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HermanMelville's Replies
It's ok. Stalkers are encouraged here apparently
You call me a troll then you say
Second, if you had a brain and actually used
it for a few seconds would not have to ask the question
You viciously attack me for no reason.
When he was sated with her charms, He set his face towards the open country of his cattle. The gazelles saw Enkidu and scattered, The cattle of open country kept away from his body. For Enkidu had stripped; his body was too clean. His legs, which used to keep pace with his cattle, were at a standstill. Enkidu had been diminished, he could not run as before. Yet he had acquired judgment, had become wiser. He turned back, he sat at the harlot's feet. The harlot was looking at his expression, And he listened attentively to what the harlot said. The harlot spoke to him, to Enkidu,
"You have become wise Enkidu, you have become like a god. Why should you roam open country with wild beasts? Come, let me take you into Uruk the Sheepfold, To the pure house, the dwelling of Anu and Ishtar, Where Gilgamesh is perfect in strength, And is like a wild bull, more powerful than any of the people."
She spoke to him, and her speech was acceptable.
(The earlier Old Babylonian version continues the narrative.)
The woman's suggestions Penetrated his heart. She took off her garments, Clothed him in one, Dressed herself In a second garment, Took his hand, Like a goddess led him To a shepherd's hut Where there was a sheep-pen. The shepherds gathered over him . . . . . . . He used to suck the milk Of wild animals. They put food in front of him. He narrowed his eyes, and looked, Then stared. Enkidu knew nothing Of eating bread, Of drinking beer. He had never learned. The harlot made her voice heard And spoke to Enkidu,
"Eat the food, Enkidu, The symbol of life. Drink the beer, destiny of the land."
Enkidu ate the bread Until he had had enough. He drank the beer, Seven whole jars, Relaxed, felt joyful. His heart rejoiced, His face beamed, He smeared himself with ... His body was hairy. He anointed himself with oil And became like any man, Put on clothes. He was like a warrior, Took his weapon, Fought with lions. The shepherds could rest at night; He beat off wolves, Drove off lions. The older herdsmen lay down; Enkidu was their guard, A man wake.
But when Enkidu finds out that he's gotten the death penalty for all his misbehaving, he changes his tune. He tells the god Enlil,"I did not kill the Cedar (from the forest)" and then about two lines he starts cursing the amazing door he and Gilgamesh made out of the Cedar, and pretty much all but admits he did cut down the Cedar (7.22). Contradictory, much?
He then follows this up with a string of curses directed at virtually everyone he's met since his romp with Shamhat, because he holds them responsible for bringing him out of the wilderness—thus indirectly leading to his death.
John – the illicit son of the Director and Linda, born and reared on the Savage Reservation ("Malpais") after Linda was unwittingly left behind by her errant lover. John ("the Savage", as he is often called) is an outsider both on the Reservation—where the natives still practice marriage, natural birth, family life and religion—and the ostensibly civilised World State, based on principles of stability and shallow happiness. He has read nothing but the complete works of William Shakespeare, which he quotes extensively, and, for the most part, aptly, though his allusion to the "Brave New World" (Miranda's words in The Tempest) takes on a darker and bitterly ironic resonance as the novel unfolds. John is intensely moral according to a code that he has been taught by Shakespeare and life in Malpais but is also naïve: his views are as imported into his own consciousness as are the hypnopedic messages of World State citizens. The admonishments of the men of Malpais taught him to regard his mother as a whore; but he cannot grasp that these were the same men who continually sought her out despite their supposedly sacred pledges of monogamy. Because he is unwanted in Malpais, he accepts the invitation to travel back to London and is initially astonished by the comforts of the World State. However, he remains committed to values that exist only in his poetry. He first spurns Lenina for failing to live up to his Shakespearean ideal and then the entire utopian society: he asserts that its technological wonders and consumerism are poor substitutes for individual freedom, human dignity and personal integrity. After his mother's death, he becomes deeply distressed with grief, surprising onlookers in the hospital. He then ostracizes himself from society and attempts to purify himself of "sin" (desire), but is finally unable to do so and hangs himself in despair.
