Darlings, I fully understand that Rape is a Terrible Thing, and ought not to be permitted.

What strikes me as strange is that no-one on this thread has challenged the notion that 'women are men's equals in a combat situation.'

Simply, we are not. We lack the upper body strength, and the hormonal capacity to achieve it. And if I were a soldier under fire who was forced to trust my life to the notion that this was not the case, I might be just a wee bit resentful about it.

I do not believe that this is about feminism; it is merely a biological fact. If these facts were openly acknowledged without accusations of prejudice and misogyny, perhaps a sane and rational debate could move forward.

This incident has not inspired me to support tougher gun control laws. It has inspired me to BUY A GUN, and learn to use it. If guns had not been banned on the VT campus, chances are that some of those murdered students would have had the capacity to defend themselves, and fewer people would have died.

Does anyone honestly believe that more LAWS will keep lethal weapons out of the hands of unstable people? Did LAWS keep those thirty-one students safe? Were things All Okay once the police had been called?

Government does not and cannot keep us safe. We are responsible for defending ourselves.

Please listen to Cary.

Because the world will be a sad, dark, lonely place when people who have been through travails, and have learned finally to love one another, support one another, travel through the darkness together and come out the other side, stop having children out of fear of the darkness.

It means that they will say and do whatever it takes to flog their issues ... not caring who the hell they offend, who the hell they make mad ... and whether or not what they say can be proven to be untrue.

Er...to suggest that this is purely a right-wing disease strikes me as disingenuous in the extreme. In many of the Extreme Left Wing communities I have known, 'making people angry' is counted as one of the Cardinal Rules of Ethics.

But that is tangential to the problem at hand.

As I have discussed at frivolous length in the past, the main reason that our healthcare system is ailing is that all parties involved expect to get something for nothing. This can't work. Socializing the healthcare system without addressing the root causes of spiralling healthcare costs will bankrupt the country, not provide 'free healthcare.'

What people need is access to basic, affordable preventive care, coupled with catastrophic coverage to shield them from bankruptcy in the event of devastating illness. So what is the problem with individually managed health savings accounts, perhaps subsidized by employers or government on a sliding scale, coupled with catastrophic insurance policies, subsidized the same way?

That would give individuals the maximum control over how their health is maintained and how their money is spent, giving them incentive to seek out the best care at the lowest prices, and obviating the sort of system-milking that goes on when healthcare management is turned over to insurance companies and lawyers. Government then acts as an equalizing financial force, for the purposes of risk management, not a controlling financial force, interfering with economic efficiency.

Darling, Cary knows best. This was going to be the title of my letter, but my Web browser wrote 'co-dependency kills' instead, and I let it stand.

Because it seems to me that an abusive man is essentially an unavailable man. Whatever he may say in his gentler moments, his actions are not loving, not nurturing, not those of a committed partner; an abusive man does not love you because his actions are not loving. You have gone from one unavailable man to another.

This tells me that whatever lesson you need to learn by experiencing life with an abusive man has not been learned. Until you figure out just what specific thought patterns lead you to pick unavailable men and stay with them, you will continue to repeat the same pattern.

Remember, a thought that causes you to stay with an abuser is a lie that you tell yourself, no matter how reasonable, stoic or serious it may seem. Learn what the truth is and live by it.

Is it too much to ask that a man, who was once in the running for President of this country, have the presence of mind, ethical clarity and personal charisma to declare, 'That's enough, now, would you please leave the gentleman alone! I must ask you to stop, now!' when a member of his audience is treated with unjustified brutality right in front of him?

The level of passivity endemic in this country as our civil rights are removed right in front of us is disgusting.

I stand by my previous statement that the words, "I beg your pardon! Please take your hands off this gentleman at once!" are not difficult to utter, nor to understand. If Pretty Lady can utter them in a manner which produces results, a tall and imposing figure of Authority standing on a podium in front of a microphone should have no trouble at all in producing them, to practical effect.

Mr. Obama is quite possibly one of the least intellectually lazy persons to run for President in the last half-century. He simply does not flaunt his erudition, because, in addition to being informed about a huge number of major issues about which our current president remains ignorant, he constantly adds to this store of information by actually listening to others.

Just to be very, very, very clear on that.