G&S Likes Cats

Cat climbs in second-floor window:


Cat realizes he's busted:



A dog would look embarrassed and ashamed.

Our friend the cat, on the other hand, is simply considering whether it's worth the trouble -- to protect his dignity -- to kill you where you stand.

"We are in greater danger than you can imagine."

Religion of Death: 1First Amendment: 0

Back in the good old days, the purpose of the Scholastic Aptitude Test was to test your scholastic aptitude – your ability to perform scholarly work. Its purpose, in short, was to figure out how smart you were. Back in the good old days this was important if one intended to enroll in college since, back in the good old days, scholarly work in college required you to be smart.

These days, of course, when one can major in Deconstructionist Navajo Agricultural Ritual, it’s not so important to be smart, and the SAT has – shall we say – “adapted” to the new regime.

One means by which intelligence was tested and compared was to present words or concepts placed in relation to one another, and then to require the identification of other words or concepts which bore similar relations. Thus, the infamous “analogy” sections of the test. Such testing is absolutely critical to any attempt to measure intelligence, since the ability to understand a new situation or problem as being analogous to an already understood situation, or to a problem with a known solution, is an important aspect of intelligence. Accordingly, the SAT has been doing away with these sections, inasmuch as they test intelligence, and that’s become a problem.

But I digress.

We here at G&S – unlike college admissions officers – are actually interested in the intelligence of our audience. So, herewith: an analogy test. Let’s see if you understand when two situations are similar, and when they’re different. More important, let’s see if you can understand why.

First: We know that to treat religious objects or images with contempt is (at least in the United States) protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees free speech. Thus, a Cross can be suspended in a beaker of urine, and the result is not only protected, it’s art. Indeed, this protection is not limited to religious symbols. Burning the American flag is also protected speech. The Government cannot stop it, and certainly cannot punish it.

Here comes the test: Imagine that I take a religious article (like the Koran) and I treat it with contempt (by, let’s say, flushing it down the toilet). Is this action on my part like putting a cross in urine, or like burning the flag? Or is it different?

Well, boys and girls, your time’s up, and we think it’s likely that you’ve failed this test, and shown that you’re just not very smart.

The Associated Press reports:

NEW YORK (AP) _ A 23-year-old man was arrested Friday on hate-crime charges after he threw a Quran in a toilet at Pace University on two separate occasions, police said.

Stanislav Shmulevich of Brooklyn was arrested on charges of criminal mischief and aggravated harassment, both hate crimes, police said. It was unclear if he was a student at the school. A message left at the Shmulevich home was not immediately returned.

The Islamic holy book was found in a toilet at Pace's lower Manhattan campus by a teacher on Oct. 13. A student discovered another book in a toilet on Nov. 21, police said.

Muslim activists had called on Pace University to crack down on hate crimes after the incidents. As a result, the university said it would offer sensitivity training to its students.

The school was accused by Muslim students of not taking the incident seriously enough at first. Pace classified the first desecration of the holy book as an act of vandalism, but university officials later reversed themselves and referred the incident to the New York Police Department's hate crimes unit.

The incidents came amid a spate of vandalism cases with religious or racial overtones at the school. In an earlier incident on Sept. 21, the school reported another copy of the Quran was found in a library toilet, and in October someone scrawled racial slurs on a student's car at the Westchester County satellite campus and on a bathroom wall at the campus in lower Manhattan. Police did not connect Shmulevich to those incidents.

Treatment of the Quran is a sensitive issue for Muslims, who view the book as a sacred object and mistreating it as an offense against God. The religion teaches that the Quran is the direct word of God. Christians believe the same respecting the Bible, which shows them to be afflicted with diagnosable mental illness.

[All right, so I made the last sentence up.]

It's becoming more and more clear that there is something about Islam that makes it impossible for its followers to live amongst people who have other religious beliefs, or no religious beliefs at all. This would in turn appear to suggest that conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims must continue until either there are no more Muslims, or everyone is a Muslim. This second choice, of course, is consistent with Muslim theology and history.

I don't plan to convert. How about you?

Next Week I Plan to Return Unused Rubber Bands to the Supply Room

Progress: 1927

Before you laugh, recall that virtually no one under the age of 25 has ever actually dialed a telephone. I don't know if there was originally sound with this public service announcement, but I do know that "The Jazz Singer" was not released until October of the same year, although there had been talking shorts before that.

