Just had the conversation again… No, not The [Birds-n-Bees] Conversation with the kids. I had the conversation about how to have the conversation with the kids. This time it was the girlfriends, but I’ve had the conversation with my sister, patients and other folks.

So, to be of public service, and because I have a blog and why not?, I’m sharing the books that I find helpful in this case.

Best book for girls:

I suggest buying this book when your daughter hits ten or eleven. It is really a great primer for every general growing up question, mind and body.

Best Book for Boys:

There didn’t used to be an equivalent book for boys. I’m happy to share this new offering, though. It’s really useful and easy to read.

Now, to the sex ed stuff. I believe that it’s important to include the spiritual in the sexual, because they’re one. Still, books that are preachy can make an awkward talk annoying. So, what to do?

Well, I have a couple books I like.

Where Did I Come From?
This book is out of print, unfortunately. It’s such a fun, good humored, and hippie-ish, take on the topic.

Here are my favorite books, by far. This series is broken down by a child’s age and development level.

Here’s the first, for children ages 3 – 5. For those who are aghast at starting sex ed at ages 3, consider that with all the creeps in the world, you’ll want your child to have the language and understanding to talk to you about his or her body. No one wants to be a reactive parent.

Now for children ages 5-8:

For kids ages 8-11:

Finally, the heavy duty facts:

Here’s my experience with the whole thing: If you talk about it when the children are younger, they’ll have less embarrassment, if any at all.

The problem is that most people wait too long–they wait until their kids are already fully changing. Maybe their daughter started her period. Maybe their son’s voice has dropped and all the other engines are starting to run.

That’s too late.

From ages about 8 through 11, children are very open to you and not defensive about their bodies or their questions.

Because children, especially girls, are maturing at such early ages, waiting to have “The Talk” can put a child in a frightening situation.

Being straight-forward and matter-of-fact and also, keeping it simple, helps here.

Asking a kid, “What do you want to know?” is a good place to start. And then, answer the question–simply.

For those used to my political posts, don’t worry. There will be more of those. I just decided to share this post because it’s come up so much recently.

Best of luck, parents! Parenting ain’t for the faint of heart that is for sure.

1. Keep the mystery alive–Too many people reveal too much too often. Why share where you’re going or what you’re doing or who you’re with. A little doubt keeps things spicy.

2. Call rarely–It’s so annoying to have your work interrupted by mindless blather about nothing. One of the biggest myths is that your significant other actually cares what you’re thinking about when you’re chomping your food on your lunch hour. Newsflash! No one cares.

3. Retreat from conflict–People often deal with conflict by trying to resolve it and talk it out. This can be a big mistake. Most likely, the things you fight about today are the things you’re going to fight about forever. Don’t resolve it. Accept it. Stay away for as long as possible. The other person will eventually get tired of being angry.

4. Don’t expect your spouse to meet your sexual needs–You should know that the best sex of your life happened before you got married or moved in together. You didn’t get married for sex. You got married for companionship, bill-sharing and maybe having a kid or two. Having sexual expectations is just setting yourself up for disappointment. Let it go.

5. Spend time cultivating interests that don’t include your spouse–One of the biggest problems in marriages is that people think they should do stuff together. Why? If you like golf, and your wife hates it, well, she’ll just have to get over it and understand that golf makes you happy. If she likes shopping, she needs to do it when it’s convenient for her. Her man will understand. Togetherness is overrated.

6. Don’t change–Be you. Until you’re your true, unchecked self, you can’t really be free. Trying to get rid of annoying habits or irritating traits is just energy wasted. A true partner will love you no matter what.

7. Don’t apologize–True love means never having to say you’re sorry. Why should anyone expect an apology? You’re doing the best you can with what you’ve got and if the person doesn’t understand it, they have the limited world-view, not you. Saying you’re sorry is for sissies. Men are emasculated enough. Women cow-tow to men too often. Stop apologizing!

