perfidy

My esteemed coperfidian Buckethead recently reprinted a couple of the most tasteless Norwegian slanderings of the Prophet that have the least hingeful elements of the Muslim world feeling all smashy and burny of late. While the images in question are terribly offensive - a fact which ought to be obvious to anyone who wasn't raised by wolves - I feel I must point out that smashing and burning are not the solution. This goes double if your grievance is partly that Islam is frequently depicted as a violent and xenophobic belief system.

However. If you must burn our embassy in redress for our crimes against your (curiously delicate) way of life (if cartoons are a dire threat and all), our embassy is conveniently located at 161st Street and River Avenue, Bronx, NY, just steps from the 4, B, or D subway lines.

[wik] Link changed and made less funny because Google Maps is teh suck.

This video takes me back a little to my days playin' the Dungeons and Dragons in high school, and it turns out that memory lane is girded about by ouchy thorns and stuff.

Although I was certainly never quite that geeky - not compared to this - I probably shouldn't disavow my role-playing gamer past too loudly, consideratin' that I have been named dorkiest Minister by popular acclaim. But still, that video is teh funny. LOL and whatnot.

Thanks to texasbestgrok's JohnL, who is also way beyond this kind of thing.

It's only a matter of time before the moon is a giant red and blue yin-yang urging us to drink Pepsi. A new company on Cape Cod, Roofshout.com, is trying to monetize the experience of getting your house's picture on satellite-image-driven services like Google Earth. You could help pay your mortgage with a small tasteful rooftop ad for, say, GOLDENPALACE.COM or POKERPARTY.COM or

PRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERS

that just happens to be visible from space.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... the future. Use it wisely.

While many streets are named for presidents or trees, relatively few are named for diseases.

This week's chocolate-themed Carnival of the Recipes is up!!

In a couple weeks, the Carnival will be coming through the Ministry... check in and see what evil lurks in the hearts of artichokes.

As an update to the recent posts by Patton and myself on the furor over the Danish Bomb-Head Muhammad cartoons, we have these items:

• A US State Department offical, Janelle Hironimus, has said that, "Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable. We call for tolerance and respect for all communities and for their religious beliefs and practices." She also mentioned that while there is great press freedom, these rights must be coupled with press responsibility. I don't think the Spiderman creed applies to the press generally, and certainly not in this case. Janelle should take a long walk off a short pier, we don't need to embolden the Muslims in their intolerance.
• Muslims protesting in Morocco.
• Muslims protesting in the West Bank.
• Muslims protesting in Egypt.
• Muslims protesting in Jerusalem.
• Muslims protesting in London.
• I could go on, but I won't.
• Meanwhile, there is a complete lack of protesting in NYC, where some idiot made a picture of Osama bin Laden as Christ.

I won't be surprised if lots of Muslims die in riots over this. Saddened, but not at all surprised.

[wik] So far, at least four people have died.

Strangely, the act of forgetting is the only thing we do that requires the entire brain.

You may have heard about the whole Muhammad cartoon contretemps. Some Danish newspaper printed some cartoons which featured the visage of the Prophet. Apparently, that alone is offensive, considering the iconoclastic tradition of Islam. But those evil Danes went further. They drew pictures mocking the Prophet. So, a Danish newspaper prints the evil images. And the whole Islamic world breaks out in rioting and shit, Islamic nations recall their ambassadors from Denmark whose government had nothing whatever to do with the original cartoons, and the faithful stop buying legos.

So I found a website that has all the cartoons. The one that was on Drudge and elsewhere was cool, with 'ol Muhammad as Bakunin wearing an lit anarchist's bomb as a turban. Here's a picture:

For some reason, though, this is my favorite:

I don't know exactly what that reason is, but I dig it.

Now, I realize that posting these images on Perfidy could very well result in a Jihad being declared on the Ministry. These images are offensive to Islam, and all the faithful. Well, I had to look at endless pictures and video and stories about things like "piss christ" which is rather offensive to my religion. I did not declare war on anyone, or even get out of my chair. I might have blasphemed and uttered some profane statements. That's about it. See, I'm tolerant. It is my central political belief that everyone has a right to be a completely retarded offensive loonytune. All of our rights derive from this profound insight. It's easy to argue that someone making a serious political statement is entitled to, uh, make it. Without getting shot, imprisoned, or beat up too much. Extending that protection to the soi disant artist responsible for the potty-humor abomination we know as "Piss Christ" is a challenge.

I know the Islamic world has no tradition of tolerance or forgiveness, either politically, religiously or culturally. But still, really, fuck off. Get a life. Pictures of Muhammad drawn by some not terribly talented or funny Danish cartoonists is not an existential threat to a billion-strong, millennia and a half old world-spanning religion.

Go play with some legos.

Found in an AP story:

"If they want a war of religions, we are ready," Hassan Sharaf, an imam in Nablus, said in his sermon.

A war of religions? "Oxymoronic" doesn't even begin to cover such an idiotic thing.

Yeah, yeah - I know. There have been religious wars for as long as there have been religions. This history is one of the oldest and most valid reasons for eschewing religion entirely, as I hear some people do. The fact that war of religions is an ancient concept doesn't mean such a thing is any less ridiculous. Even when one side or the other is begging to have its ass kicked, the concept of a war presumably demanded by one's God is an idea I have never been able to wrap my head around.

Of course, the latest such kerfuffle is occasioned by the continued and frightening lack of ability of the most fervent of Muslims to recognize irony when it's right in front of their faces. Islam is accused of violence and intolerance by cartoonists in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten, and "Islam" complains mightily. Fair enough. Truth can be embarrassing, and embarrassed people complain.

But when their complaints impinge on the modern world's decided preference for free speech, resulting in further and broader publishing of these same 5 month old pictures, the Islamic zealots react by blowing shit up. Smooth move, fellows. I'd suggest they butch up, even though I'm sure there's a sura somewhere that would tell me this, too, offends mightily.

If you're one of the benighted few who's not yet seem what all the fuss is about, you can find, collected at this site, examples of what it takes to puncture the thin skin of the Islamic extremists.

Oddly, according to a poll reported in the Brussels Journal only a mild majority (57%) of Danes thought publication of the opinions behind the cartoons was the correct thing to do, with 31% opposed and presumably the remaining 12% giggling at the stupidity of it all.

As could be expected, Cox & Forkum summarize matters nicely:

But perhaps a better guide to understanding right from wrong on this matter is to temporarily ignore the free speech implications of Islam's demands to be coddled, as such demands are utterly unacceptable, and instead to focus on the lessons of an old Onion classic.

Loyal Reader #0016, EDog, forwards this priceless discussion board in which new doctors discuss the crazy things they see in the ER.

I tell ya, no matter how many times you hear a story about some guy needing a pickle jar fished out of his cornhole, it just doesn't stop being funny.

I like the one about the guy who got a script for Vicodin and got on his cell phone right there in the ER to sell it, in full earshot of the doctors what gave him the script.