Is Sex Rape?

Is sex rape, or are some particular forms of sex always rape?    Radical Wind  says yes:

Just to recall a basic fact: intercourse/PIA is always rape, plain and simple.

This is a developed recap from what I’ve been saying in various comments here and there in the last two years or so. as a radical I’ve always said PIA is rape and I remember being disappointed to discover that so few radicals stated it clearly. How can you possibly see it otherwise? Intercourse is the very means through which we are oppressed, from which we are not allowed to escape, yet some instances of or PIA and anal intercourse may be chosen and free? That makes no sense at all.

If PIA, or any particular form of sex, is indeed rape, then we should match our deeds to our words and make PIA, or what ever, illegal. What say you?

Hat tip and reax, DMartyr, Jawa Report.

A Ship of Fools, From the BBC:

The Chinese ice-breaker that helped rescue passengers stranded on the Akademik Shokalskiy vessel in Antarctica may now itself be stuck.

An Australian ice-breaker carrying the rescued passengers has been placed on standby in case the Chinese ship, Xue Long, needs assistance.

On Thursday, a helicopter from Xue Long transferred 52 passengers from the Shokalskiy to the Aurora Australis.

Paging Algore.

The United States Marine Corps is not what it used to be, by Pauline Jelinek:

WASHINGTON (AP) – More than half of female Marines in boot camp can’t do three pullups, the minimum standard that was supposed to take effect with the new year, prompting the Marine Corps to delay the requirement, part of the process of equalizing physical standards to integrate women into combat jobs.

The purpose of our military used to be to prepare for war and to prevail in war. Now it is simply to advance dubious social agendas.

Hanna Rosen writing at Time snarks:

Are men literally obsolete? Of course not, and if we had to prove that we could never win. For one thing, we haven’t figured out a way to harvest sperm without them being, you know, alive. But in order to win this debate we have to prove that men, quote unquote, as we’ve historically come to define them — entitled to power, destined for leadership, arrogant, confused by anything that isn’t them. As in: “I don’t understand. Is it a guy dressed up like a girl? Or a girl dressed up like a guy?” They are obsolete.

To which Noel Sheppard,  Newsbusters, lets loose a old quote by Camille Pagilla:

If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct — unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where women clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks and pit vipers.

[….]

After the next inevitable apocalypse, men will be desperately needed again! Oh, sure, there will be the odd gun-toting Amazonian survivalist gal, who can rustle game out of the bush and feed her flock, but most women and children will be expecting men to scrounge for food and water and to defend the home turf. Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall

When we need a dirty, dangerous or physical job done, we call on men.   So let Rosen change her own flat, or unplug a clogged toilet.   Oh yes we still need women.   Somebody has to pluck the ducks.

The nun-sense that emanates from Washington,  a smart person knows the limits of his knowledge.    Kathleen Sebelius is not a smart person, for she recognizes no limits to her presumed expertise.   A smart person would realize that a nun requires health insurance coverage for birth control about as much I a fish needs a bicycle.   Yet Ms Sebelius  has taken it upon herself to mandate that nuns be provided with birth control, from Politico:

The Obama administration Wednesday said the Affordable Care Act contraceptive coverage regulations are fair — and they don’t really hurt the Denver-based religious organization that got a temporary New Year’s Eve reprieve from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

“We defer to the Department of Justice on litigation matters, but remain confident that our final rules strike the balance of providing women with free [*] contraceptive coverage while preventing non-profit religious employers with religious objections to contraceptive coverage from having to contract, arrange, pay, or refer for such coverage,” a White House official said

Reax, Pirate’s Cove:

Obviously, Team Obama knows if you’re hurt more than you do. Your feelings are just a part of their daily talking points and executive orders.

Let’s not forget that the contraception mandate, which includes sterilization procedures and abortifacients, is not a mandated requirement per It’s The Law. It does not appear within the text of the the Affordable Care Act. This was created by the bureaucrats who were given massive authority to craft the law by the law.

I certainly agree that there is no limit to what Team Obama pretends to know.

