Great God Ganesh!

Being gay? Nothing that can't be cured by a, er, downward dog.

India's top television yoga expert has challenged a landmark court ruling legalising gay sex, claiming it is a "disease" that can be cured by yoga, reports said Thursday.
Swami Baba Ramdev filed the petition on the grounds that the Delhi High Court "erred" in decriminalising "unnatural sex acts" last week and that homosexuality was an illness which could be treated, according to the Indian Express newspaper.
"It can be treated like any other congenital defect. Such tendencies can be treated by yoga, pranayama (breathing exercises) and other meditation techniques," he said in the challenge filed in the Supreme Court.

I do a lot of yoga, especially Kundalini, and I have to say, there are worse ways to be re-educated. At least yoga is more fun than what I would imagine Christian camp would be!

Obama in Africa: "Unprecedented"? Nope.

What I find funny -- not "ha ha" funny, of course -- is the look of disappointment on the CNN reporter's face when the African journalist blows his theory that only Barack Obama has received such a warm welcome in Africa. Then, he regroups, and makes sure that no one thinks George Bush was special -- everyone gets treated that way over there, right?

The CBC: As per Usual

Did I just hear a CBC reporter (fawning all over Obama in Africa) say that Barack Obama is the descendant of slaves? Is he? I thought his father moved -- voluntarily -- to the U.S. from Kenya, in like, 1959 or something. No slave trade then. Michelle Obama is the descendant of slaves, but not hubby. Besides, the U.S. got its slaves from West Africa, didn't it? It gets its supermodels -- and presidents -- from East Africa.

United Breaks Guitars/Sons of Maxwell Update

Further to this, Dave Carroll posts a response on the power of his YouTube hit.

Obama's Got Some 'Splainin' to do!

Geez. Within days of publicly ogling a 16-year-old (yup, she's 16 -- a junior G8 representative from Brazil), Barack appears to have forgotten where he met his lovely wife:

President Barack Obama, who has seemed to set an impossibly high bar for many men when it comes to dealing with their wives, has finally stumbled — and in a very public way.
“I don’t know if anybody else will meet their future wife or husband in class like I did, but I’m sure that you’re all going to have wonderful careers,” he said as he warmed up the audience before delivering a commencement speech at an economics school in Moscow Tuesday...
But the truth is that the couple met not “in class” but at a law firm in Chicago, Sidley Austin, in 1989. Obama was a summer associate (essentially a legal intern) there and Robinson was an attorney completing her first year at the firm. Both attended Harvard Law School, but Michelle graduated in the spring of 1988, while Barack Obama did not arrive at the Cambridge, Mass., campus until that fall.

Oops! Not his best husband-ly week. I think Michelle should do some revenge shopping -- but not before consulting these bitches.

Sons of Maxwell Achieve Fame...

...in an unexpected manner. Dave Carroll, of the Sons of Maxwell, a group I have seen in concert a couple of times in Toronto, has gone big-time, thanks to this video which, as the kids say, has gone viral. The funny -- because it's true! -- story is here. The song is cute and eminently hummable, if a tad long. Okay, we get it. They broke your guitar and they don't care. Still, revenge is sweet when a dish served cold. (Yeah, I'm quoting Stalin.) And it reinforces my conviction that my pets will never fly in the belly of an airplane.

Peggy Noonan: Boomer Mixes Up X and Y

Nope, nope, nope.

"The media did her in." Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it's arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they're perfect in every way. It's yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.

Sorry Peggy. Palin is from the same generation as me, and we were raised to have no self-esteem and an inflated sense of inadequacy. It's the little punks after us, the evil Millenials, Gen Y, who have nothing to give the world but their boundless self-esteem. That said, Noonan's dissection of Palin is, apart from the glaring error above, insightful.

Berlusconi's Shoes

Further to this, take a gander here. I can't believe Silvio is staring at his shoes at this moment! They're probably fine Italian shoes...

Barack Obama: Flesh and Blood, After All

Barack is a mortal -- a mere mortal! (Actually, in this photo, I think I like Sarkozy's expression better. Ooh la la!)

(Reuters Photo/Jason Reed)
(H/T, Baconeater.)

Good Lord!

Pun intended.

A new game show on Turkish television will pit a Greek Orthodox priest, a rabbi, an imam and a Buddhist monk against one another in attempt to convert atheists to their respective religions.

