One of my missionary friends, who is now serving in an Islamic country that shall go unnamed and previously worked in Uzbekistan before being thrown out, sent me a sad and hardly shocking email today.

Dear prayer partners

There is a young brother in Uzbekistan who needs God’s help. Would you pray for him.

Please pray for D***. He is a faithful young man (about 22 I think) who, because of his unique maturity, has been leading and pasturing a group of believers in ******, Uzbekistan. I’ve sat and prayed with this brother many times and have heard first hand his heart for the Lord.

He is facing probable arrest by authorities because he leads an ‘illegal’ Christian house church (who have tried to register and become legal and been rejected with no explanation). He has already faced rejection from his parents and other family. He feels that he may have to flee the country to avoid arrest. Another complication is that his wife is pregnant.

It is no exaggeration to say that Uzbek prisons are some of the worst in the world. Please cry out to God for this dear brother!!

I’ll let you know when / if I know more.

Blessings,
G*****

This sort of thing happens every day throughout the Islamic world, as a hard and vicious wall is thrown up against any belief other than Islam. Children are thrown out of the house, or worse. Customers leave a business. Pastors are thrown in prison. Bibles are burned.

And this sort of thing happens every day throughout the Christian world:

First, we heard about a large group of Somali Muslim airport cabbies in Minneapolis refusing to provide service to travelers carrying alcohol or using dogs. At first, the airport moved to accommodate, but then the Somalis lost the battle to impose coercive interpretations of sharia (Islamic law) upon airport travelers. We recently have also seen airports, schools and universities agreeing to install foot-washing stations for Muslim airport cabbies and students at a significant cost to taxpayers in the name of special accommodations for Muslims. In Lincoln Park, Michigan, a few Muslim women insisted that a co-ed health club to which they signed up provide them a women’s-only room for exercise. Fitness USA acquiesced under fears of litigation despite the fact that the Muslim women signed up for no such guarantee with their enrollment contract. (Islam Watch)

We allow this to happen in our land because we believe in freedom, of course. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore the prosecution of minority religions to go on throughout most of the Muslim world? How about for each church the Saudis or the Uzbeks allow to remain open, we will install a foot-washing station?

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Pro-Beijing (i.e., pro-totalitarian) Chinese by the thousands demonstrated in front of CNN’s LA office today — but it seems they were more angry about disparaging remarks about the quality of Chinese products than about coverage of the repression of Tibet:

Up to five thousand people gathered Saturday in front of the Hollywood offices of CNN to protest disparaging remarks about China made by one of the channel’s commentators, police said.

The demonstration came as pro-China protests were held across the world against what they see as disinformation of the Western media over China’s recent crackdown in Tibet, which has proved a public relations disaster ahead of August’s Beijing Olympics. …

The Beijing government took CNN to task this week after outspoken commentator Jack Cafferty slammed China for exporting unsafe products, which he called “junk with lead paint,” as well as Beijing’s massive purchases of US securities.

“I think they’re basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years,” Cafferty said of China in an April 9 broadcast.

The Chinese foreign ministry on Thursday rejected a CNN explanation that his comments — which caused a huge outcry in China — were aimed at the government, and not the Chinese people. (AFP)

[Idiocy disclaimer: Cafferty is a raving idiot and I get very, very nervous when I'm on the same side as him. I like the sign above: "Cafferty, do you eat with that mouth?"]

Missing, by the way, is any coverage of the event on the CNN home page or its national news page. Cover-up News Network?

The Chinese are not making any friends or influencing any people with these demonstrations — in fact, they stink of the same sort of arrogance of Muslim thugs who tried to tell us we couldn’t print cartoons despite our freedoms.

They are free to demonstrate against our government and do — despite the fact that protests are brutally shut down in their own country. We are free to be ticked off at them if they don’t like it if they ship us crap or crush the dream of freedom among their people.

Photo: LA Times

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Survival

I didn’t know there was a publication called Survival until my friend Jim forward a link to it. No, it’s not about eating grubs and avoiding grizzlies — it’s about geopolitical survival, the tectonic plates of foreign policy, and what we must do, as humans, to avoid the alternative to the publication’s name.

In the winter 2007–08 issue, which I haven’t seen, Philip Gordon, a Clintonista from the Brookings Institution, published an article that argued that America’s strategy against terror is failing ‘because the Bush administration chose to wage the wrong war.’

The current issue gives former Bush speechwriter Peter Wehner an opportunity to rebut, and he does it quite well, without the arrogant rhetoric Gordon accuses the Bush administration of suffering from. Gordon presented six reasons why Bush has failed, and Wehner rebuts each quite neatly, while admitting our shortcomings along the way.

Each of the six rebuttals is a gem to file away for safekeeping until the next time you have to debate a rhetoric-spewing anti-Bushite, but I particularly liked this little bit in response to Gordon’s claim that Bush has squandered the goodwill of the world:

For Gordon’s thesis to have merit, then, he would have to rewrite most of the history of the past six years. He would have to erase virtually all of the day-to-day activity of the war on terror, which as a practical matter consists of unprecedented levels of cooperation and integrated planning across scores of countries, both long-time allies and new partners.

All of this calls to mind the scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian in which the Judean ‘guerrillas’ debate whether the Roman Empire has brought any good to the Holy Land. John Cleese’s character asks rhetorically what good the Romans have done. After his men point out one benefit after another, the Cleese character is obliged to say: ‘All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?’

Apart from the vast number of multilateral anti-terrorism initiatives from 2001 to the present, when has the Bush administration ever worked in partnership with other countries?

