The Scientific Case for Masturbation

I came across a very informative article written by Sharon Begley in NEWSWEEK last month. It might not be everyone's topic of interest but I'm sure at one time or another we all had a "hand" in it. But to ignore the latest findings on masturbation would be a mistake: the stakes are simply too high, going all the way up to the very survival of the species. While we all were admonished against toying with the organs of procreation that would somehow undermine baby making, the facts are to the contrary. Evidence from elephants to rodents to humans shows that masturbating is----counter intuitively---an excellent way to make healthy babies and lots of them.

The science is straightforward. Whenever a behavior is common in the animal kingdom, biologists suspect it has an adaptive function. That is, the behavior enabled individual animals to survive better and leave more offspring than animals that did not engage in the behavior. As a result, genes for the behavior spread throughout that population until it became essentially ubiquitous. And so it it is with autoeroticism, which is common...really common.

When you think about it, with "spanking the monkey," "charming the snake," and "freeing willy," you have a remarkable number of slang terms for pleasuring oneself referring to animals. That reflects reality: the practice has been documented in Japanese macaques, gibbons, baboons, chimps, elephants, dogs, cats, horses, lions, donkeys and even walruses that manage to "flog the bishop" with their flippers. (To prove a point, Ms Begley mentions that clicking this blog http://www.scienceinseconds.com/blog/Spanking-the-Monkey you'll see an excellent photo of an elephant in flagrante dilecto.)

What then, might be its adaptive function? How can a male's autoeroticism help him triumph in the war of survival of the fittest? Lucky for us scientists have come up with four basic theories, each with some support in one or another animal species. Here they are:

1. Masturbation removes old, damaged sperm that are passed their Use-by-Date from the reproductive tract. That would increase the fraction of healthy, speedy sperm, improving the male's chance of becoming a father. Notes biologist Jane Waterman (University of Central Florida), in her paper in the journal PLoS One, "In humans masturbating decreased the number of sperm a man delivered the next time he had sex but not the number of sperm that woman retained." She concluded that "masturbation is a male strategy to increase sperm fitness." Result: healthier and possibly more babies.


2. Masturbation might be a form of advertising. According to this theory, males that engage in autoeroticism signal to possible mates as well as competitors how much they have to offer. Result: more mating, more babies, bigger families.


3. Masturbation might be a sort of Victory Lap. Some animals masturbate after they mate. Since other members of the group know this, then this act signifies to other females looking for a mate that, "if he was good enough for her...." Result: more mating, more babies.


4. Masturbation can serve a hygiene function. According to this idea, males engage in autoeroticism because it cleans the reproductive tract and reduces the chance of acquiring a sexually transmitted disease from a female he mated with and who had other recent partners. Result: a lower incidence of STDs, better sexual hygiene, more mating, more babies.

And what about females??? There have been far fewer observations of the females of various species. Instead, primatologists conclude, in the case of females the purpose is simply to produce enjoyable sensations...with or without batteries.

The Way I See It....all in all and across great and small, autoeroticism (at least among males) is a cornerstone of procreation and thus the formation of families. If religious fundamentalist views of the practice were to dominate, it would be a worrisome threat to family values and to our species. It seems that the church is always pushing for pain while males are always pulling for pleasure. Oh well...

Appeasement Wasn't in JFK's Vocabulary

On the forty-seventh anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination it's fitting to compare him with the present President of the United States. Especially since Barack Hussein Obama has said a number of times, besides Abraham Lincoln, he emulates himself with Kennedy's presidency. Yes.....their youthfulness, dynamic speaking ability and a general likability are the common denominator of the two but the similarity ends there. John F. Kennedy was not an appeaser!

Winston Churchill, who had to wear the consequences of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Adolf Hitler in 1939, said this about appeasing: "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last." Europe paid a terrible price for that appeasement. In 1962, JFK stood up to the Russians and blockaded Cuba from receiving their missiles and technicians. It put the world on the brink of war but to defend his country from this threat appeasement was not an option, he was prepared to put American safety on the line. The Russians "blinked" and the rest is history. A fitting legacy of patriotic leadership.

