For want of a better metaphor, sex can be compared to baseball in a few ways:

In order to score you have to round all the bases, a glove is an important accessory in order to play the game right. And, perhaps most importantly, that warming up is always a good idea. Without it, someone will end up with a pulled muscle.

Foreplay, or, to stay in the world of baseball, the pre-game warm-up, is an integral part of any sexual experience in order to avoid injuries of any sort.

According to a lecture in "Lifespan Sexuality," the excitement phase, or the stage synonymous with foreplay, is one of the longest of four phases of the human sexual response cycle.

Arousal occurs from both physical and visual stimulation, from activities such as touching, being touched, dry humping, oral sex, or even just an active imagination and good visual of your partner's ass.

With an adequate amount of warming up, not only will your body actually heat up temperature-wise, but there will also be other physical responses.

A woman's vagina will start lubricating and become larger and more elastic, and a male will gain a full erection. Both sexes often have erect nipples, a faster heart rate, and quicker breathing during this stage.

Sex is the most likely next step, once both parties are ready. Either that, or an evening going back to the basics of that often sped-up or overlooked pre-game could be in order.

So what's the take home message? No matter who you chose to engage in sexual activities with, even if you are athletic or have amazing endurance, warming up to prep your body for the sensations and contortions it could be put through during your tryst is a good idea.

Kudos to you if you're naturally flexible, as it means less twisting and turning for your partner.

But remember: with great power comes great responsibility. And three strikes means you're out!

Flashback to the Crash of 1929

The Great Crash of 1929 plunged America, and the rest of the world, into an economic depression that was to last for the next decade.

As one commentator memorably explained afterwards: ‘Anyone who bought stocks in mid 1929 and held onto them saw most of his or her adult life pass by before getting back to even.’

So why did the Crash — which had been precipitated by government increases in interest rates to cool off the stock market boom — turn into a depression?

Simply because of the uncertainty the Crash fuelled.

No one knew what consequences of the Crash were going to be — so everyone decided to stop trading until things settled down.

Banks stopped lending money. Consumers stopped buying durable goods from shops.

The stores, in turn, stopped buying from the manufacturers.

Firms, therefore, cut back on production and laid off workers. And all of this fed on itself to make the depression still worse.

In the following ten years 13 million Americans lost their jobs, with 12,000 losing their jobs every single working day.

Some 20,000 companies went bankrupt, including 1,616 banks, and one in every 20 farmers was evicted from his land.

In 1932, the worst year of the Great Depression which continued until the beginning of the war, an astounding 23,000 Americans committed suicide in a single year.

Fat Cats & The Destitute of America

Turn your back on Wall Street. Walk a few blocks up from the gleaming and soulless towers of disintegrating capitalism to the shabby, brick Catholic Worker house at 55 E. Third St. Sit, as I did recently, in one of the chairs in the basement dining room with its cracked linoleum and steel utility tables.

“Works of mercy and contact with the destitute sustain the spark in the ashes,” William Griffin, who has been with the Catholic Worker for 34 years and writes for the newspaper, told me.

“It is with the poor and the indigent that you sense the imbalance and injustice. It is this imbalance that inspires action. Generations come in waves.

"One generation is inspired by these sparks, as Martin Luther King was during the civil rights movement. These fires often fall away and smolder until another generation.”

The coals of radical social change smolder here among the poor, the homeless and the destitute. As the numbers of disenfranchised dramatically increase, our hope, our only hope, is to connect intimately with the daily injustices visited upon them.

Out of this contact we can resurrect, from the ground up, a social ethic, a new movement. Hand out bowls of soup. Coax the homeless into a shower.

Make sure those who are mentally ill, cruelly cast out on city sidewalks, take their medications. Put your muscle behind organizing service workers.

Go back into America’s resegregated schools. Protest. Live simply.

It is in the tangible, mundane and difficult work of forming groups and communities to care for others and defy authority that we will kindle the outrage and the moral vision to fight back. It is not Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson who will save us.