In each episode of Penitents Compete, to be broadcast by Turkey's Kanal T television station in September, the four faith guides will try to persuade 10 atheists of the merits and truth of their creeds.

The show's producers say there is a good chance none of the atheists will be converted, Turkey's Hurriyet Daily News and Economic Review reports.

But those who are will be sent on a pilgrimage. New Muslims will head to Mecca, Buddhists to Tibet and Jews and Christians to Jerusalem – with television cameras following them.

Wow. Countdown to an American or British network producing a version of this show.
Read the story.

(H/T, Laurel.)

Robert McNamara: Just a Quibble

Call me picky, but isn't it inaccurate to call Robert McNamara the "architect" of the war in Vietnam? Surely JFK was the architect, and McNamara the engineer. Here's a lengthy and fair only by New York Times' standards, I think, obituary of the remarkable man. (Check out the headline of the obit -- right away we know where we're going. Regardless, it's an interesting read, packed with information.) I don't think the war in Vietnam was "wrong," even if the execution of said war was inadequate. But I can respect someone who speaks honestly about where he thinks he was mistaken. And it's hard to argue with these words:

“War is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend,” he concluded. “Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.”

Songs from my Childhood...

...that make me happy. I'm from the first Sesame Street generation and I remember watching this the first time. Bob -- check out his groovy shirt -- stays up all night with some hippie muppets to welcome the dawn, singing Good Morning Starshine along the way.

Obama: Ideologue-in-Chief?

My sense of Barack Obama is that he has no real ideology, other than that it is nice to be beloved. He seems to have gotten through life with a natural intellect, a great smile and loads of charm. I have been thinking he is not like Jimmy Carter, because unlike Carter, he has no real beliefs, no strong tenets. And I have been assuming that where he will be tested is when he realizes that all his likeability won't make the Palestinian leadership willing to budge on accepting Israel as a Jewish state, won't make Ahmadinejad worth talking to, won't make Kim Jong Il less crazy and so forth. But Caroline Glick, someone whose analyses I respect, sees Obama in a completely different light.

The only reasonable answer to all of these questions is that far from being nonideological, Obama's foreign policy is the most ideologically driven since Carter's tenure in office. If when Obama came into office there was a question about whether he was a foreign policy pragmatist or an ideologue, his behavior in his first six months in office has dispelled all doubt. Obama is moved by a radical, anti-American ideology that motivates him to dismiss the importance of democracy and side with anti-American dictators against US allies.

I hope she is wrong, but she might be right. Read the whole column. (Whether she is right or wrong, though, I am mighty pleased Netanyahu is Israel's leader. He is not a wallflower and won't be pushed around.)

Historical Tweets

What a hoot! My favourite is Gandhi's.

Michelle Obama's Clothes

I'm not a big of Michelle Obama's fashion sense and while I realize the media need to fawn all over anything Obama, I think trying to portray her as some sort of new millenium Jackie Kennedy is foolish. Some of Mrs. Obama's outfits are terrific, but sometimes...well, my belief is that she simply doesn't know what looks good on her body. In other words, some of her clothes are lovely...but not on her. (And some of her clothes are awful. This is true of all of us, of course.) The boys at Project Rungay are some of the few out there willing to criticize her. Check out their Lady O page.

Ferals

I love this guy. One sock up, one sock down.

Enjoying his dinner.

It looks gross to me, but he seems to think cat food is YUM.

What I Wouldn't Mind Paying For

I keep hearing, on American news programs, about this:

Call it government waste, pork-run-amok or legitimate spending, but be sure to check out Sen. Tom Coburn's oversight report of 100 stimulus projects. It offers a different perspective on the stimulus dollars that President Obama promised would help heal the economy that ails us.
Many of the projects leave one rightly skeptical that the stimulus bill became the states' Christmas wish list rather than an effective tool to get the economy moving again...
One of the most headlined projects is a $3.4 million turtle tunnel in Florida that locals say will help prevent accidents while keeping turtles from becoming road kill. Others are shell shocked by the cost of the turtle detour.

(Emphasis mine.)
I would not mind paying for that! That strikes me as exactly the kind of thing I want public money to support. Who else is going to pay for it? The turtles themselves? Heck, we're the ones who keep killing them, albeit unintentionally, so perhaps we're the ones who ought to invest time and money into their protection.

