically stormy and intense, they spend most of their time either making up or breaking up. They make frantic attempts to AVOID ABANDONMENT, including suicidal gestures. In addition, they fail to realize that their clinginess via dramatic and drastic measures drives others away. Plagued by feelings of anxiety, depression, guilt, and inferiority, many engage in self-destructive behaviors, indulging themselves impulsively in promiscuous sexual activity or drugs and alcohol. Some even mutilate their own bodies by cutting or burning.

Lacking a mature sense of self-identity, they flip-flop on goals and values,suddenly change jobs on impulse, and REVERSE PREVIOUS OPINIONS WITH INDIFFERENCE. During stressful periods, this incohesiveness makes them susceptible to temporary psychotic states and dissociative episodes. The borderline personality is peppered with many aspects of other personality disorders.

Although its symptoms are obviously severe, the borderline personality can neverthe-
less be viewed as existing on a continuum with normality. The mercurial style is described as living a roller coaster life. Frequent ups and downs are the rule, and attachment is the central theme in all relationships. Echoing the borderline’s frantic attempts to avoid abandonment is a desire always to be involved in a passionate romantic relationship. Such individuals process experience emotionally rather than logically, showing their feelings with SPONTANEITY & CREATIVITY.

Socially, they are lively and engaging, with an open mind toward experimenting with
various roles and value systems. Exhibiting aspects of the dependent and histrionic personalities, they urgently seek closeness with their partners, like a merging of souls but even more intensely. They expect the same from others and quickly become hurt whenever the same desire is not forthcoming. Anger and resentment follow.

Consider the case of a fictitious 'Jenny'. What is immediately striking about many borderlines, is a specific kind of instability in their relationships. Jenny swings from loving people to hating them and back again, as if she knew only two modes of appraisal: either complete idealization as the best person on earth or devaluation as a demon from Hell. There is, always, sudden and never-ending shifts of attitude.

What Jenny seems to need most is magical fusion with a loving caretaker. Indeed,
feelings of abandonment seem to underlie the intense anger she feels toward some people. Moreover, she seems devoid of life goals or consistent values. Whereas normals develop a solid sense of identity that defines the person and gives direction to life, Jenny lacks a stable identity that might anchor her against the influence of intense, transient impulses that threaten to seriously damage her life.
These include polysubstance abuse and the habit of leaping from moving vehicles to get away from her “evil” boyfriend (replace with anything).

Jenny seems angry AT JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME. Sometimes, her anger is so intense that she accuses OTHERS of planning to hurt her. Perhaps she cannot imagine how life could become so dissatisfying, believing that the course of events would need to be helped along by some evil agency to be so effective in its misery. Obviously, she feels misunderstood, alienated, and alone. Although everyone feels this way at some time, Jenny reports constantly feeling “hollow inside,” apparent
evidence of feelings of emptiness but probably more closely related to dissociation. Jenny notes, for example, that life sometimes seems to be “moving in slow motion” and that she is “like an observer” watching things “from the outside,” evidence of breakdown in the normally integrated functions of consciousness.

Jenny’s feelings about others swing from loving to hating. Far from being simply experimental and curious in a way that builds self-identity, Jenny seems too Consumed with emotional upheavals to allow for life goals or real values to develop. Finally, SHE is not simply sensation-seeking in ways that add to the richness of life; instead, she is impulsive in harmful ways.

The borderline construct has proven remarkably controversial. Indeed, the very label borderline presages problems of definition. Logically, anything known primarily for bordering something else obviously cannot be its own entity.

The Paranoid Personality

2009-08-03T07:58:00.000-07:00

From below descriptions, you may identify aspects of yourself that match with the paranoid pattern. Paranoid-style thinking, when appropriate to the realistic demands of your environment, is healthy. Most readers will agree that the world is sometimes a dangerous place and that mistrust, when not carried to extremes, has definite survival value. In fact, there is a period of mistrust that is a vital part of human development. Young children go through a genetically programmed stage of stranger anxiety, during which they become anxious when confronted with unknown others and seek the comfort of familiar faces. Stranger anxiety thus functions as a means of keeping children close to the tribe, or at least to caretakers, and away from those that might do them harm, perhaps members of other tribes competing for scarce territory or food resources in the same area.

Undoubtedly, you have encountered people who question the integrity of everything
said to them. Often, they are fearful that they will be taken advantage of and have no qualms expressing this fear. Distrust fills their lives to the extent that even family members and others who may be considered closest to them are not excluded from this equation. Yet trust and self-determination are fundamental to existence.

We trust others to have our best interest at heart, to come to our assistance in
time of need, to provide helpful advice, to anticipate dire outcomes that might escape us, to inform us tactfully when our judgment is wrong, and to help keep our lives running smoothly. We may, at times, argue vehemently with our family and close friends, but when the chips are down, there is an understanding that those we love will “be there” to protect us and fight by our side, at a moment’s notice, if necessary.

Among paranoid personalities, the, the basic capacity for trust has somehow been destroyed. Most people see some fundamental goodness in human nature. Paranoids, however, usually view sincerity as a DANGER SIGN, a “Trojan Horse” sent to conceal evil schemes and nefarious intentions. Others are the enemy, waiting to rush
in, strip them of their already-questionable safety and security, expose their precious vulnerabilities, and ultimately devour them with sadistic delight. For protection, paranoids wall themselves in to keep others out. Never letting their guard down, they watch vigilantly for any sign of impending onslaught from the deep recesses of their fortress.

Nothing must escape their scrutiny. From the perspective of others, they are guarded, hostile, self-righteous, rigid, black-and-white thinkers, unwilling to consider the objective evidence and draw rational conclusions. Instead, they misread consensual social reality, attribute hidden motives to others, and even ACCUSE LIFELONG FRIENDS OF HEINOUS BETRAYALS. Standing alone against the world at the very precipice of destruction, paranoids BANDAGE THEMSELVES WITH RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION & SELF-PITY, further fueling their anger.

To protect themselves against hidden assaults, paranoids search for information that
corroborates their suspicions. Even the most incidental fact may become a huge brush
stroke and subsequently be used to support sweeping conclusions. Gradually, uncon-
nected facts are drawn together into a fabric that reveals the OUTCROPPINGS OF A DARK CONSPIRACY. Eventually, paranoids fabricate a “pseudocommunity” in which the objective attributes and intentions of real people have been lost, replaced instead by sinister traits and motives imposed by the paranoid mind.

By creating a reality that confirms their fears, their anxious desperation grows ever more intense, fueling circles ever more vicious, leading to retreat behind ever stronger and higher walls, still greater vigilance, and finally, the discovery of new layers of intrigue, which function to keep the cycle going.

Reflect on the hypothetical case of 'Ron'. Because trust and loyalty are such fundamental issues for paranoids, many become obsessed with the notion that their spouse or lover has been unfaithful. Ron accuses his wife of cheating, though he has no solid evidence, and even suspects that his children are not his own, although their ages would require an ongoing affair stretching 12 years into the past. Strangely, Ron is tormented by the fact that both his children and his best friend have brown hair, even though his wife also has brown hair. HE NEGLECTS THE OBVOIUS IN FAVOUR OF DATA THAT SUPPORT HIS OWN MISINTERPRETATION OF REALITY.

Moreover, he deeply fears and resents the possibility that he might be forced by the legal system to supply funds that will be used to raise someone else’s children, and he is determined not to LET THIS HAPPEN. Ironically, the more he is pushed to take responsibility for his children, the more aggressively certain he will become that the children are not his at all.

Like other paranoid personalities, Ron’s concern with deceit is easily generalized be
yond a single forum or relationship. He could reconstruct reality in any number of ways, but he has chosen a path in which HE IS THE VICTIM & OTHERS ARE THE BENEFICIARIES. For example, he believes that his coworkers are manipulating the time clock. He suspects that they not only cheat him out of pay but also add that money to their own checks, thus allowing them to enjoy the fruits of Ron’s toil behind his back. Therefore, his indignation is doubly justified: HIS DEFICIT IS THEIR SURPLUS; HIS AGONY, THEIR JOY.

WE can easily imagine Ron lying awake at night, recycling the injustices done to him again and again, becoming angrier and angrier and more and more determined to avenge himself or at least catch them in the act. Like other paranoids, Ron holds grudges and seldom forgives an injury. He can’t, because he is always reconstructing reality so that others have self-consciously exploited or attacked him. Nothing is accidental.
Moreover, the putative attacks on Ron made through the time clock go beyond simple
exploitation. Instead, they are attacks on his character. If successful, they will prove something to the world: Ron is a person of low moral quality, and he is
unable to provide for a family, apparently a characteristic essential to his self-respect and one he believes is essential to the respect of others. Thus, in addition to deceiving Ron, his enemies are now waging war on another, even more malicious front: They are attempting to deceive the public about him. Of the two forms of attack, Ron may fear the second even more than the first. He can potentially thwart attacks against his person, buthe cannot as easily control the perceptions of others.

Such distortions of reality could give way to further, more severe paranoid developments, perhaps the notion that others are talking about failures and inadequacies behind his back even though they may have no foundation in truth. In Ron’s mind, others might be saying, “Yeah, I heard his take-home pay was so embarrassing his wife couldn’t take it anymore and started screwing his best friend.”

Psychology of Love

2009-08-01T09:16:00.000-07:00

The sacraments of GOD are everywhere woven into the texture of men's and women's bodies. Lips good to kiss with are indeed first of all chiefly good to eat and drink with. So accumulated and overlapped have the centres of force become in the long course of development, that the mucous membranes of the natural orifices, through the sensitiveness gained in their own offices, all become agents to thrill the soul in the contact of love; it is idle to discriminate high or low, pure or impure; all alike are sanctified already by the extreme unction of God.

Ultimately the worth and loveliness of life must be measured by the worth and loveliness for us of the instruments of life. The swelling breasts, for example, are such divinely gracious insignia of womanhood because of the potential child that hangs at them and sucks; the curves of the hips are so voluptuous because of the potential child they clasp within them; there can be no division here, we cannot cut the roots from the tree. The supreme function of manhood—the handing on of the lamp of life to future races—is carried on, it is true, by the same instrument that is the daily conduit of the bladder.

It has been said in scorn that we are born between urine and excrement; it may be said, in reverence, that the passage through this channel of birth is a sacrament of God's more sacred and significant than men could ever invent. Our attitude towards the naked human body is the test of our attitude towards the instinct of sex. Love craves the flesh, and if the flesh is shameful the lover must be shameful. However illogical it may have been, there really was a justification for the old Christian identification of the flesh with the sexual instinct. They stand or fall together; we cannot degrade the one and exalt the other. As our feelings towards nakedness are, so will be our feelings towards love!

“Man is nothing else than fetid sperm, a sack of dung, the food of worms.... You have never seen a viler dung-hill.” Such was the outcome of St. Bernard's cloistered Meditationes Piissimæ. Sometimes, the medieval monks would admit that the skin possessed a certain superficial beauty, but they only made that admission in order to emphasize the hideousness of the body when deprived of this film of loveliness, and strained all their perverse intellectual acumen, and their ferocious irony, as they eagerly pointed the finger of mockery at every detail of what seemed to them the pitiful figure of man.

St. Odo of Cluny—charming saint as he was and a pioneer in his appreciation of the wild beauty of the Alps he had often traversed—was yet an adept in this art of reviling the beauty of the human body. That beauty only lies in the skin, he insists; if we could see beneath the skin “women would arouse nothing but nausea”, he said. “Their adornments are but blood and…bile. If we refuse to touch dung even with a fingertip, how can we desire to embrace a sack of dung?”

But we have emancipated ourselves from such vile. It is possible to say, with Henry Thoreau, that “THE GODS HAVE REALLY INTENDED THAT MEN SHOULD FEED DIVINELY, AS THEMSELVES, ON THEIR OWN NECTAR & AMBROSIA”. Clement of Alexandria, with all the eccentricities of his over-subtle intellect, was yet the most genuinely Greek of all the Fathers, and it is not surprising that the dying ray of classic light reflected from his mind shed some illumination over this question of sex. He protested, for instance, against that prudery which, as the sun of the classic world set, had begun to overshadow life. “WE SHOULD NOT BE ASHAMED TO NAME,” he declared, “WHAT GOD HAS NOT BEEN ASHAMED TO CREATE.”

There are many who seek to conciliate prejudice and reason in their valuation of sex by drawing a sharp distinction between “LUST” & “LOVE”," rejecting the one and accepting the other. It is quite proper to make such a distinction, but the manner in which it is made will by no means usually bear examination. We’ve to define what we mean by “LUST” & what we mean by “LOVE”, and this is not easy if they are regarded as mutually exclusive. It is sometimes said that LUST must be understood as meaning “a reckless indulgence of the sexual impulse without regard to other considerations.”
So understood, we are quite safe in rejecting it. But that is an entirely arbitrary definition of the word. LUST is really a very ambiguous term; it is a good word that has changed its moral values, and therefore we need to define it very carefully before we venture to use it. Properly speaking, LUST, I think, is an entirely colorless word and merely means desire in general and sexual desire in particular; it corresponds to “HUNGER” or “THIRST,” & to use it in an offensive sense is much the same as though we should always assume that the word “HUNGRY” had the offensive meaning of “GREEDY”.

The failures to find love are often remarkable and unexpected. WE MAY FIND IT WHERE WE LEAST EXPECT IT. Sexual desire is idealized even by some animals, especially birds, for when a bird pines to death for the loss of its mate this cannot be due to the uncomplicated instinct of sex, but must involve the interweaving of that instinct with the other elements of life to a degree which is rare even among some of us.

Donnay, in his play L'Escalade,(translated into English) makes a cold and stern man of science, who regards love as a mere mental disorder which can be cured like other disorders, at last fall desperately in love himself. He forces his way into the girl's room, by a ladder, at dead of night, and breaks into a long and passionate speech: “Everything that touches you becomes to me mysterious and sacred. Ah! to think that a thing so well known as a woman's body, which sculptors have modelled, which poets have sung of, which men of science like myself have dissected, that such a thing should suddenly become an unknown mystery and an infinite joy merely because it is the body of one particular woman—what insanity! And yet that is what I feel”

The Schizotypal Personality

2009-07-31T00:54:00.000-07:00

In the Schizotypal, THE OVERALL DESIGN POSSESSES AN ECCENTRIC & INDECIPHERABLE LOGIC, BY WHICH THE BIZARRE IS MADE NORMAL & THE NORMAL MADE BIZZARE.

Three more personality disorders remaining. Today we look at the Schizotypal as opposed to the Schizoid personality disorder. A sad sad structural defectt this Schizotypal personality disorder is.

