I mean, come on. Say no to sex until you're married? Abstinence is the only truly moral path? Where are we, 1756? What's next, trepanning and lobotomies and hurling virgins into the volcano to appease the corn god? Are you people high?
Put it this way. Anti-sexual thoughts make you into some sort of shrill humorless neoconservative evangelical QVC addict with a thing for plastic lawn ornaments, Purity Balls, Coors and all things pleated.
We've also found devastating evidence linking the widespread activity of not having good, respectful, dirty, open-mouthed sex to everything from acid reflux to infertility to global biochemical warfare to a chronic adoration of Adam Sandler.
It's really quite astonishing. Except for the part that it's totally obvious.
Here is the most astounding fact of all, the thing that makes you want to scream in the faces of these legislators and religious nutballs and pour a gallon of honey over them and then toss them onto a giant mound of gay fire ants.
Sex is just ridiculously good for you. Sex is good for the heart. It's good for the blood. It's good for the mood and it's good for depression and it's good for self-esteem and it's good for making you feel more human and alive and present in your skin.
The sort of raw, real sex education human children deserve will never happen in your lifetime, not on any large scale, not with the whiny self-righteous Christian Fundamentalists screaming into their underwear and trembling at the sight of their own genitalia.
There's new evidence that the Bush Administration's "abstinence only" approach to sex education is not proving effective at preventing unwanted pregnancies or the spread of sexually transmitted disease.
Many Americans wonder why the White House promotes "just say no" programs when they don't work.
The answer is simple and disturbing: George Bush is a dogmatic ultra-conservative; he believes that the maxim, "just say no," solves a variety of social problems ranging from pre-marital sex to terrorism.
Beginning in the Reagan Administration, conservatives attacked a so-called "culture of permissiveness" they claimed had been unleashed by the social events of the sixties.
They accused liberals of espousing sixties values: "if it feels good, do it."
Conservatives declared that a mythical liberal attack on traditional values produced many of America's problems such as poverty, promiscuity, and drug use.
Combined with the naive belief that the free market will inevitably solve most social problems, Bush's conservatism produced a potpourri of aberrant social policies:
Don't give poor children free lunches or special tutoring because that will enhance their sense of being victims.
Don't teach teenagers about birth control because that will cause them to become promiscuous.
Don't provide clean needles for drug users because that will legitimize their behavior. And so forth.
Bush is a true believer. Only he's not a devotee of mainstream Christianity, but rather of an ultra-conservative social philosophy that believes the best form of sex education is simply not to talk about it, to chant, "just say no" and hope for the best.
Identifying blowback as the root cause of 9/11, Chalmers Johnson also argues that Bush's excessively violent and lawless reaction to the attack, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, will provoke blowback of its own.
Significantly, because Johnson inaugurated his three-part series before the Bush Administration had begun to inflict its impulsiveness and inexperience on the world in earnest, he presents Bush's militarized response to 9/11 less as a sharp departure from the military policies of preceding administrations than as a predictable continuation of them, stressing, for instance, that "the United States has been continuously engaged in or mobilized for war since 1941."
Paul Krugman talks about his new book, Conscience of a Liberal, and the almost lethal refusal among some conservatives to consider the problems of suffering of others.
The Turkish government's decision to allow its military into northern Iraq to avenge recent ambushes by rebel Kurds is paving the way for a new hot spot and increased tensions between the US and Turkey, as well as between Baghdad and Ankara.
And a vote by the US House of Representatives committee on foreign relations that officially terms the 1915 mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as "genocide" is only inflaming the mix.
Former president Jimmy Carter is once again lambasting the current occupants of the White House.
In one interview yesterday, Carter accused President Bush of abandoning the basic principles of human rights, engaging in torture, and lying about it.
In another, he called Vice President Cheney a disaster for our country and a militant who is "trying again to promote once again what might well be a counterproductive and catastrophic military venture."
One of the main objections socialists hear is that “old-fashioned” ideas about class struggle are irrelevant in a society where most people are “middle class” [the bourgeoisie]. Yet the working class [proletariat] is the vast majority in America.
