With good reason. Female circumcision is a disgusting act – detestable, brutal, and monstrous – even by barbarian standards.

From today’s Washington Post, readers get an anecdote of the practice followed by the quote of a proud supporter, the latter revealing the intellectual origin of said evil.

Yeah… it’s called unconditional blind faith.

Sheelan Anwar Omer, a shy 7-year-old Kurdish girl, bounded into her neighbor’s house with an ear-to-ear smile, looking for the party her mother had promised.

There was no celebration. Instead, a local woman quickly locked a rusty red door behind Sheelan, who looked bewildered when her mother ordered the girl to remove her underpants. Sheelan began to whimper, then tremble, while the women pushed apart her legs and a midwife raised a stainless-steel razor blade in the air. “I do this in the name of Allah!” she intoned.

As the midwife sliced off part of Sheelan’s genitals, the girl let out a high-pitched wail heard throughout the neighborhood. As she carried the sobbing child back home, Sheelan’s mother smiled with pride.

“This is the practice of the Kurdish people for as long as anyone can remember,” said the mother, Aisha Hameed, 30, a housewife in this ethnically mixed town about 100 miles north of Baghdad. “We don’t know why we do it, but we will never stop because Islam and our elders require it.” [emphasis mine]

Dumbed-down version here:

The right to work, for example, is fundamentally different from the right (entitlement) to a job; the right to marry does not entitle me to a spouse; the right to free speech does not entitle me to an audience.

Whole thing here, which I really, really recommend, especially for those of you who want to get the historical basis and, moreover, hear a contemporary defense (via Cass Sunstein… blech).

H/T: Hit & Run

Jim Edgar, former Governor of Illinois, and Bill Daley, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce, came together today with Illinois civic and business leaders and the Bill & Melinda Gates and Joyce foundations to launch Advance Illinois, a bipartisan effort to push toward improved public education in Illinois.

Illinois public education stinks. The organization recognizes this. Good. That’s the first step:

…22 percent of high school students are college-ready across the four ACT testing areas, and fewer than 30 percent of Illinois students demonstrate proficiency on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests, placing the state at or below national averages in all areas and at all grade levels.

So what exactly are the strategies, the particular tactics, to this end? What is their plan to improve public education?

<Crickets>

Yeah… that’s hard to tell. Really hard. Arguably painful. I mean, watch this story from Monday’s Chicago Tonight. Tell me if you can figure out what their plan is. Chicago Tonight spends over five minutes on the story and all they come up with is a “listening tour”, whatever that means.

You will notice, however – taking a page out of the Obama playbook – that a big part of their solution is “Change”.

Yes, “Change”. Throughout the broadcast, in fact, viewers hear the word “change” 13 times. 13 times!

Like the Obama campaign, “Change” for Advance Illinois remains undefined and thereby, utterly meaningless. That’s okay though. People just want “Change”. Me? I’d rather they be feeding me some more of that “Same”; at least it’d be honest.

Aldermen have approved Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s $6.2 billion budget amid worries over the economy.

The budget, approved 49-1 on Wednesday, calls for as many as 635 layoffs, selling city assets and new fees and taxes.

It requires the hiring of fewer police officers, but stipulates that no officers or firefighters will lose their jobs. The city also won’t fill 1,600 vacant positions.

Yet, it’s $300,000 more than last year’s budget…

More! What up with that?

My guess is dishonesty on the part of the city and journalistic laziness on the part of the AP.

Still, one alderman – my old one, in fact – voted against it. Hot damn! Was it because the alderman in question pierced through the charade, the misrepresentation, and wanted to stand up for the taxpayer? No. No, he was protesting the severity of the “cuts”.

Alderman Billy Ocasio cast the lone dissenting vote. He says most of the layoffs affect “people who do the work and get paid the least.”

Blech.

From my least-favorite-2008-presidential-candidate’s brand-new book Do the Right Thing:

The real threat to the Republican Party is something we saw a lot of this past election cycle: libertarianism masked as conservatism. And it threatens to not only split the Republican Party, but render it as irrelevant as the Whig Party.

Of course, I’d frame it inversely, that the real and most damaging threat to liberty is the Republican Party, whose alligients oh-so-casually throw around the small-government lingo but fail to deliver on anything even remotely close.

Instead, decade after decade with their paternalistic impulses, hyper-religious moralism, and corporate socialism, the association continues to bastardize the philosophical reputation of liberty.

F@$%ing Keynesians:

(H/T: Standard of Living)

And, in case seeing ten minutes of Peter Schiff hammer the same points over and over despite the objections of the voodoo-economic pros, here’s Uncle Strooge.

F@$%ing multiphonic duplicator feds.

