lookin

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Should we be doing this with or without a wand?

Please notice the past perfect conditional tense (in all possible senses of the phrase): Were I to spot a clone of my present-day self, my impulse would be considerably less adductive.

The only thing potentially creepy for me would be the reaction of the friend's sister (or brother). If it was just a fling, I wouldn't put other family members through the aggravation. But, if it's a relationship with staying power, then where's the harm? It's not like they're at risk for producing inbred children. I'll up the ante. Had I been born with an identical twin brother who was also happy and gay, I'd definitely fantasize about a relationship. Narcissistic, yes, but not creepy. Not to me anyway. Am I missing something?

No firsthand experience here, as he was several forms behind me. But, when AdamSmith lays a trail, I follow.

Well, let's just hope the Brewer twins never invite you to join them in a three-way.

Late one evening, while out on a lark, I sashayed 'round a path through the Park. There, attached to a tush Bobbing out of a bush, Was the 7th Seigneur of Sark!

Think of it! Should the two of them ever tie the knot, your friend's sister would be his new mother-in-law. And his niece.

Meet Sheremetyevo, 3rd flr, tues 6am. Make sure not followed.

Researchers from the UK, USA and Singapore found that, in large-scale studies involving nurses, people who ate whole fruit, especially blueberries, grapes and apples, were less likely to get type 2 diabetes, which is obesity-related, but those who drank fruit juice were at increased risk. People who swapped their fruit juice for whole fruits three times a week cut their risk by 7%.

Travel Tip #57

Think of it as the difference between a French kiss and a thimbleful of spit, or a blow job and draining a used condom, or rimming someone and - Hmm, I think I'll drop back and let AdamSmith carry on. Analogy's a pastime and I'll often have a go. Scatology's a calling and I'll leave it to a pro.

More blueberries for me. I've always liked them, but never thought of them as a health food. Turns out the best blueberries I ever had were in Vancouver. Costco also has organic blueberries at a good price.

I wonder how many here know of a crazy who has access to a gun. One of the denizens of my favorite watering hole recently lost both his parents. His brother still lives in the rural family home, surrounded by a large collection of guns. My friend says his brother is the kind of person who would use them and go out fighting. What concerns me is that my friend and his brother have very different viewpoints on the estate. I've suggested he get a lawyer and settle things quickly. I wonder if I should suggest that he report his brother. But could that escalate things and result in more harm than good? And what happens to a gun-owner who is reported for being unstable? Would there be an evaluation? And what if my friend knows his brother better than the examiner does? Would an attempt to confiscate his weapons cause the tragedy that needs to be prevented? I guess most of those who know a crazy with a gun have had these same questions. Perhaps some public service announcements with the answers would help. They would at least help focus attention on the problem. I'm not the only one who knows this story, but no one has done anything yet. Sadly, I don't think getting guns out of the hands of crazies is as simple as it sounds.

She's a smart lady.

Some Fruits Are Better Than Others By Nikolas Bakalar The New York Times September 4, 2013 Eating fruits is good for you, but new research suggests that some fruits may be better than others, and that fruit juice is not a good substitute. Recent studies have found that eating a greater variety, but not a greater quantity, of fruit significantly reduces the risk for Type 2 diabetes. This made researchers wonder whether some fruits might have a stronger effect than others. Using data from three large health studies, they tracked diet and disease prospectively over a 12-year period in more than 185,000 people, of whom 12,198 developed Type 2 diabetes. The analysis appears online in BMJ. After controlling for many health and behavioral factors, researchers found that some fruits — strawberries, oranges, peaches, plums and apricots — had no significant effect on the risk for Type 2 diabetes. But eating grapes, apples and grapefruit all significantly reduced the risk. The big winner: blueberries. Eating one to three servings a month decreased the risk by about 11 percent, and having five servings a week reduced it by 26 percent. Substituting fruit juice for whole fruits significantly increased the risk for disease. “Increasing whole fruit consumption, especially blueberries, apples and grapes, is important,” said Dr. Qi Sun, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard and the senior author of the study. “But I don’t want to leave the impression that fruit is magic. An overall healthy lifestyle is essential too.”

Sounds like it was right up there.

