Brutally Honest

Food: The New Sex

irreverently posted by guest blogger, Leslie

Back in the old days, it used to be OK to eat whatever you wanted and it was wrong to have sex with anyone but your spouse. Now, it's OK to have sex with whomever will have you and it's wrong to eat anything but broccoli. Or broccoli type stuff.

Coincidence? Think of all the foods of the night that are now verboten. Steak, butter, carbs, salt, alcohol etc, etc.

Tarts, all!

Gastroporn: A book or magazine with pictures of food so good it makes you say "more, yes, GIVE IT TO ME!!!" and then feel guilty just for looking at it.

Guilt, guilt, guilt.

What's my point? My point, and I have one, is: Food is the new piety movement!

Sex was once a matter of universal moral law and food a matter of taste. Now, food is a matter of universal moral law and sex is a matter of taste. The guilt flipped from sex to food.

So now I ask you, is it worth it? All this sex we the people are having? Is it worth it to have so much sex and only be able to nibble on a little celery at meal times? Don't even get me started on the egregiousness of decaf.

3 meals a day, every day, day after day. Year after year.

I don't know. The free love types told us about all the guilt back in the day when people were more reserved about only sleeping with their spouse. Seems to me, it could have been worse. At least they had their cake and they ate it too.

I, Alice the Camel, wrote portions of this here, there and everywhere.

The White Wampum: Penseroso by E. Pauline Johnson

posted by guest blogger, Leslie

Once in a while I get the feeling there is someone looking out for me. What a day it has been.

In the midst of it all, I happened past a shelf of 10 cent books and flipped open a hardcover which turned out to be a book of Canadian poetry by Mohawk-British E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) published in 1912. Now, I am neither Mohawk, nor British, but she and I stood together for a brief moment this afternoon and I came away blessed.

Penseroso

Soulless is all humanity to me
To-night. My keenest longing is to be
Alone, alone with God’s grey earth that seems
Pulse of my pulse and consort of my dreams.

To-night my soul desires no fellowship,
Or fellow-being; crave I but to slip
Thro’ space on space, till flesh no more can bind,
And I may quit for aye my fellow kind

Let me but feel athwart my cheek the lash
Of whipping wind, but hear the torrent dash
Adown the mountain steep, ’twere more my choice
Than touch of human hand, than human voice.

Let me but wander on the shore night-stilled,
Drinking its darkness till my soul is filled;
The breathing of the salt sea on my hair,
My outstretched hands but grasping empty air.

Let me but feel the pulse of Nature’s soul
Athrob on mine, let seas and thunders roll
O’er night and me; sands whirl; winds, waters beat;
For God’s grey earth has no cheap counterfeit

taken from: Flint and Feather as part of a poetry collection under the title The White Wampum

I sprang for the dime.

Be assured we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.

cp:  Alice the Camel, Dust My Broom

What free speech is...

... and what it isn't, brought to us by BH guest blogger Leslie, aka Alice the Camel who put this up at Dust my Broom:

The U of C's chapter of Campus Pro-Life has had an on going row with the U over an annual picture display that compares abortion to genocide, called the Genocide Awareness Project.  It is important to note that the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, creators of the GAP project, strictly forbids any kind of assertive protest. The students are to simply stand with the sign display and if debate arises they then engage.

The U of C has charged the students with trespassing because they refused to turn the signs inward so they weren't visible to the public...the students have now had their group status revoked and been slapped with a $2000 fine for trespassing on the campus.

 Funnily enough, other gory displays seem A-OK:

The U of C expresses no qualms about large colour photos showing the effects of torture on political dissidents in China, the cruelty of animal testing, the consequences of spousal abuse, and other controversies. Gory and disturbing displays on campus are fine, as long as they do not convey the wrong view on abortion. (John Carpay, Executive Director Of The Canadian Constitution Foundation & the group's lawyer)

Here is the quote that keeps kicking me in the teeth.  U of C Students' Union held a 10 minute (!) hearing for the group to state their case before revoking their club status:

During Tuesday’s hearing, pro-life club secretary Asia Strezynski repeatedly asked the committee chairwoman Alex Judd what policy had been violated but the committee only referred to a bylaw that gives the Students’ Union the right to punish a club for violating policies or bylaws.

Outside the hearing Tuesday, students’ union president Dalmy Baez said a letter sent by university administration to the club requiring it to turn inward the display constituted a policy. (Calgary Herald)

A letter is a policy. Sez the union.  The union of the students.

This is liberalism.  This is par for the course at institutes of higher learning throughout the Western world.  This is the lie being foisted as that which cares for and promotes freedom for the masses.

When you see or hear liberalism, in all it's guises, you need to see the lie that it is.

Before it's too late.

