I'm pretty sure that most gay people would rather not coerce some god fearing baker to bake their cake, especially since there are plenty of places that advertise themselves as gay friendly, and I am sure that almost all bakers, even those who disapprove of Adam and Steve would bake them a cake because business is business, I don't expect the law either way will change much that goes on in the daily life of gays and straights,
But it is the principle of the thing. There is that pizzeria that proclaimed that they wouldn't serve gays, actually I think they later backed down to where they would serve them pies, but they wouldn't cater their weddings, and they brought down this firestorm of liberal outrage on their heads. I think a bunch of people trashed them on their yelp page, and they claimed there were some death threats, though, as I have said, you would get death threats if you posted on a blog that, ahem, actual people read, that you thought George Washington was a handsome man. Then people associated with Glen Beck's website, or whatever he has these days, got up a fund and I think they got up a quarter of a million dollars for the place. At some point they closed, and now with a quarter of a million I imagine they will be retiring, but the news has moved on since then, so I haven't heard how that is going in the last week.
I think the whole thing has roots in the way restaurants in the south wouldn't serve blacks or let them stay in their hotels which was pretty hard on black people because whites owned almost everything, Well you would think the free enterprise system would beat that injustice because some guy could open up a restaurant that would serve blacks and look at all the business he would get, except that I think no white people would go there and probably the guy would get beat up and his restaurant burnt down. But once that system was broken black and white people eat together in restaurants in the south and nothing bad comes of it.
Something like that for the gays, back when we were kids their bars were all secretive and subject to being raided, and themselves, if they wanted to get along in society they had to pretend that they were straight, and now all the politicians are standing in line to get a place in the gay pride parade.
Oh yes, and of course when this controversy hit, as when any controversy hit, all the politicians leapt to their podiums to proclaim to their faithful. A few posts back I had claimed that the tea party pols were all silent in this, and certainly the govs of Indiana and Arkansas backed off, but that holy trinity Cruz, Da Huck, and Santorum, have all weighed in on the side of that pizzeria.
All in all, I would have to say the whole thing is a bit of tempest in a teapot, but if I was a public figure I wouldn't dare say that lest I reap the whirlwind on my head,
I don't know about the city fathers of Cheboygan discouraging doctors from performing abortions but I have been doing a little googling and certainly your gov, and I assume his wrecking ball reps in the state legislature, have done plenty. Mostly the usual stuff like a an abortion clinic can not be within so many miles of a school, and the doctors have to be registered with a hospital and they have to have this and that, and all of it in the name of making them safer, but with the intent of making it impossible for them to do business, and that's why some poor girl in the upper peninsula has to go the clothes hanger route or hitchhike down south. And of course there is that finagling with the insurance also.
Yeah saltpeter, one of us should do some research as to how the rumor got started. Oh wow, Snopes' explanation cites what you reported, the lack of sexual drive during boot camp, and the need to blame some external force and since they were already putting saltpeter in food to preserve it, I guess somebody put two and two together. It's not hard to see how such a rumor would expand to include guys in college dorms.
Monday, April 6, 2015
Friday, April 3, 2015
Don't Ask, Don't Tell
I saw some more about that "freedom of religion" thing tonight on Washington Week. They said it started out in New Mexico several years ago when a photographer didn't want to do the photography at a gay wedding. I don't know why he didn't just say his schedule was full or something like that. He must have been trying to make a name for himself. You can get away with lots of things if you don't make a big deal out of it. You don't need to be overly secretive either, just don't make a public spectacle of yourself. I remember, some time ago, when they tried to re-institute registration for the draft. They weren't actually going to draft anyone, they just wanted a list of names in case they ever needed it in the future. It was in the news for awhile, and then it was dropped and we never heard of it again. I think most guys just blew it off. The only one who was prosecuted for it was a guy who wrote a letter to the President of the United States explaining why he refused to register, sending copies to the news media.
