Foreign Dispatches

Al Gore is Jor-El

Even if you don't agree, the Stiff One is certainly self-righteous and sanctimonious enough to give this tale a certain plausibility: just replace inventing "the internet" with "the brain interactive construct" and you're already half-way there.

Former Apollo 14 Astronaut Goes Senile ...

Starts raving about aliens and government coverups in his dotage, makes UFO nuts and tinfoil hat wearers the world over giddy with delight. Dr Edgar Mitchell has done so much worthy of note in his lifetime, and it is a shame that he's now bringing said life to a close in such a ridiculous fashion; even more shameful is that there are such large numbers of stupid people eager to swallow Mitchell's delusional claims about "little men" who "come in peace" wholesale - you'd think at least a few would be a tad suspicious about just how much Mitchell sounds like a Weekly World News article, but the UFO obsessives are so happy to have anyone of stature endorse their viewpoint that they'll gladly accept tales of little green men who seem to have stepped right off the cover of a 1950s "Amazing Tales" comic.

Bread is Bad for Your Health!

So you think you know bread, huh? You don't know nearly enough! In fact, the stuff can kill you!

Stay away from bread, dear reader, lest you find yourself on an irreversible path to ruination. In fact, I say we ban the dangerous substance altogether, for the sake of the children of course. Won't someone think of the poor, innocent children being put at risk here?

(Hey, the reasoning in the linked article is at least as sound as anything one reads on Commentary, National Review or the editorial pages of the WSJ ...)

So Now Obama is Hitler?

First we had some idiot on National Review suggesting that Barack Obama was a Jewish communist, and now it's Ben Stein making a ridiculous comparison to Hitler which any German ought to find deeply insulting. Will the right-wing lunatics please make up their minds? Is Obama a Judeo-communist, a Nazi, an atheist, a Muslim, or all of the above? Nothing better displays the ideological bankruptcy of the GOP today than this relentless resort to outrageous slanders and absurd innuendos: such nonsense is the first and last resort of those who cannot talk of ideas and have no policies of any coherence to offer.

Frankly, I don't like Obama's left-wing, big government policy proposals at all, but it's hard not to throw my support behind him if the alternative promises to give solace to all these right wing crazies and the numerous vermin who made Jesse Helms out to be some sort of American hero.

PS: To show how shamelessly inconsistent so many right wingnuts can be, Lisa Schiffren, the very same lunatic who suggested that Obama was a commie Jew just a few months ago, is now comparing Obama's speech in Berlin to Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will"!
You'd think the idiot would at least take a moment to get her story straight ...

The Best of Britain

Good to see that there are still British tourists out there holding up the flag for Britannia:

NINE British women face vice charges for taking part in an oral sex competition on a saucy holiday. The raunchy tourists were arrested for prostitution offences on the Greek party island of Zakynthos.

What class! What elan! It just fills one with pride, doesn't it? But the women of Great Britain aren't the only ones at the top of the greasy pole(s).

A spokesman said the sordid competition had been video recorded and was to be posted on the internet. Female tourists from Britain and Sweden reached the final of the oral sex competition after getting through several knock-out rounds.

Where were these upstanding representatives of Swedish womanhood when I was actually in Sweden? Were they all on holiday in Greece or something? These fine specimens clearly aren't marriage material (at least not in my book), but at least there'd have been a good chance they wouldn't all look like Jabba the Hutt ...

[Via The Marmot's Hole.]

PS: Let it also be said here that apart from displaying an admirable spirit of competitiveness, the women of the British Isles are nothing if not generous when overseas - drunken excesses notwithstanding, the locals in many a resort have much to be grateful to us for.

Driving While Gay?

Courtesy of the BBC, the strangest tale of discrimination I have ever heard.

An Italian court has ordered the government to pay 100,000 euros (£79,919) to a man who had to retake his driving test because he was gay.

Danilo Giuffrida, now 26, told doctors he was homosexual during a medical examination for military service.

The information was passed to the defence and transport ministries.

Mr Giuffrida was told to repeat his driving test or have his licence suspended because of his "sexual identity disturbance".

Mr Giuffrida passed his test for the second time but his licence was renewed for just one year rather than the usual 10 years because of his homosexuality.

I really don't get it. What does being gay have to do with driving, and why give the man a license to drive for even a single year if this "sexual identity disturbance" is so debilitating? The whole thing is utterly bizarre.

The Truth about Jesse Helms

I don't know why it is that so many people feel obliged to sugercoat the life of a man like Jesse Helms upon his passage: to read about Helms' life even in organs like the New York Times, one would think he were a man of honor in spite of having a few flaws, when in truth Jesse Helms was nothing more than a power-hungry, vicious, ignorant, Bible-thumping racist and homophobe who just happened to have a talent for exciting the same prejudices in large numbers of white voters in North Carolina.

Fortunately, not everyone is willing to abide by such hypocrisy: Christopher Hitchens sets the record straight - the world is a better place without the worthless bastard's presence in it, and the only thing to be sad about is that Helms didn't die much sooner.

(Some) Arabs Love Israel

I discovered the rather interesting statistic quoted below while browsing the Catallaxy blog.

77% of Arab citizens would rather live in Israel than in any other country in the world.

It would be one thing if this were saying they'd rather live in Israel than in any Arab country, but the statement is actually far stronger than that, and therefore all the more surprising. It suggests to me that Israel's Arab citizens appreciate that despite whatever resentments they might have about Judaism's privileged religious status in Israeli law, Israeli Arabs really do have it good, especially by comparison with Arabs living in Arab-majority states.

There is more to the report than this one statistic, however, and I suggest reading it in full, but even this much should give a little pause to all those fond of tiresome rhetoric about Israel being an "apartheid state" [sic]: evidently Israeli Arabs know something such sloganizers do not.

Not All in the Genes

It was only last week that I wrote about why it was necessary to remain sceptical about any research announcements supposedly identifying a genetic basis for homosexuality, so the timing of this report in Science could hardly be more exquisite.

Why are some people gay? Most researchers who study sexual orientation think that both genetic and environmental factors play a role, but the relative contributions of each remain unclear. A new study of Swedish twins reinforces earlier findings that environmental influences--including the environment in the womb--may play a greater role than genes.

A Most Realistic Bond Monologue

With the demise of Suck oh so many years ago, the Internet lost a precious source of sardonic humor, of a dryness which the Onion manages to attain only very rarely; as such, I find it something of a relief to learn that McSweeney's Internet Tendency is not only still up and running, but evidently still as funny as ever ...