Now in this current time, enacting the policy of appeasement was in fact embodied in the most recent international trip of President Barack Obama. One would think that it would be possible to become accustomed to the humiliation Obama causes the United States everywhere he goes to represent it, every time he speaks in its behalf and every place he is accompanied by his wife. But in this trip to the East and the Muslim world, he surpasses even himself in shameful behavior. His constant fulsome praise of the world of Islam was on overdrive; I don't think that even the Muslim world regards itself as highly as Obama regards it.

What Obama did on this trip was a classic demonstration of appeasement of the enemy. Despite the fact that Muslims worldwide have sworn in innumerable ways, and in innumerable venues, to destroy the West, Obama feels that the U.S. of A. must make accommodation of any and all kinds to the Muslim world. He is not satisfied just to praise Muslims for the greatness of their accomplishments, he feels he must also denigrate the nation he was elected to lead at the same time. This President thus magnifies the national weakness that he projects worldwide by his behavior and his words, thus making the strongest nation on earth, appear a toothless, witless, ineffectual tiger. And Obama knows full well what he is doing.

He is working feverishly in these continuing efforts to destroy American sovereignty by always choosing Globalism over the interest of the country he purports to lead. Obama has spent the entirety of this shameful trip gleefully reporting on America's decline in as many ways as he can have fitted on his teleprompter. If Obama were only capable of saying a fraction of the wonderful things about his own country that he says about all these nations of the so-called "emerging world", well then, I guess he wouldn't be the Barack Hussein Obama, the President the Americans have come to know and NOT love.

The Way I See It....there is a consequence of accepting the appeasement of the enemy as national foreign policy. At this point, the world of Americas friends and enemies knows what President Obama is made of, and it is the opposite of the patriotism, determination, grit and brilliance displayed both by Winston Churchill and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. What is even more remarkable is that Obama makes any and all accommodation and capitulation to his enemies without anything being achieved or even asked for in return. But his every action and words make it blindingly obvious on this trip that he demonstrates his loathing and contempt for the nation he leads which plays into and harmonizes so well with the loathing and contempt felt by the Muslim world, giving them encouragement to further their efforts to continue their Jihad.

The REAL "Stolen Generation''

Twenty one years ago, in a poor region of China, a nightmare began for a 6 year old boy named Zhou. It happened as he was leaving school when he met a couple who claimed to be friends of his parents. The man and woman said they were there to take him home, instead of walking, they would treat him to a bus ride. While waiting they also treated him to a bowl of his favourite cold noodles. It was only when the bus passed his home Zhou sensed something was wrong. He laid on the floor and cried. No one paid him any notice. Once off the bus they held him tightly, then boarded a train.

The journey, which lasted at least two days, continued by another bus and then by boat. Once in the countryside, the couple transferred Zhou to a older woman. He remembers, ''She didn't seem happy. Maybe it was an issue of price. So we took a three-wheeled cart to another farm and then another. In the end they took me to my new family.'' Zhou was repeatedly told by his new family, a large farming clan in Fujian, that life would have been much worse had he never been sold to them. But he was treated more like Cinderella than part of this large family. Eventually they treated him better and he grew to like them.

It's important to remember that the late 1980's were an unsettling period for China. The economic reforms that had began a decade earlier had opened up huge opportunities - not just for law abiding citizens. The Chinese penchant for corruption also began to rise, and organized crime, beaten back by relentless social controls, grew once again. Because of a new freedom of movement, gangs found it easier to take children from one place and sell them in another. There have been many crackdowns in the past, but the authorities are cracking down much harder and in the last 18 months have arrested 15,000 people, with ringleaders sentenced to death. They were selling children for up to $6000 each. However, the scourge continues as 2,093 cases were already reported in the first seven months of this year.

To control population growth, in 1979 the government launched the One-Child Policy, which prevented most families from having multiple offspring. A traditional preference for male children, meanwhile, persisted in many areas. For these moderately prosperous citizens buying a child is an investment to ensure they are taken care of in old age. These factors contributed to the springing up of syndicates that traded not only in children but also in young women, who were sold into marriage in rural areas short on eligible brides.