The magazine offers the opportunity for counterpoint to Kishore Mahbubani, Dean and Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, and the tired, recycled rhetoric of his piece underscores the effectiveness of Wehrner’s piece. Here’s an example, part of his argument that America’s support for Israel makes friendship with the Islamic world difficult:

The threat Israel faces was illustrated very well by Deng Xiaoping, who once used a simple comparison to describe the folly of Vietnam taking on China after defeating America in 1975. When he was asked how long China could fight Vietnam, Deng replied that when a large rock and a small stone are continuously rubbed together, over time the small stone disappears. Vietnam soon realised the wisdom of Deng’s comments. Despite the confidence the nation felt after America’s retreat, it sued for peace with China. Vietnam’s population is 84 million, while China’s is 1.3 billion, meaning there are 15 Chinese for every Vietnamese. The ratio of Israel’s population (7m) to that of the Islamic world (1.5bn) is even worse – 1:200. Wisdom dictates that Israel should work for peace.

What a concept! Israel should work for peace! Why hasn’t this occurred to us before? Mahbubani, in one paragraph, has succeeded in exquisitely illustrating for us the blind, hate-filled, anti-Semitic mind of Islam — even the highly educated, moderate Islamic mind he says is different from our perception of Islam.

Unlucky Seven

Lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy and pride, look out. You’ve got company.

After 1,500 years of committee meetings and prayer, the Catholic church has added to the list of mortal sins for the first time since Pope Gregory. And I have to say, the new Bad Biggies lack the simple message impact of the first Big Seven.

Lust? Got it. Gluttony, yup. Sloth … I could go on through the seven but I’m sooo tired, and you get the point: They’re all one-worders that get their point across well and easily. But some of the new ones? “‘Manipulative’ genetic scientists?” What does mean? That they play nasty little tricks to get more than their fair share of Petri dishes?

Fortunately, we have Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Vatican body which oversees confessions and plenary indulgences, to explain it to us. Manipulative genetic scientists are those who “carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos.”

I see. But I bet these scientists are already loaded up with avarice and pride and therefore are in for a Dante-esque afterlife.

Abortion is also new to the list, and let’s give it a warm welcome — as long as we’re talking about abortionists, not women who have abortions. It’s the abortionists, who live high on the hog by murdering the unborn with full recognition of what they’re doing, who deserve to move up to Majors in the Sin League.

Unfortunately, it appears the Catholic Church is including those that have abortions on the list as well, just as it is including those who take drugs with the deserving new mortal sin bunch, drug dealers. People who have abortions and people who do drugs have much wrong with them and are guilty of many sins, but I don’t understand how the Vatican can group them with the profiteers who exploit their weakness. Given that the Catholic Church had 1,500 years to make the list, couldn’t it have done a better job?

Rounding out the seven are environmental polluters (which includes all of us, of course, so I hope some quantification is provided), pedophiles (including those in priest’s robes), the “obscenely wealthy” (how does that differ from gluttony?), and social injustice that causes poverty (which is sometimes the scapegoat for sloth and avarice).

All in all, we’ve been presented with a complicated and confusing bunch of new sins, lacking the simplicity and clarity of the first seven. Come the year 3,508 — 1,500 years hence — the Church may stretch the list to 21. Let’s hope they do a better job than they did with this bunch.

Wombs For Rent

Best be careful here … this seems to be a dangerously narrow loophole between the genetic manipulation and social injustice mortal sins we just talked about. Let’s let the NYT (which is surely some sort of mortal sin all by itself) explain:

An enterprise known as reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding business in India. Clinics that provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have recently been inundated with requests from the United States and Europe, as word spreads of India’s mix of skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices.

Commercial surrogacy, which is banned in some states and some European countries, was legalized in India in 2002. The cost comes to about $25,000, roughly a third of the typical price in the United States. That includes the medical procedures; payment to the surrogate mother, which is often, but not always, done through the clinic; plus air tickets and hotels for two trips to India (one for the fertilization and a second to collect the baby).

Because few if any well-healed women will offer to be a surrogate womb for a stranger, surrogacy is a business of giving poor women enough money ($7,500, according to the NYT) to make an all-business pregnancy worthwhile, for the benefit of a wealthier couple.

While I like the free trade aspects of it — that these desperately poor Indian women are quite literally lifted out of grinding poverty for the price of one or two pregnancies — it’s hard not to be struck by this paragraph from the NYT story:

In the Mumbai clinic, it is clear that an exchange between rich and poor is under way. On some contracts, the thumbprint of an illiterate surrogate stands out against the clients’ signatures.

Is the fact that the surrogate’s own children will never have to sign a contract with a thumbprint, thanks to the education they received because their mother rented out her womb, enough to make this entire enterprise cheery and bright? Not quite.

Shocking Headline of the Day

And the winner is … BBC!

Meanwhile …

Those Iranian conservatives have been busy protecting their slaves citizens from things the poor oppressed masses happy participants in the Islamic Revolution don’t know to protect themselves from:

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran’s Culture Ministry on Sunday announced the closure of nine cinema and lifestyle magazines for publishing pictures and stories about the life of “corrupt” foreign film stars and promoting “superstitions.”

The Press Supervisory Board, a body controlled by hard-liners, also sent warning notes to 13 other publications and magazines on “observing the provisions of the press law,” the ministry said on its website.

It was not clear why the nine magazines were targeted for closure. They do not deal with politics, focusing on light lifestyle features, family advice, and news of celebrities.

They regularly publish photos of Iranian actresses in loose headscarves and stylish clothes, as well as foreign female film stars without head coverings — but nothing more revealing than what is tolerated on some state media.

The ministry said it shut them down for “using photos of artists, especially foreign corrupt film stars, as instruments (to arouse desire), publishing details about their decadent private lives, propagating medicines without authorization, promoting superstitions.”

You know, sick as I am of 24/7 Brittany and Paris news, I sometimes wish we could have a little media repression here … but then the thought passes.

