The great comedian Rowan Atkinson, disgusted with Islam, asks a serious question:

Here he is taking Christianity unseriously. The skit is called Amazing Jesus.

These two videos are among 10 chosen by Sunny for  PJ Media (see them all):

This one’s late for its Buying-Silly-Things-That-Nobody-Wants season, but is too good to omit:

The Turkish broadcasters of the endlessly fascinating Simpsons cartoon – surely one of the most brilliant creations of the age – have been fined for blasphemy.

Blasphemy! Well done, Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie!

This is from ANSAmed:

Just about everything that could be said and written about the super-popular cartoon ‘The Simpsons’ had been, except that it was blasphemous. Now even that ”milestone” has been reached, thanks to the watchdogs of Turkey’s television stations under the Islamic-leaning government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. According to the newspaper Hurriyet, Ankara’s Council of Radio and Television (RTUK) has handed down a TRY 52,951 fine (about 23,000 euros) to the private broadcaster CNBC-E for having broadcast an episode of the cartoon in which ”God is mocked”. In the episode, God goes so far as to offer coffee to the devil. In the eyes of RTUK, this ”can be considered an insult” of a blasphemous nature, and the cartoon was held to encourage young people ”to drink alcohol during New Year’s celebrations in New York City”. What’s more, ”one of the characters insults the religious beliefs of another to induce him to commit murder”, ”the Bible is burnt in public” and ” God and the devil are represented in human form”. ”In a country in which the head of the government thinks that a TV series must be historical documentation, it is entirely normal that the RTUK fails to understand the jokes in a cartoon,” said Hurriyet op-ed writer Mehmet Yilmaz.

Remember the Ayatollah Khomeini said “There are no jokes in Islam.”

As well as the death of freedom, and the death of music, the rise of Islam spells the death of laughter. Those gone, could anything worse happen to humankind?

Let’s blaspheme while we may.

And let those who object accept Bart Simpson’s repeated invitation to his enemies: “Eat my shorts!”

Except about “God”, Mitt Romney was really funny in his speech at the annual Alfred E. Smith charity fund-raising dinner last night. Most of his good-natured jokes are at Obama’s expense. He looks great too.

This is by Libsmack, who sent it to us. Very catchy.

Reuters reports:

A French magazine ridiculed the Prophet Mohammad on Wednesday by portraying him naked in cartoons, threatening to fuel the anger of Muslims around the world who are already incensed by a film depiction of him as a lecherous fool.

A video film made by a Californian Coptic Christian which mocks  Muhammad and which the Obama administration is absurdly blaming for the Islamic world going up in flames and al-Qaeda murdering a US ambassador in Libya.

The drawings in satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo risked exacerbating a crisis that has seen the storming of U.S. and other Western embassies, the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and a deadly suicide bombing in Afghanistan.

Riot police were deployed to protect the magazine’s Paris offices after it hit the news stands with a cover showing an Orthodox Jew pushing the turbaned figure of Mohammad in a wheelchair.

On the inside pages, several caricatures of the Prophet showed him naked. One, entitled “Mohammad: a star is born”, depicted a bearded figure crouching over to display his buttocks and genitals.

The French government … had urged the weekly not to print the cartoons …

“We have the impression that it’s officially allowed for Charlie Hebdo to attack the Catholic far-right but we cannot poke fun at fundamental Islamists,” said editor Stephane Charbonnier, who drew the front-page cartoon.

“It shows the climate – everyone is driven by fear, and that is exactly what this small handful of extremists who do not represent anyone want – to make everyone afraid, to shut us all in a cave,” he told Reuters.

We like what Charlie Hebdo have done (though we don’t think the cartoons are great). We applaud their courage. But  – only a “small handful of extremists”? Are most of the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world serenely tolerant of criticism?

One cartoon, in reference to the scandal over a French magazine’s decision to publish topless photos of the wife of Britain’s Prince William, showed a topless, bearded character with the caption: “Riots in Arab countries after photos of Mrs. Mohammad are published.”

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius criticized the magazine’s move as a provocation.

So much for the Liberté part of the French national motto, Liberté, égalité, fraternité!

“We saw what happened last week in Libya and in other countries such as Afghanistan,” Fabius told a regular government news conference. “We have to call on all to behave responsibly.”

Except Muslims. They can behave as irresponsibly as they like. Because the French government is afraid of them.

Charlie Hebdo has a long reputation for being provocative. Its Paris offices were firebombed last November after it published a mocking caricature of Mohammad, and Charbonnier has been under police guard ever since. …

The French Muslim Council, the main body representing Muslims in France, accused Charlie Hebdo of firing up anti-Muslim sentiment at a sensitive time.

“The CFCM is profoundly worried by this irresponsible act, which in such a fraught climate risks further exacerbating tensions and sparking damaging reactions,” it said.

It is the expression of opinion that must be stopped, you see, not the “damaging reactions”.

Well, that may not be entirely fair:

French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said the authorities had rejected a request to hold a march against the Mohammad film in Paris.

