Read it.

An article in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Play details not only how much children’s play time has declined, but how this lack of play affects emotional development, leading to the rise of anxiety, depression, and problems of attention and self control.

“Since about 1955 … children’s free play has been continually declining, at least partly because adults have exerted ever-increasing control over children’s activities,” says the author Peter Gray, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology (emeritus) at Boston College. Gray defines “free play” as play a child undertakes him- or her-self and which is self-directed and an end in itself, rather than part of some organized activity.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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A huge early Celtic calendar construction has been discovered in the royal tomb of Magdalenenberg, nearby Villingen-Schwenningen in Germany’s Black Forest. This discovery was made by researchers at the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum at Mainz in Germany when they evaluated old excavation plans. The order of the burials around the central royal tomb fits exactly with the sky constellations of the Northern hemisphere.

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That squeaky sound you hear is me trying not to laugh out loud, which would be insensitive.

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Occupy Wall Street protesters said yesterday that packs of brazen crooks within their ranks have been robbing their fellow demonstrators blind, making off with pricey cameras, phones and laptops — and even a hefty bundle of donated cash and food.

“Stealing is our biggest problem at the moment,” said Nan Terrie, 18, a kitchen and legal-team volunteer from Fort Lauderdale.

“I had my Mac stolen — that was like $5,500. Every night, something else is gone. Last night, our entire [kitchen] budget for the day was stolen, so the first thing I had to do was . . . get the message out to our supporters that we needed food!”

Don’t see what room they have to complain — stuff should be free, they’re sayin’; some just take it closer to home than others.

Hey parasites! Be careful what you wish for!

Their master’s voice.

After the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent a recent email urging supporters to sign a petition backing the wave of Occupy Wall Street protests, phones at the party committee started ringing.

Banking executives personally called the offices of DCCC Chairman Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) and DCCC Finance Chairman Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) last week demanding answers, three financial services lobbyists told POLITICO.

Here’s a teachable moment for you.

The people with money learn a valuable lesson that the people with power will turn on them at the faintest scent of blood.

And the people with power learn a valuable lesson that there is a limit to how stupid the people with money will be over time.

John Hinderacker turns over a rock.

To be blunt, people this dumb should be ashamed to show their faces in public, let alone try to tell the rest of us how to run the country.

Read it.

Read it.

Don’t say we never have useful stuff here.

Read it. And ponder the graphs.

Among the numerous College Know It All Hippie fallacies common in the #OWS movement is the apparent association between having wealth and supporting capitalistic or pro-business policies.  It is true that to a point, wealthier individuals are more Republican than poorer ones in their voting habits, but this relationship starts to beak down as income increases, and at lower levels than most might think.

[graph]

As we can see, Republican voting peaks in the 100-200,000 a year range, and those making 200,000+ mostly voted for Obama (The actual numbers are 52%-46%, approximately the same distribution as the nation as a whole).

Steven Landsburg, a Real Economist, spanks RINO Romney.

I interpret Romney’s answer to mean that he wants to cut capital gains rates not on efficiency grounds, not on supply side grounds, and not on philosophical grounds, but on redistributionist grounds. Well, okay, I myself don’t think very much of redistribution as a primary driver of tax policy, but Romney and I can disagree on that one. But where the incoherence comes in is this: If your goal is to redistribute from the rich to the middle class, why on earth would you do it by cutting the capital gains tax, as opposed to lowering income tax rates in the middle and raising them at the top?

To put this another way: If you care about efficiency, you’ll want to cut the capital gains rate to zero for everyone. If you care about fairness, and if you believe fairness mitigates against double/triple/quadruple taxation, you’ll still want to cut the capital gains rate to zero for everyone. If you care about redistribution, you’ll want to juggle the tax brackets. But I can’t think of a single thing you could care about that would lead you to laser in on cutting capital gains rates for middle income taxpayers only.

In other words, Romney is either pandering to the redistribution crowd or doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to economics. (Or both, which is my guess.)

Read it.

