An open letter to the Democratic congress

Health care is the single most important issue of our times.  It has always been apparent that we don’t yet have the political will nor the right economic landscape to do what is right — a single payer system and universal health care for all.  Too many people are too afraid of the consequences.  Too afraid that we can’t get it right.  To be fair, we’ve not shown them something that works yet.  We’ve not shown them in many, many years that a Congress can do something right, at least not something big.

However, it is also apparent that right now we have a chance to pass a public option.  That option will grant new freedom to millions of people.  Freedom to pursue opportunities that might otherwise be too risky to take; but whose potential payoffs for themselves, their families, and their fellow Americans are great.  Freedom for people who have until now merely dreamed the American Dream to pursue it.

Think of an economic recovery fueled by people unafraid to pursue entrepreneurship, advanced degrees, higher education, because they don’t have to worry that they can’t find health care for themselves and their families.  It’s a better, stronger, more responsible, and politically easier recovery than one fueled by billions of dollars of scattershot public spending on corporate bailouts.

This public option will only stand if there are people willing to stand for it, not merely as part of a larger package, but as a non-negotiable part of that package.  More than 60 representatives have pledged themselves to that cause, saying that health care reform is not reform unless there is a strong and workable public option. But 60-something is not enough.  I encourage those of you who have not yet committed to stand with our President and with us.

The voices against a public option, and against health care reform are loud, and their voices have banded together, making them seem louder and more numerous than they are.  They have also stirred the fears of people who already live in fear, making them afraid of this reform, this change.  Once it is done, over time, much of this fear will go away. Don’t be afraid to stand with us.  We will support you.  Serve the people of your states, reasonably, fairly, and with honor. The rest will attend to itself.

How I hate misleading graphs

Note to redditors who have linked to my article and are whining about how it supports the tea partiers, it does NOT. Let me be clear.  Thesis: The graphs from the Tax Foundation are misleading.  The trend in tax burden is perfectly reasonable given the data and not unfair.  My own personal opinion:  Income has become more stratified and the top 1% are making a ridiculous portion of the total income.

Lord. Read, folks!  This article explicitly states how the graphs from the Tax Foundation on personal income tax are misleading. It specifically states that it  is perfectly reasonable for  the top 1% to be  paying more taxes than the bottom 95% because of the increase in the percent of  total national income they account for. Please stop inundating me with comments calling me a teabagger. Now…  on with the show:

So, the Tax Foundation recently released their Fiscal Fact 183, which itself is a piece of responsible journalism if you read the entire thing and digest the data for yourself, but that which surrounds it is not.  In fact, now going to the top three pages of google items on “top 1% of taxpayers”, the rage is all about how the top 1% of taxpayers now pay more in taxes than the bottom 95% of taxpayers:

Now first of all, let me say: this is 100% true. However, this statistic, though true , is profoundly misleading.  Here is the graph as it was released on the Tax Foundation’s blog (not part of Fiscal Fact 183, but rather an opinion post of one of their bloggers):

So what’s wrong with this chart, exactly?  Well, first we’ll start with the title.  It’s very clear what they want to show you, that’s true.  There’s also the question of where 4% of the taxpayers are.  Why do we not select them?  Because using their methodology, and using the bottom 99% of taxpayers, the lines wouldn’t cross. Take the top 5% instead of the top 1% and their argument doesn’t sound as convincing.  They wouldn’t be able to use their snappy title.  Oh, and let’s define tax burden vs. tax rate.

• Tax Burden: The amount of taxes one group of people pays vs. the total amount of taxes paid by everyone.
• Tax Rate: The amount of taxes one group of people pays vs. the amount of income they declare.

Now for the less obvious things: psychological impressions I get looking at this graph. It’s not like they had staff psychologists analyze this graph for effect, because if they had it wouldn’t be so ugly, and because that would be just plain conspiracy theory.  No, but the lines along with the text of the blog post this is embedded in make it look like there’s been a conscious shift of burden from the bottom 95% to the upper 1%.  In fact, what they want you to believe is that things are more unfair in 2007 than they were in 1987 (back in the halcyon days of Reagan).

In fact they never say why the tax burden has gotten so much higher.  Even the Tax Foundation, which originally released the report never goes so far as to link the tax burden with anything else, even though they mention it in the same sentence with adjusted gross income.  They say, and I quote:

In 2007, the top 1 percent of tax returns paid 40.4 percent of all federal individual income taxes and earned 22.8 percent of adjusted gross income. Both of those figures—share of income and share of taxes paid—are significantly higher than they were in 2004 when the top 1 percent earned 19 percent of adjusted gross income (AGI) and paid 36.9 percent of federal individual income taxes.

