Hear ye! Hear ye!

Your Pope is here.

I Pope Ron Paul am stepping forward to take the reins of leadership out of the hands of the ignorant. I will bless you and keep you safe from the scary minds of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani. Go forth my minions and tell the world of my coming!

As your Pope, I have decrees. Hear them.

1. I have excommunicated the Washington Monument. Good government doesn’t need monuments or Washington
2. Bring me your gold. In the future, gold is the only money, and its value will be regulated by a giant robot brain.

Civilised man was nearly always able to become master of his environment temporarily. His chief troubles came from his delusions that his temporary mastership was permanent. He thought of himself as “master of the world,” while failing to understand fully the laws of nature.

Man, whether civilised or savage, is a child of nature — he is not the master of nature. He must conform his actions to certain natural laws if he is to maintain his dominance over his environment. When he tries to circumvent the laws of nature, he usually destroys the natural environment that sustains him. And when his environment deteriorates rapidly, his civilisation declines.

This is the third installment of our weekly column entitled Ask a Shiite. Our resident Shiite and United Arab Emirates citizen will be fielding questions of a philosophical, physical, and political nature in regards to Shiite Islamic belief and Middle East perception. Interested in asking a question? Send an email to alec.

Question: Can you talk about sex and society in the United Arab Emirates and in Islamic culture in general? What is temporary marriage and how does it function in Islamic law and faith? Is there premarital sex and can you talk about the relationship between sex and religion for Muslims?

Come on Ron Paul and your Klan of support; lets go.

The Artlcle: Rich, Black, and Flunking by Susan Goldsmith in the East Bay Express.

The Text: The black parents wanted an explanation. Doctors, lawyers, judges, and insurance brokers, many had come to the upscale Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights specifically because of its stellar school district. They expected their children to succeed academically, but most were performing poorly. African-American students were lagging far behind their white classmates in every measure of academic success: grade-point average, standardized test scores, and enrollment in advanced-placement courses. On average, black students earned a 1.9 GPA while their white counterparts held down an average of 3.45. Other indicators were equally dismal. It made no sense.

It’s time to face the facts. Liberal democrats could and should wield more influence and power than they are willing to admit. Democrats swept the 2006 elections, and as a voting bloc liberals are better educated and wealthier than most demographics. However there hasn’t been a sweeping change to enlightened benevolence. The voting body ushered in their representatives and sat back content to let someone else do the work. American politics are now officially a spectator sport. The American electorate is willing to let someone else handle their problems.

Now, I don’t know about you guys, but I would NOT want a known retard to handle my food. I’m pretty sure that its contagious, as I read on Wikipedia. I’m going to hell for this, aren’t I?

This is the first installment of Fatwa Friday. After successes on declaring jihad on numerous subjects — Natasha Mitra, American society — we decided to make this a weekly affair. From now on, we will be calling out everyone left and right. Prepare to be jihaded.

The Article: The American Left’s Silly Victim Complex by Matt Taibbi in AdBusters.

The Text: The biggest problem with modern American liberalism may be the word itself. There’s just something about the word, liberal, something about the way it sounds – it just hits the ear wrong. If it were an animal it would be something squirming and hairless, something that burrows maybe, with no eyes and too many legs. No child would bring home a wounded liberal and ask to keep it as a pet. More likely he would step on it, or maybe tie it to a bottle-rocket and shoot it over the railroad tracks.

There’s a new post-hipster, post-modern fashion craze sweeping across our Christian land, and we here at Prose Before Hos are proud to present an exposé on the latest inster fashion trends.

At a House Party:

At Work:

On Myspace:

Going to a poetry slam:

Working out:

As you can see, your typical inster is fit and literate, and enjoys coffee. Floral notes accent the vibrant colors and dyi aesthetic. This is clearly what to watch for 2008.

Interesting Statistical Comparisons

Every 9.62 days, there is an equivalent amount of casualties in Iraq & Afghanistan as September 11th.

There are 9.65 Virginia Tech shootings in Iraq & Afghanistan everyday.

There are 1.61 Madrid bombings in Iraq & Afghanistan everyday.

In 11 days as many Iraqi & Afghani civilians are killed as the entire amount of American military personnel killed since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2002 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

I added my thoughts to a thread at Tiny Revolution on recent foreign realist op-eds in the WaPo and NYtimes:

“In the excitement over the unfolding of his scientific and technical powers, modern man has built a system of production that ravishes nature and a type of society that mutilates man. If only there were more and more wealth, everything else, it is thought, would fall into place. Money is considered to be all-powerful; if it could not actually buy non-material values, such as justice, harmony, beauty, or even health, it could circumvent the need for them or compensate for their loss. The development of production and the acquisition of wealth have thus become the highest goals of the modern world in relation to which all other goals, no matter how much lip-service may still be paid to them, have come to take second place. The highest goals require no justification; all secondary goals have finally to justify themselves in terms of the service their attainment renders to the attainment of the highest.”

The Article: Whither Palestine? by Daoud Kuttab in the American Prospect.

The Text: Since 1967, and before, the aspirations of Palestinians to liberty and independence have repeatedly hit one snag after another. There is plenty of room to place the blame on Palestinians themselves, Arabs, and the international community. Palestinians have failed to measure accurately their own powers in comparison to the Israelis. The Arab states gave plenty of lip service to the Palestinian cause and the international community spent more on weapons to the region rather than efforts to encourage all sides to a peaceful resolution.