It is my understanding that not everybody who looks gay or acts gay is gay. Also that a lot of gay people don't look or act particularly gay. They might dress up all frilly for the annual Gay Pride Parade but, the rest of the year, you couldn't pick them out in a crowd walking down the street. I recently found out that the guy who has been doing our income tax for over a decade is gay. It came up in a casual conversation with my hypothetical wife, who said I was the only one in town who didn't know about it. Well, it just never occurred to me to ask him and, if it had, he might have told me it was none of my business, and he would have been right. Now if, the first time I went to see him, he had a big banner over the entrance to his office saying, "I'm gay and proud of it", I probably would have gone someplace else. But he didn't, and I didn't, and I'm not about to dump him now after all these years.
Other than the wedding photographer and the guy who makes the wedding cake, most businessmen wouldn't know if a customer was gay unless he told them that he was. I don't understand why a gay couple would deliberately hire somebody for their wedding who they knew didn't like gays. Weddings are stressful enough without having to worry if somebody like that was going to make a scene. Why would anybody, gay or not, want to force anybody to participate in their wedding against his will? Are they getting married because they love each other, or just to make a political statement?
As for the politicians who are weighing in on this, both pro and con, they are also probably more concerned with making a name for themselves than they are about doing the right thing.
I am not aware of anything the Town Fathers did to discourage doctors from performing abortions in Cheboygan. As far as I know, there just aren't any doctors around here who want to do that sort of thing. There are some doctors who won't deliver babies either, I think it has something to do with liability or malpractice insurance. I understand that there are abortion clinics where that's all they do. There probably isn't enough demand to justify opening one of those around here. I'm sure that, if there was enough money in it, somebody would be doing it.
I looked up saltpeter on Wiki. The name has been applied to a number of chemicals, mostly salts of potassium or sodium. Both sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite are used as food preservatives, particularly in sausage and other smoked meats. Sodium nitrite additionally enhances the flavor and color of smoked meats. There has been some concern over the years that both chemicals might cause cancer, but studies have been generally inconclusive. Sodium nitrite is toxic when ingested in sufficient quantity, particularly to hogs, and has been used in poison bait to control wild hogs in regions where they have become a nuisance. I found no mention of any of the saltpeter type chemicals ever being deliberately fed to humans or animals to inhibit sexual activity, or that they are even capable of doing so.
It is my understanding that not everybody who looks gay or acts gay is gay. Also that a lot of gay people don't look or act particularly gay. They might dress up all frilly for the annual Gay Pride Parade but, the rest of the year, you couldn't pick them out in a crowd walking down the street. I recently found out that the guy who has been doing our income tax for over a decade is gay. It came up in a casual conversation with my hypothetical wife, who said I was the only one in town who didn't know about it. Well, it just never occurred to me to ask him and, if it had, he might have told me it was none of my business, and he would have been right. Now if, the first time I went to see him, he had a big banner over the entrance to his office saying, "I'm gay and proud of it", I probably would have gone someplace else. But he didn't, and I didn't, and I'm not about to dump him now after all these years.
Other than the wedding photographer and the guy who makes the wedding cake, most businessmen wouldn't know if a customer was gay unless he told them that he was. I don't understand why a gay couple would deliberately hire somebody for their wedding who they knew didn't like gays. Weddings are stressful enough without having to worry if somebody like that was going to make a scene. Why would anybody, gay or not, want to force anybody to participate in their wedding against his will? Are they getting married because they love each other, or just to make a political statement?
As for the politicians who are weighing in on this, both pro and con, they are also probably more concerned with making a name for themselves than they are about doing the right thing.
I am not aware of anything the Town Fathers did to discourage doctors from performing abortions in Cheboygan. As far as I know, there just aren't any doctors around here who want to do that sort of thing. There are some doctors who won't deliver babies either, I think it has something to do with liability or malpractice insurance. I understand that there are abortion clinics where that's all they do. There probably isn't enough demand to justify opening one of those around here. I'm sure that, if there was enough money in it, somebody would be doing it.
