Knowing Jack About Dick

I am the last person in the world who should be writing about penis. There are none in my life, no real honest to god attached-to-a-body kind of penis that swings freely between the legs of some of my brothers as well as some of my of sisters.

I haven't seen real live penis since I changed my youngest nephew's diaper and found out it is true what they say about Black men...damn! “at a month old!” Whoooo-eeee!

I've been honest about my sexual orientation so that when I tell you that the only little blue pills on my dresser are Aleve and the only dick that I come in contact with is battery powered or hangs from a leather harness strapped around the waist of a beautiful woman, ya'll know where I'm coming from.

Despite the convoluted theories of Sigmond Freud....I don't suffer penis envy... Never have....To me it is a useless appendage...Who needs a body part where you constantly walk around touching it to make sure it's still there........What?

I don't need the drama...My body parts are either attached or they're not..all of em are hanging at my age, anyway...as long as they don't drop off...I'm okay....

I mean, really, male body parts are the last thing on my mind...They play no part in my world....

Until this week....

Two times this week....penis conversation has erupted on my computer....Presidential penis conversation no less.…

I thought the Birthers were done....Their phony African birth certificate had been discredited...and they had been laughed off the six o'clock news...

But noooooo!.......Now they want a peek at the Presidential Johnson....They want to see if Obama is circumcised...

Because according to them...if Obama is not circumcised......then he was not born in America....

Why do they suppose this....Because...They say ...circumcision is the law in America....

Well, Au Contrair, Mon Frere.....

See the problem with banning books, refusing to be educated beyond third grade church Sunday school, and listening to walking wastes of oxygen like Rush, or Glenn or school dropout Karl Rove, is that when you do decide to join in the public debate, you come off sounding like the ignorant, uneducated ass that you are....

Circumcision has never been the law in America. It has been a sometimes widely adopted policy in America...But it has never been law..

The practice of circumcision dates back to the Egyptians who used to force it upon their slaves circa 3000BC. It is a religious practice for Jews and Muslims.

The Greeks and Romans passed laws forbidding it...calling it what it is...genital mutilation..

But leave it to America to mess things up....

Circumcision was pushed by some silly fundamentalist health reformer named John Harvey Kellogg, the same Kellogg who invented corn flakes, by the way....

Kellogg wrote in a book in 1888 claiming that circumcising boys would keep them from engaging in that nasty practice of self love, otherwise known as masturbation.

He said;

"The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment. In females, the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement." -John Kellogg, “Plain Facts for Old and Young”

And he wasn't the only sick f*** walking around with these ideas. I'm not even going to address the fact that this fool also advocated pouring acid on a woman's clitorus to keep her from enjoying herself...

I need to breathe a minute and compose myself...

These so called educated fools had people believing that masturbation caused consumption, heart disease, made you go crazy and could make you want to kill yourself.

Now, I've have had sex to die for... but usually with a partner...not from solo masturbation...

And you know one of your dumber relatives told you that lie about hair growing on your palms if you did it..

When immigrants flooded American shores back in the 1800's, circumcision became a sign of gentrification and class. In other words, that cleanliness was next to godliness and you weren't clean unless you'd been circumcised according to Victorian mores of the time.

They used this as yet another way to discriminate against the newer immigrants fresh off the boats. American men were circumcised, ugly dirty immigrants, were not...

How did they know....did a man walk up to a woman that he wanted to get to know and after tipping his hat, promptly drop his drawers, whip out his thing and wave it at her with a big smile on his face and say,

“see, ma'am, I'm a American gentleman” I ain't no Irishman.”

There are no, and never have been medical imperatives mandating circumcision. It is a practice driven by the usual screwed up mores of perverted and phobic fundamentalists, the sames ones fighting gay marriage and LGBT equality rights today...

You can bet that the medical profession goes along simply because it is another way of getting paid for yet another useless medical procedure.

And that brings me to the Center for Disease Control, which is in the process of putting together another medical mandate that would reportedly recommend that babies be circumcised at birth as a way to combat the spread of the HIV/AIDS virus.

In Africa circumcision seems to keep men from becoming infected with AIDS after having sex with an AIDS infected woman, according to one report going around.

However, the ease of female to male virus transmission has long been a topic of controversy....It has proven to be an extremely rare way to get the disease....

and the problem is...men lie...about who have they have sex with...it's easier to blame women rather than to admit they have sex with men...and when determining how a man becomes infected all the doctors do is to ask him, how it happened...

