Well, obviously. This is from Pravda, so you know it's the straight (ahem) dope.

Russian physiologist Leonid Kitaev-Smyk has stated that most male diseases are caused by women who adhere to provocative clothes and behaviour. As a result, the Western civilization gradually turns into the society of sexually unsatisfied men and eventually unsuccessful and physically unhealthy men, the scientist considers.

...

Since the start of the sexual revolution women of the developed world took to wearing revealing clothes, while Oriental women still wear gowns and yashmaks, said Leonid Kitaev-Smyk, the senior research officer of the Russian Research Institute of Culturology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In the street men cannot satisfy all desires they have. They see naked parts of the body – miniskirts and transparent tops. The modern fashion gives rise to male lust. So there is much lust, but little satisfaction. What does it have to do with the disease? We can draw an analogy with the fauna. If a male is weak, a female will see it and reject the male. This male cannot win a female, for there is a defensive mechanism in nature – this male suffers from prostatitis and impotency.

Nowadays, 70 percent of impotency is a natural defensive reaction to stresses caused by constant unsatisfied arousal. But this reaction is rather long-standing.

Thus, women dig a grave for menÂ’s health with their bare legs and low-cut dresses. Every nice girl going on a date with a sexy top on will make only one man happy and a dozen men on her way will suffer from her revealing looks. In this case strippers are weapons of mass destruction; they have already turned the Western civilization into the society with limited erection.

Sexologists made up the list of impotency-causing activities:

Scrutinizing internet pornography
Watching erotica and pornography on video
Staring at scantily-clad girls in the street
Reading erotic magazines
Going to striptease clubs

Well, I'm fucked.

Posted by: Ace at 01:00 PM | Comments (44)
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Pretty much the most bracing (in a lucid way) thing I've read in a while, and on Huffington Post, if you can believe that.

Read the whole thing, but here's a sampling:

[Fitna creator Geert] Wilders, like [cartoonist Kurt] Westergaard and the other Danish cartoonists, has been widely vilified for "seeking to inflame" the Muslim community. Even if this had been his intention, this criticism represents an almost supernatural coincidence of moral blindness and political imprudence. The point is not (and will never be) that some free person spoke, or wrote, or illustrated in such a manner as to inflame the Muslim community. The point is that only the Muslim community is combustible in this way. The controversy over Fitna, like all such controversies, renders one fact about our world especially salient: Muslims appear to be far more concerned about perceived slights to their religion than about the atrocities committed daily in its name. Our accommodation of this psychopathic skewing of priorities has, more and more, taken the form of craven and blinkered acquiescence.

There is an uncanny irony here that many have noticed. The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you. Of course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as it ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or kidnap and slaughter your journalists, know that we will hold you primarily responsible and will spend the bulk of our energies criticizing you for "racism" and "Islamophobia."

...

Nature, arguably the most influential scientific journal on the planet, recently published a lengthy whitewash of Islam (Z. Sardar "Beyond the troubled relationship." Nature 448, 131-133; 2007). The author began, as though atop a minaret, by simply declaring the religion of Islam to be "intrinsically rational." He then went on to argue, amid a highly idiosyncratic reading of history and theology, that this rational religion's current wallowing in the violent depths of unreason can be fully ascribed to the legacy of colonialism. After some negotiation, Nature also agreed to publish a brief response from me. What readers of my letter to the editor could not know, however, was that it was only published after perfectly factual sentences deemed offensive to Islam were expunged. I understood the editors' concerns at the time: not only did they have Britain's suffocating libel laws to worry about, but Muslim physicians and engineers in the UK had just revealed a penchant for suicide bombing. I was grateful that Nature published my letter at all.

In a thrillingly ironic turn of events, a shorter version of the very essay you are now reading was originally commissioned by the opinion page of Washington Post and then rejected because it was deemed too critical of Islam. Please note, this essay was destined for the opinion page of the paper, which had solicited my response to the controversy over Wilders' film. The irony of its rejection seemed entirely lost on the Post, which responded to my subsequent expression of amazement by offering to pay me a "kill fee." I declined.

...

It is perverse for the western media to lament the lack of an Islamic reformation and willfully ignore works such as Wilders' film, Fitna. How do they think reformation will come about if not with criticism? There is no such right as 'the right not to be offended; indeed, I am deeply offended by the contents of the Koran, with its overt hatred of Christians, Jews, apostates, non-believers, homosexuals but cannot demand its suppression.

It is time we recognized that those who claim the "right not to be offended" have also announced their hatred of civil society.

Thanks to PetiteDov.

Posted by: Ace at 12:37 PM | Comments (26)
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National Review's big article isn't available online, but Powerline has a bit of it.

[Kurtz:] "Nearly every sermon Wright preaches, as well as his now-infamous bulletins and church magazines, is filled with his radicalism, and it's therefore impossible not to conclude that Obama was broadly attracted to Wright's politics."

Significantly, Wright's radicalism sparked a mass exodus from the church on several occasions. By 1975, nearly all of the members who had invited Wright to become their pastor in 1972 had defected. In 1983, "a group of particularly active and prominent members uncomfortable with Wright left Trinity. . .for a local Pentacostal Apostolic church." Wright's radicalism also caused his relations with the United Church of Christ to be rocky at times.

