Them was the good ole days . . .

THE VICTORIANS HAD A FIXATION, actually, they had lots of 'em, but male masturbation was a hard-point of concern for Christian moralists, back in the day. IO9's Cyriaque Lamar has a look at two patented "solutions", which you see above. Check it out.

Indeed, Mr. Long was patenting a boner-activated anti-wet dream machine (or perhaps an an anti-wet dream alarm).

Going to the Vatican? Wear a sleeping bag

Apparently the officials at the Vatican have nothing more to worry about than seeing peoples' knees and bare shoulders.

Tourists and Romans clad in scanty summer clothing were being told to cover up before entering the Vatican City on Tuesday. Long-standing rules on modest dress, previously applicable only to those visiting St Peter's Basilica, appear to have been extended throughout the tiny walled state. Swiss Guard officers manning the official customs point between Rome and the Vatican City began pulling aside members of the public dressed in 'inappropriate' clothing early in the morning. Men in shorts and women with exposed knees or uncovered shoulders were all stopped by the officers, who asked them if they knew "how things worked here". Bewildered locals, accustomed to treating the Vatican much like any other part of Rome, initially assumed a new bureaucratic procedure was in force. Prescriptions, letters and shopping permits were hastily produced as evidence of plans to use the Vatican's pharmacy, post office and shop. Only to be told the real reason was their clothing. "This is the Vatican City and for reasons of respect, you are not allowed in with uncovered shoulders or wearing shorts," was the standard explanation. Some retreated without protest, while a number of the women made impromptu purchases from one of the many stands selling shawls and scarves near the Vatican gates. A cheap, quick solution to cover the bare legs of men in shorts was harder to come by, although some duly trudged off to the nearby shopping district of Cola di Rienzo to buy a pair of trousers. However, a number of visitors, especially the more elderly, refused to budge.

And from the Telegraph ...

The crackdown on inappropriate clothing comes at a time of almost unprecedented crisis for the Vatican, with senior figures, including Pope Benedict XVI, accused of failing to act against priests who sexually abused children.

Priorities. The Vatican has some.

(The unclad statue of Perseus in the image above is from the Vatican Museum)

Supporting the troops...not

First they send them to a place they just shouldn't be on the basis of trumped up charges and outright lies. Then they don't provide enough body armor or armored vehicles. Then they screw over the returning wounded at Walter Reed. Now, Bush is screwing the veterans out of health care so he can cut taxes for Haliburton and Paris Hilton.

The Devil made me do it!

A male comedian dressed up like a woman saying "the devil made me do it" in a comedy routine is funny.


A fundamentalist Christian teenage mother using it to defend her teenage would-be preacher's attempt to roast their toddler alive-- ehhh, not so much.


More progressive parenting in Jebusland:




Woman blames devil, not husband for burning daughter in microwave


May 20, 2007, 12:45PM
© 2007 The Associated Press


GALVESTON, Texas — A woman blames the devil and not her husband for severely burning their infant daughter after the 2-month-old was put in a microwave, a Houston television station reported.
Eva Marie Mauldin said Satan compelled her 19-year-old husband, Joshua Royce Mauldin, to microwave their daughter May 10 because the devil disapproved of Joshua's efforts to become a preacher.
"Satan saw my husband as a threat. Satan attacked him because he saw (Joshua) as a threat," Eva Mauldin told Houston television station KHOU-TV.
A Galveston County grand jury indicted Joshua Mauldin last week on child injury charges after hearing evidence that he placed his daughter in a motel microwave for 10 to 20 seconds. The infant, Ana Marie, remains hospitalized. She suffered burns on the left side of her face and to her left hand, police said.
Eva Marie Mauldin, the girl's 20-year-old mother, told the television station that her husband is "not the monster people are making him out to be."


(cross posted from the Woodshed)

And he's killed fewer people than Charlie Manson

Note to Conrad Black: If you want to stay out of jail, you may not want to compare yourself to the only man ever driven from the White House for his criminality.

