We’ve been watching stupid politicians on both sides of the Atlantic for a good few decades, but we’ve never seen one quite as stupid as the US Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano. How long will millions of air travelers put up with the time-squandering, inconvenience, bother, and humiliation she is imposing on them?

We like Mark Steyn’s take on the increase of hellishness in international airports. Here he is being interviewed by Hugh Hewitt:

HH: I want to read to you the first paragraph of a story from the Times of London today. “Nigerian opposition politicians are demanding visual proof that the country’s president is still alive and fit to govern, six weeks after he left the country for medical treatment.” My question, Mark, are Nigerians better off than Americans where we do not get six minutes without seeing our president on TV?

MS: (laughing) Yeah, I would love to have six weeks without Barack Obama. In fact, you know, people complain that he had nothing to say about the Christmas Day pantybomber until whatever it was, the 27th or the 28th or the 29th. I mean, that three days, I think, was the longest he’s been off TV since he took office. So I’m up for the Nigerian option, six months without seeing the head of state.

HH: Yeah, I think the Nigerians may not be aware of just how lucky they are. Here are a couple of excerpts from today’s Obamafest, Mark Steyn. Cut number one.

BHO: I am less interested in passing out blame than I am in learning from and correcting these mistake to make us safer. For ultimately, the buck stops with me. As President, I have a solemn responsibility to protect our nation and our people. And when the system fails, it is my responsibility.

HH: What do you think, Mark Steyn? Does he really believe that?

MS: Well, you know, I think there’s a tinny sound to Obama. The more…there’s a very funny thing he does when he has to sort of correct course, when he goes too far to the left and he has to rein himself in. And he gives these great sonorous banalities that I think now ring totally hollow. When you look at what’s actually going on here, he’s…the whole pitch here is far too bureaucratic. The idea that they’re going to institute new systems now so that this guy, who was fingered to the CIA, not just to an embassy official, but to a CIA person at that embassy, by his own father, that didn’t get anywhere. So now we’re going to have a whole department dedicated to examining young jihadists who are leaked to the U.S. Government by their fathers or whatever. The response is always a bureaucratic one. And it’s not going to do anything for Americans.

HH: Here’s a second response from the President today, and it’s…this one is just as risible.

BHO: Here at home, we will strengthen our defenses, but we will not succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices the open society and liberties and values that we cherish as Americans. [We’re stunned to hear Obama speak respectfully, even though we know he’s only pretending, of  ‘the open society and liberties’! – JB]

HH: Try telling that to the people in the New Jersey terminal the other night, Mark Steyn.

MS: Yeah, that’s the point here. Why do al Qaeda need to blow up planes? Right now, they just have to walk through an airport, or make a phone call, or just like this guy in Miami, some bonehead called Mohammed gets on the Detroit flight Northwest out of Miami, and he says let’s kill all the Jews. So they, he goes bananas, and they take him off the plane, but they make everybody else on that plane go back and be rescreened. So the 87 year old granny, who’s never expressed any desire to kill all the Jews, has to go through and be rescreened. So the President’s thing is a joke, and that joke won’t change until all three hundred million of us are on the no-fly list. That’s my solution now. I think we should all get on the no-fly list, and then they’ll have to start from scratch all over again.

HH: If they stop flying people who express the desire to kill all the Jews, it’s going to cut down on the Middle Eastern air traffic quite a lot, isn’t it?

MS: (laughing) It is. I’m not even sure if that guy wanted to file suit, I’m not even sure that’s a bona fide reason for being thrown off planes these days. But you know what I find interesting about this, Hugh, is I was at the airport the other day. And as you go in, the guy looks at your picture ID, my driver’s license. And he gets out this little thing that jewelers have to examine diamonds. And he’s looking at it to see if it’s a fake driver’s license. Now nobody has ever tried to blow up an American airliner with a fake driver’s license.

HH: (laughing)

MS: The guys on 9/11 all had real Virginia picture ID, which they acquired through the illegal immigrant network, because anyone can get real driver’s licenses now, so why do you need to fake them? But what was interesting is that in the course of all this, he never looked me in the eye. He never looked at me.

HH: Right.

MS: They look at the driver’s license, they look at the bottle of shampoo. So if you’re, say, like a nervous 23 year old student who’s underwear is packed with explosives, I would imagine that’s actually quite a tense situation for you. But nobody in the TSA is ever going to look you in the eye. They avoid looking people in the eye, because they know that three hundred millions despise them. And all they can see when they look in your eye is total contempt for them and their absurd security kabuki.

HH: It’ll be interesting to see how long it lasts, because we are, I do believe, reaching a point where people are going to say no mas, no mas.

May that point be reached very soon!

This joke, funny yet too near the bone to be very funny, is going the rounds in England. We have not found the source. If we do, we’ll acknowledge it.