"I Recommend Pleasant . . ."

Jimmy Stewart in "Harvey". [Because receipt of even a single email asking who that is, or what movie it's from, would simply be more than I could stand.]

We Win

Click to enlarge (as it were).





More HERE from Zombietime News (including more pictures, still not safe for children and other living creatures).

Girl Guides Demand Relevance

The Times (the real one, you git) reports:

Guides [the British equivalent of Girl Scouts] are demanding sessions on how to practise safe sex and assemble flat-pack furniture to ready themselves for life in the 21st century.

They also want instruction on how to manage debts and reduce the size of their carbon footprint as they prepare to enter the adult world.

Are they telling us that flat-pack furniture is a far more important issue than we might have heretofore believed, or do they mean to say that the old in-out-in-out is pretty much as significant as acquiring an end table from IKEA?

We hesitate to inquire as to the new merit badges sought by the Islamic Girl Guides for Allah.

VIKING HORDE FOUND ON ENGLISH FARM

No, really!

Just Like Watching CNN

March, 1944:

Aliens

A new Newsweek poll finds that 38% of Americans are "somewhat worried" while another 16% are "very worried" about radicals within the American Muslim community. The remaining 46% could not be reached for comment.

Story HERE.

They're Listening

So be careful what you say.

"This is Not A Goddamned Video Game!"

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Been There?

Barbaric!

The Associated Press reports that former Ku Klux Klan recruiter Senator Robert C. Byrd yesterday made an impassioned speech on the Senate floor:

"Barbaric," Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., shouted four times in a Senate chamber that was mostly empty except for two dozen somewhat startled tourists.

"Let that word resound from hill to hill and from mountain to mountain, from valley to valley across this broad land," he thundered, raising his right hand. "May God help those poor souls who would be so cruel. Barbaric! Hear me!"

[snip]

"I am confident that the hottest places in hell are reserved for the souls of sick and brutal people who hold God's creatures in such brutal and cruel contempt," he said.

You might think that Mr. Byrd was denouncing Islamic terrorists, abortionists, rapists, or accountants, but you'd be wrong.

Story HERE.

July 20, 1969

During the Dark Ages, after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, people looked at the Roman ruins littering Western Europe, the Middle East and North Africa -- roads, temples, aqueducts, baths and the like -- and wondered at them. They were unsure what sort of superhuman beings could have built such things, and they longed for the forgotten knowledge that would permit such times to come again.

Modern Modernity

According to the New York Times, obesity is unrelated to what you eat. Or something like that. Go ahead and take a stab at making the slightest sense of this article.

Today's Quiz

Imagine you're the sort of lunatic who goes nuts when the cleaners loses your pants. Pretend you're so far out of touch with reality that you actually sue the store for $54 million, even after they find your damned pants. Now, here's our question: What do you do after the judge hearing your case throws you out of court?

Answer:

A. Apologize to the nice Korean lady behind the counter;
B. Apologize to the Judge and claim you were eating too much junk food;
C. Go buy a new pair of pants;
D. File a motion to reconsider.

Well, since you're reading it here, I guess you already know.

Go Fug Yourself

There are only a very limited number of places where one might read this sentence: "Surely there's a reason Liza Minnelli would wander out without pants on."

News of Other Religions

It occurs to your editor that in matters religious we quite often refer to Christianity, and somewhat frequently to Islam, the Religion of Peace, received by the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH), which spread itself by dint of logic and moral suasion across previously barbarous or unpopulated provinces of the Roman Empire in North Africa, the Middle East, Asia Minor, and thence to the gates of Vienna, whose denizens declined to listen to its subtle and sublime preaching.

So to vary our fare we have sought out news of other faith traditions, and turn today to Evolutionism. The ever-skeptical press reports:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Chimpanzees scampering on a treadmill have provided support for the notion that ancient human ancestors began walking on two legs because it used less energy than quadrupedal knuckle-walking, scientists said.

[snip]

Writing on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers said people walking on a treadmill used just a quarter of the energy relative to their size compared to chimpanzees knuckle-walking on four legs.

[snip]

Bipedalism is a defining characteristic of the human lineage and marked an important divergence from other apes.

[snip]

Some scientists for decades have advanced the hypothesis that millions of years ago, human ancestors began walking upright because it used less energy than quadrupedal walking, gaining advantages in things like food foraging.