For it to work, you would need to keep the contrast of the original raw material juxtaposed with other material surrounding it as is here:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/80/Ruby_-_Winza%2C_Tanzania.jpg/240px-Ruby_-_Winza%2C_Tanzania.jpg
and here
http://geology.com/gemstones/emerald/emerald-colombia-calcite-shale.jpg
and here
http://india-herald.com/clients/india-herald/12-16-2014-6-50-05-PM-6597039.jpg
The other raw material that is not considered precious accentuates the beauty of the precious raw material
Compare Ruby in its original form
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/80/Ruby_-_Winza%2C_Tanzania.jpg/240px-Ruby_-_Winza%2C_Tanzania.jpg
with polished and artificialized
https://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/symbolism/images/b/ba/Ruby.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20151016185054
I believe any "white only" movie winning prestigious awards is a post-nazi enterprise
So, if it is an Academy Award Winner, it is automatically deemed worthy of having zero flaws? Seriously, we cannot allow such racism in our post-race society
Certainly the most beautiful
Studies also imply that men are fearless warriors who can bear any form of pain and fight wars and shit and suffer through various extremities of pain. Studies also suggest that the pain of childbirth is exaggerated; as males we will never experience it, so the females deliberately lie about the pain they feel. There are also veritable studies that say that women experience true orgasms during childbirth
We live in a post-rape society. Keep up!
Studies say that women fear pain the most
These results suggest that post-copulatory sperm competition drives the evolution of semenogelin. To complement this study, we’ll need to see what biochemical properties of the protein have presumably been selected for in chimpanzees, for example, and how they give sperm a tail up on the competition. For now we don’t know much other than the fact that semenogelin has undergone positive selection, and that it’s highest in polyandrous species. It’s interesting to note that the protease that liquefies the coagulum, kallikrein 3, did not show any signs of positive selection. That would indicate that it’s some property of coagulum formation, rather than liquefaction, that allows some sperm to do better than others. There’s bound to be lots more fascinating research in this area, thanks to those intrepid scientists who study monkey splooge.
This is something that B. F. Skinner pointed out years ago, Hrdy says--the principle of intermittent reinforcement. In the behavioral psychologist's scenario, a rat that is rewarded a pellet when it presses a bar in its cage will press the bar only when it's hungry. If, however, the rat gets a pellet every 10 or 20 times it presses a bar, it will spend every waking hour pumping away at the bar. The rat learns that a great deal of effort is required for any return at all. Hrdy suggests that our female ancestors may have been subject to similar conditioning.
Hrdy's notion that female primates must be ever-ready lovers also jibes with Masters and Johnson's finding that women remain sexually excitable after orgasm. Whereas men's anticlimactic physiology quickly returns to its baseline level, women, before they cool down, retrace their steps, so to speak, to the plateau of arousal that immediately preceded their climax. It's now widely accepted that women can experience more prolonged arousal and more orgasms per unit of time than men--which, without benefit of Hrdy's interpretation, would seem to run counter to what you'd expect in a Darwinian world.
In her 1991 book, Mystery Dance, biologist Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts tries to walk the center line of the design argument, claiming that while early on "the clitoris had no evolutionary significance ... the opportunities for evolutionary invention were so rich that such a useful little mechanism was eventually put to use within the complex framework of human evolution."
Trouble is, according to Symons and other critics, "adaptationists" such as Hrdy have precious little evidence to appeal to. "It's pure imagination about some polygynous past we supposedly had," carps Symons. "You find no evidence that women anywhere are behaving in ways to confuse the issue of paternity."
That's because human males, Hrdy argues, developed institutions such as marriage and clitoridectomy (the amputation of the clitoris) to repress women's indiscriminate sexuality, so that paternity could not be so easily confused. She points to the behavior of female chimpanzees, gorillas, and macaques as an indication of a past in which human females flaunted their desire. She notes too that if the evolution of the clitoris were dependent on the simultaneous development of the penis, you'd expect to see some correspondence between penis size and clitoris size in primates--which you often don't.
"What you do see," she says, "is variation across primate species. If you look at species where you have multiple-mate breeding systems, the clitoris is more developed. So it is not tracking the penis." The chimpanzee penis, for example, is "very small and pencillike" in comparison with the human penis, while the clitoris is among the more pendulous of its class.
Hrdy's argument would be buttressed by observations showing that orgasm among nonhuman female primates is correlated with promiscuous behavior. But again, while a physical reaction that is probably an orgasm can be noted, unequivocal evidence of the sensation of orgasm among species less articulate than our own is impossible to come by. There's the clutching reaction of the rhesus monkey, in which the female generally reaches back with one hand and grasps the male, sometimes turning and looking over her shoulder at the presumed moment of his climax--which, if it does indicate a female eruption as well, would leave people in the dust when it comes to simultaneous orgasms.
Then there's the disturbingly familiar "ejaculation face" of the stump-tailed macaque: a round-mouthed expression composed of one part surprise, one part epiphany, and one part catatonia. Males and females alike commonly adopt such expressions in the throes of passion. The unanswerable question is, of course, does the "face" correspond to a seismic tweak of ecstasy?