I looked up saltpeter on Wiki. The name has been applied to a number of chemicals, mostly salts of potassium or sodium. Both sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite are used as food preservatives, particularly in sausage and other smoked meats. Sodium nitrite additionally enhances the flavor and color of smoked meats. There has been some concern over the years that both chemicals might cause cancer, but studies have been generally inconclusive. Sodium nitrite is toxic when ingested in sufficient quantity, particularly to hogs, and has been used in poison bait to control wild hogs in regions where they have become a nuisance. I found no mention of any of the saltpeter type chemicals ever being deliberately fed to humans or animals to inhibit sexual activity, or that they are even capable of doing so.
freedom of religion, it's all about baking cakes
I always assumed that the less intelligent animals had less of a, oh call it life force, than the more intelligent animals, I always assumed that there was kind of a gradient with us at the top and the paramecium way down at less than toe level, Of course it's all speculation. One rather suspects that outside of some apes and maybe some dolphins and I've heard there are some pretty smart birds, that most of them lead the unexamined life. One wonders when the first proto human paused in his hunting, or in her gathering, and wondered what is this all about, all this eating and fighting and sexing, what is the purpose of it all? But probably they were immediately distracted by something that might eat them or something that they might eat, and that whole thing didn't really get started until we figured out agriculture and the guys on top. who didn't have to slave in the fields all day, got to thinking about things.
It's a story Beagles, of course feeding and sheltering animals wouldn't make them smart or else our pets would be ruling us, well they sort of do, but outside of feeding them and cleaning their litter box, and pausing to rub their bellies when our heads are full of important ideas that we want to share with our fellow deep thinkers, they pretty much let us do whatever we want. The guy had been a real human, but after he died they collected all the data about him and put it in some smart computer so that it kind of made a replica of him, the way they do in a lot of science fiction stories.
I was putting you on about the saltpeter. It was a rumor alive and well, though few of us actually believed it, when I went to college, and I am sure it is still around today. I don't know why saltpeter of all chemicals got the rep, but it doesn't do that, and neither do they, put it in the mashed potatoes.
I was wrong about one thing about those freedom of religion laws, I just read last night that both Cruz and Huckabee have come out against being against them, and saying basically that the good thing about them is that they keep godly bakers from having to bake gay wedding cakes. I assume that those laws would also make it okay for women to pose for their drivers license photos in their burkas, but this is not something they are talking about. If they were to extrapolate I am sure that they would say something along the lines that this is a Christian nation, so Christianity, and only their particular fundamentalist brand, not that liberal Christian clap trap, is the only religion that should be defended.
Well anyway, as I'm sure you've read, these kind of laws first started in 1993 when the gov wanted to protect peyote eating Indians. And not all these kind of laws are the same, they have different variants on who can sue of their rights are validated, people, corporations, etc?
And it's kind of an amorphous thing because how do you define religion and what is a reasonable accommodation? We can probably let Sikhs grow beards, but probably not let Rastafarians smoke pot. But of course what it is really about, in the here and now, is baking cakes for gay weddings.
That abortion thing, they are doing that all over the red states, making laws where clinics have to have this and that and the doctors have to do this and that, so that basically no clinic can conform to that, so that even though the Roe vs Wade has never been overturned, most people in a red state can't get an abortion without driving hundreds of miles.
It's a story Beagles, of course feeding and sheltering animals wouldn't make them smart or else our pets would be ruling us, well they sort of do, but outside of feeding them and cleaning their litter box, and pausing to rub their bellies when our heads are full of important ideas that we want to share with our fellow deep thinkers, they pretty much let us do whatever we want. The guy had been a real human, but after he died they collected all the data about him and put it in some smart computer so that it kind of made a replica of him, the way they do in a lot of science fiction stories.
I was putting you on about the saltpeter. It was a rumor alive and well, though few of us actually believed it, when I went to college, and I am sure it is still around today. I don't know why saltpeter of all chemicals got the rep, but it doesn't do that, and neither do they, put it in the mashed potatoes.
I was wrong about one thing about those freedom of religion laws, I just read last night that both Cruz and Huckabee have come out against being against them, and saying basically that the good thing about them is that they keep godly bakers from having to bake gay wedding cakes. I assume that those laws would also make it okay for women to pose for their drivers license photos in their burkas, but this is not something they are talking about. If they were to extrapolate I am sure that they would say something along the lines that this is a Christian nation, so Christianity, and only their particular fundamentalist brand, not that liberal Christian clap trap, is the only religion that should be defended.
