Thursday, October 23, 2014

Real Feminism VS Bullshit Feminism

My day began on a gritty note when the morning news chose to fill air-time with this video:



I advise to not bother watching unless you're missing examples of the Left's obsession with corrupting everything they can, dragging people and things through the muck and bringing them down until everything is equally dirty, equally degraded, equally impoverished. Little girls in princess outfits? Let's ruin that! And they do, purportedly for the greater good, which in this case is..

..oh, who cares? As with the Islamic terrorist, any excuse for destruction will do.

The Left believes that little girls who are taught to use filthy language (after being told it's okay by a lousy parent) and do so at the top of their lungs are empowered. The Left believes that the Whore is the epitome of strong women, independent and the maker of her own destiny.

What the Left doesn't take into account is that the Whore doesn't eat unless the Man pays her. So let's talk about sexism, Leftists. Let's talk about female grade-school teachers who have sex with their male students, and who are not faced with the same outrage or punished with the same sentences as their male counterparts are. Let's talk about women who bitch about unequal pay yet can't seem to negotiate pay that they're satisfied with when they agree to take a job. Let's talk about those same women who demand crushing, punitive alimony payments upon divorce, once they tire of their husbands or have a harpy's ire when he gets tired of the alienations of affection and leaves for warmer climes. Empowered, are you? Not unless you're standing on your own.

Let me tell you about real power. I have frequently had the privilege and honor of being admitted into a man's inner emotional life. He has bared his deepest vulnerabilities with me, scared afterwards that I would become repulsed by his weakness and thereafter reject him as unworthy.

I have the power to get inside of a man's citadel, roam about, and either make the place my own, or burn the tapestries and loot the armory. That's power.

A Whore can't do that. Whores aren't admitted into the keep, no matter how loud they scream their blue streaks or how fast they take their clothes off. Any man worth his armor and sword wouldn't trust a woman who didn't value herself, because if she doesn't value herself, she cannot value others. The way a woman comports herself is an indication of how well she will guard a man's secrets, and maybe even how well she will turn progeny into men and women of merit.

Little girls whose mothers teach them to have contempt for innocence and cleanliness will rue those mothers one day, when ill-considered social media photos dog them into adulthood, when the boys can't be enticed by more backseat amusements, when STDs contaminate intimacy and real love is a dim idea too seemingly impossible to even want to attain. How would one start looking for it? There was no role model to show the way. The father was only a commodity, cast aside once he had paid the Whore with himself before he could teach the daughter how she should expect a man to honor her.

Or more tragically, perhaps the Man had accepted finally, after all of the shrill haranguing and accusations, that he truly was an oppressor and should move on from female to female so as not to over-burden any woman with himself. Maybe he became all-too-happy to take advantage of the lack of accountability. An abundance of free women and no responsibilities keeps a man a child.

A nation of man-children and whores. Thank you, American Left. You call this "Progress" and the people are too cowed even to ask "Progress unto where, exactly?"

UPDATE:
I don't have the time or resources to rebut garbage like the above video, but I'm glad other people do. Thanks, Julie Borowski!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgNV3FbottE&list=UUzIjg5vIfBGcdyLWu6lhXxw

Friday, October 17, 2014

Six Reasons to Panic | The Weekly Standard

Six Reasons to Panic | The Weekly Standard

And if you haven't already, now might be a nice time to read Max Brooks' World War Z just to begin familiarizing yourself with the dance of denial, panic and cold calculations necessary to stop the spread of plague.

Monday, September 22, 2014

Athens, 9/12/2014

My husband Alan and I left JFK airport at 6PM Thursday evening for the 7 hour flight to Amsterdam. I was in the window seat and saw sunset over the Atlantic before deciding to try and catch a little sleep on Alan's shoulder. Alan can sleep under almost any conditions and had already been napping for half an hour. The plane's cabin lights were dimmed, making conditions a little easier for me. Normally, I can't sleep at all on airplanes, but the flight was fairly smooth and it was after midnight according to my circadian clock. I was beginning to drop off into sleep when Alan's arm jerked, his arm going to sleep from pressure I'd put on a nerve in his shoulder. I looked around, groggy, and saw something out of the window in the peripheral vision of my left eye.  Unsure of what I was seeing, I opened the window shade to get a better view.

It took me a few seconds to register what I saw out on the horizon toward the southern tip of Greenland. Green bands of ghostly light undulated, pulsated and flared. Aurora borealis. I'd never seen it, but viewing it had been on my list of things to see at some time during my life. The possibility of an opportunity existing during this flight hadn't even crossed my mind. I stared at it for a few minutes while a broad grin broke across my face. I woke Alan so that he could see it, too. We took turns leaning forward to look out of the window. I thought about taking photos but the dim light from the airplane's cabin would have made the aurora appear as a fuzzy and indistinct smear. Its appeal came partially from the color and partially from the shifting bands of light, so instead of trying to capture it with a device bound to be inadequate to the task, I kept watching and marveling at the phenomenon until it winked out suddenly.

