I am linking two pieces from Asia Times, one by M K Bhadrakumar, and one by Gabriel Kolko. Kolko’s is second, and zooms back from Bhadrakumar’s relative microanalysis of realignments in the Middle East. M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for more than 29 years, with postings including [...]

male privilege personified. every freaking college boy who is complicit supporting the show should know about the below article. and women should think what we’re licking the boots of. also see analysis here, which relates the below to murder/rape in Iraq – and a response to that analysis – i’ve been thinking about the lack [...]

Two days ago, alone with a colicky baby in arms, I was channel-surfing, when I came upon an HBO documentary called Thin. It was shot in an expensive treatment facility for eating disorders. The profiles of the women featured, with feeding tubes and suicide-attempt scars and some with the ability to vomit on demand, were [...]

[Also published at huffingtonpost. Comments there recieve a very large audience.] * * * Here is a thought exercise. Think of all the euphemisms used to describe the distinctly male external appendage, or eroticized acts from the male point of view, that call to mind conquest, war, or violence. Examples: I’d like to hit that [...]

The top contenders for the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination, according to the latest poll, are Hillary Clinton (33% of likely D-voters support her), Barack Obama (15%), John Edwards (14%), Al Gore (14%), and John Kerry (7%)… sorry, John. The same poll has 63% of the likely D-voting population opposing the war in Iraq. That position [...]

Specialist James Barker, United States Army, took a plea agreement that will allow him a life sentence in a Federal Penitentiary. He was among the group of soldiers that killed an Iraqi family in Mahmoudiya — a father, a mother, and a 4-year-old boy. They had spared the fourth, 14-year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, from death [...]

We’ve touched on this topic before: the tendency of both Lefty and Righty boys to revert in times of stress to a kind of Tourette’s Syndrome of misogyny, or phallolalia: the compulsive repetition of a stock set of highly gendered (male supremacist) metaphors and tropes. Recently, liberal pundit Billmon has been on a real roll — not that I’m picking on the guy out of personal spite, it’s just that I read his column fairly regularly and so am exposed to the boysh_t content thereof, which imho detracts considerably from the allegedly progressive message. And sometimes you just get fed up, ya know? Thought I’d do a little field anthropology (or andropology) for the ongoing project of the Gender Dyslexicon. A while back we were kicking around the notion of a website called Boysh_t Watch or something of the kind; here’s a foretaste of how durned tedious — and what a full-time job — it would be to keep up with the source material . . . Please feel free to add any recent gems — elections, like other major national sporting events, tend to bring the testosterone to the surface.

Any time you hear the term bipartisan, check your six and check your wallet. It means the ruling class is united and on the move. Given the history of this term, I can’t imagine why it doesn’t send shudders down our collective spine. They call it bipartisanship; but it’s more like The Bipartisan Ship — the primary war vessel of the ultra-elite.

I spent yesterday at the Durham Road Fire Station, voting point for Precint 08-08, Wake County (Raleigh) North Carolina. I arrived at 7:30 AM about one hour after the polls opened and stayed until 6:30 PM, one hour before they closed.