Friday linkfest

1. Top ten calamities for which global warming was blamed. (via HotAir)

2. Get your Koran on your cell phone, courtesy of . . . an Israeli company?

3. Yankees offer bleacher seats for 25 cents for exhibition openers. Scalpers begin drooling immediately.

4. The only thing better than a huge foul-smelling flower is its Latin name. (via Ace)

5. Indicted lawyer was "the Houdini of impersonation and false documents." Bonus: I met the guy back in the early 1980s but haven't seen him since then.

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Sunday morning mini-linkfest

I was going to leave you a mini-linkfest on my way out of town for the weekend, but it happened too fast. So with your indulgence, I'm going to give it to you a little late.

1. 1. S.Weasel has discovered Abraham Lincoln's YouTube account. It's actually a Joe Biden joke.

2. Out of concern for the sensibilities of certain very quiet and unassuming people, the Brits are installing toilets at the 2012 Olympics that face away from Mecca. (via HotAir) You can't face Mecca when you're doing your business. Brits have previously dealt with this in their prisons. As the article notes: "Muslim prisoners complained of having to sit sideways on toilets so as to not break code." They're in prison and they're worried about breaking the law? I've always complained about Jewish prisoner who commit crimes and then demand to keep kosher in prison. Same thing there.

3. Maybe we should check with Muslim prisoners first, but PETA wants Ben & Jerry's to use breast milk for its ice cream, instead of cows' milk. (also via HotAir)

4. An article that actually exists: 5 Insane Devices From Kids Cartoons (That Actually Exist) (via Ace)

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Al Qaeda imitates Woody Allen's "Bananas"

Remember the scene in Bananas where the successful guerrilla leader addresses the people and announces his new edicts?

From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. Silence! In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check. Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now 16 years old.

According to this article, Al Qaeda really ticked off the Iraqis by imposing similar edicts.

Besides the terrible killings inflicted by the fanatics on those who refuse to pledge allegiance to them, Al-Qa'eda has lost credibility for enforcing a series of rules imposing their way of thought on the most mundane aspects of everyday life.

They include a ban on women buying suggestively-shaped vegetables, according to one tribal leader in the western province of Anbar.

Sheikh Hameed al-Hayyes, a Sunni elder, told Reuters: "They even killed female goats because their private parts were not covered and their tails were pointed upward, which they said was haram.

"They regarded the cucumber as male and tomato as female. Women were not allowed to buy cucumbers, only men."

Well, I guess if you had to choose the quintessential male and female vegetable, they chose the right ones. Cucumbers are obviously male; tomatoes are obviously female.

In fact, to quote Woody Allen again, the queen in a sketch in Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex * But Were Afraid To Ask is shocked when the Woody Allen jester character touches her on the breasts. Woody Allen denies it, saying he would never lay his hands on "the royal tomatoes."

(hat tip: Soccer Dad, who writes, "Who knew that Al Qaeda operated in Montgomery County?")

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A match made in heaven

From Saturday's Washington Post, a pair of stories:

1. A professor at Princeton's Institute of Advanced Studies (or "Advanced Salaries" as a friend of mine used to say) spends her time trying to track down the originator of the "Obama is a Muslim" email.

2. "Air Base Ex-Guard Convicted of Hiding Muslim Name"

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Wednesday linkfest

This is the place where I drop links that I've been collecting but haven't had time to write about while I've been trying to figure out my mother's taxes.

1. From the distaff side of the moronosphere, S.Weasel has a delightful tribute to Charlton Heston. Well, to his buttocks, anyway.

2. Speaking of the moronosphere, check doubleplusundead regularly for his daily roundups, called "around the moronosphere in 80 iq points." I think the Moron-in-Chief was responsible for that name.

3. Since it's tax time, I'd like to bring you this: "Woman Apologizes for Pitbull Attack on IRS Employee." (via TaxProf Blog)

4. Here's the barbecue guy who loves the NoKos. The FBI already knows about him, thanks to his dad. Really. Will there be a place for him as Secretary of State in the Obama Administration? And this: A coincidence?

5. Will you be more in love with your wife if she learns to play poker? This article says you will. It sounds totally asinine to me, because you play poker precisely to be alone with the boys, but there are some other tips for women that sound a little better than that.

6. If you live in Minnesota, your tax dollars are funding what may be a madrassa.

7. Ace writes about a post by a user at Obama's site attacking the Jews. A commenter finds the cached link after the post is taken down.

