More and more men, reports maintain, are turning to masturbation and sex toys rather than to their female counterparts. And further exacerbating an already declining birthrate of 1.29 children per women found in a 2004 survey by The Daily Yomiuri, is the fact that some men are increasingly turning their backs on sex.

"Sex is just way too much trouble," a 35-year-old Japanese man told Shukan Asahi this week, adding that ever since he used masturbation as a teenager, he's never desired a woman again.

"As long as I have a sex toy available, I don't need women. I can't come when I have sex, and you've got to put a lot of emotion into dealing with women. Self-pleasure is a hell of a lot less demanding than trying to please somebody else."

Pornography, masturbation aids, Internet porn sites and social networks that lead to "virtual relationships", soaplands and Japan's widespread prostitution industry all allow men outlets for sexual fulfillment while not fulfilling other needs, such as procreation.   more »

The media have sorted it all out so neatly: He is young, glamorous, charismatic and funny; he represents the future.

She is older, strident, earnest and humorless; she is the past. He inspires; she hectors. Ugh!

Not only is Clinton well beyond the age when our culture deems women to have lost most of their value, but so are all too many of her supporters -- and there are few things this country is less interested in than aging women.

America requires that females be (or at least appear) young and sexually desirable. Once they've passed the age of facile objectification and commodification, they're supposed to disappear.   more »

"Something is indeed taking shape in the region," says Ahmed Youssef, professor of political science at Cairo University and the director of the Arab Studies Centre.

The assassination of Hizbullah ground commander Imad Mughniyah in Syria on 12 February, America's deployment of the destroyer USS Cole off the coast of Lebanon earlier this week, the "open war or holocaust" in Gaza, the cold war between the Arabs, new UN sanctions against Iran approved for the first time by China and Russia are, says Youssef, "all connected and could suggest confrontation and war".

Naqash believes the presence of the American destroyer USS Cole is intended to send a message to Syria and Hizbullah that, "Israel is not alone and that we are on its side".   more »

This collapse in economic confidence has occurred even though the full economic effects of the implosion of the housing market and the freezing of the credit markets have yet to be felt. As more things fall apart, perceptions will only get worse.

All of this should work to the Democrats’ advantage. They can contrast the Clinton boom with the Bush bust; they can make the case that Republican economic ideology, with its fixation on privatization and deregulation, helped get us into this mess.

And John McCain can be ridiculed as a man who has declared on a number of occasions that he doesn’t know much about economics — only to insist, straight-talker that he is, that he never said any such thing.

But first, of course, the Democrats have to settle on a nominee. And the shift in electoral focus from Iraq to economic anxiety clearly plays to Mrs. Clinton’s strengths.   more »

She surrounded herself with 13 retired senior military officers and appeared before a massed array of American flags. The assembled top brass were invited to weigh in on Clinton’s national security capabilities and Obama’s lack thereof.

The only politically consistent answer to Clinton would be a thorough-going critique of US foreign policy and the social interests that underlie it.

Obama is unable to conduct such a campaign. First, it would not be credible as he has never really been an antiwar candidate.

As Clinton herself has often pointed out, since entering the Senate, his voting record is exactly the same as her own, including support for successive measures funding the war and keeping US troops in Iraq.   more »