*   It seems the Ms Sebelius failed to study economics as well.  Artificial contraception is product, and products cost money to produce.    No product can ever be said to be free.

The New York Slimes tried to analogize Barack Obama’s man made disaster of Obama Care to Dubys’a response to the natural disaster that was Katrina. For her part, Professor Ann Althouse was having none of it, the Snark of the Day:

But think about it this way, NYT. What if Bush and the Republicans had created the hurricane, and the Democrats adamantly believed it would be better not to have a hurricane? Would the Democrats have been “occasionally cooperative” to Republicans who smugly announced that they won the election and they’ve been wanting this hurricane for 100 years and canceling the hurricane was not an option?

This is the coveted Snark of the Year.

The Snark of the Day, from Glenn  Reynolds:

ACTUALLY, AS WE LEARNED WITH SARAH PALIN’S FAMILY, IT’S ONLY THE CHILDREN OF DEMOCRATS WHOM DECENCY PLACES OFF-LIMITS: “Quite aside from racial politics, I thought children were off limits. Here you have an MSNBC panel segment planned around laughing at a baby. We scrupulously avoid using Obama’s daughters as raw material for jokes. Why didn’t anyone at MSNBC nix this?” Because those are Obama’s daughters.

The much coveted Bitsblog Snark of the Year, later

About the only thing wrong with this story is that Algore is not on board, from Paul Tilsey, Fox News:

The leader of a scientific expedition whose ship remains stranded in Antarctic ice says the team, which set out to prove climate change, is “stuck in our own experiment.”

But Chris Turney, a professor of climate change at Australia’s University of New South Wales, said it was “silly” to suggest he and 73 others aboard the MV Akademic Shokalskiy were trapped in ice they’d sought to prove had melted. He remained adamant that sea ice is melting, even as the boat remained trapped in frozen seas.

Reax, R.S. McCain:

It probably seemed like an excellent idea: Load a bunch of tourists and journalists aboard a ship for an expedition to Antarctica in December (the height of summer at the South Pole) so they can see for themselves how global warming is melting the ice.

Alas, somebody forgot to tell the ice that “the science is settled”:

More: Pirate’s Cove:

“Cute how these Warmists who hate fossil fuels take a trip to the Antarctic to show just how horrible fossil-fueled climate change is, then need rescue from their fossil-fueled trip by other fossil-fueled ships and helicopters, which still can’t rescue them.”

I’ve said it before, and say it again. Start believing only when these idiots start behaving as if their theory were actually true. Nobody who actually believed in anthropogenic global warming would taking a tourist cruise to the Antarctic.

A slush fund is money which a politician can use with no strings attached, and with no supervision. Governor Andrew “JMario, Jr.” Coumo has set up such a fund, from Green Biz:

New York’s first bank dedicated to boosting the deployment of clean technologies is set to open in early 2014, after the state’s Governor confirmed an initial $210 million of funding.

[…]

On Thursday last week, Governor Andrew Cuomo confirmed an initial $210 million backing for the Green Bank, $165m of which is from unallocated government funds, such as surcharges in utility bills that the state already collects for energy-efficiency programs, and $45 million from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative emissions trading scheme.

Two hundred ten million dollars wrestled from the over burdened taxpayers of New York State, to be spent at the sole discretion of Junior, surely to boost his re-election campaign. What could go wrong?

View Jesus as a savior or just a victim of Roman justice, nobody, to my knowledge, has ever called Jesus a mugger.   Yet some demented wack job replaced a depiction of Jesus in the manger, with the late mugger Trayvon Martin,  from Rick Rojas, Los Angeles Slimes:

On the lawn of a Claremont church, just like at many churches at this time of year, cutouts of wise men on camelback head toward a makeshift stable, a meager wooden structure where Mary and Joseph have huddled inside.

But instead of an infant Jesus cradled in his mother’s arms, the Nativity at Claremont United Methodist Church — the creation of congregant and artist John Zachary — features a depiction of Trayvon Martin slumped over in his hoodie, a pool of his blood spreading over a bed of straw.