Meanwhile, the evidence mounts that Barack Obama was indeed a Muslim in his youth, helping explain why he'd be so attracted to the firebrand ravings of the ex (?) Nation of Islam preacher Wright.

Thanks to someone.

Posted by: Ace at 11:29 AM | Comments (46)
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A pretty horrifying message for the parents:

Sandie Petee, Phillips' mother, and her husband, Jeff Petee, weren't home at the time of the call. They returned home to find a three-minute voice mail on their answering machine.

...
"They were pinned down and apparently his barrel was overheating," said Jeff Petee. "It's something a parent really doesn't want to hear. It's a heck of a message to get from your son in Afghanistan."

The three-minute call ended abruptly.

"You could hear him saying stuff like, he needs more ammo, or he needs another barrel," said John Petee, Phillips' brother. "At the end, you could hear a guy saying 'Incoming! RPG!' And then it cut off."

Of course they frantically began trying to reach him. Eventually they did. He's okay and is scheduled to return home next month.

"I finally got a hold of him," Sandie Petee said. "He was embarrassed, he said, 'Don't let Grandma hear it.'"

The audio is below the fold. Thanks to someone. more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:04 AM | Comments (77)
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I hope the pilot has Plan B for a career lined up. How do you say, ‘would you like fries with that in French?’

Terrified passengers claim their plane had to dodge another jet by suddenly climbing 10,000ft because their pilot was "showing off" to a boy in the cockpit.

The pilot of the flight to Paris suddenly pitched left at 33,000ft and the crew allegedly announced the Airbus A320, with 143 passengers, had got "too close" to another plane.

Taking passengers into the cockpit is contrary to aviation rules brought in after the September 11 terror attacks.

Â…Shaun Robinson, 40, from Rossendale, said the jet "rocked and rolled" like in a fairground ride and terrified passengers said prayers aloud while children cried.

He claimed: "The pilot was clearly showing off to this young boy," said Mr Robinson, who was on a business trip.

French aviation investigators have released cockpit surveillance video of the incident.

Posted by: DrewM at 10:54 AM | Comments (22)
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In other news, dog licks himself.

Stephen King made the following comment at the Library of Congress in front of high school students. Classy.

I don't want to sound like an ad, a public service ad on TV, but the fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don't, then you've got, the Army, Iraq, I don't know, something like that. It's, it's not as bright. So, that's my little commercial for that.

At least he did not call the soldiers felons, unlike my congressman, Jim McDermott (D-Baghdad).

McDermott said that “we’re losing in Afghanistan,” accused the President of planning to expand the war into Iran, and said “we’re running a gulag – one over in Guantanamo, and several in Iraq.” Yet, the congressman argued, “nobody cares” about the war because “as long as we can hire mercenaries to fight this war for us” the war would continue. McDermott said that the "mercenaries" were recruited from those who could not get jobs, or who could not get into school, or who were in jail due to having committed felonies.

Shut Up, He Explained [ace]: King shuts down his own message boards; begins telling fans to email Newsbusters saying "Hi, Noel [Sheppard], Steven King says shut up and I agree."

Wow. Steven King managed to write something that wasn't a thousand pages long.

Posted by: Open Blog at 10:33 AM | Comments (98)
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Pretty good round up over at Nice Deb's.

That's a whole lot of commie ninnyhammers backing the Chosen One. Along with a few cacafuegos.

And another thing. Hillary. Hillary, come on girl. If you can't land the endorsement of Democratic Socialists of America or Daniel Ortega (Cacafuego El Supremo) for cryin out loud, how can you expect the Democrat voters to treat you like a serious candidate?

The Confederate Yankee Decision Desk Calls NC For Obama: Very high turnout among blacks in Durham, making it impossible for Hillary to win, and perhaps impossible for her to even lose narrowly.

Hillary's lowering expectations and while Republicans are crossing over to vote in the Democratic primary in Indiana, it's not clear they're following the Operation Chaos plan, and may in fact just be voting against their eternal bete noir. By which I mean Hillary. Not the noir dude.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 09:26 AM | Comments (61)
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Cool stuff.

Neat link at the end: bionic, telescopic-vision contact lenses.

Coming soon. Supposedly.

Posted by: Ace at 09:13 AM | Comments (11)
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"Ninnyhammer," for fool, seems to be the most generally useful, but the etymology on some of these is hella-interesting.

"Feist," from which "feisty" is of course derived, has a third meaning (after mongrel dog and short-tempered person): A silent fart.

I can't wait to call someone a cacafuego.

Thanks to Alice H.

Posted by: Ace at 09:01 AM | Comments (29)
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Insider Advantage: NC Obama +4 and only 4; Indiana Hillary +4.

Zogby puts Obama up by 14 in North Carolina and up 2 in Indiana.

Given Ambinder's back of the envelope demographic analysis, it seems Hillary can't win NC under any likely scenario, unless she carries white voters by eye-popping majorities. Which she almost certainly can't, as the white Democrats in college-heavy NC are almost as lockstep for Obama as black voters are.

On the other hand, a solid win in Indiana and a narrow loss in North Carolina keeps Hillary viable. If she doesn't manage both, superdelegates may rush to wrap this all up now and put her down.

This post is also good. It's possible, a generally-pessimistic Republican analyst says, that this year could be disastrous for the Democrats on the presidential level.

Posted by: Ace at 08:49 AM | Comments (15)
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