Sunday Funnies

All webcomics from the one and only xkcd.com.

More Don Henley: The Boys of Summer

My favorite lost love tune of all time (With HQ audio and video).

Yeah, it reminds me of a particular girl. One who had red hair, red eyebrows, red eyelashes, and sky-blue eyes. It’s almost painful to listen to… but brilliant.

Why art has done more damage than science

I followed the link from Instapundit”> titled Art kills, and I have to say, Jonah Goldberg is probably the smartest man in the universe today. Now, I consider myself an artist (although I admit my mediocre talents), but I haven’t the desire, ability, or power to become a dictator. And I have the smarts, if I do say so, not to have been sucked into the black hole of liberalism that is the “art scene”. But I love all art that makes sense to me, and I suspect there are some artists (Beef of God?) in our coterie who agree.

On the bright side, we do permit pretty much everyone to study anything. If you want to read a book about how to design, say, the Hoover Dam, you’re perfectly free to do so. If you want to learn how to make a nuclear reactor, there’s literally nothing stopping you except the price of a few dozen books, some schooling, and the time and energy necessary to process the information.

It’s only when you want to do things outside your head that we as a society saunter-up to your garage workshop and ask “Hey, what are you doing?” If you answer, “I’m making a better mousetrap,” we say “good luck,” and walk away. If you answer, “I’m making a thermonuclear device to slaughter the infidels once and for all.” We say, “Huh. Do you have a permit for that?”

Obviously, I’m simplifying. In fact, we ask too many people to show their permits for the stuff they do. We just institutionalize the process through regulations. And, yeah, there’s some technology you can’t research to your heart’s content. If you post a query to a bulletin board asking how to poison the water supply of New York City, you’ll probably get a visit from the FBI. At least I hope you will.

It’s worth a reread to discover why the “artists” (actor-celebrities, musicians, artists, writers, etc) have done more damage to the idea of freedom than have scientists and technicians with their command of technology.

I’ve Always Been Nice to Fat Girls

I’m not kidding, either. And not just because you never know. Some of the most excellent girls I’ve ever met were “fat.”

Here’s a knock-your-socks-off before and after.

I love stories like this.

Remember, “Big Bottom Girls Make the Rockin’ World Go ‘Round.”

My Favorite Don Henley: In the Garden of Allah

With an extra-special treat, video by a moonbat!

En-fucking-joy. While I was looking for the best audio track, I watched every version of this. In the comments to every single version is a moonbatbabe who thinks this is all about the OJ Simpson trial… because they were selling t-shirts then. Fucking morons.

Of course, The Garden of Allah was an apartment complex, and Henley was writing about the famous literati who hung out there, not the illuminati.

The world is populated by fucktards… but it’s a great song.

All She Wants To Do Is, Dance…Remix. Yea, Baby…

Don Henley

Cool Change

Michelle Obama sucks it up….

Now we know why, in her adult life, Michelle Obama has never been proud of America until now. As Byron York reports, her life here is such a struggle. And not because of the demands of the political campaign. As she puts it, “I don’t know what I would do, even if we weren’t running; I don’t know what I would do as a professional without having that kind of support system [provided by her mother who lives nearby].” It is that support system, she confesses, that “keeps me sane.”

It’s easy to see her point. The Obamas, according to Michelle, spend roughly $10,000 a year just on programs for their kids — “piano and dance and sports supplements” and “summer programs and so on and so forth.” And, having had the audacity to quit “corporate America” the Obamas must do so on Barack’s salary and book money, Michelle’s salary of $317,000 (up from the $122,000 she made before Barack was elected to the Senate), and whatever she can scrape together from serving on corporate boards (her abandonment of corporate America apparently has not been complete).

But Michelle Obama is still instructive. She’s a depressing speciman of a post-modern class of victim — demanding, whining, self-absorbed, self-pitying, and infantile.

Power Line

WE type, you opine.

Audio: Obama Raised Funds for Islamic Causes! Posted to make your own mind up…AND WE are just a few short of 1000 posts.

Humanitarian or raising funds that will find its way for rockets?

Aaron Klein, Jerusalem Bureau Chief for WorldNetDaily.com, reports that Democratic presidential frontrunner Senator Barack Obama has spoken at fundraisers for Palestinians living in what the United Nations terms refugee camps.

 There is an audio portion, should you choose.

