Eideard

What – me worry?

A man who has been representing Taliban senior leadership in secret talks with the Afghan government appears to have been an impostor.

The man, calling himself Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, the Taliban’s second-ranking official, was exposed after another man who knows Mansour did not recognise him during a negotiation session…

The secret talks with the impostor had been going on for months and were used by senior US officials to claim progress on the diplomatic front in the Afghan war.

NATO and Afghan officials told the New York Times they held three meetings with the man, who allegedly received large sums of money to take part in the negotiations.

The fake Taliban leader, who travelled from across the border in Pakistan, even met with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, in the presidential palace in Kabul, the capital. He was flown to the capital on NATO aircraft…

I’ll bet the TSA would have caught him, right?

Al Jazeera’s Sue Turton, reporting from Kabul, said US officials always held suspicions about the identity of the man.

“Americans here admit that they don’t often know what these people look like; that they can only go on who they say they are because these people have been hiding and fighting this insurgency for so long,” she said.

“So they have to go on trust to a certain extent, and it seems that this particular man has managed to get away with it.”

Har!

The social harm of polygamy should outweigh any fear that enforcing the laws against it will violate protections of religious freedom, Canadian prosecutors said on Monday at the start of a judicial inquiry.

The inquiry will grapple with legal and moral questions raised by a breakaway Mormon church sect that has allowed men to have multiple wives at its rural British Columbia compound since the late 1940s.

The Canadian province had long refused to file charges against the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints saying it feared the 19th century law ran afoul of more recent civil rights protections.

But provincial prosecutors told the hearing they have changed their minds, and now want the law declared constitutional so they can enforce it. Their past views had hampered their recent efforts to file criminal charges…

The FLDS, which split from the mainstream Mormon church over the issue of polygamy, has an estimated 10,000 followers in Utah, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, South Dakota and British Columbia.

The church says it is exercising religious freedom. There’s another chunk of law to consider beyond this case. After all, many global religions, most notably Islam permit polygamy. Some allow polyandry.

And if the religious question is settled to allow polygamy, how can the stae justify special treatment for a religion – and disallow the right for the secular and sensible?

The woman who told President Barack Obama that she was “exhausted” from defending him and his economic policies and waiting for the change she expected after voting for him has another reason to be put out: She’s lost her job.

Velma Hart, the chief financial officer for AmVets, a veteran services organization based in Maryland, said Monday in an interview with CNBC that she was laid off as part of the nonprofit’s effort to cut expenses.

“I want to focus on the positive and be optimistic,” said Hart, who lives in Upper Marlboro, Md. “And assume that somehow things will work out, that there’s an opportunity out there with Velma’s name on it that’s right around the corner.”

Am Vets executive director Jim King told The Washington Post that the nonprofit was looking for ways to survive financially.

“It’s not anything she did,” King told the Post for a story that appeared online Monday. “She got bit by the same snake that has bit a lot of people. It was a move to cut our bottom line…”

Hart told CNBC that she still supports Obama and noted that the economy is improving, though she finds the prospect of unemployment “scary.”

I watched her on TV, this morning. She’s well aware from the work that AmVets does that it’s no longer unusual for someone to be out of work during this Great Recession for a couple of years.

Fortunately, she’s well-enough qualified that I hope she’ll be able to find a new job – or things will turn around enough for AmVets to bring her back.

Rupert Murdoch, head honcho of the News Corp. and Fox News, is investing $30 million and a staff of about 100 to create and run The Daily, the first newspaper available only on the iPad and other tablet devices, scheduled to roll out early next year…

The New York Times media columnist David Carr explored the prospect: The Daily will still retain some of the more archaic aspects of a print newspaper in that it will be produced into the evening and “printed” in the morning. Updates will come, but not like we’re used to with news websites now.

Even more bizarre: “The Daily will have no inbound links from other sites, and nothing outbound either.”

For the most part, it will produce original content, although Fox Sports will provide some video. Murdoch is bringing some heavy hitters into the new project: The New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, ABC News TV producer Steve Alperin and Page Six’s Richard Johnson.

While millions of readers were lost when News Corp. moved The Times of London and The Sunday Times behind a pay wall in July, the Daily can start with a clean slate having never been free. It will have an “easy payment” format…

John Koblin at Women’s Wear Daily reported more details: The Daily will be in beta mode before the new year, around Christmas, and will cost 99 cents for a 7-day week subscription, or $4.25/month. WWD also reports that the newspaper will go beyond the iPad to other tablet devices beginning in 2011, so they won’t be missing those growing number of Android consumers…

Sounds like Rupert has actually been paying attention to Steve Jobs. His primo criticism of all the business models attempted for print media spin-offs has been what newspaper types think they can sharge for unlimited access to their product.

