School is in Session

Stories HERE and HERE.

Back in the day, we filled Rutgers Stadium on those rare occasions when someone like Ed Marinaro was coming to town. Now, concern is expressed that our kicker missed a 56-yard field goal attempt, and that our wide receiver might want to gain some weight. Or maybe not:

All True

From the best website I discovered today - indexed.

H/T, the best website I discovered a while ago, the Freakonomics blog.

How Ya' Gonna Keep 'Em . . . .

That's a map of Manhattan, of course. Almost certainly the most expensive real estate on earth. Certainly among the most intensely urban tracts on the planet. With 1.5 million folks packed into 23 square miles, it is the most densely populated county in the United States -- more than 2,100 people per acre.

So what are those red dots?

They represent people who receive subsidies from the Government of the United States.

Farm subsidies.

Would we lie to you? We would not. More HERE.

Some Things Never Get Old

Profiling?

Mark Steyn muses:

If Senator Craig had gone into the stall, rolled out his prayer mat, yelled "Allahu Akbar!" and been observed attempting to weaponize the ballcock, the undercover cop would have shrugged, "Do I really want to get stuck with another four-week stint in Sensitivity Training hell?" and gone about his business.

Smokin' Babe

More HERE.

The President Speaks

The President has suggested that our only choices may be "an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran."

No -- not that president, you twit: this president.

Take Me Back to Mayberry

Pandas?

Giant panda Mei Xiang enjoys her afternoon nap at the National Zoo in Washington, Aug. 23, 2007. (Kevin Lamarque /Landov)

What's A Nice Girl Like You . . . .

"The first time you get blown up by an IED, you're like, Dude, this is badass! but after that you're like, This really is not cool at all anymore. But riding out there, getting shot at, shooting back -- that doesn't get old."

From the real world. Read the whole thing on Notes From Downrange, "Spec. Alison K: I Guess I've Done My Duty." We guess so too.

Report Yourself to the Thought Police at Once

You may not have seen this cartoon (click to enlarge) in your local paper. It makes fun of Muslims, and therefore . . . . We ask the usual questions as to whether those same papers censor cartoons (or news articles, for that matter) that slander Christianity or Judaism. And we ask what the test might be. What is it that distinguishes Islam from Christianity in the minds of newspaper editors? Has it something to do with explosives?

[Yes, we know. The cartoon doesn't actually make fun of Muslims. As a matter of fact, it attributes to the Religion of Death several admirable attributes. No matter.]

From Editor & Publisher.

[UPDATE] Among the brave defenders of freedom of the press is our very own Washington Post.

Sexual Ethics

From "The Ethicist" column in today's New York Times Magazine:

I am a lawyer. During a first date with another lawyer, we had sex, and I wore a condom. Days later, when I came down with a bad fever and couldn’t determine the cause, she revealed that she had genital herpes. A judgeship will soon open up in her county, and she’s a near lock for it. But if I report her lapse of sexual ethics, I doubt that the selection committee will pick her. Should I? — NAME WITHHELD

The sophisticated Randy Cohen, the Times ethics guru, responds that (of course) this "lapse" ought not to be disclosed since "being unscrupulous in bed does not presage being inept on the bench."

If only there were some agreed upon set of qualifications for judicial office, so that one might know that a particular candidate was likely to be "inept" or not. One might have thought that since judges, well, "judge," a function which sometimes involves the exercise of, er, uhmm, "judgment," it might follow that someone with the morals of a feral cat did not have precisely the optimal skill set.

But that's just us.

Of course, only the militantly atheist New York Times could have a regular feature on "ethics" entirely divorced from religion. We're pretty sure that, in that reality-free environment, the touchstone is whether something or someone is nice and, if so, then it's ethical. After all -- in the final analysis, as Mammy Yokum taught us, good is better than evil because it's nicer.

Note to Homeowners: Shoot First

Because if you don't, then that fellow who climbed through your window is apparently entitled to live in your house:



More HERE. I've become accustomed to overfed, underworked, rich American kids having come to believe that the world owes them a living. I guess I didn't notice when the world decided that we owed it a living as well.

Figures Don't Lie . . .

. . . but . . .

You know where this is going: HERE.

Life Lessons

Bears Eat Man at Beer Festival

BELGRADE, Serbia (Reuters) -- A 23-year old Serb was found dead and half-eaten in the bear cage of Belgrade Zoo at the weekend during the annual beer festival.

