In most of the sessions I went to, complex statistics, dry presentations, and boring analyses were more common than provocative topics and engaging presenters.

I'm all for super-duper sex brainiacs (sex nerds make me hot), but the event felt like any standard academic gathering—the presentations just happened to be on masturbation, barebacking, and sex work.

Some of the research was undeniably interesting, like studies on gender and sexual coercion, sex and emerging technologies, and female erotic response.

But there was a wide gap between what the academics were inquiring into and theorizing about. Too much sexual dysfunction, not enough function.   more »

Life's horrible trauma originated

when we were so small, helpless, and fragile

We could do nothing about it

In all cases our primal trauma occurred in the womb

The agony of this moment is expressed

in later life by neuroses, distress and anxiety

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An apt precedent for Obama is the rhetoric of a Democratic standard-bearer from the past - Adlai Stevenson - who, not coincidentally, also embodies the strain of high-minded reformism that, of all liberal traditions, influences Obama most.

Stevenson, the famously virtuous Illinois governor who nobly went down to defeat against Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, remains the model Democratic loser.

He was the sensible champion of civility who gallantly upheld the liberal banner in a conservative age, even while getting drubbed at the polls.

One of his favorite tactics was to proclaim his ability to flout his audiences and instead act on behalf of the whole public.   more »

Capitalism is not the path to prosperity, opportunity and hope but eventually it is the primrose path to desolation, disillusionment and to ruin, once it has reduced the earth to a moonscape, filled every hollow and crevice with junk and created mountains of the dumped residue of maniacal consumerism.

There is no other end to a nation’s future but ruin if it insists on pillaging prodigally its natural wealth and nature’s legacy.

Capitalism is fueled by greed; that is, the prospect and chance of expropriating the surplus value created by labor.

No man can get rich from his own labor. He must acquire the value of the labor of ten or twenty or thousands in order to become wealthy.   more »

A week before the Bush Regime’s grand Middle East peace conference is scheduled to begin in Annapolis, Md., there is still no confirmed list of attendees, no confirmed date and no agenda. Up to 50 countries were to be invited.

The event, if it takes place at all, has now been downgraded from a three-day conference to a one-day meeting to set a “framework” for later talks—in other words, an empty photo-op.

That the hated war criminals in the White House could even propose such a fraudulent gathering while in the midst of brutal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has made many of their collaborators in the region nervous about accepting an invitation.

They fear that the failure of such a gathering to reach any agreement will only further isolate the U.S. in the region and weaken their own position.   more »