Call it Islam, call it Hamas, call it ISIS, call it the Muslim Brotherhood, call it BokoHaram; call it the Palestinians; call it the United Nations; call it by the name of any Islamic state; call it the interfaith movement, call it the Left, call it the religion of peace; demonstrate for it in the streets of the capitals of Europe; parade for it in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles; this is the thing itself:

We found the video at christianpost.com. We quote part of the text:

A Christian man in Syria recently had his head brutally hacked off by Islamic militants after being forced to deny his faith and salute Mohammed as “the messenger of God”.

So by Muslim rules he became a Muslim. Islam forbids Muslims to kill Muslims.

The perpetrators themselves filmed the atrocity “for the world to see and broadcast as a warning to ‘everyone like him’.”

In the video that was posted to YouTube with translated captions, the helpless Christian man is surrounded by armed militants wearing masks and he is heard reciting as instructed: “There is no God but God and I testify that Mohammed is the messenger of God.”

The victim did not say “God” but “Allah”. The Christian reporter chooses, like many Christians, to claim that the god of Islam and the god of Christianity are one and the same.

An apparent leader in the group of militants is then heard instructing the group: “No one will shoot him now, do you understand? He will not be killed by shooting because it is merciful for him.”

By which the savage seems to mean that death by shooting would be too merciful for him. He goes on:

“He will be beheaded because he is Kaffir, non-Muslim, sided [with] the government and was not praying at all. Everyone like him will have the same end, beheading,” said the militant.

Then they cut his head off as the Muslim murderers cry ‘Allahu Akbar’.

This happened today (August 4, 2014) in New York. A pro-Hamas demonstration provokes a much bigger, louder pro-Israel demonstration.

As the current wars of religion rage on, the mainstream media are chiefly reporting the war in Gaza. They put much stress on the number of Palestinian deaths – information they get only from Hamas, which has every reason to claim as many deaths as possible. Hamas’s tactic is to provoke attack and then show the wounds – the deaths of the women and children it uses as shields – and cry loudly until “the world” rescues them from defeat.

Is “the world” really concerned about the deaths of civilians in the Middle East? Or only concerned when they die because Israel strikes back at the Arab enemy after years of rocket attacks?

Is “the world” moved by Arab deaths if Israel can’t be blamed for them? Not so much. Shall we say Muslim deaths then? Also not so much.

What about Christian deaths at the hands of Muslims? The oppression and intense persecution of Christians? Christians being stripped of all they possess and expelled from lands their ancestors have lived in as Christians since the second century C.E?  Hardly at all.

No outcry about their treatment from Christian America? No. Not a word from those Presbyterians who have lately evinced so much interest in boycotting Israel? No.

The Pope? He’s praying for their persecution to end. No persecutor named. If he was expecting a quick response from his God now that Omniscient attention has been drawn to the issue, is he disappointed?

The Archbishop of Canterbury?  No –  the Anglican clergy likes Islamic sharia law and helped introduce it into Britain.

What about the UN? You must be joking! The UN is an agency of the Arab states.

David Singer writes at Canada Free Press:

The Syrian civil war has claimed 170,000 lives in three years; this past weekend’s death toll in Syria was greater than what took place in Gaza. By some accounts, the past week may have been the deadliest in the conflict’s grim history. Meanwhile, the extremist insurgents of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), have continued their ravages over a swath of territory stretching from eastern Syria to the environs of Baghdad, Iraq’s capital; the spike in violence in Iraq has led to more than 5,500 civilian deaths in the first six months of this year.” …

The newly-declared Islamic State (IS) – which includes Mosul – Iraq’s second largest city – already exceeds the area of Great Britain. …

Christians were given 24 hours to leave Mosul or convert to Islam and pay a tax – or die.

Nuri Kino – reported on Fox News – confirms the tragic situation in Syria and identifies those engaged in persecuting these ancient Christian communities:

Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, also has been nearly emptied of Assyrians, Armenians and other non-Muslims …

The prideful tone in which the perpetrators speak whenever I have interviewed them — both Al Qaeda and IS — is equally shocking. These are mostly disgruntled young men who were teetering on the edges of society in their own homelands, often in European suburbs, and now believe they have the power to do whatever they want in the name of Islam. They can claim any house in IS-controlled areas of Iraq and Syria as their own, and tell the owners to either leave or risk being killed. They can take any woman as their wife …

At least 700, 000 non-Muslims — Christians, Mandeans, Yezidis and others — have left Iraq by now. No one knows how many have left Syria.

