Nobody's Business

Mullahs in Any Dress Are Still Mullahs

Ponder the craziness and hubris of this shit for a second:

The Teheran city government installed bicycle lanes so that the city could be more 'green,' and to promote healthy lifestyles in the Islamic Republic’s capitol. However, once the lanes were installed, local Mullahs called for them to be removed. They were concerned that faithful Islamic men were being tempted to look at women's knees, which are usually exposed when they ride bicycles. The stone-age morality pigs won out, and the bike lanes were removed.

Wait… I got that whole thing wrong. It wasn't in Teheran, it was in New York City. And it wasn't Islamic stone age cult members, it was Hasids. But, in New York, you don't criticize these fundamentalist nut-bags. You do as you're bloody well told by them.

I love the sudden clarity, the lightbulb-over-the-head moment that these little thought experiments bring. I've done my share of them, but the especially fine specimen above comes courtesy of the indispensable Legal Satyricon.

TSA Keeping Us Safe By Taking Sleeping Child's Pillow

The security of our planes and airports is truly in the hands of some of the dumbest most unimaginative people on the face of the planet. The latest genius bit of security theater to emanate from the TSA is to forbid passengers from getting up during the last 60 to 90 minutes of a flight. The idea is to prevent a terrorist like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from going to the bathroom and doing something nefarious anywhere near the plane's descent. I'm sure it will never occur to Islamist scum to try to detonate their bombs, say, 93 or 120 or 206 minutes before scheduled arrival.

So, how's this for protecting us all?

Amanda Cain, 41, flew on China Eastern from Beijing to Los Angeles with her 5-year-old daughter, Emily. ... "The last hour and a half, they said we can't move at all," Ms. Cain said. "That was very hard for her. The flight attendant came by and took the pillow from her head. I didn't like that. Why did they have to wake her up? It would be better for her to sleep." Then Emily threw up, never any parent’s dream, but all the more unpleasant when the bathroom cannot be visited.

Mustn't allow children to use pillows. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: Little kids might use pillows to hide chemical bombs. But only in the last 90 minutes of a flight, of course.

Meanwhile, because even the hair-trigger perception of ethnic profiling is surely worse than allowing 300 innocent passengers and their plane to get blown up, we're going to frisk five-year-olds from China and wheelchair-bound octogenarians from New Hampshire to the possible exclusion of 22-year-old Mohammed, the engineering student from Yemen who paid cash for his one-way ticket; or Hakim, the 30-something Saudi preacher, who happens to be traveling without luggage.

Makes sense, no?

No.

Atheists "Unfit to Serve" in Seven States

According to their respective state constitutions, it is illegal for atheists to hold office in Arkansas, Maryland, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and both Carolinas.

Surely these are dormant, outdated clauses, you say? Not so fast: in Asheville, North Carolina, enraged Christians are demanding that duly-elected council member Cecil Bothwell resign because he does not believe in God. They have the state law on their side. Article 6, section 8 of North Carolina's constitution says: "The following persons shall be disqualified for office: First, any person who shall deny the being of Almighty God."

Enviro-Kids: High on Their Rocking Horse

Spike's Frank Furedi dissects the official opening video of the Copenhagen summit on climate change, and puts his finger on something that I've quietly found irritating for quite some time now.

Titled 'Please Help The World', the four-minute film opens with happy children laughing and playing on swings. A sudden outburst of rain forces them all to rush for cover. The message is clear: the climate threatens our way of life. It then cuts to a young girl who is anxiously watching one TV news broadcaster after another reporting on impending environmental catastrophes. Then we see the young girl tucked into bed, sweetly asleep as she embraces her toy polar bear… but suddenly we're drawn into her nightmare. She’s on a parched and eerie landscape; she looks frightened and desolate; suddenly the dry earth cracks and she runs in terror towards the shelter of a distant solitary tree. She drops her toy polar bear in a newly formed chasm and yells and screams as she holds on to the tree for dear life. The video ends with groups of children pleading with us: 'Please help the world.'  ...

[E]nvironmentalism has become one of the few values that educators feel comfortable with. [O]ne of Britain's leading green crusaders ... recently informed children that 'your parents and grandparents have made a mess of looking after the Earth', adding: 'They may deny it, but they are stealing your future.' Instead of serving as role models, adults are often castigated for setting a bad example to children. ...