God knows why they picked 2004 as opposed to any other year.  I can’t figure it out, statistically.  That aside, look how they very definitely didn’t say that the two figures track each other, and they make no mention of the tax rate.  For that, we have to go back to their source data.

A couple of notes first before I explain the graphics.  I’ve changed the methodology somewhat from the Tax Foundation’s methodology.  Like I said, using their methodology but adding the other 4% to compare 99% versus the top 1% would mean that there was no crossing of the tax burden lines.  My methodology preserves the crossing even though I’m using 99% and 1% respectively.  Specifically the change I’ve made is that I use the numbers from the IRS SOI here, same as they do, but I take AGI, income tax minus credits, taxable income, and highest tax rates only from the raw list of the “Taxable returns” columns on the IRS data.

Now to explain the charts and table.  In the table are the percentages of the total AGI, taxable income, and taxes paid declared by the top 1% of taxpayers and the bottom 99%.  This means, for example, that in 1997, the top 1% of taxpayers collected 21% of the total Adjusted Gross Income declared by all Americans filing taxable returns.  The other 99% of taxpayers collected 79% of the Adjusted Gross Income.  The final row of the table has the percentage change from 1997 to 2007.  That calculation is: figure at 2007 / figure at 1997 * 100 – 100.

The left chart shows as a percentage of that declared by all taxpaying Americans:

• In yellow, percentage of total Adjusted Gross Income declared by 99% of taxpayers, for each year 1997-2007
• In red, percentage of total income tax minus credits declared by 99% of taxpayers
• In green, percentage of total income tax minus credits declared by the top 1% of taxpayers
• In blue, percentage of total Adjusted Gross Income declared by the top 1% of taxpayers.

Note that the green and blue graphs (the 1%) track each other exactly, as do the yellow and red graphs.  The tax burden has decreased directly with the proportion of income collected by the bottom 99% of taxpayers.  The tax burden of the top 1% has increased directly with the proportion of income they collected. In fact, as we look at the chart on the right, the actual top tax rate on each group has remained relatively flat — there’s been a very slight drop in both groups’ top tax rates.  The top 1%’s has decreased more than the other 99%, but that’s not too disturbing given that they’re already nearly 10% more taxed than the rest of the taxpayers.  In fact, if the tax foundation and tea-partiers were trying to get us properly indignant, they might point that little fact out rather than trying to mislead the public into thinking that the tax burden on the wealthiest Americans has increased wildly out of proportion with economics.

Methodology change or not, the shapes of the trends do not change.  Income proportion and “tax burden” as defined by the Tax Foundation and its adherants are directly related.  The changes are not wildly out of proportion, as they’d have you believe; but directly in proportion with changes in income.  If anything seems out of proportion to me, it’s the change in the ratio of income declared by the top 1% vs the income declared by the bottom 99%.  Surely the bottom 99% of taxpayers are not all of a sudden that much less productive that they should be collecting 14% less of the money earned by all taxpayers now than they were in 1997.  What economic force is in play there?

Ethics in modeling the human brain

I was listening to Science Friday last week on NPR and Michael Frank predicted that in 10 years we would be able to produce a complete computer model of the human brain.  Now I take that with a grain of salt, of course (although only a grain or two, since they have successfully modeled a significant portion of a rat-brain), but the thing that bothered me wasn’t the claim, but the fact that the scientists were talking about all the experiments they could do on it, modeling drug interactions, testing drugs in the computer on the brain, and so forth.

Basically, they’re talking about using the electronic model of the brain as a surrogate for experiments they wouldn’t be able to do on a person. But that’s great, right?

Unless, like me, you’re not a mind-body dualist, and increasingly conscioussness researchers are not mind-body dualists.  In fact, not “increasingly,” but rather pretty well universally as much as you can get in any scientific field.  It’s not Newton’s Laws, but it’s still pretty well accepted that the mind is the matter.

No-one will listen to me.  I’ll be one of a very few voices clamouring on the sidelines, I’m sure, but I think that if we have a human brain modeled “perfectly” inside a computer then we have a human brain for all intents and purposes.  It has rights and expectations.  It will feel emotions.  It will react to stimuli.  It will be capable of conscioussness if it’s modeled as well as they’re promising, and therefore I would expect the IRB to apply the same rules to experiments on this subject as it would any wetware human.

That won’t happen.  It’s a damn shame.  We’ll commit the same kind of horror that we’ll look back in 200 years on and think how horrible people were back then.

