Posted 8:44 PM by Floyd

To me visiting Little Green Footballs is a painful duty. This is not a knock on Charles Johnson, who seems like a great guy and works hard on his site. Nor am I criticizing the comment community; I think a lot of them are mouth-breathers but I am free to ignore them. The problem with LGF is that Johnson does such a good job exposing the horrors of the Muslim world.

Fundamentalist Muslims are like Nazis in that they overtly and gleefully offend the consensus on good behavior that the civilized world has painfully accumulated over the last few hundreds of years. There is almost nothing that a normal person from a halfway civilized country considers his obligation to polite society that cannot be offended by the facts reported in Little Green Footballs. Cruelty to animals, oppression of women, religious bigotry, use of children in war -- it's all there, and no one in Cairo or Nazareth or Islamabad is going to apologize for it. At some point a mullah will proudly declare that whenever he hears the world "culture", he reaches for his AK-47.

Here is a particularly striking example of the LGF article that makes me wince:

Two days ago the Islamic Ruling Committee in Al-Azhar, considered the highest religious authority for Sunni Muslims, announced that the acquisition of nuclear weapons is a religious obligation for Islamic states: New Islamic Ruling Calls for Nuclear Weapon Armament.
According to a member of the Islamic Ruling Committee, Sheikh Ala A-Shanawi, "The Islamic nation has to recognize the enemy, and to prepare itself accordingly." In answer to a question sent to Sheikh Ala A-Shanawi, he wrote, "Allah's messenger [the prophet Muhammed] would have prepared himself with all the resources possible in order to deal with the enemy. Therefore, if the Islamic nation is not equipped with the desired weaponry needed, it will be forced to suffer the consequences, and will be blamed for negligence."

Sheikh Ala A-Shanawi emphasized, "All Islamic nations are required to seize nuclear weaponry, giving the nation the utmost respect. We see how far behind our nation is as a result of not being prepared as well as it should be, while the enemy has equipped itself with the best weaponry there is, which it will use to harm and destroy Muslims." wrote A-Shanawi.

Islamic clerics agitate in favor of atomic weapons. Does A-Shanawi lead protests against conventional weapons? Has he been arrested for sneaking into an Al-Azhar military base to pry open the tops of cordite cluster bombs and stuff plutonium in them?

The next time someone gives you some hug-em-all Russians-love-their-children bullshit about how Islam means struggle and they're just like us and we have to try to understand, show them this article. And ask them if it would be conceivable, even in The Onion-style satire, to imagine a Christian pastor behaving like A-Shanawi.

Posted 8:24 PM by Floyd

Yesterday I ran across a blogger who said that Christmas is the Jewish day to enjoy movies and Chinese restaurants. My friend Eric said the same thing about movies. Sherry and I found out how right they were yesterday.

Last Sunday we had tried to see The Two Towers and found that the showing was sold out. No problem, I said; we'll see it on Christmas day. I wasn't sure if anyone would be at the theaters; on the way out we stopped to visit Eric, and he made his comment. Still, we planned to get there an hour early, buy tickets, and get a bite to eat. How bad could it be?

When we got to the theater -- the Mercado in Sunnyvale -- we could see a massive line in front of the ticket booths. Sherry got in line and I looked for parking. On the way to meet her I looked at the displays in the ticket booths, and Two Towers was sold out. Anyway even if we could get tickets, the line was a good 20 to 30 minutes long and there was nowhere nearby to eat.

So we went to a Chinese restaurant! There was a Szechuan place that we had wanted to try, and they were open. We had a kung pao chicken that was soggy and unremarkable, and some crawfish with chili peppers. The crawfish were good, and the sauce had peppers you rarely see in America called huajao. Huajao means flower pepper; it's like a hollow peppercorn. It has a black pepper taste and numbs your mouth.

Christmas is one of the three great American holidays; it is by far the shortest of them. The Fourth of July is at the height of summer and features outdoor activities during the day, and fireworks at night. Thanksgiving has massive amounts of food and lots of football. But Christmas is over by noon. What else is there to do in the evening but go to the movies?

Posted 3:12 PM by Floyd

I don't often Fisk news reports, but this amazing AP report about a persecuted airline passenger cries to the heavens for justice to be done.

MADISON, Wis. - An airline passenger was cited for disorderly conduct Tuesday after the plane's crew accused him of insinuating the pilot had been drinking.

"Accused him of insinuating." I'd like to see the full text of that statute. Reminds me of Soviet laws used to charge dissidents, like "contacts leading to suspicion of espionage."

The remark caused Comair to cancel the 9:30 a.m. flight to Cincinnati, forcing 26 passengers to make other travel plans, said Lt. Michael Krembs of the Dane County Sheriff's Department.

If Comair hates the idea of serving customers by transporting them through the air, that's one thing. But please don't dignify their actions by claiming the remark as a "cause". In other news, the fear that pygmy headhunters might be hidden in his trees forced Floyd McWilliams of Woodside to stay inside all day and play Civilization III.