The flipside of the devaluation of adult authority is the sacralisation of the status of the child. Increasingly, children are assigned the role of educators, charged with enlightening their misguided, greedy, stupid elders.

It seems to me that maybe this is the unfortunate followup to a spate of cultural massaging/messaging, from commercials to sitcoms and movies, that portrays men as pea-brained dolts. The wave appears to have subsided a bit, but starting in the mid-nineties, we were treated to at least a dozen years' worth of fictional male chowderheads whose limited intellects and slavish surrender to their dumb manly impulses got them into the kind of trouble from which they could only be rescued by a woman — a wise, levelheaded, superior one, of course. If you had reversed the roles, and consistently painted women as the airheads, even the most incorrigible male chauvinists might have pointed out that you were perhaps being a bit sexist.

Now that Furedi mentions it, that genre may have morphed into one in which rosy-cheeked, high-horse children go on a holier-than-thou binge, their accusatory cris de coeur against adults (men, mostly) ringing from the depths of their snow-white peewee souls.

That whole kids-are-so-morally-pure thing has never sounded very convincing to me. My own two girls (5 and 7) are lovely, but it takes nothing away from my parental delight to realize that, at their age, they're hardwired to be narcissistic little sociopaths — like 98% of their age group (linked article is satire, the underlying truth is not).

Telling tykes that everyone over 18 or 25 or 40 sucks is fine, of course, if you don't mind taking a page from the Stalinist re-education playbook. The day my kids come home to tell me, on the authority of some down-with-capitalism educator, that their mother and I are responsible for fucking up the planet, is the day I ground them for two weeks and read them a daily chapter from Lord of the Flies.

Udderly Mad

In Missouri, a farm family was put under surveillance, then prosecuted, for selling...raw milk from its own cow, Misty. Naturalnews.com notes that the contraband is nothing more or less than

...the bovine mother's milk, unpasteurized, unprocessed, non-homogenized and wholly pure, natural and innocent. The stuff America was raised on. The stuff your parents fed you when you were a kid, if your family was lucky enough to have a cow. In Missouri today, selling such a natural product is now apparently a criminal act. What's next? A ban on farm-fresh eggs because the Dept. of Health doesn't control their quality?

[thanks, Sylvia!]

Zero Tolerance = Zero Brain

In the greater Toronto area, residents can always count on the heroic feats of the DRAVIS police squad. The acronym stands for Durham Region Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy. The squad's website says the officers' goal is to "reduce violence, increase community safety and improve the quality of life for members of our communities."

So here's how they accomplish that. They routinely cruise around at night looking for people who stand outside bars waiting for a taxi service. If the car that shows up happens to be from a known designated-driver service, that's prima facie evidence of "public intoxication," which then provokes — bingo! — a $65 fine. Most recipients of a ticket are not accused of disturbing the peace, and most have spotless or near-spotless records.

The citations are part of the authorities' zero-tolerance approach to law enforcement. Never mind that the outcome is that people who indubitably do the right thing end up getting busted, thus increasing the likelihood that next time, they'll just take a chance and get behind the wheel.

The police don't see it that way. Intones Inspector Charlie Green, "It's not a mixed message. You can't be intoxicated in a public place. It's an offense."

In a just world, it would also be an offense to wear a badge without possessing a brain to go with it.

Where the Hokey Pokey is a Hate Crime

Robert Degen, the man who may have written the Hokey Pokey (the song's origins are disputed) died the other day. The Times, in his obituary, explains why some Catholics are very, very offended by the song:

Some Roman Catholic churchmen, meanwhile, have said that the words "hokey pokey" derive from "hocus pocus" — the Oxford English Dictionary concurs — and that the song was written by 18th-century Puritans to mock the language of the Latin Mass. Last year the Catholic Church in Scotland, concerned that some soccer fans were using the song as a taunt, raised the possibility that singing it should be prosecuted as a hate crime.

Are there any persons more reliably thin-skinned than those who've nursed their "God-given" victim complexes? I don't think so. Exhibit one. Exhibit two. I could go on, you know I could, but instead I'm going to spend a few minutes groovin' to this mad prog-rock classic by Dutch band Focus. I'm sorry if the title offends any Catholics.