Further to this, two things you may not know about Californian tree hippies.

They protest through the medium of dance:

They flatter themselves shamelessly:

“Shades of Germany, 1938.”   

More. And. (h/t, Cookslaw.)

Starting up a major new particle accelerator takes much more than flipping a switch. Thousands of individual elements have to work in harmony, timings have to be synchronized to under a billionth of a second, and beams finer than a human hair have to be brought into head-on collision.

Attention nerdlings. Tune in to the LHC “first beam” broadcast, 9am-6pm. So far, so good.

Feeling rough today, thanks to throbbing temples, a temperature and fits of explosive sneezing. But this is too good to miss.

Jeff Goldstein on Juan Cole on Sarah Palin: 

Rhetorically, Cole’s trick is to ascribe to Palin motives that he knows his readership, who’ve been conditioned to believe that Christian boogymen are out to replace the Constitution with the New Testament, will believe uncritically; from there, it is but a small step to suggesting a sinister cause/effect relationship – the suggestion being all that matters, else the facts would have received a place of prominence in Cole’s “investigation”. But then, because the facts undercut the suggestion, and because the suggestion is what Cole hopes will have lasting power, Cole merely omits the facts. Academic rigor at its finest!

What Cole also fails to acknowledge is that, when it comes to book banning or bowdlerization, the real problem lies with PC progressives, who have, in recent years, had problems with the “ageist” Old Man and the Sea, the “racist” works of Faulkner and Twain, the “insensitive to the differently abled” title, Hunchback of Notre Dame, and on and on and on – to the point where textbooks themselves are being “cleaned” of anything that might give “offense” or be construed as “hate speech” – foregoing historical context and intent for a more sanitized and “diversity-friendly” world of literature and learning.

The whole thing.

Update: Anna points out that Cole is no stranger to censorious urges himself. From the Detroit Metro Times, February 2006:

I think it is outrageous that Fox Cable News is allowed to run that operation the way it runs it. It is a highly ideological, explicitly ideological operation, and it is polluting the information environment… Frankly, I think in the 1960s the FCC would have closed it down. It’s an index of how corrupt our governmental institutions have become, that the FCC lets this go on.

“Polluting the information environment”? Not at all like our esteemed academic, whose disregard for facts is a much loftier endeavour.

Update 2: The academic language police have issued new euphemisms. “Civilised” and “immigrant” are now racist words. And “seminal” is sexist. Please update your records and comply.

Busy today, but I thought you might like to see this exploding banana mask.

You heard me.

I often enjoy Nick Cohen’s writing, not least when he upsets his readers at the Guardian and Observer. Which he does again today:

For once, the postmodern theories so many [Democrats] were taught at university are a help to the rest of us. As a Christian, conservative anti-abortionist who proved her support for the Iraq War by sending her son to fight in it, Sarah Palin was ‘the other’ – the threatening alien presence they defined themselves against…

Hatred is the most powerful emotion in politics. At present, American liberals are not fighting for an Obama presidency. I suspect that most have only the haziest idea of what it would mean for their country. The slogans that move their hearts and stir their souls are directed against their enemies: Bush, the neo-cons, the religious right…

Naturally, umbrage ensues.

Eco-hippies weep for fallen trees. “I want you to know, trees, that we care.”

Emotional Hippies – Crying Over Dead Trees – Watch more free videos

Hand me the gun. No, the bigger one.

(h/t, Clazy.)

When the parachute doesn’t open. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus.) // Your very own dinosaur suit. Frighten children, impress women. More. // Idhi oka idi le. Bollywood psychedelia. // Bicycles with enormous speakers. It’s a thing, apparently. // Stop-motion fireworks. // Stop-motion chalk. (h/t, 1+1=3.) // Water sculpture. // Bruce Mozertom’s underwater photography. (1938) (h/t, DRB.) // Japanese goblin shark. Does anything about it look… familiar? // Guinness and light. // Sun spots and climate change. // Sunglasses of the Sixties and Seventies. (h/t, Anna.) // Nigerian man to divorce 82 of his 86 wives. // The size of Africa. (h/t, Norm.) // Michael Jackson at 50. // Tube clocks. // Buildings of note. // A short history of anatomical maps. // Architectural jelly. // Geothermal energy projects. // Deodorising snowflake gun brings joy to consumers. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Ms Valaida Snow. 

Arabella Weir, whose leftist credentials have previously been noted, today shares her wisdom on parenting and education:

Weir’s definition of a “good, responsible citizen” will become apparent in due course.