“A person’s a person, no matter how small...”

Headlines from the week that was, July 19th

Checkmate? The role of gender stereotypes in the ultimate intellectual sport. A new study by the University of Padova, Italy’s Social Psych department reports (abstract quoted here)

Women are surprisingly underrepresented in the chess world, representing less that 5% of registered
tournament players worldwide and only 1% of the world’s grand masters. In this paper it is argued that
gender stereotypes are mainly responsible for the underperformance of women in chess. Forty-two
male–female pairs, matched for ability, played two chess games via Internet. When players were
unaware of the sex of opponent (control condition), females played approximately as well as males.
When the gender stereotype was activated (experimental condition), women showed a drastic
performance drop, but only when they were aware that they were playing against a male opponent.
When they (falsely) believed to be playing against a woman, they performed as well as their male
opponents. In addition, our findings suggest that women show lower chess-specific self-esteem and a
weaker promotion focus, which are predictive of poorer chess performance. Copyright # 2007 John
Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Telegraph reports that women who dress provocatively are more likely to be raped while the headline of the research is actually that promiscuous men are more likely to commit rape. That’s a lot of bias to throw into a single headline, not that this is surprising in these dark days of journalism. Not only did they err in the headline, but they reported an MS student as an “expert scientist” and her findings were, as she put it, “very preliminary,” but this was not detailed in the article.  I detest bad science journalism along with the rest of the scientific world, who watches with horror as journalists scrape articles that portray us as interested in the trivial or obvious, or that we get gigantic grants to study whether or not people like sex, or confirm peoples’ biases when the opposite is actually concluded in the paper, or report scientific conjecture as actual fact. Or any of the other things science writers and headline writers do day after day.

My absolute favorite science journalism to hate is journalism on science about sex or gender.  They tend to get so tongue-in-cheek, laughing uncomfortably at how their stereotypes are confirmed, or that they got to use the word vagina in an article in print.  Hur-hurr journalism at its finest.  The telegraph’s article is no exception.

Can you love and work? A Salon opinion piece on a “sympathetic” article by NYT journalist David Brooks about how something must be wrong with a woman who’s that passionate about her work. After all, no family and a string of “failed relationships?” “There must be something wrong with her”, as the Salon article sarcastically points out… Oy.

Jack Vance, the Genre Artist. A nice retrospective on the life and work of the 92 year old Grand Master of fantasy and science fiction.  This is the man who brought us most of the source material for Dungeons and Dragons (the Dying Earth series), and brought an air of highbrow literature to the pulp fiction aisles of the 1950s and 60s.  He expanded my vocabulary as a kid, and the best of his writing challenges and enlightens.

Why I will not be getting a Kindle (bonus feature: Debating Google Books)

An article from the NY Times noted that the other day, Amazon stripped its customers of certain of their eBooks at the request of their publisher, which said that it no longer wanted eBooks of its holdings on the market. Yes, stripped.  They took them right off their Kindles the next time they signed into the net.  Amusingly, 1984 and Animal Farm were among the books stripped.  Now, people were issued a full refund, but…  where does this leave us?

As long as we’ve had books, we’ve had the notion of owning our books.  With the current legal climate in the US and the EU and the deftly avoided Righteous Anger of publishing and author’s guilds, Amazon has licensed eBooks on the Kindle rather than flat out sold them to their customers. What’s the difference between licensing and owning, you may ask?  Well, exactly this – the licensors can revoke our licenses as per the conditions in the license. Most license agreements are revocable at will, meaning that whenever the company felt like it, and for any reason (or no reason), it can revoke your license to the work without recourse.

I don’t want my books to expire.

I don’t want my books to be censored.

I don’t want updates to my books without my explicit permission.

I don’t want my books to contain ads (a recent Daily Finance article speculated that they are thinking of this based on patents held).

I don’t want to have my child or his children walk into their schools and have their banned books erased off their Kindle-like devices.  I don’t want my books to become unreadable overseas because a particular book isn’t published or is banned in that country.  I don’t want an author to pull all his or her books off my Kindle in a fit of pique with their publishing company.

In short, I want to own my books, damnit!

This is why we need serious competition in the eBook distribution and device market.  This is why we need consumer protections, the same kind of consumer protections that we enjoy now with our dead-tree books.  This is why we should push back against publishers and authors’ guilds who look at the tide in intellectual property now and think they can change the way things have always been, monitor and manipulate our information and our things.

