I used to feel so alone in the city.
All those gazillions of people and then me, on the outside.
Because how do you meet a new person?
I was very stumped by this for many years.
And then I realized, you just say, “hi.” they may ignore you.
Or you may marry them.
And that possibility is worth that one word.
-Augusten Burroughs
(Source)
Interesting point of view. I foresee troubles with the way we treat our Megan’s Law offenders. I expect we will see serial murderers, targeting only registered sexual predators. Unfortunately, this will probably be what it takes to change. What do YOU think?
It is an oft-told story, but it does not get any less horrific on repetition. Fifteen years ago, a paedophile enticed seven-year-old Megan Kanka into his home in New Jersey by offering to show her a puppy. He then raped her, killed her and dumped her body in a nearby park. The murderer, who had recently moved into the house across the street from his victim, had twice before been convicted of sexually assaulting a child. Yet Megan’s parents had no idea of this. Had they known he was a sex offender, they would have told their daughter to stay away from him.
In their grief, the parents started a petition, demanding that families should be told if a sexual predator moves nearby. Hundreds of thousands signed it. In no time at all, lawmakers in New Jersey granted their wish. And before long, “Megan’s laws” had spread to every American state.
America’s sex-offender laws are the strictest of any rich democracy. Convicted rapists and child-molesters are given long prison sentences. When released, they are put on sex-offender registries. In most states this means that their names, photographs and addresses are published online, so that fearful parents can check whether a child-molester lives nearby. Under the Adam Walsh Act of 2006, another law named after a murdered child, all states will soon be obliged to make their sex-offender registries public. Such rules are extremely popular. Most parents will support any law that promises to keep their children safe. Other countries are following America’s example, either importing Megan’s laws or increasing penalties: after two little girls were murdered by a school caretaker, Britain has imposed multiple conditions on who can visit schools.
Which makes it all the more important to ask whether America’s approach is the right one. In fact its sex-offender laws have grown self-defeatingly harsh (see article). They have been driven by a ratchet effect. Individual American politicians have great latitude to propose new laws. Stricter curbs on paedophiles win votes. And to sound severe, such curbs must be stronger than the laws in place, which in turn were proposed by politicians who wished to appear tough themselves. Few politicians dare to vote against such laws, because if they do, the attack ads practically write themselves.
In all, 674,000 Americans are on sex-offender registries—more than the population of Vermont, North Dakota or Wyoming. The number keeps growing partly because in several states registration is for life and partly because registries are not confined to the sort of murderer who ensnared Megan Kanka. According to Human Rights Watch, at least five states require registration for people who visit prostitutes, 29 require it for consensual sex between young teenagers and 32 require it for indecent exposure. Some prosecutors are now stretching the definition of “distributing child pornography” to include teens who text half-naked photos of themselves to their friends.
How dangerous are the people on the registries? A state review of one sample in Georgia found that two-thirds of them posed little risk. For example, Janet Allison was found guilty of being “party to the crime of child molestation” because she let her 15-year-old daughter have sex with a boyfriend. The young couple later married. But Ms Allison will spend the rest of her life publicly branded as a sex offender.
Several other countries have sex-offender registries, but these are typically held by the police and are hard to view. In America it takes only seconds to find out about a sex offender: some states have a “click to print” icon on their websites so that concerned citizens can put up posters with the offender’s mugshot on trees near his home. Small wonder most sex offenders report being harassed. A few have been murdered. Many are fired because someone at work has Googled them.
Registration is often just the start. Sometimes sex offenders are barred from living near places where children congregate. In Georgia no sex offender may live or work within 1,000 feet (300 metres) of a school, church, park, skating rink or swimming pool. In Miami an exclusion zone of 2,500 feet has helped create a camp of homeless offenders under a bridge.
There are three main arguments for reform. First, it is unfair to impose harsh penalties for small offences. Perhaps a third of American teenagers have sex before they are legally allowed to, and a staggering number have shared revealing photographs with each other. This is unwise, but hardly a reason for the law to ruin their lives. Second, America’s sex laws often punish not only the offender, but also his family. If a man who once slept with his 15-year-old girlfriend is barred for ever from taking his own children to a playground, those children suffer.
Third, harsh laws often do little to protect the innocent. The police complain that having so many petty sex offenders on registries makes it hard to keep track of the truly dangerous ones. Cash that might be spent on treating sex offenders—which sometimes works—is spent on huge indiscriminate registries. Public registers drive serious offenders underground, which makes them harder to track and more likely to reoffend. And registers give parents a false sense of security: most sex offenders are never even reported, let alone convicted.