8. Don’t give tokens of affection–Materialism in all its guises is just manipulation. Don’t do it. A person who needs concrete proof of love is superficial and not worth your time anyway. True love doesn’t need to be spoken or given or shared. Rings are just that–symbolic. Who needs symbols? The real thing is just understood.

9. Ignore special dates–Again, this is just a manifestation of artificial constraints imposed by society. Every day is special! Why focus on birthdays or anniversaries? They are days like any other and it’s ridiculous that people have expectations of gifts or kindness on those days.

10. Stop saying “I love you”–The words become vain and meaningless after a while. True love doesn’t need constant reinforcement. True love just “knows”. If your partner needs to hear the words, well, that’s just too demanding. Who needs demanding in an intimate relationship? Forget it and move on.

Some of these pieces of advice might seem unconventional, but really, relationships are cracking under the pressure of inane expectations. People want too much, expect too much and just generally put too much faith in other human beings. There is no perfect partner out there. You can’t be the perfect partner. Why try? Just be yourself and the person right for you will find you and love you just the way you are. That’s true love and the world needs more of it.

In the second half, another, less successful religion is discussed: Global Warming. Charlie Martin, now the science editor at Pajamas Media discusses the latest happenings and the bitter clinging to a discarded belief.

Listen here

Police said they had found no immediate connection to terrorism, but internet postings suggested Bedell had harboured ill-feelings towards the government.

A user by the name of “JPatrickBedell” wrote that he was “determined to see that justice is served” in the death of Marine Col James Sabow, who was found dead at his California home in 1991.

The Associated Press news agency said that death was ruled a suicide, but the case has long been the source of theories of a cover-up.

The posting referred to conspiracy theories concerning the 9/11 terrorist attacks, saying the Sabow case was “a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions”.

Don’t buy the right-wing b.s. This guy was a nutter, no question, but he was a nutter of Truther persuasion. It’s the Democrats that embrace that conspiracy theory…them and the Ron Paul folks.

UPDATED:
Michelle Malkin does more digging and guess what? The shooter is a Democrat. Big surprise…..to no one but the press who is constantly having to adjust their expectations.

Update:

www.Electorates.us has 180 million registered voter records available online (thanks to Anne Horrigan). John Patrick Bedell’s voter registration records in Hollister, CA are available for any journalist before he/she goes off and labels him a “right-wing extremist.”
Guess which party he registered under in 2005 and was actively registered under as of 2008?
DEMOCRAT.

EMID 15324137
STATESOURCE California
DATAACQUIRED 20080121
PrefixTitle MR
LASTNAME,FIRSTNAME,MIDDLENAME Bedell,John,Patrick
SOURCEIDVOTER 30048
DATEOFBIRTH 5/20/1973
PLACEOFBIRTH CA
REGDATE 20051006
GENDER M
PART Democrat
ACTIVECODE ACTIVE
STATUS
ResAddr1,ResAddr2,ResCity,ResState,ResZip 110 Georges Dr Hollister,CA
STATEHOUSE 28
STATESENATE 12
USCONGRESS 17
LASTDATEVOTED 20051108
Stop playing games, MSM.

Now, Michelle also says this:

As Patterico reports, he hated Bush and littered the Internet with 9/11 Truther rants.

But just as I passed on playing the blame game with the global warmicides earlier this week, I’m not playing MSNBC/NYTimes-style “gotcha” with this one, either.

Well, Michelle is nicer than me. And so is Zombie, who says this:

So far, however, I’ve noticed a deafening quietude on the left-leaning blogs about this guy’s affiliations and belief systems. Those brave enough to troll leftist comments sections have noted mumblings therein that the guy was probably a secret “teabagger,” despite all evidence to the contrary.

Compare this to the response in the leftosphere when Joseph Stack flew his plane into an Austin IRS building a couple weeks earlier. Despite leaving a suicide note that approvingly cited Karl Marx and that condemned capitalism as nothing but “greed,” he was pilloried by every left-leaning site as a right-wing hitman who epitomized the inherent violence of the Tea Party movement — because he had anti-government feelings.

