Every sex therapist I spoke to said that in the Internet age it is a problem in many romantic relationships. But it is easily fixed, they advise.

It's a matter of educating one (often, but not always, the woman) that she should be more broadminded and understand that her spouse's habit of masturbating to cyberporn is not tantamount to infidelity.

"Porn is only a representation of someone else," says David McKenzie, a relationship counsellor and sex therapist in Vancouver.

"It's not the same as a spouse having an affair. We impose on that representation, on that image, our fantasies, our desires. It's really having sex with ourselves. It's safe."   more »

I am getting used to these moments - when gentle holiday geniality bleeds into… what? I lie on the beach with Hillary-Ann, a chatty, scatty 35-year-old Californian designer.

As she explains the perils of Republican dating, my mind drifts, watching the gentle tide. When I hear her say, " Of course, we need to execute some of these people,"

I wake up. Who do we need to execute? She runs her fingers through the sand lazily. "A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralise the country," she says.

"Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that's what you'll get." She squints at the sun and smiles. " Then things'll change."   more »

There is still a choice, of course, between the red pill and the blue pill. White people could still wake up; they could still learn to resist the fascism that their culture has programmed them to accept.

But it will take a new understanding; they will have to start seeing themselves as a group like any other, not as a “white nation,” and not as “individuals,” and they will need to begin to understand and to break with the Inquisitorial fear of being different that permeates their culture to its very core.

They will have to learn to see their culture’s depth of suspicion, its rigid obedience to the “rules” of the white middle class game, and to experience first hand the depth of violence it reserves for those who betray it.

They will have to stand strong against it, understanding that their own culture and its agents are their mortal enemy.

Most of all they will have to learn that their apparent “privilege” makes them no different at all: that in the long run they are not exempt or superior. That’s what Morpheus tells Neo when he offers him the Red Pill.   more »

“Throw at his head! Throw at his head!”

The egg-shaped man in Milwaukee’s Miller Park, who looked like he would be sitting behind a desk by morning, continued the arrhythmic chant as those around him chimed in.

They were all pleading to see a 95-mph fastball hit a man in the temple, and felt that their demand was righteous.

The player they wanted to see put down was, of course, San Francisco Giants baseball star Barry Bonds, and it is hard to say what was more shocking: the call for his beheading or the near-collective rapture at the thought.

One guy yelled, “Hit his knee! End his career! Please! I will name my kid after you!” A friend of mine who was attending this game and relayed this story almost got into fisticuffs for the crime of wearing a Giants cap.   more »

Americans are fine with fueling our republic of road rage using the blood of Iraqis (or any other distant and darker people) as long as "the mission" doesn't drag on too long or reveal too much about ourselves.

How did we come to be a nation of vampires who live by sustaining ourselves on the blood of others? Is our mode of collective being so toxic in the United States that a writer must bandy about metaphors culled from Gothic horror fiction to describe it?

I'm afraid it's come to that: We are a people who psyches have grown monstrously distorted from an addiction to imperial power and personal entitlement.

The corporate culture of exploitation has begot a hellscape of narcissists. It is an authoritarian culture riddled in kitsch and cruelty, in nationalistic hagiography and displaced rage -- all the distortions of national character inherent to privileged grotesques and ordinary monsters.   more »