Others see them as ECCENTRIC, DIFFERENT, WEIRD, ODD, OR STRANGE. Excessively anxious around others, they keep themselves separated and isolated, even from those they have known for long periods of time. Some seem absorbed in stimulation that derives from their own internal world and may have difficulty expressing their thoughts and feelings coherently. When engaged interpersonally, they may seem distracted or unable to focus or even ramble from subject to subject.

Emotions may have a constricted range or be completely inappropriate to objective events. They may have odd beliefs unsubstantiated by science; for example, they can communicate telepathically or somehow read the future. Some have perceptions that are equally odd; for example, they may think about LONG DEAD RELATIVES, then suddenly get the feeling that these spirits are hovering in the room near them. Often, they are EXTRAORDINARILY SUSPICIOUS of the motives of others. Such individuals are called SCHIZOTYPAL PERSONALITIES, or SCHIZOTYPALS for the sake of
convenience in this blog.

The schizotypal personality lies on a continuum with schizophrenia. As such, both schizotypals and schizophrenics are often referred to as schizotypes. The continuum that links the two disorders is called schizotypy. Schizotypal symptoms that suggest a surplus or exaggeration of normal functioning, such as delusions, hallucinations, and ideas of reference,are usually referred to as positive symptoms, and those that refer to interpersonal and motivational deficits are often referred to as negative symptoms.

Consider the case of 'Pete'. He experiences what are called ideas of references, meaning that he believes that other persons are referring to him or that he is somehow at the center of interpersonal events. He “knows” that the people are talking
about him, simply because they keep looking at him and trying to hide it, as least from his perspective. Pete’s referential ideas are probably related to the social anxiety. He is uncomfortable around everyone, even though it appears he has no cause to be. THE MORE UNCOMFORTABLE HE FEELS, THE MORE VIGILANT HE BECOMES & THE MORE LIKELY HE IS TO CONSTRUE EVENTS SO THAT THEY REVOLVE AROUND HIM.

Although YOU ask HIM, for example, simple biographical questions, the style and content of his responses are strange. He cannot connect with the purpose of the interview or the intent of the interviewer and is puzzled by basic questions, as if he and the interviewer were not sharing the same consensual social reality.Seemingly unambiguous inquiries lead to disconnected and somewhat tangential responses, as if the main purpose of the question WERE LOST THEN RECOVERED, THEN LOST AGAIN.

Whereas meaning and emotion are tightly coupled in the speech of most people, they are only loosely coordinated for Pete. Sometimes, they are completely inappropriate to objective events, as if in-terpersonal interactions were being interpreted through frames of reference that are either wrongly applied or somehow emphasize trivial aspects of the interaction at the expense of those that are important or central.

HE has unusual perceptual experiences reminiscent of schizophrenia. When he states, as an example, that the true purpose of an interview has been “told to him,” he is not speaking metaphorically. Instead, he is asserting that he has privileged access to information outside the realm of normal human experience. He also has unusual perceptual experiences that resemble hallucinations. When he says that he has GLIMPSED THE FUTURE, he literally believes that he has somehow looked ahead in time. When he claims that he can see what is happening in other places and what might happen should he go there, he is SPEAKING PERCEPTUALLY, not INFERENTIALLY.

Interestingly, HIS revelations and extrasensory information seem to serve a protective function, making him suspicious but also making it possible to keep himself safe. When HE becomes socially anxious and construes events so that they somehow point to him, he at least has a means of guarding himself. That’s why they have become a basis for action in the course of his everyday life. And because HIS fears are mostly fictions anyway, his countermeasures always seem to work, thus reinforcing superstitious beliefs and exotic cognitive modes.

HE exhibits behaviors that seem odd or peculiar. His next-door neighbor reports that he has been known to TWIST HIS BODY UP IN KNOTS and have conversations with himself. Likewise, Given his social anxiety and the unusual cognitive methods through which he protects himself, it is not surprising that PETE has no close friends. Instead, he is pretty much on his own, PURSUING A MINIMALIST EXISTENCE AT THE MARGINS OF SOCIETY.

AMONG the SCHIZOTYPALS, temporary periods dominated by bizarre behavior, irrational impulses, and semidelusional thoughts are common. Such individuals may drift in and out of contact with consensual social reality, as if caught up in a momentary dream. Unable to grasp the illusory character of these inner stimuli, they may be driven to engage in erratic and hostile actions or embark on wild and chaotic sprees they may only vaguely recall later. Every so often, their intrapsychic world erupts and
overwhelms them, blurring their awareness and releasing bizarre impulses, thoughts,
and actions. Most have a checkered and erratic history of relationships, school,
and work performance, as with PETE.

Personality can be likened to an office building. The workers have their own jobs, and the building complements their activities. Internal traffic is not shunted down convoluted pathways, for example, or turned out into the street. All workers and visitors find their destination easily, without wasted effort or frustration. The entire structure, in fact, just naturally encourages efficient functioning. Each person naturally integrates with the others so that, ideally, the entire complex functions as a single harmonious whole.

In the schizotypal, borderline, and paranoid personalities, however, structural defects prevent the whole from operating smoothly. For the PARANOID, the building is too rigid and constrictive, so much so that anyone who enters must conform to its specific, predetermined rules or be ejected. In the BODERLINE, the building is structured so loosely that its insides hardly seem separated into rooms. Instead, contents spill from one compartment to the next, so the entire structure seems labile and vulnerable to splitting or
heaving unpredictably.

A hand, for example, is made to write, grasp, and manipulate. That’s what it does. Structurally, however, a hand is formed of bone, muscle, nerve, and tendon; without these, no hand can function. In the same way, structural domains of personality support its functional aspects, thus forming the architecture of the mind. Cognitive schemata, for example, provide structural support for the expression of cognitive styles. SELF-IMAGE provides yet another structural component to personality, one that influences interpersonal ways of relating, as well as the operation of defense mechanisms, which support and protect self-esteem.

Thus, compulsives see themselves as conscientious and conform scrupulously to external standards to make absolutely sure this image is confirmed; minor errors are magnified into major mistakes,leading to self-condemnation. As this example shows, structural elements of personality are so deeply imprinted that they actively transform the nature of objective events. No matter how successful the compulsive may be at fending off error, a deep fear that something has slipped by remains. Every interpersonal interaction takes place under a black, solemn cloud.

The Schizoid Personality

2009-07-29T20:38:00.000-07:00

Although the schizoid construct is somewhat nebulous, many readers may nevertheless
recognize some aspect of themselves in the schizoid pattern. Everyone knows someone
who is an extreme introvert, for example. We all want to be left alone from time to time, if only to quiet our own thoughts or think things through, to unwind from a long day of boring business meetings, or simply let down that façade of friendliness that is required by burdensome visits from friends and relatives. We love them, but sooner or later, enough is enough.

In contrast, individuals with schizoid traits feel this way about their social interactions MOST OF THE TIME. What is interpersonal is intrinsically unrewarding to them; thus, they often turn toward objects and abstractions or toward isolative hobbies such as stamp or rock collecting, mechanical gadgetry, or even mathematics or computer science.

Imagine, as you are walking to class, you spot an individual sitting on the campus lawn lawn, back against a tree, textbook opened and inverted on his lap, gazing distantly to the sky.You instantly recognize him from your classes, where rambunctious classmates often harangue and berate him, yet to no avail, as though he was emotionally detached and indifferent, appearing almost numb. He is also the one who seems so apathetic when the professor praises him for his academic performances.

Nearing him, you glance his way with a nod and smile, acknowledging his presence and inviting a response. He reciprocates the nod and resumes his reading. As a friendly gesture, you invite him to join you at lunch. He declines, which is reminiscent of the many other offers he has rejected, saying, “I much prefer being by myself.” Though in keeping with his past behavior, it puzzles you as to whether he is merely fearful of rejection or truly enjoys a life of solitude.

Pondering this query, you realize you have never seen him with nor has he sought out
friends. Could it be that he truly enjoys a life of solitude and lacks the need for inter-personal relationships? The answer is YES. As we see, you have just encountered a SCHIZOID PERSONALITY. Typically distant and viewed as introverted, these individuals keep to themselves. With the exception of minimal familial relations, schizoid personalities, or SCHIZOIDS, feel NO NEED FOR RELATIONSHIPS, whether platonic or sexual. This is notably unlike the painfully shy avoidant, who desperately desires intimacy and acceptance but fears shame, humili-
ation, and embarrassment.

Because schizoids choose to be by themselves, they go through life with markedly reduced interpersonal stress, as they are immune to the demands that others might put on them. Neither responding to praise nor criticism, the social dynamics typically held to most of us as important are merely incidental to schizoids. They almost seem incapable of experiencing emotional extremes of pleasure—as they rarely become excited about anything and anger as they hardly ever become HEATED OR IRATE. Their emotional experience and expression may be so flattened that they seem detached from the world and even themselves. Perpetually untroubled and indifferent, they work SILENTLY & UNOBTRUSIVELY at their jobs and rarely get noticed by anyone, even by those with whom they have some ROUTINE CONTACT.

Left to their own doing, they would probably blend into the background indefinitely.
Take the case of 'LEONARD', as an example. HE finds it difficult to be friendly to others, to smile, to make small talk, or to follow the niceties of casual social encounters. In fact, the need for closeness is a NOTION CONFUSING TO HIM; the concept is simply beyond anything his life experience might incur. Rather than having a gregarious lifestyle, Leonard prefers to spend time alone watching TV or working on his model airplanes (Whatever).
It is not that he is hostile, but simply that he is INDIFFERENT. When others smile at him or try to develop a conversation, he probably senses that they want a response of some kind, but he either does not know what to say in return or just does not feellike saying much of anything.

For this reason, people automatically conclude that Leonard is unlike most and view him as deliberately aloof and condescending, perhaps even too arrogant to speak. In reality, he is merely detached and without proclivity to engage others. Detachment from human relationships is a central theme of all schizoid personalities. For Leonard, it extends even to his association with his family. When he changes his residence, for example, Leonard has been known to DELAY NOTIFYING HIS FAMILY FOR MONTHS. Once he does, however, they continue to stay in touch with him, despite his lack of reciprocity. He just doesn’t find such relationships rewarding, and he may even find them aversive, overstimulating, and confusing.

For that same reason, he avoids making friends. Leonard finds that he neither wants nor needs social affiliation. Friends contribute seemingly nothing to his quality of life. When others try to strike up a conversation with him in the library, he may reply only briefly, perhaps BORDERING RUDENESS, thus bringing the interaction to a conclusion or otherwise exposing his indifference. In fact, he appears to be much more comfortable in the world of inanimate objects.

Because he receives so little reinforcement from the social world, he has little
incentive to change his behavior in any way. Accordingly, he does not truly grasp why
his job performance is perceived as unusual and why others are dissatisfied with it, and he finds no reason to change based on the assessment of his supervisor. He is INDIFFERENT TO BOTH PRAISE & CRITICISM. If terminated, he is not likely to feel
angry or disturbed. Instead, he will simply go through the motions of getting another
job that supports his existence in a BASIC WAY.

Why is Leonard so detached?

To those unfamiliar with the schizoid personality, he might be characterized as an extreme introvert. To the trained professional, however,
Leonard’s clinical interview exposes distinct signs of the personality disorder. The
similarity between introverts and schizoids extends only to their asocial nature, as introverts are able to experience and express emotion. On the other hand, schizoids are most recognized for FLATTENED AFFECTIVITY. Leonard has no fear, annoyance, anxiety, or curiosity—just an UNWAVERING ABSENCE OF FEELING.

HIS life typically lacks fascination, immersion, intimacy, and perhaps even joy. It is also without transcendental or peak experiences because they require the ability to fuse with something more ultimate than self. To most, humans are commonly regarded
as innately expressive, emotional, and social creatures. As such, persons like Leonard,who lack these typically human characteristics, may be perceived as robotic and somewhat mechanical.

Is Obama surrounded with "Self-hating Jews"

2009-07-28T09:16:00.000-07:00

IN his TV appearances and global tours, President Obama has spoken to Africans-like me, Arabs, Muslims, Iranians, Western Europeans, Eastern Europeans and Russians. His words have stirred emotions and been well received everywhere. But he hasn’t bothered to speak directly to Israelis.

The effect? Months into his presidency, Israelis find themselves increasingly suspicious of Mr. Obama. All they see is American pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to freeze settlements, a request that’s been interpreted here as political arm-twisting meant to please the Arab street at Israel’s expense — or simply to express the president’s dislike for Mr. Netanyahu.

This would seem counterproductive, given the importance president Obama has placed on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If Israel is part of the problem, it’s also part of the solution. Yet so far, neither the president nor any senior official of his administration has given a speech or an interview aimed at an Israeli audience, beyond brief statements made at diplomatic photo ops.

The Arabs got the Cairo speech; Israelis in Israel got silence.

The policy of ignoring Israel might carry a price. Though President Obama has succeeded in prodding PM. Netanyahu to accept the idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, he has failed to induce Israel to impose a freeze on settlements. In fact, he has failed even to stir debate about the merits of one: no Israeli political figure has stood up, to my recollection, to PM. Netanyahu and begged him to support Prtesident Obama; not even the Israeli left, desperate for a new agenda, has adopted President Obama as its ICON.

As a result, PM. Netanyahu enjoys a virtual domestic consensus over his rejection of the settlement freeze. Moreover, he has succeeded in portraying President Obama as a shaky ally. In PM. Netanyahu’s narrative, the president has fallen under the influence of top aides — in this case RAHM EMANUEL and DAVID AXELROD — whom the PM has called “SELF-HATING JEWS.” Meanwhile, PM. Netanyahu is the defender of national glory in face of unfair pressure, someone who sticks to the first commandment of Israeli culture: thou shalt never be the freier (that is, the dupe).

So far, Israelis have embraced PM. Netanyahu’s message.

What went wrong? Several explanations come to mind.
First, in the 16 rosy years of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Israelis became spoiled by unfettered presidential attention. Memories of State Department “Arabists” leading American policy in the Middle East were erased. The White House coordinated its policy with Jerusalem, and stayed out of the way when Israel embarked on controversial military offensives in Lebanon and Gaza. This approach infuriated America’s Arab and European allies, which blamed Washington for one-sidedness — something they were willing to forgive of Bill Clinton but not of George W. Bush.

President Obama came to office determined to repair America’s broken alliances in Europe and the Middle East. One way to do this — to prove that he was the opposite of his predecessor — was to place some distance between Israel and himself.

