Why can't a woman be more like a man?

Does anyone else think that the court martial of the woman B-52 pilot is actually an elaborate practical joke? I mean, I thought it was amusing that they were charging an unmarried woman with adultery, but today's NY Times says that another part of the charge is conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.

Speaking of conduct unbecoming, there's a new biography out of Viscount Melbourne, the British prime minister 1834-41. Evidently he beat up his wife and his mistresses pretty regularly, but really got off on whipping children. He encouraged his friends and relatives to leave their children with him so he could "educate" them. He actually had discussions with young Queen Victoria about this. She thought that the practice of beating school boys was degrading, while he said that Eton hadn't flogged him enough. This was before the birth of Victoria's children, so she may have changed her mind later. Edward could probably have benefited from a good paddling in his 50s.

Speaking of mad, bad and dangerous to know (actually originally said about Lord Byron, whose mistress Melbourne's wife had once been--he beat her up too--and who wrote the first vampire literature in the English language)(ok, it's not a great segue, but it's still a segue), Romania has lately taken up Vlad Draculya as a national hero and is quite pissed off at all the fuss over the 100th anniversary of Bram Stoker's little book.

Speaking of not treating your citizens very well at all, it seems that 5,000 Russian soldiers are now dying each year. 1,000 are suicides, the rest are, well, hazing. Really really bad hazing.

And speaking of soldiers behaving badly, I trust you are all following the newly-released British intercepts of German radio messages in 1941, indicating that it was not the SS but ordinary German police (well, occupation police, but still police) who killed most of the Jews in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, starting at the very beginning of the invasion of Russia. This could bring those Holocaust figures up another million.