Reax, from Sacred Monkeys:

The Claremont United Methodist Church, about 30 miles east of Los Angeles, California, and John Zachary, the individual behind the “artistic interpretation,” has managed to infuriate many with their depiction of the Nativity scene this Christmas season by replacing the baby Jesus with Trayvon Martin. Yup … because some how I get the two of them confused all off the time. I just have two words, “Sacrilege” and an “Abomination”!!! All in the name of “artistic interpretation” these fools have managed to desecrate the Birth of Christ by replacing the innocence of the Baby Jesus, the son of God, Our Savior with the hoody-wearing, Trayvon Martin, slumped over, shot in the chest with blood pouring out on to the ground. UNREAL. Wow, because some how Trayvon Martin is supposed to symbolize the innocence of a child, really? Who knew the drug using, pot smoking, middle finger displaying, gun carrying, school skipping, gangsta fightin’ thug was so innocent

Christian believe that Jesus died for our sins.  The late Mr. Martin died while attempting to  mug George Zimmerman.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson wanted to tell A&E where to put Phil and Duck Danasty, from Legal Insurrection:

According to ABC, Jackson is urging A&E to uphold Robertson’s suspension and requests an urgent meeting with A&E and Cracker Barrel executives.

A&E tells the Reverend Jackson to suck a duck, from ABC News via  Legal Insurrection:

A&E has decided to resume filming #DuckDynasty “later this spring with the entire Robertson family.”

Well Reverend, when you get a number one rated show, you too can tell a network where to go.   Till then.

Phil Robertson quotes Scripture, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson gets offended.   Jackson as attributed by ABC News:

“These statements uttered by Robertson are more offensive than the bus driver in Montgomery, Alabama, more than 59 years ago.”

I find it amusing that the Reverend Jackson would rather defend Jim Crow Law rather than the Bible.

The unrepentant sinner the Reverend Jackson is offering atonement for cash from the repentant sinner  Phil Robertson, or A&E or Cracker Barrel.

Edtor’s note:

Once again as in the 12 or so years past, I’ve found my inbox filled with messages from longtime readers who wonder if I’m going to be re-posting “A Bithead’s Christmas”, and begging me to do so.

As I believe I’ve told you in previous years, I get more email about this one single post, these 2900 or so words, then I have about anything else written here. And it happens every single year. Either this one post is particularly good, or the rest of it is comparatively bad. You’ll forgive me if in my vanity, I believe the former. I take that they’re using Email, instead of simply leaving comments, to mean that I’ve struck a very personal and private nerve. Touching people in that fashion is a very rare thing, and one I take very seriously, so the answer to the question is “Yes, of course I’ll run it again”.

Understand going in, it may not be politically correct. I seek no absolution, no forgiveness, for it’s being overtly Christian in nature, any more than I seek absolution or forgiveness for anything else that I put into these spaces. It is what it is, because Christmas is what it is, and because I speak my mind on the topic at hand, whatever that is.

Christmas, and thereby, Christianity itself, has been going on for a little over 2000 years, in spite of all the naysayers, protesters and government regulations that history has managed to toss up in those 2000- plus years. It does so, because at the core of it all, is a message…….. a message that all the naysayers, protesters and government hacks will never understand, much less conquer. It is a message that will survive the ravages of time, government, and liberals, fascists, and anything and everything else, long after you and I are no longer even a memory in this world.  The Christmas message, you see, is eternal, and ever green.

(Evergreen. I am suddenly struck with the symbolism here)
There is something of a journalistic precedent for this as well. . . I do not pretend to hold myself quite so high in the world as these media outlets who have such traditions as “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus”… but they’ve been getting away with such things for well over 100 years, so I suppose I can get away with it, here.

One of the things that man has always found fascinating about the Christmas story, is that you can reread it all your life, and every time you reread it, you find a new truth buried within it, so perhaps that’s WHY we get away with repeating such stories. It’s perhaps where such traditions come from.