It would not be hard to redesign America’s sex laws. Instead of lumping all sex offenders together on the same list for life, states should assess each person individually and include only real threats. Instead of posting everything on the internet, names could be held by the police, who would share them only with those, such as a school, who need to know. Laws that bar sex offenders from living in so many places should be repealed, because there is no evidence that they protect anyone: a predator can always travel. The money that a repeal saves could help pay for monitoring compulsive molesters more intrusively—through ankle bracelets and the like.
In America it may take years to unpick this. However practical and just the case for reform, it must overcome political cowardice, the tabloid media and parents’ understandable fears. Other countries, though, have no excuse for committing the same error. Sensible sex laws are better than vengeful ones.
Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature,
An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature;
Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses
Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.
I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations,
A singular development of cat communications
That obviates your basic hedonistic predilection
For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection.
A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents;
You would not be so agile if you lacked its counterbalance.
And when not being utilized to aid in locomotion,
It often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion.
O Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display
Connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array.
And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend,
I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend.
Blackberry Tour 9630
Clinton has signed a bill passed by Congress that orders the states to adopt new, more onerous drunk-driving standards or face a loss of highway funds. That’s right: the old highway extortion trick. Sure enough, states are already working to pass new, tighter laws against Driving Under the Influence, responding as expected to the feds’ ransom note.
Now the feds declare that a blood-alcohol level of 0.08 percent and above is criminal and must be severely punished. The National Restaurant Association is exactly right that this is absurdly low. The overwhelming majority of accidents related to drunk driving involve repeat offenders with blood-alcohol levels twice that high. If a standard of 0.1 doesn’t deter them, then a lower one won’t either.
But there’s a more fundamental point. What precisely is being criminalized? Not bad driving. Not destruction of property. Not the taking of human life or reckless endangerment. The crime is having the wrong substance in your blood. Yet it is possible, in fact, to have this substance in your blood, even while driving, and not commit anything like what has been traditionally called a crime.
What have we done by permitting government to criminalize the content of our blood instead of actions themselves? We have given it power to make the application of the law arbitrary, capricious, and contingent on the judgment of cops and cop technicians. Indeed, without the government’s “Breathalyzer,” there is no way to tell for sure if we are breaking the law.
Sure, we can do informal calculations in our head, based on our weight and the amount of alcohol we have had over some period of time. But at best these will be estimates. We have to wait for the government to administer a test to tell us whether or not we are criminals. That’s not the way law is supposed to work. Indeed, this is a form of tyranny.
Now, the immediate response goes this way: drunk driving has to be illegal because the probability of causing an accident rises dramatically when you drink. The answer is just as simple: government in a free society should not deal in probabilities. The law should deal in actions and actions alone, and only insofar as they damage person or property. Probabilities are something for insurance companies to assess on a competitive and voluntary basis.
This is why the campaign against “racial profiling” has intuitive plausibility to many people: surely a person shouldn’t be hounded solely because some demographic groups have higher crime rates than others. Government should be preventing and punishing crimes themselves, not probabilities and propensities. Neither, then, should we have driver profiling, which assumes that just because a person has quaffed a few he is automatically a danger.
In fact, driver profiling is worse than racial profiling, because the latter only implies that the police are more watchful, not that they criminalize race itself. Despite the propaganda, what’s being criminalized in the case of drunk driving is not the probability that a person driving will get into an accident but the fact of the blood-alcohol content itself. A drunk driver is humiliated and destroyed even when he hasn’t done any harm.
Of course, enforcement is a serious problem. A sizeable number of people leaving a bar or a restaurant would probably qualify as DUI. But there is no way for the police to know unless they are tipped off by a swerving car or reckless driving in general. But the question becomes: why not ticket the swerving or recklessness and leave the alcohol out of it? Why indeed.
To underscore the fact that it is some level of drinking that is being criminalized, government sets up these outrageous, civil-liberties-violating barricades that stop people to check their blood – even when they have done nothing at all. This is a gross attack on liberty that implies that the government has and should have total control over us, extending even to the testing of intimate biological facts. But somehow we put up with it because we have conceded the first assumption that government ought to punish us for the content of our blood and not just our actions.
There are many factors that cause a person to drive poorly. You may have sore muscles after a weight-lifting session and have slow reactions. You could be sleepy. You could be in a bad mood, or angry after a fight with your spouse. Should the government be allowed to administer anger tests, tiredness tests, or soreness tests? That is the very next step, and don’t be surprised when Congress starts to examine this question.
