Jonah Goldberg on Sarah Palin and the Feminist-Industrial Complex: 

Gloria Steinem, the grand mufti of feminism, issued a fatwa anathematizing Palin. A National Organization for Women spokeswoman proclaimed Palin more of a man than a woman. Wendy Doniger, a feminist academic at the University of Chicago, writes of Palin in Newsweek: “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretence that she is a woman.” […] Feminists have argued for decades that womanhood is an existential and metaphysical state of enlightenment. But they have no problem questioning whether women they hate are really women at all.

Fabian Tassano on the politics of the World Health Organization: 

By arguing that health is ‘political’, they are admitting that they themselves have a political agenda. And this is difficult to dispute when you look at the some of their statements, which can best be understood as expressions of a political position: “Where systematic differences in health are judged to be avoidable by reasonable action they are, quite simply, unfair.” “Reasonable action” here, it should be noted, includes more taxation, more state intervention and a bigger public sector. Beyond using the phrase “quite simply”, however, it is not explained why such differences are unfair.

Matthew Sinclair on Sharia in Britain:

These are not the fuzzy sort of judgements that apologists for the Archbishop promised would be the only ones Sharia courts could make. These are women being denied a fair share in inheritances or not having their complaints of domestic abuse followed up (after they have been pressured into accepting that they are not victims of a crime deserving of punishment).

Peter Risdon on political empathy:

I wondered whether conservatives and right-liberals understand left-liberals better than they are understood in return because many of them used to be left-liberals.

Please feel free to poke about in the archives or peruse the greatest hits.

Brilliant Noise, by Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, is a short film about the Sun. Not so much twinkling as seething, spitting and flaring.

Brilliant Noise from Semiconductor on Vimeo

More. And.

From today’s Sunday Times, Camille Paglia on Sarah Palin:

In the US, the ultimate glass ceiling has been fiendishly complicated for women. Our president must also serve as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, so a woman candidate for president must show a potential capacity for military affairs and decision-making. As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing for 20 years that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than women’s studies with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances.

The gun-toting Palin is a brash ambassador from America’s pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the civil war — long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men, which is why men could regard them as equals — unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the eastern seaboard… Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.

My other half once suggested a political thought experiment. When deciding who to vote for, you should try to imagine that the country has been invaded and the streets are teeming with Nazis, Communists, aliens or some other uncongenial presence. Can you picture your PM or president among the last line of resistance, gun in hand, fighting to the bitter end?

Well, I can’t picture Obama doing that. For one thing, his neck is just too thin. More importantly, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 atrocities, Obama urged Americans to “[understand] the sources of such madness” and the “fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers” – both of which, he maintained, had nothing at all to do with any particular religion and how it is taught, but instead “grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.”

I can, however, picture McCain and Palin leaning out of a White House window wielding automatic firearms. And, improbable as that scenario may be, I think the ability to picture it matters.

The new 122-second ad for Hovis. A journey home from the shops, through 122 years.

Agency: MCBD. The making of. More. (h/t, The Thin Man.)

Hurricanes, seen from space. // Tilt and shift. Make big things seem small. // The ultimate masculine barbecue. // The deep dish pizza vending machine. // “After the liquor was smoky, he filtered out the bacon pieces and chilled the vodka to congeal the fat.” (h/t, Ace.) // Ejector seat tests we have known and loved. // The typewriter sculptures of Jeremy Mayer. // Robert Hughes: American Visions. A history of American art. // Visual migraine, visualised. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus.) // The otherworldly Socotra Island. // Homes that defy gravity. // More dwellings of note. // Fish condo. (h/t, The Thin Man.) // Greensleeves played on a Theremin. (h/t, Coudal.) // Cockatiels perform The Imperial March. // Christina Hoff Sommers on the war against boys. (h/t, Jeff.) // Bruce Bawer on multicultural doublethink. Soaping the vanities of our would-be overlords. (h/t, Cookslaw.) // Stalin and genetics. // Cold War concept cars. // Alan Moore on comics, politics and Watchmen. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Ms Carmen McRae.