What else have our guilds been up to?  Well, there was the Google Books scandal awhile back, and I’ve been watching a one-sided train wreck of a discussion by authors in a mailing list I’m on whinging about how the Authors’ Guild that they’re not a member of negotiated away their rights without their permission, setting precedent by settling with Google on scanning books that are still in copyright.

You can go to the library, any library in the entire US, Canada, EU, and most of the other nations of the world and pull a book off the shelf, take it to the clerk, and for free, or in the case of inter-library loan, for a nominal fee, take it home, read it, and return it.  Admittedly, the supply-side of Google Books is of a different scale than your public library.  They can serve up millions of copies of book-excerpts at once, and because the medium is different readers don’t have to return them as there’s no transfer of property.

However, the music and movie industries have already discovered much to their dismay that they cannot control the dissemination of electronic information.  It cannot be done.  No format can be made so secure (analog hole if nothing else can copy anything) that it cannot be copied.  No legal force can catch and sue millions of people.  Information on the internet spreads just like the viruses that spread on the internet.  It’s only been 10 years since Napster, and look at where we are.  The music industry giants admit that they’re defeated (although they’re going to fight for a few more years until the price-point becomes too costly).

I’m not arguing that it’s right.  I’m not arguing that it’s fair.  I’m not arguing that authors and publishers shouldn’t try to make money by selling books.  But the internet is a fundamental change in dissemination of information.  It has routed around every law and firewall and attempt to control it.

The Kindle, if it keeps its inconsistencies up, will die or be hacked.  The publishers will go bankrupt if they fight this way.  The authors will go bankrupt and all die of heart-disease if they fight this way and scream this much.  Someone more dedicated to the means than me will find a way to make money pushing books over the internet without paper, and that person will make billions of dollars and the publishing industry will cry to Congress and like bodies for protection from their mistakes and short-sightedness.  But like the monks who copied each book painstakingly by hand in large rooms filled with feathers and ink, they will disappear in the tide.

Shame your senators

I know this is a little behind, since the article I’m linking to was authored on the 17th of June, but I don’t think it’s too late to shame the Republican senate for this, especially since the resolution is still tabled!

Condemning the use of violence against providers of health care services to women.

Whereas Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, Kansas, was shot to death while attending church on Sunday, May 31, 2009;

Whereas there is a history of violence against providers of reproductive health care, as health care employees have suffered threats, hostility, and attacks in order to provide crucial services to patients;

Whereas the threat or use of force or physical obstruction has been used to injure, intimidate, or interfere with individuals seeking to obtain or provide health care services; and

Whereas acts of violence are never an acceptable means of expression and shall always be condemned: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That the Senate–

(1) expresses great sympathy for the family, friends, and patients of Dr. George Tiller;

(2) recognizes that acts of violence should never be used to prevent women from receiving reproductive health care; and

(3) condemns the use of violence as a means of resolving differences of opinion.

Scary stuff, huh? I mean, the Senate condemning violence as a tool to resolve conflicts over abortion… what will that lead to next? More Dead Babies!!!  The hold put on this was done so anonymously (any senator can put a hold on a resolution without giving name nor reason as per their rules) by a Republican senator who was not Olympia Snowe (she was a cosponsor).  However, since we don’t know who did table it, I encourage anyone reading this who has Republican senators in their state to speak up and say that this is unacceptable.  We pass nonbinding resolutions all the time, praising, condemning, and and taking note of events, and because of it’s nonbinding nature, it’s not like it actually makes any real difference one way or another whether this is actually passed.  Not one life will be saved either way.  However, it would be nice to have faith that it is the position of our legislative body that vigilante “justice” against law-abiding, law-observing citizens is condemned.  If our senators have no faith in the laws they help pass or the system they uphold, then who is supposed to?

I realize that the pro-life camp is frustrated with their standing in society, and that they think that people who perform abortions are condemned, but dealing out death is abominable and should be condemned.  If the case warrants the Senate’s attention at all (and I would say it does), then the criminals and the crime warrant the Senate’s disapproval.

Is it about constituents and believing that they’ll alienate their voter base, or is it their own personal belief that this act wasn’t wrong? Cynical, petty, reprehensible politicians.

Please shame your Senators.

Gotta lurve Fox News…

Really, they don’t even try.  Most important story in the very recent past, in terms of U.S. news: The announcement of a nominee for U.S. Supreme Court Justice.  What does Fox consider important?

