1. Women & Machine Orgasms

2. Capitalism & Empire: America's Turn to Fall

3. Sarah Palin 'Killed' Joe Biden

4. From Iraq to Wall Street: The Great George Bush Fuck-up

5. Financial Crisis: We're All Going Down

6. Paulson 'Rescue' Plan Won't Work



Photo from Kink.com’s website, Fucking Machines



Why Machine Sex? Violet Blue goes deep undercover

to find out why women like to have sex with machines,

and why people pay good money to watch [Source]

As this year’s international sex and technology conference Arse Elektronika 2008 hit its stride last Saturday — that’s Folsom Street Fair eve here in San Francisco – I found myself on a panel discussing “The Erotic of the Machine” (listen to the MP3 here) with six men and a sizable audience.

The men were an assembly of artists from the Bay Area and Seattle to Austria and France, along with a sex machine maker, a sex machine pornographer and a spokesperson from San Francisco’s Kink.com, where the most famous sex machine site hails from. (That’s Fucking Machines.com*, also here in San Francisco.)

They went off on an existential tangent as we discussed sex with machines, ideas for “softer” interfaces, theories about the industrial revolution, gender and sexuality.

I sat on my hands with a burning query until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Finally, I grabbed the microphone and asked Monochrom’s Johannes Grenzfurthner if I could ask Kink.com’s Thomas Roche what I thought was the million-dollar question. And for Kink that million dollars is probably literal.

I said, “Thomas. You work at Kink. The Fucking Machines site is insanely popular. Why!? Why do people want to watch women have sex with machines, and pay good money to do it? What’s the appeal?”

Thomas is of course used to this type of outburst from me onstage. His response was fantastic, including conjecture about the viewers projecting themselves into the scene, but he centered on the basic fact that it’s a woman alone, pleasuring herself, with no unnecessary window dressing tacked on.

It’s true that a machine enables huge variations in how one conjures an orgasm, as in speed, stroke, size, vibration, steadiness, how long it all lasts — things that wouldn’t be possible with a human.

Thomas told me, “There are many other advantages to sex with a human, and many things you will not get — yet — from a machine, like skin touch, smell, eye contact, tenderness, etc.

"Those things that humans alone can provide (so far) are only part of the sexual experience, but they are so fraught with intensity that they can often dominate the experience." (read more]

Capitalism & Empire: America's Turn to Fall

Important results can be drawn from the present crisis. By relying on the US dollar’s supremacy and taking the same road Holland and England took before, the US has come to the end of making money through speculation (not with production).

Its finance economy has collapsed. This also means the collapse of the neo-liberal economy policies.

If we take the 1973 big crisis as a starting point, worship of free market economics, deregulation, privatizations have lasted only a little more than thirty years.

Thus, capitalism’s ideology, which it praised so much as Socialism was collapsing, is wounded. Now the US government is the giant, indisputable actor of the American finance markets. Who would have thought of it!

The second important conclusion is the possibility of ending of dollar’s function as reserve money. The US is trying to postpone this destiny with all its power. But the color of the dollar is now pale.

Third, the US dream of unipolar world has been lost in the desert storms of Iraq war. The crisis reminds us of this once more in its own language. The first crack in English supremacy started in 1870s but seventy years passed until it actually lost its leadership.

Forty years has passed since the first crack of US in 1970s. With this new crisis the process has deepened.

Lastly, will capitalism go back to new Keynesian economy period with the bankruptcy of neo-liberalism? Capitalism had begun this period of government, being active player and regulator of the world economy, after the 1929 crises and World War II.

But at that time, there was not only rubble left from the capitalist ruins but also the Socialist System had risen. And passing over to Keynesian policies was only possible with two big reconciliations among capitalist countries.

Capitalist centers had accepted the US leadership and took regulatory measures to minimize the ruination. The Bretton Woods agreement is one of them.

The second, also as important as the first, is the reconciliation with the worker class promising them a “welfare society.”

Can the current crisis produce such reconciliations in the present world balance of power? Definitely not! In the capitalist world there is no leader as powerful as the US of 1950s.

Besides, the capitalist world is divided roughly as West and East or in their word as “democratic capitalist nations” and “totalitarian systems”. The US is no longer a rising power.

It is at an altitude of losing power which desperately tries to attract accumulated capital to finance its enormous debt. On the other side, the working class and working masses are not strong enough to force it to reconciliation - yet.

Capitalism knows this well and keeps on taking all of its gains to maximize profits.

As a result, in today’s world the two reconciliations that form the base of Keynesian economy, cannot be achieved. The present crisis is inevitably going to increase the competition and struggle between the power centers.

If this crisis deepens as much as the old crises, this may be a catastrophic scenario for the whole capitalist world.

With its enormous debt and its continuing drive to attract world capital into its black hole, the US may bring the world capitalism once again to the edge of abyss.

As the capitalist history shows us, preventive measures bring limited relaxations to the crisis. Following the big crises capitalism had brought us two world wars.

