…. is funny!

The author links to PETA’s anti-KFC website, at which I found the following {exerpted from an article called The Hidden Lives Of Chickens}:

Chickens understand sophisticated intellectual concepts, learn from watching each other, demonstrate self-control, worry about the future, and even have cultural knowledge that is passed from generation to generation

Excuse me while I move away from my keyboard to take a sip of coffee, so as not to spew the java all over it during my next convulsion of laughter….

I had never read anything by Dave Weinbaum before, then I bumped into an OpEd of his at Jewish World Review a few minutes ago. Based on the column of his I just read, I’d love to buy him a beer.

Mark Steyn’s kicking some serious butt this week, and making me laugh my touchas off at the same time, with this column.

You gotta hand it to these guys: “Redeployment” is ingenious. I’ll bet the focus-group consultants were delirious: “surrender,” “lose,”,”scram,” “scuttle ignominiously,” “head for the hills” all polled poorly, but “redeploy” surveyed well with all parts of the base, except the base in Okinawa, where they preferred “sayonara” — that’s “redeploy” in any language. The Defeaticrats have a clear message for the American people. Read da ploy: No new quagmires.

Read the column and see if you don’t — heh heh — laugh your ass off at the way Steyn presents a too-true state of affairs.

Don’t drink your coffee while you read the column, or you might spew it all over your keyboard.

Way back when I was a kid {and I mean way} we weren’t “overprotected”. We did all the stuff you do at playgrounds over a concrete or pebble filled asphalt ground, monkey bars, swings, see-saws and all. No built-in rubber mats underlining whatever venue we were playing on. No bicycle helmets, knee pads and so forth. In the winter, we went flying down long hills of snow and ice laying prone on low slung, narrow wooden sleds on steel runners. We climbed trees, we built tree houses, we played with solid hardballs in Little League baseball, bashed the hell out of each other in Pop Warner football and bombarded each other with projectiles that were big rubber balls in games of dodge ball. We went to the local pizza shop and gorged large slices of thick, doughy Sicilian pizza and loved the heck out of enormous ice cream sundaes that housed every kind of fattening agent known to man. We dove off of high diving boards. We weren’t mollycoddled by society, we were permitted to be kids.

Now, all is liability.

Liberal trial lawyers have managed to instill terror in the hearts of cities, states and business concerns — the mishap that results from someone’s clumsiness has become the fault of whoever owns the property on which an accident occurs. In many ways, similarly to the denutritionalisation of bread, they are bleaching a lot of the fun out of growing up….

Steve Moore of the Wall Street Journal sums it all up rather well, using as his vehicle the veritable extinction of… the diving board.

I’ll leave you to it….

Read This!

Despite numerous residential meanderings about the country in my lifetime to date(I am now settled down, house and all, in Charlotte, NC), my “point of origin”, as it were, was New York, where I’ve spent several years of my adult life as well.

In my opinion, the two best mayors New York has had since I was old enough to notice were Rudi Giuliani and, though he is a Democrat, Edward Koch — one positive attribute of most N.Y. mayors is that they tend to lead from the front, and put the five boroughs ahead of most political considerations. I say most, not all because, after all, they are politicians.

Koch was a great mayor, very decisive, very colorful and entirely a New Yorker who placed his city first.

Since the Global War On Terror was launched by President Bush, Ed Koch has supported it as he supports, unlike so many of my fellow Jews (the liberal ones) Israel’s right to exist — while Jewish liberals both here in the U.S. and over in Israel are supporting capitulation to Palestinian terrorism, Mr. Koch advocates fighting back. He even wrote a column why, his being a Democrat notwithstanding, he was voting for George W. Bush in the 2004 election.

Basically, the former N.Y. mayor is what most Democrats used to be when I was growing up in the 1960s and early 1970s, before that political party was taken over by liberals: Patriotic, supportive of our national defense and a believer that the United States, because we are a rich and powerful world leader that can, has a mission to help spread freedom where we are able throughout the world.

Unlike so many of today’s Democrats, he understands the danger our nation and other western nations face from the third major Jihad by a religion whose entire history, dating back 1300 years, encompasses bloody attempts to achieve Islamic world domination. While liberals do everything in their power to cause us to lose the War On Terror, Mr. Koch is quick to defend our efforts.

