I don’t know if this is a blog. Open the title, and you tell me.

Senator Specter has reached agreement with the White House on a bill that would amend FISA and allow judicial review of the Administration’s domestic surveillance activities on a program by program basis. The text of the bill is here and a summary is here.

This entry contains two separate bodies of writing. Section 1 is by Mattie U. Richardson, PhD, Priya Kandaswamy, PhD (almost!), and Marlon M. Bailey, PhD. Section 2 contains some of my own (radical, profeminist, queer) thoughts on the subject of marriage.

Those of us who opposed this war cannot apologize to you for what our government has done. But we can offer out condolences and our solidarity. As a former member of the US military, I join thousands of other veterans who abhor this administraton and its inhuman, illegal, and immoral occupation of your land and your society.

Is Palestine.

And the discussion of Zionism for what it is — exactly as we are witnessing right now — a secular, racist political movement, characterized by expansionism and militarism , is going to have to happen online, because neither the mainstream press nor mainstream politicians will touch it with a ten-foot pole… even when it is piling up more bodies as it leads the world into a regional disaster.

As part of the West Coast launch of his new book, Letter in Support of a Black Reconstruction in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, Eric will be discussing the centrality of the Black Liberation Movement for the U.S. Left and programmatic proposals for a new reconstruction in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

I’ve included the last two think-pieces, both the Ouellette piece and this one by Susan Dwyer (which, yes, will open the porn debate again, to raise questons (if folks are willing) about the implications for popular notions of “addiction,” which have become culturally hegemonic… 12-step programs are now grist for dozens of films and teevee dramas, and folks overcoming a “disease” in gruop settings doesn’t threaten power in any way, because social origins for these problems are placed off-limits as “outside issues” that could split 12-step gatherings. Obssessive behavior, which now includes “cyberporn addiciton” (and it IS areal thing, no matter how sketchy the discription) just raises this again. This compulsion to seek certain sensations over and over, one might argue, are displacements of some sort growing out of what we might loosely term alienation, though that doesn;t capture the whole essence of “lack” in late capitalist metropolitan culture, where consumer demand production has become a major industry unto itself… the manufacture of compulsions and the concommitant destruction of the basic sense of personhood… I’m rambling, but I am also welcoming thoughtful remarks and analyses. It seems that part of our political project is breaking through that alienation and “deep superficiality” (there’s an oxymoron for you) in ways that orient our efforts toward filling that void with something that is felt as genuine.

By Marc Ouellette (not pictured above)

…in our culture at least, the physical sense of maleness and femaleness is central to the cultural interpretation of gender. Masculine gender is (among other things) a certain feel to the skin, certain muscular shapes and tensions, certain postures and ways of moving, certain possibilities in sex. Bodily experience is often central in memories of our own lives, and thus in our understanding of who and what we are.

Chaos and complexity theory suggest that we can no longer assume that we can predict, therefore control, and therefore dominate, nature. The domination of nature is predicated on the ability to solve linear differential equations and predict the outcome; that means we can then control nature in small, closed systems.

What chaos and complexity theory are suggesting is that only in unusual cases–where, say, we’re building a bridge or using closed mechanical systems–can we solve problems and control nature. Chaos theory says that we can’t predict and can’t control most of the domain out there, and therefore we can’t dominate it, and therefore we have to give up the ethic of mechanistic science that led to the death of nature.

Five more US soldiers have been formally charged in the alleged rape of a young Iraqi and the killings of her and three family members in March, the American military announced yesterday.