As part of the deal to free Gilad Shalit, the butcher of Ramallah who participated in the disemboweling and mutilation of two Israeli soldiers who took a wrong turn on a road in the West Bank in October 2000 at the start of the 1st Intifada, will be set free:

The soldiers were beaten, stabbed, had their eyes gouged out, and were disemboweled. At this point, a Palestinian (later identified as Aziz Salha), appeared at the police station window, displaying his blood-stained hands to the crowd, which erupted into cheers. One of the soldier’s bodies was then thrown out the window and stamped and beaten by the enraged mob. One of the bodies was set on fire. Soon after, the mob dragged the two mutilated bodies to Al-Manara Square in the city center as the crowd began an impromptu victory celebration.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

Read it.

Saturday night I watched Bill Clinton give himself a blowjob for four hours, and it wasn’t pretty.

But nobody does it better. Barack is still in training.

Read it.

An especially busy month in the persecution of Christians in the Muslim world, September also witnessed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton release the Annual Report on International Religious Freedom. Ironically, aside from Iran and Sudan, none of the countries that habitually appear in this series were designated as “countries of particular concern,” defined by the State Department as countries that are “engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom.”

Egypt, for instance—which this year alone has seen nearly 80 Christians killed, their many churches burned or bombed, and their daughters kidnapped and forcibly converted—was not listed as a “country of particular concern,” this despite the fact that the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom, an independent, bipartisan federal government commission, had recommended that the State Department designate it so.

Neither was Pakistan cited as a “country of particular concern.” According to CNS news, “Clinton did not designate Pakistan even though the State Department’s own report stated that Pakistani law calls for the death penalty for people who commit ‘blasphemy’ against Islam or who convert from Islam to another religion—and even though the report listed multiple instances of the Pakistani government using the law to persecute Christians.”

Read it.

Read it.

The world’s oldest marathon runner, 100-year-old Briton Fauja Singh, has achieved another feat – completing the Scotiabank Toronto Marathon in Canada.

Yeah, can’t get much more ‘British’ than Fauja Singh. The beard and turban are dead giveaways.

(Wonder what it would be like in a world where ‘journalist’ wasn’t a joke term?)

Read it.

What are the consequences?

Kleine-Hartlage: The consequence is that the widespread assumption in this country under which we perceive Islam — that all religions are equal or “want the same thing” — is misleading. Let me give you an example: Islam does not generally outlaw violence, not even in a strictly moral sense. It is a legal system that he controls violence: Whether violence is acceptable or even required depends, not only in the legal, but also in the moral sense on the who, whom, why, and how. Christian culture with outright condemnation of violence tends to the elimination of private violence and is therefore dependent on the state and its monopoly on violence. Islam isn’t. On the contrary, violence has prestige value.

Why?

Kleine-Hartlage: Because the Prophet’s example, made a permanent feature in the Quran, teaches that the ability to use force a sign of divine election. Thus, the meaning of violence is similar to that of material wealth in Calvinism. Violence in Islam has a structuring function: it makes a difference between above and below, i.e. master and slave, men and women, believers and unbelievers. Islam doesn’t define peace as a universal principle.

But? After all, “Islam” means “peace”.

Kleine-Hartlage: No, “Islam” means, in friendly translation, “devotion” and less friendly, “submission”. The word is derived from the same word-root as “Salam” (peace), but it is not a synonym. The Islamic concept of society is based on the division of humanity into “believers” and “infidels” — and Islam leaves no doubt that the “infidels” sooner or later have to disappear in history. “Good” in the ethical sense, is what is good for the spread of Islam; “evil” is any opposition to it. Islam rejects the notion of a universal ethics by which all people have equal rights, no matter what religion they belong to, or peace as a matter of principle. Such views contradict not only the teachings of Islam, but its basic structure.

Read it.

Read it.

The flapping sound you hear is the chickens coming home to roots. They have no one to blame but themselves, for voting into office the people who are destroying their economy and their lives.

“The people at the bottom, young people trying to start their career, the underclass, people in the service and agricultural industries, they have got an insurmountable problem in attaining the California dream. A young person leaving college and wanting to start a family in California today goes to Texas.”

… where they will be welcome, if they are willing to work and willing to keep their noses out of other people’s business, i.e. leave their California ways behind.

The stark divide between the haves and have-nots is growing. Beverly Hills 90210, with its $50 million mansions, was named the fifth most expensive zip code in America this week by Forbes magazine. But two of the state’s other cities, Fresno and San Bernardino, are among America’s ten poorest population centres of over 200,000 people.