Some might think of that as where ideology collides with actual parenting.

Actually, Ms Weir attended the hardly-rough-and-tumble Camden School for Girls, a voluntary aided school, whose alumnae include Emma Thompson and Eva Germaine Rimington Taylor. Arabella is, lest we forget, the daughter of former British ambassador Sir Michael Weir and not short of a bob.

State schooling is, one might suppose, entirely free of disabling and alienating effects, being as it is so ideologically sound.

Here, the “right thing to do” has a sacrificial air and seems to mean trading educational opportunity – say, in terms of motivation, class size and a culture of learning – for an approved and “representative” social mix, i.e. one which involves mingling conspicuously with those deemed “disadvantaged”. Thus one’s leftist credentials can be seen by passers-by. Is this really about doing the right thing? Or is it just a matter of admiring one’s own socialist credibility?

For shame. Parents must make sacrifices, you hear? Not for their own children, of course, or for their peace of mind, but for the Greater Good.

Norman Geras spots some cultural cringing at The Observer:

“America and Britain talk about human rights and democracy as if their benefits are self-evident and universal. But when it suits their strategic aims, in Latin America, Central Asia or the Middle East, they collaborate with brutal dictatorships.”

OK, so you should practise what you preach. But can’t you also preach what you practise if you do practise it? America and Britain do have a certain record they can point to as democracies. And the benefits of human rights and democracy are universal, aren’t they? Or did The Observer change its spots and retreat from its attachment to liberalism?

“American and European interests will not be served by military grandstanding and asserting the moral superiority of their political systems.”

Hmmm… I thought democratic political systems were superior. I thought The Observer might think this too.

Indeed. The rest.

Tonight sees the return of Channel 4’s extraordinary Undercover Mosque investigation. Sara Hassan, whose covert filming is featured in tonight’s programme, reports on what she found in one of Britain’s “most respected centres for moderate Islam.” 

In a large balcony above the beautiful main hall at Regent’s Park Mosque in London – widely considered the most important mosque in Britain – I am filming undercover as the woman preacher gives her talk. What should be done to a Muslim who converts to another faith? “We kill him,” she says, “kill him, kill, kill… You have to kill him, you understand?”

It’s heartening to see the wisdom of Muhammad still shining upon the world.

Adulterers, she says, are to be stoned to death – and as for homosexuals, and women who “make themselves like a man, a woman like a man… the punishment is kill, kill them, throw them from the highest place.”

I’ve remarked before on how the enthusiasm for sacralised murder never quite fails to jar. And despite repeated exposure to such impressive piety, I still can’t help noting that the quoted sermons feature the word “kill” no fewer than nine times. However, the news isn’t all bad:

These punishments, the preacher says, are to be implemented in a future Islamic state. “This is not to tell you to start killing people,” she continues. “There must be a Muslim leader, when the Muslim army becomes stronger, when Islam has grown enough.”

Naturally, as with most things Islamic, inconsistencies abound.

Regent’s Park Mosque has a major interfaith department, which arranges visits from the Government, the civil service, representatives of other religions and thousands of British school children a year. I watched as an interfaith group was brought in to meet the mosque’s women’s circle for a civilised exchange. But when the interfaith group wasn’t there, the preacher attacked other faiths, and the very concept of interfaith dialogue. One preacher said of Christians praying in a church: “What are these people doing in there, these things are so vile, what they say with their tongues is so vile and disgusting, it’s an abomination.” As for the concept of interfaith live-and-let-live: “This is false. It does not work. This concept is a lie, it is fake, and it is a farce.”

Doubtless these inconsistencies will be resolved “when the Muslim army becomes stronger.” Allah willing, of course.

Please, read the whole thing.

Undercover Mosque: the Return is broadcast tonight at 8pm. The original Undercover Mosque documentary can be viewed in full here.

Update: Via The Thin Man, here it is.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

The phrase that comes to mind is “business as usual”. Unfortunately, it’s also business as usual with regard to airbrushing Islam’s founder and his “exemplary” exhortations to hatred, supremacism and violence. The reporter, Sara Hassan, is implausibly naïve and appears to believe that what she finds is somehow unrelated to Muhammad and his teachings. Perhaps registering this connection – and what it implies – would make a moderate Muslim’s faith seem somewhat misplaced, perhaps grotesque. And so it isn’t registered.

Related: Act Casual, Say Nothing, Dialogue, A Fear of Ideas, Naming the Devil.