Canada says "No" to Bill Ayers

Posted by guest blogger Leslie

A thought to ponder courtesy of the Toronto Star:

Dr. William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago and a leader in educational reform, was scheduled to speak at the Centre for Urban Schooling at University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. But that appearance has now been temporarily cancelled.

Cancelled because he was turned back at the border. No word yet from Barack Obama on this injustice.

cross posted at Alice's new digs.

He who sings (UPDATED)

Posted by guest blogger Leslie.

I've been picking away at a book I found over at Angry Roughneck called Another Sort of Learning. Aimed at university students, James Schall discusses how to get an actual education while dippy-dooing your way through academia. It's highly readable. (I started out life an avid reader and now find reading pretty tough...so when I say highly readable I mean, even I can read it.) In it, he asks his class,

"Was Plato right after all about music and politics: What you like reveals what you become? That change in music portends the first sign of political change?"

Now camels don't read much Plato, but they should. Regardless, enter The Singing Revolution and Estonia's rise to independence. I'm not smart enough to figure out how to embed the trailer into my post, so go over there and experience it for yourself. It is magnificent. An excerpt of the voice over:

It was an extraordinary show of mass defiance in the Baltic region of the Soviet Union. Whenever you give free speech to people then things get out of hand. This singing together, this was our power. If 20,000 people start to sing one song then you just cannot shut them up. It's impossible. What role can singing play when a nation is faced with annihilation by its neighbours. Can culture hold a people together?

Given all the political antics of late, I'd say in Canada North America, we've lost our song.

Yours truly,

Alice the Camel. And also Leslie at the Broom.

h/t

Related: George Gershwin in Denmark. No words; no comment. Just a few bars of "It Ain't Necessarily So"

UPDATE: The video trailer mentioned above:

Human rights: Canadian bloggers sued

Posted by guest blogger:  Leslie.  Submitted as evidence of the effects of years of socialist governing.

Ever since I heard Kate McMillan, Kathy Shaidle as well as Ezra Levant and Free Dominion were being sued by Richard Warman I've been thinking about the leader of the Progressive Element, The Head, whose main minion said this:

"Why you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled.  All our difficulty comes with the others.  When did you meet a workman who believes the papers?  He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles.  He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats.  He is our problem.  We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don't need reconditioning.  They're all right already.  They'll believe anything." (C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 1945)

The Head, you see, was a scientist who had, through careful planning, dodged the inevitability of death and survived the guillotine when his followers, The Progressives, dusted off his disembodied melon and mounted it with a connection of tubes filled with precise concoctions of life-giving fluids.  And it was from there he lead, that severed head, and to where he said the people sped.  Because you don't need reality to get an idea, um, rolling. Or up off the ground. Never mind that The Head was armless and legless.  The Progressives granted him importance, so he needed to be dealt with.

Upon reading the newspapers today, we are living out C.S. Lewis' sci-fi prophecies. Only in Canada, I'm not sure where The Head is actually housed these days.  But I see his minions everywhere. As Mark Steyn puts is:

Incidentally, if you examine the philosophical underpinnings of Canada's "human rights" "jurisprudence," you're struck by a consistent contempt not just for freedom of expression and the presumption of innocence but also for property rights: it's no surprise that a body that takes unto itself the power to regulate the content of privately owned magazines also assumes with nary a thought that it has the right to hijack its neighbours' computer systems when it needs to construct a false identity.

This is Canadian reality today: government regulation of magazine content, hijacked computer systems and false identities.

As Oz Guiness puts it, Without absolute truth there is only manipulation.

If this is news to you, please avail yourself of a special one-time only Alice the Camel Canadian Current Events Human Rights Primer.  Or ACCCEHRP for short. Read your way through and catch a glimpse of The Head's minions before they catch a glimpse of you:

Mark Steyn will get you started --  "Serial litigant and Stormfront member Richard Warman launched a blizzard of lawsuits today, against The National Post and the backbone of the northern blogosphere - Ezra Levant, Kate McMillan, Kathy Shaidle and Free Dominion."

Ezra Levant thoroughly explains -- "It’s impossible to criticize section 13 without criticizing Warman, because without Warman, section 13 would have been defunct years ago – almost no-one else in this country of 33 million people uses it."

Macleans -- Richard Warman says he's fighting hate

Free Mark Steyn -- Great stuff up there.  Keep checking it. Study up and then dig out your wallet.   Paypal buttons aplenty.

• Kate McMillan of Small Dead Animals
• Kathy Shaidle of Five Feet of Fury
• Ezra Levant
• FreeDominion.ca

Regular people are racking up irregular legal bills simply by doing regular things.

c/p: Alice the Camel

More Fallout From America's Occupation of Iraq

"This is so unusual, and I don't know whether or not it's a lesson from God," Karim said.

ht: Captain Capitalism

Posted by guest blogger, Leslie.

