Porn used to be relegated to a video hidden in the bottom drawer, or a magazine under the mattress. Today, it's part of everyday life.

Hugh Hefner's girlfriends have become TV's "girls next door." Porn stars have MySpace pages and do voice-overs for video games. And while "porn on demand" is standard for hotel TVs and upgraded cable packages, it's even easier to find it with a few clicks on the computer.

In April, more than a third of the U.S. Internet audience visited sites that fit into the online "adult" category, according to comScore Media Metrix.

So the message is clear: In today's world, sex doesn't just sell. The pervasiveness of porn has made sexiness - from subtle to raunchy - a much-sought-after attribute online, at school and even at work.   more »

Looking at porn online is probably a more productive use of time than watching the vast majority of what's posted on YouTube.

While it's fun to coo at cute polar bear cubs or watch some kid ramble into her webcam, anyone wanting something more substantial should visit Ubuweb instead.

An independent, completely free archive that operates without official funding, is a peerless source of brilliant artistic materials.   more »

No fewer than five books by the New Atheists have appeared on bestseller lists in the past two years--Sam Harris's The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and now Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great.

The most remarkable fact is not their books themselves--blunt, no-holds-barred attacks on religion in different registers--but that they have succeeded in reaching mainstream readers and in becoming bestsellers.

Is this because Americans are beginning to get fed up with the religiosity of the past several years?

It would be comforting if we could explain this as a cultural signal of the end of the right-wing/evangelical ascendancy.   more »

We are, right now, in the middle of a class war - one that threatens to destroy the social contract that has made this country what it is today.

The statistics are grim. Today, American workers' take-home pay represents a smaller share of the nation's total income than at any time in the last forty years.

At the same time, corporate profits as a share of national income are at an all-time high. In all, the top 1 percent of Americans--those who make on average $1 million a year or more--owns a larger percentage of the nation's wealth than at any time since the Great Depression.

None of this, of course, happened by itself. These trends occurred at precisely the same time our government threw its lot in almost exclusively with those at the top.   more »

Republicans represent the Mr Hyde side

They play to our childish fear of monsters

They bring out the fearful side in us. The dark side

They are snake oil salesmen,

selling the only product they have left

to win elections anymore, fear

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Keywords: fear, republicans, indoctrination, bogeyman