Nina Shea reports in Fox News:

ISIS has set out to erase every Christian trace. All 30 churches were seized and their crosses stripped away. Some have been permanently turned into mosques. One is the Mar (Saint) Ephraim Syriac Orthodox Cathedral, newly outfitted with loudspeakers that now call Muslims to prayer. The 4th century Mar Behnam, a Syriac Catholic monastery outside Mosul, was captured and its monks expelled, leaving behind a library of early Christian manuscripts and wall inscriptions by 13th-century Mongol pilgrims. Christian and Shiite gravesites, deemed idolatrous by ISIS, are being deliberately blown up and destroyed, including on July 24, the tomb of the 8th-century B.C. Old Testament Prophet Jonah, and the Muslim shrine that enclosed it.

Patrick Coburn does not mince his words in The Independent:

It is the greatest mass flight of Christians in the Middle East since the Armenian massacres and the expulsion of Christians from Turkey during and after the First World War.

Yet the media show little interest in exposing the decimation and dispersal of the Christian communities in Syria and Iraq.

And here’s Mark Steyn:

Baghdad used to be 40% Jewish. Tripoli used to be 40% Jewish. And the Jews were all chased out there. And now it’s the turn of the Christians. … ISIS are effectively doing every day what the European media and American campuses accuse Israel of doing. Everyone thinks Israel is slavering with blood and wants to eliminate every last Muslim in Gaza. No, they don’t. They just want to live with them. The difference is ISIS actually wants Iraq cleansed of Christians in the way it was cleansed of Jews, just as the Muslim Brotherhood wants Egypt cleansed of Coptic Christians the way it was cleansed of Jews.

But still the West, Christian by tradition if not in belief or observance, shows little concern.

This can be seen not only in the dearth of comment from governments and churches, but also among the people who seek their information and spread their opinions on the “social media”.

David Singer adds this statistic to his article:

Google reports on the Israel-Gaza war outnumber reports on the ISIS-Christian conflict by about 20:1.

Obama is so outrageously wrong about everything, and the fact that he is president of the United States is so preposterous, that exasperation with him and all his works and all his sayings can only be endured if one can laugh at them.

Satire is the safety valve that lets off the steam of a politically captive nation.

Shamelessly we lift almost all of this Corrective to Popular Misunderstanding of American History from The People’s Cube, by “Komissar al-Blogunov”:

It’s a silly question to ask; of course we’re a Muslim nation with a deep Islamic tradition – it should be enough that Barack Obama says Islam built America. But, as everybody knows, the history books were written by Islamophobes. …

Let’s begin with the Muslim pilgrims on the Mayflower in 1620, who left England to seek religious freedom in the New World. On the way, they wrote the Mayflower Compact to institute Sharia Law in the Plymouth colony. The Mayflower Compact famously begins with, “In the Name of Allah, the Beneficent…” and then goes on to explain how they will expand the Caliphate.

In 1630, the great imam, John Hussein Winthrop, wrote “A Model of Muslim Charity,” a speech just peppered with quotes from the Qur’an. This is the speech from which we get the famous “Cordova on a Hill” metaphor, signifying what America stands for before the yet unconquered world.

Fast forward to 1639. Muslims settling along the Connecticut River wrote the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, a document widely believed to be America’s first constitution. It clearly states in the opening paragraph that their purpose is to “enter into Combination and Confederation together, to maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of Islam as taught by the Prophet (peace be upon him) which we now profess, as also, the discipline of the Mosques, which according to the truth of the said Qur’an is now practiced amongst us…”

Further along in the Orders, it stated that a candidate for governor had to be “always a member of some approved Mosque.” There can hardly be any doubt that the founders of our colonies were devout Muslims.