Second, Mr. Obama’s quest for diplomacy has appeared to Israelis as dangerous American naïveté. The president offered a hand to the Iranians, and got nothing, merely giving them more time to advance their nuclear program. In Israeli eyes, he was humiliated by North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests. And he failed to move Arab governments to take steps to normalize relations with Israel. Conclusion: Mr. Obama is a softie, eager to please his listeners and avoid confrontation with anyone who is not PM. Netanyahu.

Third, Mr. Obama seems to have confused American Jews with Israelis. Israelis in Israel are close emotionally and politically to those in the diaspora, but they are different. They (in Israeli) mostly speak Hebrew and not English, they live in the Middle East and have separate historical narratives. President Obama’s stop at Buchenwald and his strong rejection of Holocaust denial, immediately after his Cairo speech, appealed to American Jews but fell flat in Israel.

In Israel jews are taught that Zionist determination and struggle — not guilt over the Holocaust — brought Jews a homeland. President Obama’s speech, which linked Israel’s existence to the Jewish tragedy, infuriated many Israelis who sensed its closeness to the narrative of enemies like Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

Fourth, as far as most Israelis are concerned, President Obama has made a mistake in focusing on a settlement freeze. For starters, mainstream Israelis rarely have anything to do with the settlements; many have no idea where they are, even when they’re a half-hour’s drive from Tel Aviv.

More important: in the past decade, repeated peace negotiations and diplomatic statements have indicated that larger, closer-to-home settlements (the “settlement blocs”) will remain in Israeli hands under any two-state solution. Why, then, insist on a total freeze everywhere? And why deny with such force — as the administration did — the existence of previous understandings between the United States and Israel over limited settlement construction? There is simply too much evidence proving that such an understanding existed. To Israelis, the claim undermined Mr. Obama’s credibility — and strengthened Mr. Netanyahu’s position.

Perhaps there are good reasons behind Mr. Obama’s Middle East policy. Perhaps the settlement freeze is in Israel’s best interest. Perhaps the president is truly committed to Israel’s long-term security and well-being. Perhaps his popularity in the Arab street is the missing ingredient of peacemaking.

But until the president talks to Israelis in Israel, they won’t know.

The Narcissistic Personality

2009-07-28T05:43:00.000-07:00

Although it has appeared across the globe and throughout history among the royal and
the wealthy, the narcissistic personality seems to have gained prominence only in the
late twentieth century. Narcissism may manifest differently in different cultures BUT importantly, narcissism may be associated with higher levels of Abraham Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs.

Most individuals in disadvantaged nations must navigate the slings and arrows of disease and famine; they are too preoccupied with basic safety and survival needs and cannot afford the luxury of a passive existence where the riches of the world are, in their eyes, owed to them. However, as basic survival needs become satisfied, the quest for self-actualization moves into the foreground, at times along with pathologies related to more extreme forms of that quest, including the NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER. Indeed, the risk is likely to be much lower in a collectivist society. Many Western societies, such as the United States, UK stress individualism
and self-gratification at the expense of community (for imperative reasons).

Moreover, this disorder seems more prevalent in professions that are unusually respected, including law-my proffession law, medicine, and science, or those that boast celebrity status, such as entertainment, sports, and politics. Narcissists are more likely to be male than female, perhaps because males are widely considered more exploiting and entitled.

ANATOMY OF THE NARCISSITIC PERSONALITY
We have all met people who constantly present themselves as superior, often with an inviolable arrogance. They seem to reflect on themselves in an exaggerated manner, getting lost in their self-generated fantasies of godlike power, infinite riches, mastermind intelligence, or unparalleled celebrity. They not only perceive themselves themselves as better than others but also hold others in contempt for being inferior, if not just for being average. They are self-proclaimed shining stars, and we are expected to WATCH AND ADMIRE.

For them, the rest of us are simply worker bees, worthy only of taking and carrying out their every direction but not worthy of ever having an original thought, much less a life independent of their plans and desires. To balance out our indebtedness to them for the honor of their association, we must anticipate their every need and excuse them from any mundane duty, while working tirelessly toward the realization of their glory. Other people in their lives frequently come to feel as though they are possessions of such individuals, existing to be used and exploited without SHAME.

Their egocentricity makes them indifferent to the rights and welfare of others and, sometimes, indifferent to the laws of society as well. To justify their actions, they rationalize ad nauseam, presenting convenient reasons that excuse their inconsiderateness and superior attitude, thus placing themselves in the best possible light. When pressed or confronted, they are likely to become even more haughty, dismissive, and, in some instances, enraged.

Such individuals demonstrate the NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY PATTERN. For the people who must interact with them, they are among the most difficult of the personality
disorders.
Consider the case of our self-proclaimed genius, lets call him 'Gerald'. HE identifies himself with EINSTEIN, VAN GOGH and SALK, individuals who “had suffered nobly for being ahead of their time, just like me.” Undoubtedly, Gerald’s grandiosity is what fuels many of his behaviors. HE shows such self-importance as to persevere in spite of what he sees as others’ ignorance. His grandiosity feeds a fantasy life where unbridled brilliance and success are realized. He mentions, for example, that he sees himself as president of a new company that will put his ideas into action and he can only imagine that success is just a matter of time. More than likely, HE needs these fantasies,which support and protect a superior image of the self against intrusions from an above-average but much less stellar reality.

Undoubtedly, his need for superiority has evolved in connection with the worship he receives from his mother/father, who insists that he will do something important, implying that he will become famous by somehow contributing to human history.Though HE is obviously intelligent, his perception is still distorted to magnify his apti-
tude. His estimation of his own abilities and his expectations that others should bow to his every whim speak to a considerable discrepancy between reality and his own aggrandized self-image. He believes that he is special, and he is pleased that he is being treated by a psychiatrist, for only someone with a medical degree would have a chance of understanding his situation.

Moreover, he feels so special that he is entitled to invent new ways of doing things that disrupt organizational patterns, without worrying about their effects on the lives of others. Instead of offering sympathy, HE expects that his subordinates should simply recognize and automatically effect the wisdom of his intellectual mandate.

If there are costs of extra time and effort to their own lives, these are inconsequential and not worth worrying about, at least from HIS perspective. Given such a sense of entitlement, HE can only exploit those around him and shamelessly does so repeatedly. HE has also created the perfect way of dealing with the displeasure of those he makes miserable: He sees them simply as jealous. Again, it is not HE who has the problem. As HE sees it, everyone recognizes HIS outstanding abilities and realizes that HE is on his predetermined road to success and riches. Therefore, they inevitably recognize their own unworthiness and, out of spite, put obstacles in HIS way. Compared to HIM, they are just aspirants who can only want for something better but never achieve what they desire, as HE is destined to do.

The Obsessive-Compulsive Personality

2009-07-26T05:39:00.000-07:00

Are there people in your life who seem just a little too efficient, well-ordered, and organized? You may have noticed these virtuous workers dutifully putting in long hours, attempting to ensure that their performance measures up to their self-imposed standard of flawlessness. They try to do everything they do perfectly to avoid the slightest mistake or flaw that would induce mountains of guilt and cause them to regard their performance as marred, if not ruined.

Don’t be surprised if you recognize aspects of yourself in the descriptions, above and below, of the compulsive personality. This pattern, in particular, is prevalent in societies, where traits such as efficiency, punctuality, a willingness to work hard, and orientation to detail are valued as necessary prerequisites to social and financial well-being. Self-discipline and organization are personality features encouraged by many modern societies. It is almost a prerequisite, for example, to possess at least a few compulsive traits when seeking an advanced graduate degree. How else could you be diligent and motivated enough to do all the reading and write all the papers necessary to get through school? Many professors have strong compulsive traits, as well.

Rigidly devoted to productivity, they rarely take time out for themselves or their families. Instead, they are known for arriving early and staying late and
persevering until the job is not only done, but done to perfection. They set high, often unrealistic standards for themselves and expect the same from others, especially those who work under them. Anyone who takes too much free time is branded a “slacker” and gets no respect. In contrast, they are routinely appeasing to those in authority, seeking opportunities to prove themselves as selflessly committed to the “greater cause.”

In their private lives, they are often rigidly dogmatic in matters of morality, ethics, and values. Everything is by the book; nothing is on the sly. What they believe they hold as absolute truth, so much so that others see them as exceptionally stubborn. Such individuals exemplify the OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE PERSONALITY PATTERN; for convenience, they are referred to simply as compulsives in this BLOG. They seek to assuage their anxiety about any number of factors by plunging themselves ever deeper into detail.

We might speculate, for example, that SHE probably has her bra and pants color-coded and systematized, which can be sorted in advance so that everything matches, thus saving time in the morning. SHE can detail everything to which her stomach is sensitive. When SHE goes in for a checkup, the doctor need not be concerned that the patient will omit some small piece of crucial information. The Doctor may, however, run into the opposite problem, which may be the greater of two evils. HER responses are comprehensive to a fault. If allowed, SHE will undoubtedly indulgein a lengthy treatise about HER dietary habits, outlining specific foods and quantities, and
sharing any relevant research SHE has already done on the subject, leaving the doctor in the awkward position of having to either agree or risk losing any rapport with his patient.

SHE thrives in the details, but SHE tends to overwhelm others with it because SHE expects them to value it just as much as SHE does. In fact, SHE becomes condescending when they don’t.
In HER work life, HER devotion to detail supports HER perfectionism. SHE prides herself on her ability to get work done and get it done perfectly. We can imagine that her desk is cleaned off at the end of each day, with every pencil sharpened so that tomorrow starts smoothly. Indeed, SHE is probably proud that SHE has parlayed this character trait into occupational success. In HER view,the rapid promotion to a middle-management position validates the superiority of HER approach to life and justifies HER contempt for the “average worker,” whom SHE no doubt considers “sloppy” or “neglectful.”

SHE will always be tapped whenever there’s paperwork to do and details to control, but SHE isn’t likely to be the person that the board of directors looks to develop some imaginative new product or to construct broad corporate strategy.

SHE constantly appears to be restrained and defended, as if SHE were anticipating
some impending catastrophe. For example, SHE fears that SHE will make a mistake and
that HER superiors will secretly take note of it, recording it somewhere in the dreaded database created specifically for HER failings. SHE can already imagine them
saying in a stern voice, “JUNE, that’s your second mistake this year. We’re watching
you.” SHE carries this condemning voice around inside HER, and it ensures that SHE
labors perpetually under the same kind of threat that SHE inflicts on those under HER.

If you lived down the block from HER and her family, you would probably know her as a morally sound, upstanding citizen of your community. As you got to know her better however, you would begin to see more and more of her rigidity in matters of values, ethics, and morality. HER and the family always make it to church and always make it there in a timely manner, with the kids neatly dressed. For HER, God is just the top-level manager in the hierarchy, the ultimate superior whom SHE must please, but SHE does not feel this at a conscious level. SHE does have rebellious tendencies, but SHE cannot afford to be aware of them. Instead, SHE buries them so deep that not even HER can see them; then SHE does just the opposite so that SHE can be absolutely
comfortable with herself.

SHE is dogmatic in her beliefs, a quality SHE and others sometimes mistake for passion. SHE overconforms to armor herself against impropriety. HER religion and morality are entirely by the book, but SHE is not known to be a forgiving person despite HER religion’s teachings to the contrary. Instead, SHE tends to be self-
righteous, and SHE is not above using the rules to bring a little sorrow to someone who doesn’t know how to follow orders or doesn’t have the kind of serious attitude that SHE respects; this includes the people who work for HER.

HER dogmatism, in fact, extends beyond matters of morality and religion to just
about everything in HER life, and this is expressed in his considerable stubbornness. In fact, SHE can’t afford to change HER mind about anything because
that would imply that SHE was wrong, and SHE must be on HER guard against mistakes. To HER, people who change their minds are wishy-washy. They lack the courage of their
convictions. So, SHE stands pat and argues HER points, stringently committed to HER
point of view, regardless of genuine convictions.

Auto-Erotism:{Spontaneous Manifestation of the Sexual Impulse}

2009-07-25T04:16:00.000-07:00

"Without a certain overheating of the sexual system," said NIETZSCHE, "we could not have a Raphael."

I do not know that any apology is needful for the use of this term "auto-erotism"but i strongly recommend you read on for what you can learn. As marriage-rate declines, and as illicit sexual relationships continue to be openly discouraged, it is inevitable that auto-erotic phenomena of one kind or another, not only among women but also among men, should increase among us both in amount and intensity. It is necessary to investigate this subject.

Among animals in isolation, and sometimes in freedom, it is well known that various forms of spontaneous solitary sexual excitement occur. Horses when leading a lazy life may be observed flapping the penis until some degree of emission takes place. Bulls and goats produce emissions by using their forelegs as a stimulus, bringing up their hind quarters. Goats sometimes take the penis into the mouth and produce actual orgasm, thus practicing auto-fellatio. Among ferrets, if the bitch, when in heat, cannot obtain a dog she pines and becomes ill. If a smooth pebble is introduced into the hutch, she will masturbate upon it, thus preserving her normal health for one season. But if this artificial substitute is given to her a second season, she will not, as formerly, be content with it. Sheep masturbate; as also do camels, pressing themselves down against convenient objects; and ELEPHANTS compress the penis between the hind legs to obtain emissions.

HYENAS have been seen practicing mutual masturbation by licking each other's genitals. Mammary masturbation is found in certain female and even male animals, like the dog and the cat. Apes are much given to masturbation, even in freedom, according to the evidence of GOOD OBSERVERS; for while no female apes are celibates, many of the males are obliged to lead a life of celibacy. Male monkeys use the hand in masturbation, to rub and shake the penis.

Masturbation is found among the people of every race. Among Hottentots, among the young women at all events, masturbation is so common that it is regarded as a custom of the country; no secret is made of it, and in the stories and legends of the race it is treated as one of the most ordinary facts of life. It is so also among the Basutos. When the Spaniards first arrived at Vizcaya, in the Philippines, they found that masturbation was universal, and that it was customary for the women to use an artificial penis and other abnormal methods of sexual gratification.

The banana (in ancient times) seems to have beeen widely used for masturbation by women owing, I think, to its size and shape. The mythology of Hawaii tells of goddesses who were impregnated by bananas they had placed beneath their garments. And in a poem in the Arabian Nights, we read:

"O bananas, of soft and smooth skins, which dilate the eyes of young girls ... you, alone among fruits are endowed with a pitying heart, O consolers of widows and divorced women."

Brooding on sexual images, which the theologians termed delectatio morosa, may lead to spontaneous orgasm in either sex, even in perfectly normal persons. "Psychic coitus," is a condition in which the simple act of imagination alone, in the presence of the desired object, suffices to produce orgasm. In some public conveyance, theatre, or elsewhere, the man sees a desirable woman and by concentrating his attention on her person and imagining all the stages of intimacy he quickly succeeds in producing orgasm.

