HAPPY GRADUATION!

Survey: out of 100 recent American high school grads.....

■ 71 were physically assaulted: 28 victimized sexually (10 from date violence, 10 raped), 32 experienced maltreatment, 27 had a physical fight, 16 carried a weapon.

■ 64 had sex: 48 are sexually active, 27 used condoms, 12 on birth control pills; 21% had a sexually transmitted infection; 3-4 young women have been or are pregnant, 1 had an abortion.

■ 39 have been bullied, physically or emotionally: 16 in the past year; 29 felt “sad and hopeless” continually for at least two weeks; 14 thought seriously about suicide, six went through with the attempt.                         ■ 34 are fat, 22 live in poverty (10 in deep poverty).

GAYS & STRAIGHTS FOREVER

On a positive note, there have always been and always will be gay (bi-, gay, lesbian, transgendered) people. Laws, threats, oppression, torture, and death have not been able to stop them. Just as, on a negative note, there will always be hurtful affairs outside marriage, spousal and child abuse, addictions, hypocrisy, greed, corruption, injustice, and poor people. The flawed wiring of human creatures demands it....Now, is it possible to stop hitting our societal heads against the wall of fact, and start improving the sad, often tragic lives of us all?

GOOD & EVIL HACKERS

Capitalist, Communist, Oligarchy, and Dictatorship governments around the world 

all react to their good citizens seeking justice and truth 

in the exact same way: CRUSH THEM. 

Here is only one example....

"HACKER WHO EXPOSED VIOLENT SEX CRIME 

CAN GET LONGER JAIL SENTENCE THAN 

CONVICTED RAPISTS." 

The U.S. Department of Justice should be thanking 

Deric Lostutter (the hacker), not imprisoning him.

Demand that they stop prosecution of Deric Lostutter.

http://act.weareultraviolet.org/sign/steubenville_lostutter

TOUCHING

EXPLORATION OF THE UNIVERSE

佾選的健康生活

FLAPPERS

Women were allowed to own and drive cars in the 1920s and 1930s. They could go dancing, have fun, have sex, explore life, make their own decisions, and live independently....

Then World War 2 came, and women worked physically hard in factories building guns, tanks, boats, and planes for America's (male) Armed Forces....

Then Peace came, and women were sent back into the home to do dishes, clean, cook, and take care of babies.

Now woman can serve in the Armed Forces, where they are often raped like Comfort Women. They can also go into battle and get killed equally with men.

Progress.

ASPIRIN WON'T FIX OUR HEADACHE

Three young women who were kidnapped in their teens, then imprisoned inside a house and raped for 10 years by three brothers (then in their 20's), were freed.

Many people want to castrate them.  But castration might be a big relief. 

Besides understandably reacting Biblically with hatred and vengeance, society must painfully delve into its own deepest twisted secret pits of hell....These 3 men had parents. They went to school. They worked. They had friends. They had neighbors..... 

What failed in our system? Unless we have the courage to confront that, and change, such traumatic events will repeat over and over. As they do now.

DARK ALLEYS OF THE BRAIN

Art by Guillard Emmanuel

Another valid scientific research project: "X" numbers of priests molest children. "Y" numbers of priests become archbishops. All Popes were archbishops. Therefore, it is statistically logical that "Z" number of Popes have molested children. Yet Popes set the official doctrine, and enforcement of that doctrine, in the Catholic Church....Another study would be: "Do a larger percentage of priests molest children than do the leaders of each other religion, than teachers, doctors, Boy Scout leaders, and parents?"

ABUSE

From New York Times

Payment for Afghan Debt: Daughter, Age 6

If a man at a refugee camp who borrowed $2,500 for medical care for his family cannot repay his debt, his daughter will have to marry the lender's 17-year-old son.

Comment

Immediate response: Pay the father's debt. Long-term solution: Birth control, sexual and moral education..... The physical, sexual, and psychological abuse of children, girls, wives, women, and non-married lovers has been going on in every tribe, every culture, every country, every religion, for as long as human history. Because of improved media and the internet, we now know about some of it.....Our response must be immediate, unyielding, ethical, practical, effective, and long-term. This can only be done, for more than a handful of abuse cases, at a national and global level. Yet the moral and political corruption at that level is endemic.... "Think Tanks" abound in the civilized world, yet nothing seems to change.  Are there any realistic solutions?

