The wheel turns full circle

Feminists arguing that adult women shouldn't be allowed to make decisions on what to do with their bodies. In this case raising the age of consent to appear on Girls Gone Wild videos from 18 to 21. Oddly, the author supports her argument by pointing out the many lawsuits filed against GGW producers by people who did not consent to be photographed/videotaped. It's a bit like saying Iraq is a horrible disaster, therefore we need to invade Iran.

I suppose the right of women to control their bodies only applies below the waist.

Lou Dobbs continues his fight against the brown peril...

This time with verbal jousting against America's other adulterous, Catholic mayor Gavin Newsom. It produced this little gem

Dobbs, an outspoken critic of illegal immigration who hosts an opinionated evening news hour, criticized San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom on Monday, saying he and immigrant protection advocates "might as well work for Hermann Goering. I mean, they're running so much propaganda, trying to confuse the debate, the national dialogue, by talking about immigrants rather than illegal aliens and legal immigrants. It's mindless beyond belief.

Never mind that Goebbels was the propaganda minister, (Goering commanded the Luftwaffe), and never mind that the source of the gripe is that Newsom is refusing to allow local police to enforce immigration law. Never mind that the appropriate German/Nazi comparison to draw (if one must be drawn, Godwin's law must be obeyed) is to Admiral Canaris (who helped hundreds of Jews escape the Nazis while he headed the Abwehr).

But don't think of that, just think of the huge social advances if we brought back dueling. Huge swathes of hacks, apparachiks and fashionable non-conformists would be removed from the gene pool at no cost to the taxpayer. Still others, when forced to put up or shut up, would shut up (or at least try).

We could finally resolve all the pointless debates; is illegal immigration a huge problem that we're not going to do anything about, or is it a charitable endeavor that we're not going to do anything about. We would finally know!

Random links

• Remove the web developer and the web gets developed
• Term of the day "Fever Swamp - A political website or mindset that is prone to wild accusations and is especially susceptible to conspiracy theories."
• An excellent post on conspiracy theories
  

A foppish post

From National Review's Mark Steyn. He makes the valid point that people in their 20s are not children, but the asinine part is

They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are “children” if they’re serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton’s Oval Office. Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

It presumes that all of the victims were cowering in fear while they were shot. My initial thought is that since the fatality count is so high suggests that people were attempting to fight, and died trying. Furthermore, a gun-wielding attacker is qualitatively different from a knife-wielding attacker. If six men rush someone with a knife, it's reasonable to expect, say two, of the six to die, but their side would prevail. Against a gun, it's likely that all six would fall, and their side would lose (presuming a sufficient start distance). And suicidal attacks with no expectation of victory are a trademark of the Islamic extremists that Steyn usually rails against.

Being insightful as I throw stones

Somehow I stumbled across this book The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 on Amazon and it provoked two thoughts.

• First I thought of Eric Hoffer's adage, to wit, Americans can only hate Americans, they consider foreigners to be inferiors and feel sorry for them. That would make this book a sign of health, albeit an ugly one.
• Then I thought of the South Park episode "The Mystery of the Urinal Deuce" and the lines:

  Kyle: So who was responsible for 9-11?
  Stan: A bunch of pissed off Muslims. What are you, retarded!?

  
  

Perfectly put

Don Boudreaux put it very well in his open letter to Lou Dobbs. Why he's taken more seriously than Bill O'Reilly or Cynthia McKinney I'll never know.

An interesting blog find

Via Tom Palmer, comes the interesting blog Right Watch, which is dedicated to keeping an eye on the self-styled "Paleo - Libertarian" section of the American political landscape, the Paleo libs being those who identify strongly with the later thought of Murray Rothbard and (improbably) the Confederate States of America. While a small group, they do seem to speak for a somewhat larger group of anti-war right wingers.

I've seen these folks in print for a while, and one thing always jumps out at me. For all their pro-CSA rhetoric, they have no visible connection to the actual South. One does not see any mention of a Southern birthplace or education on their bios. Any actual tie to the South, old or new, is conspicuous by it's absense.