Concerning erotic dreams,the diagnostic value of sexual dreams, as an indication of the sexual nature of the subject when awake, cannot be overemphasized. Sexual dreams tend to reproduce, and even to accentuate, those characteristics which make the strongest sexual appeal to the subject when awake. At the same time, this general statement has to be qualified, more especially as regards inverted dreams. A young man, however normal, who is not familiar with the feminine body when awake, is not likely to see it when asleep.

We owe to Restif de la Bretonne what is perhaps the earliest precise description of a woman masturbating. In 1755 he knew a dark young woman, plain but well-made, and of warm temperament, educated in a convent. She was observed one day, when gazing from her window at a young man in whom she was tenderly interested, to become much excited. "Her movements became agitated; I approached her, and really believe that she was uttering affectionate expressions; she had become red. Then she sighed deeply, and became motionless, stretching out her legs, which she stiffened, as if she felt pain." It is further hinted that her hands took part in this manœuvre.

Pictorial representations of a woman masturbating also occur in eighteenth century engravings. Thus, in France, Baudouin's "Le Midi" represents an elegant young lady in a rococo garden-bower; she has been reading a book she has now just dropped, together with her sunshade; she leans languorously back, and her hand begins to find its way through her placket-hole.

SOME PEOPLE say that It is especially an undesirable tendency of masturbation, that it deadens the need for affection, and merely eludes, instead of satisfying, the sexual impulse. "Masturbation," they say, "though a manifestation of sexual activity, is not a sexual act in the higher, or even in the real fundamental sense. For sex implies duality, a characteristic to which masturbation can plainly lay no claim. The physical, moral, and mental reciprocity which gives stability and beauty to a normal sexual intimacy, are as foreign to the masturbator as to the celibate. In a sense, therefore, masturbation, they say, is as complete a negative of the sexual life as chastity itself. It is, therefore, an evasion of, not an answer to, the sexual problem; and it will ever remain so, no matter how surely we may be convinced of its physical harmlessness."
BE THE JUDGE!

The Avoidant Personality

2009-07-24T07:41:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you have noticed someone at a party who shows up early and stays late but spends most of the time anchored to a corner of the room, hoping someone else will approach him or her to make conversation. If you are that person who approaches, you will likely notice the person’s immediate discomfort upon your initiating even the most pleasant, innocuous, non-threatening conversation. You might wonder what keeps people this socially “wrapped up” and defended and how such individuals perceive themselves and the world they share with you.

You might correctly perceive that they are filled with chasms of self-doubt, they intensely fear any sort of humiliation, and they would not dare knowingly (or even unwittingly) expose themselves to other people or a competitive and cut-throat world for which they feel they are no match. You may have seen individuals in your associatoions who seem to earnestly desire participation in discussions, but they say little to nothing and seem awkwardly self-conscious on those very rare occasions when they speak a few words.

These individuals demonstrate the AVOIDANT PERSONALITY PATTERN. They may have just
one or two trusted friends, perhaps a spouse or partner, or even a sole family member.Few others, if any, would be able to pass their strict tests of uncritical support and acceptance to gain access to their more PRIVATE CIRCLE OF EXISTENCE. Does this mean that such a person is content with this very secretive, isolated way of life? Quite the contrary.

Their pain wrought from loneliness and seclusion hurts them to the core of their existence, but rather than allow themselves to be vulnerable to the “inevitable” social humiliation that would follow from their perceived incompetence and awkwardness being put on naked display, they take their silent, lonely pain and make themselves nearly invisible—out of the trajectory of others’ “harsh but deserved” criticisms.

Because of their way of exaggerating potential for embarrassment, they do more to themselves than forego social enhancement. They resist any life change that may bring them more openly into the public eye, including occupational promotions and other life rewards. While they may deeply wish for love, genuine intimacy, and greater life enjoyment or satisfaction, their souls are seen as so disgraced that they must withdraw into a private world of shame, where they can at least be alone with their inadequacies (perceiveed or not).

Avoidants are in a constant state of threat and alarm when they must interact with others. They are hypersensitive to negative evaluation, doubt that they have anything to offer others, and thus find it terrifying to interact with anyone they do not already know.
Hypersensitive to a marked degree, she (hypothetical) panics on having to interact, as she quickly feels that the critical eyes of everyone are on her. Her self-consciousness convinces her that others are taking great pains to notice her;this possibility is recycled unremittingly in her mind, her anxiety snowballs, and she feels forced to flee. Whereas some personalities, such as the narcissist or histrionic, may find the spotlight irresistible, avoidants dread it and must take flight for the relative safety of obscurity.

Life is left with very little joy, but at least it holds no pain.Similar themes permeate many, if not all, aspects of the avoidant person’s life.Fears of evaluation will likely cause avoidants to restrict their occupational activities. Their job suffers under imagined nightmares that their performance will somehow be defective or inadequate. Depending on the severity, they may simply quit or may remain stuck in positions with no challenge, where adequacy is easy.

There is only one way that she may ever involve herself with others: She must be ab-
solutely certain that she will be liked. This is, however, extremely difficult to accomplish. She has an abiding faith in her own defectiveness, in her ability to
bring shame on herself simply by existing. Whereas most of us are insecure about some
thing, her insecurities constitute her perceived reality. Accordingly, the notion that someone might like her and might accept her for who and what she is, is virtually unthinkable.
To develop a friendship, she needs repeated overtures of nurturance and assurance. Moreover, she needs consistency. Let some small criticism slip just once, and like a frightened turtle, she recoils in terror, withdrawing to the sanctity of her shell,shutting out the world. Because the shell is so thick, few people ever gain the trust of an avoidant person.

Even when SHE does overcome her hypersensitivity long enough to let someone in,her belief in her own imagined inadequacies has another unfortunate consequence:she is afraid to be herself. To grow, relationships must balance between SELF-CONSCIOUS COMMITMENT & SPONTANEITY. But SHE can’t afford to be herself because SHE is hyper-aware of the faults and imperfections all humans carry and the price of authenticity is too high. Were SHE in a relationship, SHE would find it extremely difficult to reveal her true self, to share a secret, or even to tell her partner about her real likes and dislikes. Any of these could poison the thin illusion of genuine companionship that her insecurities afford and leave her with nothing.

So SHE sacrifices the potential of a romance for a steady trickle of togetherness, which is at least more certain. There are no flings of infatuation, weekends away, or
sweep-you-off-your-feet dreams-come-true for HER. No one would ever like her that
much, or so she believes; if someone did like her, it would only be because she had the wisdom never to show her true self.

Avoidant personalities fear criticism and rejection, but they also live in fear of simply disappointing others. That is, rejection doesn’t need to be actually voiced to summon up the fears of people like HER. Just the idea that someone might privately judge them as having failed or fallen short is enough to make avoidants want to disengage. Worse is the possibility that someone might take a stern attitude toward them, presuming to judge them from a position of authority, where the verdicts are more powerful and absolute in their condemnation.
It is of little wonder, then, that avoidants are inhibited in interpersonal situations.

The philosopher Hegel said, “To be is to be perceived.” For HER and others like her, however, the existential truth is just the reverse. The only way to be is not to be perceived, at least if you want to be safe and salvage a marginal quality of life. Accordingly, whereas some personalities, such as the narcissist and histrionic,surge forward in social situations, seizing the limelight and demanding admiration, avoidants inhibit themselves and withdraw to a niche where they can at least be alone and, therefore, feel some comfortable. AVOIDANTS SHOULD ALWAYS BE AWARE OF OTHERS, BUT OTHERS SHOULD NEVER BE AWARE OF THE AVOIDANT.

As with many personality disorders, positive change and improvement of life circumstances is very difficult for the avoidant person. Personal growth requires a measure of risk. To expand our horizons, we must push the boundaries. Or, as the old adage goes, experience is the best teacher. Avoidant personalities, however, refuse to take risks that might leave them open to public view. They can be highly creative in the privacy of their apartment or become SUPERHEROES in their own fantasy life, but in the real world, it’s best not to attempt anything that might bring attention to themselves.

Vision in beauty and art: The Psychology of Sex IV

2009-07-20T23:35:00.000-07:00

The idea of beauty is not an unmixed idea; it is intimately united with the idea of carnal pleasure. Stendhal defined beauty as 'a promise of happiness.' Indeed. Beauty is a Woman. In Arabian poetry you meet such descriptions of the Woman:

"Her lips are colored agate and coral; her tongue secretes eloquence; her saliva is more desirable than the juice of grapes. But her bosom, blessed be the Creator, is a living seduction. It bears twin breasts of the purest ivory, rounded, and that may be held within the five fingers of one hand. Her belly has dimples full of shade and gives origin to her finely modeled and elastic waist. At the thought of her flanks I shudder, for thence depends a mass so weighty that it obliges its owner to sit down when she has risen and to rise when she lies. Such are her flanks, and from them descend, like white marble, her glorious thighs, solid and straight, united above beneath their crown. Then come the legs and the slender feet, so small that I am astounded they can bear so great a weight."

Beauty is so sexual that the only uncontested works of art are those that simply show the human body in its nudity. By its perseverance in remaining purely sexual GREEK STATUARY has placed itself forever above all discussion. It is beautiful because it is a beautiful human body, such a one as every man or every woman would desire to unite with in the perpetuation of the race.
That which inclines to love seems beautiful; that which seems beautiful inclines to love. This intimate union of art and of love is, indeed, the only explanation of art. Without this genital echo ART would never have been born and never have been perpetuated.

If anyone were desirous to produce a being with a great susceptibility to beauty, he could not invent an instrument better designed for that object than sex. Individuals that need not unite for the birth and rearing of each generation might retain a savage independence. For them it would not be necessary that any vision should fascinate, or that any languor should soften, the prying cruelty of the eye.

Sex endows the individual with a dumb and powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually toward another; makes it one of the dearest enjoyments of his life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solitude an eternal melancholy. What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty. We find that Woman is the most lovely object to Man, and Man, if female modesty would confess it, the most interesting object to Woman.

Aesthetic values are changed under the influence of sexual emotion. Thus from the lover's point of view many things are beautiful which are unbeautiful from the point of view of him who is not a lover, and the greater the degree to which the lover is swayed by his passion the greater the extent to which his normal aesthetic standard is liable to be modified.

Beauty as incarnated in the feminine body has to some extent become the symbol of love even for women. Under the influence of sexual excitement a woman regards her body as made for man's gratification, and it is this complex emotion which forms the initial stage, at least, of her own pleasure. Her body is the symbol for her partner, and indirectly for her, through his admiration of it, of their mutual joy and satisfaction.

The poet and story-teller who seeks to describe an ideally lovely and desirable woman always insists mainly, and often exclusively, on those characters which appeal to the eye. The maiden whose loveliness inspires the most impassioned expressions in Arabic poetry is celebrated for the following fours:
"Four things in a woman should be black—the hair of the head, the eyebrows, the eyelashes, and the dark part of the eyes; four white—the complexion of the skin, the white of the eyes, the teeth, and the legs; four red—the tongue, the lips, the middle of the cheeks, and the gums; four round—the head, the neck, the forearms, and the ankles; four long—the back, the fingers, the arms, and the legs; four wide—the forehead, the eyes, the bosom, and the hips; four fine—the eyebrows, the nose, the lips, and the fingers; four thick—the lower part of the back, the thighs, the calves of the legs, and the knees; four small—the ears, the breasts, the hands, and the feet."
Let me finish this way; beauty, to a large extent, is an objective matter. The things that to man are most beautiful are those that are intimately associated with, or dependent upon, the sexual process and the sexual instinct. The beautiful woman, Geoffrey Chaucer said, is one "With buttokes brode and brestës rounde and hye";that is to say, the woman obviously best fitted to bear children and to suckle them.

The Antisocial Personality

2009-07-20T08:10:00.000-07:00

In the antisocial personality, badness and madness seem to shade together. Sometimes,
antisocials’ crimes are so incomprehensible and morally repugnant that the act alone
makes us doubt their SANITY. For example, the normal person has no way of identifying
with one Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed, had sex with, and ate the bodies of many of his victims,or with one Herman Mudgett, whose evil adventures ended when he was hung just before the end of the nineteenth century.

Mudgett, a graduate of the University of Michigan’s Medical College and a practicing pharmacist in Chicago, excelled at insurance fraud and the seduction of young women, at least 27 of whom were killed after signing papers that made Mudgett the recipient of their insurance and savings. Drugged with chloroform after a night of prenuptial sex, each would awaken trapped in the elevator shaft of an elaborate three-story office building, specially designed by Mudgett to conceal his nefarious activities. This building, outfitted with trap doors, soundproof rooms, peepholes, enormous furnaces, and vats of acid to dissolve human remains was dubbed his “Castle.” Savoring the terror of the trapped girls, he would pump in poison gas and then haul their lifeless bodies onto the dissecting table for the removal of parts that held for him a special fascination.

Fortunately these extreme examples. In fact, not all antisocials are criminals and not all criminals are antisocials. In fact,only a minor subset of the antisocial pattern comes into conflict with the law. Indeed, individuals with normal-range antisocial traits are often rewarded by our competitive society, where the ability to act tough and bend the rules is admired as necessary for success and survival in a DOG-EAT-DOG world. Between the extremes of normal adjustment and the most brutal abuse of human life lie many SHADES OF GRAY. Some antisocials jealously guard their autonomy, striking preemptively at anyone who might restrict or condemn their behavior.
An antisocial has the reputation of being “difficult to get along with.” She works hard at creating a formidable and aggressive image thus identifying her to the world as someone to be taken seriously—someone you’d better keep your distance from. Her posture, clothes, attitude, and remarks cultivate that image. She wants to impress the listener with her callousness and self-sufficiency. Not surprisingly, they have a police record(at times). Ask her why, and she’ll tell you, “I DON'T TAKE ANYBODY'S SHIT,” without ever breaking eye contact.

HER history includes a conspicuous absence of prosocial role models. She lacks a Conscience. She sneers at religious faith and instead puts forward her own moral principle: “Do unto others before they do unto you.” With no obvious prosocial impulses and no internal moral restraints on action, SHE is free to do whatever she wants, whenever she wants. The only barrier to her actions is society itself, and
the only constraints she respects are those that society can enforce through its police presence and the threat of punishment or those that others can enforce through their own threats of harm or revenge. SHE is chronically deceitful. SHE is unable to maintain steady employment, preferring to obtain money by racking up huge debts in other people’s names with no intention of honoring the obligations.