DEAR MARGO ®

Margo Howard is (by far) the best, most psychologically astute, mentally healthy "advice" columnist in the international English media. Her wise advice is not always 100% correct, as she is not a mind-reader or God, but it is as close to constructive and useful reality, (not self-help dogma or nice-sounding politically-correct platitudes), as humanly possible. 

If your newspaper doesn't have it, you can read her column at no charge on the net, from Creators.com [This is not a paid endorsement.]

AWAKENING

The people I’ve tried to make love with, haunt my virtual reality dreams that are as fragile as a crashed hard drive or pulled plug. My dreams haunt my dreams. Everything I have ever seen or imagined or done, invisibly haunt my super-reality dreams.

I am not a bad man, yet I am a troubled man, troubled by what could have been, what was, what should have been, what can never be. If my dreams trouble someone as guiltless and meaningless as me, what must the dreams of Adolf, Idi, Mao, George W, and Pius XII have been? Not to mention good men like Bill, Obama, and Indira. What was in the dreams of Chopin, A.S. Neill, and Groucho as they lay dying?

How can it be that 5000 years of human majesty and shame can absolutely vanish in a millisecond explosion, along with all the cute bunnies, redwoods, hummingbirds, crocodiles, roses, manatees, and mosquitoes we’ve killed.

My list of tragedies are endless and soothing, yet fill only a page of the Great Unabridged Dictionary of things known, experienced, not known, imagined, unimagined, and distorted.

SIZZLING PERFORMANCE ART

One of the most sensual, non-sexual performance pieces in memory, barrier-breaking in Taiwan….8 men, 1 woman, wrapped only in white towels and clear plastic. Confronting the 11-degree bitter night air for one hour, on the windy mountain overlooking Taipei. Confronting Asian cultural prohibitions against nakedness. Confronting the stares of 100 young happily horny and/or love-hungry men and women fantasizing about their (beautiful) bodies.

VICTORY OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT

Human beings worldwide desperately want to put a face to the brutalized Indian girl who was raped and killed. That is why the Facebook photo (real or not) went viral....because we all want to mourn a real person we can see and try to know....Any female photo can be the girl, because all women are equally vulnerable, in India and every country. Male lust is not the cause, abhorrent international cultural male barbarism is. It not only brutalizes women, it brutalizes children, the elderly, gays and lesbians, and those of other races, castes, religions, political views, and economic levels. Male barbarism is not animal instinct, it is human insanity.

from NY Times,  1/7/13, by Sohaila Abdulali 

I Was Wounded; My Honor Wasn’t

THIRTY-TWO years ago, when I was 17 and living in Bombay, I was gang raped and nearly killed. Three years later, outraged at the silence and misconceptions around rape, I wrote a fiery essay under my own name describing my experience  for an Indian women’s magazine. It created a stir in the women’s movement — and in my family — and then it quietly disappeared. 

Then, last week, I looked at my e-mail and there it was. As part of the outpouring of public rage after a young woman’s rape and death in Delhi, somebody posted the article online and it went viral. Since then, I have received a deluge of messages from people expressing their support.

It’s not exactly pleasant to be a symbol of rape. I’m not an expert, nor do I represent all victims of rape. All I can offer is that — unlike the young woman who died in December two weeks after being brutally gang raped, and so many others — my story didn’t end, and I can continue to tell it.

PASSIONATE LOVE: A SHORT LIFE

In fairy tales, love and marriage lasts happily ever after. Science, however, tells us that love has a limited life.

Western researchers tracked 2000 couples who stayed married over 15 years: newlyweds enjoy a big happiness boost that lasts just two years. Then the special joy wears off and they are back where they began, in terms of happiness. 

The good news is, if loving couples stay together past that two-year slump - for another couple of decades - they may recover the excitement, discovering each other and their early bliss, once again. 

When love is new, we are in “passionate love” -- intense longing, desire, attraction. This love changes into “companion love” -- deep affection and connection. Or love disappears forever. 

SEX SURVEY (2012)

In last 2 years, surveys (248 pages) 
in Europe, USA, and Asia, 

questioned over 200,000 gay men:

The average age of the gay men is 38 (USA), 34 (Europe) and 29 (Asia).

The percentage of the total general population with HIV+ is decreasing slowly,

but the percentage of gay men who have HIV+ is increasing.

In the US, new HIV+ diagnoses are 48,000 a year,

but young gay men it increased by 35% in the last four years,

and young black gay men by 50%.

There are big increases of HIV+ 
in Asian countries: