AdamSmith

Don't know where my mind went. My real 15 min would have to be winning OZ's frequent-poster contest here 3 years ago. ...Life has been anticlimax since.

OMG. What is wrong with me?! You and kev have only been telling me for half a decade now. ...Can't speak for lurker!

Mine have alas been confined to professional talks given to the likes of the Society of Automotive Engineers or the American Council of Engineering Companies or IHEEP (the International Highway Engineering Exchange Program, no less) or else webinars for the devoted readerships of Aviation Week, Off-Highway Engineering, Offshore Engineer, MIT Technology Review and similar electrifying titles. I do occasionally get quoted in WSJ, Financial Times, NYT, South China Morning Post, Fortune, Newsweek, etc. But those predictably bring in no business leads, in contrast to the dull but profitable citations in the unglamorous trade rags. (First touched the hem of greatness when, fresh out of college and working for a periodical called -- wait for it -- Industrial Water Engineering, I landed a phone interview with the CEO of reactor maker Babcock & Wilcox. Which became the highlight of that year's Boiler Feedwater Corrosion Control issue. Second in popularity with our advertisers only to the annual Sewage & Sludge Pumping number.)

I heard all that.

Odd. I've never gotten a warning. Win7/Firefox. Could Kaspersky be responsible?

You will take part in the mandatory group sex, no?

That is true about the rare 'grab.' That happened I recall with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I read straight through in one sitting. Likewise Naked Lunch. What a thing, when it strikes.

The only thing standing in the way is your refusal.

You know what is required to spend a night with OZ and his friends? (King bed, no sleeper sofas... )

hito, you can drive me nuts. The author makes no claims particular to the Swartz case, just verifiable statements about U.S. prosecutorial malpractice at large. The author is a well regarded Brit journalist, helped run The Economist for a long spell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Crook

I think I know that North Haven store! What a hoot. He could have really helped the Vatican Bank if everyone had just kept their mouths shut.

In fact I read books from the inside out. Somehow authors find beginnings so tedious. So do I. In bookstores I flop a book open to the middle to see if I like it. Then at home I keep reading that way, then go back and start it once I've finished it. This is the case with what little fiction I read as well as all the history & biography. Makes it easier to "throw the nerves in patterns on a screen." Goes to show what comes of having long ago adjusted to finding lyric poetry the thing really worth the trouble of trying to read.

If this helps any, several relatives report that new knees are well worth the trouble & short-term pain. (Providing enough opioids in the recovery phase!)

Mother Jones maps how the gun industry has inserted itself into NRA's upper echelons. With predictable results. Which, as this and other reporting is making more and more evident, look to be much at odds with views of many sane hunting-type rank-&-file NRA members. http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/nra-board-newtown-bushmaster?page=1

Excellent Atlantic article by Clive Crook on mad prosecutorial overreach turned on Swartz: http://m.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/01/the-death-of-aaron-swartz/267224/

Try one of those confectioners that sells genital-shaped chocolates.

Actually that looks more like something that would have happened in The Omen. A queer version of which could also be great fun! ...assuming it wasn't already?

Panetta doesn't mince words. Leon Panetta Defends Obama's Gun Control Package By LOLITA C. BALDOR 01/17/13 07:42 AM ET EST AP VICENZA, Italy -- Defense Secretary Leon Panetta fired off a strong defense of gun control legislation Thursday, in front of a decidedly skeptical audience. Speaking to about 150 members of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, Panetta said steps can be taken to protect kids in school without undermining the Second Amendment. "Who the hell needs armor-piercing bullets except you guys in battle?" Panetta told the soldiers at the U.S. Army Garrison Vicenza in northern Italy. "For the life of me, I don't know why the hell people have to have assault weapons." Panetta, who said he believes in the Second Amendment and has been a longtime duck hunter, was asked about the issue by a soldier who wanted to know what steps the Obama administration was going to take to deal with attacks in schools that "don't have to do with tearing apart our Second Amendment." Known for his often blunt and colorful language, Panetta added that things can be done to protect children "so that the nuts that are out there won't use these kinds of weapons to wipe them out." President Barack Obama's sweeping gun control package includes calls for a ban on assault weapons and a universal requirement for background checks on gun purchases. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/17/leon-panetta_n_2494452.html

