Read it.

It was the searing pain between her legs that jolted the 14-year-old Somali schoolgirl from her sleep.

Terrified, Asha Hassan opened her eyes expecting to see an intruder. But, in the dim light of the early morning, she could see the person standing over her was her mother. And she was smiling. Asha ­soon realised why.

In her right hand her mother was ­holding a pipette that was dripping sulphuric acid… acid which she had just emptied into her daughter’s vagina.

What peaceful, friendly people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?
That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.
Of course, as we all know, the real problem is Islamophobia.

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

You seldom see those two words in the same sentence, except when a Democrat is convicted of ethics violations or — as occasionally happens — pleads guilty to felonies. The Democratic Party is the most successful criminal organization in American history, and the amazing thing is that they haven’t yet stolen everything that’s not nailed down.

But have patience, they’re trying as hard as they can.

Read it.

Uh … because they can?

Read it.

Jihad recruitment has evolved into using a mainstream format, it is now cool. Print and online magazines provide practical detailed instruction on how to commit terrorist acts. The latest offering, Lone Mujahid Pocketbook, Spring 2013, is published courtesy of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula’s Inspire magazine, and is available on multiple websites.

Read it.

“One senior Christian leader in Tanzania told Barnabas Aid that the country could be totally Islamised in five to ten years if the Church does not make a decisive response.” How’s that “dialogue” working out for you, Bishop?

What peaceful, friendly people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?
That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.
Of course, as we all know, the real problem is Islamophobia.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

If I ever get out of here,
Thought of giving it all away
To a registered charity.
All I need is a pint a day
If I ever get out of here.
If we ever get out of here.

The Other McCain looks at the political agenda of modern ‘journalism’.

For example, I’ve never quite understood (and there was a lot of questioning among media-watchers at the time) why Matthew Shepard’s death became a nationwide cause célèbre, with nationally televised vigils and so forth. As murders go, Shepard’s murder wasn’t particularly unusual: Privileged college kid goes to a local pub, meets up with a couple of local two-bit hoodlums who decide to rip him off and, instead, the rip-off escalates into murder.

Nasty crimes like that are unfortunately not man-bites-dog news and, except for the fact that Shepard was gay, his death might never have made headlines outside of Wyoming. But of course, Shepard was gay, and so his death became a symbol of America’s Rampant Homophobia and — if you didn’t pay much attention to the details — you might have thought Shepard’s killers were right-wing fundamentalist Christians, rather than a couple of small-town petty criminals, both of whom had prior records for minor offenses including burglary and marijuana possession.

Hey, if it fits the Narrative, that’s front-page material.

OK, so what if the rape-murder victim is a 13-year-old boy? That’s kind of a rare crime, and if the victim suffocated — bound and gagged — during an hours-long torture ordeal in which he was repeatedly sodomized, you might think a crime like that would be considered newsworthy.

But most people have never heard of Jesse Dirkhising, and there are those of us who suspect that maybe Jesse Dirkising is nearly unknown for pretty much the same reason that Matthew Shepard became famous: There’s an agenda.

Never mind whether it’s a good agenda or a bad agenda, it’s an agenda, and everybody knows what it is.

The point, from my perspective, is that news coverage is being influenced by a sort of consensus opinion among the influential elite of the journalism industry that some crime victims are more equal than others.

Hey, if it doesn’t fit the Narrative, it’s buried in the back pages.

Read it.

I’m not saying that the federal government should eliminate all medical or scientific research funding. But the next time someone makes the argument that any cuts in the budget for federal medical research means that the medical breakthroughs will not happen, the story of Robert Edwards and test-tube babies is a pretty good comeback.

The horror.

I have always been of opinion that the essence of a Jayne Hat is that it be handmade by a friend or relative.

Tagatose

Air Mail Launcher

Read it.

UNION GROVE, Wis. – Eighth-graders in Wisconsin’s Union Grove school district were assigned to fill out a “Liberalism vs. Conservatism” crossword puzzle, and they learned some new and very questionable “facts.”

Students learned conservatism is “the political belief of preserving traditional moral values by restricting personal freedoms … ”

Conversely, they learned liberalism is “the political belief of equality and personal freedom for everyone, often changing the current system to increase government protection of civil liberties.”

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised. So are the people who want to smoke in restaurants, drink a Big Gulp, use transfats or salt in cooking, or own the gun guaranteed them by the Second Amendment.

Well, that’s what happens when you send your kid to a government school.

Read it.

