Their astonishing research shows that the Bush Regime's abstinence-only sex education programs are not only utterly useless and a complete waste of taxpayer money, but they actually invite all manner of disease and destruction and savage karmic pain upon those who attempt to adhere to them.

It's true. Such programs have long been touted by sexually denuded Republicans and nervous Christian righters and applauded by the Taliban and fundamentalists and Ann Coulter as some sort of psychosexual panacea.

Some sort of dour, clinical, sex-is-bad-for-you hammerblow to the sensual human soul all meant to act as some sort of humiliating deterrent to our fleshy, dangerous, sex-obsessed culture.

These programs lead directly to severe anxiety, hair loss, acne, whininess, temporary blindness, adult bed-wetting, screaming, lousy taste in shoes, death, pararectal abscesses and even, in rare and bizarre cases, an overwhelming urge to date Jenna Bush.   more »

There is only one conclusion you can draw from the astonishing pro-environment sea change now happening in our politics and culture. One thing we must all acknowledge in our wary, jaded, globally warmed universe: The hippies had it right all along. Oh yes they did.

You know it’s true. All this hot enthusiasm for healing the planet and eating whole foods and avoiding chemicals and working with nature and developing the self? Came from the hippies.

Alternative health? Hippies. Green cotton? Hippies. Reclaimed wood? Recycling? Humane treatment of animals? Medical pot? Alternative energy? Natural childbirth? Non-GMA seeds?

It came from the granola types (who, of course, absorbed much of it from ancient cultures), from the alternative world views, from the underground and the sidelines.

It’s about time the media, the politicians, the culture as a whole sent out a big, wet, hemp-covered apology.   more »

Burdened with a logical mind, I was never able to take leave of reality. As a result, just after Sept. 11, 2001, the country left me behind.

That tragic day, George W. Bush went missing. It took days for him to show up at ground zero with a bullhorn and a determined look on his face.

Even then I recognized bad acting. I already thought that Bush was an incompetent fool.

So I watched with a growing sense of horror and disbelief as my badly frightened countrymen convinced themselves that they had a real leader in the White House, one they could count on and trust to make them safe again.

It like watching was mass hypnosis. It reminded me of the time when more than 900 people at Jonestown in Guyana lined up to drink arsenic-laced Kool-Aid. But on a larger and more tragic scale.   more »

Over the past decade, an old word once used in the Maoist gulags has come back to China. It is "gulaosi" - and it is used to describe the men and women who are literally being worked to death producing clothes, electronics and toys for you and me.

Wie Meiren was a standard-issue gulaosi, the kind you can find in every Chinese town.

She was a 32-year-old woman with three kids who left her hungry village and travelled to Dongkeng, where she got a job assembling the toy cars for the British kids' market.

There, she was expected to work 360 days a year, from 7.30am to as late as 9.30pm, with only a half-hour break for lunch and fines for taking too long on the toilet.   more »

>Whatever one thought of the original decision to invade Iraq, the political question the nation now faces could not be clearer: Should we ask our troops to continue to fight this war?

The American people have already answered that question, and their answer is “No.”

In the end, Bush’s failure to heed the will of the people isn’t so much an act of principle, but rather an outburst of sheer peevishness.

With Democrats in control of Congress, he’s no longer getting a blank check to fund his military adventures. He finds this frustrating, so he’s stamping his foot, covering his ears, and taking his party down with him.   more »