Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.

Democracy is disruptive. Around the world, peaceful protesters are being demonised for this, but there is no right in a democratic civil society to be free of disruption. Protesters ideally should read Gandhi and King and dedicate themselves to disciplined, long-term, non-violent disruption of business as usual - especially disruption of traffic.

Peaceful, lawful protest - if it is effective - IS innately disruptive of “business as usual.” That is WHY it is effective.

Demographically, I'm a hippie from San Francisco and I'm not culturally inclined to be sympathetic to states' rights. My cultural heritage is FDR and Medicare and federal government solutions. But if you think through the analysis, strengthening state rights is a good corrective of the aggregation of an over-reaching federal power.

To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men's sexual - and hence social - confidence while undermining that of women.

The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.

'The End of America' details the 10 steps that would-be dictators always take in seeking to close an open society; it argued that the Bush administration had been advancing each one.