I hardly need mention the Muslims who signed our Declaration of Independence in 1776, when we separated from British rule to form the North American Caliphate which would later have 57 to 61 states. How much clearer could Thomas Mohammed Jefferson have been when he concluded the document with “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of Allah, the Most Merciful, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

After the Revolution, we wrote the Constitution, which opens with “We, the subjects of the Caliphate…” What’s more, the first amendment to the Constitution clearly reads, “Congress shall make laws coercing compliance with Sharia, and prohibiting the free exercise of any of the religions of the infidels; and defining freedom of speech, and of the press; and the right of the people peaceably to assemble to burn private property in protests, and to accept whatever the Grand Mufti decrees for a redress of grievances.”

It even contains the interesting phrase: “done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the Sheiks present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of the Blessed Prophet (peace be upon him) one thousand one hundred and eighty seven and of the Independence of the United Sheiks of America the Twelfth…”

There is so much more, so when Barack Obama says we’re a Muslim nation, he’s only repeating what every other president in our nation’s history has already proclaimed: that Muslims indeed built the “very fabric of our nation.”

Isn’t it time we burned all the history texts and documents that have been corrupted by infidels?

Contact the Muslim Brotherhood’s Department of Education in Washington today and demand that they start teaching our children the truth about America’s Islamic roots and traditions.

Under Obama, America has switched sides.

Caroline Glick, one of the most astute reporters and commentators on Middle East affairs, draws that conclusion, and explains why:

When US President Barack Obama phoned Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Sunday night … he ended any remaining doubt regarding his policy toward Israel and Hamas.

Obama told Netanyahu that Israel must lose. He wants an unconditional “humanitarian” cease-fire that will lead to a permanent one.

And he wants it now.

And …  the eventual terms of that cease-fire must include opening Hamas-controlled Gaza’s borders with Egypt and Israel and ending Israel’s maritime blockade of the Gaza coast.

That is, the cease-fire must allow Hamas to rebuild its arsenal of death and destruction quickly, with US political and financial support. …

Obama is siding with Hamas, and its Muslim Brotherhood patrons in Qatar and Turkey, against Israel, and its Sunni Arab supporters – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.

It is Obama who demands that Hamas have open borders so it can resupply, and receive billions of dollars – starting with an immediate cash injection of $47 million from US taxpayers – so it can pay North Korea for more missiles and import building materials to reconstruct its tunnels. …

[Obama’s] White House will never acknowledge that Israel is in the right, or that it is fighting a moral war against a barbaric foe. And since the administration will never be satisfied, Israel can expect to be condemned by various UN bodies, including the Security Council, because no matter what it does to try to earn the support of the administration, it will never receive such support. …

The [Israeli] Left understands that the administration’s behavior has destroyed it. Leftists can no longer say that Israeli territorial withdrawals will win it international support. They can no longer say that Israel will receive US support if it places the security of Palestinian civilians above the security of its own civilians and military forces. They can no longer say that the PLO is the answer.

The Israeli Left has been Obama’s ace in the hole since he first ran for office, fresh from the pews in Jeremiah Wright’s anti-Semitic church. … They were the ones who could be counted on to tell the US media and the American Jews that Netanyahu is to blame for Obama’s hostility. …

Through his actions, Obama demonstrated that his “love affairs with the Muslim Brotherhood in the region,” are so central to his foreign policy calculations that he is willing to destroy the Israeli Left in order to strengthen the Brotherhood.

And this leads us to the larger point about Obama’s foreign policy, which his Sunday night telephone call to Netanyahu revealed. As rattled as Israelis are over Obama’s decision to support Hamas against Israel, Netanyahu made clear in his remarks Monday night that Israel has no choice but to keep fighting until we defeat this barbaric enemy.

Netanyahu didn’t mention Obama, but it was obvious that he was respectfully refusing to hand Israel’s head on a platter to Hamas’s friend in the White House.

And while it is hard for Israel to ignore Obama, it is impossible for Americans to ignore him. He runs their foreign policy.

Americans are the ones who need to be most alarmed by what Obama’s actions on behalf of Hamas reveal about the general direction of American Middle East policy under his leadership.