Jeri Wright was charged with seven counts of giving false testimony to a grand jury, two counts of money laundering, and two counts of making false statements to federal officers in a case involving a $1.25 million state grant for a non-profit program called “We Are Our Brother’s Keeper.”

Just pets of the Crust wetting their beaks. Nothing to see here — move along, move along….

Read it.

Yeah, it’s called ‘freedom’, and it’s a feature, not a bug, you communist.

 While each of these substances are legal to use in the US, whether or not they are safe for long-term consumption — by themselves or in combination — is a different story altogether. Many have been deemed too harmful to use in other countries.

Yeah, we really trust foreigners to know more about what’s healthy and what isn’t than we do. That’s why they all come over here for treatment when they get sick.

Read it.

In a move that foreshadows the radical left’s plans for churches should gay marriage become the law of the land, the California legislature is moving to strip the Boy Scouts of America – a private organization – of its non-profit status for refusing to allow gay scoutmasters. The Youth Equality Act, created by Sen. Ricardo Lara (D-Long Beach), would deny nonprofit status to any youth groups that “discriminate on the basis of gender identity, race, sexual orientation, nationality, religion or religious affiliation.” This would invalidate any Christian nonprofit that does not accept non-Christians, any youth group restricted to boys or girls, or any similar group.

Read it.

Maryland Democratic Governor Martin O’Malley has instituted a tax on citizens for the amount of rain that falls on their property.

The tax, officially known as a “storm water management fee,” will be enforced in nine of the state’s counties. The state legislature passed it in 2012 purportedly to “raise revenue to cleanup [sic] the Chesapeake Bay,” according to MarylandReporter.com.

I am not making this up.

If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street,
If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat.
If you get too cold I’ll tax the heat,
If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet.

Don’t ask me what I want it for
If you don’t want to pay some more
‘Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman

Read it.

Hint: Not you.

While there appears to be no acceptable level of alcohol consumption to participants at the Alcohol Policy 16 Conference, which met last week in Arlington, Virginia, they certainly don’t mind profiting from people who do drink. During a discussion on alcohol tax policy, these “public health advocates” discussed ways to hike the rates as much as possible and earmark the funds to their own organizations.

Read it.

“Courts Without Judges” reads the headline of an attack on Senate Republicans by the New York Times editorial board. Bemoaning the fact that there 85 vacancies in the federal judiciary, the Times asserts that “by far the most important cause of this unfortunate state of affairs is the determination of Senate Republicans, for reasons of politics, ideology and spite, to confirm as few of President Obama’s judicial choices as possible.”

However, as Ed Whelan points out, in the second-to-last paragraph of the editorial we learn that “62 district and circuit court vacancies have no nominees.” Thus, the cause of three-quarters of the 85 vacancies is that President Obama hasn’t made nominations.

Of course, Democrats do exactly the same thing to Republican Presidential nominees (Judge Bork, are you listening?), but that somehow never seems to make it into the papers.

Read it.

I, for one, am not surprised.

 Because the pundit class in America is related to so few people who want to enlist in the military, there’s negligible media awareness of how hard it has become to join up. A major hurdle is scoring high enough on the AFQT cognitive test.

The Pentagon isn’t in any hurry to make its intelligence requirements explicable to the media.  The conventional wisdom is that intelligence testing is a racist hoax or it just applies to academia, not the real world, or whatever. The fact that the military is obsessive about cognitive testing is something that simply isn’t in the reigning worldview, and the military is fine with that. It likes testing and it dislikes outside interference, so the more convoluted its jargon for talking about its intelligence requirements, the better.

Read it.

If the news media hadn’t told you how brilliant Barack Obama was every day for the last six years, you might have your doubts.

Invoking a national outrage in which 41 laws were violated by a lone madman in Newtown, Connecticut, the president of the United States and celebrated orator said on Thursday, “We need everybody to remember how we felt 100 days ago and make sure that what we said at that time wasn’t just a bunch of platitudes, that we meant it.”

Read it.

Dog lovers paid out hundreds of pounds for fashionable ‘toy poodles’ – only to discover they were fluffed-up ferrets on steroids.

One pensioner was duped into buying two of the “pedigree” pets from a market in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires.

Read it.

Small businesses, who employ the bulk of American workers, don’t plan to hire additional staff, in another sign the job market is deteriorating again.

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

Read it.

Isn’t it great how ‘weapons bans’ manage to catch the guys with weapons before they hurt somebody?

Almost as great as the way people determined to hurt others pay any attention to ‘weapons bans’.

Amazing how that works.

Read it.

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

I’m also sure that this will be dead on arrival just like every previous Obama budget. Pretty sad when you can’t even get your own party in Congress to support your budget. I guess that’s what Democrats call ‘leadership’.