Hers the Kingdom of Heaven

Amy Pickard, has spent the last 6 years in a coma doing nothing but digesting what is poured into her to keep her alive. 6 years ago she was 17.

Treasure in jars of clay.

Guest post by Leslie

Your Will Be Done

Posted by guest blogger, Leslie, on this All Hallow's Eve.

What lies beyond death? Considering what a prominent place this question has held in both myth and literature throughout the ages, it is easily a point of human fascination. Hell, in particular, has literally and figuratively captivated the imagination of human history. The Greeks feared Hades, Dante pondered the circular depths of his Inferno and evil Norsemen expected to wade through venomous rivers of Náströnd. Suffice to say, the concept of Hell is not primarily a Christian one. Civilizations across time have felt the burden of accusation and have crafted into their stories ways of doling out punishment to heap justice on the deserving and vindicate the plight of the victim.

Many of our traditional, western, tent-revival, rattling-chain perceptions of Hell are based on nothing related to the Bible. For instance, Satan is often crowned ruler over Hell and those cast into it. Once rejected by St. Peter, Satan is invited to have his way with you. This is a lie. Jesus let it slip in a story he told, “Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” Apparently the Christ of the Christians claims the devil is not only accused, he’s already condemned.

On the other hand, the post-modern, scientific world has enthusiastically denounced the existence of Hell or any form of afterlife for that matter. In an ironic twist of divine comedy, this widespread rejection of the possibility of eternal torment seems to have compelled people to concoct for themselves a living Hell right here on Earth, embracing Chaos and the Trauma that holds its hand. One way or another it seems there is no escape for the accused. Infliction comes. If not from outside sources, then from within. If the heat of the flames does not reach us it is as though we are driven to search in hopes of dangling our toes over the edge that we may partake in that punishment we crave deep down.

How those flames lick at our toes. We torture ourselves with ideals of perfection. The ethereal standard that whispers relentlessly in our ear entices us to work at getting ahead. More professional development courses to climb the ladder of job perfection. More dieting, and a little botox to create visual perfection. More exercise to prove the body invincible. More learning, life-long learning, because knowledge is power and power is the only way a person can be in control of their circumstances well enough to place themselves in a context of perfection.

All of it is a means of ferreting out our inadequacy and casting it to the flames. Who needs the threat of Hell to fear us into submission when we do a masterful job of it on our own?

C.S. Lewis once said, There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.' As our relationships suffer at the hands of our advancing worklife, chemicals numb our railing joints after winning the marathon, our minds tire and tanning beds scorch us with skin cancer, we bask in the delicious fulfillment of our goals.

In the midst of it all The Angry God lays his cards on the table and reveals his will: "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."

How often I choose the flames.

c/p & c/p

Ancient Torture, Modern Health Care, Afghanistan

Guest Post by Leslie from Canada

As an aside, I really like this post. A lot.

Both an epiphany and a paradigm shift occured while laying face down on a physio table this afternoon. Last week, when in the same position I was a candidate for regular feel-good treatment options. This week, no dice. Today, the same-old-same-olds were sent packing only to usher in the new regime.

The verdict for my shortened, flaring muscles? IMS It's all the rage:

A trained therapist inserts very fine needles (like those used in acupuncture) into the shortened muscle at the points where it is tight. The needles change the electrical potential of the muscle, and cause micro-injuries that stimulate blood circulation and healing. The needles cause almost no pain when inserted into normal muscle. They cause painful cramping when they are inserted into a shortened muscle; but after the muscle cramps, it relaxes. With weekly treatments over several weeks, the initial pain is followed by long-term relief for many [so not all - A] patients.

C.S. Lewis once said, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; BUT THOSE WHO TORMENT US FOR OUR OWN GOOD WILL TORMENT US WITHOUT END [!], for they do so with the approval of their consciences."

So, as it was described to me this afternoon, during each session I could expect upwards of 30 needles inserted into the hardest part of each muscle knot along both sides of my spine from stem to stern. Once inserted, the therapist will twist the needle to amplify its presence and maximize the after-effects. "Neat!" I thought. "Then I can pretend I'm a damsel in distress captured and tortured by some ancient barbaric people group." Only in theory I'll willingly call the clinic, drive myself there and pay $100 a session for the priviledge of getting stabbed in the back. Which led me to think about pacifism.

pac-i-fism: 1 : opposition to war or violence as a means of settling disputes; specifically : refusal to bear arms on moral or religious grounds 2 : an attitude or policy of nonresistance

So the options are:

a) WAGE WAR: I pay a man to stab me in the back and literally twist the knife with the expectation that peace will reign in my spine. Or,

b) MISSION OF PEACE: I oppose the violence and take the line of least resistance with the assurance that I will continue this life of intramuscular oppression.

What should I do?

WWTD?

c/p: Alice the Camel