Obama’s choice of a vicious Islamic terrorist organization over a democratic US ally should not come as a surprise to anyone. He has signaled his bias so clearly that it could not be missed by anyone paying attention. There was his pro-Islam speech in Cairo early in his presidency; there were his bows and apologies for his country to the Saudis (though now he has turned to more radical Muslim powers than they); there are his repeated claims (purely fictitious) that Muslims made an important contribution to building the United States; there is his continuing aid to Iran, with friendly talks that give the mullahs time to develop their nuclear arms program; and plainest of all there is his open support of  the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organization of Hamas. Not only has he tried to keep that self-announced enemy of America (and of the whole non-Muslim world) in power in Egypt, he has placed Muslim Brothers in departments of his own government as advisers. They would hardly be advising him to let Israel win against their own sub-organization Hamas, would they now?

Caroline Glick knows this, of course:

The problem is that in every war, in every conflict and in every contest of wills that has occurred in the Middle East since Obama took office, he has sided with Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, against America’s allies.

It is good if a part of the Left (the Israeli part at least) has woken up to Obama’s real agenda – the destruction of Israel and the triumph of Islam – and is shocked by it. But most of the Left everywhere else is unlikely to care very much, or they’ll positively like it.

While we are nauseated by the thought of the upstart commie-kid Obama telling the Prime Minister of Israel to lose his country’s war of survival and start making arrangements for its total extinction, we enjoy thinking of Netanyahu (of whom we have been highly critical in the past) saying – however politely – NO.

Today is the centennial anniversary of the start of the First World War. On 28 July, 1914, the Austro-Hungarian army fired the first shots, to crush rebellious Serbia. What happened then, and why, is traced in this video. 

Blame is laid on the growth of nationalism, and even more on imperialism – the acquisition of colonies by the powers of Europe on other continents, in fierce competition with each other, Britain being far and away the  winner. The fact that at least some empires, chiefly the British, brought incalculable benefits to the lands they conquered, colonized and ruled, is touched on briefly; in our view, too briefly.

We think it is an overview worth watching, though there are points where we would place a different emphasis.

We agree with the presenters that the day World War One broke out was the day Europe began its terminal decline.

(We took this information from Breitbart, where Ben Shapiro adds his own cogent comments.)

On July 25, 2014, Senator Elizabeth Warren propounded, to an applauding audience, her “11 Progressive Commandments”.

They constitute the CREDO of a contemporary Democrat: “I believe …” (Though as a passionate collectivist, she prefers of course to say “We believe …”.)

Here they are, with our interpretations and comments:

“We believe that Wall Street needs stronger rules and tougher enforcement, and we’re willing to fight for it.” 

Wall Street supports Warren’s Democratic Party more than the Republican Party. So she won’t actually fight it, though she postures as a Joan of Arc leading an army to glory or death. What she means is that, true to her collectivist ideology, she wants government to control the economy.

“We believe in science, and that means that we have a responsibility to protect this Earth.” 

Interpretation: We want you to believe that without government (preferably world government) controlling everything you do in your everyday lives, earth will turn into a raging furnace or the seas will rise to cover the land and then you’ll be sorry.

“We believe that the Internet shouldn’t be rigged to benefit big corporations, and that means real net neutrality.” 

We hate the fact that there is currently an area of freedom which government can’t control. We must get control over it somehow or other.

“We believe that no one should work full-time and still live in poverty, and that means raising the minimum wage.” 

We’ll force employers to pay more, whether the labor provided by their employees is worth more or not. If jobs are lost as a result, we’ll blame the employers.

“We believe that fast-food workers deserve a livable wage, and that means that when they take to the picket line, we are proud to fight alongside them.”

What an inspiring declaration of human vision and courage! It will surely ring down through all the ages to come. (We make no apology for our sarcasm. It wells up irresistibly when we’re dealing with this shrill, blustering, trivial-minded demogogue.)

“We believe that students are entitled to get an education without being crushed by debt.” 

And if you don’t, you’re a nasty person.

“We believe that after a lifetime of work, people are entitled to retire with dignity, and that means protecting Social Security, Medicare, and pensions.”

Ditto last comment.

“We believe —  I can’t believe I have to say this in 2014 — we believe in equal pay for equal work.” 