Read it.

Just looking at her I’d say that she’s Legally Black, although her skin color isn’t any darker than my mother’s.

Read it.

 First thought: “Ha!” Second thought: “Oh, wait — competition is an excellent thing.” While it’s highly probable that AT&T is looking to both overshadow Google’s launch party and maintain a foothold in one of its most prized states, the outfit’s terse announcement of an impending 1Gbps fiber network should honestly be seen as nothing but excellent news for residents of Austin. Merely hours after Google and the city of Austin jointly made clear that Google Fiber would be hitting up local homes in mid-2014, Ma Bell has made public its “intent” to built a 1 Gigabit fiber network in the same area.

Wouldn’t mind living there, except that it’s a catchment area for all the socialists in Texas. Politicians and college kids are as bad a combination as whisky and car keys.

Read it.

“It kind of reminds me of welfare,” said disabled former truck driver James Ottesen. Ottesen told the Wall Street Journal he would “like to get re-educated to do something” because “my body is broke but my mind is not.” Still, says Ottesen, he’s reluctant to leave the disability program because it is like “a blanket covering you, and to walk out from it… at my age, it’s a little intimidating.”

Disability enrollments have exploded under President Barack Obama. Since 2009, 5.9 million people have been added to the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program, a 23% jump over the last five years. During that same period, just 2.5 million new jobs were created.

“Of equal importance was the new conception of authority. The Sheik of the Umma, that is, Muhammad himself, functioned for those who were truly converted, not by a conditional and consensual authority, grudgingly granted by the tribe and always revocable, but by an absolute religious prerogative. The source of authority was transferred from public opinion to God, who conferred it on Muhammad as His chosen apostle. This transfer shaped the whole future history of Muslim government and Muslim political thought.”

— Bernard Lewis, The Arabs in History

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

Read it.

Thank goodness we let in all those illegal immigrants to do the jobs Americans are just too disabled these days to do. Who knew that working class Americans would suffer an epidemic of vague back pain and balky knees after decades of business, political, and economist elites conspiring to hammer down their wages through non-enforcement of immigration laws? Fortunately, our political, economic, intellectual, and moral betters somehow sensed that their fellow citizens would be getting more disabled in the future (apparently, arthroscopic surgery has been disinvented, or something), so our leaders brilliantly took action ahead of time to make sure America had an ample supply of unskilled foreign laborers to replace the Americans overwhelmed by this mysterious epidemic of disability.

Yup, totally mysterious.

Read it.

Thank you, Barack Obama. You’re our only nope.

Read it.

Islamic teaching permits deceits, ruses, and dispensations. For an in depth examination, read about the doctrines of taqiyya, tawriya, and taysir.  Then there is Islam’s overarching idea of niyya (or “intention”), best captured by the famous Muslim axiom, “necessity makes permissible the prohibited.” According to this teaching, the intentions behind Muslim actions determine whether said actions are permissible or not.

From here one may understand the many incongruities of Islam: lying is forbidden—unless the intention is to empower Islam; killing women and children is forbidden—but permissible during the jihad; suicide is forbidden—unless the intention is to kill infidels, in which case it becomes a “martyrdom operation.”

Thus, feigning interest in Christianity, attending church for over a year, participating in Christian baptisms, and becoming “like family” to an infidel—all things forbidden according to Islamic Sharia—become permissible in the service of the jihad on Christianity.

History offers several examples of Muslims feigning friendship and loyalty to non-Muslims only to break faith at the opportune moment, beginning with Islam’s founder.  When a non-Muslim poet, Ka‘b ibn Ashraf, offended Muhammad, the prophet exclaimed: “Who will kill this man who has hurt Allah and his prophet?” A young Muslim named Ibn Maslama volunteered on condition that, to get close enough to Ka‘b to assassinate him, he be allowed to deceive the poet. The prophet agreed.  Ibn Maslama went to Ka‘b feigning friendship; the poet trusted his sincerity and took him into his confidence. Soon thereafter, the Muslim youth returned with a friend and, while the trusting poet’s guard was down, they slaughtered him.

Muslims cannot be trusted. Not ever.

Read it.

The US Navy has been pursuing solid-state laser weapons capable of setting other vessels on fire for years, but now one is almost ready to actually be put out to sea. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) today announced that it is aiming to “field and test a solid-state laser prototype” in early 2014 aboard the USS Ponce. The Ponce is a transport vessel from the 1970s that was recently upgraded into a hi-tech floating base and is stationed in the Persian Gulf, in range of Iranian attack boats.