That’s what socialism does. The nomenklatura live in luxury, and everbody else starves. That’s why rich people in California are all liberal Demorats — if you aren’t a member of the pack, you’re prey.

Perhaps the starkest example of how far some people have fallen in the economic downturn is a man in his 50s, who once earned a six figure salary as a producer on television studio sitcoms and small budget Hollywood movies.

A few years ago he lived in a three-bedroom house with two cars in the drive and occasionally mixed with A-list stars. Now, he lives with his wife and two children in one room at the Union Rescue Mission. He calls it the shelter’s “penthouse suite.”

That’s what happens when you’ve got a niche skill. When the niche goes away, so do you. If he were a plumber or an electrician — or a computer programmer — he’d probably still have a job.

Read it.

But this week, in the prestigious journal Nature Genetics, researchers provide evidence for such a theory.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Call us paranoid, but we obtained a law-enforcement-grade software extraction tool for the iPhone to see exactly what data is up for grabs. You’d be surprised to see just how much data today’s smartphones can store — and police can access.

Legally, during traffic stops, officers need a warrant to search your cell phone; however, if you give them your phone voluntarily, they can use these tools to search it. Next time an officer asks you to give up your phone, ask to see a warrant first.

Read it.

Of course, scholarly books are still full of footnotes. The prototypic footnote is the source note, providing a citation for each proclamation in the text (early annotations were sometimes called “proofs”). These footnotes range from useful to pedantic, sometimes lending an air of authority, sometimes providing a map of the writer’s path. Legal writing in particular is rife with these footnotes, perhaps an acknowledgment that law is built on laws-past.

But I champion another species of footnote: the wandering footnote. These digressive notes, seeing a sentence that some might consider complete, determine to hijack it with a new set of ever more tangential facts. In the wayward note, the bumps and curves of the author’s mind seem to be laid plain on the paper. I came of intellectual age hearing the author’s sotto voce asides in the philosophy essays I loved. I still recall footnotes that begin, enticingly, “Imagine that . . . ”; “Consider . . . ”; or even, in one of J. L. Austin’s famous thought experiments, “You have a donkey. . . . ” I had the feeling of being taken into confidence by a wise fellow during an erudite lecture, and being told something even more clever and lucid.

Read it.

Apparently not, in the strict sense.

Thackston has identified five dialectal clusters that he classified as follows: “(1) Greater Syria, including Lebanon and Palestine; (2) Mesopotamia, including the Euphrates region of Syria, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf; (3) the Arabian Peninsula, including most of what is Saudi Arabia and much of Jordan; (4) the Nile Valley, including Egypt and the Sudan; and (5) North Africa and [parts of] the … regions of sub-Saharan Africa.”[11] He acknowledged that although these five major dialectal regions were speckled with linguistic varieties and differences in accent and sub-dialects, “there is almost complete mutual comprehension [within each of them]—that is, a Jerusalemite, a Beiruti, and an Aleppan may not speak in exactly the same manner, but each understands practically everything the others say.” However, he wrote,

When one crosses one or more major boundaries, as is the case with a Baghdadi and a Damascene for instance, one begins to encounter difficulty in comprehension; and the farther one goes, the less one understands until mutual comprehension disappears entirely. To take an extreme example, a Moroccan and an Iraqi can no more understand each other’s dialects than can a Portuguese and Rumanian.

Read it.

Hint: Probably. Why should they remain in a country where English is becoming a foreign language?

Read it.

Welcome to Londonistan. Take off your shoes, shoot the dog, throw a blanket over your women, and leave your civlization behind; it won’t be needed.

Read it.

Thanks a lot, Barry.

Read it.

At middle schools across the country, metal lockers that were long considered decorated if they had photos of friends or the teen heartthrob of the moment — Shaun Cassidy years ago, Justin Bieber today — have suddenly become the latest frontier in nesting.

Peek inside, and find lockers outfitted with miniature furry carpets, motion-sensor-equipped lamps that glow when the door opens, mirrors, decorative flowers, and magnetic wallpaper in floral and leopard-print patterns.

It is hard to say whether retailers have merely capitalized on or actually created demand among girls for the accessories. Either way, they are being embraced from Little Rock, Ark., where an owner of an upscale children’s boutique, the Toggery, said the demand for locker chandeliers had led to “snatching and grabbing” in the store’s normally genteel aisles, to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where shoppers at Lester’s who failed to pounce quickly enough found themselves picking over the dregs before the school year even started.

