Obama shows his customary judgement - decides to trust North Korea

From the the Oh Please Give Me a Break Department:  North Korea agrees to stop nuclear tests.

From the Are You Smoking Crack? Department:  "Welcoming the progress, President Barack Obama's administration said it would move ahead on a long-mulled plan to deliver 240,000 metric tons of food aid(.)"

Klavan on Islam...

" it’s a religion, a metaphysical philosophy of life, and has to be open to question, debate, ridicule and attack like every other."

What he said.  Whole post is here.

America continues to reap what the Baby Boomers sowed

"No one wants to be uncool, but the end result of the Tyranny of Hip is tyranny."

Read the whole thing.

Oliver Stone's son converts to Islam in Iran

He seems to have a theologically interesting view of the matter:  "The conversion to Islam is not abandoning Christianity or Judaism, which I was born with."

Good luck with that at the blasphemy trial, Ali.

The Telegraph article here.

Fear of Islamic Violence Spreads

Hamas leadership is moving to Qatar:

"Hamas leaders no longer felt safe as the violence spread to Damascus."

Why am I smiling?  Radical depravity, I suppose.

From the Jerusalem Post.

Feeding people to wild animals.

What kind of society requires humans to request permission to defend themselves from a ferocious animal that is eating their women and children alive? What kind of society refuses that permission?

From London's Telegraph:  Leopard Kills Fifth Girl in Nepal.

In the latest attack, the unnamed teenager was cutting grass in the forest near her home in Baitadi district, on the border with India, when she was attacked by the animal, said Bishnu Bahadur Karki, a local deputy superintendent of police.

"The locals found the body torn into pieces and eaten below the neck at the forest area yesterday," he told AFP.

Fifth girl.  Not including the three victims the same leopard has eaten across the border in India. 

And it gets better (emphasis added):

"We requested the district forest office to allow us to kill it but they refused, saying that the law does not provide such permission," Karki told AFP.

"Our request to have the leopard handed over to a zoo has also been rejected."

Spengler on American Education's Systematic Child Abuse

In the Asia Times Online:

"The grand result of a generation's worth of brain-science application is a generation of schoolchildren who are disproportionately illiterate, innumerate, anxious, angry, and unhappy."

Read the whole thing.  And weep if you trusted your children to these fools and charlatans.

The Grey - Movie Review - Nasty, Brutish, and Shoulda Been Shorter

The Grey stars Liam Neeson as a nihilistic old codger with a rifle and no good reason he can think of not to stick it in his own mouth. And a bunch of CGI super-wolves. The story is set in Alaska, but I understand the breathtaking shooting location is actually Canada. Good actors, good cinematography, good location, okay CGI effects, and an audience ready to see Liam Neeson do some more of his reluctant-but-super-capable-action-hero thing. This movie should satisfy. But it doesn't. By the time it's all over, you can't help but think the nihilistic old codger should have pulled the trigger and saved us all a couple hours. Long before it's over, on the other hand, you realize the movie-makers are selling you something funky, and they only promised you an action movie to sucker you into the theater.

I read that some animal rights activist objects to The Grey because wolves don't act in real life the way they are portrayed in the movie. It's sensible to ignore opinions of animal rights activists, but the fellow has a minor point. I imagine wolves do not, in fact, act the way the wolves act in this movie. But he should relax and look at the bright side. If he wants people to think animals are as good as people, this movie can work for his cause. Not because the wolves are nice; they aren't. But in this movie neither are the people. And the guy whose job it is to protect the rest of the oil crew refers to himself as a "hired killer" because he shoots dangerous animals that are attacking his fellow-man. If that isn't laying philosophical ground work for PETA, nothing is.

I've never been to a remote oil field but I have a hard time believing a company would hire these men, or run this kind of canteen, in a multi-billion dollar, high-tech facility. The workers are all dead-enders - drunks, ex-cons, broken men, the scum of the earth. And the company bar where these desperate men drink and fight looks like a cross between a Hells Angels clubhouse and the joint where Han Solo shot that alien under the table. In this economy you should be able to find a better crew for $150K blue collar jobs, but I suppose if the company recruiters did a better job this movie couldn't keep beating you over the head with its vile message. The fake wolves aren't evil, you see, they're just man's alter-ego. And unlike the men in this movie the wolves actually have a purpose in this bitter, wind-swept panorama. They're there to prove nothing men do will keep them from being eaten alive in an ice-cold and merciless, malevolent universe. Naturally and by the way, the major message here is that there is no God, and also he really hates you. This could go without saying but, just in case the audience is slow on the uptake, the characters spout all sorts of materialistic fatalism. Repeatedly. Even after there aren't any other characters left to spout it to.