Guys, do you really even try to pass yourselves off as news anymore?  I swear, the “news” organization parody in Babylon 5 all those years ago reported things in a less biased manner.   First of all, “it’s the showdown you won’t see anywhere but on FOXNews.com”  Yeah.  You won’t.  Because American Idol vs. Britain’s Got Talent is the least important thing that’s made it to the front page since…  well, since CNN.com’s Person of the Year was YOU!  And only on FOXNews.com would you see it being given more space than the new supreme court justice nominee, and more than the partial (and I hope eventually pyrrhic) victory of the Prop Eighters.  Of course, if the marriages hadn’t stood, I could tell you with some certainty that it would have made the front story instead of the second story, but any kind of defeat, however partial means that Fox should deny that it happened slightly. We also have “Obama declares war on gun owners” making a headline and “Sotomayor’s controversial statement”.

What a banner day for American ‘Mainstream’ Media…  guess I’ll be watching the Daily Show tonight.

Circumcision

It’s unusual that I feel the need to comment on an article in Time magazine.  But despite the fact that there are a lot of things implicit in this person’s attitudes that tell me he and I wouldn’t get along in a lot of the issues I talk about here (notably polyamory and implicit attitudes about the chastity of women), I think he brings out an important question about the main point of his article, namely circumcision. Being a circumcised male, I don’t have any perspective on the loss of feeling that might have happened or about whether it helps or hurts my health.  I also wonder what the difference would have been, and as an otherwise largely unadorned person, aesthetically, I think I would have preferred to remain uncut.  But that’s just it — it ought to be my choice, my preference, and if I’m worried that I might catch an STI from not being circumstances based on a single study, then I could go out myself and have it done. There are reasons to circumcise out there, I’ll grant you.  If you’re particularly prone to infection and you suspect this is genetic (say yeast infections and so forth), then maybe that’ll help. It’s been shown to by multiple studies, after all.

Now, no, male circumcision isn’t anything like female circumcision and the two don’t really bear comparison.  But why is it socially acceptable to remove a perfectly functional and useful part of the anatomy at birth just because of ancient custom?  I mean, we could just as well take out a baby’s tonsils at 18 months to prevent them getting bronchitis and pneumonia.  Or we could take out the appendix laproscopically to prevent them getting appendicitis. These are both equally if not more prophylactic surgeries than male circumcision, but no-one would do something so un-necessary to a child.  Okay, not no-one, but not most people.

The study that says that male circumcision is a health benefit are new, unreplicated thus far, and the reasons for the prophylactic effect of circumcision aren’t clear, and well, decisions about sex ought to be left up to the people having it.

I have to say also that I’m a bit … disgusted by his wife’s reasoning that she “doesn’t want to have to touch his penis too much” when she bathes him.  Oh, please.  Are we really that prudish still?  Or rather, even if we are, don’t we feel the slightest twinge of guilt about forcing compliance with that prudishness on our children at so young an age?

Thoughts on implicit gender and sexuality bias…

I was working on posting the story yesterday, and as I did I briefly thought I should print a warning of some sort letting people know that it involved sex between men, and then I thought, “What the hell?  I would never do that for any other coupling.  Hell, I’d never even think of doing that for any other coupling,” and so of course I didn’t print a warning at the top of the story after all, but the thought spurred me on to listen to myself for the last couple of days.  I’ve noticed a few things, the meaning of which I haven’t really decided yet.

In social situations, my vocal register is softer when I talk to women than when I talk to men.  Voice timbre warmer, tone and volume more even, volume slightly softer.  Words don’t change so far as I can tell, though. My softer voice sounds more natural to me, but I suppose I’ve developed a louder, more masculine tone with men to deal with situations where I’m not as self-confident.  I wouldn’t say that I developed it from talking to my old Ph.D. advisor over years, but it certainly made the difference more pronounced and the masculine voice is characteristic of him.  I’d be curious to study myself and see if I use the masculine register for women who outrank me in one thing or another, where self-confidence is based on having a sure footing in the conversation and not looking like a fool.

And I notice that the story brings back all the same worries that I had about my friends that they might feel weird reading erotica by someone they know.  Gay sex, man, I’m telling you…  brings out the worry in me for some reason, at least writing about it.  I’m consciously working to change that, now that I’ve noticed it, but here’s to self-discovery in the meantime.

Okay, that was only a couple of things I’ve noticed, at least that I can vocalize, but I’m still more conscious of myself at the moment.  We’ll see what else I turn up.

FICTION: David

As always, a PDF version with nice layout and fonts can be found here

When I got the inkling I might be bi on a lonely night of self-experimentation in my first year of college, I never thought it would take ten years before I actually did anything about it. For years, I had only this vague idea that someday I wanted to have sex with a man. There was never a guy I was all-out attracted to; just the notion that when an my girlfriend bangs the living daylights out of me with her strapon I love every second of it. That and the memory of that rainy Saturday night in college I mentioned, sitting in front of a computer screen full of porn when I discovered I liked the taste of my own semen and thought maybe I might like the taste of someone else’s.