Had the Iranian election been fair (a BIG “had”), chances are the government would have paid the price for this sort of unwelcomed, heavy-handed control over peoples’ lives. But it wasn’t fair, so the conservatives won big.

The reference to “propagating medications without authorization” is apparently a reference to ads the shuttered publications ran for male enhancement formulas. Apparently the Islamic state has no room for enhanced males.

Going Green, China Style

Perhaps, being better read than I, you’ve read kudo-laden accounts of an emerging solar panel industry in China, and perhaps you’ve thought, “Ah, the corner is begining to be turned. China may be changing from its polluted ways.”

Well, that just proves that being better-read doesn’t mean having better sense. ENN explains why:

As people worldwide increasingly feel the heat of climate change, many are applauding the skyrocketing growth China’s fledging solar-cell industry. …

A recent Washington Post article, however, has revealed that China’s booming solar industry is not as green as one might expect. [Really?!] Many of the solar panels that now adorn European and American rooftops have left behind a legacy of toxic pollution in Chinese villages and farmlands.

The Post article describes how Luoyang Zhonggui, a major Chinese polysilicon manufacturer, is dumping toxic factory waste directly on to the lands of neighboring villages, killing crops and poisoning residents. Other polysilicon factories in the country have similar problems, either because they have not installed effective pollution control equipment or they are not operating these systems to full capacity. Polysilicon is a key component of the sunlight-capturing wafers used in solar photovoltaic (PV) cells.

Uh-oh. That’s a mortal sin, fer sure.

So now when you put those PV units on your rooftop, you can rest easy knowing that not only are you greener than the Jones, you’re significantly less poisoned by Chinese industrial pollution than the Pengs, whose picture (above) ran with the WaPo story.

Feeling A Little Cocky

Let’s see if the Euros, the ex-Soviets, the Chinese or the Caliphate can do this:

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft performed a daring flyby of Saturn’s moon Enceladus on Wed., March 12, flying about 15 kilometers per second (32,000 mph) through icy water geyser-like jets. The spacecraft snatched up precious samples that might point to a water ocean or organics inside the little moon.

A Euro-Terrorist

On the heals of a study proving that al-Qaeda cynically recruits social outcasts for suicide bombings, we read this, from Spiegel:

His last mission began at exactly 4.04 p.m. on March 3. The driver pulled up his blue Toyota Dyna truck in front of the Sabari district center in the eastern Afghan province of Khost. The motor was still running when he hit the detonator. The force of the blast shook the earth and caused the guard post to collapse, trapping dozens of US soldiers under the rumble. The explosion was so forceful that eye witnesses assumed there had been a rocket attack on the building that the US army had built just two months previously.

Of course, as a suicide bomber, his “last mission” was also his first mission. This punk who killed two of our men has been identified by the Islamic Jihad Union as 28-year-old “Cüneyt C.” from Bavaria, a scrawny, pimply-faced loser of a German-born Turk. Spiegel provides more detail:

Cüneyt C., a 28-year-old German-born Turk, is known to be an Islamist and to have had links with the so-called “Sauerland Cell” led by Fritz Gelowicz and Adem Yilmaz. He had been regarded as dangerous since their arrest last year on suspicion of planning a terror attack (more…) in Germany. “Ismail from Ansbach,” as C. was called by his friends had already left Germany by then. He left Ansbach with his wife and two children on April 2, giving up his apartment, quitting his job and even going to the local registration office to inform them he was leaving the area.

The investigators have since regarded C. as belonging to a group who have traveled from Germany to Pakistan in order to receive training as Jihadists. In the eyes of the German authorities this makes them extremely dangerous.

This is why we can’t treat terrorism as a problem to be handled by the legal system, as the Libs and Dems would have it. German intelligence was well aware of the risk posed by C. and his scummy friends, but because no crime had been committed by them, Germany couldn’t stop them. By exploiting the system, the Islamic Jihad carried out a successful operation … leaving behind at least two orphans and sending a sick young man to Hell.

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Bringing Honor Back To “Monica”

Here’s a story out of Afghanistan that would be completely wonderful, were it not for the five wounded US soldiers that are central to it:

CAMP SALERNO, Afghanistan (AP) – A 19-year-old medic from Texas will become the first woman in Afghanistan and only the second female soldier since World War II to receive the Silver Star, the nation’s third-highest medal for valor.

Army Spc. Monica Lin Brown saved the lives of fellow soldiers after a roadside bomb tore through a convoy of Humvees in the eastern Paktia province in April 2007, the military said.

After the explosion, which wounded five soldiers in her unit, Brown ran through insurgent gunfire and used her body to shield wounded comrades as mortars fell less than 100 yards away, the military said.

“I did not really think about anything except for getting the guys to a safer location and getting them taken care of and getting them out of there,” Brown told The Associated Press on Saturday at a U.S. base in the eastern province of Khost. …

Brown, of the 4th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, said ammunition going off inside the burning Humvee was sending shrapnel in all directions. She said they were sitting in a dangerous spot.

“So we dragged them for 100 or 200 meters, got them away from the Humvee a little bit,” she said. “I was in a kind of a robot-mode, did not think about much but getting the guys taken care of.”

For Brown, who knew all five wounded soldiers, it became a race to get them all to a safer location. Eventually, they moved the wounded some 500 yards away and treated them on site before putting them on a helicopter for evacuation.

“I did not really have time to be scared,” Brown said. “Running back to the vehicle, I was nervous (since) I did not know how badly the guys were injured. That was scary.”

The military said Brown’s “bravery, unselfish actions and medical aid rendered under fire saved the lives of her comrades and represents the finest traditions of heroism in combat.”