The man was found naked, with his clothes lying intact inside the cage. Two adult bears, Masha and Misha, had dragged the body to their feeding corner and reacted angrily when keepers tried to recover it.

"There's a good chance he was drunk or drugged. Only an idiot would jump into the bear cage," zoo director Vuk Bojovic told Reuters.

Local media reported that police found several mobile phones inside the cage, as well as bricks, stones and beer cans.

Punishment Optional

My father used to tell me that if you can't do the time, don't do the crime. When that phrase later became famous, I wondered who'd overheard my dad.

In Norway, however, it turns out that "doing the time" is optional: About 20% of convicted criminals simply fail to show up to serve their sentence. And the reason's not far to see:

The dilemma facing the prison authorities is that failure to show up at prison is not yet illegal. Although Parliament has passed new legislation making it a criminal offence to skip prison, the law has not yet been implemented and until it is, prison authorities can do nothing but hope that the criminals will eventually show up at the prison gates.

Some system. From tomorrow's Aftenposten.

Fundamentalists

The Empire Previously Known as the Soviet Union was founded on a comprehensive set of beliefs as thoroughgoing as any other religion: Communism. This was not simply an economic theory or a new way of analyzing the world. No, indeed. This was a complete set of wholly scientific knowledge that, if applied to human activity, would result in peace, happiness and propserity. It was true in the same sense that chemistry or arithmetic is true.

Accordingly, if Red Star Tractor Factory #5 was organized according to the principles of scientific Communism, then it necessarily would produce 50 flawless machines daily. If, in fact, it failed to do so, then it was because of saboteurs, counter-revolutionaries, and the like. It had to be so, since their faith in Communism told the commissars that it must be so. And millions of innocents died for their sins.

The West today is similarly ruled by a rigid ideology, held as the fundamental explanation of the Universe by the intellectual elites in our government, media, and universities. Were an archaeologist to uncover evidence that suggested that Jesus Christ never existed, faithful Christians would nod and wonder what the real explanation was, confident that their Lord was still The Lord. Similarly, our Secular Fundamentalists are unmoved by data, and all evidence supports their belief. Indeed, some information would be so confusing to the mass of citizens, so likely to be taken by the ignorant to disprove a tenet of Secular Orthodoxy, that it is hidden from them, like some medieval Cardinal of the Church of Rome, fearful lest the laity themselves read Scripture. Surely no end of confusion and discord would ensue.

Which brings us to our text for today, from Mark Steyn:

When Matthew Shepard was beaten and hung on a fence in Wyoming, Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times that it was merely the latest stage in a "war" against homosexuals loosed by the forces of intolerance. Mr. Shepard's murder was dramatized in plays and movies and innumerable songs by Melissa Etheridge, Elton John, Peter, Paul and Mary, etc. The fact that this vile crucifixion was a grisly one-off and that American gays have never been less at risk from getting bashed did not deter pundits and politicians and lobby groups galore from arguing that this freak case demonstrated the need for special legislation.

By contrast, there's been a succession of prominent stories with one common feature that the very same pundits, politicians and lobby groups have a curious reluctance to go anywhere near. In a New York Times report headlined "Sorrow And Anger As Newark Buries Slain Youth," the limpidly tasteful Times prose prioritized "sorrow" over "anger," and offered only the following reference to the perpetrators: "The authorities have said robbery appeared to be the motive. Three suspects – two 15-year-olds and a 28-year-old construction worker from Peru – have been arrested."

So, this Peruvian guy was here on a green card? Or did he apply for a temporary construction-work visa from the U.S. Embassy in Lima?

Not exactly. Jose Carranza is an "undocumented" immigrant. His criminal career did not begin with the triple murder he's alleged to have committed, nor with the barroom assault from earlier this year, nor with the 31 counts of aggravated sexual assault relating to the rape of a 5-year-old child, for which Mr. Carranza had been released on bail. (His $50,000 bail on the assault charge and $150,000 bail on the child-rape charges have now been revoked.) No, Mr. Carranza's criminal career in the United States began when he decided to live in this country unlawfully.