Fascinating history of the NRA's about-face from its pro-gun-control origins: http://www.alternet.org/suprising-unknown-history-nra?paging=off

Moving piece by a female sex worker. Good to see such a viewpoint presented to mainstream readerships. The Good Men Project / By Charlotte Shane Why I'm Happy I Became a Prostitute Some of the nicest men I've ever met were my clients. We must move beyond cartoonish depictions of villainous, lustful men victimizing vulnerable women. November 22, 2010 | This story first appeared on the Good Men Project. I was in my early 20s, teaching undergrads in the morning, taking graduate classes in the afternoon, and selling nighttime webcam sex shows on a site that regularly featured professional porn stars like Jenna Jameson. The man watching me that night bought 90 minutes, which would have cost him nearly $600. I’d landed a big fish, and I didn’t want to lose it. But when he told me his request, I froze. “Why don’t you take a nap?” he wrote. It was the most unusual request I’d ever received. And, as you probably know, people feel free to get veryunusual when they’re anonymous online. “You look like you could use some sleep,” he continued. “Don’t you want to tell me your real name?” I asked, smiling, shaking the ends of my wig around my face. I doubted my sleeping would actually keep him interested. “We can get to that later,” he replied. “Just nap a little for now. And put some clothes on, or you’ll get cold.” I arranged my body in a flattering position and laid my head on a pillow. What is with this guy? I thought. I wouldn’t figure it out until much later. ♦◊♦ Disclaimer: coercion is wrong, kidnapping is wrong, and hiring someone underage is wrong. There are men (and women) in the world who want to inflict suffering on others, and hiring a sex worker gives them an easy way to do it. But I’m tired of seeing men and women buy into the lie that male sexuality is inherently violent and sadistic. My experience as sex worker has taught me the opposite. When I first began working in the sex industry, I believed the cultural script about the men who made it profitable. Male sexual desire consisted of seeing thin young women naked and suffering, handled roughly, used callously. I read and trusted every word by Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon. There was so much evidence to support their theories of how male hatred of women was expressed through abusive sex. Frankly, men terrified me. I suspected they were incapable of compassion. To get them off, I thought, they all needed cruelty. ♦◊♦ I started working online during the peak years of anal-sex mania, and requests of ass-to-mouth (ATM) and double penetration (DP) with toys were common—not that I (always) honored them. One of the pleasant things about webcam was that it was possible to fake almost anything, especially penetration. On the webcam site, non-paying visitors could type anything they wanted into the un-moderated chat windows: “Your family must hate you.” “I bet you have AIDS.” “You’re a fat whore.” But not every man treated me this way, even with the luxury of complete anonymity. My first regular client was a man who talked with me for up to an hour before asking me to bring myself to orgasm. He wanted to see an orgasm, and he didn’t make demands about how I achieved it. Then came another regular who had only days earlier attempted suicide after a breakup with his fiancée. A year after we first met, he told me that our friendship—which many people would dismiss as illusory and degrading—was sometimes all that kept him from making a second attempt. One young man in particular left a deep impression. He was younger than I was, working a blue-collar job in New Jersey, and he couldn’t afford much private time. But he would stay at his computer for as much of my shift as he could, cracking inside jokes and distracting me from other users’ insults while I was in free chat waiting for someone to pay for a show. We talked about music, his puppy, and the girls he was dating. In this strange cyber world, he became a dear friend. And years after I retired from webcam, we still occasionally reached out to each other through email. Once he wrote, “It’s funny, you used to be this sexual icon that I would never have. Now it’s just like you’re an old friend I haven’t talked to in a long time and all I wanna do is catch up.” I began to attract more and more men who wanted conversation, who bought me gifts and sent postcards and told me about their lives. They wanted to see me play with myself; they didn’t want to see me hurt. I became more vocal about what I did and didn’t like—in part because, for the first time, I was figuring out what I did and didn’t like. When someone told me to do something I didn’t want to do, I would refuse. I started countering requests for anal with “I will if you will.” It was possible to engage with them. It was astounding to me how many men would listen and suggest something else if I told them what I was doing hurt. They were free to leave and spend their money elsewhere, but few did. It occurred to me that many men had trouble expressing empathy because no one had ever taught them how. Most were clueless, not brutal—although some were both. Lots of these guys had grown up so confused and undereducated about the female anatomy that they hardly even had a sense of what sensations might feel best or what activities were most satisfying. The more men I talked to, the more sympathetic I felt. I was approaching the biggest epiphany of my life: men had as much anxiety and shame around sex as women did. We were all in this together, and any ideology that couldn’t admit as much was doomed to fail. ♦◊♦ It was this newfound comfort that facilitated my switch to in-person sex work. The vile cesspool that is the Internet made transitioning easy. Refreshingly, I never had a man call me fat, ugly, or diseased while we were standing face to face. And the men I met in person were shockingly tame when it came to sexual quirks. On webcam, I was asked to play the part of a murderous dominatrix who poisoned her submissive and stood laughing over his grave. One customer wanted to see me tie myself with boat rope in impossibly bizarre configurations. I even had a regular who got off on me fake-sneezing and blowing my nose. But with escorting, the ATM and DP requests were long gone. In the flesh, men were downright vanilla. Some in-person clients did want to incorporate violence, but only when they were the recipients. (Even the most casual research will bear out the fact while dominatrices can make a good living kicking the shit out of men, female submissives are so rarely in demand that most have to work as a switch in order to stay afloat.) People who deeply distrust the sex industry—who’ve been personally harmed by it or find it threatening or who associate it only with exploitation—often get very angry when escorts (or academics who study sex workers, like Sudhir Venkatesh) claim some clients don’t want sexual interaction. But it’s true: some don’t. I’ve been hired by men who never asked me to get naked, never requested that I touch their genitals. There’s always conversation, regardless of the other activities during a date: clients talk to me about their parents (especially their fathers) and about failing marriages or life after divorce. They often show me pictures of their children and, sometimes, spouses. The longer I’ve worked, the more it seems that the sex is often a front. It’s an entry point that allows men to make their real request (for affection, understanding, and connection) while still satisfying stereotypical ideas of masculinity. What most men want is a great romance or, at the very least, a great friendship. They want to feel like they’re falling in love. They want to feel loved in return. The clients who do want to have sex—and of course, there are many—don’t want that sex to be uncomfortable or unpleasant for me. They want to me to take pleasure in the act as well. They want to feel attractive and competent and gentle and attentive. Many of them are all of those things. If they express guilt about paying for sex, I don’t try to talk them into feeling otherwise. When one man said he should stop seeing me because the money he spent on our appointments should be going toward his kids’ college funds, I replied, “Well, if it makes you feel any better, it’s going toward mine.” (I never saw him again.) Yes, I’ve met men who didn’t respect my boundaries and who harmed me, inadvertently or purposefully. But such men were few and far between, and I refused to see them again. Not every man who visits a strip club, watches a clip of porn, or pays for sexual companionship wants to commit an act of violence against a woman. Rapists and murders are the ones who want to rape and strangle people; some of them hire escorts, some don’t. When Melissa Farley tells The Economist that men who hire prostitutes “are not nice guys looking for a normal date. They regularly attempt to rape and strangle women,” she’s not talking about my experience. Farley’s cloudy thinking rests on the belief that a man’s sexual interest in a woman is fundamentally disrespectful, fundamentally abusive, and fundamentally wrong. But what’s wrong is the stigma surrounding sex work. In the professional world, there is no other service arrangement in which clients are accused of hating those whom they hire. Not janitorial work, furniture moving, notoriously dangerous meat-factory work, or any other job that requires use of the service provider’s body in grueling, unhealthy ways. ♦◊♦ In the seven years I’ve known “Napman,” the gentle soul whose strange request opened this piece, he’s yet to let on that he secretly desires to strangle me. He periodically sends me gifts. We email and punctuate our updates with pictures. He knows the names of all of my pets—he even knows where I live. I told him about this article. I came to know him as a man who only wanted what most men want: to do something nice for someone else. There are many important conversations to be had about the sex industry, but I don’t believe those conversations will be beneficial unless they move beyond cartoonish depictions of villainous, lustful men victimizing innocent and vulnerable women. I’m not claiming that my experience is representative of all sex workers, or even all sex-working women, but I know my experience is not entirely anomalous. I don’t regret selling sex for a variety of reasons—one of which is that it’s allowed me to meet many good men. And in doing so, it’s forever changed me for the better. Charlotte is a prostitute living on the East Coast. She writes at NightmareBrunette. http://www.alternet.org/story/148948/why_i%27m_happy_i_became_a_prostitute?paging=off