Nietzsche distinguished between master and slave moralities. The former challenges societal orthodoxy [its ideology], the latter is a conditioned subject. The "good" man of the master morality equates to the "evil" man of the slave morality.
Turkey may be tempted to push for the adoption of bill aimed at punishing anyone who does not characterize as genocide the killings of Algerians under French colonial rule or the mass slaughter of American Indians by European settlers.
Television has clear and fairly strict rules for the depiction of sex, nudity or violence. Silent Witness has scenes involving characters who are both naked and dead. TV is rightly nervous of pornography, but it should also be wary of autopsy porn.
The essential features of APD include pervasive patterns of extreme self-absorption, profound and long-term lapses in empathy, a deep disregard for the well-being of others and a powerful aversion to intellectual honesty and reality.
Bush dismissed rumors of a US-planned attack on Iran as "baseless gossip" and "empty propaganda".
Two days later, his top military commander, General Petraeus, accused Iran's ambassador to Iraq of being a member of Iran's Revolutionary Guard.
Taxing the inheritance of the wealthy is vital. Ultimately if you do not tax this, you end up with the groping hands of the wealthy in previous generations pushing their decendants upwards as opposed to anyone else's descendants.
You perpetuate an aristocracy. That after all was the reason that inheritance tax was rightly introduced- to enable people at the bottom of the pile to rise to the top.
Large capital transfers can ultimately allow people to leapfrog others- using that capital to invest in setting up companies where others don't have a similar opportunity. It perpetuates an aristocracy of property.
Obama is certainly charismatic, so much so that people often describe him as a rock star on the campaign trail.
But he's more Paul McCartney than Mick Jagger -- so cool and self-conscious that it's hard to imagine him saying "let it bleed."
He may be the smartest candidate in either party this year, and also the most visionary. But traveling with him, you get the sense that he's tight as a tick.
He's Mr. Cool, holding himself back, wary of letting audiences see either his passion or his vulnerability.
We are condemned, the smart guys tell us, to stay in Iraq. None of the three leading Democratic presidential candidates will pledge to remove all U.S. forces by 2013. In the think-tankocracy of Washington, defense intellectuals of both parties argue that pulling up stakes is not an option.
"Some of the people mentioned as possible defense secretaries under a Democratic White House," The Post's Thomas E. Ricks reported last month, "offer a vision of a U.S. presence in Iraq that does not differ markedly from that of the Bush administration."
Even the fantastical idea floated by Defense Secretary Robert Gates -- that U.S. forces should settle into a permanent presence in Iraq as they have in South Korea -- seems to have won at least tacit acceptance among many defense deep thinkers.
Everyone's on board except the American people, but what do they matter?
The Chief Rabbi of the Orthodox Jewish Community in Austria, Moishe Arye Friedman, says that the “Zionist regime is using the Holocaust as a tool and weapon to silence people. The root of the world’s problems is the existence of the Zionist regime.”
As millions of women inject Botox, reshape noses, augment breasts, lift buttocks and suck away unwanted fat, many are going in for genital plastic surgery - tightening vaginal muscles, plumping up or shortening labia, even restoring the hymen.
The web is the tool of curiosity and imagination, taking us forwards to a new counterculture. The web can, through exploring links, deconstruct any assumption presented to us by the culture's elite, and that includes all institutions of power.
Booming home prices gave Americans the confidence and the financial wherewithal to spend more than their income. America's household savings rates were either negative or zero. With higher interest rates depressing housing prices, the game is over.
Flintstone Fred Thompson made his first appearance in a Republican presidential candidates debate yesterday - and would have made more impression on a cushion. His performance is not going to dispel the gathering doubts over his campaign.
Hillary's camp seems to think her vote was a safe one because bush and Cheney do not have the time or support to bomb Iran, and that Bob Gates can stop it. But she may be underestimating Bush and Cheney. She should be totally paranoid about that pair
The reality is all of the points of friction between Iran and the US could be readily resolved with viable diplomacy save two: Israel’s current level of unflinching hostility towards Iran, and America’s addiction to global energy resources.
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