These are the kids who, in ten or twenty years, will wind up camping out with signs in a park in the City, wondering how their lives went so horribly wrong.

Megan McArdle attempts to restore a little perspective.

I spent quite a lot of time on the “We are the 99%” website last night and this morning.  There’s been a considerable amount of carping about it from the conservative side, and to be sure, some of the stories strain plausibility (the percentage of people in the sample who have either taken up prostitution, or claim to have seriously considered doing so, seems rather high, for instance, and as far as I could tell, not a single person on the site had been fired for cause).  Many of the people complaining made all sorts of bad decisions about having children, getting very expensive “fun” degrees, and so forth.

But quibbling rather misses the point.  These are people who are terrified, and their terror is easy to understand.  Jobs are hard to come by, and while you might well argue that any of these individuals could find a job if they did something different, in aggregate, there are not enough job openings to absorb our legion of unemployed.

There’s nothing like not knowing where your next meal is coming from to concentrate the mind. These people have never been in that position, and it scares the shit out of them — perhaps rightly so.

I think it’s hard to read through this list of woes without feeling both sympathy, and a healthy dose of fear.  Take all the pot shots you want at people who thought that a $100,000 BFA was supposed to guarantee them a great job–beneath the occasionally grating entitlement is the visceral terror of someone in a bad place who doesn’t know what to do.  Having found myself in the same place ten years ago, I can’t bring myself to sneer.  No matter how inflated your expectations may have been, it is no joke to have your confidence that you can support yourself ripped away, and replaced with the horrifying realization that you don’t really understand what the rules are.  Yes, even if you have a nose ring.

On the other hand, taxpayer-funded benefits have never been so pervasive and easy to get, so I’m not really sure what their gripe is. Yeah, you won’t be living on the Upper East Side, but you won’t be starving in a doorway, either. Their grandparents didn’t have that assurance.

I’m not sure that this constitutes the seeds of a political movement, however.   For all the admiring talk about bravery and perseverance, it’s not really al that difficult to get young, unemployed people to spend a couple of weeks camping out somewhere.  They have a low cost of time, they’re in no danger, and yes, I have to say it, demonstrating is fun.  No, don’t tut-tut me.  I was at the ACT-UP die-ins, the pro-choice marches, the “Sleep Out for the Homeless” events and the “Take Back the Night” vigils.  It’s fun, especially when you can see yourself on television.  This is not the Montgomery bus boycott we’re talking about here.

Indeed. Compared with facing fire hoses, truncheons, and police dogs, not to mention the very real possibility of firebombs or a shallow grave on some back country road in Mississippi, this is rather a plastic playground revolution.

Of course, in this country a traditional option for young people without prospects is to join the military. (Quit laughing.) I think I can safely predict that, even if they were starving in a doorway somewhere, not one of these kids would even think of it, much less seriously consider doing it … which says, to me, something very sad about our culture these days.

Read it.

One intriguing part of the answer as to why income inequality has not played a big role in current American politics may be supplied by Dallas Federal Reserve economist Michael Cox and Dallas Federal Reserve economics writer Richard Alm in a column in Sunday’s New York Times. They argue that our focus should be on consumption inequality rather than income inequality. The bottom fifth of American households earned $10,000 while the top fifth averaged $150,000 per year. However, spending for the bottom fifth averaged $18,000 per year and the top fifth $70,000 annually.

Note the imbalance between ‘earnings’ and ‘spending’ for the bottom fifth. How do people earning $10,000 spend $18,000? The obvious answer is taxpayer-funded benefits. These are the ‘poor’ over whom there is much hand-wringing among the bleeding hearts.

So, bearing this in mind, if we compare the incomes of the top and bottom fifths, we see a ratio of 15 to 1. If we turn to consumption, the gap declines to around 4 to 1. A similar narrowing takes place throughout all levels of income distribution. The middle 20 percent of families had incomes more than four times the bottom fifth. Yet their edge in consumption fell to about 2 to 1.

So, if they aren’t spending it, what are the rich doing with their money? Hiding it under the mattress? They are, of course, investing it — in various financial investments that create jobs and economic growth. So ‘soak the rich’ doesn’t mean that Algernon has to give up his fifth Maserati, but that businesses don’t get started and unemployed people don’t get employed. This is why Democrat class-warfare winds up hurting us all.