So with all this in mind, and with the hope of helping you find new meaning in this season… and peace… a personal peace… in these troubled times, I will offer once again this year:

A Bithead’s Christmas

I find myself wanting to take more seriously, the challenge of writing to the subject of Christmas, today, than I have in years past. It’s not clear in my mind as to why, but this isn’t unusual… I never really do have a firm grip on why I want to attack a subject in these spaces. In fact, the writing of a coulmn for me has becomes more an effort of exploring a subject; the codification of random thoughts. The act of putting those thoughts into words on a screen allows me to think about, and RE-think about the subject at hand. My thoughts on a given subject often do not fully take shape until such time as I’ve re-written them twice. Often, indeed… usually, the ideas are already there, waiting to be cast into words, but not fully defined until the act of sitting down and typing them out. I suppose this subject is no exception.
To this effort, some blogs, this time of year will quote the great Gospels of Christ’s arrival, and expound on that. And that’s worthy, and right. Some others will take the secular angle of the holiday and go off on that. That too, is fine, though frankly it’s always for me missed the core of the topic, a little.
But not me, for either of those tacks. Not this year. I’m going to go off the beaten path, for this post, at least in context of this blog, given it’s Christmas, and off the beaten path in terms of the Liturgical calendar, given it’s me. I’m going to stick with the meaning of Christmas, but to point it up, I’m going to turn to something a little later… about 30 years later… for my subject. I trust you’ll see why when I’m done.
This story is in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. We’ll use Luke’s version for the purpose.

In Luke 18 it reads:

15 Now they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them; and when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. 16 But Jesus called them to him, saying, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of God. 17 Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.”

Now, all three versions add a little something to the story, and I suggest you read them yourself to get it all.

Most times that Christians hear this text or read it, a child is being baptized. The apparently intended thrust of reading it in those situations is to make a loose connection with the Children being accepted by Christ. And, that’s a valid angle for the story. But, think about the story line, here, so you can get the flavor of what I’m going to describe to you. There’s a far bigger angle that many miss.
See, Christ has been playing “superstar” for a while, now. He’s been attracting flat out huge crowds wherever he goes. The disciples are starting to become concerned for the (human) well being of Christ. Children are, then as now, a source of some stress to adults already under stress, so the disciples decide, wordlessly to give the Lord a break. But Jesus says.. “Hey… No.. Let ’em come… It’s OK. ” Apparently, seeing some remaining resistance in their eyes, he reinforces the command with a statement that must have shaken them badly. “It’s to the likes of these as belongs the Kingdom of God.”
Now, It’s not hard for us to imagine what’s going on in the minds of the disciples…. They must have felt a little put back… While not saying so, they must have figured they had an inside track to Heaven. (Shrug) It’s human nature.
The passages don’t record if they said anything, but you just know what they’re thinking, here… “Comon, Jesus… We’re tryin’ to give you a break here! And you elevate these lowest of low, mere children, into the ownership of heaven? You raise a polite nothing to a path to heaven and eternity? What’s THAT about?”
And you know, Jesus knows it too. He knows full well what they’re thinking, because watch what he comes back with: “I’ll tell you the truth;”, he says, “Unless you change… Unless you transform, and accept the kingdom of heaven like a child, you’ll never enter it.”
But what does he mean, here? He’s talking, I’m afraid, about how you lose touch with happiness and the sense of wonder, as you become an adult. That loss prevents us from seeing the Kingdom of heaven as it is.
For most of us, the happiest times of our lives was when we were children. When we’re younger, we have less in the way of cares, and troubles. Let’s admit, too, that as we get older, we become aware of, and allow more and more sadness into our lives.
It’s true; It’s a hard world out there, and being adults we’ve come to understand this, in a way of understanding that only long exposure and experience… and lots of scar tissue, can bring.
It seems that every year we have more worries and concerns.