1. Teaching Maths In 1970

A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.

His cost of production is 4/5 of the price.

What is his profit?

2. Teaching Maths In 1980

A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.

His cost of production is 80% of the price.

What is his profit?

3. Teaching Maths In 1990

A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.

His cost of production is £80.

How much was his profit?

4. Teaching Maths In 2000

A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.

His cost of production is £80 and his profit is £20.

Your assignment: Underline the number 20.

5. Teaching Maths In 2005

A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because he is selfish and inconsiderate and cares nothing for the habitat of animals or the preservation of our woodlands.

Your assignment: Discuss how the birds and squirrels might feel as the logger cut down their homes for just a measly profit of £20.

6. Teaching Maths In 2009

A logger is arrested for trying to cut down a tree in case it may be offensive to Muslims or other religious groups not consulted in the Felling License.

He is also fined £100 for his chainsaw in breach of Health and Safety legislation as it is deemed too dangerous and could cut something.

He has used the chainsaw for over 20 years without incident however he does not have the correct Certificate of Competence and is therefore considered to be a recidivist and habitual criminal. His DNA is sampled and his details circulated throughout all government agencies.

He protests and is taken to Court and fined another £100 because he is such  an easy target.

When he is released he returns to find Gypsies have cut down half his wood to build a camp on his land.

He tries to throw them off but is arrested, prosecuted for harassing an ethnic minority, imprisoned and fined a further £100.

While he is in jail the Gypsies cut down the rest of his wood and sell it on the black market for £100 cash. They also have a leaving BBQ of squirrel and pheasant and depart leaving behind several tonnes of rubbish and asbestos sheeting. The forester on release is warned that failure to clear the fly tipped rubbish immediately at his own cost is an offence.

He complains and is arrested for environmental pollution and breach of the peace, and invoiced £12,000 plus VAT for safe disposal costs by a regulated Government contractor.

Your assignment: How many times is the forester going to have to be arrested and fined before he realises that he is never going to make £20 profit by hard work, give up, sign on to the dole and live off the state for the rest of his life?

7. Teaching Maths In 2010

A logger doesn’t sell a lorry load of timber because he can’t get a loan to buy a new lorry because his bank has spent all his and their money on a derivative of securitised debt related to sub- prime mortgages in Alabama and lost the lot with only some government money left to pay a few million pound bonuses to their senior directors and the traders who made the biggest losses.

The logger struggles to pay the £1,200 road tax on his old lorry, however, as it was built in the 1970s it no longer meets the Emissions Regulations and he is forced to scrap it.

Some Bulgarian loggers buy the lorry from the scrap merchant and put it back on the road. They undercut everyone on price for haulage and send their cash back home, while claiming unemployment for themselves and their relatives. If questioned they speak no English and it is easier to deport them at the Governments expense.

Following their holiday back home they return to the UK with different names and fresh girls and start again. The logger protests, is accused of being a bigoted racist and as his name is on the side of his old lorry he is forced to pay £1,500 registration fees as a gang master.

The Government borrows more money to pay more to the bankers as bonuses are not cheap. The parliamentarians feel they are missing out and claim the difference on expenses and allowances.

You do the maths.

8. Teaching Maths 2017

أ المسجل تبيع حموله شاحنة من الخشب من اجل 100 دولار. صاحب ت3لفة

الانتاج من

الثمن. ما هو الربح له؟

From our reader, Moe:

The New GM (Government Motors)

Proudly Introduces

The 2010 Obama

This car runs on hot air, bull-shit, and broken promises.

It has three wheels that speed the vehicle through tight left turns.

It comes complete with two Teleprompters, programmed to help the occupants talk their way out of any violations.

The transparent canopy reveals the plastic smiles still on the faces of all the happy owners.

Comes in S, M, L, XL and 2XL

It won’t get you to work, but hey, there aren’t any jobs anyway!!!

From Islam Watch:

Mark Steyn writes in ‘the corner’ of National Review:

A reader asks:

Can Obama accept the $1 million Nobel prize?

I believe, since he’s also won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his groundbreaking work demonstrating that “profit” is part of “overhead”, that the prize is being increased to $1 trillion. They give it him in small bills and if Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod can get it in the attache case they get to share the Nobel Prize for Physics.

However, under Congressman Rangel’s recently tightened federal ethics rules, the president has to give the money to an ACORN-supported child-sex brothel symbolizing in a very real sense “cooperation between peoples” of many lands. So don’t worry about it. On Monday, he’s scheduled to win the Eurovision Song Contest . . .

Post Script: according to James Delingpole, writing in the Telegraph with exemplary sarcasm:

The other candidates on the shortlist were Robert Mugabe; Osama Bin Laden; Ahmed Jibril; and the late Pol Pot.