The Money Quote:

His book, Richard Nixon: The Invincible Quest, is largely an attempt at rehabilitating the president brought down by Watergate. Had it not been for his "legal and ethical shortcomings," he writes, Nixon would now be ranked alongside Reagan andFDR as one of America's greatest presidents.

Yeah, and aside from that brief bit of unpleasantness in front of the Book Depository, the future Mrs. Onasis quite enjoyed the drive through Dallas. On what basis can Nixon be considered a great president? His prolongation of the Vietnam war? His secret and illegal wars against Cambodia and Laos? His backing of Pinochet's coup in Chile? His backing of Indonesia's bloody invasion of Timor?

"Oh, but he went to China!" the conservatives always say. He was hardly the first to recognize that the communist regime there formed a legitimate government -- and it only happened 30 years after they had chased Chang-kai Shek off the mainland.

Yes, he ended the draft and started the EPA, but that hardly makes up for using the constitution as toilet paper.

And let's be clear: Reagan was a disaster as president. He tripled the national debt, sparked the homeless problem by emptying the mental hospitals, was a union-buster, sold arms to Saddam Hussien, gave the religious right the undue influence in U.S. politics that it weilds to this day, got rid of the FCC's fairness doctrine thereby allowing evil, lying bags of pus like Rush Limbaugh to abuse the public airwaves, contributed to international tensions and instability by heating up the cold war until it threatened to turn hot, ignored AIDS until it reached epidemic proportions and made George Bush his vice president, thus leading to the coronation of the current dolt in the White House.

And all that is in addition to the crimes he commited gassing students as Gov. of California, rushing to eagerly name names for Joesph McCarthy and making the Bonzo movies.

That Black believes Nixon and Reagan were great presidents on par with FDR tells you all you need to know about his lunatic, aristocratic Tory view of history, but if you need other reasons to dislike him look let us judge him by his actions and his words rather than his reputation as a ruthless robber baron who gutted the Canadian newspaper industry.

He also responds to the repeated attempts by the prosecution to portray him not just as a thief but prone to an over-the-top lifestyle. "It is a total fraud that I lived with any particular extravagance," he complains. "I had certain ideas about how the chairman of a big newspaper should behave. So I tried to conform to that. But I was not a vulgar person."

Contrast that with:

They also allege Black used shareholder money to partly fund a US$54,114 birthday party for his wife at La Grenouille, an upscale New York restaurant, and charged shareholders when he took the company's jet on a personal vacation to the South Pacific island of Bora Bora.

Nothing over the top about that at all, nor his $9,000 gardening bill, although many people live on less than $200,000 a month

While he admits that there have been some "scary moments", he goes on to insist:
"The game is won. I'm on an inexorable march to victory."

That is going to look so good after Lady Babs has one of the servants embroider it on a sampler for his lordship to hang in his cell.

Addendum
Commenter John M. Miller correctly points out that Ford and not Nixon was the president during the invasion of East Timor. However, I would argue that as Ford and Kissinger were both Nixon appointees, Nixon still bears some degree of responsibility for what happened on their watch. The same goes for ending the draft - it was Ford that signed the papers in 1975, but the original groundwork had already been laid by Nixon, who ended active conscription in 1973.

There is one other nail that should be driven into Nixon's coffin; He brought Donald Rumsfeld (whom he admiringly called a "ruthless little bastard") into the executive branch, and thus Dick Cheney, both of whom clearly took to heart the boss's arguments about executive privilege and the right of the president to do anything he wants.

(crossposted to The Woodshed)

Pace's moral compass needs to be degaussed

I actually have a reasonable amount of respect for US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Peter Pace. His recent outburst, however, is the reason I try to steer completely away from identifying any living, serving senior member of a military as a hero. Too often they develop clay feet.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Monday he considers homosexuality to be immoral and the military should not condone it by allowing gay personnel to serve openly, the Chicago Tribune reported.

Marine Gen. Peter Pace likened homosexuality to adultery, which he said was also immoral, the newspaper reported on its Web site.