Whatever....Circumcision does nothing to prevent the circumcised man from infecting women or other men, for that matter..

The main route of transmission is still men having unprotected sex with other men...

Straight Black women would not be served either, and they are the largest group being infected in America today, because they continue to have unprotected sex with men who lie about with whom they sleep...

So why is the CDC going there and repowering this circle jerk?

This mandate, due out later this year, reportedly is going to also recommend that grown men submit to circumcision as a means of fighting HIV transmission....in addition to circumcising babies...

Why?

The mandate does not address the issue as it exists in America, which is that straight Black women are seriously at risk of infection...

So we have a bunch of simpletons who want to check out the presidential member....

and we have a bunch of lazy bureaucrats who are apparently trying to convince people that they are doing something to help the Black community in its battle with AIDS..

Okay...if you say so...

I'm going back to my dickless world and not think it about it for awhile..

Swine Flu Skeptic

The 1976 fiasco.....2009 Problem

I will admit upfront, that I'm a total skeptic when it comes to government vaccination programs. Just like all Americans my age, I went through them as a kid. They didn't really hurt me or anything, but then my Mom was in charge. She said take them, I took them. I was only five years old after all.

As I have gotten older, I have come to learn that we don't really know what is in the medicines that we take.

A lot of the medicines on the market are there purely to make a profit for someone, at the expense of you and me.

I don't take the yearly flu vaccinations even though I'm considered high risk.

Having lived through the swine flu epidemic of 1976, I not sure if I will ever trust my government or the big drug companies to do the right thing.

Not the way it was set up then...and certainly not the way it is now. Because as bad as the drug companies were back then...

They are a hundred times worse now in their disregard for consumers, viewing them only as cannon fodder for their big profit money making machine.

If you think that is a misstatement or a wrong statement then check out what is really going on in Africa with the drugs that could save so many, but are being withheld by their makers in order to make greater profit.

This is done by simply not making the drugs available because the people cannot afford the price that the drug companies want to charge to support their profit scenario in Africa.

Back in 1976, the big drug companies demanded that the US government take the fall if the swine flu vaccine turned out bad, because they didn't want to get sued. It did. The government took the hit.

The same thing is going on today with health care reform and this so called developing flu vaccine. I have no proof, but my mature gut tells me that we, the people are being screwed again, despite the fact that Obama is in charge. But I will wait and reserve judgment until the reform bill is passed and we get through the flu season.

One of the big players in 1976 and today in 2009 is Roche, the big pharmaceutical company. Roche makes Tamiflu, which you may know, the United States government, as well as other governments, worldwide have stockpiled in recent years to combat Swine and Bird flu.

The US decided to stockpile Tamiflu after Bush elevated Donald Rumsfeld to Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld makes millions off the drug....He has stock in the company that created Tamiflu. Gilead Sciences gave Roche the rights to manufacture the drug.

Our government paid Roche $100 a dose to buy the drug...that works out to $2 billion dollars for useless meds.

Rumsfeld allegedly recused himself from all governmental decisions concerning the stockpiling of the drug. However, with the lies that are now coming to light...

Who knows what Rumsfeld did back in the day...

Rumsfeld and Bush just got the ball rolling. Tamiflu is held up as the treatment for the flu, which really it is not...

Tamiflu is only effective if taken at the first sign of the flu...It is not a cure...or vaccine....If you don't take it at onset....

In other words, if you don't have it in your house..then you're wasting your time.

And there are some nasty side effects to the drug, too...Deaths were reported in Japan to children given the drug, shortly after it came on the market.

If it has to be taken immediately...then wouldn't stockpiling be a waste of time, considering that the government can't get it to you in time to save you...they can't mobilize fast enough...

Think that's wrong...think Katrina....the only thing that's changed since the Katrina debacle is the President...the mechanism for saving American lives...is the same...

Obama has not changed the mechanism, yet. I love Barack Obama...He's like that Nia Long line from the movie The Best Man (pretty M*****), and it's way too early to make any judgments....

But so far, all I'm seeing is same old, same old...lots of charisma and very little change...Just like Bill Clinton....Love em...however...they are consummate politicians...

And as I've said before...if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck....you can finish...

The difference that I'm seeing between the last administration and the new one..is that one of them is giving us vaseline before telling us to bend over...

Back to this new developing vaccine in time for the coming flu season. As I said, I don't trust it. When they tried this in 1976, more people died from the vaccine then the so called epidemic.