Well anyway, as I'm sure you've read, these kind of laws first started in 1993 when the gov wanted to protect peyote eating Indians. And not all these kind of laws are the same, they have different variants on who can sue of their rights are validated, people, corporations, etc?
And it's kind of an amorphous thing because how do you define religion and what is a reasonable accommodation? We can probably let Sikhs grow beards, but probably not let Rastafarians smoke pot. But of course what it is really about, in the here and now, is baking cakes for gay weddings.
That abortion thing, they are doing that all over the red states, making laws where clinics have to have this and that and the doctors have to do this and that, so that basically no clinic can conform to that, so that even though the Roe vs Wade has never been overturned, most people in a red state can't get an abortion without driving hundreds of miles.
Thursday, April 2, 2015
Are We Having Fun Yet?
I didn't mean to say that animals don't enjoy anything, just that they don't enjoy anything the same way we do. I have heard and read that a well trained adult German shepherd dog is about as smart as a two year old human. Two year olds certainly enjoy things, but not the same way that adults do. The significant difference between human behavior, including thoughts and emotions, and animal behavior, is that human behavior is more complex. Some of that has to do with self awareness. When one of your kitties is playing, they must be having fun. But do they know they're having fun, or are they just doing it because it feels good at the moment? Then again, a lot of humans don't look into things any deeper than one of your cats does, so maybe you're right about this one.
I have had pets that weren't very useful, but I loved them just the same. The thing is, you have to recognize their limitations. You can't expect a pet to replace your wife or girlfriend. Well, maybe you can, but I don't want to, thank you very much. You can only teach an animal so much, and then you either accept them as they are or get rid of them. Come to think of it, people are like that too, so maybe you're right about this one.
The problem with your sci-fi story about animals developing civilizations is that lots of animals in the real world are fed and cared for like that, and they don't develop civilizations. I think you would need to do more for them than feed and protect them. You would need to do some selective breeding and spend a lot of time educating your charges. Even then, I don't think you would live long enough to see any significant progress made. You said that the guy in your story wasn't exactly human, some sort of computer generated facsimile. In that case, he could theoretically live forever, so maybe he could do it.
I didn't say that saltpeter doesn't work, just that the amount of it you would have to ingest would probably make you sick. The fact that it is used as a food preservative in trace amounts might be the origin of the myth. The college students you describe don't sound like any college students I have ever heard of. Is it possible you are putting me on? As far as the military, we gave the subject some thought when I was in basic training. The consensus was that the reason you don't get a hard on in basic training is that there are no women around, and frequent shake down inspections quickly relieved us of any girlie magazines we had managed to smuggle in. Sure enough, when we graduated and went on to our permanent assignments, where they let us go downtown on pass occasionally and didn't care about our literary pursuits, we all were back to our old selves again. Now that they let gays into the military, there might be a valid reason to feed saltpeter to the troops but, back in my day, there wasn't. I don't know if they feed it to men in prison but, from what I've heard about prison, maybe they should.
I just heard about those "freedom of religion" laws on the news today, and they didn't give a lot of details. They did say that, although only two states have passed them so far, several other states, including Michigan, are considering something similar. I have heard before that Michigan does not have a law prohibiting discrimination against gays, at least not yet. We must have something like that about abortions, though, because no doctor around here will perform one. If a woman in God's Country wants an abortion, she has to go Down Below to get it, just like they did before abortion was legalized. Maybe that's what they were shooting for with those "freedom of religion" laws, but I don't know that for a fact. At any rate, they have certainly kicked the hornet's nest. It's like that old paper mill proverb: "When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's hard to remember that your original intention was merely to drain the swamp."
I have had pets that weren't very useful, but I loved them just the same. The thing is, you have to recognize their limitations. You can't expect a pet to replace your wife or girlfriend. Well, maybe you can, but I don't want to, thank you very much. You can only teach an animal so much, and then you either accept them as they are or get rid of them. Come to think of it, people are like that too, so maybe you're right about this one.