Although she would qualify for a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder, the
terms psychopath and sociopath also compete for CLINICAL CURRENCY in describing in-
dividuals who flagrantly and pervasively violate the rights of others. PSYCHOPATHS re believed to possess some constitutional disposition to the syndrome. SOCIOPATHS are biologically normal but develop antisocial characteristics through incompetent or hostile socialization, mainly defective parenting.

Whereas the noxious behaviors of the antisocial are often obvious, Psychopaths often cloak themselves in the trappings of normality, but nevertheless damage or destroy lives without remorse, shame, or conscience. Most are pathological liars adept at sizing up situations and feigning sincerity, thus allowing them to literally flourish undetected behind a “mask of sanity.” Such individuals possess a deep-seated inability to understand the emotional dimension of language, particularly those aspects connected with feelings of attachment and empathy.

The total portrait suggests an individual beset with multiple short marriages, juvenile delinquency, a versatile criminal past, a parasitic lifestyle, sexual promiscuity, narcissism as evidenced by traits such as egocentricity, grandiosity, intolerance of boredom, lack of empathy, manipulativeness, inability to feel remorse, complete lack of internal behavioral controls.

Many readers of this blog will be surprised that some of their best and most admired qualities express characteristics associated with the antisocial personality, though certainly in A MUTED FORM.

The Dependent Personality

2009-07-19T05:38:00.000-07:00

Dependent personalities are caring to a fault, allowing others’well-being to come first no matter what the cost may be to themselves or their identity. Ever helping and giving, they are committed to their personal relationships, especially to their spouses and the institution of marriage. Essentially, they live their lives through others and for others, to whom they offer warmth, tenderness, and consideration.

We will use a fictitious "she" and "Pete" for illustration. Read on. You will hopefully have a wealth of understanding of the human personality.

When people they care for are happy, they (dependent personalities) are happy. Not surprisingly, they tend to assume the more passive role in their relationships, deferring to the opinions and desires of those they love, whose pleasure and fulfillment they then enjoy vicariously. They prefer harmony in their relationships and tend to be apologetic even when others should take the greater part of responsibility for a disagreement.

Many characteristics associated with the dependent personality are prized and ad-
mired in our culture. These include the quality of being happy when loved ones are
happy and making personal sacrifices for the good of others, including volunteering to perform many selfless acts.

On the surface, they are warm and affectionate, but underneath, they see themselves as HELPLESS and FEAR DOING ANYTHING ON THEIR OWN. They need to be taken care of and seek competent instrumental surrogates who reward submission by facing down the problems of the world in their place. Many are incapable of MAKING EVEN ROUTINE DECISIONS WITHOUT FIRST SEEKING ADVICE. By putting their lives in the control
of others, they suffocate their partners with their clinginess and in turn leave themselves vulnerable to ABANDONMENT. To protect against this possibility, dependents quickly submit to their partners’wishes or become so pleasing no one would possibly want to leave them.

Often, they arrange their lives so that they can avoid acquiring competencies that
might allow them to stand on their own. When a relationship does finally dissolve, their self-esteem is devastated. Deprived of support or attachment, they withdraw into themselves and become increasingly tense and despondent. They find it almost impossible to take the initiative on their own behalf or to provide direction to their lives or careers. Instead, they bond themselves to those they perceive as confident or in control and constantly solicit advice and reassurance before committing to almost anything.

In effect, they piggyback themselves on the talents, abilities, and fortitude
of others, often even in trivial matters, such as what to have for lunch or what clothes to buy. Her life has always taken whatever direction others might give it, so that her life is their creation, not her own. Although she is all grown up, psychologically, she remains a child in many ways. In her private moments, her immaturity scares her. Independence is anathema to her. Instead, in her mind, she must always be pleasing and never disagree with those on whom she depends. Conflict is not only inconsistent with her self-image but also risks her continued protection, either explicitly by evoking others’ anger or implicitly by establishing a separate identity to be respected, a dangerous precedent for any dependent.
It seems a better strategy for the dependent to play it safe and submit to the opinions and desires of others. As she herself says, she finds it difficult to assert herself in the marriage because “Pete might become angry with me.”

She has plenty of energy; she simply lacks direction. She cannot commit to a decision without first knowing that others approve of it. She lacks confidence to set
her life on a course of her own making and then follow through. On the surface, she
might agree to attend college, but she becomes suspicious when other people push such an agenda too hard. If she were to be successful, others might demand that she do even more. They may even demand that she assume a measure of control over her own life, a trend that frightens her. “What happens after I attend college?” she wonders. “What else will they expect? Why does Pete really want me to attend college? Is he setting me up to leave me?” She believes that the less she initiates on her own, the better chance she has of holding on to people.
In fact, her goal is to maintain things as they have always been, a kind of timeless
childhood in which she is passive and pleasant and is ensured protection and a comfortable attachment to others.

We cannot say exactly what the future holds for her. We do know, however, that Pete feels suffocated, and we can infer that he has begun to see their relationship as something She needs more than she wants. Pete thinks that She should have more of an identity of her own. He may even doubt that she honestly loves him or is MATURE ENOUGH TO KNOW WHAT LOVE MEANS.

IN SUMMATION, this personality is characterized by A pervasive and excessive need to be taken care of that leads to submissive and clinging behavior and fears of separation, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts,
as indicated by five (or more) of the following:(1) has difficulty making everyday decisions without an excessive amount of advice and reassurance from others.(2)Needs others to assume responsibility for most major areas of his or her life.(3) has difficulty expressing disagreement with others because of fear of loss of support or approval. Note: Do not include realistic fears of retribution.(4) has difficulty initiating projects or doing things on his or her own (because of a lack of self confidence in judgment or abilities rather than a lack of motivation or energy).(5) goes to excessive lengths to obtain nurturance and support from others, to the point of volunteering to do things that are unpleasant.(6) feels uncomfortable or helpless when alone because of exaggerated fears of being unable to care for himself or herself.(7) URGENTLY SEEKS ANOTHER RELATIONSHIP as a source of care and support when a close relationship ends.(8) is unrealistically preoccupied with fears of being left to take care of himself or herself.

Modesty in the woman kind

2009-07-18T03:39:00.000-07:00

Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex. It has been observed that birds of prey hide themselves to drink, because, being obliged to plunge their heads in the water, they are at that moment defenceless. To a timid and tender woman there ought to be no greater torture than to allow herself in the presence of a man something which she thinks she ought to blush at. For a woman above the vulgar level there is everything to gain by very reserved manners.

The sexual impulse in women is fettered by an inhibition which has to be conquered. A thin veil of reticence, shyness, and anxiety is constantly cast anew over a woman's love, and her wooer, in every act of courtship, has the enjoyment of conquering afresh an oft-won woman.

While the young virgin is more shy than the young man of the same age, the experienced married woman is usually less so than her husband, and in a woman who is a mother the shy reticences of virginal modesty would be rightly felt to be ridiculous. She has put off a sexual livery that has no longer any important part to play in life, and would, indeed, be inconvenient and harmful, just as a bird loses its sexual plumage when the pairing season is over.

Primitive woman, proud of her womanhood, for a long time defended her nakedness which ancient art has always represented. And in the actual life of the young girl to-day there surely must be a moment when she feels the pride of her sex, the intuition of her moral superiority, and cannot understand why she must hide its cause. At this moment she scarcely knows if nakedness should or should not affright her. A sort of confused atavistic memory recalls to her a period before clothing was known.

Judging from my own inquiry, few women care to look upon male nakedness, and some women, though not wanting in esthetic feeling, find no beauty in man's form. Some are positively repelled by the sight of nakedness, even that of a husband or lover. On the contrary, most men delight in gazing upon the uncovered figure of women. It seems that only highly-cultivated and imaginative women enjoy the spectacle of a finely-shaped nude man (especially after attending art classes, and drawing from the nude).
Stories are told of brides who sob and tremble with fright on the wedding-night, the hysteria being sometimes alarming. Ignorance of the nature of the sexual connection is often the cause of exaggerated alarm.

When a young woman is surprised in a state of nakedness by a person of the opposite, or even of the same, sex, it is her instinct to conceal the primary centers of sexual function and attractiveness, in the first place, the pubes, in the second place the breasts. The exact attitude and the particular gestures of the hands in achieving the desired end vary with the individual, and with the circumstances. The hand may not be used at all as a veil, and, indeed, the instinct of modesty itself may inhibit the use of the hand for the protection of modesty (to turn the back towards the beholder is often the chief impulse of blushing modesty, even when clothed).
The sexual modesty of the woman is rooted in the sexual periodicity of the female, and is an involuntary expression of the organic fact that the TIME FOR LOVE IS NOT NOW. But this expression itself becomes so habitual that it even intrudes at those moments when it has ceased to be in place. We may see this in the female dog, who, when in heat, herself runs after the male, and again turns to flee, perhaps only submitting with much persuasion to his embrace.

The sexual modesty of the female is thus an inevitable by-product of the naturally aggressive attitude of the male in sexual relationships, and the naturally defensive attitude of the female, this again being founded on the fact that, while the sexual function in the female is periodic, and during most of life a function to be guarded from the opposite sex, in the male it rarely or never needs to be SO GUARDED.

The Histrionic Personality

2009-07-17T05:25:00.000-07:00

This is the first of a long series in which we will be looking at The biological, psychodynamic, interpersonal, and cognitive perspectives of humans starting with the HISTRIONIC PERSONALITY. I hope it will be helpful to you in knowing yourself trully well and your friends too.

At some point in your academic career, you may have encountered a classmate or two who invariably claimed the center of attention. Typically dramatic and often seductive, these individuals made every attempt to impress the teacher and classmates with witty remarks and suggestive behaviors.

Perchance you may have noticed that their interaction with other classmates involved a frequent interrupting or reframing of discussions to sustain themselves as the focus. Anything falling short of others’ admiration or reverence toward themselves would inevitably invoke feelings of resentment and depression. Yet, these negative moods would have been fleeting as their relentless striving for approval prompted a more suitable affect. In addition, you would have noted to your-self how easily influenced they were, especially as you witnessed their opinions and behaviors conform on a whim to suit whomever they sought to interact with.

Once in conversation, they communicated with flamboyant headlines at the expense of substantive details. This bold pattern of expression was usually perpetuated by their physical appearance, whether it was their hairstyle, make-up, clothing, or a memorable combination of the sort. In the end, you would have felt these people were the “LIFE OF THE PARTY.”
The pattern displayed by these individuals is that of the HISTRIONIC PERSONALITY. To him/her attention bestows narcotizing effects as it is something they “can’t do without”. Bolstering his/her sense of worth, he/she (I'll use her henceforth) can readily interact with others whose attention she’s captured. Without it, she feels SUBPAR and SCRAMBLES to redirect all interests back to her. Over the years, she has developed ingenious ways of doing so with a sensitivity to the qualities and behaviors that others might find interesting and attractive.

Her strategies are seductive or sexually provocative; her repertoire of behaviors contributes to her success. Her tendency to hyperemotionalize overshadows her rationale as she exhibits an ever-changing stream of consciousness and its respective, uncensored emotional expressions. Her emotional life has the trappings of depth and seems vividly alive but, on deeper inspection, lacks authenticity. Always a little exaggerated and theatrical, her emotional shifts are sometimes so rapid and overplayed that an observer may wonder whether her feelings are genuine or else wonder about the underlying conflicts and insecurities her never-ending kaleidoscope of affect conceals.

On reflection, she seems too concerned with her own universe. She talks freely but, for the most part, she tends to avoid serious matters, causing her words to lack detail and substance. She uses her physical appearance to direct attention toward
herself.
On any day ripe with social opportunity, She probably tries to look flashier, sex-
ier, and more colorful than everyone else, for these are the qualities that she believes will win friends and influence people. Though She is right some of the time, her INTERPERSONAL POSTULATE COMES AT A SUBSTANTIAL COST. She tends to confuse attraction and intimacy, apparently because SHE HAS AS LITTLE INSIGHT INTO OTHERS AS SHE HAS INTO HERSELF.

She openly will state, “Most guys just want me for my body,” yet she also says, “I think I find it easy to get to know others, and that’s why I get so bored with people so fast.”This boredom results from her innate DISINTEREST IN DETAIL & PREFERENCE FOR HEADLINES. As in life, headlines are fleeting and so, too, is the shelf life of her interpersonal relationships. In fact, she becomes bored because she has little substance of her own through which to connect with others. SHE knows many people, but she doesn’t know anyone deeply, and that likely includes not knowing herself. In this sense, her cascade of exaggerated emotions serves as a distraction from the emptiness of her experience.

in summary these are the elements of Histrionic Personality Disorder. A pervasive pattern of excessive emotionality and attention seeking, beginning by early adulthood
and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following: (1) is uncomfortable in situations in which he or she is not the center of attention (2) interaction with others is often characterized by inappropriate sexually seductive or provocative behavior (3) displays rapidly shifting and
shallow expression of emotions(4) consistently uses physical appearance to draw attention to self (5) has a style of speech that is excessively impressionistic and
lacking in detail (6) shows self-dramatization, theatricality, and exaggerated expression of emotion (7) is suggestible, i.e., easily influenced by others or
circumstances (8) considers relationships to be more intimate than they actually are.

Rise of anti-Semitism in Russia and Poland

2009-07-16T08:23:00.000-07:00

Russian Tzardom began persecution of Jews when it received, by way of bequest, the vast Jewish population of disintegrated Poland. The rise of Russian Judaeophobia, the Russian technical term for Jew-hatred, was paralleled by the appearance of German anti-Semitism in which it found a congenial companion.

The social and cultural anti-Semitism of the West did not undermine the modern foundations of Jewish civil equality. But Russian Judaeophobia, more governmental than social, being fully in accord with the entire régime of absolutism, produced a system aiming not only at the disfranchisement, but also at the direct physical annihilation of the Jewish people. Hitler had his fore runners.

The characterization of merchants, artisans, mill-owners, and ferry-holders as "leeches" could only spring from a conception which looked upon the Jews as transient foreigners, who, by pursuing any line of endeavor, could only do so at the expense of the natives and thus abused the hospitality offered to them. This inimical view of the Jewish people was retained by Nicholas when he became the master of Russian-Jewish destinies. He regarded the Jews as an "injurious element," which had no place in a Slavonic Greek-Orthodox monarchy, and which therefore ought to be combated. As a result of these considerations, a singular scheme was gradually maturing in the mind of the Tzar: to detach the JEWS FROM JUDAISM by impressing them into a military service of a wholly exceptional character.

lETS GO TO POLAND. The "Poles of the Mosaic Persuasion," as these Jewish assimilationists styled themselves, had long been begging for admission into Polish society by 1850, though rudely repulsed by it. During the insurrection of 1861-1863, when they were graciously received as useful allies, they were indefatigable in parading their Polish patriotism. The fact that the Jews had a history was their misfortune in Europe, for their history inevitably presupposed an isolated life severed from that of the other nations. After the insurrection, the Polonization of the Jewish population assumed menacing proportions. The upper layer of Polish Jewry consisted exclusively of "Poles of the Mosaic Persuasion" who rejected all
elements of Jewish culture, while the broad masses rejected fanatically even the most
indispensable elements of European civilization.