Read it.

The basic tribal framework of “us versus them” remains in Islam. The conception “my group, right or wrong” does not exist because the question of right or wrong never comes up. Allegiance is to “my group,” period, full stop, always defined against “the other.” An overarching, universalistic, inclusive constitution is not possible. Islam is not a constant referent but rather, like every level of tribal political organization, is contingent. People act politically as Muslims only when in opposition to infidels. Among Muslims, people will mobilize on a sectarian basis, as Sunni versus Shi‘a. Among Sunni, people will mobilize as the Karim tribe versus the Mahmud tribe; within the Karim tribe, people will mobilize according to whom they find themselves in opposition to: tribal section versus tribal section; lineage versus lineage, and so on.

The structural fissiparousness of the tribal order makes societal cohesion difficult. Affiliation places people and groups in opposition to one another. There is no universal reference that can include all parties. Oppositionalism then becomes the cultural imperative. While the tribal system based on balanced opposition effectively supports decentralized nomads, it inhibits societal integration and precludes civil peace based on settlement of disputes through legal judgment at the local level.

Reminder for the ignorant: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology, under the guise of a religion, with which no co-existence is possible.

Read it.

Read it.

Oh, this would be so much fun.

Don Boudreaux, Chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University, rewrites a news story so that it actually tells the truth. The result is amusing. Too bad our ‘journalists’ have the intelligence of green vegetables.

The Obama administration, under fire for not taking a harder line on China over its currencyon American consumers who stubbornly take advantage of good deals offered by Chinese sellers and, allegedly, made even more attractive by Beijing’s monetary policy appears set to move against the Asia export powerhouse on other frontsthese politically unorganized Americans as next year’s U.S. elections approach.

I especially like the way he fisks Mitt Romney, who (for all his success in business) is apparently ignorant of certain elementary principles of economics.

Not that any of the other candidates represent any improvement. Herman Cain, for example, who ought to be able to run the numbers, sticks with his superficially attractive but ultimately useless tax reform plan.

Read it.

Hey, that’s a serious question.

The Other McCain brings up a good point.

It says a great deal that Bush himself condescends to hang out with the enlisted guys who were permanently harmed on his watch.

It says far more that the guys harmed on Bush’s watch really want to hang out with him.

Read it.

For every OccupyWallStreet participant, there are 20,000 kids in India cramming for a calculus final.

In other words,

• the Indian kids are serious and the squatters on Wall Street are dilettantes looking for a concert ‘rush’.
• Indian kids struggle to get ahead, the Wall Street Squatters struggle to get laid.
• the Indian kids may have bathed today, but it wasn’t in their very own tiled bathroom. The Squatters defecated on police cars. The epitome of kewl.
• The Indians want a chance. The Squatters want a megaphone so they can take turns interrupting.
• The Indians add, or will add, to global productivity. The Squatters will consume.
• Indian kids hope. Squatters hate. Just ask them for the photo-copied list the nice union man gave them.
• Indian kids have been educated. Squatters don’t need no education, at least not one they’re willing to pay for.
• Indian kids study maths and sciences. Squatters major in Queer Dance Theory After the Death of Patriarchy.
• Indian kids dream. Squatters scream.
• Indian kids have learned to persist because life isn’t fair. Squatters are determined to repeal that basic law. “Down With Gravity”.

Read it.

In recent years Somali pirates have seized dozens of vessels and made millions of pounds from ransoming their crews.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

A pointed reminder that there is no stricture in Islam against stealing from non-Muslims. In fact, it’s encouraged; Mohammed himself was a notorious bandit (and mass murderer).

Read it.

But they benefit American producers, who have big bucks to spend on lobbyists (and Congresscritters). Nobody gives a shit about American consumers, who stupidly keep voting the same Congresscritters back into office.

Read it.

In official Washington, there is an afterlife, and it’s a crowded, cacophonous place. Called the public speaking circuit, this D.C. Elysium is bound by the same transactional laws as the realm that preceded it. But instead of political parties, it is governed by speakers bureaus that promise visibility to those who sign up. In the past 30 years, a proliferation of bureaus has promoted, booked and enriched former lawmakers, candidates, consultants, Cabinet members, political reporters and gadflies.