The problem with your sci-fi story about animals developing civilizations is that lots of animals in the real world are fed and cared for like that, and they don't develop civilizations. I think you would need to do more for them than feed and protect them. You would need to do some selective breeding and spend a lot of time educating your charges. Even then, I don't think you would live long enough to see any significant progress made. You said that the guy in your story wasn't exactly human, some sort of computer generated facsimile. In that case, he could theoretically live forever, so maybe he could do it.
I didn't say that saltpeter doesn't work, just that the amount of it you would have to ingest would probably make you sick. The fact that it is used as a food preservative in trace amounts might be the origin of the myth. The college students you describe don't sound like any college students I have ever heard of. Is it possible you are putting me on? As far as the military, we gave the subject some thought when I was in basic training. The consensus was that the reason you don't get a hard on in basic training is that there are no women around, and frequent shake down inspections quickly relieved us of any girlie magazines we had managed to smuggle in. Sure enough, when we graduated and went on to our permanent assignments, where they let us go downtown on pass occasionally and didn't care about our literary pursuits, we all were back to our old selves again. Now that they let gays into the military, there might be a valid reason to feed saltpeter to the troops but, back in my day, there wasn't. I don't know if they feed it to men in prison but, from what I've heard about prison, maybe they should.
I just heard about those "freedom of religion" laws on the news today, and they didn't give a lot of details. They did say that, although only two states have passed them so far, several other states, including Michigan, are considering something similar. I have heard before that Michigan does not have a law prohibiting discrimination against gays, at least not yet. We must have something like that about abortions, though, because no doctor around here will perform one. If a woman in God's Country wants an abortion, she has to go Down Below to get it, just like they did before abortion was legalized. Maybe that's what they were shooting for with those "freedom of religion" laws, but I don't know that for a fact. At any rate, they have certainly kicked the hornet's nest. It's like that old paper mill proverb: "When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's hard to remember that your original intention was merely to drain the swamp."
my science fiction story
I was looking towards a more detailed description of animals' emotional response to having sex. Not a whole lot of details, but just inasmuch as whether they seem to be enjoying themselves or if they are just in the thrall of hormones, but I suppose it could be both.
Just from my limited experience with house cats I would have to disagree with your idea that animals don't enjoy anything. I guess you could call eating a biological imperative, but what about play? They play all the time, and they come back for more. Oh I can't see how you can't call that enjoyment. I know that you had that Beagle that you are named after, but I suspect he was more of a working dog, and I wonder if you had any pets. Did you ever have an animal that was of no service to Beaglesonia, but you kept it around and fed it, just because you liked it?
I think any further evolution intelligentwise is going to have to wait until we are gone. We are not going to tolerate any competition, Hey remember that "I once read a science fiction story where..." thing. This gives me a chance to tell one. I may have told it before, but I can't pass up the chance to tell it again.
There was this guy who wondered why rabbits, foxes, alligators, never developed any kind of civilization, and he figured it was because they had such a hard time surviving that they never had any time to figure things out, so he fed them and housed them so that all they had to do all day was think about science and philosophy and the arts, and sure enough they developed their own advanced civilization.
This guy had also fed and housed the ants, and now they were building steel towers instead of ant hills and little robot ants were buzzing through the skies, and they were taking up more and more land, and the other animals were alarmed, but they didn't know what to do about it because how do you talk to ants?
Man had left the Earth, I don't remember why, but they had like saved a simulation of the guy who had fed and housed them on a computer so that they could talk to him when they came across a problem. So they explained the situation to him and right off he told them how to make ant poison. They were horrified, they had worshiped the guy and here he had proposed mass slaughter.
I suppose the big hole in the story is how can you ever expect to have an advanced civilization if you aren't ruthless? You and I wouldn't be discussing things on this fancy dancy electronic blog if we weren't on the winning side of slaughters going back to the first guy who figured out how to throw a rock.
Saltpeter doesn't work? Well then how do you explain why the guys in my dorm spent all their time discussing philosophy and doing arts and crafts and trying to find a cure for cancer, instead of staring at the windows of the girls' dorm for a peek of a nipple or whatever or swapping those skin mags from trembling sweaty hand to trembling sweaty hand, like we would have done had that pat of butter not lain so sensuously in her little pool of steaming gravy?