Capitalism's free market God has been cursed once more. Now the times for the world’s poor to curse the capitalism is approaching.

Sarah Palin 'Killed' Joe Biden

Sarah Palin showed on Thursday night that she has her own way of winning: kill him with kindness.

From her opening line to Joe Biden – "Hey, can I call you Joe?" – to her brazen refusal to "answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear" to her groan-worthy zinger "Say it ain't so, Joe," she sounded upbeat, lyrical, and kinda Minnesotan, dontcha know.

She also sounded like a winner, which was vexing to many debate watchers, especially uptight liberal ones.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson confessed an hour into the exchange "I don't know what anybody is making of this. I don't even know what I'm making of it. This is the strangest debate I've ever seen."

But it wasn't so strange, really, to people who have been observing Palin for any length of time. She has bucked the odds in the past to win bruising elections with meagre resources. She is good at delivering vicious attacks in a way that doesn't seem at all vicious until you take a step back to look at them.

Thursday night, Palin used Biden to bludgeon Obama like so: "You opposed the move he made to try to cut off funding for the troops and I respect you for that.

"I don't know how you can defend that position now but I know that you know especially with your son in the National Guard and I have great respect for your family also and the honor that you show our military. Barack Obama though, another story there. Anyone I think who can cut off funding for the troops after promising not to is another story."Biden hit back, but not effectively. He repeated "let me repeat this" a lot. He digressed. He said that he once felt like a jerk for ridiculing the late North Carolina archconservative senator Jesse Helms.

And he left Palin mostly uncriticised, at one point saying that he would gladly put "my record and Barack's record against John McCain's or anyone else". Like, say, the person he was supposed to be debating?

From Iraq to Wall Street: The Great George Bush Fuck-up

This is the first time in the history of the United States that the president has sought to provoke a financial panic to get legislation passed through Congress.

While this has proven to be a successful political strategy - after the House of Representatives finally passed the bank bail-out plan today - it marks yet another low point in American politics.

It was incredibly irresponsible for George Bush to tell the American people on national television that the country could be facing another Great Depression.

By contrast, when we actually were in the Great Depression, President Roosevelt said: "We have nothing to fear, but fear itself."It was even more irresponsible for President Bush to seize on the decline in the stock market five days later as evidence that his bailout was needed for the economy.

President Bush must surely understand, as all economists know, that the daily swings in the stock market are driven by mass psychology and have almost nothing to do with the underlying strength in the economy.

The scare tactics of President Bush, Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, and Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, created sufficient panic, so that by the time of the first vote on the emergency package in Congress, much of the public believed that the defeat of the bail-out may actually have had serious consequences for the economy.

Millions of people have changed their behaviour because of this fear, with many pulling money out of bank and money market accounts, and adjusting their financial plans in other ways.

This effort to promote panic is especially striking since the country's dire economic situation is almost entirely the result of the Bush administration's policy failures. First and foremost, the decision of Paulson and Bernanke (and previously Alan Greenspan) to ignore the housing bubble, allowed for the growth of an $8tn bubble, which is now collapsing.

It is the collapse of this bubble - which has already destroyed more than $4tn in housing wealth, and is likely to destroy another $4tn over the next year - that is at the root of the economy's problems.

While competent economists were warning of the bubble and the dire consequences of its collapse, the top officials in the Bush administration were celebrating the rise in homeownership rates.

The Bush administration made the crisis even worse by deregulating Wall Street. This led to the huge over-leveraging of financial institutions, which has vastly complicated the country's economic policies. It is especially disturbing that Secretary Paulson personally profited from these policies, earning millions of dollars in compensation from Goldman Sachs during his years there as its chief executive.

The collapse of the housing bubble, while falling short of the magnitude of the Great Depression, is likely to lead to the worst recession since the second world war. Repairing the damage caused by this bubble will be a long and difficult process.

Cleaning up the damage to the political system from President Bush's unprecedented fear campaign may prove to be even more difficult.

Financial Crisis: We're All Going Down

Schadenfreude is impossible because the fat cats — the ones who bent the rules, the ones who pushed the envelopes, the ones who paid lower taxes because capital gains were most of their income, the ones who opposed regulations on the banking and mortgage industries — are taking us down with them.

The very wealthiest are, as always, likely to do just fine. Real, hard-core Wall Street, as Tom Wolfe reminded us last weekend, long ago decamped for the hedge funds of Greenwich.

The political leaders who allowed this mess to develop have turned into the great defenders of “Main Street.” (If I have to hear the juxtaposition of “Main Street” and “Wall Street” one more time, I will be the one drowning in a pool of vomit.).

It’s a whole host of other people — vulnerable middle class homeowners and small business owners and, now, universities unable to make payroll — who are hurting.

I called my friend in publishing yesterday to ask him how things were going on the train.

“There’s a lot of rueful chuckling. There’s a lot of talk about riding this out, about maintaining,” is all he had to say.