I will end this post with Judah Leib Gordon (1830-1892), the most important poet of the era he lived(the Jewish new era), who composed biblical epics and moralistic fables and was the champion of enlightenment and a trenchant critic of old-fashioned Jewish life. He composed his "Marseillaise of Enlightenment". In it he sang of the sun shedding its rays over the "Land of Eden," where the neck of the enslaved was freed from the yoke and where the modern Jew was welcomed with a brotherly embrace. The poet calls upon his people to join the ranks of their fellow-countrymen, the
hosts of cultured Russian citizens who speak the language of the land, and offers his Jewish contemporaries the brief formula: "Be a man on the street and a Jew in the house," i.e., be a Russian in public and a Jew in private life.

He defined his function in the work of Jewish regeneration at that time to be that of exposing the inner ills of the people, of fighting rabbinical orthodoxy and the tyranny of ceremonialism.

In "contemporary epics" he vents his wrath against petrified Rabbinism. He portrays the misery of a Jewish woman who is condemned to enter married life at the bidding
of the marriage-broker, without love and without happiness. The tragedy is that this woman remained unhappy the rest of her life because the Hebrew bill of divorce
which she had obtained from her husband was declared void on account of
a trifling error in spelling!!!. He lashes furiously the orthodox spiders, the official leaders of the community, who catch the young pioneers of enlightenment in the meshes of Kabal authority, backed by police force. Climbing higher upon the ladder of history, the poet registers his protest against the predominance of the spiritual over the worldly element in the whole evolution of Judaism. He assails the prophet Jeremiah who in beleaguered Jerusalem preaches submission to the Babylonians and strict obedience to the Law: the prophet, dressed up in the garb of a contemporary orthodox rabbi, was to be exhibited as a terrifying
incarnation of the soulless formula "Law above Life."

The Nobility of That Problem

2009-07-15T07:26:00.000-07:00

"Vice has no friend like the prejudice which claims to be virtue."
Of all the problems which the alert and curious mind of modern man is considering, none occupies him more than that of the relations of the sexes. This is natural. It touches us all and we have made rather a mess of it!

We resent being the sport of circumstance and perhaps we are beginning to understand that this instinct of sex which has been so great a cause of suffering and shame and has been treated as a subject fit only for furtive whispers or silly jokes, is in fact one of the greatest powers in human nature.

Today it is the normal exercise of a normal instinct by normal people that interests us: and it is of this that I try to write and speak.

The curiosities of depravity are for the Physician and the Psychologist to discuss and cure. ORDINARY MEN & WOMEN WANT FIRST TO KNOW HOW TO LIVE ORDINARY HUMAN LIVES ON A HIGHER LEVEL & AFTER A NOBLER PATTERN THAN BEFORE. They want, I think, and I want, to grow up, but to grow rightly, beautifully, humanely.

The sex-problem is the problem of SOMETHING NOBLE, NOT SOMETHING BASE. It is not a "DISAGREEABLE DUTY" to know our own natures and understand our own instincts: it is a joy. The sex-instinct is not "the Fall of Man.

If Christendom has been staggered at the austerity of Christ's morality not less has it been shocked at the quality of His mercy. His gentleness to the sensual sinner has been compared, with amazement, to the sternness of His attitude to the sins of the spirit. Not the profligate or the harlot but the Pharisee and the scribe were those who provoked His sternest rebukes. And perhaps the most characteristic of all His dealings with such matters was that incident of the WOMAN TAKEN IN ADULTERY, when He at once reaffirmed the need of absolute chastity for men--demand undreamed of by the woman's accusers--and put aside the right to condemn which in all that
assembly He alone could claim--"Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more."

Women, difficult as some people find it to believe, ALSO want the satisfaction of every human need. THE IDEA THAT EXISTENCE IS ENOUGH FOR THEM-THAT THEY DO NOT SUFFER IF THEIR SEX INSTINCTS ARE REPRESSED OR STARVED-is a convenient but most cruel
illusion.

I hear this often: "I find it hard to reconcile sex with the purity of Providence." Such speakers never could understand why God arranged for sex anyway. Why something else might not have been done. Why children might not have come in some other fashion.

Look at the harm sex has involved. Most of the deviltry of history that was not done for money was done for sex. And even the deviltry that was done and is done for money had, and has sex back of it. Take sex out of man and you have something worth while, they say. God must have been short of expedients when God, in creating male and female sex, conceived sex. It certainly looks as if the Divine fell down this time. As if infinity was at the end of its tether. As if the adept creator for once was caught napping, or for once botched a job.

So we such comments. And heaven knows what else. Too much sex some places. Too little sex other places. Some people swearing on and some swearing off. THE PROSTITUTE GIVING AWAY THAT WHICH WAS MEANT TO BE KEPT. THE VIRGIN KEEPING THAT WHICH WAS MEANT TO BE GIVEN AWAY. A force contending with a force. Drawing in opposite directions when they should be pulling together. Through it all, motherhood misunderstood. And fatherhood misunderstood. The body cheapened to the soul. And the soul cheapened to the body.

We breed youngsters in fatal ignorance. They are always asking questions. But we don't answer their questions. Nobody who could answer answers them. But they don't go unanswered. They get answered. And they get answered WRONG INSTEAD OF RIGHT. They get answered, SMUTCHED INSTEAD OF WASHED. They get answered blasphemously instead of reverently. They get answered so that the body is suspected instead of being trusted.

A boy who knows nothing asks a boy who knows nothing. A girl who knows nothing asks a girl who knows nothing. From nothing nothing comes. Men who have been such boys know nothing. Women who have been such girls know nothing. EX NIHIL NIHILO FIT.

Pro-Creation

2009-07-14T21:42:00.000-07:00

The command "Be fruitful and multiply," God's command to the ancient Hebrews was, in my view, a command supposed to have been uttered when there were only eight persons in the world.
If the time should ever again occur when the inhabitants of the world could be counted on one's fingers, such an injunction would again be reasonable.
But to-day humanity has spawned itself over the world in hundreds and even thousands.

Luther (the other one of the 16th Century) was accustomed to say that God's way of making man was very foolish (of course he was terribly wrong), and that if God had deigned to take him into His counsel he would have strongly advised Him to make the whole human race, as He made Adam, "OUT OF EARTH." And certainly if applied to the manner in which procreation in Luther's day, as still for the most part in our own, was usually carried out there was SOME sound common sense in the 'Reformer's' remarks. It was, however, unjust to place the responsibility on God.

It is men and women who breed the people that make the world good or bad. More on this in up-coming issues.

The Woman

2009-07-14T07:45:00.000-07:00

This old Oriental legend about creation of woman is so exquisitely charming that it deserves to be reproduced on this blog first.

At the beginning of time, Twashtri—the Vulcan of Hindu mythology—created the world. But when he wished to create a WOMAN, he found that he had employed all his materials in the creation of man. There did not remain one solid element. Then Twashtri, perplexed, fell into a profound meditation from which he aroused himself and proceeded as follows:

He took the ROUNDNESS of the moon, the UNDULATIONS of the serpent, the ENTWINEMENT of clinging plants, the trembling of the grass, the slenderness of the rose-vine and the velvet of the flower, the lightness of the leaf and the GLANCE of the fawn, the GAIETY of the sun's rays and tears of the mist, the inconstancy of the wind and the timidity of the hare, the vanity of the peacock and the SOFTNESS of the down on the throat of the swallow, the hardness of the diamond, the SWEET FLAVOR of honey and the cruelty of the tiger, the WARMTH of fire, the chill of snow, the chatter of the jay and the cooing of the turtle dove.

He combined all these and formed a WOMAN. Then he made a present of her to man. Eight days later the man came to Twashtri, and said: "My Lord, the creature you gave me poisons my existence. She chatters without rest, she takes all my time, she laments for nothing at all, and is always ill; take her back;" and Twashtri took the woman back.
But eight days later the man came again to the god and said: "My Lord, my life is very solitary since I returned this creature. I remember she danced before me, singing. I recall how she glanced at me from the corner of her eye, how she played with me, clung to me. Give her back to me," and Twashtri returned the woman to him. Three days only passed and Twashtri saw the man coming to him again. "My Lord," said he, "I do not understand exactly how it is, but I am sure that the woman causes me more annoyance than pleasure. I beg you to relieve me of her."

But Twashtri cried: "Go your way and do the best you can." And the man cried: "I cannot live with her!" "Neither can you live without her!" replied Twashtri.

And the man went away sorrowful, murmuring: "Woe is me, I can neither live with nor without her."

The same elusiveness, the same mocking mystery, meet us throughout when we seek to investigate the manifestations of the sexual impulse in women.

Mandeville said of women that "their passions are not so easily raised nor so suddenly fixed upon any particular object; but when this passion is once rooted in women it is much stronger and more durable than in men, and rather increases than diminishes by enjoying the person of the beloved."
Schopenhauer said that a man's love decreases with enjoyment, and a woman's.

Women, i think, tend to show an increase of sexual ardor after sexual relationships have been set up increases. The threshold of excess is passed very much sooner by the man than by the woman. Alacrity, rather than languor marks a woman after coitus.

This great diffusion of the sexual impulse and emotions in women is as visible on the psychic as on the physical side. A woman can find sexual satisfaction in a great number of ways that do not include the sexual act proper, and in a great number of ways that apparently are not physical at all, simply because their physical basis is diffused or is to be found in one of the outlying sexual zones.

I think I will stop there.

Doctrine of Economic Determinism

2009-07-14T07:27:00.000-07:00

Let's turn to economics today, after all, 'the bread and butter question is the most important question in life'. I hope this will not be a boring read. And I will keep it short.

All the rest of the life of an individual is affected and dominated by the way he earns his/her bread and butter. The political, legal, ethical and even religious institutions of men/women have their roots in the economic soil, and any reform that does not go clear to the roots and affect the economic structure of society must necessarily be abortive. Any thing that does go to the roots and does modify the economic structure, the bread and butter side of life, will inevitably modify every other branch and department of human life, political, ethical, legal and religious. This makes the social question, the legal question, the religious question an economic question.

Engels said: "In every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained the political and intellectual history of that epoch."

Put simply another way; laws, customs, education, public opinion and morals are controlled and shaped by economic conditions, or, in other words, by the dominant ruling class which the economic system of any given period forces to the front.
The ruling ideas of each age have been the ideas of its ruling class, whether that class was the patricians of ancient Rome, the feudal barons of the middle ages, or the capitalists of modern times. The economic structure of society largely controls and shapes all social institutions, and also religious and philosophical ideas.

Marx himself said that the mode of production obtaining in material life determines, generally speaking, the social, political and intellectual processes of life. This is as far as i wish to go with this not so lively topic.

Marvelous Instinct

2009-07-11T05:14:00.000-07:00

Medieval ascetic writers regarded woman as "a temple built over a sewer,"! They thought that sexual impulse (male and female) was dependent on the need of evacuation thus, for example, they studied a male frog and noted that during coitus it will undergo the most horrible mutilations, even decapitation, and yet resolutely continue the act of intercourse, which lasts from four to ten days, sitting on the back of the female and firmly clasping her with his forelegs.

They were wrong.
The chief parts in the drama of sex, alike on its psychic as on its physical sides, are played by two protagonists, The Hormones, or The internal secretions of the reproductive organs. In humans, preliminaries themselves constitute a partial satisfaction to the sexual impulse.

But first let me say this: The part played by the female in courtship is usually in some respects, a more difficult and complex part. Except when the male fails to play his part properly, she is usually comparatively passive; in the proper playing of her part she has to appear to shun the male, to flee from his approaches—even actually to repel them. The true nature of the passivity of the female is revealed by the ease with which it is thrown off, more especially when the male refuses to accept his cue. Or, if we prefer to accept the analogy of a game, we may say that in the play of courtship the first move belongs to the male, but that, if he fails to play, it is then the female's (some females) turn to play.

Sexual instinct is an instinct of reproduction. But that is not all, otherwise we might as well say that the impulse by which young animals seize food is "an instinct of nutrition. A woman may not want a lover, but may yet want a child. A desire for reproduction, as soon as that desire becomes instinctive, necessarily takes on the form of the sexual impulse, for there is no other instinctive mechanism by which it can possibly express itself, by which a woman can have her own child except through intercourse.
A high degree of excitement of the nervous system is necessary to procreation. Such a stage is necessary before any markedly passionate discharge of motor energy. The primary object of COURTSHIP is to produce sexual excitement. COURTSHIP, I repeat, is the strong and steady bending of the bow that the arrow may find its mark in a biological end of survival of healthy specie.

Judgments of men concerning women are very rarely matters of cold scientific observation They are colored both by their own sexual emotions and by their own moral attitude toward the sexual impulse. The ascetic, for example, who is unsuccessfully warring with his own carnal impulses may see nothing in women but incarnations of sexual impulse; The ascetic who has subdued his own carnal impulses may see no elements of sex in women at all. Actually, Statements about the sexual impulses of women often tell us less about women than about the persons who make them (ha!).

"Turn to history," wrote Brierre de Boismont, "and on every page you will be able to recognize the predominance of erotic ideas in women." It is the same today, (today being 1862), he adds, and he attributes it to the fact that men are more easily able to gratify their sexual impulses. Methinks that the sexual coldness of women is in fact only apparent, either due to the concealment of glowing sexuality beneath the veil of outward reticence prescribed by conventional morality, or else to the husband who has not succeeded in arousing erotic sensations which are complicated and with difficulty awakened. The sexual sensibility of women is certainly different from that of men, but in strength it is at least as great.

I venture to state that it is often the failure of the man to produce sexual excitement in the woman which leads to voluntary repression of sexual sensation on her part. Sexual excitement, not brought to its natural climax, the reaction leaves the woman in a very disagreeable condition, and repeated occurrences of that kind may even lead to general nervous disturbances. Some of such unfortunate women learn to suppress their sexual sensation so as to avoid all these disagreeable experiences. Such a state of affairs is not only unfortunate, because it deprives the female partner of her natural rights, but it is also to be deplored because it practically brings down such a married woman to the level of the prostitute.

Let me finish this way: To the man coitus must be in some slight degree pleasurable or it cannot take place at all. To the woman the same act which, under some circumstances, in the desire it arouses and the satisfaction it imparts, will cause the whole universe to shrivel into nothingness, under other circumstances will be a source of anguish, physical and mental.