Because we keep a sharp eye on religious authorities of all stripes (okay, we spy on them), we got hold of an email (okay, it was leaked to us), from the EoZ to their man in Tehran, Sabourjian alias Ahmadinejad, of which we have decided to reveal this telling part:

You ********** ass! Why in the name of **** did you go and let the ******* cat out of the ******* bag prematurely? You were ordered to keep your Jewish identity secret until you’d ‘provoked’ the bombing of Iran by Israel. What a victory, what a crow we would have enjoyed! How completely we would have humiliated them! Now even the slow-witted mullahs will tumble to our scheme. Or maybe not. Try to stay in place, keep the hate-Jews-deny-Holocaust-annihilate-Israel talk going, and we may be lucky yet. But watch it. You’ve done your job well so far, the long slow climb to the top, the winning of the trust of the mullahs. We  were really proud of you. And now you go and blow the whole ********* thing with one stupid ******* gesture, holding up your ******* passport to the cameras of the world! What were you thinking? … Ah, well, carry on as long as you can, maybe raise the threat a few notches, bring forward the announcement that the nukes are ready …

While this episode immediately compels us to mark down the Cunning of the EoZ, which we had rated as A++, to B, and depending on developments maybe even lower, we wait to see if our mark for the mullahs’ Brains, currently D – , will need to be changed. If they let S aka A stay in place, down it goes. We’re watching.

Mark Steyn said on the Hugh Hewitt Show:

MS: What was interesting to me in the account that I heard on Rush’s show earlier today, we had the guy who actually found the finger call in. And he said that this pro-Obamacare protestor had deliberately selected the oldest fellow in the counter-demonstration. In other words, he picked an elderly man, gray hair, bespectacled, stooped, much smaller than him. The pro-Obamacare protestor, when he was looking for some guy’s finger to bite off, didn’t go for any of the big guys, didn’t go for the guys his own age or his own size. And it was an interesting account. This senior is very lucky to have his finger restored to him, because the guy bit it off and then just basically spat it into traffic. So Rush’s listener happened to find it, and took it to the nearest hospital, which happened to be the hospital that this guy had been taken to.

HH: This is pregnant with symbolism. If he attacked the oldest person there, that’s rationing carried to an extreme and immediate step.

MS: Yeah, this is basically, we’re seeing freelance death paneling going on now. I mean, if you’re going to have death panels, then this is one of those situations where you’ve got to have it under government regulation, obviously. It’s like everything else in the new utopia. It’s got to be government regulated. If people are going to go around doing their own freelance death panels, the whole thing’ll go to hell.

HH: Well, you pointed out California can ill afford an outbreak of finger munching out here, because this is, reattachment surgery is not inexpensive.

MS: No, it’s not inexpensive, but on the other hand, it’s cheaper than finger reconstruction surgery, which is what the guy might have been in for if they hadn’t found the finger. I mean, the reality is, this is a very good example. When an old guy loses his finger, who cares? He’s not using it, he’s not contributing to society with his finger, what does it matter if his finger gets chewed off and tossed into traffic. It is interesting to me that when we hear these stories about how nutty the anti-health care, anti-Obamacare protestors are, that in fact all the individual explicit acts of totally insane violence, like the guy being beaten up in St. Louis, or this finger munching, are actually being presented by the nice, reasonable, moderate, liberal protestors. Make of that what you will.

From The Community Organizer

A little brightness on the time horizon is discerned by Mark Steyn, the wittiest writer in the West – or anywhere. He foresees that  liberal environmentalists  may be a dying breed. (Read it all.)

Perhaps the environmentalists are right, and the best way to preserve the planet for the next generation is not to have a next generation. But somebody will. Germany’s Turkish Muslims drink less beer than their Teuton compatriots, but is their carbon footprint otherwise significantly different? I would doubt it. The British Medical Journal’s rebuke of English motherhood is already unnecessary: Britain has a below-replacement fertility rate; its population increase depends entirely on immigrants and their children. If Scots and Ulstermen and the like are despoiling the planet, you can tie their tubes. But their place in the maternity ward will be taken by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, and even some virtuous Ethiopians: As Europe already knows, no matter how fast you self-extinguish, First World infrastructure does not stay empty. Ethiopia comes to you: Abyssinia in all the old familiar places.

As I usually say around this point, the future belongs to those who show up for it. The Germans, Italians and Spaniards have upside-down family trees of the type the biens pensants are commending to the Anglo-Americans. But a people without grandchildren cannot grandfather in their environmental fetishism for all eternity. The health of the planet will be determined by those who stick around – like the Ethopians. I’m chary about predictions but I’d be willing to bet that by the end of this century the anguished western liberal environmentalist will be on the endangered species list.

From The Community Organizer