Tackling the aftermath, however, can be even harder than cracking the trafficking gangs. Despite a new official effort to reunite families with their lost children, it's mostly volunteers that shoulder much of the work. And while the, mostly indifferent, public is slowly becoming aware of the extent of the human trafficking, the implications of having tens of thousands of children wrenched from their families are only now emerging as those who went missing in the 1980's reach adulthood. Some were kidnapped at such a young age that they will never have any recollection of their birth family. The police have recently launched a website called ''Baby Searching for Home,'' which publicizes the details of the rescued children to help grieving parents identify them. The authorities confirm any possible matches through DNA tests. So far 813 children have been reunited with their families through this program, unfortunately the now 27 year old Zhou wasn't one of them.

The Way I See It....this is a true story of human tragedy, a real "Stolen Generation" rather then the phony one foisted on the Australian people. This manufactured guilt-trip instigated by anti-religious, leftest historians (which I exposed in my previous posting on the subject) to malign the good intentions of those missionaries working in difficult conditions with half-caste children in dire circumstances. Zhou's story is emblematic of a country in the throes of rapid change, torn between tradition and modernity, challenge and opportunity, morality and corruption. Hopefully there is a good end in sight.

Absurd Vaccine Marketing of Gardasil

In Australia, Queensland's Premier, "Captain" Bligh, is being approached by the vaccine maker, CSL and is being strongly advised to allow school-age boys to get vaccinated with Gardasil, a vaccine that was only developed for girls. This new absurd recommendation is based on the notion that boys could get throat cancer if they have oral sex with an HPV-infected girl or at least genital warts. Aside from them being very rare diseases to begin with, it's made them even rarer now that three quarters of school girls have already received the vaccination.

It should be obvious to most clear-headed parents that recommending Gardasil to boys is little more than a scare campaign aimed at gaining a bigger market from teenage boys. Even the advice to give Gardasil vaccinations to young girls is simply disease mongering designed to sell vaccines. This is because girls who have HPV do not automatically get cervical cancer. Why? Because girls who have healthy immune systems (even healthier under Chiropractic Care) and who lead healthy lifestyles, have little risk of developing cervical cancer from HPV. It is only girls who have a compromised immune systems that are vulnerable.

Honestly....this could be a new low for the pharmaceutical companies, recommending a vaccine for boys that's designed for a body part they do not have. It is my belief that this an obvious and reprehensible attempt to sell more of their potentially dangerous vaccine. After all, if CSL pulls it off by Bligh getting hoodwinked by their fallacious reasoning they will have doubled Gardasil's target market with a corresponding doubling of their profits as well not to mention the amount of deaths and side-effects as has been experienced in the United States and Canada. A gross neglect of duty-of-care by the Australian government is not having an Adverse Vaccine Reaction Reporting System to publicly monitor severe drug/vaccine reactions rather than the media reporting occasional deadly episodes as in Perth and in Brisbane in April this year.

Gardasil, which during the first year of its use has resulted in more than 3,500 adverse events including deaths, more than any vaccine in history. Gardasil contains a whooping 275 micrograms of toxic aluminium! And one of the scientists who developed it, Diane M. Harper, warned that the vaccine had never been tested on young girls before it was released for widespread use by them. This kind of negligence is criminal!

The Way I See It....this is an important decision and if you have not carefully studied it (see my earlier 2 postings in April) and are responsible for making the decision for your son and daughter, then I would implore you to spend serious time CAREFULLY analyzing both sides of the argument. A wrong decision could have absolutely devastating consequences for your children as evidenced overseas. This evidence will have you understand that many of the boys who receive the chemical cocktail in Gardasil will begin to experience side effects just as their female peers did.

Unfortunately, the effectiveness of the drug company's million-dollar marketing campaign is such that many of the medically-brainwashed public will believe this is how to "protect" their children. Fortunately, you now know better....and you have the right to refuse it without feeling guilty.

Watermelons Invade Norfolk Island

So you think I was exaggerating when I said global warming is just the latest cause of the "closet totalitarian"? Then pay close attention to an experiment the Warmists are about to inflict on the people of Norfolk Island (an Australian external territory). BE WARNED! What's being trialled there with $390,000 0f Gillard Government money may, if it works, be spread to the mainland, say the researchers. Which means those Watermelons might be coming to a "patch" near you.


