Think modern furniture, airports, Ipods and city plans. Nonetheless, I wonder if the modernistic painter Piet Mondriaan could have imagined designer vaginas.

What used to be a somewhat mysterical territory of the female body is being formalized into the clear and accessible designer vagina.

These post-sexual vaginas, also referred to as playboy vaginas because they are modeled after the photoshopped vagina’s featured in playboy magazine, are the ideal of many young girls.

Although a slightly diminished sexual sensitivity is a known complication of the surgery, girls seem to prefer the visual power of a clear cut vagina above their own sexual arousal.   more »

Rorty has made us uncomfortably aware of a large distance between the truths at which we aim, whether in science or history or law or economics, or any field of interpretive endeavour, and the forces that shape our minds.

There seem to be forces at work of which we have little knowledge that generate the categories - socio-economic, cultural, gender-related - in which we work.

They mould the practices of our "interpretive community," determining which approaches count as respectable at any given time.

Hence there is no such thing as the given, or the unvarnished truth. There are only what the Harvard philosopher Nelson Goodman called "versions," and the versions current at any place or time are the results of these hidden forces.

The truth is not even to be discerned at the end of a tunnel: it is varnish all the way down.   more »

Hillary Clinton on Friday proposed $70 billion in emergency spending to stave off a possible U.S. election-year recession, upstaging Republican rivals who clashed over the economy but offered few specifics.

The New York senator proposed $30 billion to help low-income families hit by the mortgage crisis and $40 billion in other spending, mainly for the poor and unemployed.

It also includes aid to families having trouble paying heating bills, which seems like a clever way to put cash in the hands of people likely to spend it.

You have to say that Mrs. Clinton seems comfortable with and knowledgeable about economic policy.

I’m sure the Hillary-haters will find some reason that’s a bad thing, but there’s something to be said for presidents who know what they’re talking about. More than can be said for Barack Obama.   more »

Bush is entitled to his warped opinions about Iran, but his message would have been better-suited for delivery to his deluded cronies in the White House than to his wiser allies in the Gulf.

The average American might be fooled by Bush's latest attempt to lump Al-Qaeda, "freedom-haters," Hamas, Hizbullah, the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents and Iran into the same lot, but the people of this region have a much better understanding of these phenomena and forces.

They fortunately also have a better sense of the real root causes of the region's challenges, as well as the required solutions.

Thus the Iranian people can rest easily knowing that Gulf Arab leaders will respond wisely to Bush's latest attempt to stir up mischief.   more »

America's mass corporate media are capitalist-run. But, then, so is the State.

Therefore, we are indoctrinated by the 'State' media, where concentrated economic and political power sets the outer parameters of permissible discourse.

For more than six years, America's media have made frequent references to ‘the war on terrorism’ and ‘the war on terror’.

The media have relentlessly promoted such official buzzwords as though they were objective realities instead of terms devised to manipulate the public for endless war.   more »