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Abstinence Works, Oh Yes

Back in the Middle Ages, after the Roman Church had largely abolished the use of concubines and slaves among well-off Christians, the most popular method for European women to control their fertility and for men to avoid causing impregnation became anal sex. Not until prophylactic technologies improved during the Scientific Enlightenment did European sexuality move away from the rampant buggering of male and female.

Today a similarly zealous religious movement aims to promote wide-spread alteration of sexual behaviour. They wanted to encourage abstinence from sex, and have spent billions within the United States over the past couple of decades promoting an ideal of vaginal virginity to captive schoolchildren. The results are in: by raising the taboo level for vaginal intercourse, the anti-sex campaigners have effectively lowered the taboo level for alternative sexual behaviours, especially oral and anal. There may be a core principle of sexual economy at work here, some sort of inelastic demand curve that responds to social engineering projects in a semi-predictable fashion. Over the past decade or so, the frequency of heterosexual anal intercourse among young adults has doubled. done Jesus Creepers, you’ve spawned a new generation of oral-anal enthusiasts.

For males, the proportion who have had anal sex with a female increases from 4.6 percent at age 15 to 34 percent at ages 2224; for females, the proportion who have had anal sex with a Wellmale increases from 2.4 percent at age 15 to 32 percent at age 2224.

One in three women admits to having had anal sex by age 24. By ages 25 to 44, the percentages rise to 40 for men and 35 for women. And that’s not counting the 3.7 percent of men aged 15 to 44 who’ve had anal sex with other men.

Bond Unbound in Basra

Two British nationals were detained by Iraqi authorities. It emerged later that they were British soldiers. Dressed in plain clothes … the two men had been driving in an unmarked car when they arrived at a checkpoint in the city. In the confrontation that followed, shots were fired, and two Iraqi policemen were shot, one of whom later died. The Iraqi authorities blamed the men, reported to be undercover commandos, and arrested them … In a clear demonstration that the holding of the soldiers would not be tolerated, [British] tanks moved quickly to encircle the police station. Amid the confusion, a crowd initially of about a dozen, which later swelled to hundreds, soon surrounded the tanks … In the rioting that ensued, British control of the city, in the Shia-dominated south of Iraq, began to look seriously under threat. Two Iraqis were reported dead in the rioting, with 15 Iraqis reported injured, along with three British soldiers.

Axis of Medieval

President Bush doesn’t often find common cause with Cuba, Zimbabwe, Iran, Syria and Venezuela. But this month the Bush administration joined with those countries and others to eviscerate a forthright U.N. statement that nations have an obligation to respond to genocide … It’s not that [Bush] favors children being tossed onto bonfires or teenage girls being gang-raped and mutilated, but he can’t bother himself to try very hard to stop these horrors, either.

Judy Garland Dolls Samizdat

Investigators appointed by the Vatican have been instructed to review each of the 229 Roman Catholic seminaries in the United States for “evidence of homosexuality” … the American archbishop who is supervising the seminary review said last week that “anyone who has engaged in homosexual activity or has strong homosexual inclinations,” should not be admitted to a seminary.

Iran Trap

Iran strongly believes that it has complied with Articles I and II of the [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty], where it agrees not to manufacture or acquire nuclear weapons, and Article III, where it accepts full safeguards, including on-site inspections. Iran has yet to be declared to be in formal breach of any of these obligations, which raises the basic question: What is it the EU-3 wish to accomplish vis-a-vis their diplomatic intervention? The real purpose of the EU-3 intervention – to prevent the United States from using Iran’s nuclear ambition as an excuse for military intervention – is never discussed in public.

Lice Unto the Ages

University of Utah biologists studied the genetics of whale lice small crustaceans that are parasites on endangered right whales and showed the giant whales split into three species 5 million to 6 million years ago … One southern right whale crossed the equator 1 million to 2 million years ago, leaving evidence of the trip when its whale lice bred with those on North Pacific right whales.

Most cetaceans carry populations of benign ectoparasites called cyamids or ‘whale lice’, which are amphipod crustaceans (Caprellidea; Cyamidae). Cyamids spend all life stages on whales, feeding on the outer surface of their host’s epidermis (Rowntree 1983, 1996). They roam widely on their hosts, but because they have no free-swimming stage they can migrate only between whales that contact each other. The ecological universe of a cyamid population is therefore well defined and sharply bounded, consisting of many virtually identical and constantly moving habitat islands (whales) that occasionally replace themselves through a simple birth-and-death process.

Extreme Triage

Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals … senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

The Forever War

We have managed to show ourselves, our friends and most of all our enemies the limits of American power. Instead of fighting the real war that was thrust upon us on that incomprehensible morning four years ago, we stubbornly insisted on fighting a war of the imagination, an ideological struggle that we defined not by frankly appraising the real enemy before us but by focusing on the mirror of our own obsessions. And we have finished – as the escalating numbers of terrorist attacks, the grinding Iraq insurgency, the overstretched American military and the increasing political dissatisfaction at home show – by fighting precisely the kind of war [Al Qaeda] wanted us to fight.

Tear It Down, Build It Up

Private contractors, guided by two former directors of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other well-connected lobbyists and consultants, are rushing to cash in on the unprecedented sums to be spent on Hurricane Katrina relief and reconstruction … Joe M. Allbaugh, a close friend of President Bush, the president’s 2000 campaign manager and the FEMA director from 2001 to 2003, and James Lee Witt, an Arkansan close to former President Bill Clinton and a former FEMA director, are now high-priced consultants, and they have been offering their services to companies seeking or holding federal contracts in the post-hurricane gold rush.

Classy Habits

For the nine years between 1972 and the end of 1981 … so great was Rehnquist’s Placidyl habit, dependency, or addictiondepending on how you regard long-term drug usethat by the last quarter of 1981 he began slurring his speech in public, became tongue-tied while pronouncing long words, and sometimes had trouble finishing his thoughts … [this illustrates] the ugly double standards that excuse extreme drug use by the powerful, especially if their connection is a prescribing doctor, and condemns to draconian prison terms the guy who purchases his drugs on the street.