A kind word and a pair of good-looking pants that fit.  Thanks Carol!  You're the only person I know on this Earth that actually knows how to buy clothes for me.
   

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You know a lot of people say "yes" to this question out of the grounds that the "times have changed."  Others say that this is wrong and immoral because they are teenagers and are "children".

I think that they are both wrong.

As to the first:  yes, times have changed.  The human species has not changed too much socially.  We still have groups and cliques.  We still have puberty around the same age--a little earlier because of hormones we eat in America.  Immorality is still immorality.  It is the natural state at that age to begin procreation.  It has been for centuries.  Millennlia.  It is also the natural state to begin maturity and responsibility. 

Of course full maturity, traditionally doesn't begin until one hits 30 after sometime being married and participating in the community.  People should be making life choices when they hit puberty for themselves and their family and they must also take full responsibility the consequences of their actions without meddling from their seniors.  That is experience and growth.  There are some lessons that cannot be learned except through experience.

Wise people may heed counsel and advice, but MUST be allowed to make the choices for themselves for good for ill taking what results from their choices.

I charge those who would say that this is not fair and yet would still allow birth control.  The power of maturity and self-control comes from choice and consequence.  It is a FAIR trade.  You cannot eat your cake and have it too.  It's either one or the other.  You can't make a mature adult decision of having sex and then hide and say you are a child when suddenly there are difficult and oftimes painful results of that decision. 

Parents and good-intentioned people have made the law so that it forces the person to do just that.  Well the message has been sent and young people are doing just that.  Having sex then hiding behind the excuse of being a "child."  All that does is reinforce personal irresponsibility resulting in the self-centered society that we have today with broken families, et cetera.  Well as they say "The road to Hell..."  We're almost there.

Which brings me to the second point that "teenagers" are "children."  They are not.  If nature has seen fit to allow them to begin multiplying then they are mature.  Inexperienced, but mature.  Pseudo-scientific and pseudo-psychological interpretations of scientific observations have lead other well intentioned-people, and some not, to the conclusions that teens are not mature and must be protected as children.  Nonsense.  They are adults and are ready to take on the responsibilites of adults to coddle them and keep them from responsibility without consequenses is to stunt their growth as mature citizens of our republic.

They must be allowed the freedom to make their own decisions and live with whatever good or evil that may result.  They should be given counsel and support to help them THROUGH the decisions and consequences, but not to "protect" them FROM it (what that looks like is a subject for another debate).  To "protect" them from choice, pain, and consequence so they may have only pleasure ultimately harms them and our society immeasurably.  That must not be allowed to continue.

So I believe and argue that, yes, middle schoolers should be given birth control, but also that they be given the right to make adult decisions about family, work, and education.  And that the if we were to give them birth control so they may have adult pleasure--for they are adults since they can breed (as any zoologist can tell you that when any creature that can breed is an adult)--then they must also be given the adult responsiblities and consequenses without the ability to go crying back to mommy and daddy and then heaping the pain and trouble onto their parents whom did not EARN the pain and trouble as they did.

Those that would argue that this is harsh and that these people are immature and inexperienced and that it would harm them are being foolish.  Yes it would harm them--bad choices often DO harm.  That's how we learn and improve.  Without pain and harm or the REAL threat of pain and harm in our mind we will never experience and grow.  They are resilient people and will rise to the maturity that is their rightful place if given the chance and not manipulated by unscrupulous business people that want to create an intelligent, but irresponsible market for their crap.

So going back to the quotation in the beginning.  Maturity comes from experience, guidance, and from BEING allowed to BE mature.  Samurai Jack's father did not defend Jack to prevent his pain, but allowed his son to figure out a solution himself and thus grow and become mature.  Nor did he allow his son to have the pleasure of his ball without having to fight to keep it from the bullies.  Of course this is an allegory and illustration of my point as is the purpose of all good and virtuous--yet still entertaining--stories.

Cheers! 

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Nobody.  It just isn't the same.  Why would I want a twin of somebody living or dead?  Nothing guarantees that the clone will be the same.  In fact, I rather think that the clone would be different entirely. 

Now if it were for some sinister purpose: I'd clone myself so that I can harvest its organs when I need it.  But that would be wrong since a clone would be my twin.  Then again the only other sinister purpose I could see of cloning someone still living would be to do something like  "Pygmalion"  and clone one of the great beauties of this age (or just one of the exquisite, beautiful, women I know--it makes my heart burst to know they're all taken) and make her my wife.  But then nothing would guarantee a happy union.  Unless, like Pygmalion, she would be conditioned or designed.to fall in love with me.  But that would be wrong too because people are not things or toys to be possessed.

Now if I could regenerate people from the past I'd probably regenerate people like our founding fathers or Abraham Lincoln and have them run the country. 
   

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Nope. 

What is outdated is the communist-hippie notions that tradtion is of no value, that new is always better than old, that pleasure is always better than pain, and that love and liberty are free. 