What about the current religious freedom laws controversy? Here are these govs of Indiana and Arkansas thinking they are quietly going to pass a law so that their god fearing bakers won't have to sell cakes for gay weddings, a little sop to the bible thumpers, and all of a sudden they are caught in this media firestorm, and back pedaling as fast as they can while none of the prominent religious candidates, Cruz, Huckabee, Santorum, dare utter a word to defend them?
I do believe it is a bit of overkill, but I do think they deserve what they are getting.
Just from my limited experience with house cats I would have to disagree with your idea that animals don't enjoy anything. I guess you could call eating a biological imperative, but what about play? They play all the time, and they come back for more. Oh I can't see how you can't call that enjoyment. I know that you had that Beagle that you are named after, but I suspect he was more of a working dog, and I wonder if you had any pets. Did you ever have an animal that was of no service to Beaglesonia, but you kept it around and fed it, just because you liked it?
I think any further evolution intelligentwise is going to have to wait until we are gone. We are not going to tolerate any competition, Hey remember that "I once read a science fiction story where..." thing. This gives me a chance to tell one. I may have told it before, but I can't pass up the chance to tell it again.
There was this guy who wondered why rabbits, foxes, alligators, never developed any kind of civilization, and he figured it was because they had such a hard time surviving that they never had any time to figure things out, so he fed them and housed them so that all they had to do all day was think about science and philosophy and the arts, and sure enough they developed their own advanced civilization.
This guy had also fed and housed the ants, and now they were building steel towers instead of ant hills and little robot ants were buzzing through the skies, and they were taking up more and more land, and the other animals were alarmed, but they didn't know what to do about it because how do you talk to ants?
Man had left the Earth, I don't remember why, but they had like saved a simulation of the guy who had fed and housed them on a computer so that they could talk to him when they came across a problem. So they explained the situation to him and right off he told them how to make ant poison. They were horrified, they had worshiped the guy and here he had proposed mass slaughter.
I suppose the big hole in the story is how can you ever expect to have an advanced civilization if you aren't ruthless? You and I wouldn't be discussing things on this fancy dancy electronic blog if we weren't on the winning side of slaughters going back to the first guy who figured out how to throw a rock.
Saltpeter doesn't work? Well then how do you explain why the guys in my dorm spent all their time discussing philosophy and doing arts and crafts and trying to find a cure for cancer, instead of staring at the windows of the girls' dorm for a peek of a nipple or whatever or swapping those skin mags from trembling sweaty hand to trembling sweaty hand, like we would have done had that pat of butter not lain so sensuously in her little pool of steaming gravy?
What about the current religious freedom laws controversy? Here are these govs of Indiana and Arkansas thinking they are quietly going to pass a law so that their god fearing bakers won't have to sell cakes for gay weddings, a little sop to the bible thumpers, and all of a sudden they are caught in this media firestorm, and back pedaling as fast as they can while none of the prominent religious candidates, Cruz, Huckabee, Santorum, dare utter a word to defend them?
I do believe it is a bit of overkill, but I do think they deserve what they are getting.
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
The Naked Ape
That's the title of a book. I have never read it, but I suppose it has something to do with our current subject.
I don't know why apes and humans are the only animals that don't go into heat. Maybe it's just an evolutionary experiment. Come to think of it, maybe we are just an evolutionary experiment. So far we appear to be the smartest animals that evolution has come up with, but evolution is still going on, and we can only speculate about what it might lead to in the future. Be that as it may, I don't think that animals enjoy sex, or anything else for that matter, the way we do.
As far as I know, that saltpeter in the food thing is just a myth. Saltpeter is sometimes used in agriculture to suppress breeding in livestock, but it's primary use is as a food preservative. Lots of food probably has saltpeter in it, but not in sufficient amounts to suppress sexual behavior in humans. My father used to put it into his sausage, but only in very small amounts. He said that you had to be careful about that because too much of it will make people sick. The chemical name for saltpeter is either sodium nitrate or sodium nitrite, I forget which. You have to be careful about that too because one of them is quite toxic. If you put the wrong one into food, you can kill people with it. I seem to remember that happened once when I was a kid, which is how my father came to be talking about it at the dinner table one day. I mean, it didn't happen with my dad's sausage, it happened somewhere else and was in the news at the time. I believe it was bacon, but I don't remember which brand.