"I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way," Pace told the newspaper in a wide-ranging interview.

Alright, that's the personal view of the US top military leader and highest ranking marine. It's a serious problem if it weren't for the fact that he still supports the Clinton-era policy of "Don't ask; Don't tell".

However, this is the dinosaur coming out in Pace. The "Don't ask; Don't tell" policy has not prevented some 10,000 US troops from being discharged for being homosexuals. There is already legislation before the US House of Representatives to repeal the ban on openly homosexual men and women serving in the US military.

Pace may find the thought of homosexual behaviour distasteful in his own mind but we can be thankful that he didn't resort to previous arguments against gays and lesbians serving in the military. The very same arguments that, in the past, have been used to deny other groups the ability to serve. Blacks, women, and language and religious groups have all, at one time or another, been denied the right to participate, (some still are), in unrestricted military service based on this fallacious premise: The presence of those people destroys morale and undermines unit cohesion.

There has never been any credible evidence to support that assertion. In fact, many other western militaries have successfully rolled-back their service policies to make it an offence for the government to ask the sexual orientation of a potential recruit or an inducted member.

Pace said his comments were based on his upbringing. That's fine, I suppose, but it is an attitude that cannot survive. I was once at a briefing by a Canadian admiral, (who went on to become a member of parliament and cabinet minister). He was presenting the organizational changes which would see women allowed to enter the service in any and all occupations. There was some squirming about that idea at the time, but he decided to give everyone a laugh when he said, "The women are here. We just have to keep the queers out." A senior petty officer sitting next to me wasn't amused. I knew he was gay, we all did, and he kept it private. His sex life was different from that of most people in the room, but it had no effect on his ability to perform his duties. He was as good a sailor as the best in the room.

Pace's "morality" position is difficult. Military forces have morality codes which would apply regardless of sexual orientation. Fraternization regulations exist across all services. The US Marine Corps fraternization rules (Article 1100-4) are similar to those that exist elsewhere and are designed, not to restrict behaviour based on sexual orientation, but to prevent a degradation of rank and leadership roles.

His associating the "morality" of homosexuality with that of adultery is a stretch. The US military has prosecuted its members in the past for adultery but Pace made it sound like any act of adultery was an offence under the Uniform Code of Military Justice - and it's not. There is no specific article in the UCMJ which makes adultery an offence. Instead charges are brought under Article 134, General Article, which states:

Though not specifically mentioned in this chapter, all disorders and neglects to the prejudice of good order and discipline in the armed forces, all conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces, and crimes and offenses not capital, of which persons subject to this chapter may be guilty, shall be taken cognizance of by a general, special or summary court-martial, according to the nature and degree of the offense, and shall be punished at the discretion of that court.

In short, it's the same catch-all charge that exists in most modern military forces fielded by democracies. Rod Powers provides a good explanation of how adultery in the service is dealt with and how difficult it is to prosecute.

The truth is, Pace is basing his statement on anything except regulations and the written word of military law. What he said is not blanket policy. Policy, under those regulations, would suggest that two men or two women engaged in a consensual sexual relationship outside the confines of a military establishment and where their relationship does not impact the good order and discipline of the military unit are not committing an offence. The same would apply to an adulterous heterosexual marine if an such acts had no impact on unit.

The catch, (of course there's a catch), is Article 125. That makes it an offence for one person to engage in "unnatural carnal copulation" with another person, whether of the same or opposite sex. Under that article, if a heterosexual married couple engage in consensual anal sex, the military member can face a court-martial. Oh yes, the article goes on to say, "Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the offense."

The defence, of course, is "What constitutes unnatural."

Pace's statements on the immorality of both homosexuality and adultery are hard to reconcile with other personnel policies. How is recruiting persons convicted of serious criminal offences moral? How is filling the ranks of the US Army with gang members moral? How is the employment of mercenaries in theatres of operations moral?

And, while we're at it, we might ask how invading Iraq ranks on the morality scale.