I stand with Israel. I always have and I always will. Am Yisrael Chai!
Originally posted 2016-04-23 11:05:32.
While women-only toilets, restrooms and other spaces have come to be seen as a place of refuge, safe havens for women.
Originally posted 2016-03-27 12:13:52.
It’s Easter. In fact, this is the 60th Easter I have passed on Earth, although I don'[t remember the first few. Or, for that matter a good selection of those that came after. However, Easter is an important time. It is the beginning of Spring, officially defined as the first full moon after the Spring Equinox and, perhaps more importantly, the moment when the year comes into bloom. I know this might not be apparent in Canada and suchlike airts, but still. You should have left them to the Indians.
As the beginning of the year of fertility, Easter is a great Goddess festival and was such, long before it was hijacked by Christians. Indeed it was celebrated in ancient Sumer, 7,000 years ago, when the High Priestess would take a young man as consort for the year. We do not know what his fate was at the end of it. Still it is a time of giving thanks, when we should express our gratitude. And so I do.
Originally posted 2021-04-25 15:05:10.
The Princes were previously close, with William always acting as a protective big brother to Harry. If they have ‘buried the hatchet’ as Harris suggests, then that can only be good. But what about Harry’s wife, Meghan Markle?
[ebook_store ebook_id=”18652″]
Originally posted 2016-03-07 10:32:53.
A couple of weeks ago I went to Mount Arayat National Park in Pampanga, here in the Philippines.
I’d been invited by some friends to spend the day, with a walk in the mountain park in the morning followed by socialising later. This meant first taking a bus to San Fernando and then another, local bus. We wanted to be there for sunrise, which is why I found myself sitting in a taxi at 3.30 am, hurtling through Quezon City at speeds in excess of 100 kph. It was a good adrenaline rush to start the day.
Originally posted 2016-02-22 07:01:30.
‘Identity politics’ claims, on the face of it, that everyone has the right to identify as anything they want, and we all have to accept that. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Brilliant. So egalitarian. And yes, if I decide that I ‘identify’ as a Prosthetic Vogon leading a constructor fleet across the galaxy which intends to obliterate the Earth to make way for an interstellar superhighway, or that I am Superman, Napoleon or for that matter Jesus Christ, then it matters little; I’m just barking mad and decent people will humour me until I become so delusional that I need to be locked up for my own safety. I would be, in common-sense terms, a harmless lunatic.
Originally posted 2016-01-12 17:34:20.
I am drinking rum with a ghost. He’s sitting over there with all my memories beside him. He wrote the soundtrack to my life and now he’s gone. Now he’s just a ghost, a phantom. A collection of sounds and images, words and memories. But the real artist that he was has gone.
Originally posted 2020-11-02 15:40:45.
Identifying – or self-identifying – a genuinely pre-transsexual HSTS is relatively straightforward. But before we get to the symptoms, let’s look at the cause of all this. It is called Sexual Inversion. There are four basic parameters to consider in diagnosing this: Sex, Sexuality, Gender and Gender Dysphoria.
Sex, of course, is the product of our chromosomes; everyone is either male (XY) or female (XX), apart from a small number who have chromosomal variations, who are usually called ‘intersex’ – but here too, their condition is defined by their chromosomes. Sex can never be changed.
Sexuality describes our basic sexual impulse. We either have male sexuality or female sexuality. Male is sometimes called Active and is the desire to penetrate and female is Passive or the desire to be penetrated. In most people these are aligned but in a small percentage of individuals this is not so. This results in males with female sexuality and females with male sexuality. This is Congenital Sexual Inversion. This is a physiological condition and so forms an aetiology or scale of variation.
Originally posted 2015-11-16 13:08:05.
I was out on my Ducati on Friday; you know, Friday the 13th. It was a beautiful morning, sunny and mild, and I was thinking how nice it was for what would probably be the last time I venture out on a motorcycle this year. The sun struck low across the landscape and the trees, which are already mostly bare of leaves, filtered its rays. But they were still strong and sometimes it was hard to see, even though I had cleaned my visor before venturing out.
The contrast in light between the sunny parts of the road and those under the trees, especially those grouped together where they still have their leaved, was huge. It was like switching the lights off as I passed onto the shade.
I’ve been riding motorcycles for four decades now and you don’t do that without learning a thing or two. I was reminded of one on Friday: watch it! It may be beautiful and sunny with perfect dry tarmac out in the open, but under the trees the road will be wet.
Originally posted 2023-12-05 14:03:19.
For several years now I have not been writing about Islam much. Partly this was because my interest was elsewhere. However the recent murderous attacks by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians, many of them children and even babies, and the even more recent atrocity in Mindanao, where ISIS has resurfaced, have forced the issue. None of us can stand by and watch this demonic genocide without protest. We have to name the enemy. It is not Hamas, Hizbollah, al-Qaeda or ISIS. It is not ‘radical Islam’ or even ‘Islamism.’ It is the whole, the entirety of Islam, all of it. Islam cannot exist in a civilised world and so, Islam must be not only be defeated, but completely erased..
Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and the West Bank after the 1967 War and had maintained control, although it had mistakenly allowed Hamas and Hizbollah to establish Islamic schools within these areas. In 2006, however, Israel decided, on the quid pro quo of peace, to return control of these areas to the Arabs. Hamas was voted into power in Gaza and immediately abolished elections and democracy, saying they are ‘un-Islamic.’ (Which speaks volumes in itself.)
Through its ruthless control of the civil state and also through its teachings in schools, Hamas has turned Gaza into a breeding ground for the most appalling, evil terrorists in the world. Demonic genocide was in their hearts and it was only a matter of time before they acted.
Originally posted 2015-10-06 11:30:05.
I’ve spent a lot of time looking at how societies might have been structured before the development of agriculture. Clearly, we can’t directly study the human groups that existed outside Africa between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, because they no longer exist. So I also looked at relatives of humans, particularly our closest, bonobos, Pan paniscus.
Our ancestors left very little evidence. Although they did use stone and bone, a great deal of their artefacts were made of wood or leather and were perishable. The few that we do have are somewhat mysterious.
To try to shed light on this, we reviewed a wide range of anthropological literature. We especially concentrated on extant traditional societies, of which there are a surprising number, despite the attempts by religious fundamentalists, especially the Christian and Muslim ones, to eradicate them. (As a matter of fact, Islam has been less damaging to many traditional societies than Christianity, as we see from the number of traditional groups still living, and respected, in Indonesia.)
We reviewed the mythology that was recorded soon after the invention of writing, in Sumer in the 5th Millennium BCE. We then compared this to modern mythologies which form part of traditional cultures. We also looked at similar species, and that’s where bonobos came in.
