The motivation for the male performers in this business, says Barbara, is the need for security. For women, the driving force is attention, often motivated by a low sense of self-esteem.

“I share in all of these traits,” says Barbara. “I don't think these traits are restricted to the X-rated industry. If I spent five years in a bank learning about people, I think I'd come up with the same story.” But, we agree, it would never be as much fun.

“The performers are exhibitionists motivated by a need to be loved,” says Barbara during her presentation. Later I ask her if she would call herself a voyeur. “Yes,” she says, “I am definitely the other side, I am the voyeur.”   more »

The stunning military victory by the Palestinian Hamas movement over the rival Fatah organisation in the Gaza Strip last week was a strike against imperialism in the Middle East.

The US and its allies have described the Islamist group Hamas’s driving out of Fatah from Gaza as a “military coup” aimed at creating a “mini Taliban state”.

It is nothing of the sort. Hamas is the democratically elected Palestinian government. Its victory last week stopped an attempted military takeover sponsored by the US and its Israeli and Egyptian allies.

George Bush rushed to embrace the “Fatah moderates” in “the battle with extremism”.

Yet it is Bush who has worked hardest to strip Fatah of any credibility among the Palestinians by failing to deliver even the smallest concession in return for its recognition of Israel.   more »

>History will reveal America to be a nation that burned itself out on drugs, debt spending and junk foods, destroying the health its own people until its population could hardly even reproduce without medical intervention.

Lacking any useful ideas, steeped in the defense of the status quo and abandoning the true needs of its own people, American political leaders have set our nation on a destructive course that may prove impossible to reverse.

And they seem to want to destroy as many other nations as possible along the way -- as long as it generates more profits for U.S. corporations in the short term. "Poison the world and reap the profits!"   more »

Reading The Nation or listening to its leading representatives, as much as anything else, one feels the unseriousness and hollowness of American left liberalism.

There is no substance to its views, no serious intellectual grounding to its opposition to the status quo.

The judgments offered by the Nation’s editorials and columns, although perfectly literate and polished, are intellectually impoverished.

Nowhere does the journal attempt to explain the social forces and processes at work in American life, much less present a broader theoretical and historical analysis.   more »

How many television viewers would accept the supposition that much of the news programming on TV is filtered through specific geopolitcal and economic interests. And as a consequence, a lot of truth never leaves the newsroom?

Furthermore, who would disagree that many, many Americans are tuning in to these news programs and offering to them their time and loyal attention?

So, where is the disconnect?

Is it possible that news shows are also reflecting a broad cultural interest to receive limited information so that, to whatever extent, denial is supported and maintained?   more »