We wait to see what will happen to the Charlie Hebdo offices, and to Stephane Charbonnier. We hope for his safety. But the savage war of Islam against the rest of us will go on until the West uses all its weapons, of law, argument, wealth, political and military power, and mockery to crush the murderous Muslim hordes storming out of the Dark Ages.

(Charlie Hebdo cover cartoon via Creeping Sharia, where you can see the rest of them – here.)

There was a man lived on the moon

on the moon, on the moon.

There was a man lived on the moon

and his name was Akindrum.

And he played upon a lady,

a lady, a lady.

And he played upon a lady,

and his name was Akindrum.

So goes the grand old Scottish song. Or something like that.

Hum it as you read  this uproarious commentary on Todd Akin by Michael Walsh (and Charles Dickens). Akin is the Missouri Republican who announced that in instances of what he called “legitimate rape”  – whatever that might be – natural processes in women’s bodies reacted by blocking their ability to conceive. As a result of making up such a whopper on a highly emotive subject he is likely to lose his electoral race against a weak Democratic candidate for a Senate seat the Republican Party badly needs and had considered a sure win. The question is, will GOP leaders force Akin to stand down, or won’t they?

Here’s a sample:

So Todd Akin — against the urging of just about every Republican with an IQ higher than room temperature — has decided to stay in the race against the former sure loser, Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri. …

And yet all is not lost. Akin still has until Sept. 25 to do the right thing, or to be subjected to a little friendly persuasion and be replaced by a remarkably lifelike cardboard box, or even a live human being, should it come to that. And then the focus can be back on the ethically challenged McCaskill, where it rightfully belongs.

That’s something that only Romney can make happen, indirectly. Much more pressure can be brought to bear on the hapless Akin, including a discreet phone call from Mitch McConnell explaining that, in the unlikely event of an Akin victory, he will be heading up the new Senate Select Committee on KP and Latrine Duty in perpetuity, which will operate out of a subterranean broom closet at an undisclosed but dangerous location somewhere in Anacostia with a staff budget of approximately $2.47 per annum.

This short story was written by the late Ronald Chandler, a little-known fiction writer and putatively a distant British relation of the famous American detective-story writer Raymond Chandler. It dates from the late 1980s, but was only found in 2011 among his effects which had been stored in an attic since his disappearance in 2002.

We publish it here for the first time. We think it may cast some light on the debate as to who and what is to blame for the present recession in America.

The Long Good Buy

So the recession is over. At last I can tell the story of the part I played in averting disaster.

Everybody all at once seemed to know the central fact, that the germinal cause of the nation’s economic and moral decline had been isolated, and wide agreement if not complete unanimity had been arrived at as to its nature:

Materialism.

Or, in common parlance, Greed.

So far, so good. But the persons operating against society under the influence of that insidious motive were not yet identified. I decided to put a stop to this subversion. I saw it as my patriotic duty to separate the goats from the sheep and bring the goats to justice.

It was tough going. Fingers pointed everywhere, but no one could finger anybody in particular. Just what sort of acquisitive lunatic was frantically storing up treasure for himself?

Way I saw it, just like if you want to find who’s splashing cash about in the barren reaches of the Third World you look for who’s buying sugar, in the First World maybe it’s cars.

The chase began. Hot foot on a cold trail, I knocked on doors of houses with garages, wandered through multistorey carparks and waylaid drivers, interviewed prospective customers in the glassy premises of motor dealers, strolled through used-car lots, and put my question:

“Can you tell me, sir (or madam), just where is the borderline between need and greed?”

Here’s what I found:

The one-car man (or woman) puts it at the yearning for two cars; the two-car man at the hankering for three cars; the three-car man at the slavering for four cars; and the four-car man, when at last you’ve been ushered into his presence, turns out to be an ascetic on principle, with a withering scorn for what he calls “the gross materialism of contemporary society”. As for the five-car man, his PR spokesman delivered this message: “My client believes in the Marxist slogan ‘from each according to his ability and to each according to his need’ and instructs me to add that if you don’t do what you’re told you won’t get anything at all.”

I was getting nowhere. Barking up the wrong boulevard. I needed to think. I nipped into a public building and took the weight off my feet. I looked about me. Empty shelves on all sides. What had they once held? Books. And then it came to me in a flash.

I knew the louse I was after.

You see, when it first became known that the country was  in for a recession, there were many good, wise idealists who didn’t see it as bad thing. They put it that at last folk would be able to turn their attention to the things of “real value”, like culture, since the mad race after material things would just have to stop when the money ran out. But it wasn’t very long before these fine souls opened their eyes in wide dismay when they found that the theatres were closing, the orchestras starving, the art galleries emptying, and the library collections were being broken up and sold abroad. They just had not understood that “real values” cost real money.

All the best things in life cost a lot.

And even crummy things cost something.

That was the clue I’d been looking for. Even crummy things cost something. Those words burnt their way into my brain. And I knew that I was after the no-car man.

