But Luis Ignacio Planas is the Crazy One

Okie dokie.  But then there's Venezuela's far-left coalition pirate president.  Bask in the crazy.

Capitalism may be to blame for the lack of life on the planet Mars, Venezuela's socialist President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday.

Perhaps a little bird told him.

Sean Penn could not be reached for comment.

'Sadistic sex crimes on animals rise in Sweden'

Wow!  Just wow!  From The Local --

According to the Swedish Veterinary Association (Veterinärförbundet) there were around 20 reported cases of horses or cows with their sexual organs mutilated reported in 2006. By 2010 this number had doubled to 40 cases.


[...]


Niklas Långström, sex crimes expert and professor of psychiatric epidemiology at Karolinska Institutet, told TV4 that this is not a case of ordinary cruelty to animals.

“This is done by people getting a sexual kick from animals in general and of inflicting pain on them, a sexual sadistic kick, so to speak,“ he said.

Disgusting. Just a thought for the sick perps: when you've got an itch to scratch on a brisk Swedish night, you have the option to solicit the services of whores, NOT horse.

(*this and other odd images at the Small Bits and Pieces blog)

Taqiyya in the Classroom

Jed Gladstein sounds the wake-up call in American Thinker.  Here's a sampling, but read the whole thing, for the full flavour.

To a certain extent, the increasing sway of Arabs over our educational system reflects the lamentable influence of petrodollars in our economy. Textbooks are moneymakers and so are legitimate economic targets, but that doesn't explain the subversion of our history and social studies curricula. Publishers can make as much money publishing truthful accounts of Western civilization as they can by publishing pseudo-historical narratives. To understand the pro-Islamic perversions in our school textbooks, we must understand taqiyya.

I would go one step further and argue that we need to understand the subtle tactical difference between taqiyya (the dissimulation and concealment of one's convictions) and kitman (the dissimulation and concealment of one's malevolent intentions).  See Daniel Pipes piece on this topic.

As with many such cultural challenges, this is a bipartite assault.  Externally, the highly motivated political Islamists (whether they be Wahhabi, Salafist, Ikhwan, or some other militant manifestation) wish to elevate Islam in the West and weaken the ability of the West's defenders to counter or resist their messaging.  That is, taqiyya paves the way for Sharia.  In order to accomplish this goal, they must sanitize their history and sugar-coat their doctrine.

Internally, the radical Progressive left (the inheritors of Gramsci's "long march through the institutions") have been working steadily and tirelessly for decades now undermining the cultural confidence of Western societies.  In many ways, they have behaved as a fifth column.  Whether it be the imposition of social policies/ideologies such as official multiculturalism (the formalization of cultural relativism), or the pedagogical drift toward victimology in the classroom, their messaging is the same.  Western culture (indeed western civilization in toto) has everything to apologize for and nothing to celebrate.  Any expressions of cultural or civilizational confidence, in fact, will be put down sternly with a reflexive and feckless charge of "racism".  You could set your watch by it.

Yet, in spite of the obvious absurdity, the tendency of some progressives to equate opposition to -- or criticism of -- an ideology with the hatred of a person on the sole (and indefensible) basis of skin colour or ethnic background has already become regrettably commonplace.  So successfully has "the long march through the institutions" progressed.

"What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness"

Clark Whelton, former speech writer for N.Y.C. mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Guiliani, laments the infantilization of spoken English in post-adult America.

In 1988, my elder daughter graduated from Vassar. During a commencement reception, I asked one of her professors if he’d noticed any change in Vassar students’ language skills. “The biggest difference,” he replied, “is that by the time today’s students arrive on campus, they’ve been juvenilized. You can hear it in the way they talk. There seems to be a reduced capacity for abstract thought.” He went on to say that immature speech patterns used to be drummed out of kids in ninth grade.

Progressivism?  Overbearing PC pieties?  The self-esteem movement?  Elongated adolescence?  Oprahfication and the feewings culture?  Helicopter parenting?  Take your pick.

Read the rest of the article at City Journal, and see if it resonates.  (Do you remember, like, up-talk?  J'yah.)

The War of the Poses Returns

I'm informed, via Blazing Cat Fur, that the cease-fire has been broken. The pin-up war is on.

So, because it's Saturday Night, because I'm not doing anything else right now, and (mostly) because it's Billie Piper ...

Well, they'll stone you if you try to cast your vote ...

An Egyptian referendum on constitutional reform is reportedly drawing larger than expected crowds. That's the good news. Now the bad news.

Egypt's prominent opposition figure Mohammed El Baradei was attacked Saturday by stones and bricks thrown from crowds when he arrived at a polling station to vote on the constitutional amendments in Cairo, Xinhua informed.

A crowd of people shouted "We don't want you" when Baradei came out of his car at a polling station in the El Mokatam area in the capital, witnesses told Xinhua. [editor's note: a not so subtle hint that some young Egyptians perhaps view El Baradei as ... well ... the Iggy of Egypt -- the tourist politician who's really just visiting.]

People then threw stones at him as he retreated into his car. He left without casting his vote.

Baradei, who intended to run for the presidential polls, has said he would vote against constitutional amendments and called for a new constitution.

Flash mob attacks: they're not just for Coptic Christians and western journalists anymore. In the post-Mubarak/pre-Ikhwan Egypt, "everybody must get stoned."

New from the American Institute for Wanking in the Social Sciences

Or, as Kate MacMillan might say --  'Soon to be Published in the Journal of the Blatantly Obvious.'

Youngsters say they like the taste of a breakfast cereal more when there's a popular character on the box, a small study indicates. CTV

But worry not. The social engineers have been hard at work to correct this, with some success apparently.

Vaala said the kids sampled the same cereal from one of four boxes -- labelled either "Healthy Bits" or "Sugar Bits," and with or without penguins from the movie "Happy Feet" shown on the box.

The product was an organic crunch cereal with six grams of sugar per serving that was likely to be unfamiliar to the children by sight and taste.

"They all tasted the same cereal, and the results showed that when there was no character on the box, children who saw the 'healthy' cereal box liked the taste more than children who saw the sugary cereal box with no character," Vaala said.

"So we thought this is a positive, favourable finding that these health cues, these messages for kids to eat healthy foods, seems to be resonating ... However, when there was a character on the box, these health cues didn't matter. Children liked the cereal a lot, regardless of whether the cereal sounded healthy or unhealthy."

Islamic States Apartheid Week

Surely, turnabout is fair play.