Are you a self-absorbed baby boomer? Have things have gone so poorly for you, you've decided the universe sucks? Do you roll your eyes when simple-minded religious types talk about things like "faith"? This is the action flick for you.

Post-Sunday School Man

To open the door but never to step through it; to notice the modern Berlin Wall but never to challenge it; to observe the fact of the slavery and never once mention it since that would be judgmental — that is the hallmark of today’s post-Sunday School Man.

Fernandez is on a role.

Rioting arsonists should be shot by police, review finds

You don't say.

From the Telegraph.

Public Sector meets the Public Dole

The British government has proposed slowing the rate of growth in the generous pay of civil servants to the extent that they may (after a few years) have salaries not much higher than private sector workers.  Their pensions and other benefits of course will still far exceed those of the lowly subjects they, uhm, serve.  The London Telegraph covers the resulting riots.

Take these clowns and add them to the feces-encrusted "Occupiers" currently snarling traffic in many Western cities and you have a classic symptom of Western civilization's current social cancer.  The pigs at the public trough (whether government workers, or students who borrowed too much money to take degrees that are of no particular value to anyone) are furious that the rest of us want their help in paying for the operation of their gravy trains.

"Climate science is ... the teenage girl of science."

Tim Blair being Tim Blair at the Telegraph.  Good stuff as usual.

Roger Kimball reviews "The Opium of the Intellectuals". 

The primary target of Aron’s polemic was fanaticism. But he also recognized that the defeat of fanaticism often leads to a contrary spiritual sickness, indifference. Both are expressions of the ultimate enemy, nihilism. Skepticism, Aron wrote, is useful or harmful depending on which is more to be feared at the moment: fanaticism or apathy. The intervening faculty that orients us appropriately is practical wisdom, prudence, “the god” (Aron quotes Burke) “of this lower world.”

I read part of the book after Jonah Goldberg mentioned it at The Corner a few years ago.  I remember it was hard to get (it took a while for my library to get it on inter-library loan).  I liked it but never finished.  It's an English translation of a French work on philosophy/sociology and I found it heavy going.  I just couldn't put in the time.

What if they're just practicing?

I was just over at PJMedia, reading Jack Dunphy's thoughts on "Occupy LA", when a thought occurred to me about the public disruptions carried out by these urine-soaked Occupards:  This sort of thing will be useful in the 2012 elections.  In the last presidential election there were some cases of voter intimidation carried out by the New Black Panthers against Republican leaning polling stations.  Those clear cases were then dropped by the DOJ.  These black racists got away with threatening voters at their assigned voting places on election day.

Would it shock anyone if, next November on election day, groups of feces-encrusted Occupards showed up at (only) Republican-leaning polling places to disrupt the voting?  In a close election, intimidating people at a couple hundred Republican polling places in swing states could make a difference.

In case you need to justify it...

Top Five Reasons to Be a Commie Pinko

Why there is still hope for America...

"(D)espite the mistakes in Washington DC, America finds itself at the top of a heap of nations which have managed to outblunder it." - Richard Fernandez (Wretchard)

I love a good turn of phrase.

Read the whole thing.

Twenty-Seven?

Good morning, Agim. I hope that you, and all of your readers, enjoy the item I just posted on my Knight's Castle blog. It's linked to the title of this piece, or you can get it here.

It's a short piece, and pretty sketchy, so I thought I'd use this space to expand upon one point.

Herman Cain claims that his "9-9-9" proposal is simple, transparent, and neutral. There is one big exception to the apparent simplicity and transparency. Cain's plan leaves capital gains completely out of the mix. 9% across the board, with no exemptions or deductions for personal income; 9% for corporate tax, without loopholes or exception; a 9% national sales tax, without exceptions for food or medicine; but 0% for income derived from speculation and the profitable sale of assets.

I don't buy the argument that some forms of income should be privileged, particularly when capital gains benefit primarily people who don't need more benefits.

Coulter on the Death Penalty

In the matter of the execution of the recently late Mr. Davis:

It's nearly impossible to receive a death sentence these days -- unless you do something completely crazy like shoot a cop in full view of dozens of witnesses in a Burger King parking lot, only a few hours after shooting at a passing car while exiting a party.

That's what Troy Davis did in August 1989. Davis is the media's current baby seal of death row.

A brief history of Palestine

In case you need to brush up on your 20th Century Israeli/Palestinian history:



HT: Powerlineblog

America's first European President?

Concerning Europe, Brett Stephens writes:

"(T)here is always a danger in substituting grandiosity for achievement, mistaking pronouncements for facts, or, more generally, believing in your own nonsense." 

He could be describing Barrack Obama.