The Plan.....and no, I'm not joking...is to put Norfolk Islanders on rations to fight both global warming and obesity. Funded by the Australian Research Council and approved by the Socialist Left Science Minister Kim Carr, researchers from the Southern Cross University will give each island "volunteer" a Carbon Card. Every time they buy petrol, electricity or an air flight, they will have carbon units deducted from the fixed allowance on their card. More units will be lost each time they buy fatty foods, take-away meals or produce flown in from a long way away.

Now get this! If at the end of each year they have carbon units left over, they can sell them. If they've blown their allocation, they must buy more. BUT...each year, the number of carbon units in this market will be cut, causing their price to soar and thus the price of extra food, power and petrol to rise -- because the idea is to cut greenhouse gases and make Norfolk Islanders trim, taut and terrifically moral. Really! Conservatives well aware of human fallibility will immediately spot the obvious flaw in this latest scheme of the Left (read neo-commies) to remake humanity. They've forgotten that Karl Marx and his ilk are on the ash-heap of history.

The Flaw is this: what happens when people run out of their carbon rations and can"t afford the extra units they need to buy more fuel, power and even food? This was the question Andrew Bolt of the Sun Herald Newspaper put to Garry Egger, head of this draconian experiment and professor at SCU. His response was astonishing and revealing, because this basic question, which so exposes the teeth of the totalitarian, would have been one you'd think he'd long wrestled with. After all, his personal carbon rationing idea is not new, it's been kicking around for years by the bullies infesting the global warming faith and the Left. But the key question has still not been answered. "What if people don't want to live your dream? What if they rebel or merely fail you?"

Egger: In the first year you are just warned. Later, if you overspend you've got to buy the Units that are cashed in.

Andrew: If you put this on the mainland and you were really strict about it (because you people think the world was warming very dangerously) and someone exceeded their rations, one would presume that you would make some food, for example, too expensive for them to buy.

Egger: That's right, so if you got a fatty unhealthy food that is imported, which takes a lot of carbon to produce, then the price would go up.

Andrew: What happens to a very irresponsible fat family and they've blown their carbon budget and you've made their food terribly expensive? What about the kids? They go to breakfast and they've got one baked bean each?

Egger: Again, they will get money back from learning to do the right thing!

The Way I See It....with that unemotional comment, you have an insight into a key failing of so many grand schemes of the Left to improve resistant humans or build for them someone else's idea of the perfect society. These schemes so often are too perfect for the flawed humans they supposedly serve. It's the humans who must adapt to their system and not the other way around. Which is where they see some force is required, some democracy sacrificed.

What a buzz for the "closet" totalitarian then, to bully other people "for their own good"...in this case to "Save the Planet"! When the case is so just, which planet-saver could let some contemptible fatty stand in their way, begging for carbon units to feed their chubby children?

Need an illustration of the seriousness of what I'm talking about? Professor Egger himself plans to jet off to Cancun, Mexico, the end of this month to boast to a U.N Global Warming Conference how he persuaded Norfolk Islanders to ration just such joy flights for themselves. THIS IS YOUR FUTURE coming right at you folks! It's best you realise this is no longer a joke.

Heart Foundation has me "ticked-off"!

Someone needs to make this organisation accountable! Their latest news release a few weeks ago has me and anyone knowing the truth of the matter, ticked-off. Their silly Media Release, which can be viewed on the URL http://tinyurl.com/3ajvgn3 is entitled "To Avoid Trans Fat, Avoid Butter". It seems they are all in an ill-informed tizzy because popular cooking programs, celebrity chefs and food magazines are all using butter in their recipes and butter sales are up over 9% in the past year. So this Media Release is asking Australians not to eat butter because it has trans and saturated fats and to eat margarine instead. Holy embolism! My blood pressure went right up reading this nonsense.