Can you imagine having that maturity, esprit de corps and selflessness at the age of 19? I just asked that of Incredible Daughter #2, who happens to be 19, and she just shook her head and said, “That’s crazy.”

It does take a little crazy to be a good soldier, and five guys in her unit and all of America have a very good, and a little crazy, soldier to thank this morning for her valor.

Name The Fanatical Motivation

What motivated these fanatics? I had the answer five words into this story … but had to read 18 paragraphs before BBC provided just a hint:

Suspected militants arrested in western China earlier this year were planning attacks on the Beijing Olympics, a Chinese official says.

Two people were reported to have been killed and 15 arrested in a raid on 27 January in Urumqi, Xinjiang province.

Officials now say their aim was to attack the August Olympics.

The alleged plot was disclosed as officials also revealed that a plane crew prevented an apparent attempt to crash a jet on an internal flight.

The incident occurred on Friday.

Put “militants” and “Western China” together and what do you have? Islamists! BBC can’t bring itself to say that, though. Way down at paragraph 18 and beyond we find:

China has been struggling for years to contain separatist sentiment among the Uighur minority in Xinjiang.

Some Uighurs have campaigned for the mainly Muslim province to become an independent republic.

There it is: “mainly Muslim.” And then you can read “separatist” to mean “wanting to set up a Shari’a theocracy.”

Not that the media would ever make it that clear.

Gagging On Universal Health Care

A lot of us smell a rat on hearing the Dem-patter on the need for a system of universal health care. “Smell a rat” is just a figure of speech, of course … [cue the sinister voice] … or is it?

LONDON (Reuters) – A patient was told there was no reason why he couldn’t have surgery in a hospital, despite the smell caused by a dead rodent trapped in the building’s ceiling.

Andrew Cowper was due to have an operation at the Queen Elizabeth II hospital in Hertfordshire when staff “were made aware of a dead rodent in the single storey unit’s roof space,” the hospital said in a statement.

The hospital said its experts concluded that the dead animal was outside the operating theater and posed no risk.

Cowper, 19, who had been waiting 11 months for the unspecified operation, opted out, despite the experts opinion that it was perfectly safe under the rule of England’s national health care system to be cut open within feet of a decomposing rodent.

Why I’m Not As Famous As Lileks

You remember Benny Sharon, the drugged-up Hebrew University prof and latter-day Timothy Leary, who recently postulated that Moses (I think that’s Moses on the right and Jethro on the left) was stoned when he had a vision of God giving him tablets, and that the real hand-off never occurred. I thought my post on Sharon was pretty clever … then I read what James Lileks had to say in his Bleat on the subject (with a hat-tip to Jim).

Talk about an effective rebuttal!

I just remembered that I called the Bob Davis show this morning to talk about the new theory re: Moses and the Ten Commandments: dude was high. Apparently a professor somewhere has suggested that the entire experience was the result of a mushroom or some such ceremonial intoxicant. I called to say I didn’t believe it, because if Moses was tripping we wouldn’t have ten commandments. We would have three. The first would make sense, more or less; the second, written half an hour later, would command profound respect for lizards who sit on stones and look at you, because they’re freaking incredible when you think about it, and the third would be gibberish. Never mind the problem of getting the tablets down the mountain – anyone who has experience of watching stoners try to assemble pizza money when the doorbell rings doubts that Moses could have hauled stone tablets all the way down.

After the chuckles (or “grass-giggles” if you will) die down, Lileks gets to The Big Point:

Sure: you cannot call them Commandments without someone doing the Commanding, and once they’re not commandments they lose the moral authority that supercedes the individual precepts. It doesn’t mean they’re not good ideas still; it just means they are one set of ideas in competition with other ideas that found their origin in the rude clay of history.

That, my friends, is why people who so enjoy sinning spend so much time and energy attacking the foundations of religion.

Whaling War Escalates

Paul Watson, a founder of GreenPeace who now has moved on to forcefully impose his anti-human view on others as captain of the anti-whaling ship Sea Shepard, is facing some stiff opposition this time around as Japanese whaling boat captains are standing up to his grandstanding:

Paul Watson, captain of the Sea Shepherd group’s protest ship Steve Irwin, said on Friday he was shot, but survived because he was wearing a Kevlar vest.

Japan’s fisheries agency said coastguard officials had only thrown “flash grenades,” which are used for crowd control and are not regarded as weapons, after activists threw stink bombs on to the Japanese factory ship the Nisshin Maru. (source)

Tit for tat, I’d say.

Previously, the Japanese seized two whale-lovers who boarded a whaler and held them for quite some time, keeping them handcuffed to an outside railing to enjoy the Antarctic weather until an Australian fisheries patrol vessel intervened.

C-SM readers know I grew up in Japan, but you probably don’t know that one day when I opened my bag lunch at school, I found that our housekeeper had made me a pineapple and canned whale meat sandwich. Yum … not.

In my eleven years in Japan, my encounters with whale meat were slim to almost none. The Japanese whaling industry says whaling is cultural to the Japanese — but whale meat is rarely served and hardly popular.

Still, anyone who stands up to holier-than-thou Watson — a certifiable jerk-off who, when just 10, shot a kid in the butt to stop him from shooting a bird, and who once said “earthworms are far more valuable than people” — is a hero in my eyes.

For more on the chief thug of eco-terrorism, read the bio on Activist Cash or this one on Target of Opportunity (a bit of a scary site in its own right). Skip Wikipedia; it’s a bunch of bullsh … propaganda.

Muff Diving?!

Yes, there is a town in Ireland called “Muff,” and yes, there is a SCUBA diving shop there named after the town.

That’s just one of the bizarre bits of info on European towns I learned on Spiegel’s quiz based on the odd nature of European town names. (You’re going into the quiz with a one-question advantage, thanks to me!)

