… this just might go a bit of a ways towards explaining how they seem to have a seemingly inexhaustible supply of boneheads willing to blow themselves to confetti…

BEIT AWWA, West Bank – A mentally disabled brother and sister are seeing the outside world after being kept in isolated rooms in a West Bank house for about 40 years.

Palestinian police found the two during a raid aimed at finding Hamas militants and criminals.

A police officer said Wednesday they heard unusual noises. When they investigated, they found the brother and sister. Villagers did not know they were there.

The family said they hid the two away because of the stigma a family faces if it has mentally disabled children. Also, they said, there were no institutions that could take them in.

A disabled rights activist said there are probably many other such cases, partly because of the common practice among Palestinians of first cousins marrying each other.

Okay, here we go. Gravol? Check. Barf bucket? Check. Piggies on the runway? Check. I sooooo don’t wanna do this…

Everybody who spends any time here already knows that I have no love whatsoever for Billary “I love country music” Clinton (google it if you can’t figure it out). I agree with Gary Hubbell when he says that “the Angry White Man loathes Hillary Clinton. Her voice reminds him of a shovel scraping a rock.” I had no idea that Gary even knew me. 😛 The real problem here is that I also like to think of myself as someone who acknowledges common sense, regardless of whose mouth it comes out of.

So you can imagine the conundrum that I find myself in when Billary up has herself a “don’t Falk with me, Argentina” moment and blurts out the only realistic answer on the question of how to deal with a potentially nuke-packing Iran: (more…)

…bitch-slapping Al Jazeera.

I don’t write about this lady very often (maybe I should) but this is definitely one lady with a pair o’ tits that clank. Wafa Sultan (or “وفاء سلطان,” if you prefer) is a Syria-born shrink living in the US who has no problems whatso ever with banging heads with numbnut jihadi bullshit excuse-makers and their ilk.

Check her out as she locks horns with a couple of bullshit peddlers on Al Jazeera (tip o the toque to LGF for finding this first): (more…)

Well, boys and girls, the brain blockage continues unabated. I’m still sitting at my keyboard for a bit every day, shaking my head like a thinking man at a Greenpeace rally, and nothing’s popped loose. Is there such a thing as ExLax for the brain?

So, since the only original stuff I seem able to write these days is Jack and shit (and Jack’s busy running the Dippers), kick back and soak this up for now.

A big ol’ tip o’ the toque to Paul over at CJ for finding this first.

A little behind the herd here, I know but what can I say? I’ve been away for a bit. The recent act of war by Iran against Britain has, understandably, created more than a little bit of navel-gazing in its wake. Not a big surprise, when you take a minute to think about it. There was once a time when Britain would have never stood for that kind of crap (anybody out there remember the Falkland Islands?). Not now, it seems.

I was going to go on at some length about this but, as happens from time to time, somebody else not only beat me to it, they did it a lot better than I would have. So, just what do I do when someone has the audacity to outdo me like that? Simple: I steal their stuff and put it here for you to look at.

The following is from last Saturday’s TO Sun and is by UWO prof Salim Mansur; a man who quite probably has the firmest — and arguably, the bluntest — grasp of the Islamofascist mind of anyone in the country. Here’s his take on the issue, with no further needless commentary from yours truly:

Iran finds weak West

By SALIM MANSUR

The insolence of the thuggish regime in Iran is rising in inverse proportion to the self-abasement of the West and, in particular, the European Union.

The hostage taking of British sailors by Tehran was a move to test the resolve of Britain and its allies in responding to provocation bordering on an act of war.

Tony Blair’s failure to respond in a manner that could not be misread by Tehran for the immediate unconditional release of British sailors only confirmed the clerical regime’s estimate of the West as unwilling to contend with Iran’s expansionist ambitions in the Persian Gulf region.

Tehran learned from its experience of taking American diplomats hostage for 444 days that the West could be shown for being a paper tiger as China’s Mao had once described it.