Those of you who have been following my Blog postings have read my post "Ancel Keyes and his Phony Fat Myth" back in April and you would now know more than this supposed scientific foundation. Their stupid advice to switch from a natural fat to a phony substitute is down right irresponsible. The public needs to know the truth about margarine. From its conception in the 1930's it has had a trans fat percentage of between 14-35% ! The Heart Foundation had given this product (which is just a few molecules away from becoming a plastic) their tick of approval for many decades despite evidence against trans fats since 1978! Their ignorance and attitude makes me believe that the Australian public's health is not in their best interest and we should start to wonder what is behind some of their marketing strategies. Perhaps it is the almighty dollar. I seem to remember McDonald's getting a tick for one of their hamburgers shortly after a $330,000 donation.

In actuality, butter has a small amount of trans fat occurring naturally and reacts in the body differently than chemically produced man-made trans fats, or the partial hydrogenation of vegetable oil. Butter also contains saturated fats but these are not the enemy; that was totally misrepresented for 50 years as the Curse of Cholesterol. Fat is important for our health but we must eat the right type -- the good fat. It's really easy. All fats from nature, like nuts, seeds, avocado, olives, eggs, butter, coconut and anything extracted from these foods in a healthy way is good fat. A bad fat is a fat that has been manipulated, changed and contorted in some way in a chemical laboratory.

The Heart Foundation tick of approval adorns foods that aren't even foods, but rather a bunch of chemicals disguised as food but as long as they are low fat, low salt, high fibre, low calorie they get that tick. Just check out the ingredients (not the nutrition label) on the following and see if you really think they are good for your health. Kellogg's Just Right, ProActive margarine, Healthy Choice Meals, Farmers Own Milk, Diet Yoghurts and Birds Eye Chicken & Vegie Patties, just to name a few.

The Way I See It....we need to move away from the old Margarine-is-Better argument and eat real food! With new evidence over the past 7 years steering away from the links between cholesterol and saturated fat and more towards other factors then I think that the Heart Foundation needs to smarten up, jettison 50 years of Junk Science and let the public know or it's reputation will be totally discredited.

Germany's Fraying Welcome Mat

Germany's attempts to create a multicultural society in which people from various cultural backgrounds live together peacefully had failed, Chancellor Angela Merkel said last week. She conceded that "Multikulti", the concept that "we are now living side by side and are happy about it", does not work.

Backing up her rueful admission are surveys showing 35% of Germans believe the country is overrun by foreigners. An equal number believe the foreigners come to feed off German welfare. Merkel had in mind the Turks who came mainly as "gastarbeiters"(guest workers) in the 1960's. Some 2.5 million now live in Germany, in their densely packed neighborhoods with no desire to return back home to Turkey.

This was very obvious to me as I travelled around Berlin and it's suburbs last year and saw it for myself. The Turkish flag on every street, the strictly Turkish shop signage and not a German seen or voice heard. (see my photo). Recently Arabs and East Europeans have come and the Muslim population is now up to 5 million! This has led Horst Seehofer. from Merkel's party to call for a halt in immigration of "alien cultures". He says, "the Turks and other Muslims are not learning the language, not assimilating, not becoming Germans. We are committed to a dominant German culture and opposed to a multicultural one."

The German relatives I visited said they already had a growing sense that their Muslim population was becoming a culture within a culture. A real and shocking awareness of deep differences with their Turkish neighbors became acute for Germans when, grieving in solidarity with America after 9/11, they learned that Turkish sectors of Berlin were celebrating Islam's victory with barrages of fireworks and small rockets. Germans are nervous and are sensing there may be truth to the phrase; "Welcome to Eurarabia!"

The Way I See It....the resurgence of ethnonationalism that is feeding the ranks of populist and anti-immigrant parties across Europe and gaining respectability doesn't solve Germany's problem. She is running out of Germans! Yet, if her welfare state is to survive and her industries are to remain competitive, Germany will need millions of new workers. Where are they to come from, if not the Third World. For not one European nation, save Iceland and Albania, has had a birth rate for decades that is not below zero population growth. You see...Baby-Boomer Europe decided in the 1970's and 1980's it wanted La Dolce Vita, not the hassle of children. It made for a sweet life. Now the bill comes due. And the bill is the end of their "tribes"and countries as we have known them. Old Europe is dying and the populist and nationalist parties, in the words of Dylan Thomas, are simply "raging against the dying of the light!"