Really, that was it.  No torrid exploration of gay porn with secret fantasies that I hid from friends and family. No agony over whether or not to come out.  Not any qualms about whether it was moral or immoral.  I really just wanted to taste cum and feel a warm, living cock in my ass.  Just one little problem: I wanted to like the guy I was doing it with.

I’ll chuckle and admit that it actually wasn’t I who found the guy I eventually did get in bed with. It was my partner, Josie, who during a long night of drinking and watching bad movies with him at his house started relating my fantasies to him. David’s one of her best friends, and just happens to be, like me, a sort of ambiguous bi-guy. He’s slender, olive-skinned, and variously tattooed with black hair that never quite wants to hold whatever shape he brushes it into in the morning.  She thinks he’s gorgeous and I think he’s gorgeous, and fortunately, it turned out that he thought the same thing… about both of us.

She came home the morning after their drunken debauchery and we were in the middle of brunch, quietly eating away at her hangover when she mentioned it.

“Oh thank god this is starting to go away,” she said between strawberries — fresh fruit and orange juice for a hangover, the only thing that I know works for us. “Thank you so much for breakfast, love.  This is helping. So…,” there was a pause as she blushed, ”David and I had a lot of fun last night.” I blushed, too, because I thought that meant they’d ended up having sex, which they sometimes do; however then she said, “He thinks you’re hot, by the way.”  By the way?

“By the way?”

“Well, he was talking about how he realized he was bi, and I said that you came about the realization sort of the same way, but you’d never done anything about it.”

“Right,” Strangely enough, that she’d shared such an intimate secret of mine didn’t bother me at all.  I trusted David, after all, and he was one of her best friends. They always talk about everything and that’s fine.

“And so we talked some more and he said he’d always thought you were really hot, but didn’t want to say anything because he didn’t know you were bi and didn’t really get much of a sense about you.”

“Well, fair enough.  I don’t really think about it that often.  So does he know you’re telling me this?”

“Yeah, he was counting on it.”

I sat there in silence for a minute, picking at strawberries, mentally undressing David and finding that it was really hard to do. I’d never seen him naked or any guy, really, where I was thinking of him in a sexual context. Despite that, though, I felt my cock throb as blood rushed into it.  My ass tingled.  Not knowing what to expect made me aroused.  Knowing that a guy was attracted to me aroused me. I grinned, and Josie noticed.

“Yes? Thinking? Hmm?”

“Oh just…  thinking, yeah. I never really thought about him that way before, but he is hot.”

“Gothy boys do it for you, huh?”

“Yeah, tattoos,”

“Messy hair…”

“yeah, messy hair, and kind of wild.”

“Mmm, yeah he can be wild,” she grinned and said with some extra feeling. I blushed at that while her hand slipped up my thigh. She stroked it and pushed my robe to the side.

“Ha! But he’s one of your best friends.”

“He’s David, though.  He hasn’t turned into a saga for me, and he’s not going to for you, either. It’d be fine,” The back of her index finger grazed my cock as I sat there mesmerized by my own thoughts and her insistent hand on my thigh.  She took a hand away, picked up a strawberry, locked my eye, and bit into it meaningfully.  She took her time finishing it and then gave me one deep, intense, strawberry kiss.  “Come on.  I need the rest of my hangover cure.”

I stood up from the table and she bit her lip.  Josie didn’t even let me out of the room, much less to the bedroom.  She pushed my back into the wall and dove her lips into me with abandon, stripping my already loose robe away with one stroke.  I kissed back hard and grabbed her ass with one hand and the back of her hair with the other. Her neck arched back as I tugged gently on her hair and my tongue, teeth, and lips went to that soft bit between her collarbone and shoulder muscles. I could feel her goosebumps rise under my hands as I nibbled gently but insistently along her shoulder, and up her neck. We locked in one more deep kiss, and then I tugged downwards ever so gently and with a gleam in her eye she knelt down to the floor.

Her lips closed around the first few inches of my cock and I felt her tongue swirl around. I looked down; ran my fingers through her hair.  I felt my ass clench involuntarily as I arched toward those lips, hoping that she would take more of me in.  She let go, but held my cock in her hand and ran her tongue gently around my balls, teasing and testing them, warming them, cooling them, making my skin tingle.  When my cock was throbbing hard with every beat of my heart, she took it back into her mouth. Then she reached back and slowly ran a finger up along the crack of my ass before grabbing one cheek hard and curling her fingers so that I could just feel her nails between my cheeks. It felt like every finger wanted to explore me, and I had a brief flash of David completely parting me.