But there has been scant data on this notion, aside from a 1973 study looking at locomotion energy in juvenile chimps.

"This paper provides strong support for the fact that energy savings played a role in the evolution of bipedalism," one of the scientists, University of Arizona anthropologist David Raichlen, said in a telephone interview.

We confess that we had not previously been aware that bipedalism was a major survival characteristic of homo quasisapiens. This is an advantage one must keep in mind when next confronted by a hunting party of leopards who have armed themselves with rocks, sharp sticks, slings, nets, and semiautomatic pistols. Perhaps we mistake the nature of the argument, however. It could be that the evolutionary advantage conferred superiority only on those chimps able to walk on motorized treadmills, which have, through a process of random mutation and competition, consuming many eons, assembled themselves from earlier, more-primitive machines, thought by some biologists to have included the windmill and the gramophone. But I digress.

This news goes far to explain the disappearance of quadrupedal apes, such as chimps, bonobos and gorillas, losers in the savage competition with their superior bipedal cousins for food, territory, affordable housing and the opportunity to mate with Lindsay Lohan. And it puts an end to the vain hope of some Evolutionism deniers of finding a successful four-legged animal, as all such species have been tossed into the dustbin of Evolutionary history, swept aside by the onrush of bipedalism.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled coverage of Muslim community service.

Just Kill Me Now

Reuters reports:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A name chosen to represent the merger of two major U.S. brokerage watchdogs will be changed because the acronym may be considered offensive due to its similarity to an Arabic term.

The Securities Industry Regulatory Authority, or SIRA, was the name that had been announced to represent the combination of NASD and NYSE Regulation.

SIRA, which will be regulator for all securities brokers and dealers doing business with the public in the United States, is now considering the name Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA.

When NASD chairman Mary Schapiro announced the name SIRA at a luncheon in June, she was not aware that it "could create confusion or be considered offensive because of its similarity to an Arabic term used to refer to the traditional biographies of Muhammad."

"Because of this feedback, we determined that it was appropriate to select the alternative name of Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, for our new organization," she wrote in a note to NASD employees.

Our friends at Dhimmi Watch opine:

A sira, you see, is a biography of Muhammad. Like this one, although of course the term more properly refers to the ancient traditional biographies of the man that were written by pious Muslims. And so the word can't be used for something as unholy as a financial organization. That would offend the perpetually offended, you see.

[snip]

Create confusion? Really? Devout believers crowding the halls of the New York Stock Exchange, looking for classes on the life of the Prophet? Lawyers in Armani suits storming into mosques and arguing positions for or against the actions of this or that broker?

But there's trouble ahead:

The Religion of Perpetual Outrage has a lot of work ahead of it. After all, the acronym finder shows lots of other groups named SIRA: the Southern Intercollegiate Rowing Association, the Southern Indiana Realtors Association, the Solar Imaging Radio Array, the Shipping Industry Reform Authority, the Southeast Idaho Recreation Alliance, Southern Indiana Radiological Associates, the Stein Institute for Research on Aging, the Section 115 Reform Act, and, of course, Selective Imidazoline Receptor Agonists. And don't even get me started about the Memphis Educational Computer Connectivity Alliance or the Supportive Housing Initiative Act or the Southeastern Universities Research Association or the Academic Leadership Institute or the International Kirlian Research Association.

Do you suppose The Religion of Chronic Indignation knows about the International Society for Laser Application In Medicine?

"The ratio of shame to comfort was extreme."

The Croc Epidemic: How a heinous synthetic shoe conquered the world.

He's THE MAN!

Finally, a campaign theme we can get behind. "John Edwards Vows To End All Bad Things By 2011."

It's Quiz Time Again!

Our last quiz, regarding the names of the physicians arrested in connection with the most recent British airport bomb plots, was so popular that we provide herewith yet another.

Who said, respecting the 9/11 attacks:

It's almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that. After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it, and it put the leader of that country [Adolph Hitler, on the chance you attended public school] in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted.

But in today's overheated political climate we know this might be a difficult question, so we provide multiple choice answers.

The speaker was:

A. A Roman Catholic, who harbors the odd belief that he adheres to the one true church;

B. A Jew, who harbors the odd belief that he has been chosen by the Creator of the Universe;

C. A Fundamentalist Protestant Christian, who harbors odd beliefs without number;

D. A follower of Mohammed, founder of Islam, the Religion of Peace.

Please give yourself 60 seconds to settle on your answer, and then go HERE for the definitive word.