Ditto again, and you’re also a sexist.

“We believe that equal means equal, and that’s true in marriage, it’s true in the workplace, it’s true in all of America.” 

Well anyway it’s true according to Aristotle’s law of identity, A is A.

“We believe that immigration has made this country strong and vibrant, and that means reform.”

She wants amnesty for all the illegal immigrants now living in the US, and all those likely to cross the southern border from this day forth and even for evermore.

“And we believe that corporations are not people, that women have a right to their bodies. We will overturn Hobby Lobby and we will fight for it. We will fight for it!”

Joan of Arc again! Fighting for the world to recognize that “corporations are not people”. Huge odds against her there! Untold thousands have risen throughout the land to defend the notion that corporations are people.

And as for women having a right to their bodies – whoever heard of such nonsense? Whatever next!

And that’s enough fun for today, folks!

Islam punishes the crime of being raped with death.

This picture and the text are from the Clarion Project.

A 10-year girl in Afghanistan is in danger of being honor-killed by her family after being violently raped by a mullah in a local mosque after her Quran class. After the family openly talked about killing the girl, the mullah offered to marry her, claiming to the authorities that he thought the girl was 17 and that the sex was consensual.

After nearly dying from her injuries sustained during the rape due to a delay in medical care, “Women for Afghan Women”,  a shelter for battered women and children, arranged for the girl to be taken to a hospital. Her injuries included a severing of the wall between her vagina and rectum that caused hemorrhaging.

After her recovery, she was taken to a women’s shelter to protect her from her family.

Pictures taken of the girl to document the case show a small, pre-pubescent child whose weight at the time was about 40 pounds (about 18 kilos), according to the doctor.

Last week, the police were given orders to return the girl to her family, despite the fact that she will most likely be killed. Tuesday, the police entered the shelter and took the girl.

“I went to the hospital when they brought her there. I was sitting next to her bed when I overheard her mother and aunt saying that her father was under tremendous pressure by the villagers to kill the girl because she had brought shame to them,” said Nederah Geyah, who is the head of the women’s affairs office in Kunduz, Afghanistan.

Yes, there is, or has been, a “women’s affairs office” in Kunduz.

Honor killings of girls who have been raped are common in Afghanistan, as family members believe that the raped girl brings shame to the family. Moreover, a girl who has been raped is considered not fit to be married and therefore must be supported by her family.

Dr. Hassina Sarwari, who is head of the shelter and a pediatrician, said when she arrived at the hospital to take the girl to the shelter, she encounter a large group of elders from the girl’s village. The group included male members of the girl’s family – her father, her brothers and an uncle.

Once inside, she met the girl’s aunt, who told the doctor she had been told by her husband to smuggle the girl out of the hospital and deposit her into the hands of the family outside.

“She said they wanted to take her and kill her, and dump her in the river,” Dr. Sarwari said.

The doctor made her way to the girl’s room, where she found the girl and her mother holding hands and crying.

Did the mother wish to save her daughter?  Not at all.

Dr. Sarwari remembers the mother’s words: “My daughter, may dust and soil protect you now,” she said. “We will make you a bed of dust and soil. We will send you to the cemetery where you will be safe.”

With the help of Geyah, the girl was rescued from her family and placed in the shelter. Geyah also helped initiate legal proceedings against the mullah.

But that “women’s affairs office” is not very powerful or even effective.

After publicizing the case, both women[ Sarwari and Geyah] were threatened with death by the mullahs as well as the girl’s family.

A militia commander demanded that the doctor return the girl to her family or face the consequences.

At one point, Dr. Sarwari was forced to go into hiding. Geyah has since resigned her job and moved to a different part of the country. Dr. Sarwari has said she wants to leave the country altogether. …

Locals …  are angry at the shelter – not at the mullahs or the family. The shelter, which is one of seven in Afghanistan, is perceived as a tool of the Americans to destroy traditional Afghani culture.

The traditional culture, which Afghan men want at all costs to preserve, includes the brutal raping and consequent killing of ten-year-old girls.