If you thought “muff diving” is a bit obscene, just you wait … it gets much more X-rated than that!

Making Jerry Brown Look Good

It’s common knowledge that Cal. AG Jerry Brown is using global warming grandstanding as a stage for a run for the governorship — Moonbeam II, if you will.

Frightening as that thought is, Brown just became a minor irritant in the scheme of things, as reported by the SF Wrongicle:

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is considering a 2010 run for governor – a campaign that would embrace many of the same divisive causes he has championed as mayor, including same-sex marriage, universal health care and protections for illegal immigrants, The Chronicle has learned.

Newsom has long been rumored to be a potential contender in what is likely to be a crowded field of Democrats looking to succeed Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a list that includes Attorney General and former Gov. Jerry Brown, former state Controller Steve Westly and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio ["Grease-Zipper"] Villaraigosa.

In recent months, Newsom has quietly been meeting with Democratic campaign strategists and other supporters to discuss a gubernatorial run, and he is now “certain to at least consider the possibility,” said Eric Jaye, a Newsom confidant and political consultant.

When asked whether he was planning to run, Newsom said, “A number of people in the last few months have reached out and talked to me about it.”

Could there be better proof of the premise that big fish in small ponds tend to think they can be big fish in big ponds? Can you imagine how Newsome’s honoring of a gay porn studio would play in Fresno? How his city’s sanctuary city status will play in Orange County and San Diego? And shall we consider the stinking $229 million black pit that is the city’s finances?

(If you want a good rundown of the bizarreness of life under Newsome, here’s a list of SF-watcher Bookworm’s posts on Baghdad by the Bay.)

Bring it on. Let the Dems strut their stuff in the Cal primaries, turning off sane Californians by the multitudes.

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This is the most bizarre separation of church and state shenanigan I’ve heard in quite some time:

“Southwestern Oklahoma State University (SWOSU), has issued a disturbing policy which requires all employees to refrain from using the word ‘Christmas’ in oral or written form. This directive was given by the university upon legal advice of the Oklahoma Attorney General, W.A. Drew Edmondson. Liberty Counsel sent a demand letter to SWOSU following a complaint from a university affiliate.

The statement was issued by The Liberty Council and is posted in its entirety at Tapscott’s Copy Desk. It continues:

John Misak, the [SWOSU] Director of Human Resources [definitely not the Director of Human Intelligence], recently visited various university departments and employee groups and informed everyone that any decorations featuring the word ‘Christmas’ in any work or public areas of the university must be immediately removed. He also instructed everyone to discontinue the use of the term ‘Christmas’ in their speech while on the job. This censorship specifically includes exchanging greetings of ‘Merry Christmas’ among employees or with non-employees, whether initiated by a non-university employee or not. Christmas remains a legal holiday for state employees, including those at SWOSU. The directive does not include any other legal holidays such as Thanksgiving or New Year’s.

Folks, this is at an institution of higher learning, showing just how oxymoronic that term has become.

SWOSU tried to deny the charge for a while today, but employees have confirmed to Tapscott that it’s true:

A veteran administrative employee of SWOSU confirmed that she and her colleagues in her department were told by their boss “to take the word ‘Christmas’ off of our email signatures and not to use that word in any official correspondence.”

Connie Phillips, SWOSU’s admissions coordinator, said she refused to comply. “I told them they could write me up but I was not going to take it off my signature.”

But the next sentence is the real kicker:

Other SWOSU employees were resisting the orders as well. “The people in the business office had a decoration up with the word ‘Christ’ in it and they were told to cover it over. They did but then they took it off. It’s been on and off about three times now, I think.”

Can you imagine a better example of a skirmish in a culture war?

Expect a howl, a big howl, especially since Atty Gen Edmonson is already an infamous rights-tromper for prosecuting three men for the heinous crime of advocating fiscal responsibility from elected leaders. This is a man who apparently lacks any concept of the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, Freedom of Religion or Freedom of Speech.

If you would like to call Edmonson and wish him a Merry Christmas, you can reach him at 405-521-3921.

hat-tip: memeorandum

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“When you put on your Jesus glasses,” Dr. James Corbett told the students in his Advanced Placement European history class at Capistrano Valley High School, “you can’t see the truth.”

The doc also shared with his class that he just doesn’t think much of believers … any believers:

… Conservatives don’t want women to avoid pregnancies. That’s interfering with God’s work. You got to stay pregnant, barefoot and in the kitchen to have babies until your body collapses. All over the world, doesn’t matter where you go, conservatives want control over women’s reproductive capacity. Everywhere in the world, from conservative Christians in this country to, um, Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan. It’s the same. It’s stunning how vitally interested they are in controlling women.

In fact, he thinks religion draws a society down:

People … in the industrialized world the people least likely to go to church are the Swedes. The people in the industrialized world most likely to go to church are the Americans. America has the highest crime rate of all the industrialized nations and Sweden has the lowest. The next time someone [like your parents] tells you religion is connected with morality, you might want to ask them about that.

The US does, in fact, have the highest crime rate — a function of excellent and transparent record keeping as much as anything else. But if Corbett were to look at crime rater per capita — the stat that matters, since he’s talking about individuals’ relationships with God here — he’d’ find that many much more secular industrialized nations, Finland, Denmark and the UK, all have higher crime rates.

Godless Sweden’s rate is lower, but it has a higher per capita adult suicide rate than religious America. Corbett didn’t share that with his students.

Moving on through this fascinating review of European history, we find the doc saying this:

I love Rush Limbaugh. A fat, pain in the ass liar. And boy is he a liar. Unbelievable.

And this important analysis of European history:

U.S. regulators — U.S. regulators say they added new warnings about the potential risks of sudden hearing loss among men who are using Viagra, Cialis or Levitra. So what they’ve been telling you for all these years, that you’ll go blind, isn’t true. … So you know, you know, so if you run into somebody who is, you know, deaf and whose pants felt stiff, he’s probably using the drug. They’re happy, but they’re deaf.