In fact, there is ample evidence of masturbation among captive animals, and contractions la Masters and Johnson have been recorded in artificially stimulated female primates of several species. "It's much more logical to assume that they do have orgasms than that they don't," says Helen Fisher, a research associate of the American Museum of Natural History. "We're not talking about a complicated physiological response here."
But primate researchers say the animals don"t have much spare time in the wild for mating, let alone for playing with themselves, and it's in the wild that the evolutionary pressures Hrdy talks about are exerted. So in lieu of sworn testimonials from the animal kingdom, the "proof" of female orgasm's adaptive value still redounds to the person who can tell the most convincing story about its history of selection. "The beauty of this topic is that you, too, can make up a theory," says Fisher. The truth probably lies somewhere between Shakespeare's poetry and Darwin's pragmatism.
Such data present a conundrum to anyone who wants to argue that female orgasm is a sexually selected trait. John Alcock suggests that the legerdemain required to bring about the effect may have helped our foremothers distinguish between the sensitive guys who would make good parents and the love-'em-and-leave-'em louts. But the bitter truth, as Margaret Mead pointed out, is that many, many human cultures donÕt even recognize that women can enjoy sex, let alone climax the way men do. If female orgasm is an adaptive behavior, then there are plenty of women whose genes are headed the way of the dinosaurs.
The tenuous link between orgasm and intercourse in women has led other theorists, including Donald Symons, to conclude that the female climax is more accident than adaptation. "Saying that a trait is adaptive is different from saying a trait has an evolutionary history," says Symons. "Everything has an evolutionary history. To show that something is an adaptation, you have to be able to explain the how and the why, show that it has some kind of special design, a design that solved a specific problem.
"In the case of males, the design argument makes good sense. Male orgasm doesn't occur at just any time--there's this intense burst of pleasure that accompanies ejaculation, which is of extreme reproductive significance," he says. "That's an obvious adaptation."
Symons says that the most parsimonious interpretation of the evidence is that the female orgasm is a by-product, like male nipples, that exists merely because the same trait in the opposite sex confers a selective advantage. In other words, male orgasm by way of the penis is a smashing success, and since the clitoris is made from the same fetal tissue as the penis, it can't help but precipitate orgasms too. That's not to say that female arousal is superfluous, or that it doesn't have a function. Symons believes arousal is an adaptive mechanism in female sexuality, and that female genitals have indeed been "designed" to provide pleasurable stimulation during intercourse. But the particular experience of orgasm, he says, is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for reproductive fitness in females. "It's simply a by-product of the ability of males to have orgasms."
Such a view, however reasonable, cannot go uncontested, and the contest comes primarily from Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist at the University of California at Davis. Hrdy has marshaled evidence from studies of nonhuman primates to make hypotheses about human sexuality. "There is just no reason to think that orgasm is nonadaptive," she says. Her research suggests that among our closest relatives, promiscuous rather than connubial behavior greatly behooves females who want their progeny to survive.
She points out that in virtually all primates male behavior has an important effect on the survival of infants. A male can lavish a youngster with care and protection or he can kill it, depending on how confident he is that he's sired the youngster in question. A female that can persuade the community's males to be nice to her kids stands a better chance of passing on her genes. And she can do so, says Hrdy, by pulling a few males into "the web of possible paternity"; that is, by sleeping around.
"For a number of years," Hrdy says, "I've been arguing that for nonhuman female primates, the goal is not simply to be inseminated by the single best male--that's an old Darwinian and Victorian notion. What really happens is that a female primate tries to mate with a number of males to establish a network that will preclude males from attacking her offspring. It will also increase the amount of resources the males are likely to provide the infants. If a male isn't certain that he's not the father, he cannot afford to kill the infants--it's too big a risk. This margin of error that males must allow is one of the few advantages females have.
"If you look at primate breeding systems the way I do, where the problem that the female faces is how to draw multiple partners into this net, then you see the need for a psychophysiological phenomenon that keeps her motivated to solicit and mate with a number of male partners"--in short, she needs an incentive for promiscuity. And Hrdy believes the most expedient route to promiscuity is via the clitoral orgasm. "The very fact," she says, "that it is erratic in its relationship with intercourse means it works as a more powerful conditioning mechanism." A female that does not climax during her first coital encounter has the incentive to demand another round--immediately. Chances are her newly sated mate won't be able to gratify her, so she dumps him for a fresh partner. The principle is a familiar one: if at first you don't succeed, try, try again. And again. And again, each time expanding the web of possible paternity.