Steven M. Wiese, 33, of Cottage Grove, was accused of leaning into the cockpit and remarking to the pilot, "I hope you haven't been drinking," Krembs said.

Margaret Q. Thursteroy, 41, of Milwaukee, was charged with excessive blinking. She was released on her own recognizance.

Federal Aviation Administration regulations require the flight crew to be tested for controlled substances when drug or alcohol abuse allegations are made.

If I tell a woman that she is dressed nicely, are local law enforcement authorities required to investigate her to ensure that she is not engaged in prostitution?

"My assumption is it was a flippant remark," Krembs said.

The No Fucking Shit Award for 2002 is no longer accepting entries.

"But in this day and age of heightened airport security, you just don't joke about stuff anymore."

I hope no one is saying that Wiese brought this on himself by making a dumb mistake. It's one thing to go into a dark alley in a bad part of town and get robbed. It's quite another to say hello to someone in broad daylight and have them stab you with an ice pick 45 times.

The airline refused to allow Wiese and his wife on another flight Tuesday, Krembs said.

Merry Christmas!

Posted 2:51 PM by Floyd

Lots of bloggers have mentioned that they will have a white Christmas. No such luck here, though there was a non-zero probability of snow; we have had snowfall the last two winters. Here is a picture of snow at my house from last February -- click for full-sized photo:

Posted 2:41 PM by Floyd

Sometimes I wonder if there is someone who complains about every single book, toy, or movie in the marketplace. For instance the Harry Potter books are about the struggle of good versus evil, the importance of family, faithfulness to friends, and self-reliance. So naturally every time such a book is published, some lunatic says that Harry Potter promotes Satanism.

Such reasoning is especially obnoxious because of its similarity to Islamic injunctions against the modern world. You may not like conservative complaints against gangsta rap, but they have a point about violence and misogyny. Contra such sentiment, the fundamental complaint about the Harry Potter mythos seems to be that it is completely outside the imagination of the Bible, and is therefore verboten.

The latest idiocy is a protest against the doll "pregnant Midge", which resulted in WalMart removing the doll from its shelves. Pregnant Midge isn't a teenager or a crack whore; she's married, and comes with a husband doll and a child doll. For God's sake, hasn't it been fifty years since Lucille Ball was pregnant on national television?

(WalMart wins the "giving up brussel sprouts for Lent award" for removing the doll on the first day after the Christmas shopping season. I would lay 20 to 1 odds that Midge didn't sell well and WalMart had planned to dump it anyway. Such courage!)

Posted 7:23 PM by Floyd

In my last post I made a snide remark that someone should have picked up tolerance.org or diversity.org to make some bucks off left-wing web sites. This reminds me of a stupid popup I've seen a lot recently -- I think from Bill Quick's adserver.

It's an advertisement for an online wine store and starts with: "Remember when wine.com was sold for a million dollars?"

This surely violates a fundamental tenet of advertising, which is that you want the viewer to associate your product with a good feeling. "Do I remember when wine.com sold for a million bucks? Yeah, and WebVan was worth billions, and I bought Yahoo at $300. All us tech geeks were getting free massages and massive pay raises every year. Thanks for reminding me that my stocks are worthless and the job market has gone to hell!"

Posted 6:11 PM by Floyd

I have happily made fun of sites like democrats.com and tompaine.com, and will do so again in the future. But while I mock the loony left, I have some respect for their attempts to promote their political ideals and to work for what they believe is right and proper.

True scorn should be reserved for bottom feeders such as the Southern Poverty Law Center. SPLC now has a web site called "tolerance.org". (Back in the dot.com day, hundreds of weeks ago, angle-shooters took aim at domain names like tv.com and tried to extort tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for them. How come no far-sighted entrepreneur picked up tolerance.org or diversity.org?) SPLC cynically attempts to milk every hate crime and every KKK-style racist or separatist group for as much attention and donations as possible.

I came across tolerance.org while trying to find the post-credits Easter Egg to the second Harry Potter movie. Here is an article titled "Harry Potter: Chamber of Stereotypes?" decrying the stereotyping of the mentally ill (no further description here to save the surprise for future moviegoers).

Harry Potter is set in pale white England and yet is as diverse as you can get. There are important female characters, blacks, and twin sisters who are Persian. The highly competitive Quidditch matches are played by unisex teams. The characters battle prejudice against all sorts of creatures and people. None of this is enough for tolerance.org, though; I imagine that praising J.K. Rowling doesn't do much for SPLC's coffers.

Clicking around the site just made me more and more disgusted. Here is Every Victim Counts, a project to "reform hate crime reporting" so that SPLC can trumpet scarier numbers and get more power and money. (The link to this page was titled "Make Every Victim Count", which made me think of Nazi dentists visiting the crematoria with pliers.)