The West isn't ambivalent. The ruling class knows what it wants, and the rest know that what they want doesn't matter.

One valid point, made by a number of people from both parties in Congress, is that the Constitution does not give the president the power to order up wars on his own say-so. Someone should remind Mr. O of this fact.

Time to join the Occupation! http://occupywallst.org/

Well, as so much from the Middle East, the story reads like something from the Arabian Nights. '... And then he commanded the ifrit by letters and numbers and the Seal of Solomon, to snatch up the body Ussama the Wicked from out of his palace, and to burn it with fire, and to cast it into the sea east of the land of Egypt. And so it was done.' Back here is reality-land, I suppose this third or fourth and possibly definitive extinction of Osama bin Laden indicates the U.S. will now be turning its imperial attention away from its useless, purposeless wars in the Middle East, to south and east Asia, especially China. Lucky China!

"... What we really need is a new women’s health movement...." We need a lot of things, but I think the Left that ought to be supplying them is just exhausted for the moment. And so the corporatocracy steps in with its little pink ribbons, or its big Mr. O, or its next war or bailout, or whatever.

Is there a middle class of any significant sort, Black or White? I doubt it.

I wonder if the poor aren't better off if the bourgeois media lose interest in them. The few cases I know of where a poor person or group swam into their view generally began with exploitation as entertainment and ended with investigations and punishments. For instance, someone was running a community center and free store in Brooklyn, and a reporter from the New York Times, slumming, wrote them up as if they were a cute sort of Martian; before long the Buildings Department and Fire Department, smelling unorthodox behavior, showed up and issued a blizzard of violations, and the landlord naturally evicted them -- he didn't mind what they were doing but he couldn't afford the governmental harassment. I do think those who are not quite poor yet have something to learn from the poor. The poor have been dealing with and adapting to bad conditions for a long time. For example, they know about social networking -- the real thing, not Facebook. I've read that many middle-class (that is, not quite poor yet) young people, once they leave college, have no friends and acquaintances besides those from the workplace. This can be a real problem when they lose their jobs, because the people who still have their jobs may regard job loss as contagious, and in any case they no longer have the workplace in common. (And some employers explicitly discourage contact between current employees and exes.) The poor, on the other hand -- at least, the ones I've lived around -- put up with their relatives and neighbors, however boring and stupid they may seem, and maintain non-workplace friendships because they know they may need them when the hammer is coming down (as it so often is). In order to learn something from the poor, however, you can't go to the New York Times, because the New York Times's point of view is that of "policymakers" for whom the poor are a species of alien beings and a problem to be solved by increased regulation and repression (see above). It is better to actually get to know the poor. No matter where you live, they are not far away. See what they can teach you; and maybe, if you're not flat on your back already, you can do something for them. This is only prudent behavior for middle- and working-class persons because it is almost certain that things are going to get worse than they are. For the last 20 or 30 years the U.S. economy has been based on imperialism, deficit, debt, and money-printing, and the government's response to the crisis naturally produced by these practices has been to double down -- to continue them in expanded form. It's only common sense, then, to expect the crisis to return, but now in larger and deeper form. Unless you're rich and have a private army, you need to know how the poor got by in days gone by when you, too, thought they were some sort of alien species.

I read a book many years ago (30?) that stated that women had, on the average, _three_times_ as much erectile tissue in the genital area as men, not almost as much. The book seemed factual and had lots of footnotes. Among other things, it gave the difference as a reason why (1) women often took longer than men to become aroused sexually and (2) why they seem (to many observers) to experience sex more intensely than men. I suppose one could measure something as imprecise as "erectile tissue" differently.

I was born in 1939 and can recall the regime of "bowel movement" inspection, laxatives and enemas from my childhood all too well. The enemas must have been very wearing on my parents and grandmother because I fought them tooth and nail -- imagine wrestling with a screaming, writhing child spraying shit and water in every direction -- whereas until I was nine or ten I could be coerced into swallowing milk of magnesia or prune juice. I remember to this day deciding to go to the wall and take no more of either. The thing that is weird about this is that my parents were fairly rational people, considering, and not particularly disposed to make their lives more difficult than they already were. In my teens I came across a book in the house which attributed most disease to unmoved bowel movements, so I suppose between the books and the advertising people were often convinced of this complete fiction. Another crime against humanity perpetrated by the medical profession, I guess. I wonder if anyone has published a complete compendium? It could be interesting reading, and a useful offset to incessant medicalist propaganda.