“Let’s say you are secretary of something — there are two ways you are going to make a really good living: a lobbyist or a speaker, or a combination of the two,” said James Carville, the political consultant and a client of the Washington Speakers Bureau, the agency that represents Gates.

Doing well by doing … well….

Read it.

Three activists arrested for selling 10 cent cups of lemonade on the lawn of the Capitol building in August are facing up to one year in jail for their thirst-quenching crimes.

Will Duffield, Meg McLain and Kathryn Dill pleaded not guilty in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia on Oct. 4 to “sale of goods on U.S. Capitol grounds” — a crime that carries a 180-day maximum prison sentence.

The three face an additional 180 days in jail after refusing to submit to a urine test and being held in contempt of court.

Well, you know, you can’t be too careful these days.

Read it.

Those corpses in the corner? Just collateral damage.

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Yoko Ono is launching a global campaign to raise money and awareness to help fight childhood hunger and poverty.

As if Yoko Ono knows anything about either child hunger or poverty. Does it still count as White Guilt if you’re Japanese?

Read it.

Despite his rhetorical attacks on Wall Street, a study by the Sunlight Foundation’s Influence Project shows that President Barack Obama has received more money from Wall Street than any other politician over the past 20 years, including former President George W. Bush.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Message: Extortion works.

I guess the Occupy Wall Street people are occupying the wrong Wall Street. (Does D.C. even have a Wall Street? Maybe a StoneWall Street….)

Read it.

A father has been questioned by police under anti-terror laws for taking pictures of his own daughter in a shopping centre.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. (Actually, in California, this would probably be enough to make him register as a sex offender.)

Freeberg is always worth reading.

To be fair about it, “pure” capitalism already saddles us with an endless procession of sad situations in which resources are allocated according to who’s-friends-with-who, rather than what would be best for consumers and other stakeholders. But a centrally planned economy does nothing to fix this, if anything it exacerbates the situation. When you have a free economy and the consumer is in charge, there’s always some corrective force applied to it. It doesn’t win out at the end of the day, true; it doesn’t even win most of the time. But at least the corrective force intensifies as the problem gets worse, and it’s easy to forget that what we see of the problem is really just the remnants of it after the unacceptably odious parts of it have been quietly cleaned up.

A command economy lacks this clean-up device, and so, over time, the problem has to get worse. It can’t do anything else.

For the record, he’s wrong about his understanding of pure capitalism. But he’s spot on if he’s thinking of ‘crapitalism’, and respecting the alternatives.

Read it.

If Hollywood has to start complying with false advertising laws, they’re in BIG trouble.

Read it.

The villages and farming communities that surround Uganda’s capital, Kampala, are gripped by fear.

Schoolchildren are closely watched by teachers and parents as they make their way home from school. In playgrounds and on the roadside are posters warning of the danger of abduction by witch doctors for the purpose of child sacrifice.

The ritual, which some believe brings wealth and good health, was almost unheard of in the country until about three years ago, but it has re-emerged, seemingly alongside a boom in the country’s economy.

The mutilated bodies of children have been discovered at roadsides, the victims of an apparently growing belief in the power of human sacrifice.

Thank God for the U.N. and the International Community, or Africa would still be suffering under the boot of those Oppressive White Regimes. God knows what sort of a hell-hole it would be today without that blessed circumstance.

Read it.

And, of course, under shari’ah, damaged churches aren’t allowed to be repaired.

A rather pointed reminder that freedom of religion is not a Muslim value.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

Read it.

The House Judiciary Committee passed a bill yesterday that would make it a federal crime for U.S. residents to discuss or plan activities on foreign soil that, if carried out in the U.S., would violate the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) — even if the planned activities are legal in the countries where they’re carried out. H.R. 313, the “Drug Trafficking Safe Harbor Elimination Act of 2011,” is sponsored by Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), and allows prosecutors to bring conspiracy charges against anyone who discusses, plans or advises someone else to engage in any activity that violates the CSA, the massive federal law that prohibits drugs like marijuana and strictly regulates prescription medication.

This Is Not Good.

Read it.

An Iranian actress has been sentenced to a year in jail and 90 lashes for her role in a film about the limits imposed on artists in the Islamic republic.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

A rather pointed reminder that freedom of speech is not a Muslim value.