Mark Steyn: The tolerance enforcers will not tolerate dissent

Read the whole thing.

Not having a strong feeling is no longer permitted. The Diversity Celebrators have their exquisitely sensitive antennae attuned for anything less than enthusiastic approval. Very quickly, traditional religious teaching on homosexuality will be penned up within church sanctuaries, and “faith-based” ancillary institutions will be crowbarred into submission.

US Army Labeled Evangelicals, Catholics as Examples of Religious Extremism

Mark Steyn: This is one for the “too stupid to survive” files:

When I first saw the headline, I assumed it must all be a little less obviously bone-crushingly stupid or at any rate more nuanced once you got into the story. But I invite you to look at the accompanying poster for the Equal Opportunity training brief issued by the Army Reserve in Pennsylvania. It lists “extremist” groups, starting with “Evangelical Christianity” at Number One, “Al Quaeda” (misspelled under any Roman rendering of Arabic) at Number Five, “Hamas” at Six, and “Catholicism” rounding out the Top Ten.

Think of the number of people involved in the creation, printing and distribution of this graphic – and along the way not one of them stopped to say, “Hey, this is totally dumb.”

At the beginning of America Alone, I quote Arnold Toynbee: “Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.” The urge to suicide is always there; the trick is keeping it confined to the outer edges: In the Cold War this kind of moronic false equivalence was the province of leftie professors and fringe playwrights, who spent three decades failing to notice nobody from West Germany was climbing over the Berlin Wall to get into the East. Now this false equivalence is peddled by the politically correct eunuch bureaucracy of the US military.

When Major Hasan got a case of Pre-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and opened fire at Fort Hood standing on a table yelling “Allahu Akbar!”, it was just the luck of the draw: He could have been shouting the Angelus. Best to prepare for all eventualities.

As Robert Spencer says, this is not going to end well.

He adds this: Too Stupid to Survive (cont.):

I see that Fleet Street is doing the job American journalists won’t do and reporting further fascinating details of this story. From the slide presentation. we learn that, having been told Evangelical Christianity and Catholicism are “extremist”,

America’s fighting men are then warned:

Soldiers are prohibited from the following actions in support of Extremist Organizations…

*Creating, Organizing, or Taking a Visible Leadership Role in such an Organization.

A Russian officer famously described British troops in the Crimea as lions led by asses. That barely begins to cover the descent of America’s military bureaucracy into the armored wing of the Berkeley faculty lounge.

More here from Ed Driscoll.

New Cookbook, 'Semenology,' Provides Recipes, Storage Tips And More

In his new book "Semenology: The Semen Bartender's Handbook," Bay Area author Paul "Fotie" Photenhauer details the benefits of bartending with, you guessed it, human semen.

A follow-up to his first book, "Natural Harvest: A Collection of Semen Based Recipes," "Semenology" is what Photenhauer describes as "the ultimate handbook for mixologists looking for ingredients that go beyond exotic fruit juices and rare spirits."

via Instapundit.

Gallery: Dogs Wearing Pantyhose

This is actually kinda disturbing.  Via Neatorama:

What's that? Oh, just another day on the Interweb, folks, brought to you by the good people of China, where they have elevated dogshaming to a whole 'nother level: Behold, dog wearing pantyhose!

Brian Ashcraft of Kotaku wrote:

According to Chinese site Sina, "bored" people on Weibo started the meme. Apparently, Weibo user Ulatang, who noted that the pets rolled their eyes after getting dressed in pantyhose, uploaded the first "dogs wearing pantyhose" pic (above). That image has been commented on over 16,000 times in China.

DIY cardboard rifle can fire paper pellets up to 25 yards

Developed by a team of designers that includes former Nerf engineers, the Paper Shooters kit comes with all the tools needed to build the working gun. Apart from the plastic firing mechanism the gun is pretty much all cardboard.

Kim Jong-Un and the North Korean Navy set off to invade the US

Powder your eggs for home storage - just add water and sperm.

New Scientist:  "You can keep the powder at room temperature forever – and just add water to bring it back to life," says Amir Arav of Core Dynamics in Ness Ziona, Israel, who developed the method.

via Instapundit.

Friday links

12 Largest Church Buildings In The World.

25 Things You Didn't Know About Beer.

Strange Eye Exam Charts.

A NASA scientist claims to be on the verge of faster-than-light travel.

The Fascinating History of Birth Control.

Chess: how kings and queens and rooks and knights and pawns came to look the way they look.

Public schools in 9 states sharing every conceivable personal detail of their students with 3rd parties

Who is Stockpiling and Sharing Private Information About New York Students?

inBloom, a Gates-funded non-profit to harness data to improve grade school education, has partnered with New York and eight other states to encourage the development of apps to "further education" by using intimate data about students, without parental consent and with no ability for parents to opt out.

Among the data shared are name, address, phone numbers, test scores, grades, economic status, test scores, disciplinary records, picture, email, race, developmental delay... just about everything conceivable, and all specific, none of it anonymized. inBloom has arrangements with nine states (New York, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Colorado, Illinois, North Carolina, Georgia, Delaware and Kentucky) to do this.