JUST A THOUGHT; It is too often forgotten by those who write on these subjects that the man who seduces a woman has usually himself in the first place been "seduced" by a woman.

THE MASTERSINGERS OF NUREMBERG

2009-07-09T09:09:00.000-07:00

The Mastersingers of Nuremberg is an opera, a great opera, in three acts, written and composed by Richard Wagner. It was, unfortunately, Hitler's most beloved and he was, sadly, loved by Hitler as the greatest composer. He influenced Hitler's anti-semitism. It was in Nuremberg where Hitler laid down his dark scheme. And it was in Nuremberg where the Trials of the Nazi captured would be held( symbolically to bring a close to the war from the place of its planning.
The story IN the Mastersingers of Nuremberg takes place in Nuremberg during the middle of the 16th century. At the time, Nuremberg was an Imperial Free City, and one of the centers of the Renaissance in Northern Europe. The story revolves around the real-life guild of Meistersinger (Master Singers), an association of amateur poets and musicians, mostly from the middle class and often master craftsmen in their main professions. The Mastersingers developed a craftsmanlike approach to music-making, with an intricate system of rules for composing and performing songs. The work draws much of its charm from its faithful depiction of the Nuremberg of the era and the traditions of the Mastersinger guild.
RICHARD WAGNER THE MAN(The 'most German of Men')

HE WAS a controversial man. His operas, writings, his politics, beliefs and unorthodox lifestyle made him a controversial figure during his lifetime. In September 1876 Karl Marx complained in a letter to his daughter Jenny: "Wherever one goes these days one is pestered with the question: what do you think of Wagner?"

Under a pseudonym, He published "Das Judenthum in der Musik" in 1850 (originally translated as "Judaism in Music", by which name it is still known, but better rendered as "Jewishness in Music.") The essay attacks Jewish contemporaries (and rivals) Felix Mendelssohn, and accused Jews of being a harmful and alien element in German culture. Wagner stated the German people were repelled by their alien appearance and behavior: "with all our speaking and writing in favour of the Jews' emancipation, we always felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them." He argued that because Jews had no connection to the German spirit, Jewish musicians were only capable of producing shallow and artificial music. They therefore composed music to achieve popularity and, thereby, financial success, as opposed to creating genuine works of art.

Adolf Hitler was an admirer of Wagner's music and anti-Jewish sentiments and saw in Wagner's operas an embodiment of his own vision of the German nation. There continues to be debate about the extent to which Wagner's views might have influenced Nazi thinking. As with the works of Nietzsche, the Nazis used those parts of Wagner's thought that were useful for propaganda and ignored or suppressed the rest.
His work is banned in Israel, Understandably so.

The Marvel that is the Female Character

2009-07-04T05:19:00.000-07:00

I publish this postbut here I do it again, albeit with modifications and with a rider that I'm not married thus cannot be and desires not be perceived as having answers to marriage's existential problems.

Balzac has compared the average husband to an Orang-utan and says of woman that:

“Woman is a delicious instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its quivering strings, study the pose of it, its timid keyboard, the changing and capricious fingering. How many Orangs—men, I mean, marry without knowing what a woman is!... Nearly all men marry in the most profound ignorance of women and of love”

Sigmund Freud pointed out (wrong as he was on many issues) that the bridal night is practically often a rape, and that it sometimes leads to hysteria, which is not cured until satisfying sexual relationships are established. There is a psychic importance of the manner in which the act of defloration is accomplished.

This first moment in which the man's individuality attains its full rights often decides the whole of life. The unskilled, over-excited husband (let me use the word ‘Man’ ) can then implant the seed of feminine insensibility, and by continued awkwardness and coarseness develop it into permanent repulsion. The man who takes possession of his rights with reckless brutal masculine force merely causes his wife (the woman) anxiety and pain, and with every repetition of the act increases her repulsion.

A large proportion of cold-natured women represent a sacrifice by men, due either to unconscious awkwardness, or, occasionally, to conscious brutality towards the tender plant which should have been cherished with peculiar art and love, but has been robbed of the splendour of its development.

All her life long, a wistful and trembling woman will preserve the recollection of a brutal wedding night (any night, its irrelevant which night it is), and, often enough, it remains a perpetual source of inhibition every time that the man seeks anew to gratify his desires without adapting himself to his wife's desires for love".

THE condition of women among the ancient Patriarchs, appears to have been but extremely indifferent. When Abraham entertained the angels, sent to denounce the destruction of Sodom, he seems to have treated his wife as a menial servant: “Make ready quickly,” said he to her, “three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes on the hearth.”

Wrote Diderot long ago; “I have seen an honest woman shudder with horror at her husband/Man's approach, I have seen her plunge in the bath and feel herself never sufficiently washed from the stain of duty.”

Women, when their fine natural instincts have not been hopelessly perverted by the pruderies and prejudices which at times is instilled into them’ understand the art of love more readily than men. Even when little more than children they can often completely take the cue that is given to them. Much more than is the case with men, at all events the art of love is with them.

The knowledge of women cannot replace, the ignorance of men, but, on the contrary, merely serves to reveal it. For in the art of love the man must take the initiative.

It is he who must first unseal the mystery of the intimacies and audacities which the woman's heart may hold. The risk of meeting with even the shadow of contempt or disgust is too serious to allow a woman, even a wife, to reveal the secrets of love to a man who has not shown himself to be an initiate.
Numberless are the jovial and contented men who have never suspected, and will never know, that their women carry about with them, sometimes with silent resentment, the ache, the feeling that there are delicious privacies and privileges which she has never been asked to take, or forced to accept.

The case of such men is all the harder because, for the most part, all that they have done is the result of the morality that has been preached to them. They have been taught from boyhood to be strenuous and manly and clean-minded, to seek by all means to put out of their minds the thought of women or the longing for sensuous indulgence.

They have been told on all sides that only in marriage is it right or even safe to approach women. They have acquired the notion that sexual indulgence and all that appertains to it is something low and degrading, at the worst a mere natural necessity, at the best a duty to be accomplished in a direct, honorable and straight-forward manner.

No one seems to have told them that love is an art, and that to gain real possession of a woman's soul and body is a task that requires the whole of a man's best skill and insight.

It may well be that when a man LEARNS HIS LESSON TOO LATE he is inclined to turn FEROCIOUSLY on the society that by its conspiracy of pseudo-morality has done its best to ruin his life, and that of his wife. In some of these cases husband or wife or both are finally attracted to A THIRD PERSON, and a divorce enables them to start afresh with BETTER EXPERIENCE UNDER HAPPIER AUSPICES.

THE Woman, in closing (And because I would hate to say it again), is dowered with a set of organs peculiar to herself, whose complexity, delicacy, sympathies, and force are among the MARVELS OF CREATION.

If properly nurtured and cared for, they are a source of strength and power to her. If neglected and mismanaged, they retaliate upon their possessor mercilessly in mind and body. GOD was not in error, when, after Eve's creation, he looked upon his work, and pronounced it good.

Psychology of Sex:Part II

2009-07-03T07:31:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you are wondering why I’m writing on this topic. Well, first let me address your concerns.
Try to transfer your feelings and theories from the reproductive region to, let us say, the nutritive region, the only other which can be compared to it for importance. Then suppose that eating and drinking was never spoken of openly, save in veiled or poetic language, and that no one ever ate food publicly, because it was considered immoral and immodest to reveal the mysteries of this natural function!
You know what would occur. A considerable proportion of the community, especially youth, possessed by an instinctive and legitimate curiosity, would concentrate their thoughts on the SUBJECT.
They would have so many problems to puzzle over: How often ought I to eat? What ought I to eat? Is it wrong to eat fruit, which I like? Ought I to eat grass, which I don't like?
Instinct notwithstanding, you may be quite sure that only a small minority would succeed in eating reasonably and wholesomely.
THE SEXUAL SECRECY OF LIFE is even more disastrous than such a nutritive secrecy would be; partly because we expend such a wealth of moral energy in directing or misdirecting it, partly because the sexual impulse normally develops at the same time as the intellectual impulse, not in the early years of life, when wholesome instinctive habits might be formed. And there is always some ignorant and foolish friend who is prepared still further to MUDDLE THINGS: “Eat a meal every other day! Eat twelve meals a day! Never eat fruit! Always eat grass!”
The advice emphatically given in sexual matters is usually not less absurd than this. When, however, the matter is fully open, the problems of food are not indeed wholly solved, but everyone is enabled by the experience of his fellows to reach some sort of situation suited to his own case. And when the rigid secrecy is once swept away a sane and natural reticence becomes for the first time possible.
Now we can proceed with this preambular: Has sexual pleasure the same power on the sex which less loudly demands it?
My answer; Yes. A woman's erotic demands, though more silent than man's, are stronger. Without doubt she is more passionate than man, and more often torn by the evils of love.
The seeming reluctance of the female is not intended, I think, to inhibit sexual activity either in the male or in herself, but to increase it in both. The passivity of the female is not a real, but only an apparent, passivity, and this holds true of our own species as much as of the lower animals.

“Women are like delicately adjusted alembics,” said a seventeenth-century author. "No fire can be seen outside, but if you look underneath the alembic, if you place your hand on the hearts of women, in both places you will find a great furnace”
The passivity of women is the passivity of the magnet, which in its apparent immobility is drawing the iron toward it. An intense energy lies behind such passivity, an absorbed preoccupation in the end to be attained.

Some women do not express their sensations and feelings as much as (most men do). But the belief that the feminine sex feels the stimulus of sex less than the male is quite false. Intercourse before marriage is the rule in many agricultural and commercial villages and cities (they are three) in Kenya, with or without intention of subsequent marriage. The girls are often the seducing parties, or at least very willing; they seek to bind their lovers to them and compel them to marriage. Sexual enjoyment is more delicious and protracted in women than in men.
IT IS CERTAIN that very much of what is best in religion, art, and life owes its charm to the progressively-widening irradiation of sexual feeling AND human relations.

The Psychology Of Sex

2009-07-02T05:38:00.000-07:00

It is the truth among animals that the female is most easily won by the male who most strongly excites her sexual instincts, thus the excited prelude to procreation among humans and animals. In the primitive age, sexual intercourse was seen to be an end only to be obtained with much struggle; the difficulty of so stimulating sexual desire in the female that her instinctive coyness is overcome, was something for only the best and most vigorous males.

Force then was the foundation of virility. In the struggle for life violence was the first virtue. The modesty of women—in its primordial form consisting in physical resistance, active or passive, to the assaults of the male—aided selection by putting to the test man's most important quality, force. Thus it is that when choosing among rivals for her favors a woman attributed value to violence.
Courtship, we know today consist in creating that state of profound and explosive irritability which results in an imperious and irresistible craving. It is the strong and steady bending of the bow that the arrow may find its mark in a biological end of the highest importance in the survival of a healthy and vigorous race.

We could learn from the Moth Kingdom a great lesson: PROXIMITY DOES NOT DECIDE THE POINT. The males 'assemble' around the freshly emerged female, but no special advantage appears to attend on early arrival. The female sits apparently motionless, while the little crowd of suitors buzz around her for several minutes. SUDDENLY, and, as far as one can see, without any sign from the female, one of the males pairs with her and all the others immediately disappear.The wonder arises as to how the moment is determined. Proximity does not decide the point, for long beforehand the males often alight close to the female and brush against her with fluttering wings.

It is everywhere the instinctive object of the male, who is very rarely passive in the process of courtship, to assure by his activity in display, his energy or skill or beauty, his passion. Sexual conjugation only takes place after much expenditure of energy.[
We are deceived TODAY by what we see among highly fed domesticated animals, and among the lazy classes of human society, whose sexual instincts are at once both UNNNATURALLY STIMULATED and UNNNATURALLY REPRESSED, when we imagine that the instinct of sex is normally ever craving to be satisfied, and that it can always be set off at a touch whenever the stimulus is applied.
Let me say something I’ve learnt on physiological motor explosions like convulsions of laughter and the like. Of all of them, the sexual orgasm is the most massive, powerful, and overwhelming. So volcanic is it that to the ancient Greek philosophers it seemed to be a MINOR KIND OF EPILEPSY. The relief of orgasm is not merely the relief of an evacuation; it is the discharge, by the most powerful apparatus for nervous explosion in the body, of the energy accumulated and stored up in the slow process, and that discharge reverberates through all the nervous centers in the human. The sophist of Abdera said that coitus (intercourse) is a slight fit of epilepsy, judging it to be an incurable disease. And Cœlius Aurelianus, one of the chief physicians of antiquity, said that "coitus is a brief epilepsy.
On marriage, this is what I have learned: Marriage exerts a much more marked prophylactic influence in the case of men than of women. The number of admissions to insane asylums is the same for both sexes among married people, but for the single it is larger among the men as also it is among the widowed. This indicates that when living apart from men the tendency to insanity is less in women, but is raised to the male level when the sexes live together in marriage. Much the same seems to hold true of criminality. Marriage decidedly increases the tendency to crime in women, though it decidedly decreases it in men.
I think it unprofitable to say more, save that sexual relations is the queen of intricasies in human affairs. People are much teased for their obsession with why sex exists. People like to ask, in an amused way, “isn’t it obvious?” Joking apart, it is far from obvious. Sex is a puzzle that has not yet been solved; no one knows why it exists.
Its widespread prevalence today make it deserving of space in this blog.

Thinking on women in the 19th Century French Society.

2009-06-30T21:56:00.000-07:00

I adapt, with various modifications to reflect modernity, a discussion in 1828, at about one o'clock one morning, between a famous doctor, Horace Bianchon and one of the most elegant men in Paris at the time Baron de Rastignac. It does not reflect my Opinion about women at all. I propose you take it for its pure entertainment value, if any.

Love never goes to study the registers of birth and marriage; no one loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or clever; we love because we love.

But some love for quite other reasons; because a woman is fashion, for example, she has soul, her foot is very pretty, she has perhaps alot of money, perhaps he may marry her!
"I have all the discomforts of marriage and of single life, without the advantages of either; a false position to which every man must come who remains tied too long to the same apron-string."Baron de Rastignac said.

The fragile, fair woman, with her chestnut hair, who pities herself that she may be
pitied, enjoys an iron constitution, an appetite like a wolf's, and the strength and cowardice of a tiger.
There is something of the ways of the fine ladies whose bodies we attend to, saving that which is dearest to them, their child-if they love it-or their pretty faces, which they always adore. A man spends his thoughts obs4eesed with them, wearing himelf to death to spare them the slightest loss of beauty in any part; he succeeds, he keeps their secret like the dead; they send to ask for his bill, and think
it horribly exorbitant.

