George Dodd of the University of Warwick in UK, while researching aromatherapy, claims that women are 1,000 times more sensitive than men to the odour of steroid musk molecules.

Which would explain the old American custom for a man to keep a handkerchief in his armpit while dancing. After the dance he would present it to his partner. Supposedly, the anticipated effect was that of an aphrodisiac.

Humans have glands at the base of the hair follicles, especially in the armpits, the genital region and the scalp, which produce as yet incompletely identified chemicals, the odours of which might affect members of the opposite sex.

Dancing close and slow brings most men up against the apocrine and sebaceous supplies in the woman's hair while the woman can nestle in to those in the man's armpit.   more »

These are some of the words Draper uses in discussing Bush: “certitude,” “intransigence,” “his obstinate streak,” “compulsive optimism.”

“I truly believe we’re in the process of shaping history for the good,” Bush told Draper early this year. “I know, I firmly believe, that decisions I have made were necessary to secure the country.”

At the time of that interview, February 2007, Republicans had lost control of both houses of Congress.

“Americans had soured on the president and his war,” Draper writes. “The First Optimist had made pessimists out of them.” But the president did not change. “What had to be believed, he believed.”   more »

America Desperately Had to Reassemble Its Myths After 9/11

The aftermath of 9/11 began with a profound and unacknowledged sense of humiliation - precisely what was supposed to be a distinctly Muslim trait.

Alongside a lot of grown-up resolve and plain decency in action, ancestral myths were reinvented—action heroes, “security moms.”

There emerged a whole raft of artifacts that enshrined a certain image of the approved American way to respond—like a Hollywood montage called “The Spirit of America” that began and ended with images of John Wayne rescuing his little niece in John Ford’s 1956 Western “The Searchers.”

Eventually, too, the trauma spawned a catastrophic war fought in the name of a hodgepodge of deceit and delusion.   more »

There is a segment of Pakistan - which includes the judges, lawyers, and journalists - which wants to take to the streets.

They have dominated the news over the past year and they want to make a democratic push, with some people casting the lawyers in the same role as the Burmese monks.

Disengaged western audiences, pumped full of the current pro-democracy intoxicants, have almost universally decried Musharraf's behaviour.

I decry it too, precisely because I am a disengaged westerner and I have that luxury. However, the story in Pakistan is not so straightforward.   more »

Arguments in favour of the legalisation of torture have not lost their capacity to shock.

The fact that US attorneys-general and the senior legal adviser at the state department have said they are in favour of it seems proof to many of America's slide into barbarism.

In reality, however, their pro-torture arguments are no different from the claims made in favour of "humanitarian war" and of other forms of military intervention - arguments that, unfortunately, have become increasingly popular since the end of the cold war.

Torture and "humanitarian war" are similar in many ways. Both involve the inflicting of violence in order to force a change of behaviour. Both are predicated on the assumption of guilt.

Torture is justified because the victim is said to be a terrorist, or an "illegal combatant" who has committed or is about to commit a terrible crime, while pre-emptive war is justified because a state is said to be "a rogue state" violating international law (Iraq) or committing crimes against humanity (Yugoslavia).   more »