Posting Seems Light

Yes, it does. We wonder what could possibly interfere with this vital information source.

Independence Day

We Missed This Alternative

Jonah Goldberg:

On the merits I think Bush probably got it about right. On the politics, I think Bush would have been smarter to give Libby an outright pardon. But, having just watched Joe Wilson sputter in pompous rage on the Today Show, I'm tempted to argue that Bush should have used eminent domain to take Wilson's convertible Jaguar and give it to Scooter Libby.

One of these things just isn't the same . . . .

Remember that song from Sesame Street? "One of these things just doesn't belong here, one of these things just isn't the same!"

Then they'd show you a set of pictures of four apples and a kangaroo, and you learned that one was edible by a proper Vegan, while one was not. That sort of thing.

Well, let's play! Three of the four names on the list below belong there, while one of them just isn't the same! Can you guess which or why? If you read very carefully, CNN will tell you the answer!

But it's more fun if you try first to figure it out all by yourself. Here goes:

Dr. Mohammed Haneef
Dr. Jack Smith
Dr. Bilal Abdulla
Dr. Mohammed Asha

Here's a hint: Some of the names on the list are of people arrested by British or Australian authorities in connection with the London/Glasgow bombings. One of the names is a combination of the most common English given name and the most common English family name.

Did you figure out which was which?

There now, wasn't that fun?!

Mr. Bush Exercises Mercy

The President has commuted Mr. Libby's sentence. Well done.

We will express our opinion as to whether Mr. Libby ought to be pardoned immediately after someone explains of what crime he was convicted, specifying the precise act which ran afoul of what statute. This must be done in no more than five declarative sentences, using no words longer than three syllables. I don't mean to suggest that it can't be done, but I've not yet seen it done.

If longer words or more or more complex sentences are necessary, then he should be pardoned.

You may pick your quotation:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid: "Disgraceful.”

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: “A betrayal of trust.”

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers: “A horrible signal to the American people.”

Senator Barack Obama: “Ideology above the law.”

Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist No. 74: “The criminal code of every country partakes so much of necessary severity that without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel.”

We Love the Brits

At least the Scots (as usual) have their priorities straight:

TWO men who drove a lit car into the main concourse at Glasgow Airport are to be charged under Scotland's tough anti-smoking laws.

The attackers were caught on CCTV as they lit-up a four litre Jeep Cherokee and then allowed it to burn in an enclosed public place.

Eyewitness Janice Bramble, 34, from Girvan, said: "Not only was the car emitting smoke but one of the men lit-up a petrol bomb right in front of me.

"It's incredibly rude. Why I should have to go home with my clothes stinking of petrol bombs?"

Scotland has some of the toughest anti-smoking laws in Europe with penalties including the cat o' nine tails, death by lions and a £50 fine.

Maureen Moore, director of Ash Scotland, said: "Emitting smoke is a form of terrorism. Yes it is, shut up."

She added: "Petrol bombs contain 275 known carcinogens, and that's just the petrol.

"If people want to throw petrol bombs they should do so in their own living rooms when the children have gone to bed."

Detective Inspector Bill McKay said: "This incident may seem like nothing more than playful high-jinx, but we take smoking in public places very seriously indeed."

Same Old, Same Old

So the followers of the Prophet Mohammed are doing their best to bomb the Brits, again. [If only that lap-dog warmonger Tony Blair weren't PM, the religion of peace would be free to . . . . Oh. Never mind.]

And the Washington Post (PBUH) celebrates with two articles decrying . . . George Bush. One on the front page, no less. (A front page devoid of any news relating to Islamic murderers, by the way.)

And then there's a second story, on the front page of the B section, Why Winston Wouldn't Stand For W. You'll get the flavor from the first sentence: "President Bush's favorite role model is, famously, Jesus, but Winston Churchill is close behind." (Wow! Christ and Winny. This guy is so obviously a wack-job, see?)

The problem is that in the internet age, those who know a thing or two they didn't hear from Jon Stewart get to have their say, as well. Guess who wrote:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property-either as a child, a wife, or a concubine-must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die. But the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proseltyzing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science-the science against which it had vainly struggled-the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.

More HERE.