8. From the Department of Old: "Woman's Lawsuit Claims Bra Injured Her / Victoria's Secret Denies Claims." (via Ace's headlines last week)

9. From the Department of Not So New: Starbucks won't let you customize your card with "Laissez Faire" but will let you use "People Not Profits"? (via Volokh)

10. Child "maths" genius-ette becomes a call girl (with probably NSFW photo) (via Fark)

11. Get your ice cold Mets motivational poster, courtesy of Baseball Crank. Not that I've already given up on them -- that'll take another few days like yesterday.

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Baseball for the Arabs

Would learning baseball help the Arab world get rid of a harmful aspect of its culture? Ocean Guy seems to think so.

His basic idea is that in baseball you're a successful team if you lose only 40% of your games. You're a successful hitter if you're out only 70% of the time. Failure is built into the game. If you fail, it doesn't mean you're humiliated; you pick yourself up and try again.

He links his own pithy statement from four years back:

If the Arabs could learn that lesson maybe they’d be less inclined to pronounce themselves humiliated at every bad break or whenever something doesn’t go entirely their way. And if they’re not humiliated quite as much… maybe they’d stop exploding themselves.

Ocean Guy's reason for revisiting this matter is that a young Bahraini blogger has posted similar thoughts -- not about baseball but about failure: "It is high time that we [Arabs] disassociate ourselves from old ideals. From this church of stagnation. And push forth with new ideas and embrace failure. Without which no success could ever come forth."

It's actually mildly encouraging to read these sentiments. And after baseball, I think self-mocking comedy should come next.

Bonus: Baseball in Iraq, Sept. 2005

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Sunday linkfest

Tonight's linkfest is divided into categories.

1. Bush Derangement Syndrome.

BDS at the New York Public Library: an exhibit of fake mug shots of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. (via HotAir)

And BDS in Gene Weingarten's column in the Post, which actually is mildly amusing, for a change.

2. The Muhammed Teddy Bear in the Sudan.

When a British school teacher is put on trial in the Sudan for letting her 7-year-old student name a teddy bear "Muhammed," after himself, and Sudanese Islamist radicals are calling for her death, Amnesty International is nowhere to be seen.

In response, the inventors of "Islamic Rage Boy" come up with some new toys and games. (via Ace)

3. Inventions and patents.

Speaking of inventions, I discovered the InventorSpot blog through a link at HotAir. The link was to a post discussing a patent for a support for men's foreheads over a urinal. If you think I'm kidding, you'd better click that link right now. Personally, I see the need for such a device in airplanes and trains -- especially the latter, which make the business hardly smooth sailing (to mix metaphors). I wonder how much good it would do, however, in a bar.

Also at IS are two other useful inventions. One combines the scent of lavender, pumpkin pie, doughnuts and licorice to perform the function formerly performed by certain well known male potency drugs. (On the other hand, maybe pomegranate juice would be enough.)

The other is a tape-on pad to absorb unpleasant emissions from the southbound end of a northbound human. This one is interesting to me, not simply because I have an odd attraction to flatulence humor but because it relates to the punchline to my first Hillary photo comic -- "Hillary begins a conversation."

Click here to read more . . .

Sunday linkfest

Man, I've got a whole bunch of links burning a hole in my pocket, and I just don't feel like writing an entire post about any of 'em. So here's my linkfest. Hope you enjoy these.

1. A "Mom Job"? Oy. You'll be pleased to know that even mothers of college-aged children are having this plastic surgery. "'I had been thin all my life until I had my son and then I got this pooch of overhanging fat on my abdomen that you can’t get rid of,' Ms. Birkland, 39, said. 'And your breasts become deflated sacks.'" Mind you, this is a woman with a 20-year-old son. She was about 19 when he was born, and now she's concerned with her looks -- and blaming him? I shouldn't be surprised about her. Get this line: "There is more pressure on mothers today to look young and sexy than on previous generations, she added. 'I don’t think it was an issue for my mother; your husband loved you no matter what,' said Ms. Birkland, who recently remarried." Personal to Ms. Birkland's new husband: If that's what she thinks, ditch her now; she'll only get "worse" looking.

2. An observatory on the roof of your house? Cool. "'The reason why people don’t use their telescopes is they are such a pain to haul out and set up,' said John Spack, 50, a certified public accountant who had a domed observatory built on top of an addition to his house in Chicago last year. 'Now, if I want to get up at 3 a.m. and look at something, I just open the shutter.'"