Then she did that thing that only she can do.  See, when a guy jerks himself off, or at least when I do, I can’t help but gradually speed up as I get closer.  But what I like from Josie, on the other hand, is this slow, steady, hard rhythm of sucking all the way to the end as she goes down on me.  She clasped her hand around my shaft and dove in at that perfect rhythm, just fast enough so that every time I feel her mouth slide back down the thick of my shaft, coming becomes a little more inevitable and I’m a little less in control.  My cock burned with every stroke, and I held back, clenched, trying desperately to hold off my orgasm for just a couple more strokes from Josie’s lovely mouth and hand, but then it was too much.  I screamed out and came and with every spasm my knees gave a little.  I leaned all my weight back into the wall and let myself arch into her as I gave one… two.. threemore big spasms and half a dozen smaller ones as she made sure she had everything I had for her.

I slid down the wall and sat there kissing her, she still on her knees and tasting of my cum.  “Thanks,” she smiled and stroked my cheek.  We crawled over to the couch and wrapped ourselves up in each other and slept until noon.
Sometime later in the day, the thought came back to me about David.  “So…  what would I say?”

“Huh?”

“To him.  To David.  I mean, ‘Hey David, Josie said that you said I was hot while you were both really drunk, wanna fuck?’”

“Oh.  Ha!  No.  Um…  I don’t think you have to say anything.  Just sit next to him next time he comes over.  Put your arm around him while we’re sitting there watching a movie.  Let him get comfortable and you get comfortable and you’ll both lean into it.  Start there.”

I sat on that thought.  David was coming over the next day anyway to catch the premier of the next season of Dr. Who, so I guessed that if she was right, that was as good a night as any.  And I passed the time until the doorbell rang the next day without thinking too much else about it.  Good old lazy Saturdays.  Went for a bike ride.  Took some photos out at the lake.  Turned the tides on Josie in bed that night, much to hers and my delight.

The next day, we were doing the last of some random picking up when David rang the doorbell.  It all came back and I fought to control the blush as Josie went to the door. When I felt in control of myself, I managed a “Hey, David. Welcome!”  He hugged and kissed Josie and gave me the usual awkward hug.

“Evening, guys.  It was my turn for pizza, so I took the liberty of ordering on my way out here.  We all know what everyone likes, anyway.  They should be bringing up the rear any minute.”

“Excellent, show’s almost on,” I said as I plopped down on one side of the couch. Josie sat on the other side, leaving the middle – strategically – for David.  We chattered idly about stuff for ten minutes or so while commercials flashed silently on the screen across the room from us.

“I was telling Josie last night I got that paper into the conference in Moscow.  I get to go to Russia!”  David’s a young professor in genetics, on the tenure track and working his ass off publishing papers.  Even so, he targets conferences in places he’s never been, because, he says, that’s what it’s all about.  I love travel, too, but I don’t want the kind of life he’s living in order to do it.  He loves it, and that’s fine.  Someone ought to.

“Dude, that’s awesome!  When do you go?”

“Mid-September. I’m so just going to give my talk and leave the conference and check out the city.  Bought Russian language CDs today. “

“Well, my album’s off to the distributor.  It’ll be printing in a few weeks.  If it sells like the last one, then we’ll be able to go to Montreal this year.  I’m jealous of Russia, though.”

“Excellent, excellent!  How many copies did you sell of the last one?”

“About thirty thousand or so.  We’re starting to hit it big, or at least we stand a chance.”

At that point, the pizza came, and we settled into that and a round of Newcastle.  Dr. Who came on, and we watched it and all three of us slowly maneuvered our way into each others’ arms as nonchalantly as possible.  It helped that Josie and David were quite used to being cuddly already, and I just had to put my arm around David.  At some point, he and Josie kissed, and I looked over at him.  His green eyes looked meaningfully right into mine, and I shuddered inside at almost deciding to go for broke.  The moment passed, though, when commercials ended. Josie started teasing him gently with her hand, almost absently, later on in the show, I suppose to… lubricate things as it were.  I kept my arm around him and sort of lightly stroked his shoulder.  The next commercial break came and he looked back to me again and this time, I locked his eyes with mine and ran my fingers through his hair.  I could smell his shampoo as I did so.