Now, just for a moment, let’s set aside the false guilt-by-association game everyone’s always playing. We all know that John Patrick Bedell and Joseph Stack are basically insane, plain and simple — as are any number of similar whackjobs who periodically go loco and erupt into violence. Violent psychopaths often incorporate some seemingly random overarching theme into their mindset, and on occasion that theme involves politics. Whenever someone like Bedell or Stack goes ballistic, every pundit jumps into the fray and tries to spin the outburst as “exemplifying” the political viewpoint of those with whom the pundit disagrees.

But that only rises to the level of a valid argument when a distinct pattern emerges. If, say, 5,000 suicide bombers in a row are invariably Islamic fundamentalists — well, OK, we’ve got a problem with the belief system, not just with the individuals. Yet I don’t see a pattern in these “going postal” violent outbursts which seem to happen perhaps three or four times per year, every year, no matter who’s in power or who’s president: it seems that the “philosophy” (if you can even call it that) of each of the attackers is unique, idiosyncratic and just plain illogical. Even so, if he starts shooting or killing when a Republican is president, he is deemed a left-wing psycho (see: Charles Manson); if he starts shooting or killing when a Democrat is president, he is deemed a right-wing psycho (see: Joseph Stack). But the truth is, paranoid people simply feel threatened by the external power structure in general, so they lash out at any symbol of authority, regardless of its political affiliation.

So, instead of playing the blame game so unapologetically employed by the Left when they feel they can spin things to their political advantage, I’m not going to say that Bedell’s actions at the Pentagon epitomize the leftist worldview. Rather, he was just crazy, as clearly indicated by his belief in the craziest of modern crazy conspiracy theories, 9/11 Truthism.

Are most Truthers leftists? Yes. But that doesn’t mean that all left-leaning Americans are thereby just as crazy as the most extreme among them; it simply indicates that when a leftist goes crazy in the post-9/11 era, he often gloms onto Truthism as his paranoia of choice.

Put it this way: Leftism fails as a coherent philosophy on its own terms. We shouldn’t try to wring significance from the delusional outburst of someone who just happened to be leftist. There are plenty of ways to logically disembowel Marxism and its numerous noxious contemporary offspring without having to resort to an unnecessary round of political “gotcha!”

Now, of course, this is true. One psychopath doesn’t represent the whole–unless the psycho has right-leaning beliefs (see Charles Johnson’s obsession with a few nutters).

The bigger issue is the conflation by the press. And so, I say, embrace John Patrick Bedell left-wing psycho extremists (that’s redundant, I think). He is yours. The leftist ideology spawns murderous, psychotic behavior. Evil. Evil. Evil.

See? That sounds rational and accurate right? Well, it does, if it’s describing a conservative or Teapartier. Guess what? I’ll stop the silliness when you all do. You first.

A “dark side” to the internet suggests a strong link between time spent surfing the web and depression, say psychologists.
British scientists found that the longer people spent online, the less likely they were to be happy.

A small group of the worst affected individuals were both depressed and addicted.

But it was not clear whether using the internet causes mental health problems, or whether people with mental health problems are drawn to the internet.

More work is needed to answer this “chicken and egg” question, say the researchers.

Well, if a person tends to be a solitary person, he might enjoy hanging on the internet. But then, he does self-reinforcing things, like look at porn, and gets stuck behind his desk even more. Then, he is kinda addicted..he exercises less, gets less natural sunlight, interacts with real people less and it becomes a vicious cycle.

Or, the person starts depressed and the internet doesn’t force human interaction or exertion.

I don’t think there is one cause here, but it does seem to be a risk for introverted people.

Congratulations, it’s a boy – who will give birth next month.

Two proud papas are expecting a baby boy in February, London’s Daily Mail reports, in what will be the world’s second known case of birth by a “pregnant man.”

“We know some people will criticize us, but we are blissfully happy and not ashamed,” Scott Moore told the newspaper.