Interesting opinion piece in yesterday's Jerusalem Post: Terra Incognita: Irrational condemnation of Obama By Seth J. Frantzman 09/02/2013 21:32 It can’t be that only the US is responsible for stopping war crimes. Confused, weak, ineffectual, prevaricating, hesitant; all those words, and other synonyms gathered from a thesaurus that commentators likely keep at hand for these types of situations, have been used to castigate the US president’s “inaction” on Syria. He has been lambasted for abandoning Israel and giving the Iranians the feeling that their nuclear program will never be opposed. Israeli Journalist Avi Issacharoff claimed “Israel is truly alone” and Bayit Yehudi head Naftali Bennett said it “proves once more that Israel cannot count on anyone but itself.” Fellow party member and MK, Uri Ariel, claimed last week that “we, as people, we as Jews, cannot remain silent in the face of genocide.” A half page ad in Haaretz, run by a dentist, asked Obama “don’t you have any teeth?” Israel’s press has been similarly apoplectic. Yediot Aharonot ran a cover showing Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur and Syria, asking “until when?” Bradley Burston goes further; “here in the Holy Land, the genocide in Syria has made all of us, Israelis and Palestinians both, into the townspeople of Auschwitz [living next to genocide]… President Obama no longer has the option of nothing.” LET’S TAKE a step back for a moment. First of all, there is something massively hypocritical about those outside the US who “demand” US action “immediately” in Syria. Ariel told Army Radio that Assad should be “taken care of already.” It sounds like “yalla, get going America.” For those that demand America do more, perhaps they should demand their government do something, rather than tell everyone else to do more. There is an incredible dissonance for non-Americans to sit around on their armchairs and “demand action” from the US. If their logic is that the Syrian actions are similar to genocide than it is incumbent on all 200 countries in the world to take action. It can’t be that only the US is responsible for stopping war crimes and enforcing international norms. How about Brazil, South Africa, India, Australia or Nigeria? Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al Faisal has “urged US action” on Syria. He claims that his country can’t be bothered to do anything. “There is no capacity in the Arab world to respond to this crises,” he said. Really? There are 22 Arab states and they don’t have the “capacity” to do anything? The Saudi military alone has the most modern hardware, courtesy of the US. This consists of 310 Abrams tanks and more than 300 combat aircraft, including F-15s. It isn’t capacity that holds them back, it is cowardice. In 1991 when Saddam Hussein was on their border, they likewise hid behind America, vowing, as the saying goes, to “fight to the death of the last American.” Turkey is the elephant in the room. It too supports US intervention, even though it shares 822 kilometers of border with Syria. But on not one kilometer can the Turkish military, outfitted with the latest NATO equipment, be called upon to say “never again.” Only the Americans can do that, from several thousand miles away. The Arab media is full of condemnations of the US for “inaction” on Syria. Hussein Ibish, of the American Task Force on Palestine, bashes the US for “promoting” a refugee crises, intensification of the conflict and the rise of Islamist extremism through “inaction.” Elias Harfoush has bashed the US at Al-Hayat claiming “Obama sat in his oval office at the White House for two and a half years, counting the numbers of casualties among the Syrian people.” This is the Arab world’s response: Blame America. America doesn’t bomb people fast enough for public opinion. Not one editorial in the region seems to condemn Arab leaders for “dithering.” The princes and kings of Saudi and the Gulf, they are acceptable. But between discovering whales, sharks and sparrows that are “spying for Israel,” Egyptians throw up their hands and complain about US “inaction.” Americans should ask themselves serious questions about whether they are being hoodwinked once again by the “international community” to do the job that the community should be doing itself. If regional powers can’t confront Syria – but those same powers demand America take action – serious questions should be asked about why Saudis and Turks can’t stand on the front line, but young men from Alabama and Maine should staff the bombing missions? The evidence for Obama’s supposed “weakness” rests on the theory that the US has not enforced its “red lines.” However the actual “red line” spelled out in August of 2012 was more nuanced; “a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized… that would change my calculus [on intervention],” Obama said. A garbled unintelligible sentence, whose actual conclusion has to do with a changing “calculus,” not even action, is what the US president is being hung on today. But Obama has been strong in his current position: “This attack is an assault on human dignity. It also presents a serious danger to our national security. It risks making a mockery of the global prohibition on the use of chemical weapons. It endangers our friends… this menace must be confronted… the US should take military action.” And Obama has done what many US presidents have done before; “I’m also mindful that I’m president of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.” He stands in good company historically. On April 12, Confederate forces began the bombardment of the US Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. On April 15 Lincoln obliged the attackers: “In virtue of the power in me vested by the Constitution… hereby do call forth, the militia of several states of the Union… in order to suppress” the rebellion. In 1846, after a skirmish with Mexicans on April 26, it took Congress until May 13th to declare war. William Mckinley waited two months to get a declaration of war on Spain in 1898 after a US ship was sunk in Havana. Lyndon Johnson waited five days for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave him power to use convention forces against North Vietnam. When North Korean forces poured across the 38th parallel at dawn on June 25 it took Harry Truman – arguing that “communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler” – until July 7 to get a resolution out of the UN. Were Mckinley, Lincoln and Truman all hesitant confused leaders? They were only sparred these accusations because they didn’t operate in a 24-hour news cycle where immediate response is measured in hours, not weeks. THE ACCUSATION that Obama has allowed the Syrian military to escape by waiting is problematic. If the Syrians have had to disperse their chemical weapons and bury them in the desert, while breaking up their armored units and hiding tanks in orchards and in underground parking lots, this actually represents a success without firing a shot. Supposedly Sun Tzu argued that “every battle is decided before it is fought.” Assad can’t be “emboldened” by this inaction when his generals are looking skyward and some have deserted their headquarters. Let them hide. The Syrian National Council rebel spokesman Louay Safi says Obama has shown “failed leadership.” The only failure is for the rebels not to take advantage and attack now. However, a video posted online by one Islamist rebel group shows fighters in pickups “attacking” by rounding up some truck drivers who they summarily execute as “Alawite infidels.” Are the Americans seriously expected to step into the breach where some of the Syrian rebels “heroism” consists of gunning down unarmed civilians and shouting “God is great.” Similarly, those who preach that the use of chemical weapons is a form of genocide are missing the point. If Assad wanted to commit a genocide wouldn’t he kill more than 1,432 people with these weapons, and wouldn’t he have to actually attempt to exterminate a specific group? Saddam Hussein was thought to have killed some 50,000 Kurdish people in the Anfal genocide, where he used chemical weapons in 1988. It took until 2005 for The Hague to rule that an act of genocide. Comparisons between Syria and Auschwitz are so far off the mark as to dishonor the victims of Auschwitz, rather than honor the victims in Syria. The hysterical preaching about American “inaction” is devoid of historical understanding and based on hyperbole and armchair generalship, more than on reality. The reality is that Obama has made a sound decision to act pragmatically with the support of the American people.