In the same class, after denouncing the Boy Scouts for being “in their own mind a homophobic and racist organization,” he said:

It’s simple. It’s called separation of church and state.

In his mind, there is no religion called “Secularism,” but it’s evident by his comments that there is, and he is a devout believer in that faith. One of the students in his class, Chad Farnan, has filed a lawsuit with the assistance of the Christian legal group Advocates for Faith and Freedom. Read the full complaint here.

Farnan liked Corbett’s class at first, then, according to yesterday’s OC Reg, he became more and more uncomfortable, and gave a recording of one of Corbett’s classroom rants to his mother. All quotes in this story are from that one tape, from one class.

This isn’t the first time Corbett’s gotten in trouble for his views, according to the Reg:

Corbett has been involved in at least two prior court cases as a Capistrano Valley High teacher. In 1993, he was named in a lawsuit brought by colleague John Peloza, a biology teacher who challenged Capistrano Unified’s mandate to teach evolutionary theory.

Corbett was listed in the suit as one of the defendants with a “class-based animus against practicing Christians” who attempted to “force” Peloza to teach evolution through “harassment and intimidation.” A trial court and an appeals court ruled against Peloza, although the appeals court said the complaint was “not entirely frivolous” and awarded attorney fees to Peloza.

Despite this, Corbett is still teaching, and Capistrano Valley High principal Tom Ressler hasn’t commented on his teacher’s latest transgression yet, except to say that 33 percent of Corbett’s students flunked the state’s Advanced Placement exam. (Actually, he said 66 percent passed, but I thought I’d emphasize that Corbett is a lousy teacher, too, not just a bigot.)

Were a teacher to lead his students in prayer, you can bet that Corbett would be at the front of the crazed pack, calling for that teacher’s “fat, pain in the ass” head. Were a teacher to attempt to teach the true history of Communist violence and abuse, or the terrorist acts of the Palestinians, you can bet that Corbett would be the loudest voice crying “Foul!” (or something more profane).

Yet he feel free to encourage kids to have premarital sex and to not trust their parents …

So you know, some parents are objecting, saying [handing out birth control pills is] taking too much power away from the parents. Parents are pretty irresponsible. And so is the Bush administration with its abstinence policy. Spending billions of dollars [!!] on something they know doesn’t work, wonderful. Wonderful. Idiotic.

… to not trust America, and above all, to not be a fool who believes in God.

And we pay him to do this, and if the school district — the school district my taxes go to, as a matter of fact — doesn’t fire him, we will pay for his defense.

Update: Here’s a follow-up article on the spirited debate the first article on Corbett generated.

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Tell Me If This Hurts

This hurts, Doc. From an op/ed on health care solutions in today’s OC Register:

Many more doctors and nurses have been hired [by Britain's National Health Service]. Unfortunately, their productivity has declined, as the number of patients seen by each physician has declined over the same period.

Britain has imported more than 20,000 physicians from Third World countries in the past three years, as after 60 years of experience the NHS has failed to attract and retain British physicians. Most of the imports are undoubtedly well-qualified, even those few who blow up cars and airports in their spare time.

The author, Richard Ralston, a health care advocate, notes that the NHS is a model for many who would reform America’s health system along Socialist lines. Cou-Hillary!-gh. He highlights for us some elements of the model:

• No knee replacements for women weighing more than 180 pounds and men more than 218 pounds.
• Heart bypasses denied for smokers.
• “Patients 80 years and older have been denied treatment for stroke because, after all, what is the point?”
• No longer changing sheets between patients — just turning the sheets over, instead. Staph, anyone?
• British patients taking “surgery vacations” so they don’t need to wait for surgery at home.

Feeling Insignificant

An anonymous LAT editorial took a swipe at those who would stand up to the secularization of American culture. Writing on the SCOTUS decision not to take up the forced removal of a cross from LA County’s seal, the ever-tolerant LAT scathed:

The county offered up a new cross-less seal that also banished the Roman goddess Pomona (we can’t show favoritism to pagans, you know) and replaced oil derricks with a cross-less view of Mission San Gabriel. People went berserk. The deaths of inmates in county custody, or patients at county hospitals, or children in county-supervised foster homes attract only a fraction of the invective that the change to the ridiculously insignificant county seal brought.

No criticism was directed the ACLU’s way for bringing the lawsuit, even though if the seal were “ridiculously insignificant,” criticism is certainly due. Instead, the LAT reduces to “ridiculously insignificant”‘ the concerns of those of us who see a very real threat in the ACLU’s efforts to remove God from the public square, and paints us as a “berserk” bunch who would put this trifling concerns above whatever issue du jour concerns the godless heathens editorial writers at the Lost Angels Times.

The Trouble With Mormons

Now that the NYT has stopped forcing us to pay to get angry at Maureen Doud, I’m reading her again. Good thing. She’s clarified what’s so wrong about Mormons. Here’s what she wrote today about the Mormon temple near her hometown:

It did seem like an alien world, an impression that was enhanced when we took a tour of the temple and saw all the women wearing white outfits and light pink lipstick.

Ooooh. There goes my vote for Mitt.

To ice her case, Doud turns to Jon Krakauer, who’s Under the Banner of Heaven was not a kind portrayal of Mormon history. He delivers for her this line:

“J.F.K.’s speech was to reassure Americans that he wasn’t a religious fanatic,. Mitt’s was to tell evangelical Christians, ‘I’m a religious fanatic just like you.’”

Doud then jumps on the “religious fanatic” theme:

The world is globalizing, nuclear weapons are proliferating, the Middle East is seething, but Republicans are still arguing the Scopes trial.

