“I’ll have a ton of papers to grade, but instead I’ll be like, Let’s jerk off to the Internet first. So I go online, but then I despise myself. I look up, and my computer says I’ve been online for 47 minutes and I’m like, What the hell have I been doing?!”

His latest foray into teaching hasn’t helped matters: Jonathan uses the university’s high-speed connection to download pornography onto floppy discs, he says, because “my dial-up at home is monstrously slow.”

Which, he acknowledges, has produced another unorthodox temptation. “God, it’s so fucked up,” he says.

“I go into the computer lab, right? And I’m looking at it, and there are these girls all around in their little cubicles, and, I don’t know, I want to see if I can reach orgasm right there.” Discreetly, he has managed to succeed in this mission a few times.   more »

Companies that do business with Huntington Life Sciences, an animal-testing firm linked to Chiron and Shaklee, were legitimate targets, as were their employees. And it promised to double the size of all future bombs "until your buildings are nothing but rubble."

"No more will all of the killing be done by the oppressors, now the oppressed will strike back," it continued. "We will be nonviolent when ... these people are nonviolent to the animal nations."

The eco-attacks, which once were centered in remote and highly rural areas, are now more focused on urban areas.

They also are increasingly targeting "capitalism and the mind-set that allows it to exist," in the words of the ELF, rather than their more specific environmental goals.   more »

A Surge of Scare Quotes:

When the Pentagon feeds a loaded word to the media,

does surrounding it with quotation marks only help make it credible?

On November 16 last year the Guardian broke the story that George Bush had decided to make "a last big push" to win the war in Iraq and increase US forces by 20,000 soldiers. We didn't know yet that this "push" was to be a "surge".

It was publicly christened as such by a New York Times report on November 21, sourced to unnamed Pentagon officials.   more »

"American journalists," he said, "believe they belong to a kind of priesthood. Ever since Watergate, we have seen ourselves as guardians of the truth. That," he added ruefully, "is why our newspapers are so boring."

Until you have tried ingesting The New York Times with your breakfast, you do not know the meaning of ennui.

Nicknamed the Grey Lady - as a term of endearment - and boasting the priggish motto "All the news that's fit to print", it is the sine qua non of sober, morally upright journalism.

And this respectability is its greatest weakness: it is far too polite to be subversive.   more »

What rankles about Hillary – so uniquely – among better-off women is much more personal at base.

Is it possible, now that stay-at-home momdom has become a fixture of the suburbs and when relatively wealthy women have bailed out of the workforce in the face of family pressures, that the image of one who toughed it out – uninterruptedly, and with little or no publicly expressed angst – is less than welcome?

Could Hillary, the first woman to make partner at an old boy Southern law firm, a working mother who kept it all together – with a lot of household help – feel like a reproach to those who just couldn’t hack it?

Does this explain, in part, some of the “who-does-she-think-she-is” rumblings that run through the Hillary-hate?   more »