Our society is more brutal than it was. The heartlessness was introduced by Reagan. Clinton put it into place. The ruthlessness is backed up by technology. Americans have retreated into collective narcissism. They are disconnected from themselves and others.

If we face economic collapse, there are many factors that could see the wrong response. There are more elements of fascism in place than there were in the 1930s. We not only lack community, we lack information.

Wall Street: "A Bunch of Fucking Swindlers"

THE COLOSSAL theft of $700 billion in taxpayer money to save Wall Street's super-rich was on hold as of Monday night, after a vote on a financial bailout was defeated in the House, triggering the biggest stock market plunge in 20 years.

Anyone with a sense of justice has to welcome a setback for legislation that would take money out of the pockets of millions of working people--now and for generations to come--and use it to replenish the coffers of banks run by profiteers, speculators and outright crooks.

But the proposed rescue wasn't defeated because Congress is unwilling in principle to hand over huge fortunes to the bankers.

No, the Republicans and Democrats are maneuvering over which party will take the blame for this outrageous, unprecedented--and widely opposed--government giveaway to the wealthy.

The chaos in Congress and on the stock market symbolized in dramatic fashion the stark dilemma facing the leaders of American capitalism and the U.S. political system.

From their point of view, the future of Wall Street depends on a massive government operation to take over the debts run up by banks and other financial firms after years of high-stakes gambling and a speculative binge.

The U.S. government now controls nearly half the mortgages in the U.S. through the effective nationalization of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and it is well positioned to stop foreclosures. But nothing in this proposed law will stop the sheriffs from coming to throw people out of their homes.

By contrast, the core of Paulson's proposal--to pay his old Wall Street cronies $700 billion in exchange for their bad assets--remains intact.

This is a slap in the face to hard-pressed homeowners, and it should have been enough to spark a much larger Democratic rebellion in the House--if their populist denunciations of the bankers were sincere, that is.

Warning: McCainonomics Will Damage Us Further

Let's examine the historical "blood lines" and wisdom of McCainonomics. It's actually quite simple once you realize that McCain is "channeling" the inner vision of four very-related economic giants of modern world history that preceded him in this lineage:

* Nobel economist Milton Friedman, author "Freedom and Democracy"

* America's great conservative President Ronald Reagan

* President George W. Bush, disciple of Friedman and Reaganomics

* Former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, master architect of McCainonomics

The significance of the McCainonomics historical linage is obvious in Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism," a book I reviewed last fall, calling it "the most important book on economics in the 21st century."

Her book is a "challenge to the central and most cherished claim" of "disaster capitalism:" That "the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy."

The current global credit meltdown is emerging as contrary proof that, as Klein says, exposes a "unique incompetence and cronyism" in the last eight years that "merely represents the monstrously violent and creative culmination of a fifty-year campaign for total corporate liberation" and a new conspiracy with government.

World Blames America's 'Casino Capitalism'

With other countries astounded by the U.S. financial crisis that threatens the foundations of the global free market, fingers of blame are pointing at America from around the planet.

Latin American and other foreign leaders said the United States must quickly fix the crisis it created before the rest of the world's hard-won economic gains are lost.

"The managers of big business took huge risks out of greed," said President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica, which is highly dependent on U.S. trade. "What happens in the United States will affect the entire world and, above all, small countries like ours."

In Europe, where some blame a phenomenon of "casino capitalism" in financial capitals such as New York and London, there is more of a sense of shared responsibility. But Europeans also blame the U.S. government for letting things get out of hand.

Amid harsh criticism is a growing consensus that stricter financial regulation is needed to prevent unfettered capitalism from destroying economies around the globe.

Leaders of developing nations that made painful spending cuts and opened their economies heeding U.S. demands are warning of a loss of U.S. influence and the likelihood that the world's poor will suffer most from the greed of the big players in global finance.

"They spent the last three decades saying we needed to do our chores. They didn't," Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said yesterday.

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