Already, there’s a move on to prohibit cell phone use while driving. Such an absurdity follows from the idea that government should make judgments about what we are allegedly likely to do.
What’s more, some people drive more safely after a few drinks, precisely because they know their reaction time has been slowed and they must pay more attention to safety. We all know drunks who have an amazing ability to drive perfectly after being liquored up. They should be liberated from the force of the law, and only punished if they actually do something wrong.
We need to put a stop to this whole trend now. Drunk driving should be legalized. And please don’t write me to say: “I am offended by your insensitivity because my mother was killed by a drunk driver.” Any person responsible for killing someone else is guilty of manslaughter or murder and should be punished accordingly. But it is perverse to punish a murderer not because of his crime but because of some biological consideration, e.g. he has red hair.
Bank robbers may tend to wear masks, but the crime they commit has nothing to do with the mask. In the same way, drunk drivers cause accidents but so do sober drivers, and many drunk drivers cause no accidents at all. The law should focus on violations of person and property, not scientific oddities like blood content.
There’s a final point against Clinton’s drunk-driving bill. It is a violation of states rights. Not only is there is no warrant in the Constitution for the federal government to legislate blood-alcohol content – the 10th amendment should prevent it from doing so. The question of drunk driving should first be returned to the states, and then each state should liberate drunk drivers from the force of the law.
1 week of never ending Sun near the poles
“First you pee in all their mouths”
(Source)
Having been a student of dietetics since I was about 17, it’s been an interesting ride to see how much the public’s perception has changed over the years. Until the 1990s, about as high-frequency as you could get was being vegetarian; as far as mainstream health was concerned. Even mention of that word, prior to that time, usually led to weird questions and vague inferences as to being some kind of nutcase. The usual rap from just about anyone was how necessary eating dead animals was to our survival and all the rest of that claptrap. This still goes on today, for one of my sons was told by his school teacher recently that if people were to go vegetarian they would weaken and die, and the economy would collapse because of all the dairy and animal farms. See how the programming works and at a young age? My son just openly laughed in class, being better informed upon the issue.
In the 1980s, there were very few healthful stores about, and those were usually small little out of the way places, with sawdust on the floor and with most of the health-food packages covered with a layer of dust. Usually, they were run by older women and ex-hippies, with long grey hair. Nothing was corporatized in those days. When a label said organic, it usually meant it was grown nearby and you could believe it, too.
Now, the whole health food thing is a big corporate industry. Most organic labels and small producers of healthy products have been bought out by the likes of Colgate, General Mills, Monsanto, and all the usual killers who have been GMOing our food and giving us chemicals instead of nutrition since the 1950s. Very often, while visiting a health food store, it’s a veritable sea of differing labels and stuff. And very, very expensive. A one pound bag of flax ten years ago was two bucks. Now, it’s forty dollars and still rising. To eat well, to avoid the chemical-agro industry requires a budgetary expenditure usually four to six times what is required in a usual chain grocery store, where all the foods are processed and all the vegetables are irradiated and have been genetically modified.
Even so, with a small budget, there are still ways to do the best we can and generally give our bodies the things it needs to stay healthy. Of course, if you have the money and can afford the very best, than you can probably do much better than the average person. You’ll have all the necessary organic supplements, you’ll have non-GMO food, and you can assure you and yours a healthy lifestyle that will provide for the very best of what your body needs.
I base the following on careful observation of what I’ve observed over the years, especially as it relates to diet. It seems that for most, diet is all about losing weight. Hmm…well that’s incorrect. Diet is about what we put into our bodies and when we should put it in there. Losing weight is about reversing a trend toward obesity because the person made and has continued to make, extremely poor life choices as regards to their diet.
If you are overweight and generally obese, these words will mean very little to you. You serve your stomach, gluttony, and are a slave to sweeteners, chemically modified foods, and have been hypnotized by network advertising to such an extreme, that you take little responsibility for reversing any trend toward a healthy diet until something severe happens in your life path, like diabetes, etc., And any fleeting thought of making a real change in your diet is instantly forgotten when a milkshake appears on the horizon. So be it. You have the freewill to be that, if you want. Go ahead, have another candy bar.
However, many people want freedom. In every sense of the word. That usually means that at one point in our life path, we must take stock of our diet and see if changes are necessary so that we can have a better functioning body that will do what we need it to do, so we can move to more important things. If you are such a person, than possibly you already know much of what you are reading and are about to read.
