Today's quest for low emissions and high efficiency has brought us yet another obstacle to overcome: How to have sex in a small green vehicles, such as the Smart Fortwo, Chevy Aveo, or Mini Cooper.

These more-efficient vehicles are great, sure, but how can a couple fit so much, er, love into a cool-yet-compact vehicles?

Generally narrow in the cockpit with an obtrusive shifter in the center and low ceiling height, it's clear these machines were not designed for this type of adventure.

So what's a horny 'Hugger' to do? Read on for our illustrated guide to doin' it well in a small car.

The first thing to know is that you probably want to begin this venture on an empty stomach, since you'll be be scrunching and bending a lot.

It also helps to be fairly flexible and not be wearing more than two layers of clothing. Being that these cars are quite generous with windows, you probably don't want to be just outside the drive-thru at your local veggie burger stand, either. (Unless you want an audience, that is.)

If you're game to try something new, here are a four eco-conscious positions designed with the compact vehicle in mind.

(And yes, we realize that our model car isn't a modern, efficient vehicle, but we didn't have the Barbie Smart Fortwo on hand. Hello, Santa?):

Note: For these demonstrations, we'll be describing the actions as they would happen between a man and a woman, not because we're biased, but because setting these Barbie dolls up for some girl-on-girl (or guy-on-guy) action has never felt right since that time we got caught by our school teachers doing this exact same thing.

Position #1: The Passenger Seat Cowgirl: This is perfect for cars with front seats only. The guy should put his seat back as far as it will go. The girl should wear a skirt.

Position #2: Mission Missionary: This is a great position if the front seat of your green car reclines all the way back. The woman can rest her legs on the dash, arm rest, or hell, out the window. The guy can rest his legs…ah, who cares; he’s getting laid in a car!

Position #3: Passenger Seat Spooning: If your front seat doesn’t recline very far, try the passenger seat spoon…just make sure you’re, um, opening the right door for him.

Position #4: The When-All-Else-Fails Missionary: This is for those lucky enough to have a backseat. Basically, the girl sits in the back, sliding her hips forward, resting her legs on the front seat backs, while the guy crawls all over the console, finding something — anything — to support his feet and ankles and then hopes to God they can finish up before he throws out his back. More...

For the Earth to Live, Capitalism Must Die

Now, at last, the truth of what we have been presents itself unclothed. There is nowhere to hide. It is upon us.

Like a cancer, capitalism, industrialism -- truly the most advanced stage of civilization -- “advanced” the way that a cancer is called “advanced” -- has ravaged the body of the Earth.

Life on Earth is disappearing. Nothing that can be done -- or that will be done -- under the system of global death called capitalism will save Life on Earth.

The capitalist, as Karl Marx rightly noted, is “the soul of capital personified.” -- a soul unable to see beyond the limits of its own immediate perception of “gain.”

The capitalists as a whole -- as a white imperial world-ruling class -- understand the depth of the emerging crisis as well as we do.

But they advance nothing more than schemes to sustain markets and profits, while life itself is allowed to perish in a holocaust in the making, one whose end is as certain as a nuclear winter.

There are no words to convey the depth of criminal horror and illness of the rulers of a system that would create the conditions not only for genocide on an unimaginable, all but limitless scale, but that would commit the murder of all life -- ecocide, biocide and geocide -- in order to shield themselves from change and protect and maintain their ability to produce “profit.”

But the holocaust we are entering is not made of a single criminal act -- it is not the pushing of a button by a lone madman in a fit of religious mania or suicidal despair.

It is, rather, the accumulation of a billion little deaths, the reaching of a critical threshold of death, until death itself boils over, the way that water, when it reaches its threshold of heat, roils over the edges of a pot, waging war on the fire that feeds it.

The Agony of Gaza

The present crisis in Gaza started on 4 November when Israeli forces, in violation of the current six-month truce, entered Gaza to destroy a tunnel that Israel alleges could have been used to kidnap Israeli soldiers, if completed. In that operation, six members of Hamas were killed. Another five were killed in an Israeli raid last week.

Hamas responded by firing its homemade rockets towards the Israeli town of Sderot in the Negev, slightly wounding one Israeli. A number of others were “treated for shock.”

Unless extended, the truce is due to end on 19 December. Both sides would like to extend it -- but on their own terms.

Hamas wants the truce to be accompanied by the opening of the crossing points, but Israel wants to be free to besiege and starve Gaza at will, in the hope of bringing down the Hamas government. Hamas wants the truce extended to the West Bank, but Israel refuses.

Israel wants the freedom to strike and kill, but not to be hit back. It wants protection for its own people, but refuses it to others.

Yet, security is indivisible. Israel cannot hope to enjoy security at the expense of the insecurity of its neighbours. This is the dilemma at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Israel seems not to care about the serious damage to its international image and -- perhaps worse still -- about the way its oppression of the Palestinians has brutalized its own young people.

It has also aroused great hate among Palestinians and in the Arab and Muslim world in general.

Obamania: The Manufacture of Illusions

As a testimony of this worldwide illusion, it will be enough to quote a headline on the US elections from the Sunday Times, on November 9th: “Welcome Back America” –a headline bordering delirium and which, by the way, confuses a single country (US) with a continent (America), as it is frequently the case in the English-speaking press.

(Paradoxically, the very same press poked fun at the Republican vice-presidential candidate for exactly the opposite mistake, that is, to confuse the African continent with a country).