It was 23 years ago that Tom Wolfe introduced us to the Masters of the Universe. They were curiosities then — remote, very rich, and decidedly not like you and me. But now, the world of Wall Street has become our world; there is no outside to it, there is no other option than to pay and play.

Our fortunes rise and fall together to a degree like never before, and our values are enmeshed like never before.

The language of Wall Street — of cost-cutting and efficiency, self-interest, using each situation to maximize profit, is the language of everyday life and social interaction.

We’re all losers now. There’s no pleasure to it.

Paulson 'Rescue' Plan Won't Work

Conventional wisdom fails to see that Paulson's "Troubled Asset Relieve Program" (TARP), now an $810 billion measure thanks to an increase in the cap on federal deposit insurance and tax breaks, will do little to alleviate the ominous financial and economic clouds hanging over the United States and the rest of the world.

Conventional wisdom in Washington believes that a slightly modified version of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's initially US$700 billion bank bailout plan will pass the House of Representatives on Friday following the Senate's approval on Wednesday.

Conventional wisdom fails to see that Paulson's "Troubled Asset Relieve Program" (TARP), now an $810 billion measure thanks to an increase in the cap on federal deposit insurance and tax breaks, will do little to alleviate the ominous financial and economic clouds hanging over the United States and the rest of the world.

The initial defeat of the plan hatched by Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke in the House of Representatives at the start of the week should have ushered in the end of the Bush's administration disorderly financial policies, lax financial supervision and the irresponsible expansionary monetary policy of the Federal Reserve Board era under former chairman Alan Greenspan and Bernanke, his successor.

It was a setback to the inflationist forces that wanted to put the burden of the speculative bank losses on the American workers based on the thesis that the Paulson-Bernanke plan is better for American families and their children than any other economic stabilization plan, plans which were not presented and debated.

Bankers wanted to get rid of their speculative impaired assets by exchanging trash for cash, with an attendant cost to the economy of hyperinflation, in turn exacerbating food and energy price inflation and eroding family real incomes.

TARP has been a coordinated ploy to dump troubled assets onto the government in a "quick and clean" way.

Paulson will immediately issue Treasury bills that would be bought by banks, the proceeds from the sale of Treasury bills would in turn finance the purchase troubled assets. At the same time, remember that Bernanke has already injected over $630 billion of liquidity into the banking system.

Throughout their history, US banks have never been so flush with liquidity that is remunerated by the Fed.

By getting money at very low rates from the Fed and making profits in purchasing Treasury bills, banks will make huge riskless profits, and the financing of the TARP will be fully guaranteed without requiring financing from sovereign wealth funds. Paulson and Bernanke have failed since August 2007 to re-inflate unworthy (housing) assets, despite the Fed's extremely low interest rates and aggressive monetary policy.

It would appear that they found out that, only by combing fiscal and monetary policies and forcing unusual expansion of both, can they remove "clogging" troubled assets and achieve their re-inflationary objective.

The battle between the supporters of the Paulson-Bernanke plan and its opponents has been a battle between debtors and bankers and those who would like to safeguard American public finance, equity among the various segments of society, and seek to restore orderly adjustment of the financial system and asset prices.

Debtors and bankers would like to protect their acquired wealth, walk free from debt and dump unworthy financial assets onto the government budget. By inducing hyperinflation, they will be able to extinguish real value of their liabilities.

The bankers' group maintains that only the government can recapitalize the banking sector; they claim that rejection of bank recapitalization by the government would be fatal for the economy, and policymakers would live to regret the rebuttal of the TARP.

TARP's opponents, wary of the maneuvers of its supporters and observing that the sky has not or is not falling, see clearly the dangers for the economy, its inequity, the long economic decline that will ensue, and their constituency's discontent.

The proponents of TARP have maintained that the US Treasury will make money buying worthless paper. At one point, the paper will become valuable, the Treasury will resell at much higher prices than it paid and will make money.

Hence, the Paulson-Bernanke plan will end up making profits for taxpayers! Some dubbed the TARP as a genius deal by the two men. If proponents of this argument are certain that worthless financial paper will become very valuable in the future, why then do financial institutions not keep this paper, sell it later and reap profits? Why don't speculators grab the stuff?

Unfortunately, bad debt rarely becomes good debt. Throwing good money after bad money is not a sound business practice. If a modified TARP is adopted, an additional exposure for taxpayers is that the Treasury may keep coming back for additional amounts of financing, with no end in sight, and lawmakers will be hard-pressed not to give in, as they would have already invested so much in the plan.

Bernanke and Paulson appear blind to the underlying reason for the financial crisis. It is a housing bubble that has not completely burst. Prices are still inflated relative to indicators such as disposable income. Price declines still have some way to go.

Banks do have the money to lend but are unwilling to do so at these inflated prices unless the borrower puts down a much higher down payment than that required in normal times. This would appear to be good banking practice and will not be altered by the TARP.

The uneven-handedness of the TARP is obvious. It purports to protect one group (bankers) at the expense of another group (workers, pensioners) arguing that the gains of the former serve the economy while the losses of the latter have no incidence on the economy.