Interesting alternative argument as to why the 2nd Amendment exists. Thom Hartmann: The Second Amendment Was Ratified to Preserve Slavery Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that ... and we all should be too. January 15, 2013 The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too. In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states. In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings. As Dr. Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998, "The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search 'all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition' and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds." It's the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, "Why don't they just rise up and kill the whites?" If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains. Sally E. Haden, in her book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, notes that, "Although eligibility for the Militia seemed all-encompassing, not every middle-aged white male Virginian or Carolinian became a slave patroller." There were exemptions so "men in critical professions" like judges, legislators and students could stay at their work. Generally, though, she documents how most southern men between ages 18 and 45 - including physicians and ministers - had to serve on slave patrol in the militia at one time or another in their lives. And slave rebellions were keeping the slave patrols busy. By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South. Blacks outnumbered whites in large areas, and the state militias were used to both prevent and to put down slave uprisings. As Dr. Bogus points out, slavery can only exist in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the militias. If the anti-slavery folks in the North had figured out a way to disband - or even move out of the state - those southern militias, the police state of the South would collapse. And, similarly, if the North were to invite into military service the slaves of the South, then they could be emancipated, which would collapse the institution of slavery, and the southern economic and social systems, altogether. These two possibilities worried southerners like James Monroe, George Mason (who owned over 300 slaves) and the southern Christian evangelical, Patrick Henry (who opposed slavery on principle, but also opposed freeing slaves). Their main concern was that Article 1, Section 8 of the newly-proposed Constitution, which gave the federal government the power to raise and supervise a militia, could also allow that federal militia to subsume their state militias and change them from slavery-enforcing institutions into something that could even, one day, free the slaves. This was not an imagined threat. Famously, 12 years earlier, during the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, Lord Dunsmore offered freedom to slaves who could escape and join his forces. "Liberty to Slaves" was stitched onto their jacket pocket flaps. During the War, British General Henry Clinton extended the practice in 1779. And numerous freed slaves served in General Washington's army. Thus, southern legislators and plantation owners lived not just in fear of their own slaves rebelling, but also in fear that their slaves could be emancipated through military service. At the ratifying convention in Virginia in 1788, Henry laid it out: "Let me here call your attention to that part [Article 1, Section 8 of the proposed Constitution] which gives the Congress power to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States. . . . "By this, sir, you see that their control over our last and best defence is unlimited. If they neglect or refuse to discipline or arm our militia, they will be useless: the states can do neither . . . this power being exclusively given to Congress. The power of appointing officers over men not disciplined or armed is ridiculous; so that this pretended little remains of power left to the states may, at the pleasure of Congress, be rendered nugatory." George Mason expressed a similar fear: "The militia may be here destroyed by that method which has been practised in other parts of the world before; that is, by rendering them useless, by disarming them. Under various pretences, Congress may neglect to provide for arming and disciplining the militia; and the state governments cannot do it, for Congress has an exclusive right to arm them [under this proposed Constitution] . . . " Henry then bluntly laid it out: "If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress . . . . Congress, and Congress only [under this new Constitution], can call forth the militia." And why was that such a concern for Patrick Henry? "In this state," he said, "there are two hundred and thirty-six thousand blacks, and there are many in several other states. But there are few or none in the Northern States. . . . May Congress not say, that every black man must fight? Did we not see a little of this last war? We were not so hard pushed as to make emancipation general; but acts of Assembly passed that every slave who would go to the army should be free." Patrick Henry was also convinced that the power over the various state militias given the federal government in the new Constitution could be used to strip the slave states of their slave-patrol militias. He knew the majority attitude in the North opposed slavery, and he worried they'd use the Constitution to free the South's slaves (a process then called "Manumission"). The abolitionists would, he was certain, use that power (and, ironically, this is pretty much what Abraham Lincoln ended up doing): "[T]hey will search that paper [the Constitution], and see if they have power of manumission," said Henry. "And have they not, sir? Have they not power to provide for the general defence and welfare? May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery? May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power? "This is no ambiguous implication or logical deduction. The paper speaks to the point: they have the power in clear, unequivocal terms, and will clearly and certainly exercise it." He added: "This is a local matter, and I can see no propriety in subjecting it to Congress." James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution" and a slaveholder himself, basically called Patrick Henry paranoid. "I was struck with surprise," Madison said, "when I heard him express himself alarmed with respect to the emancipation of slaves. . . . There is no power to warrant it, in that paper [the Constitution]. If there be, I know it not." But the southern fears wouldn't go away. Patrick Henry even argued that southerner's "property" (slaves) would be lost under the new Constitution, and the resulting slave uprising would be less than peaceful or tranquil: "In this situation," Henry said to Madison, "I see a great deal of the property of the people of Virginia in jeopardy, and their peace and tranquility gone." So Madison, who had (at Jefferson's insistence) already begun to prepare proposed amendments to the Constitution, changed his first draft of one that addressed the militia issue to make sure it was unambiguous that the southern states could maintain their slave patrol militias. His first draft for what became the Second Amendment had said: "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country [emphasis mine]: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person." But Henry, Mason and others wanted southern states to preserve their slave-patrol militias independent of the federal government. So Madison changed the word "country" to the word "state," and redrafted the Second Amendment into today's form: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State [emphasis mine], the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Little did Madison realize that one day in the future weapons-manufacturing corporations, newly defined as "persons" by a Supreme Court some have calleddysfunctional, would use his slave patrol militia amendment to protect their "right" to manufacture and sell assault weapons used to murder schoolchildren. Thom Hartmann is an author and nationally syndicated daily talk show host. His newest book is The Thom Hartmann Reader. http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/thom-hartmann-second-amendment-was-ratified-preserve-slavery?paging=off

Putting W. aside (please!), I keep telling you: Once you learn how to bottom, it is not painful. Quite the opposite. We men have this organ called the prostate. You really ought to get to know yours.

Hito, a little common sense please. The NRA does this because it and its lobbying is backed and funded by the gun industry. Get it? http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-01-12/politics/36311919_1_nra-leaders-nra-officers-mighty-gun-lobby

Come to think, I would take her role were this device involved. Provided only that MsGuy played the old priest, and -- of course -- our hitoall played the young one. Split pea soup by Progresso, if you please.

This would be for the queer remake of The Exorcist...? (Who would take Linda Blair's role?!)