Oh, yeah, do we EVER worry. We worry about our health, and those concerns increase with advancing age. We worry about our jobs, about our investments, our savings, about the future in general. Retirement is a concern. Will we have enough? We’re too fat, we’re too skinny. We’re too tall, we’re too short, our once wavy hair is still waving… Only, it’s waving bye-bye. We worry about the future our kids will have and the normal growing up problems, but we also worry about the future that we’ve left our kids. We look at the news, and we wonder what kind of a world have we left them? We even worry if we worry too much.
We’ve seen marriages and relationships we thought would pass the test of time, pass away, instead. Things we had hoped would come to pass, didn’t, and those we’d not dreamed, in our wildest nightmares would happen, did. We see loved ones die. Jobs disappear. Hearts get broken.
And friends, those are just the hum-drum... The everyday worries that every generation has had, since Cain bopped his brother’s bean with a rock. Then you get into the problems particular to us and our times; AIDS, oil shortages, cancer, drugs, the way our own technology seems to be spiraling out of our control…And Islamofacists.

Ah, yes, there’s nothing at all, to my mind, like the specter of 3000 plus people dying on national television, in Washington, NY and Pennsylvania… while we watch, to remind us that we’re not in control.
And yes…. it’s all about control, if you think on it for long. All these things I’ve listed are worries about things we cannot control, try as we might.

The list of these reverses, these scars, gets longer as the years progress, and it starts eventually, to break down the positive outlook in every one of us… Each according to their ability to resist. Each step, each worry, each bit of emotional scar tissue, if you will, moves us farther away from the relative joy of our comparatively carefree childhood.
By now the sharper among you will notice where I’m going with this; This is where Christmas comes in. This is why Christmas holds a special place in our hearts, and our traditions.
You see, even for the not-so-religious, it is a time of renewal of our fragile human spirit. All of the hurts, small and large, become less pronounced, and fade under the soft glow of the lights, the candles, the fireplace, and the smile of the children.
Have you ever noticed that it’s the children, in fact, that do us the most healing? Christmas, it’s said, is for the children. Presidential speechwriter and WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan noted recently about some of the qualities of children:

“They are susceptible to wonder. A child can look at a red toy car in the red-green glow of Christmas tree lights and imagine an entire lifetime. A child can play with a new doll and smell good things being cooked and hear sweet music and it can make that child imagine that life is good, which gives her a template for good, a category for good; it helps her know good exists. This knowledge comes in handy in life; those who do not receive it, one way or another, are sadder than those who do.”

Of course, we move away from that ability as we grow older. Our long experience has hardened us to the realities of the world around us, and perhaps jaded our point of view. But here comes Christmas, which gives us, individually and collectively, the chance of looking at the world through the wonder-filled eyes of a child once again… Becoming childlike ourselves in the process, and becoming healed and renewed.
The experience is a far deeper one for those who have accepted the Christmas promise, and it’s meaning. Reacting to that promise includes allowing someone else to run the controls of our lives. Remember I said it was all about control? Well, I want you to think about the features of being a child. It was Randall Jarrell, I think, who once quipped:

“One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.”

Well, let’s remember.

You’re NOT in control of much of anything. Someone who knows better, and is by far more powerful than we, is running things. And looking back, I’m sure most of us would conclude that having that situation back would be of comfort to us. Haven’t we all wished to resign from the world of adulthood at times?

I guess this would be a good place to slip in a parallel story.

Consider the fictional person of Ebeneezer Scrooge. Think about how the story develops; He’s had some serious emotional setbacks in early life… and those have become a self-feeding, never ending circle by the time we meet him, 7 years after his best friend’s death.
All these setbacks have made him cold, and hard, and for all outward appearances, non-feeling. He’s covered with emotional scar tissue. Being hard, is his way of dealing with what he cannot control. Only after his overnight experience do all these cares get swept away, along with his anger of not being able to control his situation…. The realization comes to him that he never really WAS in control in the first place, so stop fretting about it all… Think about what are essentially the first words out of his mouth as he realizes that the weight of his worries.. Not unlike worries you and I have had, are gone; “I’m as light as a feather….” The weight of that scar tissue… And all the concerns they represent having been lifted off his shoulders…
“…and as giddy as a Schoolboy!”

Like.

A.

Child.

“I’ll tell you the truth”, he said, “Unless you change.. Unless you transform, and accept the kingdom of heaven like a child, you’ll never enter it.”

Amazing parallels, aren’t they?