Arutz Sheva

Please save these children.

In 2003 Dr Lara Wieland was the resident Royal Flying Doctor medico on Kowanyama Aboriginal Community in Cape York. Her abhorrence at the incidence of sexual abuse of young children forced her to write a 10-page letter to Prime Minister John Howard and Queensland Premier Peter Beattie.

After she handed the letter to Mr Howard, she was sacked by the Queensland Department of Health for making public her concerns.

She has been widely hailed as “The Angel of the Cape” for her humanitarian work among Aboriginal children.

This is an excerpt from a piece she wrote for The Australian immediately after Sorry Day. I strongly urge people to read the whole article.

I could not fathom the possibility that so many people in a community would “not care” about their children. The dysfunction has become so deep that many people do not even realise the damage that is being done to their young people.

They hardly bat an eyelid at events that would make your stomach churn. A young mother in a drunken state beats her young child with a stick and screams that she is going to kill him. The next day, that same mother, sober, hugs her child and does not even think about the lasting emotional scars. Why would she when her mother did the same to her, and her neighbours do the same, and no one has ever told her that it is wrong?

Children who have had sexually transmitted diseases and have been raped and molested are now parents. No one ever helped them or told them that what happened to them was wrong or not normal. Today’s teenage parents grew up in homes with hardly any furniture or toilet paper or soap or toothpaste.

They don’t know what it means to make your child wash with soap in the shower or brush their teeth at night. They eat meals that materialise – if they’re lucky – occasionally around pay day…

Boys raping younger boys becomes just boys “playing gay” – to be “told off”. Yes, young boys do often engage in explorative sexual play but that is completely different to non-consensual acts where pre-pubescent boys sodomise little kids with objects while they scream out “no”, or where older teenagers or adults watch as they make younger teenagers rape little kids, who then have nightmares….

I can see now what I couldn’t understand before – why a person could feed their child hardly at all, sporadically send them to school, yell at them, criticise them, beat them and then still genuinely be heartbroken, despairing and confused when their child is removed from them. Some people, in their heart, really didn’t realise that what they were doing was so bad. In fact, you’ll often hear someone say, “But why did I lose my kid for that when I know many other families who are doing the same or worse?”

Dysfunction is so entrenched that large swaths of the population’s children could meet the definition for removal because of abuse and/or neglect. It is impossible to remove all the children who would meet the criteria for removal. Certainly, children who are at immediate risk or who are in an unsafe situation must be removed immediately, and away from the community…

There needs to be a solution to this problem before we “lose” an entire generation to the dysfunction of their parents…

…

And yet the “Stolen Generations Alliance” has made a huge number of demands in a report handed in person to new Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin recently, the most frightening of which to me is this one, as reported by political correspondent Daniel Street:

The success of the Rudd Government’s apology “depended on more than just the ceremony and the wording”, with SGA insisting that the government should “specifically declare that forcible child removals will never happen again in Australia under any circumstance and under any future government“.

As I read that, they’re demanding that in order to avoid another “Stolen Generation,” abused and neglected children could only ever be saved (“stolen”) with the explicit permission of their parents. And even permission might not be enough, for as we’ve seen with some Aborigines who now claim to have been “stolen,” they were actually voluntarily handed over to various welfare institutions by their family.

If we accept the Bringing Them Home report’s accusation that the “stolen generations” were an attempt at genocide of the Aboriginal race by the Australian Government, what child protection worker in their right mind would dare to advocate another child removal, even with the parents’ permission? For who wants to be implicated in another “genocide” accusation, no matter how groundless, 30 or 40 or 50 years from now?

Now, please, take the time to read the text of Dr Lara Wieland’s letter to Prime Minister John Howard in 2003, five years ago now. The one that, according to The Australian and other sources, helped get her sacked by the Queensland Department of Health for making public her concerns.

And a final note: Keep in mind that neither the Coalition nor the ALP seem to have been able to make much of an inroad into this issue as of yet, so please, nobody should go jumping on their high moral horse; if for no other reason than that it’s hard to see the little children from way up there, and they’ve been trampled enough already.

Consider these questions.

A friend emailed this to me. I chose all the obvious answers and pretty much fell on my face.

A woman you know is pregnant. Of the eight children she has already borne three are deaf, two are blind, one is mentally retarded.
She also has syphilis.
Would you recommend that she have an abortion?