In fact, in 1976, only one person died from the swine flu and he was the first one who contracted it..

He was patient zero, in other words.

It happened at Fort Dix and you can read the story here.

I can't tell you what to do for you and your children when the time comes to face this latest “flu bug.”

It is almost upon us and they are just beginning to test. Officials have already said it's going to take 3 shots.

The shots won't be effective until a couple of weeks after you take the second one...Given the roll out..that will be halfway through the school year..

If that is the case, what is the point of taking the drug...Seems to me your immune system is working effectively already.

What I'm hearing on the news does not sound confident...it sounds panicked...and that scares me..A panicky government is the last thing we need....

Here is how the Center for Disease Control “reflects on the situation."

Let's hope the government learned its lessons from 1976.

Happy Negroes, Unhappy Slaves Redux

A continuing conversation on race in America

Back in February of 2008, I wrote about a conversation that I had with a man, whose name I don’t know, about Black people, white people and the political campaign of Barack Obama, who, at that time was merely running for president. You can read about that conversation here.

Even after the conversation, we continued to talk and a year later, we’re still engaging in our favorite weekend past time and still talking. He’s not happy with Barack as president. He voted for him as did I, but he is unable to be patient. He wants change now, as in "Okay, we put the Black guy in.....now what’s the difference..."

Today we went back to race again coming at the question from differing viewpoints. He has progressed from slaves being happy during slavery to Blacks should be grateful they were taken off the slave ships and allowed to live. According to my friend, Blacks don’t show gratitude for what whites did for them way back when, which was to save our lives from the big bad Spaniards who stole them in Africa, forced them onto ships to survive or die.

He told me that Blacks should be glad nobody forced them to get back onto those ships because the Spaniards would have killed or drowned them rather than transport them. So slavery was something of a godsend for Black people. It was a blessing that we, Blacks today, are not properly thankful enough or respectful for.

That last thing on respect comes from my reading of him as he was telling me this. He didn’t say it, and I don’t want to put more words into his mouth because he is well capable to choking himself. He doesn’t need my help to do that.

As I listened to his theory, it dawned on me that I was hearing a theory that under lay the thoughts and actions of a lot of white people....that Africa, the slave ships, were bad, but getting to America was the good thing for Black people. It saved us.....I asked him....saved us from what exactly.....the freedom of living in your own country, with your own family, on your own land, surrounded by your own stuff? Being free to make your own decisions and not have to worry about whether you put too much starch in your master’s underwear?

How can being brutally snatched to another country to serve and become the property of another man be considered salvation? He still has no answer for me. He can’t seem to get past the "Africa bad, America good" scenario, or that Blacks blame whites for a situation not of their making. I couldn’t get past the "issues" of choice.....once Blacks were unchained and taken off the ships...no one forced white people to engage in slavery....It was a conscientious choice to do that after attempts to enslave Native Americans failed. It was a dehumanizing situation from which we all, both Black and white, still suffer.

So at this point, after a couple of thrusts about the still ongoing institutionalization of racsim that permeates everything in America, we move on, saving this saga for another day. We turned instead to Herbert Hoover’s presidency as the reason why most Black people are democrats. Seems he saw something recently on television that made this connection.

In my friend’s mind he felt that Blacks should have been republican from jump instead of adopting the politics of their owners who were primarily southern democrats. I explained that many blacks were republicans or believed in the politics of abolition and the party of Lincoln, and that persisted well through the 1960s.

I have already chronicled how much of my family was republican. The switch happened when southern democrats left the party to become republicans rather than allow Fannie Lou Hamer to be seated the Democratic Convention, I believe in 1964. I can remember hearing older family members talk about the death of FDR, and of watching his funeral train. They recalled the tears they shed and shock they felt when this man passed. Yet they still called themselves republicans.

I reminded my friend that what Blacks may have felt politically, was different than expressing it, because getting the right to cast a vote was in and of itself, an adventure. It remains that way today despite the voting rights act of 1965. And unless anyone thinks the fight is over, the Voting Rights Act is not a permanent law-it must be renewed every 25 years.

It is also coming before the United States Supreme Court in the next couple of weeks. A Supreme Court that is led by an activist conservative. What will happen is anybody’s guess.

There are any number of possibilities, including striking it down and declaring it unconstitutional....just like affirmative action in California.....In the aftermath....the colleges and universities have once again become primarily all white institutions.....Will that happen to the right to vote?

Don’t know.....Just asking questions....as always....

My conversation with my friend.....to be continued....................