* SPOOKY GIFTS. Looking for a present with which to spook out your loved ones? Glenn Beck’s e-newsletter suggests that you “Put Glenn Beck Under Your Tree.” If you are unable to buy tickets to see Beck’s performance art, he’d like you to buy his products. (Actually, I have a better suggestion; buy “Broad Sides.”) I know you aren’t, but I’m still lamenting the loss of a potential force for liberty. Beck is circling the drain, caught in an echo-chamber out of which not even his indecipherable charts can lead him.

* FAIRY TALES. My husband, a fairly old-fashioned (if not old) man who works closely with the similar types, tells me that men seldom discuss their spouses at work. It should not be too difficult for the heterosexual soldiers in the military to agree to keep quiet about their families in exchange for some silence from the homosexual contingent. Aha, but you see, as “‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ For Hets and Homos” argued, the underlying impetus in this battle is to make the military as much like the culture at large: a big whore house. I do not think the activists even think in such terms. It is just that it is second-nature for the North American Personality to demand complete merger of the private and professional.

Tell me that Osama’s ascetic army will not skedaddle at the site of a brigade that looks like this:

* WIKIWONDER. Look at the WikiLeaks Mirrors page: “In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove WikiLeaks from the Internet, you will find below a list of mirrors of WikiLeaks website and CableGate pages.” An amazing operation.

Have at it. This is an Open Forum (with limitations, naturally). Please post whatever is on your mind (including, if you’d like, brief questions to your host on this or the other issue).

UPDATE (Dec. 10): The gentle-wo/man, in the image above (second from the right), is “transitioning,” me thinks. The spouse tells me that he came upon a transitioning person in the hallways at work. This poor person was not only sexually ambivalent but obese too, so it wore a muumuu. Right there they formed a bond. I’m joking. As you can imagine, your ordinary guy, the square type especially, doesn’t know what to do with this stuff. An outward display of your inner-most conflicts will make a co-worker run in the opposite direction.

I have plenty of sympathy for authentic pain, however pampered the sufferer. There is a lot of pain wrapped up in sexual ambivalence. Not so much these days, where what you get is emotionally pampered individuals publicly displaying “pain” they imagine they have; and have been instructed to feel.

Middle-aged folks like myself well remember the agony endured by a sexually ambivalent persons only two decades or so back. Everyone knows someone who is gay or even people who feel they were born the wrong sex. As if life were not hard enough. How horrible is it to be confused about a core characteristic as is gender.

Here’s the point I’ve tried to make not always successfully. A decent society is a private society. I am not opposed to gays serving in the military; I’m against the idea that sexual proclivities and peccadilloes are a public affair.