Sure we are, Mo. Just a bunch of fanatics stuck in a time warp; not that different from the Mohammed Teddy bunch in Sudan.

Ignorance and intolerance has found a Petri dish it loves to fester in at the NYT.

Edwards Answers Oprah

Yeah, this should work:

Democrat John Edwards announced Sunday that actors Kevin Bacon and Tim Robbins will join him on Iowa’s frigid campaign trail.

Edwards’ announcement came as media mogul Oprah Winfrey stumped here for Barack Obama during the weekend …

Just last week, Edwards was joined on the stump by actresses Jean Smart, who plays the first lady on the popular FOX series “24,” and Madeleine Stowe, who has appeared in such films as “The Last of the Mohicans” and “Twelve Monkeys.” Last month, performers Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne campaigned in Iowa for Edwards.

Bacon, Robbins, Smart,Stowe, Raitt and Browne between them have the drawing power of Oprah’s little toenail.

And perhaps someone should remind Pretty Boy that the entertainment industry has done oh so much for politics, proving its worth with Al Gore, then re-proving it with John Kerry.

Academics (Snark!) For Ron Paul

Twenty-one, count ‘em, twenty-one academics have signed an Academics for Ron Paul statement as of this writing.

These are an illustrious bunch. Netz Katz. Ivan Pongracic, Jr. Ralph Raico. Aeon J. Skoble. Household names all.

And darn good grammarians, too:

Paul is the only presidential candidate with a proven record of defending academic freedom across-the-board.

That would be “defending academic freedom across the board.”

Pass the Methane, Mom!

Gee willikers, there’s less then 10 years left to deal with global warming!

Does that mean — puleeeze, God! — that by 2018 we won’t have to listen to this tripe anymore?

Probably not, but it’s a good enough intro to this story:

A new species of bacteria discovered living in one of the most extreme environments on Earth could yield a tool in the fight against global warming.

University of Calgary biology professor Peter Dunfield and colleagues discovered a methane-eating microorganism in the geothermal field known as Hell’s Gate, near the city of Rotorua in New Zealand. It is the hardiest “methanotrophic” bacterium yet discovered, which makes it a likely candidate for use in reducing methane gas emissions from landfills, mines, industrial wastes, geothermal power plants and other sources.

“This is a really tough methane-consuming organism that lives in a much more acidic environment than any we’ve seen before,” said Dunfield, who is the lead author of the paper. “It belongs to a rather mysterious family of bacteria (called Verrucomicrobia) that are found everywhere but are very difficult to grow in the laboratory.”

Methanotrophic bacteria consume methane as their only source of energy and convert it to carbon dioxide during their digestive process. Methane (commonly known as natural gas) is 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and is largely produced by decaying organic matter.

Set if we let these little guys go free in methane-rich environments like landfills, they’ll convert the methane into CO2, screwing up every single global warming model the Warmies have created.

Ironic, isn’t it, that all these big believers in anthropomorphic global warming believe we’ve screwed everything up, but can’t imagine that we can actually fix things. So they don’t factor human ingenuity into their models, just assuming we’ll go roasting off to oblivion, like so many overheated lemmings.

U.N. Solves Global Warming!

Not content to deal with pursue practical approaches like methane-eating microbes, the UN jet-setted 8,000 Warmie bureaucrats to Bali to emit hot air endlessly.

The UN is big on symbolism, and they’ve done a magnificent job of being symbolic in Bali:

Further rigors, according to a report from China’s Xinhua News Agency, include the demand that all motor vehicles entering the beach area surrounding Bali’s Nusa Dua conference complex run on biofuels.

Claudia Rosette harumphs:

That sounds problematic, if the Xinhua report is accurate that only a few gas stations in Indonesia routinely sell biofuels, and they not on Bali, but are clustered around the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, on the island of Java, more than 500 miles from the UN conference.

The UN is nothing if not a good source of comedy.

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In a bit o’ power to the people, I wrote Cong. Ron Packard, a good GOP man who represents Riverside, when I heard that a complaint from a single, solitary slime-ball secularist had brought an end to the solemn “13-Fold Recital” flag ceremony at funerals at Riverside National Cemetery and other Veterans Administration cemeteries across the country. (Here’s my post on the matter.)

Yesterday I got a response, and I just have to say … YIPPEE!

Thank you for contacting my office regarding the Department of Veterans Affairs policy on the 13-fold recital ceremony. I appreciate the opportunity to update you on this situation: good sense and common cultural values have prevailed.

On October 25, 2007, an article in the Press Enterprise brought to my attention that a memo from the National Cemetery Administration (NCA) banned the recitation of a common flag-folding ceremony sometimes used by cemetery employees and volunteers at 125 national cemeteries. The change in policy was prompted by one complaint which originated at Riverside National Cemetery.

Freedom of speech and religion are American freedoms that I strongly support, and I believe that the rights granted to all citizens through the First Amendment are instrumental to democracy. Therefore, on October 29, 2007, I sent a letter to the Acting Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs, along with 127 of my colleagues expressing our frustration with the policy of disallowing employees and volunteers from providing the 13-fold recital to families if they request the ceremony.

In addition, I introduced H.Res. 783, along with Rep. Steven LaTourette, which expresses the sense of the House of Representatives that the Department of Veterans Affairs National Cemetery Administration employees, volunteers, and veterans’ service organizations that perform funeral honors and memorial honor details should be permitted to recite the 13 steps to fold an American flag (known as the “13-fold recital”) at any national cemetery if requested by the family of the deceased.

You may be happy to know that the Department of Veterans Affairs instituted a different policy on November 1, 2007, which stated that NCA employees, including VA-sponsored Volunteer Honor Guards, can read the “13-fold recital” if requested by the deceased’s survivors. In addition, they will not be selective in determining which recitations on the meaning of the thirteen folds will be read.

