What the battleship was in 1941, the aircraft carrier is now: a big, proud, expensive...sitting duck.Aircraft carriers came out of WW II looking powerful, but that was before microchips. Now, when an enemy tanker can fire 60 self-guiding cruise missiles from hundreds of miles away, no carrier will survive its first real battle. Carriers are not only the biggest and most expensive ships ever built--they're the most vulnerable. Because even one serious cruise-missile hit means the carrier can't launch its planes, its best weapons. They will sink to the bottom with their crews, not having fired a shot... ...We may be lucky a little while longer, as long as we take on losers like Iraq. But what about Iran? The Iranians aren't cowardly slaves like the Iraqis. They're smart, they're dedicated, and they hate us like poison. Imagine how many "small aircraft and boats" there are along the Iranian coastline. Imagine every one of those craft stuffed full of explosives and turned into kamikazes. Now add all the anti-ship missiles the Iranians have been able to buy on the open market. If you really want to get scared, add a nuke or two.

   

   

Take Representative Terry Everett, a seven-term Alabama Republican who is vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence. “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?” I asked him a few weeks ago. Mr. Everett responded with a low chuckle. He thought for a moment: “One’s in one location, another’s in another location. No, to be honest with you, I don’t know. I thought it was differences in their religion, different families or something.” To his credit, he asked me to explain the differences. I told him briefly about the schism that developed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and how Iraq and Iran are majority Shiite nations while the rest of the Muslim world is mostly Sunni. “Now that you’ve explained it to me,” he replied, “what occurs to me is that it makes what we’re doing over there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but that whole area.”

So what does one do when one no longer loves one's country? I do not love my country. At least not the one I see around me these days. And, oh blasphemy of blasphemies!, I do not "support our troops." You probably don't either. Now that we have that out of the way, can we talk honestly here? I may be a baby raping communist by the current war-crazed patriotic standard, but other, more conventional Americans are speaking out about the grotesques we have become. One of them is my friend Margaret Waters-Parmer in Iowa, who gives this example: Over three years ago I started a book club with a bunch of women. I am the only liberal in this group. We have one born again Christian, and the rest are hardly church oriented. This month we read a book called "Florida Road Kill." Oh the carrying on about the gore the murders and how truly gross it was! They questioned how anyone could do those horrible things, what kind of mind could think up those gross actions, the awful tortures, etc. Spawn of Satan that I am, I pointed out that our own government tortured people at Abu Ghraib and hid it and now are out-sourcing it to other countries. Like a group of cows that turn their heads in unison to see what that noise was, they turned and stared at me and silently chewed their cud. That horrible woman (me) was making those weird, stupid, statements again. Nothing was said. They didn't argue. They never do. They just paused and then went on to discuss the lack of remorse of the people in the book! How oblivious and cold-blooded these characters were! I sat there with my mouth hanging open. What are these people? They just shut their eyes, their minds, and hearts, and when I question them the answer I get all the time is "It just upsets me too much." And when they are pushed "I just try to do the best I can in my small area" comes in second. I have relatives in this group and I am starting to loath them. People I believed were good honest loving people have turned into something I don't recognize. These are the exactly same type of people they had to drag to the concentration camps after the war and stick their noses in the ashes -- and STILL they claimed they didn't know it was going on. I can't remember ever being so appalled by my fellow Americans.

This was brought to you by FORD, makers of THE FORD ESCAPE HYBRID!

Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilisation ever lived here. Yet if the aliens had good enough scientific tools they could still find a few hints of our presence. For a start, the fossil record would show a mass extinction centred on the present day, including the sudden disappearance of large mammals across North America at the end of the last ice age. A little digging might also turn up intriguing signs of a long-lost intelligent civilisation, such as dense concentrations of skeletons of a large bipedal ape, clearly deliberately buried, some with gold teeth or grave goods such as jewellery. And if the visitors chanced across one of today's landfills, they might still find fragments of glass and plastic - and maybe even paper - to bear witness to our presence. "I would virtually guarantee that there would be some," says William Rathje, an archaeologist at Stanford University in California who has excavated many landfills. "The preservation of things is really pretty amazing. We think of artefacts as being so impermanent, but in certain cases things are going to last a long time." Ocean sediment cores will show a brief period during which massive amounts of heavy metals such as mercury were deposited, a relic of our fleeting industrial society. The same sediment band will also show a concentration of radioactive isotopes left by reactor meltdowns after our disappearance. The atmosphere will bear traces of a few gases that don't occur in nature, especially perfluorocarbons such as CF4, which have a half-life of tens of thousands of years. Finally a brief, century-long pulse of radio waves will forever radiate out across the galaxy and beyond, proof - for anything that cares and is able to listen - that we once had something to say and a way to say it. But these will be flimsy souvenirs, almost pathetic reminders of a civilisation that once thought itself the pinnacle of achievement. Within a few million years, erosion and possibly another ice age or two will have obliterated most of even these faint traces. If another intelligent species ever evolves on the Earth - and that is by no means certain, given how long life flourished before we came along - it may well have no inkling that we were ever here save for a few peculiar fossils and ossified relics. The humbling - and perversely comforting - reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.

Meeting in Chicago at the end of September, a group of so-called "pro-life" advocates held a conference titled "Contraception Is Not the Answer" to launch a campaign against all "unnatural contraceptives."... ...These fringe Christian activists insist that every sex act must result in pregnancy or it is unholy. Following such a doctrine leads to the inevitable conclusion that an act of rape that results in a pregnancy is less offensive to God than the act of a married couple who block conception by using a condom or the Pill.