The latest Iranian hostage taking should be seen in a wider context of Tehran’s strategic objective of being recognized as the leading Islamic power in a multipolar world wherein Europe and the United States are no longer dominant, and in the United Nations the countries of Asia and Africa provide for the majority bloc of voting members.

Iran’s ascent to the position Tehran’s clerical regime aspires might only be realized by dividing the Arab opposition to its ambition, defying the Security Council’s various resolutions to stop its bid to acquire nuclear capability, and securing Russian-Chinese support to nullify any threat of EU singly or in combination with the U.S.

From the outset of Iran’s 1979 revolution the regime’s supreme clerical guide, Ayatollah Khomeini, maintained the road to Jerusalem and the “liberation” of Palestine was through Karbala, the Iraqi site of martyrdom for the Shiite Imam Hussein and his family. In other words, the Persian Khomeini offered the Arab-Palestinian nationalists the example of Shiite martyrdom as the means for waging war against Israel.

Iran has succeeded in dividing the Arab states by positioning Hezbollah as its fifth column in the heart of the Arab east, and by financing the Hamas among Palestinians. A fragmented Arab world nursing innumerable grievances is unable to counter Iran’s age-old Persian ambition reincarnated in Islamist ideology and financed by bulging oil revenue.

The EU negotiations with Tehran to cease its no longer secret nuclear program in return for assistance to construct nuclear reactor for civilian use has proven to be a charade.

European trade with Iran has grown over time, and commercial interests of France, Germany and Italy trump any EU concerns over Iran’s race to become a nuclear power.

Nuclear capability is the guarantee the clerics seek to make Iran’s position in the Middle East invulnerable to external challenge. Domestically it would make the clerical regime more formidable even as Iranians increasingly loathe the totalitarian rule of Khomeini and his political progeny.

Tehran’s probing of Britain’s resolve by kidnapping its sailors could be indicative of the British mood being the same as in the rest of Europe, of appeasing and accommodating Iran. If this is so and clerical rulers of Iran are proven right, then only President George Bush stands between Tehran’s ambition and its consummation.

But the Bush administration is beset with problems exacerbated by a swing in American mood in the direction of European appeasers.

The clerics in Tehran will wait out the remaining months of Bush in the White House for they know too well the Democratic party of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and taking British sailors hostage is their endgame move to run the West out of the Middle East.

Some crap really does just boggle the hell out of the mind, doesn’t it? Take, for example, the recent colossal kerfuffle over yet another twit who thinks he’s found the tomb of Christ. 🙄

Here we have some dork — and James Cameron too, it turns out — burbling on like he’s some kind of authority when, in fact, he’s nothing more than just another media hack:

A Canadian filmmaker and author claims to have new scientific evidence that could have profound implications for Christianity.

Simcha Jacobovici, from Toronto, is expected to reveal at a news conference in New York on Monday that a tomb he explored under a Jerusalem apartment building once contained the bones of Jesus of Nazareth and his family.

Further, he suggested that the tomb, stored in a warehouse belonging to the Israel Antiquity Authority outside Jerusalem, may contain microscopic remains of the Christian saviour’s DNA.

[…]

The boxes were inscribed with the names: Jesus son of Joseph, Judah son of Jesus, Maria, Mariamne, Joseph and Matthew.

A quick peek around the net reveals that our little Mr. Jackoffski (pictured at right) is an Israeli-born Canadian, and received a B.A. with Honours in Philosophy and Political Science from McGill University. That’s right, two degrees: one in bullshitology political science and the other in bafflegab philosophy.

Philosophy, of course, is a Greek word that means “why do something about it when you can drone on endlessly about it with needlessly big words” that was best described by Ambrose Bierce as “a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.” Let’s face it, kids; the only thing you can really do with a degree in philosophy is teach philosophy. And I think everybody here already knows what I think about a degree in polisci…

But enough about what he’s got. Let’s see what he hasn’t got. I wonder if he has any degrees in…

Archaeology? Nope.
Anthropology? Nope.
Theology? Nope.
Okay, how about codicology or philology? Nope.
Damn. The guy’s gotta at least have one in history, right?? Nope.

