Obligatory Friday Sex Post

From our "Some People Have Interesting Problems" department:

British couple forbidden to have sex.

USA Paying the Taliban

Did you know that we're paying the insurgents who shooting at us in Afghanistan?

According to a recent investigative article in The Nation, the process goes like this: we, the US taxpayers, give money to the Department of Defense. The DOD gives money to the private contractors who ship supplies to our troops all over Afghanistan. The contractors in turn give money to "private security firms" - local leaders, local warlords and the Taliban - in order to make sure that the supplies get through with as few bullet holes as possible.

A neat arrangement. Of course, what the "private security firms" do with the money they indirectly receive from us (probably augmented from drug operations) is their business. The recent discovery of 250 tons of explosives and bomb-making parts in the Afghan city of Kandahar is a hint, though.

This will only get worse. People on the receiving end of a protection racket will tell you that the amount of money never goes down.

In my opinion, it's time to leave.

Blackmail

Ever had to put up with a snotty brat of a child?

You tell the child that you're going to do something that the child doesn't want or like, and in retaliation the child says, "I'll stop loving you," or words to that effect.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the Petulant Child, 2009.

The District of Columbia (our nation's capital) is getting ready to pass a law that allows same-sex marriage, but contains a provision clearly stating that religious organizations will not be required to set aside space or time to conduct ceremonies. No big deal there, as marriage is also a civil rite and American culture allows you to set up whatever ceremony you and your companion feel is appropriate.

But the law also requires organizations to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and to provide the same level of benefits to same-sex couples as it does to married hetero couples.

And that's when the Roman Catholic Church became a petulant child.

The RCC has thrown down an ultimatum that is really quite unconscionable for a 'Christian' organization who includes charity as a basic - they're threatening to shut off charitable services to the District, offering as an excuse that they won't be able to afford it.

We all know the real reason, of course.

One of the things that makes it very hard for me to embrace any religion is the separation between what the religion teaches and how it puts those teachings into practice. The New Testament injunctions against homosexuality do not emanate from Christ, but from Paul, who knew how to hate and has struck many people as a bit of a woman-hater.

Of course, we recall William Durant's judgment that "Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ," and that the canon was fixed by a church council over a thousand years ago.

Nice to see that the RCC is keeping up with the times.

Setting Ground Rules

A Marine Corps reservist in the Tampa area was picking up his dry cleaning when he was accosted by a bearded man who didn't speak English.

So what did he do?

He belabored the bearded man with a tire iron, chased him, then called the cops and claimed that the man was a terrorist and had been speaking Arabic at him.

So now our staunch heroic Marine Corps reservist is in jail - for beating up a Greek Orthodox priest.

In light of the recent tragedy at Fort Hood, it's nice to see people are getting the ground rules set:

Anyone who isn't lily white, wears a beard and doesn't speak English is now fair game, apparently.

We have become the monster, gentle readers.

House Health Care Bill Passes

The final vote on HR 3962, the Health Care Reform Bill, in the US House of Reprehensibles was:

220-215 (218 needed for passage)

All but one Republican voted against it, which is no great surprise (the surprise was that one - Joseph Cao of Louisiana - voted for it), but 39 Democrats apparently felt that they don't want their jobs anymore so they voted against it.

Also in the bill is the Stupid - er, sorry, Stupak - Amendment, which will make abortion almost unobtainable by ensuring that only well-to-do women will be able to afford it. 64 Democrats voted for that obscenity, so they apparently want to be challenged in primaries come re-election time.

Still, there is cause to celebrate. This is the closest health care reform has gotten in either house of the Congress since Teddy Roosevelt first suggested it.

Now it goes to the conference stage, where the House and the Senate will thrash together a compromise bill. Then both houses vote on it and the finished product goes to Obama for his signature.

Meet the Vreelands!

Allow me to introduce Samantha (Sam) Vreeland and her husband Max. She's a badger, standing about five feet nine; he's an Island fox, the smallest of the North American vulpine species (and is very happy with that).

Both of them are dressed in the duty uniform of the Rain Island Naval Syndicate, an anarcho-syndicalist military force found in the Spontoon Island universe. She's a captain, he's a commander. The two of them are the stars of the story Kocha Koi, a story about a pirate submarine.

Artwork was commissioned by a young lady named Cherushi, who can be found at FurAffinity.

This is Just Too Precious

A bit of setup, first:

Last night on MSNBC's The Ed Show, former Congresscritter and right-wing boob Tom Tancredo was holding forth against government-run health care. His target du jour was the Veteran's Administration, which he stated was despised by veterans.

