New York Times Newspeak

Desertion = Un-volunteering.

(Via Michelle Malkin)

Must-see photos from the "How Berkeley Can You Be?" parade.

Warning: Full frontal nudity (and full frontal idiocy) on display.

Cell phone noise has now graduated from merely obnoxious to obscene.

First IKEA annoys us by selling the ugliest furniture on earth. And now this.

The cognitive dissonance is so thick you can cut it with a knife in this New York Times review of "In the Womb":

Full-frontal images of a vagina are available on cable Sunday night, but they come at a price. You have to watch a bloody, hairy baby burst through that vagina, and before that you have to watch the little creature in utero, growing in all its Operation Rescue propaganda detail, in the National Geographic Channel's latest unveiling of the hideous miracle of life.

"In the Womb" is actually a cool, beautiful movie, a celebration of computer imaging and the 4-D ultrasound. It exhibits a minimum of politics, probably because it appears to have been made in England, where the acknowledgement that humans in the womb are complex, dreaming, pain-experiencing, memory-having, walk-practicing, music-enjoying entities does not instantly put you in the same camp as doctor assassins and purveyors of "The Silent Scream."

Huh?

Those fetus/baby things are either disgusting or beautiful. She just can't decide.

Legally, of course, it depends on whether the little critter is wanted by its mom.

"I don't want to pollute the world anymore."

A new trend? Let's hope.

Michelle Malkin has a nice roundup of analysis on the FEC vs. Blogs controversy, complete with links for contacting the relevant officials.

She also has more on Moslems crossing the border to do jobs Americans won't do (like fundraising for Hezbollah).

LGF has a great excerpt from Victor Davis Hanson on Europe, Islam and cheap angst.

It's hip . . .

It's new . . .

It's the Left's latest pejorative: "heteronormative."

Compare and Contrast

This by Paul Johnson in 2005:

As for European intellectuals, who command so much power in the media, universities and opinion-forming circles, they have done everything they possibly could to abuse America's initiative in Iraq and to prevent the installation of freedom. Some make it clear that they would much prefer Iraq to be run by men like Saddam than by American-backed democrats. Of course, intellectuals pay lip service to free elections but in practice have a profound (if secret) hatred of democracy. They cannot believe that their votes should count for no more than the votes of "uneducated" people who run small businesses, work on farms and in factories and have never read Proust.

The intellectuals wanted the Iraqi elections to be defeated by terror. But now that the elections have actually taken place, they want the new government to fail. They want democracy to fail in Afghanistan as well so that they can smile smugly and say, "We told you so." For if democracy were to triumph everywhere, what role would there be for the intellectual critic? As Shakespeare put it, "Othello's occupation's gone."

And this by Eric Hoffer, some 50-odd years ago:

The fact is that up to now a free society has not been good for the intellectual. It has neither accorded him a superior status to sustain his confidence nor made it easy for him to acquire an unquestioned sense of social usefulness. For he derives his sense of usefulness mainly from directing, instructing, and planning- from minding other people's business- and is bound to feel superfluous and neglected where people believe themselves competent to manage individual and communal affairs, and are impatient of supervision and regulation. A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman's sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.

Maybe someday we'll learn contempt for "intellectuals" is the beginning of wisdom. And we will stop listening to and submissively subsidizing them.