Jose Carranza isn't exactly a member of an exclusive club. Violent crime committed by fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community is now a routine feature of American life. But who cares? In 2002, as the "Washington Sniper" piled up his body count, "experts" lined up to tell the media that he was most likely an "angry white male," a "macho hunter" or an "icy loner." When the icy loner turned out to be a black Muslim named Muhammad accompanied by an illegal immigrant from Jamaica, the only angry white males around were the lads in America's newsrooms who were noticeably reluctant to abandon their thesis: Early editions of the New York Times speculated that Muhammad and John Lee Malvo were being sought for "possible ties to 'skinhead militia' groups," which seemed a somewhat improbable alliance given the size of Mr. Muhammad's hair in the only available mug shot. As for his illegal sidekick, Malvo was detained and released by the INS in breach of their own procedures.

Read the whole thing.

Western Beasts

"They do not care about covering their private parts. Even their underwear is colored and not white, so it can conceal all that filth."

Just for the record, we do not wear colored underwear. But we suppose Sheik Muhammad Al-Munajid, a Saudi cleric, wouldn't like us much, either.

According to the sheik (and far may it be from us to bandy words with a learned man of the cloth), shari'a includes "almost 70 rules about how to urinate and defecate."

My wife has 3 or 4 rules about the toilet seat, and I can't remember any of them. It's a wonder these guys don't just spontaneously explode while trying to remember Rule # 53.

From MEMRI: transcript or video clip, choose your poison.

And, by the way: how come he can call me a "western" beast, but I'm being insensitive if I use the words "eastern" or "oriental?" Earlier this week I was trying to describe a young woman whose antecedents had emigrated from Delhi and, after a period of embarrassed stammering, decided to call her a "subcontinental."

h/t to Miss Kathy.

G & S Loves Legos

What -- you may ask -- on God's Green Earth is that thing?

We cannot express just how delighted we are that you've asked. It's a rubber-band gun, silly:

More HERE.

Are There Bathrooms?

The Daily Telegraph reports on a poll in which over 1,000 British tourists were asked to name the ten most disappointing tourist attractions. Guess which one came out on top, described as being "frustratingly overcrowded and overpriced?"



While you're pondering that, here's the rest of the list:

2) The Louvre (Mona Lisa)
3) Times Square
4) Las Ramblas, Spain
5) Statue of Liberty
6) Spanish Steps, Rome
7) The White House
8) The Pyramids, Egypt
9) The Brandenburg Gate, Germany
10) The Leaning Tower of Pisa

One wonders what the Brits were hoping to find in Times Square, but didn't.

There's a separate list of disappointing tourist spots in Britain itself, as well as a "will not disappoint" list, topped by Alnwick Castle (which [By Gad!] is still owned by the Percy's):

Oh Canada!

Where else could a fellow named Corey Crow Spreads His Wings be apprehended by Sgt. Jeff Deringer? Indeed.

Ripped From The Headlines

Washington Post headline:

Arctic Ocean Getting Warm;
Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt

From November 2, 1922.

And, winning our "overwhelming evidence of climate change" contest, it turns out that somebody was reading the thermometer wrong.

Bleeding Edge Recycling News

Japan's Mainichi Shimbun reports:

A plumbing blunder at Hiroshima University's Higashi-Hiroshima Campus resulted in water for toilet flushing being sent to drinking taps for more than a decade, it has emerged.

University officials announced the mix-up on Friday. The problem was uncovered after about 80 students at the campus who drank the water in July fell ill, with symptoms including vomiting and diarrhea.

Officials said the pipes for high quality drinking water and low grade toilet flushing water at the gymnasium on the campus had been attached the wrong way around. They said it was believed the pipes had been fitted incorrectly since the gymnasium was completed in April 1993.

We don't make up the news. We don't have to.

This Would Explain a Lot

Dr. Nick Bostrom, the director of something called the "Future of Humanity Institute" at Oxford University, tells us: “My gut feeling . . . is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”

From today's New York Times.

We have to go now, we'll be sitting at home hoping for a call from Trinity.

Bill Kristol on The Daily Show

Last night:

Your Federal Men in Action

The Knoxville News Sentinel reports:

Acting under the authority of the Patriot Act, the [FBI] agents had obtained a search warrant that allowed them to clandestinely enter the property, search for evidence and not tell anyone about it until the government or a judge was ready to let the owners know they’d been there.