3. "Pro-semites" on JDate? When, some years ago, Irving Kristol said, "the danger facing American Jews today is not that Christians want to persecute them but that Christians want to marry them," he was right on the money. It turns out that something like 11% of members of JDate aren't Jewish but are interested in meeting Jews. Pollster Mark Penn writes in a new book "that 'the number one reason they [people he calls "pro-Semites"] gave for desiring a Jewish spouse was a sense of strong values, with nearly a third also admitting they were drawn to money, looks or a sense that Jews "treat their spouses better."'"

4. Vegans dating regular vegetarians. As a former "vegetarian" who actually ate dairy, eggs, and even fish, and the father of a former vegan who was actually serious about it until he had a revelation (that vegans are morons, or something like that) and is now a proud carnivore, I have to admit this line tickled me: "'I'm in a relationship with a murderer,' bemoans Carl, one of many vegans who wrote in to the 'Vegan Freak' podcast for romantic advice." My son was never like that when he was a vegan.

5. Speaking of vegetarians, if you work for Countrywide and you didn't get the memo, W.C. Varones got it for you. Heh!

6. Stupid pickup lines. I did like the final one, which is charmingly cheesy: "Well, here I am. What are your other two wishes?"

7. "There are signs that the global Islamic jihad movement is splitting apart." Discuss. (via protein wisdom)

8. WTF? I saw this bumper sticker on a car on the highway in Maryland: "God Bless The Whole World / No Exceptions." Yeah, I understand it now: God bless Johnny, and God bless Billy, and God bless Osama. Because, heck, we're no better than any of those guys who are trying to murder us.

9. Here's a concert I'm glad I missed: Beethoven's 9th, redone according to the "aural graffiti" that Gustav Mahler wrote on the score. Tim Page lays the smackdown on Leonard Slatkin: "Somebody should sit Leonard Slatkin down and explain to him, firmly but not without compassion, that Ludwig van Beethoven actually knew what he was doing when he composed his Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, and that the work he created needs no enhancement from Gustav Mahler or any of the other musicians who followed in his shadow."

10. Andrew Ferguson in the Weekly Standard has an amusing review of Alan Greenspan's new book: "Alan Shrugged." ("Ayn," Alan would say, overcome by some Randian insight, "upon reading this, one tends to feel exhilarated!")

11. Columbia's newest friend, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has another insight: Move the damn Jews to Alaska. Seriously. (Via HotAir) He must have been reading the latest dreck from a Jewish writer suffering from Weltschmerz. Can you imagine the Jews in Alaska? All the Jewish geezers would sit around all afternoon saying things like this: "Oy, it's so cold here." "Moses got the desert, but we're stuck in this icebox."

12. And you just can't miss this last one, but don't listen to it at work, unless you can close a door behind you: Don't try that satire s--- in f---in' New Yawk. (Bad language alert.)

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Quotation of the day

Technically, this is the quotation of yesterday, and not in a good sense, but I didn't get around to putting it up then. Sue me.

"Terrorism is a tactic. You cannot eradicate it by declaring a war against it. The war on terror is causing us infinitely more harm than the terrorists could have ever imagined."

Who said it? Harry Reid? John Kerry? Coulda been, but no, that's not who.

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Bernard Lewis reminds us

Sometimes we can forget, but you don't have to have read Machiavelli to get the idea.

Bernard Lewis writes about the perception of the U.S. in the world of Islamism, and he concludes with this reminder:

From the writings and the speeches of Osama bin Laden and his colleagues, it is clear that they expected this second task, dealing with America, would be comparatively simple and easy. This perception was certainly encouraged and so it seemed, confirmed by the American response to a whole series of attacks--on the World Trade Center in New York and on U.S. troops in Mogadishu in 1993, on the U.S. military office in Riyadh in 1995, on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000--all of which evoked only angry words, sometimes accompanied by the dispatch of expensive missiles to remote and uninhabited places.

Stage One of the jihad was to drive the infidels from the lands of Islam; Stage Two--to bring the war into the enemy camp, and the attacks of 9/11 were clearly intended to be the opening salvo of this stage. The response to 9/11, so completely out of accord with previous American practice, came as a shock, and it is noteworthy that there has been no successful attack on American soil since then. The U.S. actions in Afghanistan and in Iraq indicated that there had been a major change in the U.S., and that some revision of their assessment, and of the policies based on that assessment, was necessary.

More recent developments, and notably the public discourse inside the U.S., are persuading increasing numbers of Islamist radicals that their first assessment was correct after all, and that they need only to press a little harder to achieve final victory. It is not yet clear whether they are right or wrong in this view. If they are right, the consequences--both for Islam and for America--will be deep, wide and lasting.