What did we get from those drugged-out, lost, baby boomer romantics except the broken family, pseudo-psychobabble ideas of education, and an ignorant, self-righteous, self-indulgent, and, ultimately, self-destructive society?

PS the US dollar can purchase 96 Canadian cents.

The beauty is that thd Amercant society reproduces itself too and gets exponentially worse and worse. 

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People want to feel special and be recognized be people whom are considered special.  Sometimes that's famous people.  Sometimes powerful people.  Sometimes beautiful looking people.  People that to them seem confident.  Who seem to project an image of self-definition and self-worth.  That somehow that fame or power makes them valuable more virtuous.  To be near them is to be near someone touched by grace.  And perhaps some of that grace would rub off.

To know or even be friends somebody famous, or powerful, or beautiful is to assure acceptance on some social level.

To become famous, powerful, or beautiful.  Well, that either takes a whole lot of luck or some doing.  Kiss freedom and anonymity good-bye and say hello to stalkers and annoying groupies.

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I don't know anymore.

Aristotilian isn't that?   At least for a young person becoming old or an old person that was recently young.  That is my answer.

I used to believe that beauty was the outward appearance and that because I lacked it (or so was told), I had to have it at the very least in the form of someone who was beautiful that would love me and affirm that though I do not have beauty that I have her.  That if I could not be beautiful myself at least I could be near it.  And that someone who had beauty could value and accept someone who does not have it.

Shallow as it is,  being associated, no, attached to someone of beauty confers status in our society.  A status of acceptence.  Someone whom people find attractive being attracted to me makes feel less worthless about myself, less like the alienated outcast I grew up as--neither accepted as truely American or Taiwanese or Chinese.  Certainly not accepted by Hispanic people as members of La Raza certainly had made clear to me over the years--since my first encounter with them at five in which two teenage Latinas beat the living shit out of me for just being a chino newly immigrated into their neighborhood. 

Heck, when their mother was babysitting for my mom, I wasn't even allowed to eat at the table with the other members of La Raza--the other kids did.  I was treated like a mongrel and had to go to the back of the kitchen where the mother had prepared an egg for me.  If I were especially lucky she'd give me a casadilla left over from their lunch--I think it only happened once.

Those were ugly acts by ugly, grotesque, people.  I certainly don't fault ALL American Hispanics only those whom are fervent even fanatic about their La Raza status running around protesting being oppressed and rudely, if not violently, taking what others have earned and paid for.  I've had enough of that kind ugly repression for a lifetime.  Go persecute someone else from being different than you--hypocrites.

But with these wonderful encounters--even now at my school district with the new La Raza leadership--I have begun to think that actions and thoughts are what truely creates and destroys beauty.  That the heart and the mind and the tongue can create beauty and harness what good there is in people and perhaps, for a time, allow them to control their evil, baser, natures.  But that those same things, heart, mind, and tongue, can just as easily destroy--and that the mouth is the true source of pain and ugliness.

Thus, I study and teach rhetoric, the art of the virtuous speaker speaking well.  The art where words used correctly will guide and heal; lead and restore.  But it's futile.  The truly ugly people have the power which they use to promulgate their agenda, their own little agenda of self-aggrandizing ugliness, that only benefits their own careers and bank accounts at the cost of the students and everyone else in the community.

I can only dream of this beautiful thing--that if the revolution ever does come--I want to pull the rope to their guillotines. 

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1. The collection of my journals as it represents my thoughts.
2. The collection of my poetry and writings (with rough drafts) as it represents my heart.
3. The pressed wildflower that a girl I loved gave me once to remind the person looking at my capsule that life's too short to be dwelling on the past.  

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Running out of juice when I really needed my Ipod.    haha.
   

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Violence and sex.  Isn't that what makes anything good? 

Seriously, although I don't think that violence and sex are really that exclusive from this, but the book has to be thought provoking and be interesting to me.  It just so happens that I'm interested in violence and sex as well as good versus bad, battles, romances, et cetera; to sum up a 'good' book has got to have spectacle or be sensational to hold my interests--its got to move me somehow.  Anything else is just boring.

That's why I can't read "religious" books straight through.  They bore me.  Just Like Jesus? Boring.  The Purpose Driven Life?   Mind numbingly boring.  Future Grace?  Boring too.  Become a Better You?  Boring and heretical (frankly I've read better heresies--I guess they don't make them like they use to: vis. Gospel According to Thomas).  Boring.  Boring.  Boring.  I'm not saying I don't learn anything from them or that they're not useful.  But they're boring.

I don't understand how some people can enjoy reading those things.  Give me something interesting like The Clone Republic or The Color of Magic any day.

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Oh yes.  I get it.  Call it mental constipation.  I used to write with my left hand to get the juices flowing just to wake up my right brain.  Nowadays, I just relax my brain by doing something well--brainless--like watching a favorite show or reading a good book, something just for fun not just something crazy or for work.  You know what got me writing historical fiction again was picking up and reading Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars.  It got me started writing, strangely, 18th Century historical fiction.

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