Erotophobia: fear of sex, tinged toward hatred of sex. Public sexual scandals revel in the hatred of sex. Disgust at the appetites. The strangeness of sex, the ordinary out-of-controlness of sex acts and sex drives that we all experience (if we're having it).

Actually, usually, sex is not a threat to very much. But it feels like a threat to something, which is why so many people stop having it.

So when a sexual scandal happens, people indulge in projections of what makes them uncomfortable about sex: its weirdness (I was just standing up and talking and now I'm doing this?).

Its sloppiness, its awkwardness, its seeming disconnection from so many other "appropriate" drives (to eat, for example). Then there's the fear of becoming a mere instrument of someone else's pleasure, in a way that one doesn't want.   more »

I looked, all right? This morning, I took a long and unflinching gaze. How do I say this without sounding boastful?

There in the bowl was a real beauty, my reward for yesterday's hearty oatmeal breakfast and black bean and rice dinner.

It was the kind of (how do we settle on a comfortable euphemism?) ejecta that would make Mom proud.

I consulted What's Your Poo Telling You? my handy field guide to human stools, and discovered that mine had an ideal shape, sinking nicely to the bottom of the bowl.   more »

Obama says the comments have “pained and angered me” and that “a number of people have legitimately raised questions about the nature of my relationship with Rev. Wright and my membership in the church.”

“I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have been the subject of this controversy,” Obama also writes.

“I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country or serves to divide us from our allies.

"I also believe that words that degrade individuals have no place in our public dialogue, whether it’s on the campaign stump or in the pulpit. In sum, I reject outright the statements by Rev. Wright that are at issue.”

This makes me want to throw up. The Rev. Wright is the true voice of black America, not Obama's "vanilla version." Somewhere on Obama's body is tattooed the words: "Do not disturb the Whites."   more »

You might have thought the neoconservative idea that the way to ensure America's security is by invading any country that looks at us cross-eyed (or as McCain likes to call it, "rogue state rollback") would have been thoroughly discredited by now.

Yet in McCain the lust for a new age of American hegemony, purchased at the cost of yet more activation of our enviable war machine, lives on. "There's gonna be other wars," he said in January. "I'm sorry to tell you, there's gonna be other wars."

But is McCain really "sorry" about the prospect? "He's the true neocon," Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution told The Nation's Robert Dreyfus.

"He does believe, in a way that George W. Bush never really did, in the use of power, military power above all, to change the world in America's image. If you thought George Bush was bad when it comes to the use of military force, wait till you see John McCain."   more »

Americans’ experience an ever-enduring, catatonic sleepwalk through the Empire’s vast array of bread and circuses, as always produced by the Ministry of Truth and the Department of Propaganda, better known as the American Propaganda Media [APM].

They have succeeded in the creation of an ignorant, incurious and dumbed down populace completely bereft of knowledge of what is done in its name.

With no concern for or understanding of geography, cultures, history, alien societies, the outside world and of the imperial aspirations of the Empire, Americans have proved easy targets for the manipulation and deception by the APM.

Seemingly unwilling to gain knowledge of anything outside American Idol or the weekly NASCAR rat race, the soldier ants and worker bees of the Empire are content to circumvent the horrors of war and the myriad crimes against humanity committed in their name in order to maintain "peace of mind.'   more »