Wow: that was a shocker.

I don't know if many of my readers are regular views of Dexter. All I can say is that this year's finale was a real shocker. Talk about plot! Talk about surprises.

I watched a bit of the second season and then got hooked and went back and watched season one. The story line is so unusual and raises some very interesting moral questions. Is Dexter a hero or a villain. There is some real ingenuity in the series.

All I can saw is that just as I started to relax from the drama the show took a turn that was totally unexpected and knocked the wind out of me.

While I'm getting bored with what is coming out on the big screen these days there is no shortage of good entertainment on television. And so much of it is on cable—but then cable doesn't have to placate Big Brother in Washington the way broadcast does. (Does anyone really buy the bullshit that the "airwaves" have to be government property due to scarcity anymore?)

If you haven't seen the last episode of Dexter then do so as fast as possible. Until then put your fingers in your ears, hum loudly to yourself, because a lot of people will be talking and you don't want this ending ruined.

Privacy: Is it only for people doing bad things?

When businesses get big they often suck up to the authorities. Consider the ass kissing Google CEO Eric Schmidt referring to how Google keeps track of people's searches and will happily turn them over to the government. His response is: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Really? So Mr. Schmidt how many times per month do you masturbate? Clearly that is not a privacy issue any more since, if you don't want people to know about it, you shouldn't be doing it.

This contempt for privacy is bad news for Google in that is is very off-putting. At one point they fought the State for the privacy of their clients now they roll over and take it up... well, you get my point. But if they didn't want people to know that's what they are doing they shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

The problem with bigness in corporations is not that they are big but that the tend to become institutions which have no common sense. They take on an ethos of their own which pushes them into the Statist camp. When people lose individual responsibility they act badly and when people act as a "group," as they do in corporations, they tend to act badly. It is the same phenomenon that we witness in mob behavior. People act badly in large groups in ways that would never do individually.

The same thing happens with the moral senses of government. Bureaucrats have no conscience because they don't act as individuals in their minds, but as cogs in the machine called government. Felix Morley wrote that "the State has no conscience, and is primarily a mechanism of material power..." It has no conscience precisely because it a collective body acting where no individual within the body feels totally responsibility. When people can pass responsibility for their actions to others they tend to act irresponsibly. The State does that and large institutions, such as corporations, can do the same thing (I recognize that corporations have a countervailing force that makes them less susceptible to the eradication of conscience—they can't compel customers without the State and they have to make a profit.)

In 2008 Schmidt argued that the reason Google rolls over is "the government has guns and we don't." But, of course, there are many ways of fighting state intrusion that doesn't require guns, such as in the courts. And that can be done in many different ways.

Hates "deviate" sex — you know what that means.

To paraphrase someone: Before you point out the deviance in your brother's sex life remove the kink from your own. Not exactly what was said, but it is the same principle. Unfortunately the political Right seems to have a hard time learning that lesson.

Take the antics of Rod Jetton. Jetton is the former house speaker in Missouri and a conservative Republican. His father is a Southern Baptist minister, Jetton attended a Baptist university (oxymoronic as that may sound). After leaving office he started something called Common Sense Conservative Consulting. Jetton is now known for two incidents.

The first incident was in 2007. Jetton had the chair of the Committee on Crime Prevention and Public Safety removed from his position as punishment. The chair, Scott Lipke, had included a revision in a law that revoked the law making it a criminal offense to have gay sex in Missouri. Like your typical Southern Baptist Neanderthal, Jetton explained in great detail why he had to punish Lipke.

He wrote Lipke "chose to use the bill to delete 14 words from our laws in order to repeal the gay sex ban in Missouri. Thanks to that deletion, it is now legal to engage in deviate sexual intercourse with someone of the same sex here in Missouri. This law had been on our books for decades."Jetton bragged: "I have fought attempts by liberals to repeal the gay sex ban for years..." It should be noted that gay sex was legal regardless since the Supreme Court ruled sodomy laws unconstitutional. But don't pay attention to the facts. I suspect that Jetton regrets using the term "deviate sexual intercourse."

It appears that Mr. Jetton is no stranger to "deviate sexual intercourse" himself. Here is how the story goes so far, in regards to the second incident.

Jetton, who divorced his wife (in violation of what Southern Baptist's call Biblical principles) was having sex with a woman. Actually he was having a "deviant" one-night stand with the woman that combined violence with sex. The woman says that he gave her some wine that he brought (another sin by Southern Baptist standards) which she thinks included a date rape drug as she started losing consciousness. Jetton began hitting her and choking her while having sex with her.

One newspaper blog says: "The woman says that she and Jetton talked about having sex when they were on the phone earlier in the day, but that she and Jetton had never dated or been in relationship before the night of Nov. 15. She told the detective that... she and Jetton agreed on a safe word of 'green balloons' to use to stop sexual relations."

Okay! Now let's unravel this for a second. First, safe words are something used by people into sadomasochism. To each their own, but dude, that isn't your everyday sexual intercourse. It's pretty "deviant" by most standards—not that I care if people voluntarily inflict pain as a form of pleasure. But it didn't seem so voluntary here. So, Jetton had made it clear, in advance, that he preferred violent sex thus requiring a "safe word" for the woman to use to stop the violence when it went too far. But the woman says that because she was unconscious from the wine Jetton provided that she couldn't use the word to stop his violent intercourse. That makes it rape as well as kinky.

As tolerant as I am on such matters, I do find it disturbing that a man enjoys choking a woman while having sex with her.

After the incident, when the woman complained about what he had done to her, he allegedly told her: "You should have said 'green balloons.'"

Let us also note that the couple had not previously met. That indicates that they "hooked up" through some sort of sex hotline, Internet group, or ad that caters to people seeking sex. So this wasn't even a relationship, just a screw. Again, if adults want to do that, it's not my business. I just note that it violates the Christian conservative values that Jetton was so hot about. Add in the violent nature of his sex life, which most conservative Christians would find appalling, and it becomes clear that Jetton is a major hypocrite.

Just the fact that Jetton had thought of using "safe words" in his sexual encounters implies that he was experienced in violent sex, or at least spent some time researching how to have sadomasochistic sex.

We have someone who divorced his wife, in violation of Baptist morality. He pushed wine on a woman, also a violation. And it may have been wine that he drugged. He was not married to the woman but went there to have sex, again in violation of Biblical morality. And his sex involves violence and choking the woman. And this man had the audacity to preach against "deviate sexual intercourse" for gay people!

Like so many hypocritical, sexually-obsessed conservatives Jetton immediately announces that now that he has been arrested he will "spend more time with his family." How predictable. Why do these conservatives assume their family wants them to spend more time with them just because they got caught violating the very "biblical morality" that want to impose on others? Of course, we now know why Jetton wants to use state power to force his sexual values on others—he likes combining sex and force. You could say that he gets his sexual kicks imposing his will on others. So all this time, when people thought he was standing up for God, Country, Mother and Apple Pie, he was really proposing the use of force because that's how he gets his rocks off. Lovely man.

Photo: His booking photo from his arrest.