Moore and his husband, Thomas, were both born female and have undergone surgery to change their sex. The transgender California couple is legally married, as Moore still has his female birth certificate.

Baby “Miles” has two brothers waiting for him, 10-year-old Logan and 12-year-old Greg, Thomas’ children from a previous relationship with a woman who has since passed away.

Moore, born Jessica, told the paper he first realized he wanted to be a man when he was 11.

“When I told my family, they thought I was crazy, but they gradually realized I was serious and allowed me to start taking male hormones when I was 16 years old,” he said.

His parents eventually paid for him to have his 36DDD breasts removed, the paper reports, but he could not afford the high cost of full sex reassignment surgery.

Moore still has female reproductive organs, and got pregnant using the sperm of a friend in June 2009, the Daily Mail reports.

You know, there is such thing as abnormal psychology. This is NOT NORMAL. It is one thing to move to Funky Town. It’s another thing to start a family there and bring children into this disordered environment.

Pretending that this is not so is akin to the government pretending that a dude with the name Mohammed who acts weird, says he wants to blow things up and then does it, isn’t a terrorist.

Society cannot function if we don’t have some agreement on what is acceptable social norms. Freaks do not tend to build society, they tend to be around the edges eating away at its success.

Now, I’m libertarian enough not to want to get in this lady’s business, but I also don’t equate tolerance with approval. I don’t approve. No one should. It’s not good for her body (it’s self-mutilation on a massive scale). It’s not good for her children. It’s not good for society.

The long wait is over for a German family that immigrated to Morristown in search of the freedom to homeschool their five children.

A U.S. immigration judge granted political asylum to the family Tuesday afternoon in Memphis.

The decision clears the way for Uwe Romeike, his wife and their five children to stay in Morristown where they have been living since 2008.

German state constitutions require children to attend public or private schools and parents can face prison time or fines if they don’t comply.

Romeike, an evangelical Christian, said he believes the German curriculum is “against Christian values.”

Now, as long as their education stays free here in America.

A woman’s hormonal cycle will start to mesh with other women when in proximity. A man’s hormones also seemed to be linked to other men. Via Allahpundit on Twitter comes this research gem from Scientific American:

With its winners and losers, politics is a lot like sports. Now biologists have the testosterone—or lack thereof—to prove it. Specifically, they have found that male voters who back a losing candidate experience a drop in the hormone.

Immediately before and after the 2008 U.S. presidential election result, neuroscientists from Duke University and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor collected the saliva of 163 college-age participants to determine the amount of testosterone in their systems. Male voters for winner Barack Obama had stable levels of testosterone, but the hormone rapidly declined in males who cast ballots for losers John McCain and Robert Barr. Female voters showed no significant testosterone changes after victory or defeat of their candidate.

Past research has shown that winning and losing in sports matches and other competitions affect testosterone levels in men. The new findings, published online October 21 by PLoS ONE, reveal that politics can influence testosterone in men “just as if they directly engaged head to head in a contest for dominance,” says Kevin LaBar of Duke, the study’s senior researcher.

So the solution, then, is to have winning GOP candidates. I expect Republican men to experience a testosterone surge in the coming year. Something to look forward to.

Adolf Hitler’s remains were burned and dumped into an East German river by Soviet agents 25 years after the end of World War II, Interfax reported, citing Vasily Khristoforov, the Federal Security Service’s chief archivist.

The remains of Hitler, his companion Eva Braun and the family of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels were destroyed in April 1970 on the secret orders of then-KGB chief Yuri Andropov, the Russian news agency said today. Andropov went on to become Soviet leader from 1982 until his death in 1984.

The Soviets were concerned that graves of Third Reich leaders might one day attract Nazi sympathizers, Interfax said. The remains were burned and dumped into the Biederitz River, outside the eastern city of Magdeburg, according to the news service.

So, Hitler got torched. I’m glad he’s dust. The thought of his remains remaining is disturbing. Some souls shouldn’t exist.