The article could just as easily — and just as accurately — be headlined: “Dude With Camcorder Says Outrageous Shit.” But you just know that the MSM and all the usual loopy Lefty suspects are going to be all over this like maggots on Saddam Hussein. Okay, tell ya what we’re gonna do…

Just for the moment, we’re going to forget that I’m Christian and therefore already know that Christ’s tomb is empty and this dolt is just yapping out of his arse. Let’s just examine his excuse for methodology for a few seconds, shall we?

University of Toronto mathematician Dr. Andrey Feuerverger calculated the odds at one in 600; while Dr. James Tabor, chair of the department of religion at the University of North Carolina, placed the odds at one in 42 million.

“If you took the entire population of Jerusalem at the time and put it in a stadium, and asked everyone named Jesus to stand up, you’d have about 2,700 men,” Tabor said. “Then you’d ask only those with a father named Joseph and a mother named Mary to remain standing. And then those with a brother named Yose and a brother named James. Statistically, you end up with one person.”

So here we are, over two thousand years later, and some twit finds a tomb with the name tags of “Jesus son of Joseph, Judah son of Jesus, Maria, Mariamne, Joseph and Matthew.” All of these were common names at the time. It’s like finding the tomb of “Jim son of John, Rob son of Jim, Linda, Jenny, John and Mike.” It means virtually nothing. The most important thing though, is that this whole theory hinges on one grasping compulsion: if this is, in fact, a tomb containing the remains of Jesus, Mary and Joseph themselves, then the mitochondrial DNA from the “Jesus” remains absolutely must be consistent with mtDNA from the “Mary” remains. There is no way around this whatsoever; NONE.

So, without further ado, allow me to throw in the monkey wrench (from the same article, no less)…

According to Jewish custom, the bones have long since been reburied in unmarked graves in Israel. But tests conducted at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., on DNA obtained from the Jesus and Mary tomb and show that the two individuals were not maternally related.

Not… Maternally… Related… How’s that for lowering the boom? Ah, but what’s a little snag like that when your head’s so far up your ass you chew your food twice? You don’t really think that you let inconvenient little things like a few piddling facts get in your way when you’re a card-carrying kook, now, do you? Hell no; you just decide to pull a Homer Simpson and pull your arms out of the tar with your face. Undaunted by having his little attention-whore balloon popped, he promptly shifted gears and fell back on the same old, tired, predictable, discredited, Gnostic bullshit…

“Perhaps Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married as the DNA results from the Talpiot ossuaries suggest and perhaps their union was kept secret to protect a potential dynasty – a secret hidden through the ages,” narrator Ron White says in the documentary.

“A secret we just may be able to uncover in the holy family tomb.”

Gimme a friggin’ break. Okay… Let’s assume for a minute that “Mary” isn’t genetically related to anybody else in the tomb; marriage would be a reasonable hypothesis to explain her presence. But married to whom? There are four sets of male remains in that tomb, folks, and nary a marriage certificate to be found. It’s an assumption perched on a presupposition built on a conceit. All in all, a pretty rickety affair.

On the bright side though, for a change, the gobsmacking of this idiocy isn’t confined to just folks like me. For example…

“It was an ordinary middle-class Jerusalem burial cave,” Kloner said. “The names on the caskets are the most common names found among Jews at the time.”

Archaeologists also balk at the filmmaker’s claim that the James Ossuary – the center of a famous antiquities fraud in Israel – might have originated from the same cave. In 2005, Israel charged five suspects with forgery in connection with the infamous bone box.

“I don’t think the James Ossuary came from the same cave,” said Dan Bahat, an archaeologist at Bar-Ilan University. “If it were found there, the man who made the forgery would have taken something better. He would have taken Jesus.”

Nice to see scientists being scientists for a change.