I still recall an Iraqi friend, shaking his head at my naivety when I asked if there was not any cup of generosity to be bestowed on the West for ridding Iraqis of Saddam's presence. "You supported him," he replied. "You supported him when he invaded Iran and we died in our tens of thousands. Then, after the invasion of Kuwait, you imposed sanctions that killed tens of thousands of our children. And now you reduce Iraq to anarchy. And you want us to be grateful?" And I recalled seeing a train load of gassed Iranian soldiers on the way to Tehran, coughing up mucus and blood into stained handkerchiefs and coughing up the gas too because I suddenly smelled a kind of dirty perfume and walked down the train opening all the windows. I saw their vast wobbling blisters upon which ever-smaller blisters would form, one on top of the other. And where did this filthy stuff come from, this real weapon of mass destruction Saddam was using? Components came from Germany and from the US.

   

Pro-Bush guest post, required under HR1-147: "The Internet Fairness Act", 2006. Timmy Timkins writes: when will theze stupid fucking forigners learn to STOP SPEEKING THEYRE DUMB FUCKING FOREGN TERRORIST LANGUAGES IN AIRPORTS??? What a bunch of non English speeking FREEDUM HATING morans. DUDES: SPEAK AMERCAN WHEN YOUR IN AMERICA OR ENGLISH-LAND, YOU stoopid fucking ASSWIPES! FREEDUM ROCKS, AND SO DUZ THE U.S.OFA!!! wooooooHOOOOOOO! kill all thm liberal biatches. THere not with us, there agaisnt us.

   

   

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains          An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.          Go, go, go like a soldier,          Go, go, go like a soldier,          Go, go, go like a soldier,          So-oldier of the Queen! from "The Young British Soldier" by Rudyard Kipling "Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia..." Vizzini, from "The Princess Bride"

"A British company from 3 Para had been isolated and surrounded by Taliban in... Sangin district centre," the officer relates. "They had lost four soldiers and were being attacked three to five times a day. They were running out of food and were down to boiling river water." An attempt to air-drop supplies had failed, with the supplies landing in a Taliban stronghold, so the Canadians were ordered to conduct an immediate emergency resupply operation with their light armoured vehicles (LAVs). "When we arrived in Sangin, the locals began throwing rocks and anything they could at us; this was not a friendly place," the officer reports. "We pushed into the district centre, and during the last few hundred metres we began receiving mortar fire." By the time they reached the British position, the Canadian convoy had to stay overnight. "We were attacked with small arms RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] and mortars three times that night. I still can't believe the Brits have spent over a month living there under these conditions."... ..."You see the Taliban cutting around on dirt bikes, their weapons in one hand, their kids in the other," said an email reported by The Mail on Sunday. "They think we will not shoot them. There have been some terrible accidents. It is horrible to kill a kid, nothing could prepare you for it." In many cases, however, it was the troops who were on the receiving end. "Two days ago, we ran out of GPMG [general purpose machine gun] ammunition in our forward location," said an email to a Tory MP, Patrick Mercer. "The Taliban were dodging around in great numbers at about 700 metres and firing at us from there from behind all sorts of cover. "We ran out of LINK [the linked-up ammunition for a general purpose machine gun] and we couldn't get any more in overnight because of the darkness and the weight of fire. We were within RPG range which they use superbly. We used our mortars to good effect, but again, ammunition ran short." Similar complaints came from another officer, who said that his troops' SA80 rifles melted in the heat. "You would go to pull the trigger and a piece of the gun would come away in your hand," he wrote... ...Last week it was disclosed that an elite Paras Pathfinder platoon, sent on a four-day mission to Musa Qala, in the north of Helmand Province, ended up spending 52 days under siege by the Taliban. "We were there for eight weeks; three of those were under constant attack," said a senior officer. Resupply was difficult: it was dangerous for helicopters to land inside the compound the Paras were defending, and there were not enough soldiers to secure a landing field outside. A force of 120 Paras supposed to relieve them had to be sent to Sangin instead. But, amazingly, the Pathfinders did not lose a single man, although the Sergeant Major was shot through the arm and several men suffered broken bones... ...A less glorious account of a similar engagement was given by a British soldier, however, who reported on an operation to rescue Afghan troops and French special forces who had been ambushed by Taliban. "I could not believe we were going to charge off this helicopter into a wall of lead," he wrote. "Not everyone wanted to get off. One guy actually defecated. He sat rigid with fear inside the cargo hold until we pulled him up and pointed him towards the door. "We had to manoeuvre across open ground for 200 metres. The scene was like a human abattoir. We fought off the Taliban, but were too late to save the French guys. All of us were shaking when we were flown back to base. One of the Afghan survivors said the French had been tied up, then gutted alive by the Taliban. It was one of the most shocking things I had ever heard."... ...At least two officers have quit as a result of their experiences in Helmand. The only one to be named was Captain Leo Docherty, aide-de-camp to Colonel Charlie Knaggs, the operational commander in the province. Calling the campaign "a textbook case of how to screw up a counter-insurgency", he told The Sunday Times: "We've been grotesquely clumsy - we've said we'll be different to the Americans who were bombing and strafing villages, then behaved exactly like them." Yet another leaked email from a front-line officer endorsed this, saying: "We are not having an effect on the average Afghan. We are no better than the Taliban in their eyes, as all they can see is us moving into an area, blowing things up and leaving, which is very sad." The British contingent in Helmand learned the brutal lesson some time ago that what was a reconstruction mission has turned into a war. Judging from comments on internet message boards, such as the British Army Rumour Service, that message is getting through to soldiers' families and the public back home.

I don't want to be a soldier, I don't want to go to war, I'd rather stay at home, Around the streets to roam, And live on the earnings of a lady typist. I don't want a bayonet in my belly, I don't want my bollocks shot away, I'd rather stay in England, In merry, merry England, And fornicate my bleeding life away. From "Oh What a Lovely War"