There's reason to believe it doesn't. Whereas ejaculation is a somatic phenomenon, orgasm (as Shakespeare implies) is a phenomenon of the spirit, and even in human males a strict correlation between mind and matter hasn't been established. Ejaculation in men is not always coincident with orgasm: paralysis victims bereft of feeling below the waist often get erections and ejaculate without having a climax, and prepubescent boys can achieve orgasm, even multiple ones, without ejaculating. But if ejaculation doesn't equal orgasm, how can you tell whether an erupting male is enjoying himself?
Trouble is, you can't. "I observe insects mating all the time," says John Alcock, a zoologist at Arizona State University. "But I see no way of answering the question of whether male carpenter bees experience anything remotely similar to pleasure when they succeed in copulating with a female."
For that very reason, Alcock says, evolutionary biologists have shied away from tracing orgasm's lineage: "People don't see the point of getting worked up about a question they can't answer." Says Donald Symons, an anthropologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, "I can't remember any serious discussion of male orgasm at all." Yet scientific debate has raged for years over an even more elusive phenomenon: the female orgasm. And the issue being debated isn't who, how, when, or where, but why. Why should women have the capacity for climax when they can make babies perfectly well without it? In Darwinian terms, what is the adaptive value of the female orgasm?
No one questions the Darwinian wisdom of the mammalian male orgasm. The first male to demonstrate such an aptitude would be inclined to indulge it so ferociously that other males' anorgasmic sex drives would pale in comparison. Adaptation can also explain the relative speed with which males achieve their bliss. Since the limiting factor in male reproductive success is usually the availability of receptive females, when said females make themselves available, a guy who can work fast has a distinct advantage over the slow male. He begets more kids, for one, and he is also less likely to fall prey to enemies that might attack while a couple is flagrante delicto. Furthermore, the less time it takes to philander, the more time there is to eat--another essential component of survival.
Female reproductive success, in contrast, is usually limited by the availability of resources to sustain mother and child through pregnancy, labor, and nursing, rather than an availability of mating partners. Because most females must gestate and raise their offspring, repeated bouts of lovemaking yield diminishing returns where conception is concerned and interfere considerably with the duties of motherhood. There is no strong evidence that orgasm in females directly contributes to fertility or fecundity. So why is it there at all?
Some evolutionary theorists, including Desmond Morris, maintain that human female orgasm was adaptive because it helped cement the "pair- bond" between ancestral parents that was necessary to ensure the survival of vulnerable infants. If the woman is rewarded during sex as much as (or more than) the man, goes the theory, then she will remain perpetually eager for intercourse and retain her allure with her mate, who will be less likely to stray. Scientists had also speculated that female orgasm aided conception by keeping a woman on her back long enough for her to ensure insemination, or by actively sucking sperm up into the uterus (an idea whose time has gone, since the contractions that accompany climax turn out to be expulsive).
Such theories assume that female orgasm is a reliable companion of copulation. But as Alfred Kinsey announced in his landmark 1953 report, it's not. Kinsey's interviews with nearly 6,000 women, as well as subsequent surveys, revealed that the vast majority of women do not climax during sexual intercourse without direct stimulation of the clitoris. Even in today's era of relative enlightenment, the most recent statistics from the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction show that fewer than half the women surveyed achieve orgasm through intercourse. The disparity between the reproductive act and the orgasmic reflex prompted Shere Hite, in her controversial 1976 Hite Report, to call sexual intercourse the Rube Goldberg method of female sexual fulfillment.
The most widely accepted theory of the origin of the term Easter is that it is derived from the name of an Old English goddess mentioned by the 7th to 8th-century English monk Bede, who wrote that Ēosturmōnaþ (Old English 'Month of Ēostre', translated in Bede's time as "Paschal month") was an English month, corresponding to April, which he says "was once called after a goddess of theirs named Ēostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month
De temporum ratione
In chapter 15 (De mensibus Anglorum, "The English months") of his 8th-century work De temporum ratione ("The Reckoning of Time"), Bede describes the indigenous month names of the English people. After describing the worship of the goddess Rheda during the Anglo-Saxon month of Hrēþ-mōnaþ, Bede writes about Ēosturmōnaþ, the month of the goddess Ēostre:
Eostur-monath, qui nunc Paschalis mensis interpretatur, quondam a Dea illorum quæ Eostre vocabatur, et cui in illo festa celebrabant nomen habuit: a cujus nomine nunc Paschale tempus cognominant, consueto antiquæ observationis vocabulo gaudia novæ solemnitatis vocantes
What's with the generic personal insults?
I want a remake!