In a new Op-Ed column, Mr. Koch points out the western liberal habit of blaming the west (or Israel) the minute there are any charges of collateral damage being “inflicted” by our side, yet glossing over incidents in which terrorists kill innocent civilians by design.

In his Op-Ed, Foolish Western self-flagellation, the former mayor refers to a New York Times Op-Ed (this is not the kind of thing we normally get from the NYT, the columnist in question is the man who took the opening left by the venerable William Safire when the longtime columnist decided to retire his own column) by David Brooks.

New York Times columnist David Brooks writes with the clarity of Bill Safire, whom he has succeeded as The Times in-house moderate. In a June 8 column, Brooks vividly described the cruelty of the Iraqi insurgents:

“The insurgents’ first advantage is that not only are they cruel, they are absolutely cruel. The defining feature of their violence is not merely that they murder, but that they torture those they are about to kill. Shiite militias use drills to bore holds into their victims’ heads. Sunni insurgents saw off fingers and toes. Jihadists partially behead their victims then stomp on their torsos to create gushes of blood before finishing the job. Videos of such acts are posted on the Internet or sold in the markets of towns like Haditha.”

In sharp contrast, Western countries constantly flagellate themselves when civilians are injured or killed in the course of defensive military action against al-Qaeda or its agents.

The above is completely true, though I must add here that it has been pretty well demonstrated by liberals, that aside from their animosity toward Israel and their apparent support of terrorism, much of their “shock and chagrin” stems more from their hatred of Bush and by extension his efforts to protect these same stupid “intellectuals” from either being exterminated by terrorism or losing all the rights they now cherish, especially freedom of speech, to the global caliphate our Islamofascist enemies want to impose upon us.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, senior member of Al-Queda, was killed by U.S. forces directing bombs at a safe-house in which he was believed to be living. A number of men in the house at the time, thought to be his accomplices, were also killed. In addition, a woman and a child inside the house died. Normally when women or children are killed in a combat incident, denunciations of the American military are made. Few denunciations were made in this case, because of the prominence of the terrorist Zarqawi who is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians and American and coalition civilian and military personnel.

But, what if Zarqawi had survived and escaped and the others in the house had not? The U.S. would have been denounced around the world by those opposed to our presence in Iraq today, even though the legitimately-elected Iraqi government recently advised the United Nations that it wanted us to remain.

As regards Israel and the Palestinians,

Another example of foolish western self-flagellation is seen in the different responses to actions by Hamas and Israel. Palestinian terrorists, with knowledge and approval of Hamas, launch Qassam rockets at Israel from open fields, and the Israelis respond with artillery shells. The Palestinians’ missiles are usually inaccurate, although they occasionally hit their targets — the towns and cities of Israel and their civilian populations. The Israeli artillery directed at the open fields generally hit the fields and occasionally kill those who launched the missiles.

This weekend, The Times reports: “Hamas’s military wing, which declared a tattered 16-month truce with Israel to be over after the deaths of eight civilians on a Gazan beach - apparently killed by an errant Israeli artillery shell - continued Sunday to fire volleys of Qassam rockets from Gaza into Israel. One rocket landed near a school in Sederot, Israel, and badly wounded a 60-year-old resident, Yonatan Engel, a friend of Defense Minister Amir Peretz. Another rocket made a direct hit on a house in Sederot, but there were no injuries.”

Israel is denounced by nations around the world when Palestinian civilians are injured or killed, but rarely are the casualties suffered by Israeli civilians noticed, let alone denounced. There is a major difference between the nature of the two sides’ actions. Israel is responding to missiles directed at its civilian population. It is a basic duty of any government to protect its population from foreign attack. No responsible person suggests that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) deliberately targeted innocent Palestinians on a Gaza beach who were injured by what The New York Times called “apparently…an errant Israeli artillery shell.” It is the nature of artillery shells sometimes to go astray.

To truncate here,

We learned Monday that the IDF has ascertained and confirmed, “that the explosion that killed eight Palestinians on Friday, was caused by a stockpile of Hamas explosives.” Will that make any difference to the weepers of the western world?

I doubt it.

So do I.

Look at the Haditha affair — the incident is still under investigation, no actual facts of the matter yet released to the media, yet the liberals, including politicians like that treasonous, politically opportunistic slimeball John Murtha, have already loudly convicted the Marines involved because they believe it will have adverse effects on Bush’s popularity. Yeah, I know, they all “support the troops”.