Read it.

It’s stiffer than Kevlar, thinner than paper, and in a few years, it may be mass-produced using only sunlight and water.

Foseti points out that there is nothing new under the sun.

Another example of a problem that our ancestors were better at solving is the problem of how to civilize an uncivilized area. They called this process colonization. We can’t hope to perform this task on the same scale, so we have a mini-version of the same process called gentrification.

Ross Douthat pulls back the curtain.

Every elite seeks its own perpetuation, of course, but that project is uniquely difficult in a society that’s formally democratic and egalitarian and colorblind. And it’s even more difficult for an elite that prides itself on its progressive politics, its social conscience, its enlightened distance from hierarchies of blood and birth and breeding.

Thus the importance, in the modern meritocratic culture, of the unacknowledged mechanisms that preserve privilege, reward the inside game, and ensure that the advantages enjoyed in one generation can be passed safely onward to the next.

Read it.

New research carried out at MIT and elsewhere has demonstrated for the first time that when inserted into a pool of liquid, nanowires — wires that are only hundreds of nanometers (billionths of a meter) across — naturally draw the liquid upward in a thin film that coats the surface of the wire. The finding could have applications in microfluidic devices, biomedical research and inkjet printers.

Read it.

A plaque will be placed somewhere amidst the concrete parking lot.

Hey, it’s not as if he were a real President, like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.

Read it.

And yet the poor are still with us — to hear the Democrats talk, now more than ever. How to account for this?

Since President Lyndon Baines Johnson declared “war on poverty,” U.S. taxpayers have spent $15 trillion on so-called anti-poverty programs—a figure slightly less than the national debt.

Gee, I wonder if there’s some connection.

In 1969, just 2.8 million Americans received food stamps. Today, over 47 million Americans are on food stamps. The Fox News special explained that one contributing factor to the massive expansion of the food stamp program is the crony capitalism that has cropped up around the anti-poverty program.

Soda makers, for example, bag an estimated $4 billion a year in taxpayer money through the food stamp program. Efforts to kill the so-called “soda subsidy” have been met with fierce resistance and lobbying by the soda industry.

Oh, say it ain’t so.

In Florida, State Senator Ronda Storms (R-Valrico) introduced a bill last year that would keep taxpayer-funded SNAP benefits from being spent on non-essential items like sodas, candy, chips, ice cream, and other junk foods.

“The biggest opponents I have right now are Coca Cola, the soda companies, the chip companies and the convenience store operators,” said Storms in an interview with Fox News.

It’s free! Just swipe your EBT!

Read it.

It is an intentional feature of the ever expanding non-means tested unfunded entitlements regime that people believe that they have “earned” their entitlements and are “owed” them lock, stock and barrel. It locks the regime in politically because people won’t cravenly agitate for free stuff (though they won’t look a gift horse in the mouth either), but they will defend to the bitter end what they think is theirs by right. Our entitlement state problem arises from the widespread belief that they have “earned” their entitlements, most obviously by having paid payroll taxes.

Obama is trapped…the Dems can’t be for tax reform, they can’t be for entitlement reform, and they can’t tax the middle class without destroying the left/New Class ruling coalition. There aren’t enough “rich” to tax sufficiently…AND there will soon be a borrowing constraint. The people have been systematically lied to for over 70 years–lies they have wanted to hear, though. If they ever figure out that it is THEY who have to pay for the welfare state and that–systematically–younger cohorts will pay a lot more and get a lot less, there will be hell to pay.

Watch it.

Read it.

The Obama administration is proudly shattering welfare records with an astonishing number of people collecting public benefits long term, especially food stamps.

Read it.

Scientists have used a custom-made 3D printer to make a synthetic tissue that could have a variety of applications — including the ability to transmit long-distance electric signals much like nerves. The process, published in Science by an Oxford University team led by Hagan Bayley, prints a network of droplets made out of aqueous solutions — a liquid mixture — instead of the solids that standard 3D printers produce.

We have the technology.

Read it.

 A NASA scientist claims to be on the verge of faster-than-light travel: is he for real?

Read it.

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

Homosexuality has gone from being “the love that dare not speak its name” to being “the political agenda that won’t shut up,” and its enthusiasts — 3.4 percent of the U.S. population, according to a Gallup poll last year – seem determined to make up in angry outrage what they lack in numbers.

Victims are where you find them — chiefly in the newsrooms.

Some of you young people might not believe it, but there was a time when being gay was mostly about sex. Also, disco.