The latest rumor, btw, has a debut press event sked for 9 December – headlining both Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch. Will Rupert wear a black mock turtleneck? Sure as hell Jobs ain’t wearing a suit and tie.

US government drivers trusted with transporting nuclear weapons are sometimes getting drunk while on duty, a Department of Energy investigation showed Monday.

The drivers were involved in 16 alcohol-related incidents from 2007 to 2009, with one agent arrested by police three years ago and two others handcuffed and detained last year, the Energy Department’s office of inspector general said.

The Office of Secure Transportation (OST) oversees the shipment of nuclear weapons, weapon parts and special nuclear material, with a workforce of nearly 600 agents.

“Alcohol incidents such as these, as infrequent as they may be, indicate a potential vulnerability in OST’s critical national security mission,” the report said…

Two of the 16 alcohol incidents took place when convoy trucks were in “safe harbor” status and the agents had checked into local hotels…

Under new rules designed by the government agency, agents are barred from drinking alcohol eight hours before reporting for duty and agent candidates are prohibited from “possessing kegs of beer or quantities of alcohol in excess of what is reasonable for personal use,” said the report.

I’d concur – that taking a keg along while transporting nuclear weapons might help with the jitters – I doubt if it would contribute anything positive to driving performance.

A German couple have been taken to court because their bed made too much noise during their lovemaking.

Stefanie Mueller, 24, faced a fine for one night of passion with partner Lucas Zetsch, 25, that woke up the neighbourhood.

Police said they received ten complains from neighbours of the pair in the Berlin suburb of Lichtenberg on the night in question in July this year.

The pair were summoned under anti noise-pollution laws but they refused to pay the £86 penalty.

This led to a court hearing in Berlin where Miss Mueller, a hotel worker, said; “We weren’t that loud.” The judge said; “Perhaps not you, but your bed. We have witness statements that it was heard banging and squeaking around the neighbourhood from 11.30pm until 1.00am the next morning.” Mr Zetsch told the court: “It was totally normal sex, nothing exciting” – a remark which earned him a scornful look from Miss Mueller, who snapped: “Thanks – that was nice.” Then she left the court.

The judge threw the case out as the complainants did not show up for the hearing.

Har!

According to a TIME/Pew research poll released last week, 40 percent of Americans believe that marriage is becoming obsolete, up from just 28 percent in 1978.

In that same poll, only one in four unmarried Americans say they do not want to get married. And among currently married men and women, 80 percent say their marriage is as close as or closer than their parents’ marriage.

These seemingly contradictory responses reflect the public’s recognition of a new and complex reality. On the one hand, marriage as a voluntary relationship based on love and commitment is held in higher regard than ever, with more people saying that love is essential to marriage (Consider that in 1967, two-thirds of college women said they’d consider marrying a man they didn’t love if he met other criteria, such as offering respectability and financial security.)

But as an institution that regulates people’s lives, marriage is no longer the social and economic necessity it once was. People can construct successful lives outside marriage in ways that would have been very difficult to manage 50 years ago, and they have a far greater range of choices about whether to marry, when to marry, and how to organize their marriages.

This often makes them more cautious in committing to marriage and more picky about their partners than people were in the past…

Today, however, there are plenty of other ways to grow up, seek financial independence, and meet one’s needs for companionship and sex. So what might have seemed a “good enough” reason to enter marriage in the past no longer seems sufficient to many people…

These higher expectations are good news for many marriages. People who can meet the high bar that most Americans now feel is appropriate for the transition to marriage — people who delay marriage to get an education, who have accumulated a nest egg or established themselves in a secure line of work — typically have higher quality marriages than other Americans, research shows, and their divorce rates have been falling for the past 25 years.

RTFA. Lots of interesting questions asked. There are some readymade answers. I think you’d enjoy working out your own answers. At least I hope so.

Poisonally, I think a great deal of strengthening of relationships, marriages, has to do with the diminished effect of organized religion. Unreality and superstition – no matter how ingrained in a community – lessens the ability of individuals and couples to deal with life in a changing society.

Airplanes do not look much like birds — unless you were to imagine a really weird bird or a very strange plane — but should they? This question is exactly what a pair of engineers in California and South Africa inadvertently answered recently when they set about re-thinking the ubiquitous tube-and-wings aircraft architecture from scratch in order to make airplanes more fuel efficient.