The shelter  has been receiving American aid, but the funding will stop when the last of the Americans leave. The seven shelters for women and girls in Afghanistan will have to close. Then there will be nothing to impede traditional Islamic Afghan culture from doing its worst.

How corrupt the executive branch of the US federal government has become under the rule of the Democratic Party!  Or let’s say – since it’s unlikely that there was no corruption before that – how much more visible its corruption has become.

Taking only one of the scandals (all of them “phony” according to Obama), you can see the size of the rot in the childishly transparent attempt the Internal Revenue Service is making to cover up its abuse of  power.

We quote from an IBD editorial:

An internationally accredited information-technology asset-management firm says the IRS has some explaining to do as our patience is taxed with tales of even more convenient computer crashes.

Private-sector organizations as vast as the Internal Revenue Service typically have redundancy built into their information technology systems, as secure record keeping is the key to managing their businesses and staying in business. Such records … are often required to be kept by law, and often by the IRS itself.

As we have noted, Lois Lerner’s lost emails from the critical period when the IRS was serving as a political arm of the Obama administration and targeting Tea Party and other conservative groups suggest by themselves a conspiracy to obstruct justice as well as being a violation of the Federal Records Act, which requires paper copies of such critical emails to be printed and stored just in case of computer problems.

This conspiracy to obstruct justice is further suggested by some Lerner emails that she and the Obama administration wished had been lost — especially one sent by Lerner to a Maria Hooke.

“I had a question today about OCS,” Lerner stated in the email. “I was cautioning folks about email, how we have had several occasions where Congress has asked for emails and there has been an electronic search for responsive emails — so we need to be cautious about what we say in emails.”

OCS is the IRS’s Office Communications Server, a form of online chat system that circumvents email.

When she learned that OCS messages were not set to automatically save, Lerner wrote, “Perfect.”

Clearly Lerner had a keen interest in keeping her communications from Congress and the American people.

Lerner’s hard drive allegedly crashed, which cannot be verified because her hard drive has since been destroyed and/or recycled. That questionable hard-drive direction came just 10 days after House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, the Republican from Michigan, first wrote a letter asking if the IRS was targeting nonprofit groups. …

On Monday, the International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers [IAITAM], which deals with such technical questions regarding computer hardware and record retention on a regular basis and which has reacted with the same incredulity as the rest of us, released a list of six basic questions the IRS needs to answer.

1. First, what happened to the IRS’s IT asset managers who seemingly vanished during this critical period? IAITAM , which runs the only worldwide certification program for IT asset managers, says its records show that at least three IRS IT asset managers were moved out of their positions at the time of the May 2013 inspector general’s report that detailed the agency’s targeting practices. What can they tell us?

2. The hard drives in question are federal property and cannot be destroyed or recycled without proper documentation. … Where are these records?

3. IAITAM asks if the drives were destroyed by an outside IT asset destruction unit, a not-unusual practice among federal agencies. If so, it adds an entire second layer of documentation of the destruction of these assets, including who approved it.

4. What are the IRS’ specific policies and procedures on document retention when hard drives are damaged or destroyed? In most large private-sector organizations, hard drives and computers are just not tossed in the dumpster or dropped off at the local recycling center until recovery of the lost data is assured.

5. What is the disaster recovery policy at the IRS, an agency responsible for our most sensitive tax information, particularly in light of its statistically implausible number of hard drive crashes?

6. Where are Lerner’s emails from her BlackBerry device and what is on the enterprise server? Some have even suggested Lerner may have off-loaded her emails to what is known as a USB flash drive and still has them in her possession, another federal offense.

The IRS is counting on the general public’s relative ignorance of computer technology to believe its smoke-and-mirror cover-up.

But in the age of the iPad and iPhone, even a child knows that something does not compute here.

Conspiracies seldom work, because conspirators betray them. This is a huge conspiracy. Surely sooner or later some of those who know about the plot, those shabbily-treated IT asset managers, or the ones who can’t keep a secret, or the ones with a conscience (if they exist), will spill the beans?  Or the ones without a conscience but an ability to perceive and seize a golden opportunity, will sell what they know for a big bag of greenbacks? Hasn’t that idea occurred to any of them? They just might get enough to compensate them for losing their job.