The story describes the execution of a "sneak & peak" warrant, a particularly useful technique when the bosses and accomplices of the target can be expected to destroy evidence and themselves run for cover at the first sign of attention from the authorities. A critical tool when the ultimate object of the investigation is to prevent some atrocity, or to bag the individuals actually responsible, rather than their underlings.

And what was this particular sneak & peak, Patriot Act search related to? Terrorism? Foreign intelligence? Organized crime?

Not exactly.

Separated at Birth?

Via Go Fug Yourself, HERE and HERE.

The Vision Thing

ABC News publishes this quotation:

"The problem for me with the other candidates is I don't know what it is that drives them," [Elizabeth Edwards] says. "I should think the president has to be somebody who has that kind of vision outside themselves."

Husband John, of course, has a vision of, well, it includes, something like, sort of, if you know what he means, kind of like John Edwards as President. Yeah! That's it!

[You thought we were going to make a hair joke, didn't you?]

Those Wacky African Pranksters!

ADELAIDE, Australia - An Australian farmer held hostage in Mali for 12 days by a gang of men who had posed as an online love interest has urged others to be careful when seeking romance on the Internet.

Des Gregor, 56, traveled to the West African nation last month to meet his supposed bride, whom he had met on the Internet, and collect a dowry of gold bars worth $85,000.

But when he arrived, the wheat and sheep farmer was abducted by a gang of armed bandits who bound him, beat him with a machete and stole his cash and credit cards.

I know that, for me, this is a cautionary tale.

Educational Film

I think there are valuable lessons for all of us in this video:

Let's Think This Through

The Brits may want to reconsider certain of their traditional constitutional provisions. Did you know, for example, that marrying this woman:

disqualifies her husband from being King of England? On the other hand, marrying this woman does not:



We promise we didn't make this up. Story HERE.

Just So

"It's really a shame, because if you're a woman, then there's nothing you can change about yourself to do better."

Not Exactly

Tonight! On Larry King Live:

Men who have surgery to become women, women who become men. I go inside the world of transgender people.

If only. Suppose I glue a rhinoceros horn to the middle of my forehead, then I'm a unicorn, right? Or am I only a rhinoceros? I'm so confused.

Because It's Hard to be A Hero

James Robbins writes today:

Invented atrocities usually demonize the enemy. That makes sense – it is normal in war to think that the bad guys are capable of anything. We are fortunate in the war on terrorism in being faced with an enemy we don’t have to stigmatize. Al Qaeda’s principle war-fighting method involves killing noncombatants en masse, and they further make the case for us by videotaping their acts of torture and brutality and posting them on the web. You don’t need a master propagandist to spin evil out of beheading helpless hostages.

But:

Jesse MacBeth claimed to be an Army Ranger, admitted to having executed children while interrogating their parents, shot down rock-throwing protesters, and slaughtered hundreds of worshippers in a mosque. None of that was true. Former Marine Jimmy Massey says he either killed children and civilians personally, witnessed the killings, or heard about them, depending on which story he is telling at the moment. Korean War Veteran Edward Lee Daily came forward in the 1990s claiming to be present at the killings at No Gun Ri, as well as being a lieutenant, a POW, and wounded by shrapnel, all lies. These men are spiritual descendants of the troops interviewed in Mark Lane’s 1970 shocker Conversations with Americans, the book that spurred the “Winter Solider” investigations that brought John Kerry to prominence. It contained a number of confessions by Vietnam veterans who had participated in a variety of gruesome activities, vividly portrayed. The problem was, the confessions were false, and the book was a sham. But it ushered in this new kind of invented atrocity story, aimed not at the enemy but at the United States.

And besides, making stuff up is so much safer than doing the things that real heroes do.

No Comment

Let's assume, just for purposes of argument -- hypothetically speaking -- that you're an elderly Congressman of always limited intelligence, whose career has been based entirely upon fleecing the taxpayers of other districts in order to pay off your constituents to vote for you. Let's assume further that, in your declining years, you decide to cap your sleazy tenure in office by taking a stab at "relevance" by having a go at the latest Democrat slander du jour. Let's say you decide to grab some headlines by accusing some Marines of being murderers, and implying that your grim assessment is based on inside information, since you're an important Congressman and, besides, you were yourself once a jarhead, back before treason and being a part of the kleptocracy become more profitable for you.

What do you do when a thorough investigation of the facts reveals that there was no wrongdoing at all?

