hello

BTW, were you on the Ike?

Two more lessons:
1. Oh sure. Easy enough to stand up to the little voice in your head. But what if there's eight or nine of them and they're all telling you something different and what the **** do you do then?
2. Default to the one that reminds you there's scotch in the cupboard.

Here's a fun thing to try. The next time you fly and before you get to the airport, with something obvious like a bit of masking tape, alter your passport slightly so that your photo is underneath another you've added, and it's low quality and a bit the wrong size and it is that classic photograph of Charles Manson.

I'm not sure I would describe my experience as "standing up to the little voice". More like putting it aside,in all the confusion of others somewhat like it, for a moment, waiting for some more powerful influence to take over. At last confronted, with the self-serving fickleness of the little voice, entertaining a sense of irony.

Besides there were (and are always ) several of the little critters giving conflicting advice and views, just as you wrote, and you know it. They all lie, and you or I could do much worse than heeding the "there's Scotch in the cupboard " one.

Yes. I was Executive officer of Eisenhower for a couple of years in the early 1980s.

I'll say there are. I recall one time when I was rather young and with a somewhat more mature lady and I was kissing her breasts and then her tummy and heading south and she put her hand below my chin to gently lift my face so she could look me in the eye and said, "Remember, when you get down there, to listen to the little voice'

Christ! It's always about sex....ain't it?

I'm just trying to fit in.

More sex talk!

I don't know what happened to this community while I was away but I expect that Gary Bauer could instruct us.

My communication to george above which seems to have caught your attention was merely the continuation of an old conversation between he and I regarding theological notions. That incident which was the subject of my post marked the point where I finally cast aside the tattered remnants of my Mennonite monotheism. Surely, I thought, an animism of some sort must be the truth of things if unique talking spirits dwell in such an odd place.

And, by the way, if you happen to see george, would you inquire as to what the heck they were getting up to in Gomorrah. We have the historical goods on Sodom but other place must have been REALLY kinky if they aren't even going to give us a tip.

There's an italian book about it (followed by a film re the book)..
the writer is secreted away, no kidding.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomorrah_(film)

Drat. That's modern-day Mafia stuff. What a waste of a TV series. It coulda been really good.

Speaking of Helen Mirren, have you guys seen this 1975 interview? If you haven't, get to it. Trust me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmlP_cFOoAM

You brightened a busy afternoon with that one !

It might have merely been quantity as opposed to greater kinkiness. I was once, as a young 8th grade boy, abruptly kicked out of the confessional by an angry priest. (It had been an unusually fortunate week, and to make matters worse, I confused the word fornication with adultery ..... a word I can still hear ringing through the otherwise silent church as I hastily exited the box.)

Later the Jesuits explained the moral difference between the mere inappropriate satisfaction of a natural appetite and being really mean. Yet another reason to like them.

Some years ago, I believe I might have alerted you to my thesis that Satan smuggled himself into the world hiding in the underwear of Catholics.

PS... your earlier flight story was a lot of fun. Thanks.

And by way of intro to this change of pace, permit a biblical quotation... My father's house has many potatoes.

"People on the Left often fail to realize this, but conservatism really does speak to and for people who have lost something. It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory owner.The loss may be as material as a portion of one’s income or as ethereal as a sense of standing. It may be of something that was never legitimately owned in the first place; it may, when compared with what the conservative retains, be small. Even so, it’s a loss, and nothing is ever so cherished as that which we no longer possess. It used to be one of the great virtues of the Left that it alone understood the often zero-sum nature of politics, where the gains of one class necessarily entail the losses of another. But as that sense of conflict diminishes on the Left, it has fallen to the Right to remind voters that there really are losers in politics and that it is they—and only they—who speak for them. “All conservatism begins with loss,” Andrew Sullivan rightly notes, which makes conservatism not the Party of Order, as Mill and others have claimed, but the party of the loser.

The chief aim of the loser is not—and indeed cannot be—preservation or protection. It is recovery and restoration. And that, it seems to me, is the secret of conservatism’s success. Because his losses are recent—the Right agitates against reform in real time, not millennia after the fact—the conservative can credibly claim to his constituency, indeed to the polity at large, that his goals are practical and achievable. He merely seeks to regain what is his, and the fact that he once had it—indeed, probably had it for some time—suggests that he is capable of possessing it again. Where the Left’s program of redistribution raises the question of whether its beneficiaries are truly prepared to wield the powers they seek, the conservative project of restoration suffers from no such challenge. Unlike the reformer or the revolutionary, moreover, who faces the nearly impossible task of empowering the powerless—that is, of turning people from what they are into what they are not—the conservative merely asks his followers to do more of what they always have done (albeit better)."

That's from Corey Robin's book, "The Reactionary Mind, from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin" (p 58). A hell of a read.

Possibly true, but very Protestant of you to say so. The truth is that Catholic guilt and forgiveness was the sauce that made adolescent sex sweet beyond compare. The delightful descent from the resolve to sin no more to Beverly's tits and puss was exciting beyond compare because of it. The idea that an inch more, and one was risking everything, made that first thrust an unforgettable delight. The resulting guilt was a telling counterpoint, but it was easily erased, allowing one to be born and die again of that same sweet joy. I miss it still.

One problem with sex is that the first realization makes it become a lifelong desire.

Dan Savage alerted me to this. It's utterly horrid. http://bit.ly/1vpc5zX