Before answering, read on to the next question.

It’s time to elect a world leader, and everything rests on your vote.
Here are the facts about the three candidates.

Candidate A associates with crooked politicians and consults with astrologists.
He’s had two mistresses. He chain smokes. He downs 8 to 10 martinis a day.

Candidate B was kicked out of office twice, sleeps until noon, used opium in
his younger days and still drinks a quart of whiskey every evening.

Candidate C is a decorated war hero. He’s a vegetarian, doesn’t smoke, drinks an occasional beer and has never cheated on his wife.

Make your choice…

Was it candidate A – Franklin D. Roosevelt?
Was is candidate B – Winston Churchill?
Or was it candidate C – Adolf Hitler?

Tricky, huh?

By the way – if you said yes, and persuaded that woman to have an abortion…
you robbed the world of Ludwig Van Beethoven.

All I asked for was an explanation

Got myself into a very heated argument with a young British Muslim woman on Thursday night. It all started when I politely asked her to explain the following. So why didn’t she explain it satisfactorily and instead, attack me personally? The following is commonly known as the Verse of the Sword. It appears late in the Koran and, thus abrogates earlier peaceful injunctions.

9:5. Then when the Sacred Months (the 1st, 7th, 11th, and 12th months of the Islamic calendar) have passed, then kill the Mushrikun {unbelievers} wherever you find them, and capture them and besiege them, and prepare for them each and every ambush. But if they repent and perform As-Salat (Iqamat-as-Salat {the Islamic ritual prayers}), and give Zakat {alms}, then leave their way free. Verily, Allah is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful.

With thanks to http://www.jihadwatch.org

In Kenya, U.S. Added Action to Talk of Democracy

WASHINGTON — Within hours of Thursday’s power-sharing deal between Kenya’s rival leaders, the State Department issued a rare statement from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, praising the pact and citing the United States for providing “intensive support” to bring it about.

Indeed, while Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, spent weeks in Kenya negotiating the agreement, many foreign policy experts also credit the Bush administration for putting action behind its talk of the need for democracy in Africa.

The rest at The New York Times

An Open Letter to Our Fellow Australians: Not in my name, Mr. Rudd.

(click image to enlarge)

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The advertisement above was placed in the February 29 edition of The West Australian.

I have nothing to add, except to say that I fully endorse the sentiments and I hope that anyone else who does will contact Mr. Fearis or one of the other signatories and let them know. Alternatively, leave your messages here in the comments section and I will get a hard copy to them.

Thank you.

.

UPDATE: For more on the “stolen” generation, the “lost” generation, and sorry day, see these posts and the links contained in them.

2007 Deakin Lecture: Former Federal Minister for Indigenous Affairs Mal Brough

“Sorry Day” — February 13th, 2008

Mal Brough on The ‘Lost Generation’

**and please take the time to read this post: Please save these children.

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UPDATE #2: Hello to our visitors from other blogs, including Little Green Footballs. Blog-owners, thank you for linking to this post.

The Original Detective Paco

It’s a collector’s edition friends, so treat it with care.

The pelting rain played a soggy drum roll on the window, and I sipped cold coffee while blowing imaginary smoke from the dead stump of a cigar in my federally-mandated smoke-free office, when she came in – my favorite ABC public relations employee, seeking out Paco Investigations to look into another case of missing context. She was a five-alarm redhead, with more curves than Bobo Newsome on a good day at Tiger Stadium, all of them wrapped in a tight blue dress that might have passed for a full-body tattoo.

I plucked my eyes off her frame, screwed them back into their sockets, and glanced at the file she had dropped on my desk.

Looked like the same old crap: ABC had been accused of trying to pass off a terrorist gang as harmless social workers.

“The Jews want an answer”, my ABC friend cooed, in a voice so silky you could have had polka dots printed on it and worn it around your collar like a necktie.

“Media bias, doll face. Case solved. That’ll be a hundred bucks”

She pouted a little and turned on her stiletto heels to leave. She paused at the door long enough to glance coyly over her shoulder: “Call me later?”

“We’ll see, baby, we’ll see.”

She shrugged and swished out of the office. She’d be ok; as the PR mouthpiece for ABC, smoothing over all the screw-ups of that fumble-fingered organization, she’d have a job as long as she wanted it. And me? All I was left with was a c-note and the memory of a swell set of gams, retreating briskly into the night.