As dawn broke over the North Sea, I saw short towers of cloud crowding its surface, beneath which small pinpoints of light dotted a deep grey surface in an earthly mimicry of the twilight sky. These were the floodlights of oil rigs drilling into and mining the seafloor. Thirty minutes to the east, Amsterdam itself was like a patchwork quilt of greens and browns, full of farms, its earth rich and loamy. "Oh, look," Alan said near my shoulder as we watched the land pass underneath the jet. "There are the tulip and wooden shoe farms!" I groaned.

Schipol airport was open and airy. All of the souvenir shops had tulip bulbs and wooden shoes, to my dismay.  By the time we walked from our gate to that of the connecting flight, it was time to board. Athens was a three-hour flight away. On board, the aisle seat in our row was taken by Georgio, 80, who was going to Athens to visit family, among them a new niece. We began talking when he saw Alan studying Greek from a textbook.

"You think you can learn that language?" he asked.

"I'm not doing too badly," Alan said. "My wife has been doing better with the language than I have."

"Iste Elenas?" I asked the man. Are you Greek? He nodded and said yes, but indicated that it was a long time ago. He was now and had been living for a while in Washington DC. He told us about his fishing business, and said that we would find that the fish we'd have in Greece would taste much different than that we'd had in the States. He asked where we were from. We told him that we lived on Long Island. He said that he had once lived in Seaford, and then proceeded to give me a recipe for spanikopita, which included baby spinach, fennel (anise he called it), green onions, olive oil and not butter on the phyllo, plus egg to coat the top. ("Use Dodoni cheese; that is the best kind!") He said "ya sas" ("Your health") was a phrase the older people liked better than the more contemporary "ya sou" or "ti kanete".

Thunder pealed on the way to Syntagma square (by bus, 10 Euros), but no rain came from the cumulus clouds. The air was hot and humid. The countryside looked like northern Arizona but felt like Florida.

Alan's method of battling the effect of jet lag is to forgo sleep and drop off items at the hotel, then go out and hit the ground running. We got off the bus at Syntagma Square and walked 10 minutes until we found Electra Palace hotel with help from a waiter at the Only 1 taverna, who invited us in. We had bags with us which we wanted to drop off, so we said we would be back. We unloaded at the hotel and showered to wake up, then returned to the taverna. I had a salad and iced tea, Alan had souvlaki, all were good if not remarkable. We headed to the national gardens, then back to the agora, the metropolitan cathedral, up towards the tower of the winds at the foot of the acropolis. Another taverna proprietor waved us in and we elected to stop for a bite while we watched the setting sun warm the colors of the stone's face at the base of the temple.

I did not think I would like retsina, having been told that it tasted like turpentine, but when I tried it, I found the wine pleasantly dry and possessing a faint piney character that quickly grew on me. It accompanied another tomato and cucumber salad and a side of bread with spicy cheese dip. My brain was beginning to cobweb over from fatigue. I had been awake almost 48 hours. I watched the tavern waiters and proprietor also work the passers-by. Their eyes scanned tourists' and locals' body language and facial expressions. They interacted differently with tourists, trying to coax them to a table. I suppose the locals knew whether they felt like stopping into this particular tavern or not. If the tourists passed on, the staff would sometimes joke with each other about this one or that one, mostly regarding the women. I could tell when they were teasing each other about the women even though I had no real idea what they were actually saying. My Greek wasn't good enough for me to have that level of comprehension.

We started back to the hotel at some point around 7P but quickly became lost in the maze of the agora, an area within the Plaka where goods were marketed much as they had been for thousands of years. I was mentally exhausted and the fatigue was showing on Alan as well. Neither of us was very good at helping each other find our way back and we got irritated, but eventually pulled ourselves together enough to navigate the agora and get back. After another shower and a quick email to let people know we were in Athens, we collapsed into bed at 10PM.

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

What's the best way to start writing a great short story?

http://graemeshimmin.com/how-to-start-a-story/

What is your favorite kanji and why?

A Quora question, answered by Gilberto De Melo



Not only it is a nice looking character but its underlying meaning is also beautiful.

The top part is 羊 (ひつじ), which means "sheep". The bottom part is 我 (われ), which means "I".

Together, both characters are "lamb over me", which is a concept that came from Judaism, where lambs were sacrificed for the forgiveness of sins. It was also practiced in ancient China, where it gave origin to this character.

Meaning in English:
• righteousness
• justice
• meaning
 

Thursday, July 10, 2014

Scary Query

A query letter is supposed to be one page consisting of three paragraphs.
It is just like aikido, or haiku. Graceful simplicity.
Forever to master.

I have spent all day on a letter and am maybe brushing the surface of "adequate".

The sticking point I'm concerned with is this: Queries for non-fiction have a standard format which is different from the query for fiction. Word counts are generally included for fiction. If an agent (recommended for selling fiction to a publisher) is intrigued by the query, he'll want a "full", meaning the full manuscript. Not several sample chapters. The whole thing.

The project is itself fiction, intended for a market dealing mainly in non-fiction. How do I query this project?

It's a chimera.

QUERY-LETTER HAIKU

The hook, bait and set

Story synopsis follows

Author bio. Thank.