The modern airplane design works well, but from a fuel efficiency standpoint, could planes be designed more aerodynamically — to lower drag and increase lift? Geoffrey Spedding, an engineer at the University of Southern California, and Joachim Huyssen at Northwest University in South Africa, felt they could in theory, but they lacked experimental evidence. Now they have it…

They started with a configuration where the entire plane is one big wing. Then they added a body designed to minimize drag and, most critically, a small tail, which essentially serves to undo aerodynamic disturbances created by the body. Spedding and Huyssen analyzed the airflows and at various relative angles for the wings, body and tail, searching for ways to achieve greater lift (the better for carrying cargo) and lower drag (for higher fuel efficiency). They made the stipulation that for any given mission, the best plane is the one that generates the least drag.

The flying wings alone provide an ideal (but impractical) baseline, since it’s hard to carry people or cargo in such a shape. The presence of a body, unfortunately, immediately lowers the lift and increases the drag. The addition of just the right kind of tail, however, can restore the lift, and reduce the drag, occasionally to nearly wing-only levels…

“The most important point is that we may be wasting large amounts of fossil fuel by flying in fundamentally sub-optimal aircraft designs,” says Spedding. “At the very least, we can show that there exists an alternative design that is aerodynamically superior. One may argue that there is now an imperative to further explore this (and perhaps other) designs that could make a significant difference to our global energy consumption patterns.”

Shucks. They left out discussion of ornithopters. I’d love to see an A380 flapping it’s wings.

The Catholic Church is in a state of some confusion over reports that Pope Benedict XVI has overturned a long-standing church ban on condoms by saying that their use is acceptable in exceptional circumstances.

But it is not clear what those circumstances are. It was widely reported yesterday that the Pope has decreed condoms may be used against Aids, which would be a remarkable U-turn in the history of Catholicism. The church’s hardline stance on that has for years been heavily criticised. But some commentators suggest that the Pope seems only to be saying that the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV infections is only permissible under church teaching when they are being used by gay men…

In a series of interviews the Pope gave earlier this year he gives the example of the use of condoms by male prostitutes as “a first step towards moralisation”.

The problem is that the traditional Catholic disapproval of condoms is rooted in a long-standing teaching that contraception is not acceptable because it means that sexual acts are not “open to the transmission of life” – a law which most Western Catholics, of course, ignore. But since sex between men is not open to the production of children, the use of a condom there would clearly be only for the prevention of disease.

The key question is whether the Pope is also saying that for heterosexual couples the prevention of disease should now have primacy over the ban on contraception. That would indeed herald the start of a sea change in the church’s attitude. So far, the Pope is sending mixed messages…

The message wasn’t mixed when my family left the Catholic Church.

After the funeral, my father stepped forward to the priest and speaking on behalf of a united family he told him he could stick his church where the sun don’t shine. And they all walked out of a church that had not the least perception of human needs, the slightest concept of aiding progress in life for its parishioners.

Former Senator Alan Simpson is a Very Serious Person. He must be — after all, President Obama appointed him as co-chairman of a special commission on deficit reduction.

So here’s what the very serious Mr. Simpson said on Friday: “I can’t wait for the blood bath in April. … When debt limit time comes, they’re going to look around and say, ‘What in the hell do we do now? We’ve got guys who will not approve the debt limit extension unless we give ’em a piece of meat, real meat,’ ” meaning spending cuts. “And boy, the blood bath will be extraordinary,” he continued.

Think of Mr. Simpson’s blood lust as one more piece of evidence that our nation is in much worse shape, much closer to a political breakdown, than most people realize…

Now, you might think that the prospect of this kind of standoff, which might deny many Americans essential services, wreak havoc in financial markets and undermine America’s role in the world, would worry all men of good will. But no, Mr. Simpson “can’t wait.” And he’s what passes, these days, for a reasonable Republican.

The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation — cooperation that won’t be forthcoming…

Right now, in particular, Republicans are blocking an extension of unemployment benefits — an action that will both cause immense hardship and drain purchasing power from an already sputtering economy. But there’s no point appealing to the better angels of their nature; America just doesn’t work that way anymore…

How does this end? Mr. Obama is still talking about bipartisan outreach, and maybe if he caves in sufficiently he can avoid a federal shutdown this spring. But any respite would be only temporary; again, the G.O.P. is just not interested in helping a Democrat govern.

My sense is that most Americans still don’t understand this reality. They still imagine that when push comes to shove, our politicians will come together to do what’s necessary. But that was another country.

RTFA. Many more examples of a political party committed to power and greed above national interest.

Meanwhile, step back, folks and watch the Killer Klowns try their best to shove these United States back into a depression.