Burqa Debate II

More on this, from Matthew Parris in the Times of London:

Spitting is a cultural feature in China but we discourage it here. In Syria I took my shoes off to enter mosques, though that is not in my culture; and wouldn't have worn clothing like skimpy shorts or vests, or drunk alcohol in the streets: practices offensive not to me but to the mainstream culture where I was.

Knowingly to disturb people's feelings is to be offensive. In Western European society, to go out in public with your face masked is (unless done for comic effect) disturbing. Hiding the face is felt to be threatening, and slightly scary, and subliminally this goes way back, and quite deep I think: it certainly frightens children.

Would it be wrong to try to convey to communities in Britain who adopt the full hijab that, though it is a woman's legal right to dress as she chooses, she should recognise that she's in a country where many people will find a masked face disturbing, and that (without meaning to) she is acting in a culturally inappropriate manner, which may offend? Do the masked women I see in the street in Whitechapel actually know this? I cannot say, because I've never spoken to them: or, rather, when I do, they look away and walk away.

This too, in Britain, is rude. Do they know? Shouldn't they?

Nixon on Abortion

The voice of moderation, I'd say, and except for his feelings about mixed-race babies, difficult observations with which to disagree.

On Jan. 22, 1973, when the Supreme Court struck down laws criminalizing abortion in Roe v. Wade, President Richard M. Nixon made no public statement. But the next day, newly released tapes reveal, he privately expressed ambivalence.
Nixon worried that greater access to abortions would foster “permissiveness,” and said that “it breaks the family.” But he also saw a need for abortion in some cases — like interracial pregnancies, he said.
“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding, “Or a rape.”

There is a lot more on these tapes -- recently made public by the Nixon Presidential Library -- including thoughts on Watergate, Vietnam and anti-Semitism. Much of it is fairly reasonable, some a tad nutty, but most of it we've heard. His thoughts on abortion were new to me. It's odd that only 35 years ago the climate around the abortion debate was obviously so different. I can't figure out whether where we are now is better or worse.

Karl Malden -- What Can One Say?

Quelle career, quelle vie! So many great movies, a 70-year marriage (in Hollywood, yet), respected by colleagues and critics and according to his imdb profile, a mom and dad who lived to be 104 and 96 respectively.
The trailer from my favourite Malden movie -- where he played General Omar Bradley -- Patton.

I sure hope Turner Classics has a Malden tribute day.

Happy Independence Day!

One of my favourite movies -- Yankee Doodle Dandy -- is, fittingly, on Turner Classics today. I love this scene, after George M. Cohan has received his medal from FDR, and he joyfully dances down the stairs at the White House. Wonderful.

Burqa Debate

It's funny -- the libertarian in me feels like we ought to let people where whatever the heck they like when they are walking down the street (in a workplace or school it's another matter)...but with the burqa, well, I don't know. If women wanted to walk down the street shackled, saying it was part of their religion, would we allow that? Mona Eltahawy has a great piece in the NYTimes on the matter, stating, unequivocally, that the burqa should be banned. Here is the gist (but read it all):

It’s one thing to argue about the burqa in a country like Saudi Arabia — where I lived for six years and where women are treated like children — but it is utterly dispiriting to have those same arguments in a country where women’s rights have long been enshrined. When I first saw a woman in a burqa in Copenhagen I was horrified.

I wore a headscarf for nine years. An argument I had on the Cairo subway with a woman who wore a burqa helped seal for good my refusal to defend it. Dressed in black from head to toe, the woman asked me why I did not wear the burqa. I pointed to my headscarf and asked her “Is this not enough?”

“If you wanted a piece of candy, would you choose an unwrapped piece or one that came in a wrapper?” she asked.

“I am not candy,” I answered. “Women are not candy.”

I have since heard arguments made for the burqa in which the woman is portrayed as a diamond ring or a precious stone that needs to be hidden to prove her “worth.” Unless we challenge it, the burqa — and by extension the erasure of women — becomes the pinnacle of piety.

It is not about comparing burqas to bikinis, as some claim. I used to compare my headscarf to a miniskirt, the two being essentially two sides to the same coin of a woman’s body. The burqa is something else altogether: A woman who wears it is erased.

I can't think of a more apt description.