I’m reliably informed that Charles Dickens was not as a rule what one would call very religious. Yet, in looking at the parallels in these two story lines, I must wonder in all honesty if he didn’t have some help with “A Christmas Carol”.
Now, you’ll notice I took some liberty with the way the Biblical text was quoted. Some liberty, I say, but not very much, really, since it’s long been pointed out by Bible scholars that the word that earlier versions of the text had as ‘change’ were really translated from the ancient Greek word for “transform”. This is a major point, because it demonstrates what the first step is, and whose it is… yours.

And no, change and transformation are not the same thing. The best description I’ve ever thought of to explain the difference between the two, runs along these lines:
If I take a rock, and in the other hand I take a large hammer, and I hit the rock with the hammer, and break it, I’ve changed that rock. If I take that same rock, and take a small hammer and chisel, and very carefully, perhaps over a period of decades, sculpt that rock into a flower, I’ve still merely changed that rock.
Transformation, on the other hand, is when the rock itself, as a matter of responding to it’s own will, becomes a flower. And of course that’s beyond the normal power of the rock, by any standard we know.

What Christ therefore is saying is, that we must become children, as of a matter of our own will. Which is, as I say, impossible by any standard we know…. Which in turn leads us to the source of all things, who teaches us how, and gives us the power to do it.

You see, the externalities I mentioned, the lights, the fire, the children…and that which Dickens writes of… the giving, the being open to what joys are around us, and so on, helps toward the goal of understanding the Christmas promise, but it’s not the whole deal.

At the core of it all… (and this is a connection that, alas, many people never make…) is that the one whose birth is being celebrated every December the 25th, is the one who takes over that long list of worries. But understand, here…THAT’S WHY WE CELEBRATE!!

With those worries removed, lives get changed, hearts mended, child-like perspectives restored in a way that the lights, carols and greenery can never do on their own. And the newly remade Children find that the authority and responsibility and all the ponderous weight connected with them, are taken away by the one who said “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me”.

Now, I must warn you; There are those who will resist being told all of this… to the point of removing such joy as they find, wherever they may find it, often using the power of governments, and force of arms to have it removed from town squares and schools, mocking, persecuting and yes, even killing those responsible for the spreading of the news of this miracle.

It’s a sad truth, that a world used to darkness, you see, will continually fight to see the darkness continued. That warning given, however, I will say to you also, that it’s no accident, Christmas being called the season of light, and that Christ is called the light of the world.

If I have one wish for this Christmas, it is that you will be open to the light…. With the wondering eyes of a child.

Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of the AK-47, has died, from the BBC:

The inventor of the Kalashnikov assault rifle, Mikhail Kalashnikov, has died aged 94, Russian officials say.

The automatic rifle he designed became one of the world’s most familiar and widely used weapons.

Its comparative simplicity made it cheap to manufacture, as well as reliable and easy to maintain.

The AK-47 was simple and it worked.   Alas the modern world seems to disdain simple.   Yet  we will have to deal with the AK-47 long after the horrors of the Unaffordable Care Act have faded from our collective memories.   The AK-47 was the ultimate weapon for arming peasants.

Parents is it safe to send your son to Occidental? From the L.A. Slimes:

Occidental College has been barraged with bogus allegations of sexual assault in recent days after two groups, one claiming to represent “men’s rights,” set out to undermine the school’s anonymous reporting system, a college spokesman said.

[…]

The online campaign appears to have been fueled by misperceptions about how the college’s anonymous sexual misconduct reporting form works.”Feminists at Occidental College created an online form to anonymously report rape/sexual assault,” a user wrote in a Tuesday post on Reddit’s Men’s Rights group. “You just fill out a form and the person is called into the office on a rape charge. The ‘victim’ never has to prove anything or reveal their identity.”

At Occidental. life is simple.  When an allegation of sexual assault  is received against a male student, the school sends out thugs to harrass the the male student.  However if a sexual assault complaint is filed against a female, the  school first attempts to label the allegation as false.    Occidental simply assumes all male students are guilty but tries to treat allegations against females as if they were false.   This called a hostile environment.