When all the news is depressing or fearful, it’s great to have a good laugh. Even if the laugh is a trifle hysterical.

We laughed that sort of laugh at this story from the Washington Free Beacon:

The National Science Foundation has committed $10 million to build robots that will act as “personal trainers” for children, in an effort to influence their behavior and eating habits.

The government has spent $2.15 million so far for the five-year project, which is being led by Yale University. The project, “Robots Helping Kids,” will ultimately “deploy” robots into homes and schools to teach English as a second language, and encourage kids to exercise.

The project will develop a “new breed of sophisticated socially assistive’ robots, designed to help children learn to read, appreciate physical fitness, overcome cognitive disabilities, and perform physical exercises”, according to a news release by Yale University …

“Just like a good personal trainer, we want the robots to be able to guide the child toward a behavior that we desire,” said Brian Scassellati, a computer science professor at Yale and principal investigator for the study. “What we want to do is move these robots out of the laboratory and into schools and homes and clinics, places where we can directly help children on a day-to-day basis,” he said. …

“The need for this technology is driven by critical societal problems that require sustained, personalized support that supplements the efforts of educators, parents, and clinicians,” the [NSA providers of] the grant said.  

Scassellati envisions the robots influencing nearly every aspect of children’s lives.

“We want them to help children learn language, we want to help them learn better eating habits, we want them to learn new social or cognitive skills through their interactions with these robots,” he said. …

Social skills with robots. Interaction with robots who must therefore, presumably, also have social skills. This truly is a brave new world!

Of course kids will probably love having a robot as a pet and companion. Better than a doll or a stuffed bear!

But will the robot be sending info back to a mad professor or the state? We guess so. “He didn’t eat his salad today.” “She quarreled with a classmate.”

The kids will be in the constant presence of a spy. Nurturing a serpent in their little bosoms.

The project is seeking to create robots that could be personal companions to children for up to a year. Scassellati said he wants to “build a healthy relationship of trust and respect between the child and the robot.”

Respectful robots! They may spy on you, but they’ll do it respectfully.

“At the end of five years we’d like to have robots that can guide a child toward long-term educational goals, be customized for the particular needs of that child, and basically grow and develop with the child,” he said. “We want the robot to be the equivalent of a good personal trainer.”

The NSF has allotted $10 million for the study through 2017. The grant is one of the highest amounts the agency dispenses.

The University of Southern California, MIT, Stanford, and Tufts University are listed as partners for the project. Willow Garage, a personal robotics company, is also participating in the research. …

We bet they are. Most lucratively.

Scassellati said the robots would “not replace” humans, but provide additional attention and guidance for children. The research is focusing on both “regularly developing children and those with social or cognitive deficits.” Some of Scassellati’s prior research has focused on how robots can help kids with Autism.

Did you think the do-good factor, the “help” because “we care” factor would be missing? The state always exercises totalitarian control only for your own good.

“If we’re successful in this, we think we can make a real difference in the lives of children,” he said.

We don’t doubt it for a moment. The personal robot scheme will serve the government’s indoctrination purposes much better even than compulsory pre-kindergarten schooling could. Now the state will be with you 24/7. You’ll have no secrets from it. It’ll  be in bed with you, at the table with you, in the bathroom with you, at school with you. And it will be fun!  This is how you’ll come to love Big Brother.

“And we think that we can produce some of the most interesting, the most engaging, and the most competent social robots that we’ve ever seen.”

You could make them pretty too, Brian. The things could have the look of this or that Hollywood star, for instance.

Considering the official prurience of the state these days, they will very likely be programmed to teach the kids practical sex. No holds barred, of course. (Sado-masochism is strongly advised by state-supported institutions right now.)

Loads of fun for the next generation coming up! Who said that the age of American vision ended with the close of its space exploration?

And – parents – note that the interesting, engaging, competent companion of your kid will not need feeding. It won’t consume the teeniest bite of the arugula, kale, broccoli, coarse bread and dandelion tea that it will prescribe for you and yours.

Brace yourselves for its constant (respectful) criticism though. It will be there to keep you in line too. Can’t risk your preferences or bad influence of any sort undoing its good work.