There are several reasons why I like my proposal better than yours. One is that the pill, or any other form of birth control short of surgery, is not 100% effective. I seem to remember the pill is about 90%, unless they have improved it over the years. None of them are effective at all if you don't use them.
Poor people have access to free birth control right now, at least in Michigan. You just go to your local Health Department, fill out some papers, and they give it to you for free. When I had my vasectomy, some forty years ago, they even paid for that, and I wasn't even poor. I wouldn't have known about it if my doctor hadn't told me. If poor people are not using birth control, it's either that they don't want to or they don't know about it, it's not that they can't afford it.
Unwanted pregnancy is only part of the problem with sex in America today. The other part is that we spend way too much time obsessing about it. Part of the reason for that is that it's used so much in advertising. People use it to manipulate each other in other ways too. It's not just the sex, it's all the social crap that goes with it. Delaying puberty wouldn't just delay sex and pregnancy, it would delay having to put up with all that social crap in the vain hope that it will lead to you getting laid. It's like that famous sports guy said: "Spending all night with a woman never hurt a player's game. It's spending all night looking for a woman that hurts a player's game."
Let's face it, neither of our proposals is likely to be adopted any time soon, but they're interesting to talk about anyway. Someday, after we're long gone, somebody might find our old blogs and declare that we were geniuses, way ahead of our time. Too bad we won't be around to bask in our well deserved glory.
I don't know why apes and humans are the only animals that don't go into heat. Maybe it's just an evolutionary experiment. Come to think of it, maybe we are just an evolutionary experiment. So far we appear to be the smartest animals that evolution has come up with, but evolution is still going on, and we can only speculate about what it might lead to in the future. Be that as it may, I don't think that animals enjoy sex, or anything else for that matter, the way we do.
As far as I know, that saltpeter in the food thing is just a myth. Saltpeter is sometimes used in agriculture to suppress breeding in livestock, but it's primary use is as a food preservative. Lots of food probably has saltpeter in it, but not in sufficient amounts to suppress sexual behavior in humans. My father used to put it into his sausage, but only in very small amounts. He said that you had to be careful about that because too much of it will make people sick. The chemical name for saltpeter is either sodium nitrate or sodium nitrite, I forget which. You have to be careful about that too because one of them is quite toxic. If you put the wrong one into food, you can kill people with it. I seem to remember that happened once when I was a kid, which is how my father came to be talking about it at the dinner table one day. I mean, it didn't happen with my dad's sausage, it happened somewhere else and was in the news at the time. I believe it was bacon, but I don't remember which brand.
There are several reasons why I like my proposal better than yours. One is that the pill, or any other form of birth control short of surgery, is not 100% effective. I seem to remember the pill is about 90%, unless they have improved it over the years. None of them are effective at all if you don't use them.
Poor people have access to free birth control right now, at least in Michigan. You just go to your local Health Department, fill out some papers, and they give it to you for free. When I had my vasectomy, some forty years ago, they even paid for that, and I wasn't even poor. I wouldn't have known about it if my doctor hadn't told me. If poor people are not using birth control, it's either that they don't want to or they don't know about it, it's not that they can't afford it.
Unwanted pregnancy is only part of the problem with sex in America today. The other part is that we spend way too much time obsessing about it. Part of the reason for that is that it's used so much in advertising. People use it to manipulate each other in other ways too. It's not just the sex, it's all the social crap that goes with it. Delaying puberty wouldn't just delay sex and pregnancy, it would delay having to put up with all that social crap in the vain hope that it will lead to you getting laid. It's like that famous sports guy said: "Spending all night with a woman never hurt a player's game. It's spending all night looking for a woman that hurts a player's game."
Let's face it, neither of our proposals is likely to be adopted any time soon, but they're interesting to talk about anyway. Someday, after we're long gone, somebody might find our old blogs and declare that we were geniuses, way ahead of our time. Too bad we won't be around to bask in our well deserved glory.