It’s been said many times, and by moi, that we must really take the time to listen to our bodies. When we are under emotional and mental stress (usually based on fear issues and thought forms,) it shows up in the body. If we have poor diet choices, it shows up in the body. If we are functioning against the higher potentials of this life wave, it shows up in the body. Everything devolves down to a physical issue, if ignored or suppressed.
Our first step and the easiest one, is to change our food choices and to do it slowly. I say this because radical changes will often lead to boomerang results, which will often—especially if you are weak in regards to being the master of your body—lead to you failing in your quest for a better diet and doing even more damage than was done previously. This is especially true if you are responsible for a group of people, such as your family, who have been for years, accustomed to having the old poisonous foods and regularly. Introduce changes firmly, but s l o w l y. If you want a total rebellion and reaction in your home, make sweeping changes overnight and you’ll have a full-scale revolt on your hands and a house full of pissed-off people. Modern processed foods are made to be addictive on purpose with additives that clearly create addictive personalities out of people. FACT. Many have made their changes early on, and their family is already on a healthy course. Well done. This article is like preaching to the choir for you.
By far, the hardest part of changing the diet in a home is when your spouse or significant other is totally enslaved by the chemical/agro food chain and has informed you that he/she likes things just the way they are…or else! This is still solvable, but you have to solve the problem correctly by making little changes here and there, and slowly—and this works best while eating dinner as a family—by educating the assemblage as to the food they are enjoying is thus and so, and for thus and so reasons. And golly, it tastes great! Then you have agreement. Children are most receptible to change, especially if they have been raised in a loving and encouraging home, devoid of television, fear, and anger.
What follows is what has worked for me. I paid close attention to my sons and gently made those changes, little by little, which would allow their bodies and especially their minds, to understand why these changes were occurring and so that there would be little addiction reaction by their various systems. Tell a kid no more soda and his body has a total fit. This is so, because colas are filled with many different kinds of addictive substances which causes withdrawal symptoms, the least of which is caffeine.
Well, this is a good start, and obviously more can be said about the varying things regarding nutrition, but already this article is getting long and I’ve learned to keep things short and to the point. However, remember this and always: keep things in balance. The highest frequency foods are fruit. Next comes tree branch foods, like olives, grapes, etc. From there its bush type foods, then foods just above the ground; then ground based foods, legumes next, and finally tubes, like potatoes. The body needs them all to be in balance. Each food group, according to what I’ve observed has different spiritual actions to different parts of the body. I’m not referring to that load of horse-dung called the four food groups put out by the FDA which is an ongoing load of nonsense, but by the spiritual caliber and energetic action each food type I’ve listed above in this paragraph by brightness. Fruits carry the largest amount of sun energy and brightness, decreasing as the vegetable gets nearer to the ground. Meat and some dairy are literally dead material very often energized with fear because of the circumstances in which the animal was slaughtered, but that’s another article for another day. Your body needs all types of vegetables, not just fruit. Fruit energetically affects the region of between the knees and the navel, whereas peas and ground based vegetables work nearer to the throat and head. You can see the effects of meals on any body, any where, within a few minutes after consuming. Same with liquids, pills, or whatever goes on or in the body. It’s visible. Fifty pages could be written about this easily, with detail, and by food article.
Trust your own perceptions, do your own thinking and research. Double check everything. Learn, know, be, observe, like that. What was written in this article was how I got my nutrition world on track and I did it by listening mainly to what my body was saying to me. Some years, it was complete vegetarian. Some, not. Some are blends. Some are vegan. Pay attention and your body and your prayers will provide you with all the guidance you need to get healthy and provide a healthy home for your loved ones. Once you get the basic and honest nutrition education, it’s easy.
Be wary of the big agro companies and their propaganda organs. If it’s an advertisement on TV, that should be enough to send you in the opposite direction for the truth of things. It’s a good rule to follow. Corporations, the big pharmaceutical companies, and the like, want a sick and a weak population that is easily programmed, hypnotized, and obedient. And the food these monsters make available to the masses is mainly, poisonous to the body.
You can do it. It’s in your hands, and while we still have the freewill and choice to make the change. One day, only the elite will have access to organic and healthy foods. The rest of us will be given whatever version of soylent green they intend for us to consume.
God bless you and yours, and I wish you the very best on your journey to good health.
There are many, many ways I can think of that women are not yet equal to men. We still only make a fraction of what men do on a per-dollar basis. (76 cents I believe?) We are not allowed into full combat in the military. We are judged on our ability to be mothers and housekeepers before our ability to do our jobs. All of that is real and I am the last person to say there aren’t a million other reasons that women have not yet attained equal status with men.