The XML schema used are downloadable here. Anyone can register as a developer and start using "sample" data, but "real" data is supposedly only available to developers with contracts with a school board. But this includes for-profit, third party developers, such as, say, Amplify, a News Corp subsidiary with a contract with New York. And it doesn't appear there are any constraints on their use of this data.

via BoingBoing.

25 Things You Didn't Know About Beer

24 Things You Didn't Know About Beer infographic

Why More People Are Eating Guinea Pigs

South American restaurants on both coasts seem to be pushing the trend, answering to demand mostly from Andean expats for what is considered a fine and valuable food in Ecuador, Peru and Colombia. Middle-class foodies with a taste for exotic delicacies are also ordering, photographing and blogging about guinea pig. The animals — called cuyesin Spanish — are usually cooked whole, often grilled, sometimes deep fried. Many diners eat every last morsel, literally from head to toe.

But there may be more to gain from eating guinea pig than bizarre foods bragging rights. According to activists, eating guinea pig is good for the environment.

Cell Phone Inventor Talks of First Cell Call, 40 Years Ago Today

It's 40 years ago today, April 3, 1973. Martin Cooper, then a senior engineer at Motorola, made a cell phone call — the first one ever.

Cooper, now age 85, tells the story of this call in an interview with the BBC, available at the link below. The call, in the presence of a journalist, was to his chief competitor Dr. Joel S. Engel, who was head of Bell Labs: "Joel, this is Marty. I'm calling you from a cell phone, a real handheld portable cell phone."

Yes, the first cell phone call was for the purpose of gloating. Cooper says that Engel tells him he doesn't remember the call.

He got $1 from Motorola for signing away the rights to all his inventions.

Free Range Kids has the continuing story of the 6-year-old detained by the cops for walking outside

Day 41: We are served with a complaint alleging neglect and dependency. The County wants to take Emily into “protective supervision” or “temporary custody.” The complaint contains many factual errors and inaccuracies.

There is also a motion for “pre-dispositional interim orders.” As I understand it, this is a mechanism by which CPS can intervene even before the merits of the case against us for neglect are even heard, but less decided. It is scheduled to take place more than a month before the hearing on the neglect charge. It asks the court to force my wife and I to “allow ______ County Children Services to complete an assessment with the family. This is including allowing the agency access in the home, allowing the agency to interview the children, and participate openly in the assessment process.” In other words, they want to search our house, interrogate the children, and force us to testify.

We are trying our best to raise Emily to be responsible, curious, and capable. We have chosen to include teaching her about using the library, navigating the neighborhood, and mailing letters as elements of her homeschooling. Needless to say, this entire ordeal has been quite distressing for the entire family, and we view it as a threat to our homeschooling her, our parental rights, and both my and Emily’s civil liberties. Since our family is being threatened by legal action, I have tried to confine my comments to a dispassionate statement of known facts.

Why Women Started Shaving Their Legs and Armpits

Both sexes have a love-hate relationship with removing body hair. We’ve been pulling, plucking, burning, tweezing and ripping out undesirable hair since the dawn of time. It’s believed that as far back as 4,000 B.C., women were using dangerous substances like arsenic and quicklime to get the job done. Meanwhile, the Egyptians, who never did anything halfway, removed all of their body hair from head to toe. They really liked the sleek look, but it also had a practical purpose. Being hairless discouraged the spread of disease and vermin such as lice and other icky creepy-crawlies. By 500 B.C., Roman ladies had learned how to use pumice stones and even a primitive version of the razor.

Let’s fast-forward to more recent times. When did our modern-day obsession with silky-smooth armpits and legs first take hold? As far as armpits are concerned, we can pinpoint it almost to the day. In May of 1915, the upscale magazine Harper’s Bazaar ran an ad featuring a young model in a sleeveless, slip-like dress posing with both arms over her head.

There's much more at Today I Found Out - read the whole thing.

Tuesday links

WWII Stamp Forgeries Used as Psychological Warfare.

How to Resuscitate a Drowning Victim in 1916.

5 Things You Can Do Right Now to Become Instantly Smarter.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Dinosaur Sex.

The Arms Race to Grow World's Hottest Pepper Goes Nuclear.

Famous Works of Art Recreated on Toast.

David Stockman's excellent op-ed on the failing American economy

At the NYT of all places:

Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level [above 1,500], in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the number of full-time middle class jobs, 6 percent. The real net worth of the "bottom" 90 percent has dropped by one-fourth. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans.

Less than 5 percent of the $800 billion Obama stimulus went to the truly needy for food stamps, earned-income tax credits and other forms of poverty relief. The preponderant share ended up in money dumps to state and local governments, pork-barrel infrastructure projects, business tax loopholes and indiscriminate middle-class tax cuts.

via American Thinker, which has more links and comments, including this:

Using the numbers from recovery.gov, the website that explains, sort of, how the ARRA stimulus money was spent, we find that the state of New York had created 5,856 "recipient reported jobs" at cost of $14.321 billion. That's about $2.4 million per job.

California had 14,079 "recipient reported jobs" at a cost of $27.254 billion. About $1.9 million per job.

The state of Washington used $3.3 million for each job. Ohio ran $1.7 million per job, and thrifty Florida spent only $1.1 million on each job created with the ARRA stimulus funds. Will you be remembering these numbers as you pay your Federal taxes on April 15th this year?