There may not be many of us left, however, to prove this correct.

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Discipline

I realize we have our own meshugas in my religion, but rarely do you see one of our guys gleefully explaining some embarrassing point of halacha to an interviewer for television broadcast.

These folks, on the other hand, seem to have no hesitation about explaining the finer points of shari'a law concerning the right of a husband to discipline his wife. (via HotAir) You might want to watch the entire video, because the best part is at the end. If you don't want to watch, you at least should click on the HotAir link, where there's a screencap of that best part. Some of the comments at HotAir are pretty funny, though perhaps they rate Code Orange on the Pillage Idiot Advisory System.

Happy Mothers' Day!

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Iranian street theater

Iranian women wearing Western clothing are told by burqa-wearing women that they are not modestly dressed. But sometimes they don't take kindly to that advice.

(both links to video via HotAir)

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Simply noted

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal's opinionjournal.com site ran a review of Dinesh D'Souza's newest book, "The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11." The review was written by Scott Johnson, of PowerLine, who is one of my favorite bloggers. He's smart, serious, and not a bomb thrower, like so many of the other big-name bloggers. Needless to say, Johnson's review is excellent -- calm, reasoned, thoughtful. I urge you to read it.

I have not read D'Souza's book and do not intend to. All I will say on the subject of his thesis is this: As much as I dislike the cultural left in this country, if forced to take sides between these people and the Islamists who want to destroy all of us, I'm foursquare on the side of our cultural left.

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Frontiers of plastic surgery in Egypt

In my limited experience learning Talmud, specifically Ketubot, I was never able to get past petach patuach, which essentially means an "open opening." There's an extended discussion about how to deal with situations in which a man marries and claims on the wedding night that his bride is not a virgin as promised. It gets very complicated, as is always the case in the Talmud, but, of course, at no point does the Talmud allow "honor killings." Not even close.

So if your culture does countenance "honor killings," one way of getting around it is to authorize hymenoplasty for women who are not virgins. If necessary, by issuing a fatwa.

CAIRO: Reconstructive hymen surgery for women who lost their virginity before marriage is halal (religiously permissible), said to Aly Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt.

Gomaa, the highest authority with the power to issue a fatwa (religious edict), appeared the popular terrestrial Channel Two’s talk show El Beit Beitek, where he condoned the controversial fatwa, released by Soad Saleh, the ex-dean of the faculty of Islamic studies at Al-Azhar University and noted scholar.

Shiekh Khaled El Gindy, an Al-Azhar scholar and member of the Higher Council of Islamic Studies told The Daily Star Egypt that he agrees with the new fatwa.

"Islam never differentiates between men and women, so it is not rational for us to think that God has placed a sign to indicate the virginity of women without having a similar sign to indicate the virginity of men," El Gindy said.

"Any man who is concerned about his prospective wife’s hymen should first provide a proof that he himself is virgin," he added.

El Gindy voiced his full support for Gomaa.

There's something strangely rational about this. On the other hand, maybe it would be easier to issue a fatwa prohibiting "honor killings."

The fatwa has led to much controversy within Al-Azhar and Egyptian society as a whole.

In Upper Egypt honor crimes are still committed. If a woman loses her virginity out of wedlock, she is considered a big shame on everyone and deserves to die.

Well, that may have to wait for another century.

(via Fark)

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Liberal anti-semites and their friends

This is old in internet years, an internet year being defined as approximately 12 hours, but it's good. Slate has a quiz to determine whether you are a liberal anti-semite. Take it. (hat tip: A.)

Personally, I scored a big fat zero, but I would, being a neanderthal wingnut and all.

These guys, on the other hand, would probably score off the charts:

Award nominations are generally occasions for exaggerated compliments and air kisses, so it was something of a surprise when Eliot Weinberger, a previous finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, announced the newest nominees for the criticism category two weeks ago and said one of the authors, Bruce Bawer, had engaged in “racism as criticism.”

The resulting stir within the usually well-mannered book world spiked this week when the president of the Circle’s board, John Freeman, wrote on the organization’s blog (bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com): “I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer’s ‘While Europe Slept,’ he wrote. “It’s hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia.”

(hat tip: Number One Son)

There's much to love in that short article, but I'd be remiss if I left this out. "Imam Fatih Alev, a board member of the Islamic-Christian Study Center in Copenhagen, has not read Mr. Bawer’s book," but he managed to say exactly the right thing to liberal ears:

“In many senses it is a constructed idea that there is this very severe difference between Western values and Muslim values,” he continued.

What's a little difference of values on beheadings, after all?

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