Well, if you're Jack Murtha, Porker King, then you have NO COMMENT. Can't be running off at the mouth when there's one of them-there "ongoing investigations," don't you know.

It Works For Me

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A giant, smiling Lego man was fished out of the sea in the Dutch resort of Zandvoort on Tuesday.

Workers at a drinks stall rescued the 2.5-meter (8-foot) tall model with a yellow head and blue torso.

"We saw something bobbing about in the sea and we decided to take it out of the water," said a stall worker. "It was a life-sized Lego toy."

A woman nearby added: "I saw the Lego toy floating toward the beach from the direction of England."

The toy was later placed in front of the drinks stall.

Global Warming News

Surface temperature monitoring stations have recorded about a one-degree rise over the last 100 years.

Unless they haven't.

Lolterizt!

Lolcats are so last year; the whole meme has a damp mustiness about it.

Next wave? Lolterizt, courtesy of those sick puppies at IMAO:




G&S certifies that no cats were harmed in the production of these images mocking the R.O.P.

Well, Sure -- But Can She Cook?

Girl on the Right expresses her radical feminist side while vacationing in Vegas:



H/T to Ms. Kathy, who's positively stamping her foot with envy.

Not Funny

Don't you ever do this. It would be mean. It makes a big mess, and you know damned well you won't be the one to clean it up. And it's childish, and not funny at all.

Whatever Happened to Sausage & Extra Cheese?

While disturbing in so many ways, the use of ketchup on cocktail-frank pizza is most alarming. (Yes, we said cocktail franks.)

Surprised?

Polls be damned. We're going to have to start paying attention to Amazon.com's "What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing Items Like This?" feature. For any item you're presently viewing, it tells you what other people actually ended up buying. Mostly it reveals (duh!) that folks bought the thing you're looking at. What's more interesting is to look at what was purchased by those who didn't.

If you look at this edition of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables," for example, you'll learn that while 90% bought it, and most of the rest decided to take either a different edition or the sound track from the musical, fully 3% instead bought "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." Do we suppose they're both on some sort of "reluctant heroes" reading list?

(Everyone who looked at "Harry Potter," by the way, bought, well, Harry Potter.)

It's a game any number can play, and it's fun for the whole family. But, since you asked, our own favorite is al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." Mostly these lookers bought one or another product bearing the al Gore fabular trade mark. But fully two-thirds of those who didn't instead found what they were looking for in "The Secret," a movie (heretofore unknown to us), described thusly:

The Secret is a feature length movie presentation which reveals The Great Secret of the universe. It has been passed throughout the ages, traveling through centuries... This is The Secret to everything - the secret to unlimited joy, health, money, relationships, love, youth: everything you have ever wanted. All the resources you will ever need to understand and live The Secret. The world's leading scientists, authors, and philosophers will reveal The Secret that utterly transformed the lives of every person who ever knew it... Plato, Newton, Carnegie, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Einstein.

Not only that, it comes with a (how did we know?) can't-miss endorsement: As seen on Oprah and Larry King.

Al's clearly found his milieu.

Just Die

The Times (the real one, you twit) reports that our environmental masters now command not only that we're not to drive our cars, but that your evening walk is killing the planet:

Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated.

Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes.

Some day the planet will have been environmentally perfected; there just won't be anyone left to visit the exhibit.

First, There Was "Les Miserables"

I remember thinking that I must have misunderstood when I first learned that someone was making a musical from Victor Hugo's endless 19th Century novel. The thing would have to be 5 hours long, and who the heck could write music that went with chasing through the sewers of Paris?

Shows what I know.

So maybe "Jihad The Musical" will be a wild success. Here's a little ditty from the British production called "I Wanna Be Like Osama:"



It goes without saying that the usual suspects are enraged with a harmless musical, while they ponder the complex moral questions presented by suicide bombers. More HERE.

At Last: Inspiration Not Just for Episcopalians Anymore

More HERE. And we freely give credit where credit is due. You know who you are.

Too Many Pop Tarts

We've all been here, the dreaded Windows Blue Screen of Death:


But how to explain this to your grandchildren:



Of course, it may well be that acquisition of such a work of art has a profound effect on one's opportunity to reproduce, and hence the likelihood of grandchildren.

More HERE.

Gentleman Farmer's Birthday Is A Mere 331 Days Away

Consider the Lego Millennium Falcon.
Note: Limit 5 per customer.