As IF Times

link How Islamic punk went from fiction to reality | Music | The Guardian.

I guess if you think about it, why should the Muslim culture be any different?  It’s not as if kids in that culture are blindly obeisant to their family dictates as perhaps portrayed by the popular media.  In our culture, you can’t even get kids to make their own beds or get a haircut.  Can you imagine telling Junior in the Muslim culture to strap on a bomb?  As my son would say, “equals no!”

When you think of the majority of wars in the history of the world, they are started by old men, but staffed and finished by young ones.  For this reason alone, youth can be skeptical of the judgement of their older generation.  Youth has a natural tendency to rebel against whatever status quo they are brought up with, regardless of how benign or oppressive it may be.  Think of the suburban kids in the west who emulate their rap star idols by looking ‘street’.  It’s like Sean Penn or Michael Moore looking ‘Castro”.  As if some white-bread kid from Connecticut is going to empathize with Rap Star X.   Apparently having a stable household and family life is not preferable to being an illiterate misogynist with bad taste in clothes. 

It’s easier to see the spawn of radical Muslim families rejecting their native culture since for women, it means subservience, camouflage and relegation to chattel status.  For boys, it means misogyny, praying 12 times a day and the occasional suicide mission.  I wonder why their response is not the opposite of kids in the west, ie turn to become family oriented, respectful and dressing properly. In the linked story, the kids featured may be a very small outcast minority, but that’s how things start.  Once other kids observe that they can thumb their noses at their parents, they will too.  It’s weird the things that kids find admirable. 

It may turn out that the thing that turns the tide in the Muslim world is to ship all punk and rap stars from the U.S.  into their midst to ferment social change. Boy that’s a win/win propostion for all.

link Canada warns not to buy fresh semen online.

As we all know, Amazon started this whole process years ago when they pioneered the idea of buying things online, initially books.  Buying books seems so quaint these days as the availability of buying things online has exploded to include, well,  everything.  That’s just new stuff.  If you really want to plumb the depths of what people will buy online, you’d have to check Ebay or perhaps Craig’s list. The world has become a gigantic garage sale accessible from your computer chair.  Just by doing a quick search, we can find such treasures as canned silkworms, belly button fluff and hair clippings from celebrities.  You can go the other way and buy army surplus tanks.

But Semen?

Really?  Assuming that people would want it for its intended use, why would anyone want to procreate a human being via semen bought through the Internet?  How difficult would it be to get local, fresh product? Can someone really be that ugly that they can only get insemination by mail?  Most people won’t eat day old fish, but flash frozen man juice is ok?

The proliferation of web based stores has forced many retail stores to adjust to the new cost reality since web based ones don’t require the quantity of staff found in real brick and mortar shops.  But this has taken the concept of cutting out the middle man too far…literally.  It’s easy to project where this is all going.  Obviously it’s a long term plan to get rid of men.  Makes sense.  Society has been harping on the uselessness of men for much of the past 30 years.  They smell, they drink copiously, they leave messes wherever they go, they’re insensitive to women’s needs, etc etc.  Popular culture has even played down the idea of masculine men since the modern ideals are Justin Bieber, Ashton Kutcher and other girly-men.  Clearly, it would be easier to extract all the product from these types and do away with the rest of pesky men.

The only problem is, who will kill the spiders?