Unfortunately for "No Habla Espanol" Tancredo, he was debating Markos Moulitsas, blogger, veteran and not one to be trifled with. Let's watch the fireworks:



Knowing your subject: Important
Knowing the deep dark secret of the wingnut chicken-hawk: Essential
Making Tom Tancredo cry and stomp off like a WATB: Frickin' Priceless!

Obligatory Friday Sex Post

"Birds do it, bees do it
Even educated fleas do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love!"

And, apparently, so do bats.

For many years now it's been known that fellatio is practiced by humans (no kidding, right?) as well as by juvenile male bonobo monkeys. Well a team of researchers have discovered that the short-nosed fruit bat also engages in such behavior.

The study showed that the practice affected the amount of time the bats were mating; the males who received a bit of oral magic from the mates stayed longer.

Naturally, more research needs to be done to continue stretching the boundaries of naughtiness.

The Graveyard of Empires

I will read foreign news websites as a matter of course in order to build up a more comprehensive view of the news than the pablum offered up by the American cable news networks. I ran across a speech given back on October 24th by Paul McGeough, a senior reporter for Australia's Sydney Morning Herald.

In the speech, Mr. McGeough has some unkind but prophetic things to say about our war in Afghanistan, and the title of the article gives the basic thrust of his argument - that the Afghan insurgency has come back, more virile and more vicious than ever, and is more widespread now.

And all thanks to us and our allies.

McGeough cites a report submitted by a Colonel K. Tsagalov dated August 17, 1987, only 18 months before the commanding general of the Soviet forces in Afghanistan was the last Russian to leave that country. He points out the eerie similarity between Colonel Tsagalov's report and the declassified situation report given by our commander there, General McChrystal.

McChrystal points out that the Taliban have once again become a dominant force in the country and the Kabul government's writ runs thin in spots. We went in promising big things - prosperity, freedom, democracy - and we haven't delivered.

I'll repeat that.

We went in promising big things - prosperity, freedom, democracy - and we haven't delivered.

I can think of two reasons why we have failed to deliver on our promises - and I will be repeating myself from posts I have thrown out here in the past.

One, we failed to learn from the experience of others. Alexander of Macedon tried to subdue the tribes, and failed. In the 1800s the British and Russians, in the course of the Great Game, tried and failed (the British tried about three times, as I recall). In 1979 the Soviet Union tried it, and admitted defeat in 1989. Not for nothing is Afghanistan sometimes called "the graveyard of empires."

Two, we took our eyes off the ball. We had the Taliban leadership and Osama bin Laden trapped in the Tora Bora Mountains near the Pakistani border, and we allowed them to escape into friendly territory. Why? Because the Bush Administration listened to Vice President Cheney and the neoconservative Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and decided that we needed to invade Iraq - on the flimsiest of pretexts, may I remind you, gentle reader.

General McChrystal's recommendations for thousands more troops and billions more dollars in aid might have worked - back in 2002 or 2003, as Mr. McGeough points out. One anecdote cited comes from a supposed Taliban prisoner who purportedly said, "The trouble with you Americans is you have watches – we have time.”

We gave them that time, through the previous Administration's criminal negligence and outright fraud, perpetrated upon an American nation too distracted by Bright Shiny Things to care that our money and our people were being fed into a hopeless sausage grinder of a war. All the Taliban have to do is wait us out, because the longer we stay, the more we are seen as an occupier and oppressor. More and more Afghans will consider oppression at the hands of locals to be preferable to oppression at the hands of foreigners.

I'm now going to bring up a rather ugly story.

If you're of a Certain Age, like I am, you'll get this story right off.

It's the story of Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby. And YES, I know it's rather hideously racist - bear with me.

The point that was made in the story is that the more the Rabbit fought the Tar Baby, the more hopelessly trapped he became. He was only saved by tricking his enemies into hurling him into the briar patch, because only then could he extricate himself.

The choice being given to the Obama Adminstration is a simple one - the Tar Baby, or the Briar Patch. Because one way or another we have to extricate ourselves from this mess. The current death toll of US and Allied troops in Afghanistan is 1,469; we must grasp the nettle (another briar patch metaphor) and extricate ourselves. Our economy cannot sustain the continued effort, and a growing segment of the American people are no longer willing to stand for it.

Now, the consequences.

President Obama will take a massive hit to his popularity, but he doesn't seem to care much about that anyway so it's a non-issue. We will likely retain a covert presence along the Afghan-Pakistan border for years to come in hopes that Mullah Omar and Osama come out of hiding so we can kill them. President Karzai and the Afghan National Government will likely fall amid a rash of executions and at least one pogrom. The 2010 bi-election and the 2012 Presidential election might go against the Democrats unless the economy improves.

But we will have extricated ourselves from Afghanistan.