The crazy religious roots of American sexuality -- from the psychiatric hatred of sexuality of the Puritans to the obsessive prudery of the Comstock era to the fanatical phobias of modern times -- have sprouted a jungle of current confusion about sexuality that won't survive the 21st century.

Human sexuality needs no written evidence of its historical existence or necessity: without sex we don't get from one generation to the next, from our ancestors to ourselves, so human sexuality has always existed and it's the essential engine that drives the species forward.

Darwinian evolution has given us the imperative biological sex drive -- but what we do with it is our own business and not at all Darwinian.

The fundamental questions for us are why do we have so much social conflict about sex and will this conflict lead us into an abyss? Call it the American Sexuality Time-Bomb.   more »

Mark Twain's “The Mysterious Stranger”,

although published in 1916,

described the awful tendencies of “our race”:

The irrational drive for violence,

be it burning ‘witches’ at the stake

or engaging in wars that only serve

the “little monarchs and the nobilities”

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Keywords: twain, war, bush, aggression

Part of Obama’s appeal to white America has to do with the widespread Caucasian sense that Obama “isn’t all that black.”

Many whites who roll their eyes at the mention of the names of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton — former presidential candidates who behave in ways that many whites find too African-American — are calmed by the cool, underplayed blackness and ponderous, quasi-academic tone of the half-white, Harvard-educated Obama. Obama doesn’t shout, chant, holler or drawl.

He doesn’t rail against injustice, bring the parishioners to their feet and threaten delicate white suburban and middle-class sensibilities. He stays away from catchy slogans (like Jackson’s “Keep Hope Alive”) and from emotive “truth”-speaking confrontations with power.

To use Joe Biden’s revealing terminology, Obama strikes many whites as “clean” and “articulate” — something different from their unfortunately persistent image of blacks as dirty, dangerous, irrational and unintelligible.   more »

The Pope seems to have selective amnesia when it comes to the Church and its horrendous history of human rights disasters against people of color.

This happens at a time when Catholicism is becoming an increasingly southern religion and an increasingly brown religion. Roughly half of Catholics are in Latin America.

Not only is the Pope out of step with the needs and everyday realities of the Third World, he is not speaking their language, and not owning up to the sins of the past.

Religious institutions have excused, aided and abetted crimes throughout history. Indeed, the church has much to atone for.   more »

It’s now possible to imagine a New Middle East where fundamental change is possible.

As resistance continues to swell from a trickle to a stream---we can envision "regime change" sweeping through the region from Riyadh, to Amman to Cairo---an entirely new world shaking off its colonial past.

The forces that Bush has put in motion will inexorably lead to the decline of "superpower rule" and the dismantling of the US imperium. The transition is already visible.

The battle of Gaza is just a microcosm of a much larger phenomenon which now extends from Mogadishu to Kabul.

Change is coming, but it might not be to Bush’s liking. That’s the real lesson of what happened in Gaza.   more »