However, I have a bone to pick with my female counterparts. Feminism is all about each woman having the right to choose her own path. We should be allowed to do whatever we want in this life and not be judged by society’s arbitrary sex roles, right? Absolutely.
What about men? Do they enjoy this right?
Some examples:
Bob and Jane are a middle class couple. They have two children. They get an amicable divorce. There is a custody hearing. Both of them are good parents. Both of them want to be the primary custody holder. Who gets the children? Seriously, every single time, unless Jane lights up a crack pipe in the courtroom she will get physical custody. Bob is expected by society to be happy with every other weekend and two weeks in the summer. Don’t believe me? What would you think if you heard that a woman only saw her children every other weekend and a few holidays? I PROMISE you would think, “What did she do to lose her kids?” But, with men, that’s just the way it goes, right?
What message does it send to men about what sort of fathers they should be when it’s made clear by the courts and their ex-wives that their most important contribution as fathers is a timely child support payment?
Even in less weightier arenas men lose out. If you drive by a house with a dying lawn, is your first thought about what a crappy homeowner the WOMAN is who lives there? Doubt it.
How about at work? Women can openly talk in the break room about the hot new guy in Receiving. What kind of pigs are the men who talk about the hot new manager who happens to be a woman? If a woman asks a male co-worker out on a date, the worst that can happen is rejection. For a man, the worst that can happen is the loss of his job and a sexual harassment suit. Is that gender equality?
Women can wander the world and hug every child they see without suspicion. If a woman gathers the neighborhood children together to organize a community garden, she’s a saint. If a man does it, people wonder if he’s a pedophile. Don’t believe me? Imagine you’re in a toy store and a woman shopping alone comments on what a beautiful little girl you have. You are pleased and flattered. You fill in the woman’s story in your head. She’s probably an overworked mother out to buy toys for a birthday or holiday. What about the middle-aged man wandering that same store alone? Wouldn’t it at least cross your mind that he could be a pervert? Of course it would.
It’s completely okay, even applauded, when female writers, comediennes, singers, song writers and talk show hosts make sweeping generalizations about ALL men being stupid, sex driven, lazy assholes. How do we feel about men who say that women are all crazy, hormonal, irrational, ditzy, frigid bitches?
Thousands of men in America today are routinely physically abused by women. What shelter do they show up at with their children and the clothes on their backs? What would it take to get you to believe that a six-foot-tall, 200 pound man is abused by his tiny little wife? But, every single one of us has seen a woman who could easily beat her husband’s ass being smacked around by a wiry little Napoleon-like man. What would you think of a man you heard say, “I am afraid of my wife?”
What a wussy, right?
I must say, I don’t know a single man, NOT ONE, who thinks I am a lesser person because I have a vagina. The men I know see women as mysterious, alluring and even holy. Men are now often the stay-at-home parent. Women have the option of being the sole breadwinner in a way they have never been allowed before in human history. I know my husband would do that for me in a second.
People want what they can’t have. Women are sent the message that any man will sleep with them because sex is all they think about. Sex makes them stupid, right? Men are told that women will “hold out on them.” We all want the unattainable, what we can’t have.
What would you think of a man who told a woman he would give her diamond jewelry if she had sex with him? How is that different than “holding out” on a man because he doesn’t give you jewelry? Or take out the garbage? Or mow the lawn? There should be no “price” on intimacy.
We will only have equal rights as women when we FULLY recognize that each person is a human being, regardless of sex, with the same wants, needs and feelings as everyone else. Sure, we’re hooked up differently. But, how can we expect to be treated equally as women when every man is characterized as Homer Simpson?
One final thought – I was clothes shopping with my almost-12-year-old daughter the other day. We saw t-shirts that said, “Girl Power!” – “Girls Rock!” – “Boys Suck!” – and my personal favorite “Boys Are Great, Every Girl Should Own One!”
I also have an almost-11-year-old boy. If he went to school with a shirt that said “Boy Power!” or “Girls Are Great, Every Boy Should Own One,” how long would he last? I guess it just goes without saying that boys can do anything, including staying silent while girls are brought up in a culture that has swung from female empowerment to male bashing.
I suppose all I really want to say here is that it is wrong to judge any sex as a whole. Men and women are individuals. We all begin as children and children do what is expected of them. If we expect men to be stupid, sex-crazed frat boys, many will comply. If we expect girls to think “Boys Suck,” they will comply.
We do NOT have to stand on the backs of men to get ahead.
We can go forward together.
A site I’ve been working on with a partner:
http://www.slohappyhours.com
http://slohappyhours.com