The subtitle is even more revealing: “The Bush years tainted America’s reputation in the eyes of the world. But Sarah Baxter, our Washington correspondent, who grew up in the US, says the victory of Barack Obama has revealed the nation as it really is”.

There’s no stomach which can resist the test of checking all of the press on the matter without getting physically sick, but this is the tone set up for almost every single article written on the subject.
What is that “nation” really? Those of us who suffer from a kind of insomnia of the intellect and who like of staying awaken, we do not forget the countless US aggressions to Latin American people, to the Philippines, not the enthusiastic support given to all kind of Third World dictators and to structurally genocidal regimes such as Israel or Colombia, neither do we forget Vietnam or Korea.

We neither forget the plundering of our natural resources and labour to which we’ve been subject for a century.

We don’t forget either the nefarious effects of the free trade policies, nor the economic sanctions imposed by the US to its contradictors.

Everything mentioned certainly has happened way before Bush, both with republican and democrat governments.
Can the peoples from Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan or Haiti expect for the end of their respective occupations to come to an end after these elections?

Can the future generations to come expect Obama to take some real action against Global Warming? Can the Latin American people expect the end of interventionism in the forms of Plan Merida and Plan Colombia to finish?

Can the peoples of the world expect that the White House does something to solve their endless list of demands?

Those who like waiting can remain waiting per saecula saeculorum –that is, for centuries to come.

Obama does not seem to be in any rush to change radically the old order, but he seems more concerned about adding a new facade to it.

Something like new condiments for an old soup. His declarations on Latin America or Palestine, even when he still was a candidate, give us enough reasons to suspect that it wouldn’t be wise to expect any significant change.

The above mentioned article reminds us that “President-elect Obama is about to inherit two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Osama Bin Laden is still at large (...) The threat of terrorism has not receded”.

So it seems that the so called War on Terror will last as an important element of the political agenda. Let us mention, by the way, that those chosen to be members of his cabinet do not allow much optimism, unless for the most gullible ones...

A Brief Socialist History of the Automobile

No single commercial product in the history of capitalism has had a greater effect on the economy and politics than the automobile.

No other product has been such a lever to increase consumption and increase markets in the developed world.

It could be argued that the car, more than any other product, was at the very heart of the 20th century’s economic expansion.

In US society, for over a century, the car has been raised on a cultural pedestal worshipping individuality and defining big business’ vision of freedom.

The car hastened the massive sprawl of suburbia and in itself shaped US urban planning like no other product.

Today, in the United States, public transport plays a distant second fiddle to the car with nine out of ten workers using their cars to travel to work.

In people’s everyday life, the car is now their second biggest household expense, next to housing. The car has reached its zenith.

This brief socialist history of the automobile will attempt to give some background and context to today’s car-dominated world.

It will attempt to explain how the automobile and the mad chase for profits has shaped the world, and helped in turn lead humanity to its current fork, where one road indisputably will lead to global destruction.

This history is founded on Marxist materialism, which sets off from the idea that all social and cultural phenomena under capitalism are shaped by the continuous tug between the bosses and the working class.

While this is not a history of autoworkers, it does attempt to show the role of working people’s struggles that have continuously been in the background to the birth and rise of the automobile.

One side of the auto industry that does not pervade its own advertising is the bloody road that brought it here. The industry itself has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of workers as it arose and found its feet.

This suffering was in turn surpassed by a century-long battle over resources to feed the car its oil; its rubber; its steel and glass.

Many millions have been killed in many hundreds of wars and invasions by imperialism, some more directly connected to the automobile than others.

The place of petroleum in the current war in Iraq is self-evident. But it is not the first or last war for resources for the automobile.

Over a hundred years ago US imperialism invaded Central America to establish its own rubber plantations for its booming auto industry; its brutality gave rise to Augusto Sandino, the grandfather of Nicaragua’s anti-imperialist resistance.

This article is dedicated to the thousands of workers who died fighting for auto unions and those millions who resisted the auto-industrial complex and were crushed in its wake.

Obama Will Be "Good for Israel"

Even before the voting began, Israeli politicians and pundits were asking: Will an Obama Administration be good for Israel?

"Be good for Israel" is our code for "Will the US allow us to keep our settlements and continue to support our efforts to prevent negotiations with the Palestinians from ever bearing fruit?"

For Americans the question should be: Will the Obama Administration understand that without addressing Palestinian needs it will not be able to disentangle itself from its broader Middle Eastern imbroglios, rejoin the community of nations and rescue its economy?

The Israel-Palestine conflict should be of central concern to Americans, near the top of the new Administration's agenda. It may not be the bloodiest conflict in the world – its minor when compared to Iraq – but it is emblematic to Muslims and to peoples the world over of American hostility and belligerence.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not merely a localized one between two squabbling tribes. It lies at the epicenter of global instability.

Go where you may in the world and you will encounter the same phenomenon: a sense that the suffering of the Palestinians represents all that is wrong in an American-dominated world.

As Obama comes into office, he will encounter a global reality very different from that of eight years before: a multilateral one in which a weakened and isolated US must find its place.

He will discover that much of America's isolation comes from the view that the Occupation of the Palestinian territories is, in fact, an American-Israeli Occupation.

If restoring a weakened American economy depends on repairing relations with the rest of the world, he will learn that without resolving the Israeli-Palestine conflict he will not create those conditions in which the US will be accepted once more into the wider global community.

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