The liberal way is to keep on shouting their unsupported diatribes so that by the time the truth comes out, even if it’s just the opposite, the lie has become “general knowledge” and they’ll stick by it unto death.

The international terrorist organizations count on the infidels of the west to lose their collective nerve and be unwilling to sustain casualties in this ongoing war of survival between civilizations which might continue for decades. They hope the west will submit to defeat in Iraq and consent to the elimination of Israel, even if that would mean a world dominated by the Islamic fanatics.

Their weapon is fear and their willingness to die as martyrs for their cause while we in the west value every human life. Zarqawi, Osama bin Laden’s deputy in Iraq, left us these words as his epitaph: “Killing the infidels is our religion, slaughtering them is our religion, until they convert to Islam or pay us tribute.”

{emphasis mine}

The Op-Ed is entirely on-point, definitely give it a read in its entirety.

I took a little time out today to catch up on some reading, and ran across one of Greg Crosby’s always welcome columns, this one really hitting home as both my maternal grandparents were immigrants, he from the Ukraine, she from Poland.

When they arrived here in the late 1920s and early 1930s, respectively, the first thing they did was become Americans in every sense of the word. My grandmother already spoke English along with several other languages, my grandfather made going to school and learning English a top priority, and, this accomplished, they both made the language of America their language. They assimilated themselves into American culture and traditions with great enthusiasm.

Today, largely thanks to the multiculturalism and PC promoted by the liberal sector of our society, this assimilation has become more the exception than the rule among immigrants, and as Mr. Crosby points out in this great column, it is dividing the country into pronounced ethnic subdivisions rather than providing any kind of continuum for unity among Americans. In fact, this phenomenon may well be the death knell for American traditions, culture and even national identity.

Our culture is in jeopardy because immigrants to America are not assimilating into society like they once did. My grandparents came here to be Americans, to bring up their children with American ideals and American values. It wasn’t easy, but they went to night school to learn English. They dressed American. They listened to American radio stations in English, watched American television, and attended American movies. They embraced American music, ate American food, and learned American history.

Lack of assimilation is not purely the fault of the immigrant; much of the blame is with our politically correct multiculturalism, which has been taught throughout our public schools and universities for about three decades. The teaching of traditional American history is, at worst totally revisionist, at best given short shrift. In its place, the focus is now on minorities and looking at history through the prism of our contemporary views on race, women’s rights and other hot button topics. The celebration of multiculturalism is laced through almost all subjects in our public schools … well, maybe not algebra, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Our society today makes accommodations which, if anything, discourage assimilation. Voting ballots printed in a dozen different languages, ATMs and payphones with instructions in Spanish, bilingual packaging on consumer goods, and billboards all over town in one language — Spanish — all say to the immigrant, “Hey, it’s okay, you don’t have to speak English here.”

Truer words were never written.

Read the entire column here.

Greg Crosby’s got a true masterpiece of a column posted at JWR, read it here.

And here is another direct hit from the ever right-thinking Ann Coulter.

This one’s a must-read.

American Spectator Editor-In-Chief Bob Tyrrell has definitely definitively defined our resident leftist irritant organizations as exactly what they are: Public Nuisances.

Starting at some point in the last century the public nuisance acquired a halo by claiming that his obnoxious behavior was induced by high purpose and noble values. In the 1930s pacifists tested the outer limits of public-nuisance law to oppose American entry into World War II. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini favored their labors — to a point. In the 1930s there were also food fanatics and nudists numbered among the public nuisances. Through the years Americans have become inured to these misfits and malcontents, sympathetic as we are to the protesters’ claims to higher virtue and noble purpose.

By the later decades of the 20th century many public nuisances’ misbehavior moved from mere mischief to mayhem, but ordinary Americans have remained good natured, generally, so long as the nuisances are not trampling the ordinary Americans’ petunias or hauling them into court. Nudists are too polite to commit such excesses, and even militant bicycle riders shun such tactics. Yet there are public nuisances who frequently engage in rough stuff. Probably the roughest of the public nuisances are the animal-rights fanatics. Some actually undertake acts of terror, blowing up laboratories and — for some reason — ski resorts. Just a few months back 11 were indicted on federal warrants for such crimes.

Read the entire column here.