Those women of whom is said, 'They are angels!'have seen stripped of the little grimaces under which they hide their soul, as well as of the frippery under which they disguise their defects--without manners and without stays; they are not beautiful.
If only you knew how much value the cold, severe style of such a woman gives to the smallest evidence of their affection! What a delight it is to see a periwinkle piercing through the snow! A smile from below a fan contradicts the reserve of an
assumed attitude, and is worth all the unbridled tenderness of your middle-class women with their mortgaged devotion; for, in love, devotion is nearly akin to speculation.

In short, some men have a particular horror of that kind of woman-a woman of fashion. Do you want to know why? A woman who has a lofty soul, fine taste, gentle wit, a generously warm heart, and who lives a simple life, has not a chance of being the fashion. She, the woman of fashion, is the diamond with which a man cuts every window when he has not the golden key which unlocks every door. Leave humdrum virtues to the humdrum, ambitious vices to the ambitious.

A woman of fashion and a man in power are analogous; but there is this difference: the qualities by which a man raises himself above others ennoble him and are a glory to him; whereas the qualities by which a woman gains power for a day are hideous vices; she belies her nature to hide her character, and to live the militant life of the world she must have iron strength under a frail appearance.

She feels nothing; her rage for pleasure has its source in a longing to heat up her cold nature, a craving for excitement and enjoyment, like an old man who stands night after night by the footlights at the opera. As she has more brain than heart, she sacrifices genuine passion and true friends to her triumph, as a general sends his most devoted subalterns to the front in order to win a battle. The woman of fashion ceases to be a woman; she is neither mother, nor wife, nor lover. She is, medically speaking, sex in the brain, she is as polished as the steel of a machine, she touches everything except the heart." Marry an angel! you would have to go and bury your happiness in the depths of the country!

What about the wife of a politician. She is a governing machine, a contrivance that
makes compliments and courtesies. She is the most important and most faithful tool which an ambitious man can use; a friend, in short, who may compromise herself without mischief, and whom he may belie without harmful results.

Do you accept this diatribe against the modern independent woman, what they used to call then-a woman of fashion?

Perhaps his greatest enemy was TIME itself

2009-06-27T04:24:00.002-07:00

"When it's all over, it's not who you were. It's whether you made a difference"

A man with incredibly low self esteem, painfully shy, supremely talented; he was, as is the nature of most gifted people, most fragile. He needed love and approval. I do too, infact alot of it. But he lived for it, and the only place he ever got it was on stage. That's where he was preparing to return-THE STAGE-to the one place he could find the love and adulation that never seemed to register anywhere else.
It is tempting to ponder, perhaps MJ'S greatest enemy was TIME. It was a life in modern day tragedy. A star at 11, a teen idol as an adolescent and the King of Pop before he hit 30, he spent what should have been the best years of his life HOUNDED, HAUNTED AND CONFUSED.
One thing for sure: He is frozen forever in time, electric on stage, sliding his inimitable way through Thriller, a defining image in our collective memory.
IT is a life left in ruins. We will learn by his example, the treacherous nature of celebrity in modern age. HE died at 50,reportedly awash in about $400 million in debt. But that and the other fact of certain-to-follow court battles over his children and his wealth(whatever there remains)is not for today.

He taught many how to live. There were always those waiting outside the courtroom or hotelroom who screamed his name like a prayer, a mantra. He feared he would die like Elvis(according to Lisa Marie Presley). Both, by the way, suffered abuse from their handlers. Drugs played a part in both of their deaths. And both had defective Systems of Support (hungers-on and yes-men) that led to their early demise.

ThE World mourns the arc of a life that should have been filled with the blessings of success as defined in our world: money, talent, fame and celebrity. But instead it descended into a hellish purgatory on earth and died a very lonely person-all to himself with his doctor and maybe one other person. He died damned by public opinion (not all public opinion though)and tortured by demons only he understood. Some defeat those demons, and some don't. Michael Jackson ran out of TIME.

He lived like a King but died with a Whimper

2009-06-26T08:33:00.000-07:00

'One night he called me in a panic. He had just gotten married to Lisa Marie Presley and needed advice - sex advice. He was incredibly nervous and said that he wanted to make sure that Lisa was impressed with his "moves." He asked me if I had any advice. I answered with one word: "foreplay." -Gotham Chopra, a close friend of Michael Jackson.

"Really?" He answered. "Girls really like that?"

"You and I must make a pact, we must bring salvation back, where there is love, I'll be there..."
"I'll Be There" was one of the first songs that introduced us to that legendary performing/recording act of five brothers, The Jackson 5, featuring the angelic voice of a small, skinny kid named Michael. Their music became the soundtrack of the early seventies, it being impossible to have not owned at least one of those infectious singles (information not of my own knowledge}. A mere year or so later, the pre-teen Michael Jackson (marketed as being two years younger) became a solo artist, with his own run of child's view singles that included his first monster hit and release, "Got To Be There,".

Some time between the brothers' hits "Enjoy Youself" and "Shake Your Body (Down To The Ground)" and right around the time Michael starred in The Wiz alongside the 5's Motown sponsor surfaced, tales of intense rehearsals, parental abuse and emotional neglect; it was shocking since these boys appeared on every home's entertainment device for years, thus becoming somewhat extended family to many.
That was the first controversial tabloid exposé the still rising star had to survive, but sympathies especially went out to Michael, his having been the most popular and familiar face of the act as well as one of his family's youngest children. Under the supervision of Quincy Jones, the producer/architect behind an emerging late seventies/early eighties champagne r&b sound, the album Off The Wall and its associated hits established Jackson as a young African American icon.

The album's follow-up, the international sales phenomenon that was Thriller. At the top of his game as well as the world, Michael won eight Grammys for the hit-packed album, and he showcased his famous moonwalk dance moves on Motown's 25th Anniversary special. Virtually, the next day, every kid on the planet was trying to emulate his or her pop hero, and from this point on for many years, he really was the King of Pop, all due respect to The King.

It's after this point when things started reeling out, his Bad album having included many hits, though none that touched the heart as what came before. The whole idea of Michael Jackson now being "bad" in any sense of that word was ludicrous, as was the album cover that featured a thuggish, mysteriously lighter-skinned Jackson. His growing immodesty and contrived crotch-grabbing contradicted everything we knew about him, and that emerging, fabricated image probably was the first red flag that something was very wrong. Perhaps those around him did not re-orient him from fear of losing their jobs or offending, and probably, this was the last, best moment in time that some kind of intervention might have been effective.

From then on, though pretty good albums and decent singles were released such as the beautiful "You Are Not Alone" and "Heal The World" (after which he named and created a charitable foundation), Michael Jackson's career and personal life decisions did almost nothing more than provide fodder to the tabloids. The list they were able to choose from was long and disturbing: marrying then immediately divorcing Lisa Marie Presley; converting his home into Neverland; having numerous plastic surgeries that resulted in stranger physical appearances; acquiring a hyperbaric chamber and, apparently, the bones of the "elephant man," John Merrick; adopting Bubbles the chimp; securing an arranged marriage and pregnancies with Debbie Rowe; naming his son "Prince Michael"; arranging for interviews during which he asserted his heterosexual desires a little too insistently -- something we never really gave much though about until allegations of sexual abuse with children occurred, which brings us to those stories of Macaulay Culkin, Jesus Juice and sleepovers with children that takes us to the endless lawsuits and eventual loss of his millions and collapse of his career.

Today's death of Michael Jackson accompanies the death of a little more of americas' country's innocence. And it's symbolic that his heart finally just gave out. Ultimately, the adult Michael was responsible for his own actions and will be remembered for them accordingly. But due to his abusive upbringing and unimaginable, disorienting success as an artist, he probably just couldn't handle his life in any practical way. All we know now is that he suffered from something, and his passing is tragic because it happened at the bottom of a downward spiral, his never really being able to redeem himself in the eyes of the public -- something we seem to require before a forgiveness and acceptance back into the flock. Beyond the reams of his documented eccentricities, Michael Jackson was a huge talent who'll be missed, and he was one of our better, kinder kids whose life and story spun out of control, those seeds probably planted in his misplaced childhood. Just a thought -- shouldn't we have been our disturbed brother's keeper when it was obvious he really, really needed one?

Is Iran collapsing!

2009-06-18T09:54:00.000-07:00

Some stories shock us for their audacity, some shock us for their uncommonness, but others shock us because normally they are about things that just cannot happen but then they happen!! Tell me, is iran collapsing!

For those who still doubt the movements of a society

2009-06-16T21:26:00.001-07:00

For those who still doubt the movements of a society
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dg4n86sq_2c7w2q2c8&invite=g77zjth

Today

2009-06-13T07:05:00.001-07:00

Frequency of insignifican speech

Today, the 13th of June 2009, I get inspiration from Thomas Hobbes;let's listen to him:

"In a good poem, whether it be epic or dramatic, as also in sonnets, epigrams, and other pieces, both judgement and fancy are required: but the fancy must be more eminent; because they please for the extravagancy, but ought not to displease by indiscretion.

In a good history, the judgement must be eminent; because the goodness consisteth in the choice of the method, in the truth, and in the choice of the actions that are most profitable to be known. Fancy has no place, but only in adorning the style.

In orations of praise, and in invectives, the fancy is predominant; because the design is not truth, but to honour or dishonour; which is done by noble or by vile comparisons. The judgement does but suggest what circumstances make an action laudable or culpable."

Plight of the Poor

2009-06-11T20:54:00.000-07:00

Despite the stereotypes, the poor are not necessarily lazy, (though some indisputably and regretably are), and unwilling to work, downright stupid or content to subsist on handouts and goodwill of others.

POVERTY is a state we treat mistakenly, as an abstract social issue. The Kenyan government frequently has looked the other way as majority of its population languish in depriving conditions. The old policies and many of the new pro poor pro growth policies that are being paraded by the Finance Minister in his annual budget are unrealistic, if you ask me, and fail to grasp the magnitude of the poverty situation in this country. The visible result of years of non-action has been the growth of a new type of subculture in Kenya--the working poor and the educated unemployed.

The glaring reality is that, by not doing enough to address the poverty issue, we have created a permanent bifurcated society, one whose tensions and difficulties is narrowing the scope of national aspirations and even limiting some of the economic, social, and political freedoms. Nevertheless, there are viable economic and social alternative policies that could help improve the situation.

Poverty stands as our most conspicuous failure. It has become the most pervasive socioeconomic problem in our society, transcending tribal differences and geographical locations. The rich are amazingly rich and the poor are astoundingly poor.

Any realistic assessment of politics and poverty would conclude that the poor are not well-represented in the corridors of power. Their voices are all too absent from debates on policy reform directed at improving their conditions. Some cynics are quick to claim that the poor are all denizens of a self-perpetuating culture marked by, among others, chronic unemployment, crime and long-term dependency on others. These stereotypical characterizations misrepresent the magnitude of the poverty issue and the people enmeshed in this economic condition. The poor are not necessarily lazy and don't want to work. They are not all criminals. Poverty is a vicious cycle of economic strangulation. Children brought up in poverty are more likely to remain poor as adults.

We need a Participatory Poverty Assessment (PPA. This involves the assessment of poverty; analyses of relevant public expenditures and institutions and safety nets; and the preparation of strategies to reduce poverty. The idea is to bridge the gap between policymakers and the poor by systematically bringing the human social dimension into this analysis. PPA addresses a wide range of critical questions:

* How do the poor perceive the relative importance of the various manifestations of poverty, such as low income, lack of food, security, and propensity to ill health"

* What do they see as the root causes of poverty?

* What factors block their opportunities for example, insufficient access to assets such as land and credit; geophysical factors causing isolation; and sex, ethnic class, or religious discrimination?

Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain

2009-06-11T02:03:00.000-07:00

All serious daring starts from within. With courage you will dare to take risks, have the strength to be compassionate, and the wisdom to be humble. Courage is the foundation of integrity.

Charles Darwin:A revolutuion in Thought

2009-06-08T21:11:00.000-07:00

While aboard the HMS Beagle, Darwin collected evidence for his "Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the struggle for Life". Today, scientists are exploring evolution at a level of detail far beyond what Darwin could, and they are discovering that evolution sometimes works in ways Darwin could never have imagined. They feast on a far bigger banquet of data. In his time he had no clue what the human genome was and that DNA is what makes variation and heredity possible In proof of Darwin's theories, scientists have observed thousands of cases of natural selection in action. They've observed that bacteria develop resistance to drugs that were once believed to be invincible Also they have proved Darwin's claim that different species share a common ancestry. Paleontologists have found fossils of whales with legs, linking modern whales to their territorial ancestors. The fossils point to hippos and other hoofed mammals as being the closest living relatives to whales. Our own DNA contains clues to the bonds we share with the rest of life. For instance, we are a closer kin to mushrooms than to sunflowers!

Stopping settlements first

2009-06-08T07:48:00.000-07:00

President Obama seems to have found Israel's soft underbelly-the issue of settlements. President Obama's anti-settlement stance has, unsurprisingly, prompted an outpouring of wailing and teeth-gnashing among Israel's supporters who view him as being the first American president to ever chart a middle eastern foreign policy that is markedly pro-arab. The problem in the Israel-Palestinian conflict is that there are on both sides a critical intractable minority that will accept nothing short of everything it wants. Benjamin Netanyahu must reign in ultra nationalists like Avigdor Lieberman and Abu mazan must reign in Hamas, if he ever will.

2009-06-04T21:40:00.000-07:00

Those who deny FREEDOM to others, and rage and fight against the RIGHTS of others must know that in the just rule of GOD, they will not long retain their FREEDOM or their RIGHTS. Indeed those, like many unbalanced leaders in the third world, including in my country Kenya, who make a peaceful REVOLUTION impossible, render a violent REVOLUTION inevitable.

PRESIDENT MUSEVENI'S BRINKMANSHIP

2009-06-04T07:44:00.001-07:00

A person capable of deceiving others is not nearly as dangerous as one capable of deceiving also himself. The latter is truly lost since he knows no untruths. He is dangerous since he can lie without speaking untruth, without having to lie. The grand isolation of such a person's thoughts leads him or her to express them in such words as are gratifying to only himself or herself while having a disgusting and unfortunate effect upon others who know that he or she is lost.

Post Mao Post Deng Xiaoping China

2009-06-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

The rebirth of China from the dark, the very dark days of chaiman Mao, and the repression under Deng Xiaoping, (which led to the infamous Tianammen massacre), has raised global economic and political issues that can nolonger be ignored. Some fear that a China powerful economically and politically might be harmful to world order.