I'll bet he still has your bag of peanuts.

No, as you suspected, I didn't mean that. (And I meant the award was sitting in his house, although I'm sure he sits there too from time to time.) His words before he got it led me to believe he deserved it. And he did unwind two wars that needed unwinding. However, he's not acting today as I'd like to see a Nobel Peace Prize recipient act. My hope is that tomorrow he will start growing back into the award. Tuesday, at the latest.

Well, you won't catch me pimping for the use of chemical weapons versus any other kinds of weapons. In my opinion, they all stink. Any time we humans pick up a weapon to wipe out another human, we ourselves are becoming less human. When we kill others, I think we also kill part of ourselves. My interest is in what we do when we find ourselves in that spiral of killing as a way to prevent killing. Whatever weapon we lob into Syria is, at the most, going to exchange one set of deadly weapons for another, or shift the identities of who kills whom. The end result will still be humans killing humans in Syria and, very possibly, beyond Syria. None of these outcomes is one that I would consider a 'successful' resolution to what's going on in that country or in dozens of other countries around the world. Pope Francis is coming at it from the point of a worldwide prayer vigil on Wednesday to urge all sides to stop the murder. I applaud him for it. Even if he doesn't cause a single person in Syria to lay down a weapon, he will at least focus our attention on our own future actions and perhaps convince a few of us to think of an alternative to killing someone we disagree with. The United States spends nearly $700 billion a year on our military, and has the most advanced devices for taking human life that the world has ever known. We also have a President who has the Nobel Peace Prize sitting in his house. Why shouldn't we spend even a tithe of that money, or of our leaders' time, focusing on ways to lead the world away from war? Wouldn't that be a worthwhile goal for the 'leader of the free world'? And if our immediate reaction to such an idea is "It'll never happen!", what's wrong with spending just a few moments asking ourselves how we came to that conclusion and why we find it acceptable to stay there? Just wondering.

Outrageous, I tell you! Could there be anything worse than a man taking two guys to a show and getting some auto help from a well-wisher? Well, possibly. But I'll have to think about it.

I always feel like the odd man out in these discussions about killing people. Maybe I was at an impressionable age when I first heard the commandment about "Thou Shalt Not Kill" but, ever since, I've had a real aversion to killing people, whatever the method. The hundred thousand or so Syrians dead from so-called 'conventional' weapons are, to me, just as distressing as the thousand or so dead from chemical weapons. If we were going to teach Assad a lesson about the evil of murdering folks, why didn't we start a little earlier? And why didn't we sit in the class ourselves?

Good one! Thanks for the juicy details! (So to speak.)

We'll be married by Ruth Bader Ginsberg. It's a day we will never forget. We're inviting Scalia and Thomas, But they'll both be too busy, we'll bet.