Then, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, being gay became mostly about blaming Republicans for AIDS. Nowadays, being gay seems to be mostly about wishing violent death on Republicans.

How homosexuality changed from being a personal preference to being a political identity is deserving of an essay or even an entire book, but nobody’s offering to pay me to write either. Still I can’t help but wonder: Is hating Republicans really that much more fun than sex and disco?

Read it.

India is poised to become one of the four largest military powers in the world by the end of the decade. It needs to think about what that means.

Read it.

Not too many decades ago the US and the rest of the western world had marriage as the central organizing philosophy for family structure.  This was a structure which created an incentive for men to produce more than they required for their own consumption and encouraged them to take on the responsibility of a family.  This system not only benefited children, but men and women as well.  Women benefited from the protection and resources husbands provided to them and the children they bore.  Men were provided the only socially and morally sanctioned access to sex as well as the prestige and satisfaction which came from leading a family.  Society as a whole benefited because children had the advantages of growing up in an intact home and men were willing to work extremely hard to produce the required surplus.

Through a combination of legal and social “reforms”, the US now has what appears on the surface to be a dual family structure but is in legal reality a single family structure organized around the concept of child support.  Where in the past a woman needed to secure a formal promise from a man in the form of marriage before she could expect him to support her and the children she bore, in this new structure the law declares that any man she has children by are bound to support her and her children whether she marries or not, and whether or not she honors her own marriage vows.

While men were motivated under the old family structure, they absolutely detest the new child support system of family formation.  Under the old system a man who married before fathering children could reasonably expect access to his children and the opportunity to direct their upbringing (in concert with his wife).  Under the new system the children are de facto considered the property of the mother, whom the state compels him to pay so she can direct their upbringing generally as she sees fit.  Since the new system has removed the incentive for men to work hard to provide for their families, it has to rely instead on threats of imprisonment to coerce men into earning “enough” income.  Where men used to take pride in the birth of their children and celebrate with cigars, large numbers of men now fear fatherhood more than anything.

Read it.

This is pretty amusing, but I was particularly struck by one bit:

 I never saw a college rep at Pahrump Valley High, but the military made sure that a stream of alumni flooded back to our school in their uniforms and fresh flattops, urging their old chums to enlist. Those students who did even reasonably well on the ASVAB (the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, for readers who went to schools where this test was not so exhaustively administered) were thoroughly hounded by recruiters.

Yeah, that’s about right.

 Granted, there’s a good reason top colleges aren’t sending recruiters around the country to woo kids like me and Ryan (who, incidentally, got his B.S. at U.N.R. before going on to earn his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Purdue and now holds a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship with the National Research Council). The Army needs every qualified candidate it can get, while competitive colleges have far more applicants than they can handle. But if these colleges are truly committed to diversity, they have to start paying attention to the rural poor.

But of course the ‘diversity’ meme is only a Clever Plastic Disguise for admitting Fashionable Minority Kids who will become stalwart members of the Crust upon graduation. The rural poor are the Bottom Crust, and those we will have always with us.

Read it.

IN 2010 a panel created by the White House estimated that American taxpayers spend 7.6 billion hours and some $140 billion a year keeping the IRS off their backs. According to the Washington Post over 80% of taxpayers use software or pay someone to file their taxes. The national taxpayer advocate, a sort-of in-house IRS watchdog, once said, “If tax compliance were an industry, it would be one of the largest in the United States.” But of course, it is an industry.

It is an industry made up of accountants and companies like H&R Block and Intuit, which makes the TurboTax software used by many Americans. And it is an industry that, according to ProPublica, has worked hard to keep the IRS from preparing your tax returns for you for free. Intuit, for example, has spent millions lobbying the federal government, opposing bills that would allow the IRS to send you pre-filled-in returns (the agency already has most of your relevant information) and supporting bills that would ban the practice.

Read it.

Fighting ability, largely determined by upper body strength, continues to rule the minds of modern men, according to a new study by Aaron Sell from Griffith University in Australia and colleagues. Their work explores the concept that human males are designed for fighting, and shows how this fighting ability drives both their behavior and attitudes to a range issues, including political orientation. For example, their research demonstrates that among Hollywood actors, those selected for their physical strength, i.e. action stars, are more likely to support the Republican position on foreign policy.

I’m thinking that the presence of testicles probably has something to do with it.

These features include abilities to dissipate heat, perceive and respond rapidly to threats, estimate the trajectory of thrown objects, resist blunt-force trauma and accurately intercept objects.

We call this ‘football’. There’s a reason why ‘throw like a girl’ is a cliché, and why it applies to Barack Obama.

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