However, the VA will not accept for reading any texts that would have an adverse impact on the dignity and solemnity of a cemetery honoring those who served the Nation. Among the texts that would not be read would be those that are obscene, racist, are “fighting words,” or are coarse, abusive, or politically partisan.

While our system of government can sometimes be slow and unwieldy, in this case strong reaction by the people and quick action by interested Representatives yielded a speedy “about face” by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

So today, somewhere in America, volunteer vets are once again folding the flag that had draped the coffin of a vet who has passed on, reciting the pledge, honoring his service, respecting his family … and letting secularists know that we Americans will stand strong in support of our freedoms.

p.s.: Flopping Aces has the text of the 13-fold recital here.

p.p.s.: Please see the site from which the photo came; it honors a fallen hero you should remember, Johnny Michael Spann.

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Columbia University. A front-row seat of higher learning, where only the smartest go to get even smarter. As a mere honor roll student of meager means, I couldn’t have hoped to get into a school like Columbia, a school so elite and prestigious.

So I have to wonder what has happened to this great university over the four decades since I graduated from high school that would cause its president, Lee Bollinger, to defend Columbia’s speaking invitation to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by saying:

“It’s extremely important to know who the leaders are of countries that are your adversaries. To watch them to see how they think, to see how they reason or do not reason. To see whether they’re fanatical, or to see whether they are sly.” (WSJ)

Bollinger is a First Amendment scholar and author of high repute and a former clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger, so he knows he is on solid legal ground in extending and defending the invitation. But why does he think so little of the smart kids who got accepted to his school?

Does he think they will really gain anything from seeing a polished politician on his best behavior, far from the protection of his elite Revolutionary Guards and his Mullahs? Does he think for a moment that he is tricking Ahmadinejad into revealing his true, brutal, hateful, repressive, totalitarian, theocratic, fanatic, GI-killing self, so the students of Columbia will see the world as it is?

Or is he merely being an academic pawn, supporting the purpose of Ahmadinejad’s trip, which is to project a positive image of Ahmadinejad as a thoughtful man who is dedicated to the downtrodden?

In other words, Ahmadinejad is on a mission to present a lie, and Bollinger — whose university is home to aggressively antisemitic and anti-Israel scholars — is giving him that forum.

The students of Columbia will see a polite, learned man not dissimilar to the man who presented to the Council on Foreign Relations during his last visit. In other words, one who thinks well (if faultily), who reasons well (if intolerantly) and who appears to be anything but a fanatic. A man who will try his hardest to make President Bush appear to be the one who doesn’t think well, who doesn’t reason well, and who uses his fanatical Islamophobia and Christian crusading against Islam.

In that, he will be sly. Will the Columbia students see the slyness? If they do, will they learn from it? Will they learn as much as they would have learned if Bollinger instead had rebuffed his faculty and others and said, no, Columbia is a place of higher learning, and that precludes invitations to men like Ahmadinejad?

I think not, but I also think Duncan Hunter is woefully wrong in his approach to the situation:

“For an institution of Columbia University’s caliber, it is inconceivable that you would provide President Ahmadinejad with this opportunity,” said Mr. Hunter, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination. “I trust the University will do the right thing and immediately withdraw its invitation to President Ahmadinejad. However, should you choose to go forward, I intend to introduce legislation in Congress to disqualify Columbia University from any future federal support.” (WashTimes)

Bollinger knows the First Amendment will shred any such effort by Hunter, and Hunter should know better than to issue the threat, which just makes him look like a book-burner and worse, a believer in a big, heavy-handed government.

It is not government’s place to slap Bollinger around. That role falls to the funders of Columbia University — from its big benefactors to the corporations and individuals that underwrite scholarships, to the parents who pay the tuition, to the students who enroll there. These are the people and institutions that should rise up against Bollinger’s entirely legal but entirely irresponsible decision and give the man some hurt.

As he sees the millions drain away, will he react rationally, as a man who thinks well, and apologize — or will he react fanatically, like a die-hard liberal academic, and continue to bite the hands that feed his institution?

Whichever, it’s clear that Columbia, like all our foremost universities, has a lot to learn.

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Angry Iranian officials (are there any other kind?) summoned Sweden’s charge d’affaires to the foreign ministry today for a drubbing. It seems a Swedish cartoonist and newspaper didn’t remain sufficiently intimidated following last year’s Kartoonistan riots, embassy torchings and bloodthirsty fatwas.

They went and published cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammed (Bless His Apparently Very Touchy Feelings). The artist in this case, Lars Vilks, has taken to drawing Muhammed’s head on the body of a dog. You can view plenty of examples at his blog, but I think this Vilks drawing is much wittier:
The Drawing of the Prophet Muhammed in Invisible Ink captures perfectly the absurdity of the Muslim’s position. One senses its subtlety will be lost on this crowd:

The Örebro local newspaper Nerikes Allehanda published one of the drawings on August 18 to illustrate an editorial on self-censorship and freedom of religion.

“The editorial was critical of the fact that so many had turned down Vilks’s drawings for fear of the reactions they would provoke,” Nerikes Allehanda’s chief editor Ulf Johansson told AFP.

On Saturday, a week after the publication, a group of about 60 Muslims held a demonstration outside the newspaper’s office to protest against the publication of the sketch. (source)

Uh, guys? Did you read the bit about freedom of religion? Go ahead and demonstrate — it’s your right. But it’s also Vilks right to draw Muhammed if he wants to, and Nerikes Allehanda’s right to publish it.

If this bothers you so much, my Muslim friends, I can suggest any number of repressive, freedom-hating countries you can return to.

hat-tip: memeorandum

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