We sat there looking at each other for several seconds, and the show came back on and we completely ignored it.  Forgot about the pizza.  Forgot about the beer.  I can’t remember David leaning in to kiss me, but I remember his face being like smooth sandpaper and the smell of him being almost disturbingly masculine.  Disturbing, compelling, whatever it was, it held me, and I kissed back with increasing fury.  Josie backed off, watching intently and as she later said, taking notes.

My back was against the side of the couch and he was on top of me when I reached up and pulled off his shirt.  “You’re gorgeous,”

“Josie told you,” David smiled and ran his hands down my chest before leaning into the next kiss.  I felt his hand on my cock through the fabric of my jeans and it felt different from usual.  I can’t even characterize really what it was.   Then I felt a hand on my leg and I briefly opened my eyes and looked past to see Josie half-naked and looking hungrily at me and running her hand along my calf and then over his ass.  I reached down and clasped my hand around his, grinding it into my cock, which now desperately wanted to be out of the jeans.  I reached down and snapped the first and second buttons on his fly and he dropped his kisses down onto my neck, holding my hair back like I’d done Josie’s the day before.

I ran my fingers down David’s stomach and underneath his boxers and for the first time I held another man’s cock in my hand.  It felt so… odd to feel that form in my hand but not be able to feel through it.  He was warm, hard, and damp at the tip, eager for what we were about to get up to.  Josie peeled his pants off while he undid my fly and dragged mine off.  I pulled my shirt over my head, reached to his shoulders, and pushed him back against Josie, His head fell into her lap and she looked down at him and kissed him.  She curled one finger at me and I drew in to kiss her.  “I want to taste him on your breath,” she said in my ear just before she kissed me.

I knelt down at the edge of the couch and ran my fingers along his cock in wonder for just a second longer before finally going down to taste him.  David’s cock leapt up a little when I ran my tongue around its tip, and then I dove in before it could get away from me.  I made up for years of lost time.  He was warm, hard after a fashion, but springy and the taste and texture and smooth skin was all too much and not enough at once.  I tried to take him all the way into my mouth, and had to stop.  He was probably seven inches or so, about like me, and that’s more than it seems when you first look at it.  I wondered if I’d know when he was getting close.  As much as I wanted to taste his cum, I wanted him in me even more.  I went down on him like Josie did me and he arched into every stroke with a thrust, groaning and running his hands in my hair and occasionally reaching up to pet Josie.  And then I felt it.  He was close.   I pulled back to a groan from him, and asked him, “Do you want in me?”

“Oh hell yes.”

Josie pulled our emergency stash of lube out from under the couch and took David’s cock in her hands, coating it and then coating me with a healthy if somewhat cool portion of lube.  When I felt her fingers enter me I arched into it in anticipation and desire both for her and for him.  She laid down on the carpet then and pulled me down own top of her.  “When I say, I want you in me, until then, hold out but lean close”  Her shirt was still on, but her bra was unsnapped and she was completely naked the waist down.  She was so beautiful disheveled like that, dark brown hair scattered across the carpet.  I wanted in her.  I knelt over her.  And then I heard the condom wrapper and seconds later felt his hands on my hips.  “I’ll go slow at first, let me know if it’s too much.”

It wasn’t.  I knew it wouldn’t be.  I’d had Josie’s strapon just days earlier, and as it was I was so ready, and he did take it slowly.  The first thing I noticed was how smooth it felt going in, forgiving, not like even the best made dildo.  I leaned back into it as he hesitated, trying to take more of him.  I reached back and grabbed the back of his thigh and pulled with one hand.  I needed it.  Josie had my cock in her hand and was running it up and down the slit of her vagina.  She was dripping wet.  He pushed.
And then I felt his hips meet my ass and push into them and he was all the way in. It hurt in a good way, comfortable and full and I wanted him there forever, but I wanted to feel him pull it out and push it back into me. He pulled out and thrust in again, and we slowly got into a rhythm.  It felt so wonderful, tingly inside when he filled me at the end of each thrust, and then Josie said “I need you,” and I let the force of his hips push me into her.

Somehow we got the flow right, me leaning up as he pushed down into me and then pushing me down into her.  The feel of her finally pushed me over the edge.  I came as he was fucking me, and Josie and I screamed together.  He didn’t stop, and the force kept me in her even as I was going soft.  I was trembling with the force and sensitivity of having just come and he was still pounding into me when I practically blacked out from the ecstasy. He slowed down and thrust hard as he came.  I leaned up into it, trying to keep the moment for as long as I could.  Then we were all three down on the floor, naked and sweating and kissing and breathing hard.   I held both their hands and we woke up some hours later still there on the carpet.  The pizza was cold.  We ordered another.