An interesting talk. I was confused about some things, however. At one point you all seemed to using the terms "open relationship", "swinging", and "polyamory" almost synonymously. In my book they are three different things; most of the polyamory I have observed or read about has been highly structured and not particularly open to outsiders. Swinging is also usually highly structured. The idea of open relationships (marriages or other couplings) is a rather broad category that might or might not cover particular instances of polyamorous (or nominally monogamous) relationships. At another point someone was talking about variety. It seems to me that if you are doing sex with the same two, three or ten people year after year you do not have any more variety than you do with one other person. That is, you could have a lot of psychological and sensual variety but it would come from the minds of the participants, one or many, not from switching bodies around. The big kick in bodily variety, I think, is that you don't know what's going to happen, you don't know what the event is going to be like or even if there's going to be an event, because you're doing something with a stranger. Of course, that can have a down side as well as an up side, which is why so many people prefer stable relationships (mono or poly). Also, a stable, long-term relationship or set of relationships, properly cultivated, allows you to get really crazy about the other person(s), which I think radically enhances sexual experiences, and is pretty hard to do with a day tripper; but obviously people's mileages may differ on that one quite a bit. As to the stability issue, my casual, anecdotal observation is that poly relationships have about as many problems as the mono type, that is, most of them are screwed up but some of them work.

I find the compulsory shaving thing, whether of faces, legs, pubes or whatever, extremely creepy. I became conscious of the pubic variety not through sexual adventures but because I do life drawing (that's drawing naked people). Several years ago it occurred to me that a lot of the younger models had little or no pubic hair -- they'd shaved it or cut it off. I thought it was just one of those awful but passing fashions of the young, like wearing your underpants on the outside, or driving half a pound of metal through your ears, but it hasn't gone away. Yet. I _do_ have a preference. As for SATC, I thought it was just fluffy soap opera. I don't know why people are so excited about it. It's _supposed_ to be a vacuous, trashy entertainment, isn't it? Isn't the trashiness part of the fun?

One of the things people contemplating marriage ought to look into are the many legal ramifications of marriage, which vary considerably from country to country and from state to state. It's not just the goofy romantic thing pushed by the media and the culture for the last century or so. The laws in most jurisdictions are complicated and may be surprising. Check out the fine print before you sign on the dotted line. This is all aside from the dubious cultural and political aspects of marriage. Those you can shrug off. The law is a lot harder to ignore, especially should the aforesaid shit hit the fan. Hate to be so rational this early in the morning, but duty calls.

What about the mornings and the afternoons?

If you want to get American folk music, get the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, from which Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Bob Dylan derive. The Smithsonian Institution sells it: http://www.folkways.si.edu/search/AlbumDetails.aspx?ID=2426 This kind -- these kinds -- of music disappeared when music was industrialized in the early part of the 20th century. Some of it came back decades later.

I think it is interesting how these sleazy creeps always get The Wife to stand next to them while they're admitting or denying whatever it is they've been caught with. For once I'd like to see one of them have the spine to stand up by himself instead of further humiliating one of their primary victims. I guess I'll wait a long time for that.

I resolved to never vote for anyone who had voted for or explicitly supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq. This made it easy to decide who to vote for in the primary; but I fear in the general election I may have to look at third, fourth or fifth parties, or write in my own name, or that of Felix the Cat. I find it very interesting that two-thirds of Americans are opposed to the war and think it was a mistake, yet almost all the surviving candidates are slavering warmongers. How did that happen?

Ou sont les bonhommes-de-neige d'antan?

True, IE is inferior -- after all, it's made by M$. But not everyone knows how to get rid of it. One thing you might try is putting only fairly simple stuff on the blog page, and the complicated things, videos, etc., off to the side so to speak -- on other pages.

On the other hand, you all might be glad that you had something to miss. There are those who are indifferent when their parents go off because their parents never had much to do with them -- or worse.

The chance that anyone's vote will decide an election is vanishingly small, especially a national election (unless you're on the Supreme Court). That being the case, the only way not to waste your vote is to vote for someone you like and respect. You won't feel nauseous when you do it, and some people do look at the votes, so you'll be telling them a thing or two.

If the U.S. were truly fascist, we wouldn't be allowed to say so.

Well, we have Chocolate Jesus, too!

Men are still generally expected to _perform_, that is, to produce effective, uninterrupted, long-lasting erections. If they can't do this, if they fail even occasionally, both they and their partners think there's something wrong with them. So they're working, trying to stay in control, trying to produce. That's not very sexy.

Unfortunately I think you're going to find that military service has many niches that are not too military and not too service-laden. Even combat has its little hideouts. There is really no way of making the State nice because it's all about power and oppression, and one way of exercising power is to make others do the dirty work.

About Twitter -- I don't get it. Obviously, everyone writing stuff on Twitter is writing stuff on Twitter, a subset of what everyone writing stuff on the Net is doing -- writing on the Net. Maybe they were doing something interesting before or after, but at the moment they're doing the same old boring thing everyone else on the Net is doing -- write write write write. Write-only medium. Now, in the old days: "Ring ring ring ring." "Hello?" "Hello, hello, what are you doing?" "I'm answering the phone, you dumb ...." Anyway, someone should explain this to dumb people like me. But I will probably be busy writing to read it.