Mmmmmm, mashed potatoes.
Well I suppose there are two aspects to sex, and one of course is to continue the species, and the other is that it is fun. Well it has to be fun to get us to do it. Up until humans, if you subscribe to the theory, as some do, though they are wrong, that the sole purpose of millions of years of evolution was to produce that apple of God's eye, the human natural, that whole reproduction thing was resolved by having the females go into heat. As for the males one would suppose they were always ready, but they never got interested until the female went into heat.
As a city boy, I would have to lean on Beagles' barnyard expertise on as to whether or not animals enjoy having sex. The only experience I have with this is having a female cat who went into heat, seven litters worth. She certainly seemed amorous, but I have to tell you, it didn't look like she was having fun.
Nevertheless it is certainly an effective tool, and I guess it has the added feature of making sure that babies were made at the right time of year.
But for some reason that all went out the window when it came to the apple of God's eye. Actually there are also those sex maniac chimps, but I believe they are not a step on the way to us, but rather a different path taken by the ape from which we both spring, but I'm not in the mood for wiking around this morning.
Well you wonder why Mother Nature didn't give us that going into heat thing. It would make it easier for those of us who would like to solve the problem of too many babies. Whenever the heat time came we could just send off the women to some island vacation, and then who knows what they would do there, but we men could satisfy ourselves by humping each other's legs. Not a very tidy solution, but maybe it is so crazy that it just might work.
Then there is that other solution. You never spent any time in a college dorm, but I imagine it was common knowledge in the army mess halls, and here I refer to saltpeter in the mashed potatoes. Of course you could always skip the mashed potatoes, but that little volcano with the pat of butter swimming in that pool of rich brown gravy measured against the chance of any of us of actually getting any kept us licking our plates.
The thing is, the pill is right there, already invented, this puberty delay thing in the arm that you have to get permission to turn on, we don't have anything invented like that, and it's kind of Rube Goldberg, and it would really mess up society, probably worse than having a lot of babies. But you seem to be preoccupied with this idea that the time spent thinking about sex would automatically be redirected into worthwhile pursuits, and I am not buying that at all.
And I was going to say that if sex was easy as asking the girl next door what she is doing tonight, then maybe we wouldn't be thinking about it all the time, but I'm not sure if that is true.
As a city boy, I would have to lean on Beagles' barnyard expertise on as to whether or not animals enjoy having sex. The only experience I have with this is having a female cat who went into heat, seven litters worth. She certainly seemed amorous, but I have to tell you, it didn't look like she was having fun.
Nevertheless it is certainly an effective tool, and I guess it has the added feature of making sure that babies were made at the right time of year.
But for some reason that all went out the window when it came to the apple of God's eye. Actually there are also those sex maniac chimps, but I believe they are not a step on the way to us, but rather a different path taken by the ape from which we both spring, but I'm not in the mood for wiking around this morning.
Well you wonder why Mother Nature didn't give us that going into heat thing. It would make it easier for those of us who would like to solve the problem of too many babies. Whenever the heat time came we could just send off the women to some island vacation, and then who knows what they would do there, but we men could satisfy ourselves by humping each other's legs. Not a very tidy solution, but maybe it is so crazy that it just might work.
Then there is that other solution. You never spent any time in a college dorm, but I imagine it was common knowledge in the army mess halls, and here I refer to saltpeter in the mashed potatoes. Of course you could always skip the mashed potatoes, but that little volcano with the pat of butter swimming in that pool of rich brown gravy measured against the chance of any of us of actually getting any kept us licking our plates.
The thing is, the pill is right there, already invented, this puberty delay thing in the arm that you have to get permission to turn on, we don't have anything invented like that, and it's kind of Rube Goldberg, and it would really mess up society, probably worse than having a lot of babies. But you seem to be preoccupied with this idea that the time spent thinking about sex would automatically be redirected into worthwhile pursuits, and I am not buying that at all.
And I was going to say that if sex was easy as asking the girl next door what she is doing tonight, then maybe we wouldn't be thinking about it all the time, but I'm not sure if that is true.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)