It is the no-car man, hoarding his pennies in the piggy and his pounds in the Co-op Bank in pursuance of his plot to abandon himself to the luxury of his first set of wheels, having long coveted his neighbour’s re-sprayed Mini, who is your true, hardened, compunctionless materialist. More often than not he’s also a no-dishwasher man, a no-refrigerator man, a no-microwave man, a no-centralheating man. All these things he wants. Also a water-heater, a clothes washer, a television, a telephone, a computer, a bathtub, an overcoat … The arm of his avarice would reach to the bottom, if there were a bottom, of the catalogue of our consumer civilization.

I caught him alright. This hedonist. This voluptuary.

He was on his way home from his second moonlighting job that evening as a waiter in a strip club. He came quietly.

Of course he had his story to tell. You wouldn’t believe the gas he blew. All about how if he had a car and a refrigerator and a dishwasher and could keep a bit warmer he’d have better health, and more time for the finer things of life. The lies he told! He claimed, for instance, that he didn’t want a car or a telephone just as a Thing, not just for itself, not just to show off with, but as an instrument to help him earn his living.

What a heart-string harpist he was!

He said if his wife had a clothes washer and a vacuum-cleaner she could get out of the house more. They could get to the theatre maybe, or to hear some music, or to read books in the libraries.

This was too much for me.

“You wrecked all that, chum,” I snapped. “I’m the guy who tumbled to your little racket, remember?”

And I told him to save it for the Great Court of Public Opinion.

But the verdict was a foregone conclusion. He was the goat alright. And he knew it.

To say this is the funniest Mark Steyn column yet is not possible because so many of his columns are, so to speak, the funniest. But it is very funny. These samples should tempt you to read the whole column. 

Courtesy of David Maraniss’ new book [Barack Obama: The Story], we now know that yet another key prop of Barack Obama’s identity is false: His Kenyan grandfather was not brutally tortured or even non-brutally detained by his British colonial masters. The composite gram’pa joins an ever-swelling cast of characters from Barack’s “memoir” who, to put it discreetly, differ somewhat in reality from their bit parts in the grand Obama narrative. The best friend at school portrayed in Obama’s autobiography as “a symbol of young blackness” was, in fact, half Japanese, and not a close friend. The white girlfriend he took to an off-Broadway play that prompted an angry post-show exchange about race never saw the play, dated Obama in an entirely different time zone, and had no such world-historically significant conversation with him. His Indonesian step-grandfather, supposedly killed by Dutch soldiers during his people’s valiant struggle against colonialism, met his actual demise when he “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes.” …

In recent years, the Left has turned the fake memoir into one of the most prestigious literary genres: Oprah’s Book Club recommended James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” hailed by Bret Easton Ellis as a “heartbreaking memoir” of “poetic honesty,” but subsequently revealed to be heavy on the “poetic” and rather light on the “honesty.” The “heartbreaking memoir” of a drug-addled street punk who got tossed in the slammer after brawling with cops while high on crack with his narco-hooker girlfriend proved to be the work of some suburban Pat Boone type with a couple of parking tickets. (I exaggerate, but not as much as he did.)

Oprah was also smitten by “The Education of Little Tree” [by Asa Earl Carter under the pseudonym Forrest Carter], the heartwarmingly honest memoir of a Cherokee childhood which turned out to be concocted by a former Klansman whose only previous notable literary work was George Wallace’s “Segregation Forever” speech.

“Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood” is a heartbreakingly honest, poetically searing, searingly painful, painfully honest, etc., account of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s unimaginably horrific boyhood in the Jewish ghetto of Riga and the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. After his memoir won America’s respected National Jewish Book Award, Mr. Wilkomirski was inevitably discovered to have been born in Switzerland and spent the war in a prosperous neighborhood of Zurich being raised by a nice middle-class couple. … The “unimaginable” horror of his book turned out to be all too easily imagined.

Exploitation of the Holocaust for personal – or any – financial gain is especially repugnant.

Fake memoirs have won the Nobel Peace Prize and are taught at Ivy League schools to the scions of middle-class families who take on six-figure debts for the privilege (“I, Rigoberta Menchu”). They’re handed out by the Pentagon to senior officers embarking on a tour of Afghanistan (Greg Mortenson’s “Three Cups of Tea”) on the entirely reasonable grounds that a complete fantasy could hardly be less credible than current NATO strategy.

In such a world, it was surely only a matter of time before a fake memoirist got elected as president of the United States. …

You’ll notice that, in the examples listed above, the invention only goes one way. No Cherokee orphan, Holocaust survivor or recovering drug addict pretends to be George Wallace’s speechwriter. Instead, the beneficiaries of boring middle-class Western life seek to appropriate the narratives and thereby enjoy the electric frisson of fashionable victim groups.

And so it goes with public policy in the West at twilight.

See the post immediately below, Who lit the Flame?, on the White House “leaks” of  secret information, to the endangerment of agents’ lives.