Now, I’m not referring to an explicit form of self-righteousness, where one thinks he/she is simply better than most everyone else and inconveniences oneself to express that sentiment. For, ostensibly, change.gov is the opposite. There are various invitations for civic involvement and appeals to democratic inclusion. And these things, when applied competently and spoken authentically, are not self-righteous. Not at all.

But, here, you’re not getting any of that – an invitation for civic involvement that is authentic, let alone practical. The over-the-top degree to which Obama wants to make individuals feel apart of his presidency, like they’re actually helping shape policy, is silly bordering on laughable. There’s Your Vision, a page where one is asked to, “Share your vision for what America can be, where President-Elect Obama should lead this country.” Immediately following, one is asked to invite friends so that they too can “share their visions of what President-Elect Obama should do”. Fine, fine. (Now, there has been a meta-suggestion circulating on how to streamline this (as it stands) terribly inefficient process, a suggestion, in fact, more reflective of Obama’s political philosophy. But until I see some movement on it, I remain dismissive of such an all-inclusive feedback mechanism. [Although, I still shared my vision in the comments of this blog post.])

For those not content with simply contributing policy – as if the transitory team were actually planning on reading the visions – one can help implement policy. Yes, right there on the site one can apply for a position in the Obama-Biden Administration. Not counting the contact info request, the introductory application is all of five questions. Surprisingly, I manged to fit it into my day.

And these syncophantic offerings – masturbatory in that they’ll have no effect whatsoever yet make the public feel good as if they were (i.e. recycling) – certainly mesh well with the overall tone and presentation of Obama’s policy. For instance, take Obama’s education plan. No reform here. It promises the same, an increase in funding of our demonstrably-failed public education system. But it doesn’t come off that way. And it’s all in how he asks citizens to be part of the solution. Marvel at how he makes the same old shit sound revolutionary, important, and courageous. By simply throwing on a touch of hollow civic participation at the end:

But the truth is government can’t do it all. As parents, we need to turn off the TV, read to our kids, and give them that thirst to learn.

Quite the education plan, right? I mean, all Washington had to do was ask!

Obama’s citizenry-empowered prescriptions have no meat to them. Lacking practical implementation, his interest in and advocation for civic participation is surface at best. As Dan Denning at The Daily Reckoning put it:

…the Obama brand has all the depth and staying power of a catchy pop tune. It’s like Mountain Dew, all sugar rush, no nutritional value. You feel better but you’re not getting any healthier.

That such pandering, such fake interest, has the audacity to pose itself as legitimate – assuming this tripe is, indeed, inauthentic (as I suspect) – it’s certainly indicative of self-righteousness.

At least Obama’s honest…well, here anyways.

Lots of quote-gems here for the McCain campaign. I can’t imagine some scaled-down version of this one will go unnoticed.

The tragedies of the civil rights movement was, because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community-organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that.

It’s no whitey-tape but pretty damn close.

Check out its Wikipedia page and you’ll find out some straightforward background info:

Hakani is a controversial movie addressing the theme of infanticide in tribal communities in Brazil. The film takes the format of a documentary featuring a dramatic reconstruction of the true story of an attempted infanticide…The movie is part of a wider movement against infanticide amongst Brazilian Amazonian tribes. The pressure brought by the movie has brought the issue into the public eye and as far as the Brazilian Congress with a new law, Muwaji’s Law, being proposed. The law would allow an Indian child to be removed from its parents on the evidence that the child might be the target of a planned infanticide.

And then some information that is, perhaps, more disturbing than the promo. The film has its critics.

Opposition to a film effectively decrying infanticide? On what basis? Well, the most vocal of them is a purported “human rights” (uh…) organization called Survival International. Now, for SI, what legitimizes this viciously cruel, superstitiously-inspired sacrifice of an innocent life?

The organisation claims that the film is a tool for evangelical Christian groups to increase their ability to spread religious belief despite the Brazilian government’s concerns about their methods.

You know, when it comes to being buried alive or receiving theological proselytizing, I think I’ll take the proselytizing.

A symptom of ethical relativism. Really. That’s disgusting.

Forget Darwin vs. Genesis–what about Ptolemy vs. Copernicus, or Egyptian vs. alien pyramid builders? As the folks over at the T-shirt site, Teach the Controversy explain:

‘Big Science’ is always suppressing The Truth with their blatant pro-evolution anti-wacko agenda: from the fact that UFOs built the pyramids to the reality of creationism and fact the universe is “Turtles All The Way Down”. It is time to fight back and urge schools to Teach The Controversy with these intelligently designed t-shirts.

Pick your controversy from the designs below:

Thanks to shameless capitalism, controversialists of all stripes, flat-earthers included, can now express their grievances against the demythologizing tendencies of science on their chests.

I’m totally buying the one where the devil is burying the dinosaur bones.