One thing the guidebooks never bother to tell you about France is also one of the most important of all that you should know. In fact this piece of information is so important that my imparting it to you, as I am about to do, is worth the price of the book of all this. So perhaps, if you’ve borrowed this from a friend, you should skip to the next chapter right now. (I jest.)
So what is this invaluable knowledge that no-one should travel in France without first having assimilated? Just this:
Everything Shuts At Twelve. For Two Hours. At Least.
That’s it. Outside of the major metropolitan cities like Paris and Lyon, and maybe even Marseilles these days, if you ain’t got whatever it is you were looking for by the time the midi rings, you can forget getting it until two o’clock at the earliest.
Believe me, you will not be in France long before you realise how much this immutable chronology affects life.
‘It’s as if a couple of jumbo-jets of Western culture crashed into a container-ship of Asia and the wreckage is still settling.’ These words jump out at me as I read over my notes. And it’s true; the Philippines is a cultural conundrum, a Rubik’s Cube of interlaced and interlocked themes, memes, images and sensations.
It’s not like India, where the veneer of Westernism added by a couple of hundred years of British domination is so thin it seems as flimsy as a bride’s veil, yet definitely attached, as if the bride herself is shy about lifting it, nor Thailand, where Western cultural influences seem grafted on, bizarrely co-exiting with something older and fundamentally opposed. Instead, the Philippines is a genuine melting-pot, a sculptor’s crucible where metallic elements are alloyed to make something completely new. The roots of European culture here go deep, deep into the fertile soil of Asia, and the resulting foliage is strange, at once familiar yet surprising.
Christianity has pagan origins. This has been known for hundreds of years and is easily proven.
The pagan origins of Christianity and for that matter Judaism and even Islam have fascinated me for many years.
What does ‘pagan’ mean?
The term pagan comes from ‘paganes’, a Latin word meaning country person, or in other words, not a city sophisticate. It was coined by the Romans and curiously, later became attached to the principal Graeco-Roman cults, of the Olympian gods and goddesses, as well as others.
The irony is that Christianity itself has pagan origins and we’ll be discussing them. This video is a basic taster but there will be many more.
The origins of Christianity lie far back in time, even before civilisation first appeared in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BC. Naturally, our first recordings are from after that, because previous cultures did not write and so their mythologies were oral traditions. But the earliest religious mythology can be traced forward to Jesus, directly.
The story of how we evolved what became the most successful religion ever, still dominant today, is fascinating. Christianity is fundamental to Western culture and remains powerful within it. That culture has been responsible for the greatest triumphs of humanity in the sciences, the arts, philosophy and economics. No other culture has even come close.
In an era where this culture, the most successful we have ever invented, is under constant attack, we should re-examine its roots. When we do we will find a great. all encompassing universality.
The fact that Christianity has pagan origins should neither come as a surprise nor should it be seen as a challenge to either Christianity or the cultures informed by it. While they might not be perfect, these cultures, which originated in Europe and were developed by European men, remain the most seminal and power ever to have existed; and at their heart is the Goddess, she who both gives and takes life and who begat Jesus Christ himself.
When Islam, in the form of the Ottoman Empire, launched the attack on Europe that ended before Vienna, it was engaged in Jihad — fighting in the name of Allah, to make the world Islamic. The Caliph, his general and all the men who fought, were carrying out their religious duty — to conquer the world for Islam. This is Offensive Jihad, the most aggressive form. We see it today in Daesh and similar bandit groups today, but under the Ottomans, it motivated the biggest killing machine in the world.
There are other forms of jihad, and they may, in the right circumstances, be almost as effective at destroying other cultures and their values. They corrode them just by contact.
The Philippines is steeped in folklore and mythology. The very air seems supernatural at times and even today, Filipinos firmly believe in the supernatural creatures which also populate their country. Best known of these are Aswangs and Engkantos.
Many of these beliefs certainly date from the pre-colonial period and before the establishment of Catholicism as the dominant religion. Prior to this, the Philippines was not a unitary polity, but was made up of many small kingdoms and tribal areas. These all seem to have believed in a somewhat similar form of Animism but were all brought together under one faith and one colonial rule, by the Spanish.
Only a woman would say anything was better than sex. Well, anyway, there is no risk of a ladyboy claiming such a thing, at least not when she is young, beautiful and has a body full of testosterone, oestrogen and progesterone, the particular cocktail of this hormone soup dependent on the individual.
Whatever, it does nothing to diminish the sex drive, which is, basically, turbo-charged. A ladyboy (homosexual transsexual variant, aka a batang bakla) is essentially as randy as a teenage boy should be, thinks of cock all the time and dreams every night of being ravaged by hordes of lusty Lotharios. I am not kidding.
[kofi]
That this passionate desire to be fucked blue is shared by Filipina women really does make the place special; the sexual juice is oozing out of the walls.
Manila is huge. Apart from Manila itself, the conurbation of Metro Manila includes other cities that would themselves be enormous by any other measure: Makati, Pasig, Quezon, Cavite, and others. So transport is a major part of Manila life. But this is Asia, and unlike Europe, there is no organised public transport. There are no service buses, no trams or metro systems oganised by local government. Everything is run privately, and the sheer amount of private transport provision is staggering.
Given that I have not yet see anyone carrying a passenger on his shoulders, and horse-and-cart solutions are reserved for the tourist area of Intramuros, the old part of Manila, the most basic, though not always the cheapest, means of transport is the gloriously named ‘pedicab’. This is a bicycle with a side-car.
The main problem with this solution, leaving aside the thorny moral issue of whether it can be right for a 14-stone Scotsman and an admittedly much lighter Filipina to be push-biked around by a sweating 9-stone Pinoy, is the complete lack of suspension on these contraptions. Since the roads in Manila resemble the Somme after a barrage, this means a bone-jarring ride that risks lumbar impaction.
We now know that women are becoming increasingly unhappy, and this is because they are no longer doing that which would make them happy, having and raising children. There are no unhappy women in traditional cultures, because they are not infected by feminism. They don’t need to go to the city to compete with men. Their men go there and work, while the women run the home, bear, care for and educate their children.
Women in the West are unhappy because feminism denies them the opportunity to be happy by doing the same. Any who try to do so are berated on the sewers of social media, shouted down as ‘pawns of the patriarchy’ and as ‘sex-traitors.’
Sex, folks, is real. So are Sexuality and Gender. But these are not always related as people might expect them to be. So let’s have a look at them.
In all sexually dimorphic species there are two morphs, which are directly linked to reproduction; that, after all, why sexual dimorphism exists. One of these produces large, relatively static cells called gametes, which contain half the DNA needed to make a new individual. The other produces small, highly motile gametes, which contain the other half. The former are called ova and the latter spermatozoa or sperm.
Many people are confused by the claim, widely accepted today, that there are multiple genders. In fact, this has even been enshrined in law in some countries.
However, this feels wrong. We intuitively know that it’s a lie. And of course, it is. But explaining why and how the lie is made is not so easy, partly because most of us never consider this, or even gender at all. Some people think that gender is the same as sex; which it is not. So let me explain.
